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‘He shouldn’t be here,’ I said. ‘It’s family.’
‘Don’t be so bloody unreasonable,’ she said. ‘Can’t you see how useful he is, particularly for Fergie?’
At our father’s funeral, our mother carried her wreath before her like the Queen at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday. Afterwards she stood at the lich-gate in her new little black suit and her six-inch heels and her Jackie O pillbox, dabbing at her eyes through the veiling.
The line of mourners stretched down the church path. Most were customers, people whose cars he’d repaired for next to nothing with that string and those six-inch nails, among them a small flotilla of spinsters.
‘Paying their respects,’ our mother snarled in an aside, dropping the tragic widow act for one blissful moment. ‘Why not? They paid for bugger all else in his lifetime.’
I wanted to shout at her then, I remember. I wanted to shout, ‘So what? What does it matter?’ I wanted to tell her right there, under the lich-gate, what an awful human being I thought she was. How much better I believed he was than she. How angry I was that by sheer bad luck the only decent part of my parentage was now dead with the stupid, rotten vain part left behind. I stormed away, up the path, beside the line of mourners to get away from her, to be alone. I found a quiet spot hidden from view in the furthest corner of the graveyard where I sat on an ancient gravestone that had fallen flat, and was resting under a tree, which is where Archie found me.
‘I’m sorry …’ he said, the words hesitant. ‘Cass sent me. They’ve left for the house. I’ve to give you a lift.’
‘I don’t want a lift with you,’ I said, astonished because I hadn’t been crying before but now I was. Suddenly tears that had not been there a moment before were running down my face. ‘I don’t want to go with you. You of all people. I never wanted to see you again, you know that.’
He took a step towards me. He said, ‘Look, Riley … please … I just want to say something.’ But my shouted words stopped him in his tracks.
‘I don’t want you to say something. Don’t you understand? I just want you to go away.’ I laid a hand on my heart, feeling suddenly faint. Violently sick. ‘Go away …’ I said. ‘Go away. How many times do I have to ask you? Just leave me alone, will you?’ and I dropped down on the stone.
I heard his steps receding behind my back as I threw up in the long grass beside it.
I didn’t join my mother in that large overwrought wreath. Instead I bought a dozen red roses. When I’d finished being sick, I went back to the grave where the gravediggers were just picking up their shovels.
I threw one of the roses in and it landed on the coffin with a soft empty swish and an air of finality.
I stood there beside the open grave that day listening to the unforgiving sound of the spades and the whump of the earth as it landed on the coffin. I felt as if something had been cut away from me.
To be frank, it’s a feeling that’s never left me.
* Carried out for BestInvestment.com and reported in my mother’s paper.
I am not the only one to suffer from fear of flying. The list of famous aviophobes is long and distinguished: Twiggy, who takes Dr Bach’s Rescue Remedy for it (it’s never worked for me); Stanley Kubrick, who had to recreate the Vietnam War in Pinewood because of it; Dennis Bergkamp, the Arsenal and Dutch player who leaves several days ahead of the rest of his team to get to European matches, plus some American female rock star who can’t tour because of it but whose name, unfortunately, I can’t remember. On behalf of all of them, I’d like to ask – and particularly of Bad Ponytail Peter who insists it must be cured – what is so damn phobic about being scared of being locked up in some aluminium tube half a mile in the air, and this in the full knowledge that any moment some crazy might take over the cockpit or Jonathan Livingstone Seagull do a nose dive into one of the engines. From this you will deduce I don’t regard fear of flying as remotely phobic. To me aviophobia is like ballistophobia (fear of bullets and missiles) or lilapsophobia (fear of hurricanes and tornados) or nucleomituphobia (fear of nuclear weapons), all of which are on Bad Ponytail Peter’s list, and all – as far as I can see – utterly inapplicable as phobias since they concern things which by their very nature only a complete idiot would not be scared of.
I feel much the same way about gamophobia.
Fear of marriage.
I used to think I was some sort of oddity, some beast with a brand on my forehead with regard to my gamophobia but now I don’t think so. Tell you the truth, I think that, as a condition, it’s getting as common as measles. For a start, people are putting it off. The average age for marriage now is thirty for men, twenty-eight for women, a rise of five years over the last quarter of a century.* The way things are going, in fifty years’ time, people will be hitting the big four-oh before they clamber into their wedding clobber.
As much as anything, of course, this has to do with the increased social acceptance of cohabiting instead of, or prior to, marriage. A quarter of the nation is now shacked up without benefit of clergy – or Living In Sin as my mother prefers to call it – a figure expected to double over the next ten years. As a result of this more than forty per cent of the nation’s babies are now born to cohabiting couples, a ten per cent rise over the last decade. Cue a bout of enthusiastic tutting from my mother when she read it in her morning paper.
‘All those children born out of wedlock.’
‘Out of wedlock. For God’s sake, you’ll be saying “wrong side of the blanket” next. We’re not living in a Catherine Cookson novel, Mother.’
Meanwhile there’re no prizes for guessing just why society got a taste for cohabitation as opposed marriage. It’s because it’s not marriage, that’s why. Because it’s not quite that final. Because it represents a resting place, a place to draw breath, to hold back, think twice. A place where there’s still a let-out clause, a light still shining at the end of the tunnel. All the marriage-shy spinster does, as usual, is raise her head that bit higher above the parapet.
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