MOLLY THATCHER
Collateral Damage
When the grandmother bent in half and laid her hands on the floor of the funeral home, the family held its breath. The anorexic cousin in the back stopped eating her thumb and the son rolled his shoulders as though his manhood had been challenged. Her prim little heels bobbed off the ground as she rocked up onto her palms and down again. When she righted herself, she was laughing and crying, mad-eyed as a child who is about to run away from home.
“I can still do it,” she said.
Her daughter moved to take her arm and guided her off to look at the different funerary plaques. The grandmother’s steps skipped slightly to keep up with the long strides of her daughter. Looking at the rows of plaques, I thought of playground hopscotch and imagined legions of living hopping across the stony brows of the dead. My hangover shifted slightly and settled somewhere behind my left eye, which began to tremble slightly in battle with the air conditioning.
I wasn’t sure why Ted had insisted I came. If you’re invited to the wedding, you might join the hen do, but the need for an entourage of cousins, plus ones and significant others to select a coffin summoned up memories of being made to open my first bra in front of family and friends on my 13th birthday. Of feeling a little indecent and knowing instinctively the mutual embarrassment was the point. Ted was off talking to the son. The son was also his father. The son was his father; the son was his father. That was his grandmother, over by the lilies now, and his father was the son of the grandmother. His grandfather was going in the coffin. It was all very simple, but I found it hard keeping these connections neat in my mind. Ted’s grandmother, by placing her hands on the funeral home floor, had transformed this whole scene into a sort of topsy-turvy, inside-out carnival. A Feast of Fools. I felt someone was about to come out from the embalming room with a boar’s head on a platter. I’d once sat through a college dinner next to a grown-up Swedish child star with two stage mothers and tried to sing carols in Old English, while a plastic boar’s head hung morbidly halfway down the table. I wasn’t keen to repeat the experience.
Another daughter (not the daughter who was attending the grandmother at the lilies but the one who had moved to Berlin at 23 and now worked as a pet photographer) came up to me. She had incredibly long eyelashes that rose and fell like angel’s sighs as she asked me how I knew Ted.
“We’ve been dating for 3 years,” I said, aware that this awkward revelation now hung like a particularly ugly dinner plate between us. On the plate were little medieval paintings of the Lord of Misrule and they all had Ted’s slightly bemused face. The other daughter blinked her long eyelashes. She’s really very beautiful, I thought. The pets are lucky she takes their portraits in Berlin. “I’ve heard so much about you,” I say, taking the liberty of saying her lines for her.
After this everything moves quicker. The pet photographer was clearly the family’s vanguard and once the defensive line is broken they all rushed to get the awkwardness of meeting me over with. One cousin was in the process of divorcing his husband and had recently moved out. To illustrate the width of his new kitchen he held his hands apart approximately the wingspan of an adult seagull, to which I nodded politely.
The son, Ted’s father, came over and rolled his shoulders again.
“It’s good to finally meet you,” he said. “Ted talks about you a lot. He told me you work in disasters”, here he laughed heartily. He seemed like a man used to quickly building a jovial atmosphere, to saying some sparking remark that both parties could then gratefully fan into a little bonfire of mutual goodwill, over which they would self-congratulatorily warm their hands.
“I’m a risk analyst,” I said. “I insure artworks against damage, based on where data predicts natural disasters might occur. Actors use us a lot to insure their collections against wildfires.”
Ted’s father was nodding as though these endangered artworks were a cause he’d like to personally take up in his free time, but his eyes were also drifting off to my right where I knew the grandmother was discussing prices with the funeral director.
“But to say you work in disasters,” trying the flint of goodwill one more time, “can’t set a great tone when you introduce yourself to people.” He laughed, “I mean what must people think!”
“I’ve had worse introductions.”
“Quite true, yes, I’m sure. Quite.”
*
Ted and I had arrived in the small market town where his grandparents lived the previous night. As b-tier guests to the coffin selection we stayed in the local Premier Inn. While I showered, I questioned again why I was allowing myself to be introduced to his family under such conditions.
