Life! Death! Prizes! Read online

  Praise for Life! Death! Prizes!

  ‘A real achievement … has a great deal to say about modern families and the world we live in … Full of surprises’ Melvin Burgess

  ‘[A] touching, truthful – sometimes shocking – and painfully funny portrayal of two brothers … a paean of praise for the other side of contemporary youth, the side that, with all its foibles and failures, is still driven by love and connection’ Mavis Cheek

  ‘Stephen May manages to balance hilarity and sadness in nearly every sentence of this deftly comic, completely engaging and at times absolutely hair-raising novel. Life! Death! Prizes! deserves every one of its exclamation marks’ Suzanne Berne, author of the Orange Prize-winning A Crime in the Neighborhood

  ‘Stephen May has the sharp eye of David Nicholls and the verve of Kate Atkinson’ Suzannah Dunn, author of The Confession of Katharine Howard

  ‘By turns bleak, funny, and tender … an intoxicating gulp of a novel’ Christopher Wakling, author of What I Did

  ‘Gritty, witty, uplifting, sharp – it reminded me of Nick Hornby in its portrayal of modern family in all its glorious chaos’ Kate Long

  ‘Echoes of J.D. Salinger and Dave Eggers … Stephen May is a major new talent, sharply observant of the human condition’ Monique Roffey, author of The White Woman on the Green Bicycle, shortlisted for The Orange Prize 2010

  ‘The story is beautifully put together, with a strong cast and, not least, an extremely satisfying ending’ Reader’s Digest

  For Caron, Hannah, Herbie and Joe

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Chapter One

  Mum’s funeral takes place at the Millennium Cemetery, a pale brick square that stands cringing in the shadow of the Fun Junction on the edge of town. It looks like a Little Chef. Three council grunts in hi-vis jackets stand smoking in the soft cold rain, nothing to do but watch and wait before they can start filling in some hole. There’s a tall, rail-thin man with a face so drooping he could only ever have become an undertaker. And there are great-aunts and neighbours and Office Angels and tight suits and hats and two kinds of faces. The melting ones and the blank ones.

  There’s Dean Hessenthaler, Oscar’s dad, huge in his thick, expensive Kray-twin overcoat, meaty face grim as he pretends to look at the flowers piled around us. Christ, he’s let himself go.

  There’s the Reverend Luke Newell, the vicar, twisting his hands like a nonce. Looks about my age though he must be older. This must be his biggest gig so far, and he’s got the fear bad. Looks like he could piss himself any moment.

  And there’s Oscar, solemn and still, a six-year-old Kennedy in his suit and skinny black tie. He looks cool as, like he’s in a band. And every time eyes fall on him they fill with tears. Damp tissues fly to noses. Oscar turns his gaze on someone and they dissolve. The blank faces become melting faces.

  The only person who seems immune is Dean. When he first sees Oscar he murmurs, ‘All right, kiddo.’ And when Oscar doesn’t say anything back, he just nods like he’s got the answer he’s expected all along. Oscar doesn’t even seem to see him.

  Red eyes, red noses. Sniffles and murmurs. Even from the journalists, even from the police. Pale faces, black clothes. Red, white and black the colours of this funeral. Swastika colours. Death colours. None of that funeral-as-celebration-of-life bollocks today. No party dresses. No paper hats. No Hawaiian shirts. No football kits or teddy bears. None of the gimmicks you sometimes get at the contemporary burial.

  Flick through the pages of the trauma porn mags, and you’ll soon find a kid being buried in the QPR away kit, or a girl going into the underworld in a tutu. Or an old guy buried with his golf clubs, his car keys, or his Northern soul records: a kind of council estate pharaoh, proving that you can take it with you.

  Not here.

  ‘Come on, Billy, let’s do this thing.’ Oscar whispers it, but his voice is steady like he’s a general leading troops over the top. Or rather, like an actor leading other actors over the top. Like someone whose learned his part. He squares his shoulders, stands up straight. One skinny metre of distilled heroism. He tugs at my hand, urgent and with surprising force for such a stickboy. I follow him and I can feel my own face beginning to melt like I was some stupid Office Angel. Well, fuck that. I’m not having that. I squat down, hold him by his shoulders, look him square in the eye and say, ‘OK, bud, let’s do it. Let’s roll.’ And I stand up and we’re inside.

