PREFACE

There’s a Mickey Mouse clock hanging in my kitchen, probably still ticking. I’ve taken quite a bit of stick about it over the years. Mickey Mouse on its face, with his big open smile and wide eyes, walking in place with boundless joy and enthusiasm, surrounded by numbers. My friend Christy used to shake his head when he’d see it. “The clock’s got to go, Paddy,” he’d say. It’s probably not the right clock to have on your wall when you’re forty-two years old; but for me, Mickey’s the patron saint of getting out of the soup with your spirit intact. No matter what’s thrown at him, no matter how hairy things get, his happy demeanor never fades. He walks away with a whistle and smile every time.

I’ve been to quite a few funerals in my time. More than most people, having been around the trade all my life. My father was a coffin maker for one of Dublin’s largest undertaking firms, and I followed him into it, ending up making the arrangements and running the funerals. I always liked listening to the eulogies delivered after the Mass was finished and the congregation was settled back into their pews waiting for a few words. A few years ago, I stood at the back of the church with my boss, Frank Gallagher, listening to a guy talk about his brother, who’d died at the age of twenty-eight in a drowning accident. Everyone was pretty cut up over the loss, but this guy, beleaguered though he was, had a glow about him. Probably a few years older than his deceased brother, he stood at the pulpit with his John Lennon glasses and long hair. He told the church that we were all in a dream and that his brother had woken up. This misery of a gig called life is just a dream from which we all eventually awaken, he said. Nobody gets left behind. Even the most horrible dreams end. And I never forgot it.

My life had become pretty miserable towards the end—a nightmare, if you like. I’d gone from being a contented forty-year-old with a pregnant French wife to a disillusioned widower with nothing to wake up for except other people’s funerals. My wife, Eva, died of a brain hemorrhage while standing in line at the supermarket in her thirty-sixth year. What do we do with that one, Mickey? Whistling and smiling didn’t cut it. After that, enthusiasm seemed impossible.

For a guy who wanted nothing more than to escape his grief, I probably had the worst job in the world. But I buried myself in it, nonetheless, if you’ll forgive my saying so. I worked the week. Seven days. Frank Gallagher didn’t want to give it to me at first. It wasn’t the money—he’d have had to give it to somebody—he was worried about me running myself into the ground. But I assured him it was what I wanted. I needed to help other people deal with their grief so I could escape from mine. For two years I tried this, until I couldn’t sleep anymore. Until I arrived at the last few days of my life. Until a set of circumstances so outlandish, so surreal, and so dangerous could only result in one thing: my death. My awakening from the dream. And my subsequent funeral. And cremation. And all the tears and regret that go with it.

But not from me. I’m gone beyond it, where all the madness, the chaos, the seemingly endless pain is behind me, and I find myself in a place of tremendous peace and understanding, of rest. And from this perfect, still place, I have total recall of my last days. I remember every single moment.

Monday

ONE

The insomnia had become chronic. It was so bad that it had dragged me from delirium and hallucinations to sudden lucid periods of prolonged focus and back again. I didn’t spend much time in bed those last few months, but when I did, in the hope of sleeping, my thoughts were always with Eva. Sometimes I’d even be able to conjure up her image. I’d cling to the moment as I’d study her sitting on the edge of the bed beside me. The chestnut brown of her irises. The little twitching of her nose when she smiled. The sexy gap between her front teeth. The curves of her shoulders and breasts. I’d want to sigh deeply and never breathe again. Then, when I’d reach out to touch her, she’d disappear.

The only detail that remained was my feelings. And memories. But no such luck this morning. Nothing for me to fix on but my desperate longing.

Mondays had ceased to punctuate the beginning of the week for me, as I’d been working solidly for six months now. Even at night, I’d take the calls—death didn’t keep banker’s hours—and out I’d go into the darkness of Dublin, past the stinking Liffey, the drug dealers and prostitutes, the drinkers and poets, to the freshly bereaved. Sometimes there’d be a corpse for me to take away, other times not. But every time there’d be death. The tapestry of days and nights, and weeks and months, had blurred together into one gray grieving mess of funeral after funeral after funeral, each one a secret candle of remembrance for Eva.

