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CHAPTER 3

‘Get off your phone, Rory, this is a wake.’

‘I’m not on my phone. I’m just checking something.’

The room was cool and dark compared to the scorching Spanish heat outside. It smelt of furniture polish, clouds of heady sweet perfume and the waxy candles that burnt bright next to bunches of fake flowers on every surface.

‘That’s being on your phone,’ Ava hissed in a whisper.

‘It’s not. Anyway, they’re all on their phones.’ Rory gestured to the group of men in the corner of the little room where their grandmother’s body was laid out behind a pane of glass, resplendent in all her finery – a shocking turquoise silk kaftan, pink velvet trousers, jewelled sandals, her sparrow-like wrists bedecked with chunky plastic bracelets, and around her neck three or four Bakelite necklaces – an outfit she’d had waiting in the back of the wardrobe for this very occasion.

Ava looked over and sure enough, half of the mourners who’d come to pay their respects were chatting away on their beaten-up old phones. Two men played dominos, while a group of women were knitting as they talked animatedly to the deceased.

‘Just put it away,’ Ava sighed, trying to ignore the remains of yesterday’s headache.

‘You’re very self-righteous for someone who got hit by a bus while on their phone,’ Rory said, as he did another quick refresh of his emails before slipping it in his pocket. ‘What do you think they’re saying to her?’ he added, nodding towards the knitting women nattering away to the body.

Ava shrugged. ‘I have no idea. But whatever it is, it’s very passionate. I’m feeling really British.’ She looked down at her outfit. They were both dressed starkly in black, crumpled from the flight and a hot taxi ride from Barcelona airport. Behind them were men who’d come straight from work in overalls, another in a three-piece white suit, and women in rainbow colours, chatting, wiping their eyes. The crying around them was free and open, but Ava held hers painfully tight in her chest, not quite able to let herself go in front of her dry-eyed brother and all these strangers. ‘I don’t know what I’m going to say.’

Rory shook his head. ‘No, me neither. I’m terrible at this kind of thing. I’m only just getting over the fact that we can see the body.’ He glanced backwards towards the door as if looking for a quick escape.

‘You want to sit?’ One of the knitting women turned, her face as wrinkled as a raisin, a touch of smudged mascara on her grooved cheek that she patted away with a neatly folded handkerchief. Beside her she had a little pug dog, his lame back legs propped up on a harness with wheels.

‘Oh no, it’s fine. Fine. You stay,’ Ava insisted.

Ava and Rory had been hovering awkwardly since they’d arrived. If their father had been there, he’d no doubt have taken charge and said something meaningful about how valuable she had been to them all. But as he was in China, cruising the Yangtze River, he wasn’t there to take charge.

‘I have said enough,’ the woman replied, standing so that Ava could take her place and ushering the women next to her to do the same. The candles all around them flickered.

Rory nudged Ava forwards. ‘I’m not really sure what to say,’ she laughed nervously as she felt the eyes in the room watching.

‘Say whatever you like.’ The woman raised her hands as if to encompass the world. ‘You are here to keep her company.’

‘To remind her of how greatly she was loved,’ another woman with bright dyed-red hair added as she went past. ‘Although we all know how much she liked a bit of gossip.’

Ava and Rory took the seats, staring at the figure laid out in front of them, her rouged cheeks and pink lipstick, her costume jewellery glistening in the dull spotlights, her beads, her velvet, her tiny shiny shoes.

Ava looked at Rory.

‘We flew out Ryanair, Gran,’ he said. ‘You’d have hated it. No leg room.’ Then he made a face like he didn’t know what else to say and beckoned for Ava to continue.

Ava swallowed. ‘You look amazing, really great outfit,’ she said. It felt as though the whole room was listening, so she stood up to talk a little quieter, her mouth close up to the glass, eyes staring at the fabric of her grandmother’s kaftan. ‘It feels like we haven’t been out here for ages. I’m sorry about that. I wish I’d seen you.’

Not knowing what else to say she glanced down at the floor, at her black shoes. ‘I’ve worn really boring shoes,’ she added, looking back up, this time at the face she knew so well, now lifeless and powdery. ‘Oh God,’ she put her hand to her mouth, ‘I’m going to really miss you.’ Her voice caught. ‘I’m sorry. Everyone’s watching me.’ She closed her eyes, stared into the darkness of her eyelids and said, ‘I suppose I just want to say thank you.’ She opened her eyes. ‘Thank you, for everything. I feel like you’re going to ring me and tell me that this all went really well.’ She half-laughed, then stopped, because as she stood there her eyes suddenly saw her own reflection in the glass rather than what was behind it. The black of her dress made her body disappear and she saw her face overlaid on to her grandmother’s. Her bobbed brown hair over shocking white curls, open blue eyes overlaid on closed tanned eyelids shaded with a stripe of bright hot pink.

At the same time a group of people bustled in through the door, as more of her grandmother’s friends arrived together, all wild gesticulations and a tumble of easy words, clutching tissues and holding hands. The space around them thronged. Rory stood up, their chairs now odd little empty islands as the number of people standing amassed.

A man in a slick black suit walked to the front and started to sing. Ava’s breath caught in her throat as the sound of this lone deep voice echoed around the room.