Ted had raised it as if it was a foregone conclusion I would come.
When I shared my apprehensions he said, “It’s perfect though. Everyone will be there, so you’ll see everyone’s faces but it’s a funeral home. People won’t exactly be tripping over themselves to talk to you. You can’t think that you’re going to be the centre of attention”, he stopped to look incredulous at the suggestion, “while my grandmother is bereaved. Anyway, isn’t a funeral home like a church, hushed tones and silence and all that? People will be too busy being respectful to interrogate you.”
Then, to be cruel, he said, “I think I’d feel better if you were there, you know.”
For two years Ted has been studying a PhD in international relations with the goal of becoming a diplomat in Finland. He spoke Finnish very poorly. He was incredibly neat and sparse as a person – if he did one day become a diplomat it would be more in the vein of the bureaucrat than the cosmopolitan, cajoling trickster I vaguely understood from novels. Ted had two excesses. The first was that while everywhere else his flesh was sparse and slightly mean, the skin on the inside of his mouth grew luxuriously thick and puffy. When he thought, he often chewed on it, so thick white ridges tracked down each side of his mouth like runway lines to his uvula. It gave a slight vulvic quality to his mouth when he opened it wide enough. His second excess was his transatlantic accent which he affected to cultivate to vaguely give the impression that English was his second language, but he’d gone to the correct sort of international school. This meant he often over-articulated (“feel be-tarh if you were there”) and I saw his white lines and uvula regularly.
I knew he’d feel better if I was there. Not that my loving presence would actually provide any comfort. There’d be no hand holding or silent hugs. I knew he wanted me there as a big emotional shield, that my introduction to the extended family amongst rows of empty coffins and sample sale tombstones would be a mitigating disaster, insurance against whatever private calamity he was to experience alone. I was collateral. But I said yes, because my hatred for him at that moment was so intense, so vitriolic towards a person I had thought I’d done a pretty good job loving for three years, that it scared me. So, I had packed a canvas bag with my most inoffensively colourless clothes and driven through the rain. It was the kind of September day on which ships launched that are destined to sink.
Ted and I didn’t talk much when I met him in the town. He ran his thumb one time over my knuckles, and I lightly pulled his hair at the cowlick.
After I showered, we went to a bar in the town and drank heavily. Downing long pints with desperation, a slow-building mania pushing each of us to conspire against the other. I was willing to share the punishment of a hangover tomorrow if it meant Ted was also punished.
Back in the hotel room we hurt each other in all the usual ways. Lying there in the dark afterwards, Ted’s voice (without the transatlantic accent) told me that his grandfather was his first love. The first time he was able to name what he was feeling as love was when, as a small child, he had hid in the towel cupboard to spy on his grandfather only to witness him at the mirror, slowly combing his long grey hair over a bald patch at the back of his head, on which a small red birthmark was visible.
“He didn’t want me to see it. I worshipped him. You know at school when we sang hymns, I couldn’t help imagining him as God with his beard and his big armchair. I think he knew if I saw it, my love for him would get mixed up with pity. But wouldn’t you love God more if you knew he had a little vanity? I thought about that carefully hidden birthmark everyday afterwards”
Then I had excused myself and gone into the bathroom to be sick. When I came back, I stroked the crown of Ted’s head until he fell asleep. In the hotel bed, I dreamed of a grandfather god with a little vanity; it was made of cherry wood and stuffed full of an old starlet’s powders and tinctures.
*
Across the funeral home, the grandmother was looking at me. She had a very beautiful face on a very narrow body, like a bouquet of slightly soiled flowers tied to a lamppost. You thought of car accidents, untold disasters happening in the night, when you saw her. Ted had told me she used to be a gymnast before she met his grandfather. She specialised in the balance beam and had been training for national competitions when she’d fallen and shattered her foot. It was the tragedy of her life. The pride of her life was that she could still go into a handstand until she was 70. Now she was 80 and content, I supposed, to place her hands on the floor.