  Every day I find stories sadder and more stupid than ours. Like this morning. This morning I read about a toddler from Inverness who died after falling and cutting himself on a vase. Russell Poulter was enjoying himself with his favourite toys when he knocked over the ornament and fell on the shards which slashed his neck. All of this in front of his mother, a nurse, who must have known what was happening to her little boy but couldn’t do anything about it. One minute she’s washing up, listening to her first born playing, and next she’s cradling his head while the life flows out of him. A sadder story than ours. And stupid because what could be more harmless than a vase?

  Mrs Poulter didn’t even like the vase. It was a cheap, gaudy thing, a present from her mother-in-law who was famous for her lack of taste. She’d been meaning to boot sale it.

  Sad. Stupid.

  I get all those mags now. Chat, Bella, Best, Take a Break, Love It, Reveal, Pick Me Up – most of the others. The sort that deal in real-life heartbreak. The sort that shout Life! Death! Prizes! in swirly circus writing underneath the title. The sort that tell me about the Russell Poulters of this world. It’s good. It helps. It means that I can tell myself that I’m lucky.

  I’m lucky because I’m still alive and Oscar is alive, and we have a house and enough money to go to Morrisons once a week and buy Cheerios.

  Yeah, Oscar. Let’s do it. Let’s bury our stupid mum, the woman who thought it was worth fighting to the death with some random no one in a council car park.

  From the outside the chapel looks like a motorway diner, and inside it’s pretty much the same. Inside you could be in any modern parish church, any museum, any supermarket, any school, any jail.

  The service itself is pretty retro. Poetry. Hymns. Psalms. Aunt Toni, Mum’s sister, organised it all, and I can’t say I’d have done it any differently but it doesn’t mean that it’s right. ’Cause it’s not. It’s all so, so wrong. The Reverend Luke talks about Mum’s life and puts in all the stuff we – Toni and me – told him to put in, but he makes her sound small somehow. Like just another ordinary Office Angel. Someone you’d get in to fix your filing systems and organise the Christmas do. It’s all just words. Not even words. Sounds. Noises bubbling away. And he doesn’t mention the way she died. That pathetic playground tussle, that stupid push and pull. And I think that’s a good call: it’s such an embarrassing way to go, why would you talk about that? And Rev Luke doesn’t talk about the one person who got us to gather here. He doesn’t talk about Aidan Jebb.

  The one more or less modern touch is a PowerPoint presentation of photos from Mum’s life sound-tracked by Vaughan Williams’s Lark Ascending. And in every picture Mum faces the camera with a wide-eyed, wide-mouthed, madly optimistic grin. From gurgling baby in 1969, to the glossed exec snapped at the Southwood Enterprise Awards 2009, Mum seems to be shouting ‘Yay! ROFL!’ Seeing al
l the photos like that, she looks mad. It makes me wonder if she wasn’t sort of retarded in some way.

  Is the funeral what Mum would have wanted? Probably not. She was an events organiser after all, she would have made it a huge occasion. An event organised by Mum stayed organised. She would have done Event Death. There would have been something spectacular, something to get it talked about, remembered – I can imagine her going into the chapel to the sound of ‘Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! A Man After Midnight’. Or ‘Going Underground’ even. Something outrageous anyway.

  And it wouldn’t have been here, in this Little Chef chapel. The venue would have been exclusive, thought about. Hard to get to, but worth the effort when you were there. The hippest, happening boneyard. A cemetery with a view.

  But funerals aren’t for the dead. The dead don’t give a fuck. No, funerals are totally for the living. And this funeral is a traditional, functional one, meant for those of us who are hoping just to keep functioning in the traditional English way. To keep putting one foot in front of the other until we’re through and clear of it all.