She stared at her face merging with her gran’s. With Valentina Brown – Val – her wonderful, opinionated, feisty grandmother, aged eighty-four, her outfit and her funeral preparations ready, her life lived like a peach so ripe it was ready to burst. Died at the same moment as Ava had lived. Like a deal had been struck with the universe to save her.

Ava could almost hear her voice. ‘You stupid girl. Me, I’m ready. You. You are not ready. You have more to give than this! You could have anything you like. Babies, husbands. I know, I know, I’m old-fashioned. Anything, Ava. Life is precious and time is not your friend. This is fate. Don’t sigh. I can hear a sigh down the phone. No respect – just like your mother. Just think for a moment, if this was it, Ava, would you be happy with what you’ve achieved?’

Ava stared transfixed at the glass. Was her life something to be proud of? Had it really been lived as well as it could? If someone had stood at the lectern to speak, what would they have said about her?

Then, just as the haunting song was reaching its peak, Rory’s phone started to ring.

‘Oh man.’ Ava rolled her eyes.

‘Sorry!’ Rory held up his hand. ‘Sorry,’ he said, as he fumbled to turn it off.

Then the coffin lid shut. Ava blinked. The curtain drew around the glass and the reflection popped.

‘Are you alright?’ Rory nudged her on the arm.

‘Yes.’ Ava tucked her hair behind her ears. They followed as everyone in the room headed towards the door.

‘Sure?’ He narrowed his gaze.

She nodded, sliding her sunglasses down as they stepped out into the dazzling bright sunshine of the little Spanish town, a place familiar from holidays – a fifteen-minute drive from their grandmother’s beachside house – visited for the supermarket, the nightclub and a day trip whenever it rained.

The mass of people spewed out into the road, the noise in the air like starlings. And when the procession began it was like burying royalty. People came out of shops to nod their heads, stood in the doorways of the little tapas bars, leaned against the gnarled trunks of the orange trees to watch. The air was perfumed with the hint of late blossom and exhaust smoke, while the sun baked them all like an oven.

There was a band made up of three old guys with a trumpet, an accordion and a tambourine, led by the singer from the wake. The music and the chatting followed the coffin all the way to the cemetery, loud and lively, the wobbling mass of people like jelly through the streets.

All exactly to Valentina Brown’s specifications.

Ava allowed herself a moment of morbid self-absorption to imagine, had it been her, the rainy, grey afternoon, people shaking out their umbrellas and wrapping their black macs tight, complaining about the terrible summer they were having, her father standing quietly in the front pew while Rory gave the eulogy. She glanced at him surreptitiously checking his emails. Great.

At the cemetery the sun flickered through giant fir trees, welcome shade as the group paused in front of a big white wall of little black doors. Behind these niches were the coffins of the people in the gilt-framed, sun-bleached photographs screwed above each door. Faded artificial flowers and alabaster Virgin Marys watched mournfully over the proceedings as rays of sun dappled like fingers of dusty light.

Words were said in Spanish, a blessing Ava couldn’t understand. So she remembered instead her first taste of chorizo and chickpeas, and the sound of Padrón peppers sizzling in the pan, so incongruous in the little Ealing bungalow where her grandparents lived, the crazy-paved outside wall and the gnomes in the garden. Remembered the piping hot doughnutty churros and the pots of warm melted chocolate for breakfast that they ate in their sleeping bags in the front room on swirly brown carpet in front of the two-bar electric fire. And then summer holiday trips in the car, driving endless miles through France and across Spain to Mariposa, the beach town where Valentina Brown grew up. Home of the Summerhouse. Once a ramshackle fisherman’s hut – a place where their great-grandfather hauled his boats to store them for the winter and mend his nets – transformed into a little haven on the cusp of the sea by Eric Brown, Val’s husband, his pale English skin and dislike of sand keeping him happily indoors with his Black & Decker and PG Tips. Summer after summer the roof was tiled, the walls plastered, the bathroom and kitchen refitted, a little terrace added and a first-floor bedroom built into the wooden-beamed eaves. Ava remembered standing in the shade of the palm trees, handing her grandfather nails and spirit levels, while Rory mixed thick cement with a trowel and they both got told off for flicking each other with white paint. And as Eric carefully laid the pebbles for the front path, Ava wrote the words ‘Summerhouse’ in shells and a great discussion ensued as to whether there should have been a space between the words, Rory rolling his eyes at her stupidity and Val appearing to clip him round the ear before bending down and writing ‘Our’ in shells in the wet cement above.

It was the perfect summer hideaway. And when Eric passed away, Val decamped from Ealing to Mariposa full-time, and the Summerhouse became her everyday house. But for Ava and Rory it was still the place that holidays were made of.

‘She had a bloody good innings,’ Rory whispered as Val’s coffin was lifted.

Ava turned to look at him, snapped out of her memories. ‘It’s not a cricket match, Rory.’

He snorted under his breath. Ava looked away, out across the sea of mourners, to the hats and the white hair, the smiles, the open tears, the handkerchiefs, the cigarettes, the hipflasks, the veils and the bright pops of corsage colour.

She saw the fullness of a life take shape in the people come to mourn it and was struck by the single thought: I have been given a second chance.

She turned back to see the coffin carried towards its final resting place, waves of sunlight dancing on the carved wood while glitter-edged artificial flowers shone pink around the niche in the wall like a welcoming cocoon. And as the coffin slid inside the chamber, Ava reached up to wipe the first tear from her cheek.