This is how Fat Charlie’s father died.
He had arrived in the bar early, and had launched the karaoke evening by singing “What’s New Pussycat?” which song he had belted out, according to Mrs. Higgler, who had not been there, in a manner that would have caused Tom Jones to be festooned in flung feminine undergarments, and which brought Fat Charlie’s father a complimentary beer, courtesy of the several blonde tourists from Michigan who thought he was just about the cutest thing they’d ever seen.
“It was their fault,” said Mrs. Higgler, bitterly, over the phone. “They was encouragin‘ him!” They were women who had squeezed into tube tops, and they had reddish too-much-sun-too-early tans, and they were all young enough to be his daughters.
So pretty soon he’s down at their table, smoking his cheroots and hinting strongly that he was in Army Intelligence during the war, although he was careful not to say which war, and that he could kill a man in a dozen different ways with his bare hands without breaking a sweat.
Now he takes the bustiest and blondest of the tourists on a quick spin around the dance floor, such as it was, while one of her friends warbled “Strangers in the Night” from the stage. He appeared to be having a fine time, although the tourist was somewhat taller than he was, and his grin was on a level with her bosom.
And then, the dance done, he announced it was his turn again, and, because if there was one thing you could say about Fat Charlie’s father it was that he was secure in his heterosexuality, he sang “I Am What I Am” to the room, but particularly to the blondest tourist on the table just below him. He gave it everything he had. He had just got as far as explaining to anyone listening that as far as he was concerned his life would not actually be worth a damn unless he was able to tell everybody that he was what he was, when he made an odd face, pressed one hand to his chest, stretched the other hand out, and toppled, as slowly and as gracefully as a man could topple, off the makeshift stage and onto the blondest holidaymaker, and from her onto the floor.
“It was how he always would have wanted to go,” sighed Mrs. Higgler.
And then she told Fat Charlie how his father had, with his final gesture, as he fell, reached out and grasped at something, which turned out to be the blonde tourist’s tube top, so that at first some people thought he had made a lust-driven leap from the stage with the sole purpose of exposing the bosom in question, because there she was, screaming, with her breasts staring at the room, while the music for “I Am What I Am” kept playing, only now without anyone singing.
When the onlookers realized what had actually happened they had two minutes’ silence, and Fat Charlie’s father was carried out and put into an ambulance while the blonde tourist had hysterics in the ladies’ room.
It was the breasts that Fat Charlie couldn’t get out of his head. In his mind’s eye they followed him accusatively around the room, like the eyes in a painting. He kept wanting to apologize to a roomful of people he had never met. And the knowledge that his father would have found it hugely amusing simply added to Fat Charlie’s mortification. It’s worse when you’re embarrassed about something you were not even there to see: your mind keeps embroidering the events and going back to it and turning it over and over, and examining it from every side. Well, yours might not, but Fat Charlie’s certainly did.
As a rule, Fat Charlie felt embarrassment in his teeth, and in the upper pit of his stomach. If something that even looked like it might be embarrassing was about to happen on his television screen Fat Charlie would leap up and turn it off. If that was not possible, say if other people were present, he would leave the room on some pretext and wait until the moment of embarrassment was sure to be over.
Fat Charlie lived in South London. He had arrived, at the age of ten, with an American accent, which he had been relentlessly teased about, and had worked very hard to lose, finally extirpating the last of the soft consonants and rich Rs while learning the correct use and placement of the word innit. He had finally succeeded in losing his American accent for good as he had turned sixteen, just as his schoolfriends discovered that they needed very badly to sound like they came from the ‘hood. Soon all of them except Fat Charlie sounded like people who wanted to sound like Fat Charlie had talked when he’d come to England in the first place, except that he could never have used language like that in public without his mum giving him a swift clout round the ear.
It was all in the voice.
Once the embarrassment over his father’s method of passing began to fade, Fat Charlie just felt empty.
“I don’t have any family,” he said to Rosie, almost petulantly.
