Dead Serious

Chapter 8 - The Time I Went On A Date

Once again, bear with me. This is an important part of the story which I'll get to in a little bit. But first I need to take care of this.

Despite Christian's new parlour across the road and the failure of our videos, business hadn't totally dried up yet. Aaron guessed that Steve was going to wait for the whole month to reap whatever profits he could and then sell to Christian at the last minute. It was basically a done deal and it sucked but it made good business sense. We'd kind of given up on trying to drum up extra business for the time being, and instead turned our attentions to what customers we already had. Word of mouth is the best advert anyway right?

Steve came into the den around 10am and called on Tom.

"I need to nip away out to the kids' school for a bit. Apparently my son's told some kid that I'll bury him alive if he doesn't give him his lunch money so I need to go and sort that out"

"Sounds like a nice kid" Tom nodded.

"I need you to log the details of this next funeral. It's a Mr. Smith who wants us to take care of his wife. We'll perform the service at their local church and bury her here next to her sister. They want the black hearse and a wine reception afterwards. Just log all that into the diary and I'll arrange it all when I get back"

"Yes sir!" Tom saluted the boss.

When Steve left I asked "Did he say black hearse? I thought they were all black?" At least all the ones I'd seen before were.

"Usually yeah" Aaron answered. "But we do have a white one just on the off chance someone asks for it. People do weird things for funerals sometimes"

"Seriously?" I asked. I literally couldn't picture a white hearse.

"Oh yeah. We've only actually used the white on once though. Last year we had this guy who was a massive racist. Demanded the white hearse, white suits for everyone and even asked us if there was such thing as white soil" Tom informed me.

"And is there?" I smiled.

"Yeah. If it's covered in bird shit"

"That is pretty weird" I agreed.

"That's not even the weirdest thing either" Said Aaron. "We once had to do a service for a seven year old kid. It was awful. He had cancer so they knew he was going to die but it was still tragic. Anyway, his dad was a huge motorcycle fan and he wanted to drive his son's coffin to the graveyard so Steve somehow got him a motorbike with a mini hearse as sidecar. It was the weirdest thing I've ever seen. Almost as weird as that" He pointed towards an open coffin.

We turned to look and saw Geoffrey sitting on top of a dead man's face.

"Shit! Fuck off Geoffrey!" Tom shrieked as he chased the cat away from the poor corpse.

I could have asked any number of questions, but all I really wanted to know was where all these strange vehicles were? I hadn't seen them in the car park or the neighbouring streets. Did we have a secret Bat-cave under the building?

Anyway, back to the point of this chapter.

My dad once told me that garbage men make loads of money. Well, maybe not loads but at least a good wage. This is because nobody wants to do their job but obviously someone has to. So as a result the rewards are pretty good. The same could be said for my current occupation too. No one wants to work with dead people but someone has to. Either that or Steve is just very generous.

Anyway, I figured I would finally put my not quite millions to good use.

Naomi finally asked if I wanted to meet up with her again and do something. I replied with a suggestion and then promptly went for a three hour walk without my phone. I was terrified that she would hate the idea.