funeral

Under frail skies it happened as all always happens, the funeral. It had been reasonably stipulated by paperwork to be in occurrence beachward, the sea-drenched sand piled preposterous before the taunting applause of the waves of the sea.

The son – Bramwell Sheens – acted as chief mourner, his unsocked feet so white like newborn fish flesh they were almost transparent, veins running through them like complex cartography inadequately plotted. Ever such a contrast with the black suit that swung in the pressure above his ankles. His toes dug into the sand with imprint and he led the procession marching steadily across the endless coastline. A bowl of incense swung from his clasped hands. No one could smell its finery over the seaweed. There were heavy tears in his eyes. He had loved his mother, his own Mrs Sheens.

The town’s youth carried the coffin, it only took the two boys. Poor woman weighed less than the box that bound her when the time came. The eternal whisper: when the time came.

All of their feet were bare. The paperwork had insisted. The invites too:

Sheens Funeral.
Bare foot code in application, without exception.

The townswomen were impressive against the sand, each black dress striking a chord more minor like a terminal harpsichord. They howled as sirens behind thick veils, beneath which their vision darkened into impossibility. Creeping coffinside along the beach they clutched to each other for directional guidance, their blackened bodies like lightning-struck trees, blind to the horrors of the real world yet immersed in the horrors of their own.

Formalwear so ridiculous wading through knee-deep channels of saltwater, splashing dully into groins with the disturbance of footsteps. It took an hour to traverse the strange beach, from the opening at the harbour mouth to the expanse of the North Sea beyond. The mourners were restless in their upset, bored in the wind.

Vicar on the horizon, long hair spiralling in the cruelty of meteorology but for odd lank strands stuck flat to his large face, his tears as adhesive against the pallid flesh. Fittingly he wore black, smocked neck to bare toes and front-buttoned. Neck-collar stifling. He stood firmly a vessel of God and clutched a leather bound bible before him, weeping for a woman. They came forth at an excruciating pace, flecks of darkness slowly heaving across the beach.

The grave was already dug into the wet shifting sand. Six feet of sand piled to the right of the vicar. The sight was apprehensive, macabre on the approach.

A handful of older males, acquaintances mainly, had dropped to their knees and were picking fresh samphire in their grief. For the wake, sobbed one. For the wake, sobbed another. They stuffed the rich green food into their trouser pockets, still dripping with brine, and walked on delirious.

Bramwell Sheens placed the burning incense at the side of the grave and embraced the vicar as if God Himself. The remaining others encircled the grave like a pack of hungry animals, and the teenaged pallbearers placed the box in the centre of the ritualistic geometry. Wailing, further heightened in pitch and intensity, intermixed with the mighty sea in a sound unbearable. The women began to swoon, falling one then another and one after another, only to stand with sand stuck to their dresses and suits in the shape of their falls, the visual pressures of contacting flesh. A man, somebody’s brother, slumped to all fours with a sharp cry, clawing at sand in the throes of an agony without precedent.

Only the vicar, now, could hope to express a context for this despair. His voice an instrument of grief. “Eternal rest give to them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them”. The rain fell with his words, the grave already soiled with a watery bottom. Perchance such irony is lost on the dead. Bramwell Sheens, devastated beyond the physical, nodded to the youths, who like soldiers of business lowered the coffin. It splashed at the lowest point, its wooden sides half submerged beneath the encroaching sea, the sand a poor base for eternal slumber.

Rain increasing in ferocity the vicar spoke faster.

“Ashes to ashes.”

The wet sand clung to symbolic throwing fingers, only odd lumps thudding onto the top of the coffin. The tide approached, cautiously at first. The mourners felt it on their feet with surprise, only just before the siren which announced the commencement of a period of tidal danger.

The vicar looked to Bramwell Sheens for confirmation, who nodded again, more urgently. The pallbearers began pushing the sand over the coffin, but the tide was engaged in its own burial, the grave filling with water, the sand washed in and about and away.

Quickly the mourning party left without eulogy or further conversation. Even tears had stopped, the situation now somehow too determined for such extravagance. His wet vestments so cruel a hindrance for beachwear, taut around the knees in this driving rain, the vicar fell to his lost footing, on his back flat in the rising channel. As Bramwell Sheens helped him silently to his feet he saw, like the vicar, a small crab alone, turned vulnerable on its back in the murky shallows. Its legs moved in flickers and one of its pincers opened in tiny gradations, but still he assumed it were dead. His mother had assured him in adolescence that an animal on its back always brought death. He knew not if crab was animal. His mother was dead.

Heads down the mourners marched mute, steps apart from one another. It was as if the funeral had violated them in the most personal ways. Somehow profoundly it was the end of even distant friendships. The coast guards whistle roared like a bizarre hymnal tribute.

He held hands with the vicar as they walked back to their cars.

Their shoes.

Their lives.