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The damn thing isn’t even cold enough to keep an ice lolly from melting.
Whereas I am shivering with anticipation.
This is going to be an amazing day and I’m not going to let a dodgy fridge spoil a single moment. I shrug, and reopen the door to silence the skull-piercing sound. I’ll deal with it later. For now, I follow Gloria back the way I’ve just come.
Presuming we’re not being burgled and it really is Edo, the rhythmic hammering means he’s been as good as his word. He’s made me a shop sign and it seems he’s fixing it in place. He’s been hugely secretive about the design – ‘Nina, I’m an artist! It’ll be awesome!’ – and I’m finally going to get to see what he’s done.
Except Gloria can’t get out of the door.
She’s inched it open, only to find herself nose to nose with a hulking white Transit van parked extremely illegally and mostly on the pavement.
It’s Edo’s van and I realise he’s standing on the roof of it to put up the sign above the door. A good idea because it’s a lot cheaper than scaffolding. And as it’s before eight o’clock, when the Primrose Hill traffic wardens begin their daily rounds of terror, he’ll get away with it.
Gloria steps back from the door. ‘Best to let Edo get on with it,’ she advises. ‘Anyway, how are you feeling, sweets? Ready for the off?’
Everything’s been such a rush, there’s been no time to arrange those delphiniums let alone smell the roses. But there’s no need to pause for thought.
‘I’m ridiculously excited!’ I declare. ‘It’s like being a five-year-old on Christmas Eve. I’m so impatient for everything to start happening.’
I don’t know why I didn’t do this years ago. I must have thought about it a thousand times, but never dared.
‘What about the fridge?’
‘Let’s not talk about the fridge.’
Gloria begins to clean the display window she helped me whitewash when we started fitting out my shiny new shop. I watch the murky coating that’s kept the outside world from seeing how I’ve transformed the space disappear and think about my own transformation.
I still can’t believe it. Only a couple of months ago, I was snuggled deep inside my own little comfort hole. It wasn’t until change started happening all around me that I even began to realise I’d been snared. Then fate gave me a push – although at the time, it felt more like a mighty kick up the arse – and after that everything fell into place.
Now here I am. Captain of my own ship. In charge of my own destiny. Queen of my own little slice of heaven.
I am a shopkeeper. Owner of a small business.
It’s a tiny business in every sense and, although I have no idea where my first customer will be coming from, I’m determined to be properly prepared. Fortunately, I have more than one fridge.
I do a slow three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turn and survey my miniature kingdom. Everything looks right. Better than right. Perfect. Between us – that’s me, Gloria and especially Edo – we’ve done a great job.
The shop had been empty for ages and we’ve definitely breathed new life into it. Floorboards sanded, filled, and painted white. Walls in a soft shade of blue. Gentle, subtle lighting. A small reception desk to the right of the door to make the shop look friendly and approachable to passers-by. A pair of comfy couches on either side of a fashionable low table. The whole effect is warm and inviting, and today, even before any of the lights are turned on, it seems the place is brighter than I’d imagined.
Ah, that would be because Gloria has finished with the window, and Edo has shifted the van. Which means—
Before I can complete that thought, Edo appears. Dressed in his usual uniform of ripped jeans and tight black T-shirt, his shaggy black hair frames a baby face that makes him look more like a sixth-former than a recent art school graduate. Swinging a hammer from his left hand he throws his surprisingly muscled right arm around my shoulder. Cheeky!
‘Come and look,’ he says. ‘I know I’ll be in trouble if the sign’s not dead straight. And I’m worried you’re not going to like it.’
Him and me both.
Most of the work in Edo’s portfolio is what you might – politely – call ‘out there’. Installations that make Tracy Emin’s ‘Bed’ look more sedate than a watercolour by Degas.
And all I need is a shop sign.
But my doubts disappear the moment I take in Edo’s work. Wow! He’s done me proud.
‘I don’t like it,’ I say in my best Simon Cowell impersonation, complete with theatrical pause. ‘I absolutely love it!’
It feels … it feels official. There for all the world to see. Classic hand-painted lettering. A shop sign that manages to be cool, clean, chic and somehow rather sexy – at least I think so – and announces: ‘HAPPY ENDINGS’.
