Trust Me, I'm Dead by Sherryl Clark

Author:Sherryl Clark
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verve Books
Published: 2019-06-18T16:00:00+00:00

19

I’d thrown my only decent black pants suit into my overnight bag, but I couldn’t bear to wear the black silk shirt I’d brought to go with it. All I’d need was a white tie and I’d look like something out of The Sopranos. Before my shower, I peeled the dressing off the back of my head and found a mirror that showed me I had a bizarre short patch of hair and a row of stitches underneath.

I was at the doors of Highpoint Shopping Centre at one minute to nine, and into Target at ten seconds after. I bought a tailored white shirt with narrow red pinstripes and a black cloche-style hat that covered my bald spot nicely. Now I felt more ready to face the unknown.

Parking under the same tree at the funeral parlour, I muttered, ‘Crap away, birds, you couldn’t make things any worse.’

The blonde woman was there ready to show me everything from the sandwiches to the coffin. ‘Do you want to see him?’ she asked. ‘We can open the casket.’

I shook my head. I’d seen him at the morgue and that was enough. He still wouldn’t look like the Andy I knew.

‘He’s in the chapel if you want to sit with him for a while.’

Since I was early and I liked that idea, I went in and looked at the coffin; it had a small arrangement of white roses and lilies on top of it but when I checked, they were standard funeral home flowers. No secret cards or messages there. I sat on the cushioned pew. The soothing ambience of the chapel surprised me – maybe I’d been expecting something functional or dismal – and it felt good to sit there for a while with Andy and remember some of our life together.

Even though he was younger, there was a period from when I was about ten to thirteen where we played together all the time, and he was great at inventing games. Some of them were acting games, but we didn’t just put on a play, we were Hollywood actors in a film, with servants to run after us and film directors begging us to be their stars.

We lived near the beach and Mum never cared if we went off on our own, especially in the summer holidays when she couldn’t face trying to entertain us for weeks on end. We could both swim well, so we were unlikely to drown, and we knew all about the Beaumont children and how to avoid strangers.

I smiled, thinking of Andy’s skinny little body and his determination to conquer the art of bodysurfing, getting tipped and rolled by the small waves time after time until he finally got the hang of it. Once we caught the train to Portsea in search of bigger waves, and he bodysurfed them as well, leaping out of the water, arms held high in victory. He never thought of giving up.

His favourite game was ‘Private Detectives’ – by the time that

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