A Grave Business

Reference to alcoholism, infidelity and homosexual intolerance.

A crowd of us stood around the open grave. A motley crowd, it has to be said. Fred hadn’t yet arrived. “We always said he’d be late for his own funeral,” Albert said to a mumbled chorus of assent. “Too right,” Ron agreed. “Who thought he’d actually live up to it? Well, I say live ...” 

The vicar glared, glancing at his watch, “Against my better judgement I’ve already broken with tradition and agreed to conduct the entire ceremony out here,” he complained, fiddling with his prayer book, “I could do without the levity as well. We’ve been waiting a long time now and I’ve got a wedding at half-past. All the guests will be arriving soon.” He was in a bad mood.

“You can always ask them for a volunteer,” Charlie said morosely, nodding at the grave. “Try the groom. Poor sod,” Charlie’s wife had just left him for the postwoman and he was feeling a bit down, so you had to make allowances. “I’d volunteer myself, only I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction. Anyway, Fred liked a laugh.”

The vicar looked scandalised. 

“Well,” Charlie said, “It’s all a load of nonsense innit? I told him he should have opted for a boil-in-the-bag send-off. It’s all the rage now and Fred was always one for something new. Except he had an aversion to drowning. Never did learn to swim. Not that he’d know anything about it, but you couldn’t tell him”. 

“Yeah, it was the same with cremation,” Herbert chipped in. “Didn’t want to ruin his best suit. ‘I spent three hundred quid on that,’ he told me, ‘You think I got money to burn?’ Tight sod.”

“He could always have done it naked,” Albert pointed out.

Herbert looked at him scathingly. “I’ve seen Fred naked in the golf club showers, Albert. You wouldn’t want to meet your Maker with all your tackle swinging in the Aeolian breeze would you? Especially not tackle like Fred’s!”

Mavis nodded, sagely, “Mmmm,” she said reflectively, and everyone looked askance. Mavis wasn’t Fred’s wife.

“Well, I didn’t see that one coming! I’ll be buggered,” Ron breathed.

“Not by Fred you wouldn’t,” Albert whispered. “He was against all that sort of stuff.”

Charlie caught that last remark and leaned over. “Justin’s your man for that,” he said, gesturing with his head to an elegant, slightly pink-tinged suit hovering on the periphery. “Or should that be Justine – you can never tell. Don’t know what he’s doing here. Didn’t even like Fred.”

“Well, he wouldn’t,” Albert agreed. “Probably come to mince on his grave.”

“How did he die, anyway?” Archie slurred. “He was fine last Thursday week when I saw him down the Pig’s Trotter.” Archie was a little worse for wear, as he often was. Well, if you drink at the Pig’s Trotter what can you expect, so I didn’t tell him how Fred actually met his Maker – he’d probably have thrown up on the spot, especially after a few pints.

True, there was a big hole available, but that could have been seen as disrespectful, even more so if Fred had been in it. But he wasn’t.

The vicar was looking really impatient now. “This is most irregular,” he wittered. “I’m sorry, but we are going to have to reschedule.”

“Well, that’s Fred for you,” Mavis piped up, dabbing at a wayward tear. “Always unreliable. He was either much too soon or not at all. Very frustrating! I don’t know how Freda put up with it all these years.”

Now, Freda was Fred’s wife – he always did have this peculiar penchant for sonorous syllabification, and ‘Freda’ as a spousal partner obviously ticked some abstruse alliterative box in the man’s monolithic mind. I didn’t vocalise that though. Archie wouldn’t have been able to process words like ‘sonorous’ and ‘syllab’ … well, most of them actually – especially after a couple of pints at the Pig’s Trotter. He’d probably have thrown up again with the effort.

Herbert put the bag of golf clubs down. It was Fred’s last wish that he be buried with his clubs – which was probably the best use for them, truth be told – and Herbert had promised to heft them along. “Anyone fancy a game while we wait?” he asked – only half in jest (he’s a bit of a golf nutter is Herbert). He glanced around the graveyard. “Should be a challenge. There’s plenty of obstacles, but even Archie can probably get a hole in one with this thing sitting here.” He nodded at the open grave.

