Chapter 2
In winter, the frozen ground makes tough work for the grave diggers. When my granny died it was one of the coldest Januaries there had ever been. After the funeral my mum gave the grave diggers a twenty-pound note for their trouble.
I was glad it was summer because when I wash the funeral cars in winter the cold air cracks and splits the skin on my knuckles with thin lines of red that sometimes trickle blood.
It was always in the winter that my hands looked like old people’s hands.
But after three winters of working at Feeney’s Funeral Home I was used to it.
My mum would catch sight of my hands during dinner, the cracks and the little red spots of dried blood across my knuckles.
She’d tell me to stay at the table while Dad washed the dishes and she’d rub Vaseline into my hands.
She’d do the same at night, sitting on the edge of my bed just before sleep.
But she hadn’t done that in a long time.
I don’t really have an interest in cars, not like the way my old primary school friend Jonathan did; his bedroom was filled with hundreds of toy ones.
I loved cleaning them, though. It started with my dad’s green Honda Accord.
I’d give it the full works every week, sometimes twice a week, inside and out, all year round.
The men down at dad’s workshop asked him how he managed to find time to keep his car so spruce and Dad told them it was all down to me.
So it wasn’t long until his workmates asked if I would do their cars too.
The more cars I cleaned, the more word spread about town until Gerry Feeney, Funeral Director, heard about me.
He had two hearses, two cars for mourners, his own personal BMW, his wife’s family estate car and there was also his brother Matty’s fleet of six large people-carrier vehicles that could hold up to eight with the seats installed or four wheelchairs if the seats were removed.
Matty and his drivers did school runs for children with special needs during the week, but on weekends the vehicles were used for transporting partygoers to nights out.
When Mr Feeney offered me the job and said it would keep me busy, he wasn’t joking.
It was only a fifteen-minute cycle from my house to the funeral home.
No matter the weather I cycled there to clean as many of those vehicles as I could.
Every day I was there, death arrived in some form or another, whether it was a body in a bag on its way to the mortuary at the back of the funeral home to be embalmed, or a family coming to choose a coffin, or on the day of a funeral when the bereaved gathered at the chapel of rest to see their loved one for the last time before the coffin was put into the hearse I’d just cleaned.
I was never involved with the actual funerals so I didn’t really think much about death, except maybe in the times that I got my ‘vivid life moments’.
That’s what I call them and I don’t know if anyone else experiences the same kind of thing or not but I’d be going about my day at home, in school or at the funeral home, and everything would be completely normal until I got ambushed by thoughts.
They collapsed on me. I don’t even know what the thoughts specifically were.
Ask me now and I wouldn’t be able to tell you.
All I know is how they made me feel. They swept under me like a cold current in a warm sea.
It was like my spine was a long icicle but my chest was a furnace.
The thoughts made me feel hopeless and scared for a few breaths before they faded and were gone and I couldn’t bring them up again even if I wanted to.
I had no control over those vivid life moments.
They used to not happen very often but I’d been getting them more and more during that summer.
There was a barley field miles from where I lived, I’d never been there, I’d only heard about it, but when the summer ended I couldn’t stop seeing it in my dreams.