  Not all the living appreciate the effort. My dad’s not here (a solitary text: thinkin of U m8. M8? He’s not my m8. He’s my father. He should remember that. And he should sort out predictive text) but mostly it’s a success. And success here is measured by the volume of quiet sobbing in the church, the number of bone-crunching handshakes I get back at Oaks Avenue – and by the amount of bargain booze we shift at the wake.

  You don’t have to be dead to be a ghost. Look around and you’ll see people who are ghosts in their own lives. Maybe most people are. Drifting through the streets and the shops and holidays, sighing and moaning. Or raging at the way they’ve ended up, wrapped in stuff. In ropes and chains. Jobs and houses. Tax credits. Rent and mortgages and parents’ evenings and city breaks.

  And there’s worse things to be than a ghost. You could be a dangerous zombie, trapped in an endless tramp from dealer to police desk to social worker to hostel to street. That’s us now. Our country: ghosts and zombies everywhere you look.

  Aidan Jebb weighed less than two pounds when he was born. He was six weeks premature. The surviving half of twins. Aidan was the youngest by four minutes, but where Callum Jebb simply coughed once and died without crying or even unfurling his hands, Aidan followed him already yelling, already fighting. Already elbowing the weaker kid aside. Grabbing for a life that didn’t much need him, that was indifferent to him.

  Aidan was the size of the palm of his dad’s hand, a miracle baby, born into a house without carpets but with a widescreen TV and Sky Sports. When he finally left hospital, after six months, there were pictures in the Gazette. He was carried in triumph into that house, by now fully furnished with donations from local well-wishers. Aidan – named for his dad’s dad, himself a legendary gambler – had brought good luck and the welcome home party went on for several days. Everyone remarked how quiet and good Aidan was. And Rosie, his mum – a kid herself – would laugh and say how weird it was: her being so loud and him being so quiet. Let’s face it, she was a party girl, up for anything, and he just watched and dribbled a bit as he was passed around to be poked and prodded, as sweating faces loomed in and out at him. No, give Aidan a bottle and he was happy.

  ‘Not so different from you then, Rosie.’ That was some smart-arse.

  Pretty soon, he was the sole permanent male in a house of girls. Men were around but strictly as visitors. They came but didn’t stay and that was the way everyone liked it. Aidan gurgled and smiled as skinny lads tottered in with him and Rosie. He giggled as they fumbled and cursed trying to fold the pushchair. He clapped his little hands as they carried him upstairs to his cool room with its appley smells and the constant reassuring flicker of his dad’s one legacy, the murmuring of Cartoon Network in the corner.

  In the mornings there would be shouting and banging, but Aidan would be safe in his cot till they came to fetch him. It was never about him. Nothing to do with him. The morning storms were simply the weather of the house, brought in by the men and leaving when they did, with a final gust and a bang. Then it was just Rosie and him, and his nan, and Rosie’s mates and the shops and the warm music of those pubs that didn’t mind kids. Safe until the next smiling stormbringer with his rings and his easy laugh. Safe until the next guy with ready cash, careful hair and his way of knowing just when to get the drinks in.

  After the funeral there seems to be a tacit agreement amongst the guests that it can all kick off now. Whether you’re a glammy PTA type that got to know Mum at the school gates, one of the distant uncles with hair like a crash helmet, a marketing whizz in expensive shoes, the police family liaison, or my mate Alfie teaming his ever-present eyeliner with his job interview suit. Whether you’re an Office Angel, or Mr and Mrs Khan from next door, it seems to have been decided: everyone can go mental now.

  I hand out a few Pringles and that and then look for a place to hide. I’m not hosting this party. I can’t. If anyone is the host it’s Mum’s sister Toni, and her partner, Frankie.

  Aunt Antonia is sunshine. Everyone loves her: just like Mum but bigger in every way. Bigger hair, bigger laugh. She takes up a lot of room generally. It’s odd isn’t it? How the exact same mix of genes can produce such different results. I mean Antonia has the same face as her sister, but put together a bit wrong somehow. As if a keen-but-crap amateur artist was trying to paint Mum’s face from memory.

