But how many of these people would waste a day coming to my funeral, as my father’s old work colleagues had? Precious few of them. There would always be something better to do. An urgent meeting, the kids to pick up from school, some unmissable daytime TV game show. But it wouldn’t matter to me by then, would it? A dead man needs no friends.
There was one person who would certainly come to my funeral. She’d make a point of sobbing into a handkerchief during the service, nodding sorrowfully at the platitudes of a vicar who didn’t even know me. And she’d be weeping buckets as they carried my coffin out to ‘The Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves’ from Verdi’s Nabucco — a piece of music I’ve chosen specifically because I want to make them all cry. No laughing at my funeral, thanks very much.
My next-door neighbour, Rachel Morgan, was divorced and lived alone, like me, in a house much too big for her in a neighbourhood she knew little about and cared for less. Even I could work out from her frequent appearances on my doorstep, on one pretext or another, that she wanted friendship, maybe more. Yes, Rachel would come to my funeral. She would come out of the fellow feeling that one lonely person has for another, but she’d believe she was there as something more.
It was Rachel who happened to be raking dead leaves from her front lawn that cold February morning when I left the house to look for updates on my current stories. I write a few theatre and book reviews for the local papers, but they barely bring in a few pounds. Feature articles for some of the glossy magazines had become my current interest, mainly because they pay well. All I needed was an angle, and a few good photos. Now and then, it was possible to hit lucky.
‘Good morning, number six.’
Rachel had tied her red hair back off her face in a yellow ribbon and was dressed in jeans and a baggy sweater.
‘Morning, number four,’ I responded automatically.
‘Off taking more pictures then, Chris?’
‘That’s right,’ I said, patting the camera bag stupidly, as if she hadn’t already spotted it.
Our houses are a pair of Victorian brick-built semis, like many others in the Gaia Lane area of Lichfield. Some of the houses have little wooden balustrades on their upper storeys, as if they were trying to hint at the existence of proper balconies like those of their larger neighbours round the corner. Each pair has a plaque built into the brickwork between the bedroom windows, recording a date in the first decade of the twentieth century and a romantically rustic Victorian name — The Hawthorns, Oaklands, Rosemount. Our pair are Maybank, 1910. It must have been Rachel who started the ridiculous habit of addressing me by the number of my house, but it seemed churlish not to respond the same way.
‘Where are you off to today then?’ she said.
‘Oh, the usual.’
‘Hilton, is it? Cyril the Squirrel and his friends in their tree houses?’
There were only two on-going stories I could rely on, and they were loosely related. One was the efforts of the restoration group to re-create the abandoned Ogley and Huddlesford Canal that had once run through Lichfield — a huge task that seemed about to become impossible in the face of plans for the country’s first toll-paying motorway. The South Staffordshire Link Road would cut right across the line of the canal.
The other story was a series of protest camps set up near Hilton by environmental campaigners determined to save countryside threatened by the road. Bit by bit, the Under Sheriff of Staffordshire was clearing them from their tunnels and tree houses with the help of armies of bailiffs and police. But every time they had to retreat from a site, the protestors set up camp somewhere else and defied the law to do its worst. The game had gone on throughout January and February.
Rachel was interested in the link road protest. In a way, she was typical of the readers I aimed my articles at.
‘Trees and the environment versus the road builders,’ she said. ‘Whose side are you on, Chris?’
‘I don’t have to be on anybody’s side. A journalist makes it his business to see both sides.’
‘Oh, yes?’
She tossed a rakeful of dead leaves into a wheelbarrow with a dismissive gesture, condemning the limp and useless mass to the compost heap. I took this to mean she didn’t think much of my trite remarks.
‘Look, the protestors have a point, obviously,’ I said. ‘We’ve lost enough of our environment already, and somebody has to take a stand. And why on earth do we need yet more roads, when they’ll only create more traffic?’
Rachel looked up at me then, her eyes expectant, using the prongs of her rake to turn over some decaying beech foliage. The leaves were an attractive chestnut brown on top, but when she turned them over, their rotting black undersides were exposed and tiny slugs and insects fell away, wriggling to escape the light.
‘But at the same time,’ I said, ‘if you’ve ever seen the cars and lorries crawling through places like Brownhills and Walsall, you’ll see why a new motorway is needed. It’s a nightmare for people living in those places. There are two opposite viewpoints, both with justification. So there’s bound to be conflict. And that’s what I’m reporting.’
She smiled at me, nodding encouragingly. I knew I’d done exactly what she wanted, and allowed her to provoke me into conversation, pushing me to express an opinion and show my feelings. I could never figure out how she did it, or why.
‘You shouldn’t take your job too seriously,’ she said. ‘People want some entertainment with their news.’
‘Even in the Lichfield Echo?’
‘We all need a bit of fun.’
‘I’ll look for a pile of leaves to kick,’ I said.
Rachel frowned at me, concern forming little creases around her eyes. She’d been giving me that look a lot since my father’s funeral.
‘I know it’s been hard,’ she said. ‘But it’s been three months, Chris. You need something. Your friends—’
‘I have to go now,’ I said. ‘Work to do.’
She sighed. ‘All right, then. Have a good day.’
I walked towards the little car port at the side of my house. The Escort isn’t fond of cold mornings, and it took three or four attempts to start. It was already ten years old and rarely serviced, and I hardly dared to look at how many miles were on the clock. But replacing it wasn’t a possibility right now.
Rachel waved to me as I pulled onto the road, and I raised a hand in acknowledgement. I suppose I could have had worse neighbours than her. It might have been a house full of screaming children next door, or students smoking weed every night with the stereo turned up full blast. Or it might even have been a couple with a patio barbecue and an urge for midnight DIY, just like the neighbours I’d left behind in Stafford two years ago. But if there’d been anybody like that in the other semi at Stowe Pool Lane, I wouldn’t have stayed in the house when my father died.
Rachel had been divorced for five years. She’d worked as a librarian until the cuts began, and now she was a part-time receptionist at a vet’s surgery. I gathered she also put some hours in at a charity shop for cancer relief. At weekends, she went with a couple of girlfriends to folk concerts at the Guildhall to hear Bellowhead or The Albion Band. The previous November she’d roped me in to see Pirates of Penzance staged by Erdington Operatic Society at the Civic Hall. How she’d managed to persuade me, I couldn’t remember. But somehow I ended up humming ‘I am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General’ for weeks afterwards. I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical. From Marathon to Waterloo in order categorical over and over again. Well, I say ‘singing’, but no one would want to hear me sing.
That fateful morning, I’d decided to make the canal restoration my first stop. The day was turning out clear, with a pale blue sky and a bright February sun. The weekends had been constantly wet for weeks, and I hadn’t managed an opportunity to photograph the latest stage of the work. Reinstatement of a buried lock was now being extended to the site of the old Fosseway Wharf, where vast expanses of undergrowth had to be cleared.