3rd Place in the Cambridge Short Story Prize 2024
*
I’m very lucky. Two clients have requested me at the Vale Cemetery on Saturday, which means I’m popular, too. When I tell my sister this during our weekly phone call, I phrase it as another excuse not to visit her. The other side of the line subsides into a fuzzy unsilence. She then hopes for my happiness before hanging up, leaving me alone with my half full (not half empty) mug of instant coffee.
Over lunch, I read over my clients’ emails again. Both have requested to call me, today. The funeral timings bracket the Saturday – one in the morning, one in the afternoon. Saturday will be a sandwiched day! I announce to my apartment, pulling half a loaf of white bread from the fridge. I spend two whole minutes checking for spores. Finding none, I cement a shiny sheet of cheese to the slice with butter. There are no spores, I know, yet my mouth still feels like it’s turning blue as I eat. I add hotdog mustard, imagining fungus and mushrooms and toadstools growing up into my throat from my stomach. If my body were a garden, at least it would be useful. I imagine raucous applause. It’s nice to think I can be funny sometimes. The mustard helps me swallow the bread.
A girlfriend once told me to appreciate small things, like mustard and Nina Simone. I think I made a dick joke after she said ‘small things’. She laughed and then I made her come while Ne Me Quitte Pas played through my laptop speaker. Since, I have often sat at my piano and fantasised about playing a rendition at her funeral. Open casket, her mouth slackened just how it was. My sister never likes any of my girlfriends. She tells me to forget jazz altogether and buys me ketchup whenever she has the chance.
My morning client on Saturday is a woman, Mary. She is the sister of Dave. A stroke, combined with a four hour wait for an ambulance, means he is retiring at the Vale Cemetery at the age of fifty-two. Mary swears that it wasn’t the stroke which finished him off, but all that guilt! From the debt, she confesses to me, in a clandestine tone over the phone. His pridedid him in, in the end. She lists two Beatles tracks (All You Need Is Love and, God knows why, The Fool on the Hill) and tells me dead-Dave also loved ‘all that classical stuff. It’s why I asked you, specifically. Your flyer said you’re good with Chow-pin.’ I tell her I’ll get back to her. Although I’m not sure Dave deserves Chopin.
The afternoon client is a simpering sort, but rightfully simpering. The funeral is for her six-year-old son. Jean doesn’t say how it happened, but she doesn’t know I read about it in a little square in the paper. The kid was hit by a bus whilst on a school trip. There was a trial and everything (something about negligence), but I don’t remember what happened in the end. Jean has no idea what music Thomas liked. “He loved those Horrible Histories songs, but I’m not sure that’s quite right.” We smile-hum softly. She clips her vowels deliberately, like she’s been practicing them. If this weren’t a phone call, I think I would hold her hand. For the second time today, I tell a grieving woman to trust me, and that I’ll send her a setlist to approve soon. I spend the next twenty minutes digging up my copy of Schumann’s ‘Träumerei’. I haven’t played it since that girlfriend left me and the bottom left corner is folded over itself, stubbornly obscuring the music. I’m late for my afternoon shift, but I still find the time to slide my Schumann between the pages of an old dictionary to straighten it out.
Burson is not upset, frustrated, or surprised when I arrive at the library half an hour late. He doesn’t sign a word to me, and we catalogue the afternoon away unobtrusively. Burson is stocky and red-faced and handles all the books as if they were gerbils about to be euthanised. The only disruption is around five, when a bloke in a sweater vest starts considering a girl scouring a GCSE Biology textbook. He asks her discreet, empty questions; her answers are terse, economic. From between the bookshelves, she catches my eye, pulls her textbook towards her chest. The man is not upset, frustrated, or surprised when I ask him to leave. As he stands to face me, he bears his teeth. He reminds me of an oily sheepdog which should have been shot a long time ago. He leaves, slick as he arrived, but he will return, surely. His breed don’t like to break habits. At eight o’clock, Burson and I mark the end of the day the way we always have. He turns the key in the lock, and signs me, ‘Have a good weekend.’ I smile a small smile, and sign back, ‘Yes. Goodnight.’