I put on my overcoat in the hallway and checked myself in the mirror. Gray suit, blue shirt, navy tie. More and more, when I looked in the mirror now, I saw my father staring back at me. Shay Buckley had dropped the body at sixty-three—car crash: quick exit. I’d inherited his twinkling green eyes and his dimples, but it was the grayness in the hair that had me seeing his ghost in the mirror this morning. He’d had two streaks of light gray running the length of either side of his otherwise black mop of hair since he was in his thirties, which won him the moniker of the Badger. On my fortieth birthday, I thought I’d escaped the same fate, but in the last couple of years, the little flecks of gray above my ears have grown into more pronounced lines continuing down to the back of my neck. But nobody calls me the Badger, probably in deference to my father.

—

I MANEUVERED SLOWLY down through the traffic in my brown Toyota Camry past the redbrick houses on Crumlin Road, past the drifting pairings of strung-out junkies with their sunken eyes and Borstal marks, and the unemployed builders and plumbers outside the job center, dragging the last from their cigarettes. Further down, over the Grand Canal, past the rusted swings and graffitied walls of Dolphin House, I watched a three-legged mongrel hobbling after a bearded old man while I remembered my father and the little tricks he’d taught me. My mother died when I was only four, taken out by cancer, so it had just been ourselves, and we were extra close. Back when Gallagher’s made their own boxes, Shay had been the chief coffin maker. He’d started out as a carpenter, but ended up finding his groove in Gallagher’s loft and worked there until his death. He was the rock of calm in my life. The world could collapse around him and he wouldn’t blow his cool, having a veritable tool kit for any situation he found himself in.

When I was seven, I broke my arm after falling out of a tree. I remember writhing in agony while gingerly cradling my crooked forearm and he sitting me down and looking me in the eye. “Patrick,” he said, “I want you to focus while I tell you about something very important: Independent Channel 24.” His calm was contagious. He had both my attention and curiosity.

“What is that?” I said.

“It’s a place in your mind where the pain goes away.”

“What do I do?”

“Listen to me. Your arm is broken, but you are not your arm, Patrick. Remove yourself from it. You have a sense of pain, but you are not your sense of pain.”

Even back then, I figured my father was part druid. I held my arm, still feeling the pain, but my awareness was completely away from it now, centered instead on his words and where they were bringing me. “Now, remove yourself from your body and observe this situation between us from another perspective.” Shay had helped me when I was even younger to create an imaginary sanctuary I could retreat to for relaxing and healing, and in there, he’d trained me to see myself objectively, to see the bigger picture that I was just a part of. For years after my mother had died, I’d lay in bed at night while my father guided me down twenty-one imaginary steps to the sanctuary we created together, a tranquil place, and I’d watch myself down there, removed from my body so I could see myself safe in fields of barley under the shelter of old sycamore trees. Independent Channel 24 was more radical, yet still an extension of what he’d already taught me, so I could quite easily project my imagined self to a place where I could watch myself beside him.

He must have noticed a shift in me. “Where are you now?”

My sharpened and hungry focus was informed by two things: my extreme pain diminishing and my believing in my father. I nodded to a spot beside the branch I’d fallen from. His eyes twinkled. “You’ve just accessed Independent Channel 24.” There were other channels for other situations, I learned later, but it was number 24 that I had full understanding of at the age of seven.

—

I DROVE THROUGH the open cast-iron gates of the head office in Uriel Street, in the Liberties—the oldest part of Dublin. The building itself was Victorian, a robust example of the period with its solid walls made from Dolphin’s Barn bricks—the Irish wonder brick of the nineteenth century—and its grand doorways and window frames painted ivy green. The bricks were practically black, having collected countless decades of soot and sulfur. Frank Gallagher had considered having them cleaned but figured in the end they were a nice reminder of what Dublin used to look like, and he’d made sure the rest of the building was always immaculate, from the paint on the doors, window frames, and gates to the gold-leaf Gothic lettering of the Gallagher’s sign. It was a sizable block, housing the two-story building that made up the offices and embalming room, a long row of stables that used to accommodate the horses the firm used back in the 1930s and ’40s, a gravel car park, and the garage and loft, which housed the fleet and coffins, respectively.

