Mad Hope by Heather Birrell

Author:Heather Birrell [Birrell, Heather]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Literary, Short Stories (Single Author), Family Life, Contemporary Women
ISBN: 9781552452585
Publisher: Coach House Books
Published: 2012-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

Jeremy loved the funeral, and not because it was like a party or a solemn ritual, although it tried to be both of these. Everyone kept saying how important it was to celebrate his father, to remember him when he was alive, as if they could recall him any other way. The service was in a church – United – which was not so much Jesus, really, as school lunchroom, that same institutional feeling, safe and staid, with adult secrets and stale smells around the periphery. There was a minister but it was a woman. No, not a party or a service, but a distraction, almost a holiday, with a whole circus of people and an itinerary. Rosa was there with Carol, but they hung back like bridesmaids, ceded the spotlight. And friends he had not seen in years came forward one at a time, shook his hand and sought out his eyes with their own, nodding in a kind of awe or acknowledgement. He could not remember the speeches – every single one like a momentarily hypnotizing, forgettable song. His father’s coffin, closed and sleek, shone like the mahogany inside a yacht, and Jeremy was only really jolted awake when one of the speech givers – Mike Elton, a retired cop – rapped on it on the way back to his pew. It made Jeremy so proud, that knock. It was a closed-mouthed, puffy-chested sign of respect, and he felt it deep in his breast, could still call up the tone and timbre, the one, pause, two, three, pause rhythm of it. Afterwards, back at the house, he parked himself in a corner and tried for inscrutability. Rosa had left – a practical at the Sally Caponi Institute that would determine her mark for the semester. He was glad to see her off. Someone had to have appointments to keep. He had booked two weeks off work and still had six empty squares on the calendar to wander through. He was not afraid of time and space. It was his version of Rosa’s muddy not-caring that terrified him.

It was then that Mrs. Henley had sought him out, found her place by his side.

‘A lot of people,’ she said.

‘How’s Richie?’ he replied.

She took his hand. ‘You know, he told me once about the mushrooms. How you knew them all by Latin name, would point them out like some professor when you two went riding in the ravine. There was one, he said, called the ear mushroom. He always liked that one.’

Jeremy smiled at her. Auricularia auricula. Or, not so operatically: tree ear. In less language-conscious, perhaps more clannish times: Jew’s ear. Smooth, fleshy to the touch. As unlikely as ears themselves, whorls of skin and soft cartilage stuck arbitrarily on the sides of heads. The mushrooms had a shellacked newborn look, more purely ear-like than their namesakes.

He had done a speech in Grade 4 about mushrooms, mycology. How many hours had he spent examining – memorizing! – the

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