“You’ve got me,” she said. That made Fat Charlie smile. “And you’ve got my mum,” she added, which stopped the smile in its tracks. She kissed him on the cheek.
“You could stay over for the night,” he suggested. “Comfort me, all that.”
“I could,” she agreed, “but I’m not going to.”
Rosie was not going to sleep with Fat Charlie until they were married. She said it was her decision, and she had made it when she was fifteen; not that she had known Fat Charlie then, but she had decided. So she gave him another hug, a long one. And she said, “You need to make your peace with your dad, you know.” And then she went home.
He spent a restless night, sleeping sometimes, then waking, and wondering, and falling back asleep again.
He was up at sunrise. When people got in to work he would ring his travel agent and ask about bereavement fares to Florida, and he would phone the Grahame Coats Agency and tell them that, due to a death in the family, he would have to take a few days off and yes, he knew it came out of his sick leave or his holiday time. But for now he was glad that the world was quiet.
He went along the corridor to the tiny spare room at the back of the house and looked down into the gardens below. The dawn chorus had begun, and he could see blackbirds, and small hedge-hopping sparrows, a single spotted-breasted thrush in the boughs of a nearby tree. Fat Charlie thought that a world in which birds sang in the morning was a normal world, a sensible world, a world he didn’t mind being a part of.
Later, when birds were something to be afraid of, Fat Charlie would still remember that morning as something good and something fine, but also as the place where it all started. Before the madness; before the fear.
CHAPTER TWO
WHICH IS MOSTLY ABOUT THE THINGS THAT HAPPEN AFTER FUNERALS
FAT CHARLIE PUFFED HIS WAY THROUGH THE MEMORIAL GARDEN of Rest, squinting at the Florida sunshine. Sweat stains were spreading across his suit, beginning with the armpits and the chest. Sweat began to pour down his face as he ran.
The Memorial Garden of Rest did, in fact, look very much like a garden, but a very odd garden, in which all the flowers were artificial, and they grew from metal vases protruding from metal plaques set in the ground. Fat Charlie ran past a sign: “FREE Burial Space for all Honorably Discharged Veterans!” it said. He ran through Babyland, where multicolored windmills and sodden blue and pink teddy bears joined the artificial flowers on the Florida turf. A moldering Winnie the Pooh stared up wanly at the blue sky.
Fat Charlie could see the funeral party now, and he changed direction, finding a path that allowed him to run toward it. There were thirty people, perhaps more, standing around the grave. The women wore dark dresses, and big black hats trimmed with black lace, like fabulous flowers. The men wore suits without sweat stains. The children looked solemn. Fat Charlie slowed his pace to a respectful walk, still trying to hurry without moving fast enough for anyone to notice that he was in fact hurrying, and, having reached the group of mourners, he attempted to edge his way to the front ranks without attracting too much attention. Seeing that by now he was panting like a walrus who had just had to tackle a flight of stairs, was dripping with sweat and trod on several feet as he went by, this attempt proved a failure.
There were glares, which Fat Charlie tried to pretend he did not notice. Everyone was singing a song that Fat Charlie did n
ot know. He moved his head in time with the song and tried to make it look as if he was sort of singing, moving his lips in a way that might have meant that he was actively singing along, sotto voce, and he might have been muttering a prayer under his breath, and might just have been random lip motion. He took the opportunity to look down at the casket. He was pleased to see that it was closed.
The casket was a glorious thing, made of what looked like heavy-duty reinforced steel, gunmetal gray. In the event of the glorious resurrection, thought Fat Charlie, when Gabriel blows his mighty horn and the dead escape their coffins, his father was going to be stuck in his grave, banging away futilely at the lid, wishing that he had been buried with a crowbar and possibly an oxyacetylene torch.
A final, deeply melodic hallelujah faded away. In the silence that followed, Fat Charlie could hear someone shouting at the other end of the memorial gardens, back near where he had come in.
The preacher said, “Now, does anyone have anything they want to say in memory of the dear departed?”