Inside, Frank Gallagher was sitting behind the desk in the front office, writing. I sat down opposite him and checked the list of runners for the morning’s work.

“Anything doing?” I asked. Frank pulled a sheet of paper off a notepad in front of him and handed it over.

“The artist Michael Wright, dead in the Royal Hospital in Donnybrook. Cancer. His wife is waiting in their house on Pembroke Lane.”

“Always plenty of cancer to go round,” I said, noting the address.

Frank sat back in his seat and considered me. We were the only two in the room.

“How much sleep did you get last night?”

The question made me smile; its mirthless quality wasn’t lost on Frank.

“Would you try sleeping tablets?”

“I don’t want to medicate. Besides, I don’t mind not sleeping.”

“You’ve got to get a balance back in your life, Paddy. Working around the clock is not the answer.” Frank got up from his chair. “Have a cup of coffee with me before you go out to that family.”

Apart from the engraving of nameplates for the coffins, there was little work done in the back office. It had only a wooden counter, some stools, a kettle and cups, and a door out to the yard, which was the main entrance for staff. Jack, a young driver who’d been working with the firm for eighteen months, stood at the counter, drinking tea while reading the Daily Star. He was about a strawberry short of a punnet, but lived in his heart and had access to everyone else’s as a result.

I sat on a stool while Frank went about getting the coffee together. As he did with everything else in his life, Frank insisted on what he considered to be the best, and in the case of coffee, it was French roast from Bewley’s on Grafton Street, which Frank claimed had the best coffee in Dublin. He ground the beans prior to each serving in a little electric grinder, made the coffee extra strong, and served it black. As he focused on the coffee, I took a good look at him. Frank was in his sixties now and was to me the epitome of the perfect undertaker: always dressed somberly in beautifully tailored suits—three-piece in the winter months, two-piece in the summer—and always well groomed. He was the fairest man I’d ever met, and was known for it throughout the trade. In all the time I knew him, he’d never once veered from what he knew was the righteous path, and he demonstrated this in all aspects of his life. In fact, Frank was my external moral compass. If ever in a moral dilemma, I’d need only ask myself one question: What would Frank do?

“How does he do it?” said Jack, shaking his head at the newspaper.

“Who?” said Frank.

“Vincent Cullen,” said Jack, pointing to a picture of him outside the Four Courts. “He got off again.”

Frank smiled at me and got back to the coffee. It was no surprise that Vincent Cullen had got off. He was Dublin’s most heavy-duty criminal and had a knack for avoiding prison, mostly due to very effective intimidation of witnesses and jury members. Jack, and a good portion of Ireland with him, loved to marvel at the antics of the Cullen brothers through the safe window of a newspaper.

Frank slid an espresso in front of me. I downed it in one and rose to my feet.

“See you in church,” I said.

TWO

Though the address was only a hop across town, I traversed a Georgian wonderland to get to the Wrights’ house, which was tucked away behind the landscaped lawns, wrought-iron railings, and manicured hedges of Wellington Road. There weren’t as many pained expressions on this side of town as there were in Crumlin, and there was a wealth of stylish people with fine pedigrees and polished dreams, carrying their takeaway lattes under well-seasoned plane trees, gently swaying in an autumn that had only started undressing.

The same setting at nighttime wasn’t so pretty. From Thursday through Sunday between nine at night and six in the morning, the city center took on the milieu of an open-air mental hospital. Every second or third shopfront on Grafton Street framed at least one splurge of vomit, and it was the same for the Georgian doorways on Leeson Street and Harcourt Street and around the walls of Trinity College. There were drunk people everywhere—laughing, singing, shouting, fighting—and thieves alive in the shadows. Even the buskers had to watch their money.

But by Monday morning, the madness receded, the only evidence being the last few standing revelers and the crusted vomit sneered at by the mocking light of day; the only witnesses, the slumbering homeless being woken from their cardboard beds by the nagging seagulls and choking fumes from the idling buses and gridlocked traffic.

