The Last Good Funeral of the Year by Ed O'Loughlin

Author:Ed O'Loughlin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc
Published: 2022-02-24T19:40:09+00:00

June

Stars of Bethlehem

Eleven is now Twelve, and there will be no more school runs. She graduated from primary school in a Zoom call, two weeks after her birthday, three months after the schools shut early for the year. When she starts secondary school in September, if school starts again in September, she will walk or cycle there by herself, or perhaps with her sister, Thirteen, each alone with her phone and her music. She won’t really be a child anymore, though her parents assume, they hope, that sometimes she’ll still be childish.

Twelve will no longer be walked, chattering, to school by her mother. In her new school, Twelve will not be picked up at the gate by her father, as she has been for the past eight years, even after she began to get restless, and to tell him she could walk home by herself. He had resisted this change for mainly selfish reasons. For him, the school run was a chance to leave the house and see other adult faces, a window in each day. Also, he wasn’t quite ready to let her childhood go.

Twelve is now almost as tall as her mother. Thirteen is taller. When they moved into this house, nine years ago, they stripped the old wallpaper in the front room and found the marks where the previous owners, a family who had been in the house for generations, had pencilled the heights of their growing children. They gathered round and looked at the lines on the wall, the faded names written beside them. Those children had stopped growing, got older and died. Now the room would be replastered, a final desecration, so, hoping to make some amends for it, the father took a photo of the marks on the wall. Then they skimmed the wall and painted it. Now that photo can’t be found.

Since then, they have made marks for their own children on the frame of the dining-room door. But if they are to have any permanence in this house, after they move on, alone or together, as they will, and these marks are themselves painted over, it will be in the memories of their two children. Wherever they go, and whatever becomes of it, this house will belong to their girls for as long as they live. They will also remember the previous house, the one into which they were born, the two-bedroom artisanal in Broadstone, but mainly as a blur of light and shade, and for the year of the big snow. The house they live in now, though, will be fused to them with the heat of childhood impressions. They will remember every inch of it, and, decades later, if they live long enough, their dreams will take them back here – back home – just as their father still dreams of a house in a field in Kildare, and can see it in fine detail, asleep or awake. He can even see that house from above, from hundreds of feet

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