Chapter Text
Once again, thank you christyimnotred for the beta and just her loveliness in general!
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The day of the funeral is cruel in its ordinariness.
The sun hides behind bleached wisps of clouds, the air is lukewarm on his skin, the ground stubbornly refuses to consume John from the feet up. Friends and family John has never met filter in through the door, past the mahogany casket, and into the chapel. John stands beside Dad and Harry; endures the tears of strangers, their smudged mascara, their reeking breath as they kiss his cheeks in consolation. By the end of the procession he smells of stale perfume rubbed from the outcomers’ shoulders onto his, and the cloying bouquet of peace lilies.
He smells like a funeral parlor.
Today, every last thing on earth only serves to piss John off. A lot.
Who the hell are all these people that somehow feel entitled to their grief? Mum had been sick for years, he’d not ever seen one of these faces in his home as she succumbed to the cancer growing inside of her bones.
Where were they when mum’s temperature climbed over 40.5 degrees? John had to help dad carry mum into the tub of freezing water while Harry called 999. No one had come to relieve John when his father left the house to do the shopping and John held mum’s hair back while she vomited the poison of chemotherapy up from her guts. It was painful, and slow.
“I’m so sorry, Johnny,” she had said, “You shouldn't have to-- I never wanted..”
John shook his head, smoothed his hand over her back. He could feel her bones rising up underneath the fragile, papery, skin. “It’s fine, I don’t mind.”
She tried throwing up again but it was only frothy bile, the room smelled of chemicals and disease. Sickness had covered up his mother's perfume, erasing the light smell of jasmine and apples in exchange for antiseptic and vomit.
“Don’t fib, dear. I know it’s disgusting,” she sat back against her pillow. John took the bucket into the sink and washed it out, came back with a glass of water. She smiled up at him, thin fingers stroking his cheek, the tips cold as ice, “When you were a baby you would spit up constantly. I took to wearing all my oldest shirts because you never failed to soil them. Always so ill as an infant.” Her fingers fell away from his cheek, and she held his hand. Her lips trembled, eyes clouded over, wanting to produce tears but too dehydrated for her body to spare a single drop.
“You’ve grown so much. Fifteen years old on Saturday and already a grown up,” she squeezed his hand weakly, somewhere down the hall the microwave pinged. Harry heating the beef broth for mum’s lunch.
Childhood seemed like a distant memory to John, he hardly remembered the time before his mother’s disease settled over their house like a big black veil. Before, he had been known as “Johnny down the street, the one with a decent push kick,” always chosen in the first string for casual neighborhood football games.
Now he was known as “Johnny down the street, the one with the dying mother,” and his presence made his friends nervous. Nobody knew what to say, one by one they simply stopped knocking at his door for football on Sunday. At school they drifted and eventually began avoiding John altogether, treated him like he was a walking time bomb of tears ready to drench them in grief with the shifting of a breeze. Teachers coddled him, and that was worse. John could understand avoidance, but the useless sympathy was intolerable. John wasn’t some weak thing.
“You’ll be fine. Please be fine,” her words came out as a breath. A plea. John watched her until he was sure she was asleep and let himself out of the room. He backed against the door as he closed it, inhaled deep, even, breaths until he was sure the lump in his throat wouldn’t dissolve in exchange for tears. He hadn’t known at the time it would be their last conversation. She slipped into a coma while she slept that night and never woke up. Mum died two days after his fifteenth birthday.
John would be fine. He’d be fine, because she’d said so.
John is taken from his thoughts as the last of the procession trickles past. Harry stands shaking alongside him, fingers threaded through John’s, her nose red and raw from weeping. Dad smiling politely as men clap their hands around his shoulders, women offer their platitudes. And John stands silently, hating them all.
Intruders, the lot of them. Mother belonged to Harry, and Dad, and John, and no one else.
“If the family wants to take a moment to say goodbye--” The funeral director addresses their father, his eyes sliding to Harry and John.
“Yeah,” Dad clears his throat, pulls Harry against him as tremors shake her body and she makes little choking sounds. John wants to cover his ears and disappear. “Yes, we’ll be a minute.”
Until now John had not looked into the casket, had no desire to look, but Harry tugs his sleeve and he follows her across the room. Nothing seems real. The walls and the floor underneath his feet, the soft glow of lamps, and the faint smell of coffee and disinfectant; everything feels like nothing.
They stand behind their father, John watches the line of his shoulder slump in defeat. He’d been fighting the second face of this battle since John was eleven. He’d aged within those years, mousey brown hair giving way to grey, he’d lost weight. Between teaching British Literature at the community secondary school, then coming home to illness, there was hardly a spare moment for him to be a father. John didn’t begrudge him this, he had slipped effortlessly into the role of caretaker for Harry and himself. Dad never once shielded John from Mum’s illness, and John was thankful for this. He was treated more like a peer, instead of a child. John and Dad would have whispered conversations in the dark sitting room after Harry was tucked into bed. They made plans, divvied out chores onto a chart, sorted medication into the white pill boxes. It made John feel useful, like there was some modicum of control to the creeping downward spiral.
John wonders if he and Dad have anything in common outside of their efficient rotation around the shadow that settled into the heart of their home. Both of them grew stoic and seemed to forget what it was like to play out on the lawn. For four years there was always something more important to do to fill in the empty moments.
“I’ll let you two,” Dad clears his throat, gestures toward the open casket with a limp wave, “--you know.” His voice quiet, rough around the edges. He bends and kisses Harry on the forehead, brushes strawberry blonde fringe out of the way, fingers touching down tentatively on John’s shoulder. John can’t feel the brush through the barrier of his suit jacket. Dad leaves and stands in a corner, he faces the wall and shudders a bit.