I pressed the intercom button and waited in the lane. It was October and the wind still had a warmth to its breeze. I closed my eyes for a moment and listened to the sound of the leaves and dust swirling around me. It was so comforting that I considered curling up on the ground and falling asleep.

“Hello?” came a female voice over the intercom. I opened my eyes and moved closer to the buzzer, any notions of sleep fast disappearing.

“Mrs. Wright, it’s Paddy Buckley from Gallagher’s.”

The door in the wall vibrated.

I pushed it open and walked across a little stone garden to be met at the sliding doors by a woman dressed in a dark green cashmere skirt and jacket, and a crimson silk blouse. She had her hair up in a loose bun and wore reading glasses over baby-blue eyes. I gauged her age to be early fifties. In a certain light, she might even pass for late forties. She offered her hand.

“Hi,” she said in a soft English accent, “I’m Lucy.”

I took her hand in mine. “Paddy.”

“Come in, Paddy,” she said, while moving back from the door. I stepped over the threshold and watched her slide the door closed.

“Let me take your coat.”

I took it off and handed it to her. She had a gracious quality about her, particularly apparent when she moved. She hung the coat up and led me into the kitchen where I sat down at the table. She leaned on the back of a chair briefly, with the hint of a smile.

“Would you like a cup of tea or coffee?”

I let a little smile settle in around my eyes.

“A cup of tea would be lovely,” I said, and opened my briefcase, taking out an arrangement form and pen. Lucy put the kettle on and sat down in the chair next to me, not opposite or at the end of the table, but right beside me. The atmosphere in the house was a relaxed one. The kitchen had a bohemian character, and the fixtures, cupboards, and tiles were of another time, a forgotten era of quality and craftsmanship. There were framed oil paintings and curious mementos littering the room, and a wooden antique clock above the doorway. The farmhouse table we sat at was bathed in sunlight and pretty shadows from the philodendrons growing on the sill beside the sink. Whether she was aware of it or not, Lucy had a soothing effect. She made me feel comfortable in a way that had me wondering if the warm breeze had followed me in.

“You’re not in a rush, are you?” she asked.

“Not at all,” I said. Expressing the company’s sadness for the loss a family had experienced was something I normally didn’t do. If it had been a child who had died, I would have, because of the intensity of the loss and grief. But with someone who’d run the full course of life, it was different. To extend sympathy to a family you didn’t know when you were charging them for your services could be perceived through a cynical lens as feigned or insincere, though, of course, I was sympathetic to their loss: This was evident in my thoughtful manner and dealings with them.

Lucy considered me for the first time.

“You have kind eyes, Paddy,” she said, making me melt more into my seat. “They cancel out the roguishness in your smile.”

“Not completely,” I said, letting it surface briefly. I could quite happily listen to her talk in that accent all day long.

“You’ll have to tell me how a funeral works over here. I’ve buried both my parents in London, but I understand things work a little differently in Dublin.”

“They do. Tell me, was Michael Catholic or Church of Ireland?”

“Catholic.”

“Are you thinking of using St. Mary’s on Haddington Road?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. The funeral is usually made up of two parts: the removal the evening before and the funeral itself the following morning. Would you like to bring Michael home from the hospital, or do you think you’d prefer to remove him to the church from one of our funeral homes?”

“Oh,” said Lucy, as she took her glasses off, resting the end of one of the temples between her teeth while looking off to her left, unaware of me studying her. She was utterly feminine and, in any man’s book, beautiful. Her gaze lent the mundane and ordinary an intimate quality, imbued by a subtly seductive charisma.

“Let’s bring him back here,” she said, looking directly at me.

“Perfect. This is Monday. We could bring him back to the house here in a few hours and then, if you like, we could go to the church tomorrow evening, say at about half past five?”

Lucy nodded.

“The prayers at the church last between fifteen and twenty minutes. When they’ve finished, everyone will walk up to the top pew and sympathize with you, and then we’ll bring you home afterwards. Then on Wednesday morning, I could have a car pick you up here at half past nine or so and bring you around to the church for the funeral Mass at ten o’clock. Are you happy with ten o’clock Mass?”

