quite a woman

The cloud was thick and stifling around their grief and they each clutched a handful of earth and threw it into the grave; it fell like hail but in loamy clumps upon their dead parent and smeared the coffin on impact. Her lipstick was far too thick and her face looked cold and swollen, and he was cringingly aware of the deep and rank stench of booze on his breath, of the stubble on his face, the white-ish stains around the crotch of his jeans. The wet mud stuck to their hands and they looked to the vicar and to the funeral director for a tissue or something but were greeted with indifference or else intense disgust. The team of five funeral directors refused even to unfold their arms; they had become quite fond of the parent during over the course of their arranging the prepayment plan for the ceremony, and they now felt personally offended that these two dreadful human beings should hold their parent in such little regard as to be here like this, the only gathered mourners. Like a shitted shoe he scraped his soiled hand through the grass around the neighbouring graves which took forever; she looked at him as though he were insane but then did likewise with her own hand. The vicar drew his stole to his brow and mopped it cautiously, looked to the lead funeral director – a gentle if fat man of low birth, some Michael or Mark, Martin maybe, one of those – for guidance, who nodded mostly imperceptibly. The ceremony was over. The vicar walked immediately to his car while the funeral directors waited for a minute or two for the siblings to join them in the limo.

“We’ll walk,” he said, shouting it through the desolation of graves and marked plots.

“Very well,” said the funeral director, then mumbled “you selfish fuck.” The cars left and he helped his sister to her feet.

“What are we doing here?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Let’s get a drink. It’s what she would have wanted.”

“Who?” she said.

“Mum,” he said, jerking his head in the direction of the grave, the workers slowly getting on to filling it in.

“Fuck’s sake, that’s Dad,” she said. “Mum’s alive, remember? In the hospital?”

He nodded as though he hadn’t heard her.

“She was quite a woman,” he said eventually. He reached a hand for his sister’s breast and worked it between his fingers. “And so are you.” She rested her hand upon his, the both of them upon her breast.

“Let’s go,” she said.