This riled the vicar and he began to bridle, but just then the first of the wedding guests began to arrive and, shooting an evil look to no-one in particular he hurried off muttering something over his shoulder about ‘calling the bloody funeral directors,’ and ‘next sodding week.’ The language was a bit surprising coming from a Man of God, but I suppose the circumstances were a bit trying. We were all left looking at each other in baffled silence.

It was then that Archie fell in. 

One minute he was there and the next he had disappeared. It was only when a horrible muffled groaning from the bottom of the grave broke the silence – accompanied by an answering scream from Mavis, convinced that Fred’s spirit had actually come for her at last – that we realised what had happened. Then the moaning turned to oaths that would have made even the vicar blush and we all looked over the edge to see Archie squirming about at the bottom swearing with all the fervour of half a lifetime’s devotion to the very particular language of The Pig’s Trotter.

I suppose it was not surprising in the circumstances but not very respectful to Fred, given the direction of the insults being hurled about at the bottom of his grave which should, by rights, have been occupied by him by now. And not a dishevelled, mud encrusted pissant ineffectually clawing at his jacket in an attempt to brush all the dirt off and wishing Fred ... well ... dead. As he was. But still not where he should be.

Herbert put the golf clubs to good use by hauling Archie out from the bottom of the hole. “Not quite what I had in mind when I said a hole in one,” he said as he dusted Archie off, “but that’s a first even for you. Fred would have enjoyed that.”

I won’t tell you what Archie said, but Fred’s spectral ears must have been burning. Wherever he was.

“Well, do we wait or what? Albert asked. “’cause My bladder isn’t what it was, and if I don’t go soon ...”

Fair do’s, no-one suggested the obvious solution yawning at our feet. Even our lot has some decorum and, anyway, ladies present. Although, given Mavis’s recent revelation, she’d obviously seen a lot more that anyone gave her credit for. Dark horses and all that. So, he opted for a nearby obscuring headstone with a muttered apology to the incumbent whilst Mavis decorously looked the other way pretending not to listen.

She is decorous, Mavis, in a blowsy sort of way with hair that obviously comes out of a bottle. It’s not hard to see why Fred might have been interested. Comparing Freda and Mavis was like comparing chalk and cheese. Well, flint and dolce latte more like. But she was a looker in her day was Freda. It was life with Fred that honed the sharp edges. She could stop a charging bull in its tracks with a simple icy voice command – Amazon’s Alexa lived in fear of her apparently. Always apologised if it got the selection even slightly wrong – without being asked.

Still, you had to sympathise. With Alexa, I mean. Fred deserved all he got. But it all rolled off his back like the proverbial off a hot shovel. Come to think of it, you would have to sympathise with the funeral directors. I can only imagine the tongue lashing they were getting from Freda.

The bells started pealing then. That sort of put the tin lid on it. A wedding party wasn’t going to want a funeral party putting a damper on proceedings, despite Charlie’s mournful predictions. “I’ll give it three years,” he said, tossing his head at the bell tower. “Three years and they’ll be ringing the changes, you mark my words.”

Fred turned up then. Or, at least, a sheepish Funeral Director did, all but frog-marched through the church gates by a furious Freda mouth going nineteen to the dozen, followed by a severely limping hearse. Fred was reposing peacefully in his box inside, probably revelling in all this carnage being let loose, if I know Fred.

Turned out that the hearse had picked up a puncture in the back of beyond, and someone had forgotten to blow up the spare, Freda hadn’t brought her phone with her and the Funeral Director’s battery had packed in. You couldn’t make it up.

Goodness knows what the bridal party thought when they found a hearse trying to hobble surreptitiously past the group photo shoot on its way back to lay Fred out again in the Chapel of Rest. I bet they weren’t expecting that. They should have been at the graveside. That would have been a real talking point at the Wedding Breakfast. And I expect they could have done without Charlie shaking his head sorrowfully at the groom as we all trooped after the hearse, much less the wreath he thrust into the bewildered bloke’s hands after patting his shoulder in sympathy.

Well, what else was he going to do with it? It would be dead by next week. Much like Fred.