A Blue Sky Existence

Chapter Three

Chapter Three

The Unexpected Guest

 The sky was the colour of polluted seawater. It might have been an afternoon in mid-October, but the humidity levels served as a reminder that it was still summer: the most interminable summer Charlie had ever experienced.

     It had been a week since the fire. In that time he and his family, an incomplete jigsaw, had been relocated to a small bed and breakfast on the edge of Southside, at no cost to his mother. It was more comfortable than the crypt and its camp beds, but this couldn’t dissuade Charlie from his grief, which had become fully internalised. Outwardly, his expression seldom changed, but coursing through his veins he felt his thoughts, memories of his father, composing an internal monologue to which he was forced to listen, for lack of suitable distractions.

     Not long after news of the tragedy had made its way around the village community, as well as the rest of Ashford, numerous neighbours and acquaintances had flocked gravely to the bed and breakfast, leaving bags of clothes and food baskets for the bereaved family.

    Charlie had watched Etty and her parents make their way through the front door, from the window of the room he shared with his mother and the twins. He’d wanted badly to get down the stairs and into her arms, to talk and listen to little stories from her comparatively tranquil existence, just to get out of his own head for a while.

    But he didn’t. It reassured him somewhat to know that a classic sign of grief was the feeling that you weren’t allowed to be happy about anything, that you had to insulate yourself from the world like a hermit.

     He’d watched her exit and cross the road, heading back to her intact house.

     Now, on that overcast afternoon, Charlie stood at the window again, with its old crosshatched design, and meditated on the fact that he would have to talk to her. A funeral seemed like the most suitable way of allowing a person back into your life after avoiding them: a shoulder to cry on, a hand to hold.

     He adjusted his white cuffs, stark and blank against black sleeves. The mourning suit was on loan indefinitely from his uncle, as it no longer fitted him. He was due to attend the service, along with Charlie’s other uncle, his aunts, plus numerous first and second cousins. Susan-Jane’s father, at the considerable age of ninety-four, was being driven over from his care home in Heathside. Charles’s parents had died several years back, which Charlie supposed was a grim blessing, as they could be spared outliving their child.

     ‘Well, are we ready?’

     Susan-Jane’s calm and expressionless voice allowed him to surface from the depths of his morbid thoughts. Drawing in a breath, and standing in a more upright fashion, he turned away from the window and followed his mother and sisters, all donned in plain black dresses, out of the door and into the hallway.

     The funeral cars were parked just outside the bed and breakfast. The drivers removed their hats in that traditional gesture of respect and sympathy, which Susan-Jane acknowledged with a small nod.

     As Charlie allowed her, Gwen and Mary to climb in the back, he stared at the coffin in the back of the first car. A wreath of white roses lay on top, but underneath he couldn’t ignore the thought that the remains of his father lay there. His mother had denied them all opportunity to see the body in the undertaker’s, insisting that it would only make them upset. That was a sensible enough point, considering the fire would have spared no part of his father that wasn’t burnt…but Charlie ripped this train of thought off its tracks before it could go any further. Instead he concentrated on the simple letters, also composed of white roses, which spelled out, “Dad”.