I’m noticing the hubris of streetlights (the way they try to reach and mock the moon) when Jean calls me. Her voice sounds thin even for a phone call. She wants me to come over, to meet me, to play her the pieces I’ve shortlisted for the funeral. Thomas was meant to start piano lessons in the New Year and now they’ve a Kawai they can’t stand the sight of. It’s Friday night and she assumes I’ve nothing better to do. A strange heat rises to my throat as she tells me her address. I collect my repertoire from the flat.
Jean was supposed to be sharp in all the wrong places, over-perfumed, and pale. I wasn’t expecting her to look so similar to me. Christ, when she was walking towards me there could’ve been a mirror between us. Like me, she is slight, small-breasted; not quite gaunt but a bit bird-like, yes. Her eyes are darker, more deep-set, than mine – from grief, I fancy. Our kajal is similarly smudged slightly clumsily under the waterline. And our skin is the same empty shade of brown. I apologise for her loss as she hugs me, quite simply. As she holds me, I try not to smell her hair, but even our shampoo has the same over-sweet, clawing, coconut scent. I expected her to have been drinking, but I can’t smell a thing off her, apart from our shampoo. The inside of her wrist is warm against the nape of my neck.
Her home is low-ceilinged and ochre and middle class. She shows me the piano, a pristine, virgin thing in the living room. I sit tentatively on the stool, which is very high, and upholstered in a squeaky emerald pleather. Wonder if the dead kid ever got a chance to, as I adjust the knobs on the side. Jean sits adjacently on a sofa, facing the window. For a minute, I attempt small talk which drops like a dead wren. Words, I suppose, are useless in times like these – when invited into a silence she has made for me to break. I start to play for Jean.
The first piece I play is Satie’s first ‘Gymnopédie’. When Jean only pulls her cardigan more tightly around her, I play Chopin’s ‘Prelude in E Minor’. Rachmaninoff played this at the funeral of Chopin himself, and yet I find I have to graduate to hymns, and from this to sombre Disney renditions which I pretend not to hate. Jean’s indifference throbs in the pauses between pieces like skin about to bruise. I place Schumann’s ‘Träumerei’ in front of me. As I play it for Jean, lento and cautiously, she and her grief are reduced to peripheral. Like a mole on an elbow, I think, as Jean darkens in the corner. By the end of the first motif, she is standing behind me. She breathes over the top of my head. My flyaways flutter as she watches my fingers. I finish the piece so quietly that it doesn’t sound like it resolves. Jean places a clammy hand on my shoulder. Her small breast brushes my ear. The fibres of her cardigan itch a secret corner of my neck but I won’t move. ‘Please, play just this one,’ she says, her voice small as a child’s. She pushes her hair out of her face and for a moment she is completely still, as if suddenly aware she has been caught into unbecoming a stranger. A silver Aum pendant against her collarbone catches the low lamp light. My nazar hangs equivalent but lower on my chest, obscured by my shirt. I reach through the buttons to show it to her. ‘I don’t know many Hindus called Jean,’ I confess.
‘I did want to cremate him,’ Jean starts. She walks to her front door before I realise I am supposed to be following her. I snatch up the Schumann from Thomas’ piano. Her voice abates down the corridor, her accent lilting like a waltz. ‘But my husband is Swedish,’ she says, sounding half-way between apology and explanation. Outside Jean’s home, the stars are muddled by clouds. The streetlights alone clear the darkness on my walk back to the apartment.
It is Saturday, and I’m at the Vale, stuck between a sod and a tragedy. In my bookbag, I’ve got The Beatles and some Pachelbel for Dave, Schumann for Thomas. I told Jean I’d do it for nothing, but she wouldn’t hear of it. It’s set to be a very short gig. By the end of the day, she’ll be down twenty quid for two minutes of Schumann, and a son.
