one

The coffin wobbledas it went down into the ground, the nervous bearers failing to find a mutual rhythm as they let the cords play out, hand over hand. There was a nasty moment when one of the corners at the head end dipped several inches below the others, and a muted gasp went up from the family but was hastily swallowed back, embarrassment as ever the most dominant of English emotions, even amid the stew of shock and grief and anger that was swirling around this small country graveyard.

The chief undertaker, in position at the head of the grave, took an urgent step forward, but his hands did not even need to leave the brim of the black top hat he was gripping: a quiet word of instruction was enough to restore decorum around the graveside. The bearer responsible, an older woman, one of two aunts who had been recruited for the job at the last minute, was bright scarlet, her forehead sheened with perspiration, but she managed to complete her duties without any further disaster. As she and her companions laid down the cords on the freshly cut turf and stepped back from the grave’s edge, the young man to her left, the only one who had looked definitely physically fit for the task they had just completed, stepped over and put a comforting arm around her shoulder. She dissolved into his chest in a flood of tears.

‘There’s some good strong men over here could have done the job for you,’ muttered a voice to Ryan’s right.

‘Alright, leave it, lads,’ Ryan murmured as a ripple of disgruntled agreement ran through the group. ‘We’re here, at least.’ His soft Belfast accent was somehow both soothing and authoritative enough to keep a lid on the fractious situation that was developing in this corner of the graveyard. It must be a policeman thing. An ex-policeman thing.

The group was too far away to hear the words of the vicar as he stepped forward, bible in hand, so Olly provided his own version: ‘Ashes to ashes, funk to funky.’

‘If you tell us again how you could have been in that video if you hadn’t overslept, I will actually shove you into that grave myself,’ muttered Gary, and the whole group bit their lips, clenched their fists and tried desperately not to dissolve into the most inappropriate fit of giggles ever. It was a lovely moment. It felt like what the deceased would have wanted.

As the formalities ended and the group around the grave broke away from their positions to reform into a ragged queue beside the neat pile of earth left out for scattering purposes, our own group also shifted from our regimented stances. Ryan took the opportunity to slip an arm around me and give the small of my back a comforting rub. ‘How are you doing, Tommy?’

‘I’m OK,’ I told him, my voice sounding steadier than I had expected. ‘Going to too many of these; that’s all.’

‘Tell me about it.’ The funerals were getting closer together now. Clarrie, the first of my friends to succumb to Aids, had been dead three years now. Ivan, who I’d only really got close to at the very end of his life, died the following year, not that long after news came that his partner Paolo had passed away in Italy, his furious family keeping the pair of them apart right to the end. Three other friends from the Icebreakers group where I had met Ivan were gone, including Mark Ashton, the man who had seemed the most radiantly alive of all of us. We’d buried him last February. Daniel, the partner of Dougie who was here with us, in April. And now Mar