I hadn’t spoken to Ted in more than an hour and could see him outside quietly smoking in the rain. I knew he was probably in his own private freefall of horror at the situation, that my presence as attention deflector was working. I was talking to the pet photographer daughter again, staring at her beautiful eyelashes and resolving to break up with Ted once this experience was over, when from the corner of the funeral home came a soft thump, and we both turned to see the grandmother crumpled on her side. She had clearly placed her hands on the floor again and lost balance. She was moaning slightly and her attendant-daughter was frantically shifting her onto her side.
There’s a cut of memory here I think, because suddenly the men are outside waiting for an ambulance and the women are laying towels over the grandmother’s body and I am in the same spot, but Ted is now beside me. He looks white, pale, as though his whole face is made of the gnawed skin inside his mouth. There’s the look of final resolve in his eyes.
“You’ve not said hello to grandma yet. Let’s go see if she needs anything.”
I hate him in that moment. I hate him, I think, more than any man I’ve ever seen on the news who’s killed a girl or orchestrated a war crime.
“Grandma, this is Lou, I’ve told you about her before.”
The grandmother looks up at me, smiling on the funeral home carpet. “Of course, sweetheart, thank you for coming, it was so good of you. I wish I could get up and hug you.”
I’m aware the female family members have withdrawn to the background, where they’re telephoning more invisible relatives and passing each other cups of tea over the head of the dazed funeral director.
“It’s lovely to meet you too,” I say, shifting a little. I can tell without looking over that Ted has given his only contribution to the conversation. “It’s very impressive,” clearing my throat, “that you can still touch the floor, I’ve never been able to do it. I think it’s because I inherited my mother’s legs.”
The grandmother nods, as best she can on her side and under towels. “I inherited my father’s legs. He was a jockey, so the ground isn’t very far away for me. I never met him though; he died before I was born.”
Her open mouth looks like the puckered stone in which sea creatures lived out somnambulist lives, it’s almost geologic in its slow formulations of words, while her watery eyes run over my face.
“But the first time I did a cartwheel, you know, was when I was five years old. The house we were living in burned down. It was in an old stable I remember, at the bottom of a meadow which led up to a big vicarage. My mother moved there just after my father died and it’s the first house I remember. It was my whole conception of the world for a long time. I used to run from the stables across the meadow and up to the vicarage to touch its cool stone. The meadow was all that was untethered in the world, a green fray where I could drift for hours, before returning to those two buildings on the shore.
I don’t remember why the stables caught fire, but I remember my mother getting me and my brother out into the yard. My brother was just a baby, and my mother was on her knees crying and I was looking down at the grass, because looking up at the fire burned my eyes and scared me. The grass was orange; it was glowing and each blade was lit like a flame, but I saw black ants crawling over them away from the heat of the blaze. Then every sparse trickle of my five-year-old consciousness came together, and I knew these orange flames, not the ones licking my house, were reality, and they could not burn me. I just needed to hold them up in my hands and feel their solid warmth and that would be where joy was hidden in this moment. So, I went topsy turvy over and did a cartwheel. Once I did one, I couldn’t stop. It felt like every time I did one the burning of my world felt less catastrophic.” She laughed. “So, Ruth” (that was the attendant-daughter’s name) “I never stopped.”
The grandmother trailed off, whispering “whoopsie Ruth, topsy turvy over”. Ruth came over and started stroking her back.
I saw everything very clearly. I didn’t want to be Ted’s insurance to cash in while he lost his private God. I would break up with Ted, I told myself, but later, after the funeral. Then I bend down, the loudly patterned carpet coming closer, and I can see the grime and grave-mud caked into the fibres and I notice nightingales between the flowers for the first time. The nightingales and the grime lose focus and blur as I kiss the grandmother on her cheek.
Molly Thatcher is a lesbian writer based in London. She graduated from Oxford university with a master’s degree in Twentieth Century Literature in 2022. She currently works as an editor on the Women Writers series at the British Library. Her work has appeared in The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts and The Cold Magazine. You can find her @bookish_existence on Instagram.