  The legend in the family is that they always used to think that Mum got the looks and Toni got the brains. Toni was the one who went to Oxford and all that. Then, after a while, that changed too as Mum started making a name for herself as the go-to gal when you wanted a business event organised properly. And then she started making real money at it, building a client list that took in most of the FTSE 100 and all those funky dot coms. Antonia meanwhile stayed settled teaching science at the girls’ high school. Respectable, enjoyable, decently paid, but not the heights people had expected of her. Not that Toni minded. Big heart too as well as big everything else.

  And now she’s a few vinos in and, flushed and loud, looks bigger than ever.

  Frankie, her partner – won’t marry her, won’t let her have children – he’s loving it all. Frankie is an idiot but he’s in his element here. He’s some kind of sales guy and he’s got a charm that comes from treating people in pubs. He has things to talk about. Football, the news, TV, money, gadgets, cars, diseases, the stuff people like to talk about. And he has jokes. Frankie tours all the little knots of people, filling glasses and pushing vol-au-vents and generally cranking up the bonhomie big style. At least Hessenthaler has made himself scarce.

  I have only been to two funerals before, one for Granny Ann, Mum’s mum, last year, where I skipped the wake and went off to smoke with Alfie – no trauma there that I remember – and one for my dad’s mum, who I’d only met once. I was only nine for that, but I remember it as way too hormonal. The nervy atmosphere upset me. I couldn’t wait to get home. All those adults coming apart. The sense that their grief might explode, wet and red and slimy from inside, like the alien in those movies.

  It’s not big news I guess, but death is a drug and not a smart one. A crude one. A dirty one. Premature death even more so. And then we add alcohol, light the blue touchpaper and retire. Only sometimes there’s no standing well back. They handle these things better in Arab cultures I think. Get the body underground inside twenty-four hours, make sure the weeping is done as theatrical as possible at the graveside and – obviously – there’s no booze to act as an accelerant.

  This funeral gets out of hand.

  Pretty soon aged great-aunts are sweating, gesticulating, leaning too close to young guys in top-to-toe Armani. Office Angels look like cats on heat, arching their backs and purring. PTA mums are picking fights with their husbands about just who agreed to drive. Paunchy middle-aged policemen are getting all aggro about football. There’s one fifty-year-old Liverpool fan starts yelling ‘But what’s your anthem! What’s yo
ur bloody anthem!’ at a baffled kid who has made the mistake of admitting he supports Man U. A dykey type with spiky hair and John Lennon specs is explaining the miners’ strike to a voluptuous blonde in a LBD that is, frankly, just a little bit too L for her frame, and who I recognise as running Prontaprint in town. The words seem political, sociological, thoughtful and historically accurate and all that, but they are just so obviously a cover for her eyes that keep slipping towards the creamy flesh of Ms Prontaprint’s tits. Ms Prontaprint smiles sleepily. We’ve done death in the afternoon, and now life – or at least sex – is making a play for the evening.

  Toni is sitting on the sofa in the living room watching as Oscar, seemingly oblivious to the noise around him, sits and plays quietly with a couple of plastic knights on the floor. Frankie has switched on his thickest, richest Oirish voice – the accent that’s so richly phoney they call it a brogue, the one the ladies are always so mad keen for – and he’s telling funny stories about life on a Wexford farm to a little group of charmed Office Angels. Conscientious professional girls clearly not used to drinking in the afternoon.

  It’s all bollocks. I don’t know that much about Frankie, I can’t really be bothered with him – but I do know that he hated the Wexford farm, hated Ireland. Even now he won’t touch potatoes. Not even chips. He couldn’t wait to be out of there. Frankie rocked up in London in the mid 1980s with an accountancy degree and made shitloads of money selling prime bits of London to Arabs and music biz wankers.

  On the fringes of the group, the partners of the girls glower, waiting for the old Paddy to shut up so they can start telling their anecdotes about great skiing holidays, or swapping top tips about the best route from somewhere to somewhere else.