“Perfectly happy.”

“And then to the cemetery or crematorium, and the car will bring you home after that. That’s pretty much how it will happen.”

“Okay,” said Lucy, as she got up and moved to the counter to prepare the tea. “That all sounds pretty straightforward.” She brought the teapot and cups to the table along with the milk and sugar. She poured two cups out and settled back into her seat.

“Shall I tell you about Michael?”

“Please,” I said. Usually, when the bereaved talk about their loved one unprompted, they unwittingly give out most of the details needed, such as the deceased’s age, place and time of death, and whether or not the family have a grave. I don’t normally write anything down while they talk. I remember the relevant information and write it down afterwards.

“God, I don’t know where to start, really. First of all, this is a release for Michael, I can tell you that. He’s been in such dreadful pain for so long now that, in a strange way, I’m happy his suffering is over. He’s been in that hospital for three years. Up until seven years ago, he was as strong as an ox, so young, so free-spirited. But then he had a stroke, his first one, the first of five. Just when he’d recover from one, he’d be hit by another, paralyzing him even further. He’s only seventy-two but looks more like he’s lived a hard ninety years. And, of course, the cancer finished him. He got it only last year. When I heard that, I thought: Why is he being put through this? It’ll kill him. And it did, along with the strokes. Each one made him worse. He lost the power of speech on his third stroke. He hasn’t spoken in years. There’s only twelve years between us, Paddy, but for the last five, it was more like nursing my father than my husband . . .”

I was surprised. In a business where I learned people’s ages every day, I’d become so good at guessing them that I was seldom off by more than a year or two. Sixty years old and looking this good? It was clear that Lucy Wright had been favored by nature, having had her aging process seemingly arrested at the age of fifty. She was much too beautiful to ever have been touched by a plastic surgeon; even her hands looked like those of a younger woman. It was so remarkable I felt compelled to say something but, given my position and circumstances, I said nothing.

“The last few years, Paddy, have been so difficult. To watch him deteriorate like that, unable to converse with him, wondering if he’s able to hear the words I whisper in his ear . . .” She stopped momentarily, bringing her hand to her mouth in an effort to calm herself. I pulled out my spare handkerchief and handed it to her. She took it and rested it against her eyes for a moment.

“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice trembling for the first time since we’d sat down. She cried silently for a moment.

There are a few cardinal rules in the undertaking game. One of them is to let the bereaved be bereaved. They’re supposed to be upset. Another is that the undertaker never gets upset, but remains professional at all times. Being an undertaker is like being a rock: a rock of sense in a time of confusion, a rock of dependability in a time of abandonment, a rock of sympathy, of understanding, of accommodation. But at all times detached. The undertaker is never party to the grieving process; we are there to enable the family, to facilitate them in grieving. If we become involved emotionally, then we’re of no use to the family.

I knew all this; by now it was second nature to me. I’d never crossed the line before. But for the first time in all my years making arrangements, I felt like reaching out and taking Lucy’s hand and telling her that I understood what she was feeling, that to cry was okay. But I didn’t. I kept my hands to myself.

She pulled my handkerchief away from her eyes.

“You must go through an awful lot of hankies,” she said, and followed it with a laugh, a natural laugh that kept on going. I laughed along with her. It was a welcome release from the pain and stress of the situation, and we were both comfortable enough in each other’s company to not want to stop it. When it came to its own end, Lucy let out a sigh.

“That’s the first time I’ve laughed in such a long time.”

“Me, too,” I said.

“I don’t know how you do your job, Paddy,” she said. “Have you ever lost someone?”

I nodded.

“My wife, two years ago.” Instinctively, Lucy reached over and put her hand over mine. I opened my hand and tightened it around hers while we both looked into the pools of each other’s sorrow for a minute, saying nothing.

“Does it get easier?”

“Sometimes,” I whispered. I let the moment last another few seconds before letting go of her hand.

“But we’re here to talk about Michael,” I said, bringing it back to the business at hand. “Tell me, would you like to put a death notice in the paper?”