By the expressions on the faces of those nearest to the grave, it was obvious that several of them were planning to say things. But Fat Charlie knew it was a now-or-never moment. You need to make your peace with your dad, you know. Right.
He took a deep breath and a step forward, so he was right at the edge of the grave, and he said “Um. Excuse me. Right. I think I have something to say.”
The distant shouting was getting louder. Several of the mourners were casting glances back over their shoulders, to see where it was coming from. The rest of them were staring at Fat Charlie.
“I was never what you would call close to my father,” said Fat Charlie. “I suppose we didn’t really know how. I’ve not been part of his life for twenty years, and he hasn’t been part of mine. There’s a lot of things it’s hard to forgive, but then one day you turn around and you’ve got no family left.” He wiped a hand across his forehead. “I don’t think I’ve ever said ‘I love you, Dad’ in my whole life. All of you, you all probably knew him better than I did. Some of you may have loved him. You were part of his life, and I wasn’t. So I’m not ashamed that any of you should hear me say it. Say it for the first time in at least twenty years.” He looked down at the impregnable metal casket lid. “I love you,” he said. “And I’ll never forget you.”
The shouting got even louder, and now it was loud enough and clear enough, in the silence that followed Fat Charlie’s statement, for everyone to be able to make out the words being bellowed across the memorial gardens: “Fat Charlie! You stop botherin‘ those people and get your ass over here this minute!”
Fat Charlie stared at the sea of unfamiliar faces, their expressions a seething stew of shock, puzzlement, anger and horror; ears burning, he realized the truth.
“Er. Sorry. Wrong funeral,” he said.
A small boy with big ears and an enormous smile said, proudly, “That was my gramma.”
Fat Charlie backed through the small crowd mumbling barely coherent apologies. He wanted the world to end now. He knew it was not his father’s fault, but also knew that his father would have found it hilarious.
Standing on the path, her hands on her hips, was a large woman with gray hair and thunder in her face. Fat Charlie walked toward her as he would have walked across a minefield, nine years old again, and in trouble.
“You don’t hear me yellin?” she asked. “You went right on past me. Makin‘ a embarrassment of yourself!” The way she said embarrassment it began with the letter H. “Back this way,” she said. “You miss the service and everythin’. But there’s a shovelful of dirt waiting for you.”
Mrs. Higgler had barely changed in the last two decades: she was a little fatter, a little grayer. Her lips were pressed tightly together, and she led the way down one of the memorial garden’s many paths. Fat Charlie suspected that he had not made the best possible first impression. She led the way and, in disgrace, Fat Charlie followed.
A lizard zapped up one of the struts of the metal fence at the edge of the memorial garden, then poised itself at the top of a spike, tasting the thick Florida air. The sun had gone behind a cloud, but, if anything, the afternoon was getting hotter. The lizard puffed its neck out into a bright orange balloon.
Two long-legged cranes he had taken initially for lawn ornaments looked up at him as he passed. One of them darted its head down and rose up again with a large frog dangling from its beak. It began, in a series of gulping movements, to try to swallow the frog, which kicked and flailed in the air.
“Come on,” said Mrs. Higgler. “Don’t dawdle. Bad enough you missing your own father’s funeral.”
Fat Charlie suppressed the urge to say something about having come four thousand miles already that day, and having rented a car and driven down from Orlando, and how he had got off at the wrong exit, and whose idea was it anyway to tuck a garden of rest behind a Wal-Mart on the very edge of town? They kept walking, past a large concrete building that smelled of formaldehyde, until they reached an open grave at the very farthest reaches of the property. There was nothing beyond this but a high fence, and, beyond that, a wilderness of trees and palms and greenery. In the grave was a modest wooden coffin. It had several mounds of dirt on it already. Beside the grave was a pile of earth and a shovel.
Mrs. Higgler picked up the shovel and handed it to Fat Charlie.
