By the time Nikki called for her, she was desperate to get out of the house, and squeezed herself into the back of Nikki’s aunt’s car gladly. Nikki’s mother was there, too, sitting in the passenger seat, and she reached over the headrest to pull Heather into an alarmingly fierce hug.
“How are you, Heather? How you doing?”
“I’m fine, Mrs Appiah, honestly. Will be glad to get this out of the way, though.”
There was a larger group at the crematorium than Heather had honestly been expecting—more neighbors like Nikki’s aunt, a couple of very distant second cousins that she only recognized from old photographs. Lillian was there, too, wearing a very smart black dress suit and a small black hat with a crisp flourish of black lace. Seeing her, Heather felt a flush of shame; someone who had lived down the road from her mother had made more of an effort than her own daughter.
“Come on, Hev,” Nikki took her elbow lightly. “We’re going inside now.”
Slowly, the tiny group of people shuffled into the little red brick chapel, their heads down, their eyes dry. As they passed under the arch and moved down the pews, Heather felt a shiver of dread move through her—there was a large wooden cross on the far wall, dominating everything else, and her mother’s coffin lay in front of it, a spray of white flowers draping the warm toffee colored wood.
For a long moment, she felt herself almost pulled backwards, as though the room itself was repelling her, and then she remembered; of course, this was the same chapel where they had said goodbye to her dad. How could she have forgotten that? Except that in some weird automatic act of desperate self-preservation, she had forgotten most of it. Her father’s funeral now only existed in her memory as a series of painful images and impressions. The smell of leather from the coat she was wearing; the sound of her mother’s painful sobs; and her own grief and guilt, a bright shard of glass lodged so deep in her throat she had spent the ceremony in a kind of stunned silence.
Nikki looked up at her, concern creasing a line in between her eyebrows.
“Hev?”
She nodded rapidly, forcing herself to smile.
“Come on,” Mrs Appiah slipped her meaty arm around her waist. “We’re sitting with you.”
Nikki’s family ushered her to the front pew and sat around her, fussing and handing out handkerchiefs. They were at home in churches, completely unfazed by the smell of old flowers and the looming cross, and Heather felt a surge of gratitude for them that threatened to make her cry before the service had even started. However, when the vicar stood and cleared her throat, she found herself oddly calm. She glanced around once, and spotted Lillian sitting at the back by herself, her hands folded over her large handbag and her eyes focused intently on the coffin.
“Thank you all for coming here today to celebrate the life of Colleen Evans.” The vicar smiled around at them, and Heather wondered what she thought—about the small turn out, about the circumstances of her mother’s death. There had been an awkward conversation over the phone where the vicar had asked lots of questions about Colleen, clearly trying to glean enough information to be able to talk about her confidently at the service, but Heather had found she had had very little to tell her. If her mother had had hobbies in her later life, she hadn’t known about them, and most of her memories concerned a distant and uneasy childhood. At one point she had been seized with the compulsion to tell her about Michael Reave. My mother used to knock around with a murderer of women. Can you get that in somehow? Perhaps mention how she wrote to him for decades and never mentioned it to anyone. Or you could talk about how she used to live on a hippy commune and probably took loads of drugs. That makes a good anecdote, doesn’t it? In the end she had cut the whole thing short, and now she could see the vicar struggling to build an image of someone she had known nothing about.
“Happily married to her husband Barry for many years, Colleen was also extremely proud of her daughter Heather …”
She made a small noise in her throat at that. Thinking that she was crying, Mrs. Appiah patted her knee gently.
Heather found herself staring at the coffin, inevitably remembering her conversations with the people at the morgue, when her mother’s body had been retrieved and identified. They had been kind people, solemn and attentive, and they had explained to her that it would not be possible for her to see Colleen—the damage, when someone falls from a great height (jumps, Heather had added silently, jumps) was too extensive. Instead they had introduced her to a police officer who had given her Colleen’s handbag. Inside it had been her mother’s battered purse, her bus pass, and handfuls of rose hips, as though she had picked them and shoved them in her bag on her walk to the cliffs. It had also contained her suicide note.
“The rose hips, are they
