Short fiction

Adam

It rained. Adam stood at the graveside and felt the moisture advancing through the layers of his suit. It infiltrated the tight cotton weave of his unpressed shirt to rest against the skin of his back. He allowed his eyes to peer through the rain-streaked lenses of his thick-framed glasses at the collected mourners. Black umbrellas shielded black dresses and suits, and he thought of the seeming incongruity of the service’s solemnity, considering his father’s nature. He was not a religious man, and had asked to be burned in a boat on the sea like a Viking: theirs was a noble race, he said, and he would like to walk in the halls of their dead. However, to please his newly-devout Catholic sister, Adam chose a Christian burial, committing his father into the hands of her God. He felt the priest’s words as they vibrated the air around his head and in his ears, where a multitude of small bones vibrated in kind, like a thousand tiny hands tapping a message in Morse code. A man was talking about his father.

      As the priest continued, Adam turned his attention to the dampness of his clothes, and the way in which the twenty-or-so people witnessing his father’s departure must share in that dampness a little, despite the defence of their umbrellas, as they share the loss. He thought of how the other five men who had carried the coffin from the hearse must surely notice, as he does, the square of drier fabric flattened by its  weight.

While the priest tiredly recited words spoken many times before and to be spoken many times again, Adam considered the way his father would have said them. An audacious half-smile on his lips, he would have countered their melancholy with at least one inappropriate joke. It was his father’s love of extravagance that had led Adam to secure around his neck a vermillion silk tie that morning, which had drawn glances and comments. Against the background of his black shirt and black suit, beneath the shadow of a black trilby worn at a slight angle, the tie brought a momentary spark to the scene, a tribute to his father’s eccentricity.

Adam supposed the reason that the funeral was conducted like this regardless of his father’s character was simply that this priest conducted all funerals like this. Then again, perhaps today it was the rain; it had rained every day since his father died, which Adam had not cared to mark until this moment. The clouds had gathered slowly, taking a week to choose the best portion of sky from which to deliver their sobering consignment. Having selected the three or four square miles that encompass the Nightingale Hospital, Adam’s house and the church, they waited. It was not until the moment the heart monitor sounded a solid tone that the rain fell, saturating the small section of land. As they had gathered, every second glance in the valley had been to the sky, as though imploring the clouds to blow away, to hold off, at least long enough for a postman to complete his deliveries, or for a kind neighbour to deliver flowers to a dying man. The threat of rain festered in the air as the smell of cigars clings to an old man’s beard, and it engendered a sense of urgency in every journey made across the village, excited by the gamble of stepping out when surely it must rain at any moment. And yet, though the symmetry of the weather seemed so perfect, the meteorological occurrence so perfectly in tune with mortality, Adam ascribed it entirely to the coincidence of his father’s dying in February, and England’s implacable tendency to environmental melancholy in this month.

The raindrops chased the coffin into the ground as it was lowered using a device that made a mechanical sound like the song of his father’s watch-making tools. The steady click-clack, click-clack brought to Adam’s mind the evenings in childhood when he would try to steal unnoticed into his father’s workshop past his bedtime; an act of stealthy rebellion that, upon reflection, was as much about wanting to watch his father at work as it was about testing his abilities and feeling like a ninja. Unfailingly, his father would hear him, often some time before he turned to direct his son back to bed. Until he had grown too tall and heavy, this had been conducted by his father lifting him onto his shoulder, bearing him through the house and laying him in his resting place beneath the glow-in-the-dark stars and moon. Thinking of this curled Adam’s upper lip into a smile that, like the red of his tie, invited the mourners to remember fondly his father’s peculiar qualities.

The coffin met the ground with a wet noise, followed by a second’s silence before the priest invited Adam to cast the first handful of earth into the pit. Startled from his reverie, Adam found the priest’s eyes expectant and, recovering himself, removed his left hand from his pocket and, ignoring the small shovel placed there so he might keep his hands clean, collected a clump of mud. He stepped to the edge of the grave and looked down, feeling the weight of the mud and the rain, which thinned the mud so that it ran through his fingers, across the back of his hand and into the end of his shirtsleeve. He extended his arm, rolling his hand over its heel, and led by the unfurling of his little finger concluded with his hand splayed to its full span, facing directly into the grave. Adam caught himself staring at the mud on the lid of the coffin, frozen in a splash that made no pattern or offered any omens other than the two one-pence pieces which had danced with the mud as they fell from his hand, encouraged by Adam’s words, “For the boatman.”

