Elsa sits at the far end of the wooden pew at the front of the chapel, staring down into the floor until the mumbling dies down. The church is so packed that people are standing all along the walls. Many of them have insanely weird clothes, as if they’ve been playing outfit roulette with someone who can’t read washing instruction tags.
Elsa will put “outfit roulette” in the word jar, she thinks. She tries to focus on that thought. But she hears languages she can’t understand, and she hears her name being squeezed into strange pronunciations, and this takes her back to reality. She sees strangers pointing at her, with varying degrees of discretion. She understands that they all know who she is, and it makes her mad, so that when she glimpses a familiar face along one of the walls she has trouble placing him at first. Like when you see a celebrity in a café and instinctively burst out,“Oh, hi there!” before you realize that your brain has had time to tell you, “Hey, that’s probably someone you know, say hi!” but not, “No, wait, it’s just that guy from the TV!” Because your brain likes to make you look like an idiot.
His face disappears behind a shoulder for a few moments, but when he reappears he’s looking right at Elsa. It’s the accountant who came to speak about the leasehold conversion yesterday. But he’s dressed as a priest now. He winks at her.
Another priest starts talking about Granny, then about God, but Elsa doesn’t listen. She wonders if this is what Granny would have wanted. She’s not sure that Granny liked church so very much. Granny and Elsa hardly ever talked about God, because Granny associated God with death.
And this is all fake. Plastic and makeup. As if everything’s going to be fine just because they’re having a funeral. Everything is not going to be fine for Elsa, she knows that. She breaks into a cold sweat. A couple of the strangers in the weird clothes come up to the microphone and talk. Some of them do so in other languages and have a little lady who translates into another microphone. But no one says “dead.” Everyone just says that Granny has “passed away” or that they’ve “lost her.” As if she’s a sock that’s been lost in the tumble-dryer. A few of them are crying, but she doesn’t think they have the right. Because she wasn’t their granny, and they have no right to make Elsa feel as if Granny had other countries and kingdoms to which she never brought Elsa.
So when a fat lady who looks like she’s combed her hair with a toaster starts reading poems, Elsa thinks it’s just about enough and she pushes her way out between the pews. She hears Mum whispering something behind her, but she just shuffles along the shiny stone floor and squeezes out of the church doors before anyone has time to come after her.
The winter air bites at Elsa; it feels like she’s being yanked out of a boiling hot bath by her hair. The cloud animals are hovering low and ominous. Elsa walks slowly and takes such deep breaths of the December air that her eyes start to black out. She thinks about Storm. Storm has always been one of Elsa’s favorite superheroes, because Storm’s superpower is that she can change the weather. Even Granny used to admit that as superpowers went, that one was pretty cool.
Elsa hopes that Storm will come and blow away this whole bloody church. The whole bloody churchyard. Bloody everything.
The faces from inside spiral around inside her head. Did she really see the accountant? Was Alf standing in there? She thinks so. She saw another face she recognized, the policewoman with the green eyes. She walks faster, away from the church because she doesn’t want any of them to come after her and ask if she’s okay. Because she’s not okay. None of this will ever be okay. She doesn’t want to listen to their mumbling or have to admit that they are talking about her. Over her. Around her. Granny never talked around her.
She’s gone about fifty yards between the headstones when she picks up a smell of smoke. At first there’s something familiar about it, something almost liberating. Something that Elsa wants to turn and embrace and bury her nose in, like a freshly laundered pillowcase on a Sunday morning. But then there’s something else.