The funeral director down the lane is also the local taxi service, which partly explains why I see him drive past our back gate so often.
According to my neighbours, he has been known to joke ‘I’ll take you dead or alive’, and although he has not gone so far as to have this written on the side of his car, his approach does stand as testament to the Irish having a wonderfully earthy sense of humour.
The BB claimed that the funeral director eyed him, or rather sized him, as if to assess his dimensions
The builder boyfriend met this funeral cabbie, or taxi mortician, when he went to the wake of the elderly man who sold us our house. The BB claimed that the funeral director eyed him, or rather sized him – as in he shook his hand for longer than was polite, looking up and down, then left to right – as if to assess his dimensions.
I told the BB not to be so stupid. Of course that didn’t happen. But he insisted it did.
I had been in London at the time and, as the builder b had stayed behind in West Cork, he represented us to pay our respects when the former owner of our house died while I was away.
‘Listen to me,’ the BB said earnestly and urgently, as he does when he really wants me to believe a tall tale he’s telling, because against all the odds it’s true. ‘He shook my hand for so long it was obvious he was measuring me up for a coffin. He did the same to everyone, especially the ones coughing and spluttering.’
He said that was not the worst thing. There were, he said, women sitting around the edge of the darkened room muttering Latin prayers. The BB is apt to be hysterical about ritual. Any religious rite he doesn’t understand puts the heebie-jeebies up him.
To convince me, he impersonated the chanting in his best pretend Latin – ‘Amino domino, amino domino…’ – then launched into ‘O Fortuna’ from Carmina Burana. ‘Very funny,’ I said, ‘but I think you’ll find they were saying the rosary in English with a Cork accent.’ As for matey, he’s just doing his job. The funeral director probably needs to do a lot of forward planning to keep up.
At church every Sunday, the priest has been issuing increasingly urgent appeals to the congregation not to send in details of departed relatives to pray for at Mass unless they have died that week. Not a day either side of the two Sundays, otherwise the list is too long and the Mass is held up.
Meanwhile, I see the black car going up and down the back lane by our stable yard and I wonder: where to? Cork International or the big departure lounge in the sky?
He has a fleet. It’s not like he turns up to take you to the airport in a hearse. He also has a black people carrier van with tinted windows, which is what shoots up and down the lane doing pick-ups.
I see it most days and I wonder. Then I go to the supermarket in the village and the women bring me up to date. ‘…In the night, of a heart attack.’ ‘Oh no,’ I say, because we only saw him yesterday as we drove by and he waved at us from his gate.
The Irish take all this tragedy in their stride. They give the best send-offs possible at the local bar where the Guinness and sandwiches flow.
I wish their stoicism would rub off on me because I do find illness and death a bit, well, suboptimal, and I am sorry to be so awkward as to worry about it but I’m neurotic, you see.
The BB and I had an appointment with the priest to talk about our ‘wedding’, which I have been obsessing about since deciding, given the state of the world and the fact that the authorities are adamant all this is normal, that I had better put my affairs in order.
We served the notice a year ago. The BB had to get a personal public service number, which took six months because his name wasn’t on any of the house bills.
Then we couldn’t find someone to marry us because, while I am a Roman Catholic, we couldn’t find my first Holy Communion records to prove it.
Finally, the priest said he would find a way round it if we came to see him two weeks into the new year. At Christmas we put a bottle of whiskey on his doorstep as a thank you, but our appointment day came and went, and no amount of texting raised the priest.
I panicked because I remembered him telling us he had two stents in his heart. ‘It would be just our luck,’ said the BB, ‘if that bottle of whiskey pushed him over the edge.
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