      Stood there, contemplating the six-foot hole in the earth, Adam was struck by an indecipherable depth, a significance beyond the demands of science for a burial. He thought of the conjectures about what lies beyond, beneath, above; whether we’re being looked down upon or whether his father has just been reborn; whether he now lives again as an eagle somewhere (for he lived an admirable life) or whether he now faces inconsolable nothing. Adam, who appeared to the others to be saying the long goodbye, assembled himself and retreated from the grave. He moved a little way off, ready to thank the people and remind them of the wake at the pub where his father was a regular.

             Although he knew that nothing about his physiological structure had changed, as he stood in the continuing rain Adam felt a stiffness in his lungs, as though they struggled to inflate: the oxygen that now subtly stung in his chest appeared unwelcome. The blood in his veins and arteries carried new weight now that his father’s was no longer flowing, and appeared sluggish under the responsibility of being the eldest Jameson left alive.

      Adam shook the hand of the last guest, acknowledging their final condolences, which he felt were sincere though rather prescribed, and let down his guard so that his eyes panned across to the fresh lump of earth where his father lay. He retreated, and caught up his wife Evelyn. Together they climbed inside the lead car from the funeral procession: a long, black Mercedes with tinted windows waiting to take them home. Neither of them spoke. Evelyn was satisfied simply looking at him, attempting to read the lines of his face, which appeared more refined and deeper set than usual. Adam now felt the wetness of his face. Almost unconsciously and with no urgency he reached into his inside pocket to retrieve a handkerchief, which he unfolded slowly and used to dry his face and the nape of his neck. As the cotton passed across his skin the droplets, which he had felt on his face as the million tears of those who had stood in that cemetery before him, were silently absorbed. He took off his glasses and wiped his face a final time; the handkerchief, was his father’s once, still bore the initials, ‘R. J.,’ in an elaborate, copperplate style. He held the glasses between thumb and forefinger for a few minutes, the hinge gently rocking open and shut with the lilting of the car. As they drove he looked forwards and out through the window, watching the advancing street lights. Without his glasses they looked like a child might draw the sun, eager to share their light with the surrounding stick figures and lurid-green grass. Every so often he caught glimpses of the stars through the shards of light that appeared to be bursting from their bright centres, and he looked forward to reaching home, nestled in its private pool of darkness where he could see them better.

Half an hour later the car pulled up, agitating the gravel drive and foiling a cat’s stealthy approach towards a mouse under the rose bush. Adam tipped the driver and thanked him again before getting out of the car and rooting his keys from his pocket to unlock the house.  The long, slender hallway was dark, and the sound of the burglar alarm echoed around the dark red painted walls and wood-panel flooring, interrupted briefly by the rising and falling tones of the code before being silenced completely as Adam pressed the last key. Evelyn turned on the lights as he tugged and cajoled his sodden sleeves from his arms, hanging his jacket over the corner of the radiator, something Evelyn didn’t like, but she made no comment. Adam continued through the house to the kitchen, where a box of his father’s cigars was on the table. He took one and cut off the end before fetching a box of matches and taking them into the garden. After lighting up he dragged heavily while he stood with an upwards tilt to his head, just as when a child he’d sat on the floor at his father’s feet and listened to stories about the war. The strength of the Havana made him to cough in much the same way that punctuated those stories, and Adam gave the cigar a disapproving frown before discarding it to the soaked patio and returning his attention to the stars. Evelyn, who had been watching from the doorway, hurried over to still his heaving shoulders and planted on his cheek a kiss that calmed his hammering heart, before guiding him back inside.

A note sounded from the next room, and Evelyn’s heels made a satisfying percussive sound on the auburn tiles of the kitchen, changing with a dissonant cadence as she crossed onto the wooden floorboards of the hall and living room. Adam opened the whisky and fetched a glass, while in the background he tried to discern the muffled sound of the answering machine. Evelyn returned as he was taking his first sip, and her smile made him pause for a moment before swallowing. She answered his furrowed brow by explaining that the message was from his sister. He was now an uncle, and they had named their son Richard.

Jonathan Payne