Harry holds tightly to John’s hand and they draw close to the lip of the casket to peer inside.
John expected to catch Harry as she fell, expected to have to drag her away kicking and crying and screaming, but she stands silent.
“She didn’t like lilies,” Harry says blankly, touching the spray of white-pink flowers arranged in front of the coffin. .
“I remember,” John replies.
Mum preferred the disorder of wild flowers, would bury her nose in the bouquets of yellow primrose, red campion, and dog violets that John and Harry would pick during their walk home from school. She’d run the tap into a crystal vase and dissolve a cube of sugar in the water.
“Keeps them fresh,” she’d say every time. The flowers would sit out on the dining room table until they wilted and browned. Mum never seemed to want to throw them out. Sometimes she’d press them dry between the pages of a thick book, preserve the colours, capture the memory.
Harry’s brow knits together, “It doesn’t even look like Mum,” she whispers.
John stares at the body wearing his mother’s clothes, her jewelry, the pink scarf with blue flowers she would tie around her head after her hair had fallen out (years ago); but there is something distorted and fake lying underneath the skin. The body is a stranger. Negative space. Another intruder to go with the rest that sit sniveling in the chapel mere feet away. John finds himself wishing they had cremated her instead, this isn’t closure at all. The image burns into John’s eyes, settles like a stone at the pit of his stomach.
“That isn’t Mum, Harry,” John grasps her by the elbow, tries tugging her away, “It isn’t her anymore.”
Whatever it was that made their mother into a person is gone, leaving behind this empty husk. John tries looking for the woman formerly-known-as-Mum in the set of the mouth, the thin lips they shared, and only finds something infuriatingly devoid of these distinctions. Features familiar and unknowable all at once. He doesn’t want Harry to see the body anymore, doesn’t want her to have this memory, even though she is staring right at it and it's far too late to pull her away.
Harry reaches out a trembling hand, her chipped purple nail polish glinting in the lamplight as she reaches toward the plasticine face.
“Where is she?” she breathes.
John watches his sister’s fingers strain and fight the compulsion to touch as they near a hollow cheek.
“I don’t know,” John murmurs, baffled and exhausted, “I’m sorry. I don’t know.”
The body lies there, soundless and uncaring.
“We’re moving,” Dad says nearly a year later, over morning coffee. He stares into the black, steaming, liquid and frowns.
“Why?” John asks after some time has passed.
“I’ve taken a teaching position at a university. The Dales. I’ll start beginning of term.”
“Why?” John repeats himself, slowly, because that’s not the real reason, and Dad is lying.
“I don’t want to move,” Harry cuts in, “My friends are here. This is where mum lived.”
An eruption of movement from the end of the table, John feels his eyes go wide and hears Harry’s surprised yelp when their father picks up his mug and sends it flying into the wall. It shatters into ceramic bits onto the floor. The man’s eyes go red and watery and John feels his cheeks burn in sympathetic embarrassment at the outburst. Neither of them are given to overly emotional displays, like the passion of it is a painful ache in their very limbs. Dad fists his hands in the air, clutching at it in exasperation.
“I know,” he grates out, “Don’t you think I know that? That’s why. We have to move on.”
“Don’t we get a say in it,” John hears his voice rising to match in volume, “So we just, what, pack her things and send them to charity?” John throws his seat back to clatter onto the tile.
He can feel the bottled up fury pushing at his skin, when did he become so angry? He pushes into his father’s space. Harry starts crying.
“What would you have us do? Pretend she never existed?” John yells, his voice filling the room, covering up the sounds of Harry’s, “Shh, Johnny, shh,” between her sobs.
“YES,” their father screams back, and John shoves him. Throws the entire weight of his body into the push, sending the man staggering backward into the flimsy screen door leading to the back stoop. To lash out feels terrible, it feels wonderful, and John looks at his hands and sinks to the floor to kneel beside his father who cries silently and grabs John into a tight hug. Harry rushes down to them and lays her head against John’s knees.
“We have to get away from here,” Dad whispers to them both, rocking John who can only stare at his hands and hyperventilate.
“Don’t you see? It will kill us if we stay.”
They keep Mum’s books and heirlooms. Her clothes go to the women’s shelter. Harry didn’t want to keep any of the gauzy dresses that hung unworn in their bags. Pictures are wrapped in tissue and boxed up. By the time the moving trucks are organised and packed full to the brim, the house is empty. It hardly looks like a place that once held John and Harry, Mum and Dad, as a family. John looks at the barren dining room where they shared dinner, joking and hiding bits of inedible roast in their napkins. Mum had always been a terrible cook.
Faded pencil marks go in ticks up the door frame where Harry and John would be measured every summer to see how much they’d grown from the previous season.
A hole in the drywall where Mum and Dad had tried relocating the aquarium. The thing had tipped and broke against the wall. The whole ordeal had resulted in a frantic family effort to grab the sputtering goldfish and drop them into plastic cups filled with water. The bloody fish were dumb and slippery, they flopped from between John’s fingers as he tried to save them. They managed to rescue them all, and instead of re-plastering the wall, Mum had set the new aquarium in front of the hole, said, “There, fixed it,” and smiled brightly.
Dad was right.
Being in the presence of the memories don’t bring John any comfort at all.
The ticks on the doorframe only make John miss her desperately. The uncovered hole in the wall mocks him in its emptiness.
Everything serves as representations for what John has lost. The bathroom cabinets smell of her perfume, and the bedroom she insisted on painting cherry red beams at him like an open mouth.
It hurts to look. To look and remember and not have.
John walks outside, climbs into the passenger seat of the Volvo and shuts the door. His eyes close and he leans his ear against the cool glass. He waits for Harry and Dad to follow.
They’ll drive and drive and John won’t give in to the temptation to turn and look back.