“Yes,” said Lucy, as she put her glasses back on. “I have this prepared here. You might have to change it a little to put it into the proper format.”

She handed it to me and I looked it over. She’d put in everything relevant: the date of death, where he was from, who he was, and the fact that he was married to Lucy and had one daughter. Save for the name and date being in the wrong place, it was perfect. Also on the piece of paper was the mobile number of the doctor Michael had been under, Dr. Brady, and the number of the grave in Glasnevin Cemetery.

“It’s perfect, just a little restructuring to do and putting the funeral arrangements along with it. Which paper would you like me to put it in?”

“The Irish Times.”

“Okay,” I said, now making a note of all these details. “How many are in that grave in Glasnevin?”

“Two, I think. Just his parents.”

“Plenty of room. Would you like any flowers, Lucy, maybe something for the top of the coffin?”

“Yes, I would. Could I have a bunch of white lilies with some green?”

“Of course. What would you like on the card? ‘In loving memory,’ or maybe something more personal?”

“Oh, let’s see, definitely something more personal . . .” She removed her glasses again and looked off out the window. A moment passed and then her emotion found its way to the surface again. She brought the hankie to her face and let it absorb the tears before taking it away, her lip quivering.

“I could have danced all night,” she managed to say.

I nodded as I watched her continue to battle her tears. I put my hand around hers and squeezed it tightly until she nodded that she was okay. I wrote the card inscription down on the sheet and decided to leave the questions for a moment.

Even though her face was tearstained and upset, Lucy remained as beautiful and graceful as when I’d first come in. She reached to the back of her head and pulled out the two pins that were holding her hair up. She gently shook her head, letting her hair loosen and fall to just below her shoulders.

“I’ve not been myself at all over the last three or four weeks. I’ve been forgetting everything: to feed the cat, what day of the week it is, and even more important things like paying credit-card bills and turning the immersion off. There’s nothing we’re forgetting, is there?”

“Did you think about how you wanted Michael dressed?”

“No, I didn’t,” she said, and got up from her chair. “Come upstairs with me and we’ll find something.”

I followed her upstairs. Because her husband had been living in the hospital for the last few years, the smell and look of the bedroom were entirely her own. It had been a while since I’d been in a beautiful woman’s bedroom. The thin white linen curtains were drawn, infusing the room with an incandescent light that pervaded every last particle of dust. As I stood behind Lucy and breathed in the air of the room, I became a little intoxicated by the sheer womanliness of it all.

The wardrobe took up a whole wall. Its doors were of the sliding kind and it was divided in the middle by a large mirror. Lucy opened the left side to reveal about twenty suits hanging neatly together and seven or eight pairs of well-polished shoes on the floor. She rested a hand on one of the jackets before dropping her head and bringing her free hand to her face. She wasn’t crying like before, but she was clearly upset. I wanted to hold her, to comfort her, to let her cry on my shoulder, but I restrained myself. Lucy dropped her hand away from the suit and started crying more openly. Then, in a single movement, she turned and rested her head on my chest, putting her arms around me and holding tightly as she continued to cry. I brought my arms up around her back and held her. I rubbed her back gently and let my face move down to the top of her head. She stopped crying after a few minutes, but she didn’t seem to want to move away.

I hadn’t been this close to a woman since Eva died, and it was beginning to take its toll. I’d found Lucy attractive the moment I’d laid eyes on her and now, having her this close to me with her hands around my waist and the smell of her perfume clouding my senses, I knew that if I didn’t get out of the embrace within another minute or so I was going to have a full-blown erection.

I moved my hand up her back and patted it a few times.

“You’re all right,” I said, but she wasn’t budging. I repeated the exercise, but still she stayed there. I felt my pulse quickening and all sorts of pleasurable rushes throughout my body, and then it happened, swelling up to being as stiff as a steel rod, it protruded away from down beside my left leg and stuck into Lucy’s waist.

She moved her head away from my chest a little and looked down. She touched it with her hand. I was overcome by a terrible sense of shame.