“It was a pretty service,” she said. “Some of your daddy’s old drinkin‘ buddies were there, and all the ladies from our street. Even after he moved down the road we still kept in touch. He would have liked it. Of course, he would have liked it more if you’d been there.” She shook her head. “Now, shovel,” she said. “And if you got any good-byes, you can say them while you’re shovelin’ down the dirt.”
“I thought I was just meant to do one or two spadefuls of dirt,” he said. “To show willing.”
“I give the man thirty bucks to go away,” said Mrs. Higgler. “I tell him that the departed’s son is flying in all the way from Hingland, and that he would want to do right by his father. Do the right thing. Not just ‘show willing.’”
“Right,” said Fat Charlie. “Absolutely. Got it.” He took off his suit jacket and hung it on the fence. He loosened his tie, pulled it over his head, and put it into the jacket pocket. He shoveled the black dirt into the open grave, in Florida air as thick as soup.
After a while it sort of began to rain, which is to say that it was the kind of rain that never comes to a decision about whether it’s actually raining or not. Driving in it, you would never have been certain whether or not to turn on your wipers. Standing in it, shoveling in it, you simply got sweatier, damper, more uncomfortable. Fat Charlie continued to shovel, and Mrs. Higgler stood there with her arms folded across her gargantuan bosom, with the almost-rain misting her black dress and her straw hat with one black silk rose on it, watching him as he filled in the hole.
The earth became mud, and became, if anything, heavier.
After what seemed like a lifetime, and a very uncomfortable one at that, Fat Charlie patted down the final shovelful of dirt.
Mrs. Higgler walked over to him. She took his jacket off the fence and handed it to him.
“You’re soaked to the skin and covered in dirt and sweat, but you grew up. Welcome home, Fat Charlie,” she said, and she smiled, and she held him to her vast breast.
“I’m not crying,” said Fat Charlie.
“Hush now,” said Mrs. Higgler.
“It’s the rain on my face,” said Fat Charlie.
Mrs. Higgler didn’t say anything. She just held him, and swayed backward and forward, and after a while Fat Charlie said, “It’s okay. I’m better now.”
“There’s food back at my house,” said Mrs. Higgler. “Let’s get you fed.”
He wiped the mud from his shoes in the parking lot, then he got into his gray rental car, and he followed Mrs. Higgler in her maroon station wagon down streets that had not existed twenty years earlier. Mrs. Higgler drove like a woman who h
ad just discovered an enormous and much-needed mug of coffee and whose primary mission was to drink as much coffee as she was able to while driving as fast as possible; and Fat Charlie drove along behind her, keeping up as best he could, racing from traffic light to traffic light while trying to figure out more or less where they were.
And then they turned down a street, and, with mounting apprehension, he realized he recognized it. This was the street he had lived on as a boy. Even the houses looked more or less the same, although most of them had now grown impressive wire-mesh fences around their front yards.
There were several cars already parked in front of Mrs. Higgler’s house. He pulled up behind an elderly gray Ford. Mrs. Higgler walked up to the front door, opened it with her key.
Fat Charlie looked down at himself, muddy and sweat-soaked. “I can’t go in looking like this,” he said.
“I seen worse,” said Mrs. Higgler. Then she sniffed. “I tell you what, you go in there, go straight into the bathroom, you can wash off your hands and face, clean yourself up, and when you’re ready we’ll all be in the kitchen.”
He went into the bathroom. Everything smelled like jasmine. He took off his muddy shirt, and washed his face and hands with jasmine-scented soap, in a tiny washbasin. He took a washcloth and wiped down his chest, and scrubbed at the muddiest lumps on his suit trousers. He looked at the shirt, which had been white when he put it on this morning and was now a particularly grubby brown, and decided not to put it back on. He had more shirts in his bag, in the backseat of the rental car. He would slip back out of the house, put on a clean shirt, then face the people in the house.
He unlocked the bathroom door, and opened it.
Four elderly ladies were standing in the corridor, staring at him. He knew them. He knew all of them.