I meet Mary an hour before the service. Our conversation is brief. She looks how she sounds: round and pinkish, like a peony, or a gammon. She thanks me for compiling the setlist, swears Dave would’ve loved it. As she says this, she tries to clasp my hand, but one is carrying my bookbag and the other is firmly entrenched in my coat pocket. It is a mild, sun-bleached, autumn day, but I have poor circulation and need to keep my fingers warm or else even the Pachelbel crotchets become a chore. The truth is, as my sister reminds me often, I’m not a very good pianist. But I enjoy performing for people and playing with a purpose. And so, this Saturday Mary and I are standing outside the chapel, and she is clutching my elbow. She squeezes it quickly before returning her hand to her own coat pocket. She looks younger than I think she is. Today, she has skipped mascara but overdone the blush. I understand why – the church is cold and Mary’s tears are easy when she reads the eulogy. Of course, she closes with that poem by Rossetti.
Dave’s friends and family hiccup their way through The Beatles. My Pachelbel is met with sparse applause. Mary has started smiling again. No prayers are said, and the party dissipates smartly. I sit at the piano a while longer, trying to remember where I packed my sandwich. I find it on the inside pocket of my coat. The butter made the cling film greasy, and the bread tastes faintly of plastic. I stay scrolling on my phone on a bench outside for an hour.
The funeral for Thomas is simple but the crowd is large – full of teachers, neighbours, friends, classmates, cousins, two aunts, three uncles, two grandparents. Jean’s husband is easy to spot. He is blonde, with a strong, Roman nose. He sits next to her, although Jean won’t let him touch her. When he stands to give his son’s eulogy, I realise he is a large, gawky man. But then everything seemed massive against that little box. From my place at the piano, it is easy to lock onto Jean’s face. Even her body language – anxious, all elbows and sometimes knees – emulates my own. This was worth missing my sister for. I haven’t seen her since her birthday because I haven’t wanted to. If I were more sentimental, I would say – no, I wouldn’t say that all. It’s just a different sort of grief entirely. Jean’s husband finishes the eulogy with the phrase, ‘my little boy,’ and still he isn’t quite crying. A swollen quiet follows him.
The first note of ‘Traumerei’, the centring, grounding middle-C, fails to ring out. I try again, and it is ugly-loud, but I decide to use it anyhow. Persevere, persevere. The quavers come to me too quickly and clag, and at times the bass notes don’t sound at all. The pedal turns some phrases to chowder. They must all think I’m some try-hard relative and I can’t stand it. I stumble through the refrain, linger awkwardly on the chords which make up the ritardando. After I raise the pedal on the resolving chord, I stand abruptly and leave, as if I’m upset over the child. Unlike Mary’s lot, they are a lingering party. They will forget me very soon.
Before I leave, I look back into the cemetery. Jean is smoking under a yew tree. Probably wondering if she dreamt me up. There is no breeze, and the October sun has become stronger in the early evening, yet she is shivering. The husband appears and takes the cigarette from her, the way a mother takes something accidentally sharp from her child. In an act of easy intimacy, he takes a drag from it too. I imagine his dry, small lips hugging her lipstick stain at the filter and the side of my liver flinches like the skin of a sardine meeting hot oil.
I suppose I’m lucky. My sister hasn’t phoned me again. I spent the week thinking about playing Ne Me Quitte Pas to Jean while she lies on her sofa. I’ve been thinking I about calling her. Just to say to someone, I’m sorry, I’ve been thinking of fucking myself again.
***
Ahana Banerji is currently studying English at the University of Cambridge. In 2022, she was the youngest shortlisted poet for the White Review Poet’s Prize. She has poetry published or forthcoming with Bad Lilies, Young Poets Network, and Oxford Poetry. Her debut poetry pamphlet, Piecemeal (Nine Pens Press) was published earlier this year.