“Lucy, I’m dreadfully sorr—” She brought her hand to my mouth and pressed her fingers against my lips, stopping me from talking, and then moved her mouth to mine. The satisfaction rushed through me as we both settled into the kiss.

I let Lucy set the pace initially—I didn’t want to lead her into something she might later regret. The feeling of attraction, it appeared, was mutual. I ran my hands down her back as the kissing became deeper, our breathing more erratic. I unbuttoned her blouse and unzipped her skirt and felt the silky smooth skin of her hips and buttocks. She hurriedly undressed me before pushing me back on the bed. The feeling between us was primal. I looked at her as she sat astride me, taking me inside. Luscious and ripe, she was utterly gorgeous.

For the next little while, I slowly worked the rhythm to bring us both closer to climax. And then I noticed a change in her. I thought maybe I was hurting her because of the way she was groaning and grabbing my neck with every inward thrust, so I pulled back a little, but she continued even though I’d stopped going so deep. By that stage, my own horses had broken away from me and, while holding her hips, I came deep inside her. Then, as she seemed to reach orgasm herself, she opened her mouth wide as if in extreme pleasure, but made no sound. I stopped moving and studied her. She looked into my eyes and emptied her lungs with one long blow and then collapsed on top of me. And something left her. Something definite. Something infinite. Something vital. She was dead. I rolled her off me and held her face in my hands.

“Lucy?”

The notion that she’d died wasn’t one I was willing to consider. It was simply too preposterous to have happened, to even imagine.

“Lucy?” Still nothing. I checked for her pulse. There was none.

“LUCY?” I shook her. I shook her hard. This was absurd. It couldn’t be. But it was. It took another minute before it sank in: Lucy Wright was dead. I sat on the side of the bed with my eyes as wide open as they’d ever been. I couldn’t believe it. Lucy had gone. Passed on. Just like her husband. Just like Eva. Just like twenty-two other souls in Dublin that day. And I was alone again.

I noticed a little pill bottle on the bedside table behind the alarm clock. I picked it up and examined the label. Warfarin. It was full. My aunt had suffered from angina before she died, and she’d been taking warfarin. I checked the name. Lucy Wright. Then I heard Lucy’s voice playing back in my mind, telling me that she’d been forgetting things. Even important things, she’d said.

I put the pills back on the table and looked at Lucy’s remains. Death by fucking. There’d be no talking my way out of this one. No, Your Honor, it was her idea. Her husband had just died and she thought it would be a good idea if I followed her upstairs to her bedroom and give her the ride, make her feel a little better. No, this was something I was going to keep to myself. Forever. Nothing would be gained by telling anyone about this—at any time, for any reason. There was going to be a postmortem, that much was certain, and if they were thorough, it would be clear that she’d had sex prior to death. But one thing at a time: I had a mess to clean up.

I walked into the en suite bathroom and ran a green facecloth under the tap. I washed her genitalia thoroughly before toweling her dry. Then I dressed her. For an undertaker, dressing a remains, sometimes by yourself, is part of the job. Within five minutes, I had her dressed exactly as she’d been when she first walked into the room and had her lying on the floor as if she’d just fallen after having her heart attack. Then I fixed the bed and made sure there were no hairs left on it. I got dressed, straightened the towel in the bathroom, and brought the facecloth downstairs with me and put it in the inside pocket of my coat.

I walked back upstairs, going over the story again and again: I’d been sitting there in the kitchen with her, taking down the details, having a cup of tea, just like we had been, then when it came to the part where I asked her about the clothes, she said, “Just a minute, I’ll go and fish something out,” and then she went upstairs on her own while I went about writing everything we’d been discussing onto the arrangement form, and then after what seemed like three or four minutes, I heard a bumping noise upstairs. It sufficiently alarmed me to go up and investigate, and upon finding my way to the bedroom, I discovered Lucy’s body on the floor. I checked for a pulse, but she seemed to be dead. I came down to the kitchen and phoned the doctor immediately. It sounded a lot more plausible than what had actually happened. I ran the story around in my head until I was as familiar with it as I was with the truth.

I read Dr. Brady’s number off Lucy’s notes and punched it into my phone.

