I hate Martha.
She's a stupid fucking tart.
I don't like her because of the bow in her hair and because she's wearing such a hideous black dress. I don't like her because of the way she's sitting and because she's the daughter of the man to whom my mom is engaged to marry.
But I hate Martha because Martha is sitting next to me, in her father's black Range Rover, on the way to my father's funeral.
Tiggy is okay. He's just pretending to be asleep in between us. I don't hate him, his father is dead too.
Martha is singing along to the music in her earphones. I can't hear her, I have my head out of the open window and the wind is in my ears, but I can still see her. I don't even know what song it is she's singing. Probably Iggy Azalea. It's already pissing me off.
What I could see through the faded blue hair blown over my face was the bridge over Fisherman's Port. We were on it.
Then would come the other bridge, and then the roundabout, and then the gas station. After that you could see the beach.
I had driven along this road from Black Mountain to Jacksonville sixteen times for every summer since I turned 11. Plus once for last October and then now. This was my eighteenth time driving from my mother's to my father's in eight years.
Another thing I hate; funerals. They are always black. It isn't even a colour. It's just nothing. Blue is a colour, blue was my dad's favourite. That's why he loved it so much when I changed my hair to blue at the end of a spring when he was dying, but I didn't even realise it. Dad kept dying until now, now it was the start of summer and he was finished dying and people who didn't really know him and don't really know me are pretending to be sad for me.
I couldn't talk about dying when I spoke to those people at the funeral, I couldn't talk about dad, Sid the infamous painter and hip hop dancer. The only thing I could talk about was colour, so I talked about blue. Blue was all I'd seen in the past few days.
First the blue of my dad's eyes as I watched them close as his body went cold. Next the blue of the ocean through salty eyes. The ocean we had been overlooking, it was the last thing my dad ever painted and the last thing his eyes saw.
At the end of the service someone had been hired to play Wolfgang Amadeus on oboe. Only mom and I knew that dad hated woodwind and his favourite was Beethoven, not Mozart.
He always loved Fur Elise. Elise is my mother's name. Dad told me the stories of how he spent an entire summer of his freshman year teaching himself the song on piano so he could play it for her. Sometimes he'd play it for me and sing his own lyrics he'd made, using my name. He sung 'Fur Billie,' since his Elise wasn't there for him to play to any longer.
Now there was no one left who remembered the words.