“Hello?” came the voice at the other end.

“Dr. Brady?”

“Yes?”

“This is Paddy Buckley from Gallagher’s Funeral Directors.”

“Hello, Paddy, what can I do for you?”

“I’m out at Michael and Lucy Wright’s place in Pembroke Lane, and there’s been an . . . incident. I was making arrangements with Lucy for her husband’s funeral, and when she went upstairs to get her husband’s suit, she dropped dead . . .”

“What!”

“She dropped dead. I heard a thump so I went up to see was everything okay and I found her lying there . . . dead.”

Dr. Brady’s voice was filled with levelheaded alarm.

“Are you sure she’s dead?”

I’ve been around dead bodies all my life, I think I’d know when one of them’s dead. “Pretty sure, Doctor, yeah.”

“Is there any other family there?”

“No, I’m here on my own.”

“Have you phoned for an ambulance?”

“No. You’re the first person I’ve rung. It literally happened a few minutes ago.”

“Okay, phone for an ambulance and wait there. That’s all you can do.”

“Okay, will do. Thanks, Doctor.”

I ended the call and noticed Lucy’s glasses and my handkerchief on the table. I put my hankie back in my pocket and looked around for anything else I might have missed. It had all happened so fast. My hands were shaking, and I was beginning to feel nauseous. A low panic was rising inside me. A little voice piped up in my head. It said, Keep moving, Paddy. It was her time, just like it was Eva’s time. Everything’s going to be okay. Just keep moving.

I phoned for an ambulance. Then I phoned the office and told Frank the same story I’d told Dr. Brady. Frank expressed his surprise and told me he’d free me up from any other work while I dealt with it.

Then, as I was sitting there waiting for the ambulance, a cat strolled in from another room and mewed hello. It was a long-haired gray Persian with yellow eyes. It brushed against my leg, purring furiously. I saw that the bowl in the corner was empty so I got up, opened a few cupboards, and found the cat food, which I poured into the bowl before filling a saucer with water and placing it down beside the food.

While I was still there on my hunkers, watching the cat tear into its meal, I heard the sliding glass doors open and close. I stood up just as a woman walked into the kitchen and stopped by the door.

My heart started to pound. I knew immediately that this was Michael and Lucy Wright’s daughter, Brigid. I remembered reading her name in the death notice, but apart from having registered to myself that she existed, I’d given her no further thought.

And now here she was.

I was sure it was her because of the resemblance to her mother, only Brigid was thirty years younger and even more attractive. She wore jeans, a blue T-shirt, and a tweed sports jacket. She had shoulder-length wispy brown hair, dark brown eyes, and a purity and savvy to her stare that froze the moment for me, stretching those small few seconds into what felt like minutes.

“You must be the funeral director,” she said.

“That’s right. Paddy,” I said, preparing myself to tell her of her very recent bereavement.

“I’m Brigid,” she said. “Is my mother here?”

“Yes . . . Brigid, will you sit down for a minute, please?” I gestured to the nearest chair at the kitchen table and we both sat down a few chairs away from each other. A little knot formed in my throat.

“Brigid, your mother went upstairs twenty minutes ago to get a suit for your father to be dressed in, and . . . there’s no easy way to say this . . . she collapsed and died while she was up there . . .”

Brigid brought her hand to her mouth as the blood drained from her face.

“I’ve been on to Dr. Brady and there’s an ambulance on its way. I’m so sorry to have to tell you. I can hardly believe it myself, I can’t imagine how hard it is for you to hear it like this . . .”

“Where is she?” She barely whispered the words as the tears began to spill down her cheeks.

“In her bedroom,” I said. Brigid got up from her chair and crouched down as if reacting to a searing pain deep in her solar plexus.

This was a first for me. Usually the family were the ones to tell the undertaker of their bereavement. I stayed sitting on the edge of my chair as Brigid stood up and walked around in confused little circles.

“Oh, God,” she said, holding both hands to her face now, leaning back against the wall and sinking slowly to her knees. I could see her hands were trembling. She looked into my eyes.

“Can I see her?”

“Of course . . . would you like me to bring you up?”