I’m still admiring the sign when I realise my feet are no longer on the pavement. Edo has scooped me into his arms and we’re crossing the high street, dodging a dustcart and – as I begin to struggle – almost bumping into a Boris bike.
‘Put me down!’ I insist. ‘I’m about to become a pillar of the community.’ Edo laughs and carries me, undaunted, over the threshold of Happy Endings.
Gloria watches with a smirk that says, Didn’t I tell you Edo’s got a giant crush on you? But I figure he’s just grateful I let him continue to live in the shop between the time I signed the lease (he was squatting there, called it one of his own installations) and today, when I open my brand-new business.
‘Put her down and go sort the fridge,’ Gloria orders. ‘The alarm comes on every time you close the door.’
Edo retreats – I think he’s scared of Gloria – and a moment later, the beep-beeep-beeeeping resumes.
Gloria turns to me and says, ‘So what’s next?’
‘I need to get changed before Mum and Dad arrive.’
‘Before you do, I want to say how proud I am of you. The way you’ve pulled everything together so quickly. You’re going to be a huge success, sweets!’
‘I couldn’t have done it without your help—’
I’m interrupted by Edo yelling, ‘Great! I can see what’s wrong. Don’t worry. It’s an easy fix.’
A moment later, Gloria and I flinch at the sharp thwack of a hammer against metal. Then silence. As if Edo has murdered the fridge with a single blow.
For some reason – nerves, most likely, because the destruction of a key piece of equipment really isn’t funny – I laugh. Then say to Gloria, ‘You know what? This is the best day of my life!’
‘Really?’ Gloria looks surprised. She knows I’m not the sentimental type.
‘Well, maybe apart from the day Mum and Dad finally weakened and let me have a kitten … or that time at uni with Lin, when we took an impulse trip to Dieppe and ended up in Brussels. And the day I passed my driving test. Sixth time lucky.’
‘Didn’t know that,’ she says. ‘But it explains a lot!’
Before she can tease me any further, Edo’s back. ‘Loose connection with the fan,’ he says. ‘Fixed. Shall I sort out these flowers?’ He notices my doubtful expression and adds reassuringly, ‘I used to arrange them at college when we did the still-life module.’
‘That would be great.’ We haven’t known Edo very long, but he’s a definite asset, and fast turning into a friend.
I go through to the back room and begin to change out of my paint-stained denims and into my working clothes. I’ve been dithering for days about what to wear. I finally settled on tapered black linen trousers, teamed with a turquoise top and my smartest black jacket. The one with turned-back cuffs lined with turquoise and pink patterned silk. And, of course, my lucky silver earrings. I’d feel naked without them. It’s an outfit that makes me look professional but still me. I give myself a final once-over in the mirror, quickly apply a fresh coat of lip gloss, then rejoin my friends.
Edo has worked magic with the flowers. Gloria has finished with the windows. The fridge is behaving itself.
In less than an hour, Happy Endings will be open for business. And any moment now Mum and Dad will arrive to inspect what they’ve taken to calling ‘The Investment’.
Dad stepped in after the bank took all of three minutes to turn down my application for a start-up loan. ‘You’re to take my pension pot and put it into your business.’ After he left the navy, Dad went into the construction business. Without his help, Happy Endings would never have got off the drawing board. He’s got so much faith in me it’s scary. Then again, as he says, I’ve got a great location on a busy high street, slap bang in the middle of London, how can I fail?
And I know I can do this. It’s what I want more than anything. From now on I’m devoting myself to business. Nothing else matters. Not that there is much else, to be honest. Other than Gloria and Edo, I don’t exactly have a red-hot social life. My choice, I know. Over the past five years, I’ve become a bit of a recluse.
But today, I can’t even begin to describe my sense of purpose. I’m nervous, yet exhilarated.
In short, I’ve never felt more alive.
Which is a bit odd perhaps. Because I see dead people. All the time.
It’s an occupational hazard.
2 (#u72c9106b-a016-5231-93c5-2f50ea8165e8)
Whenever I meet someone new and we get to the bit where they ask me, ‘So what do you do?’ and I say I’m an undertaker, I get one of three reactions:
1. ‘You’re kidding!’
2. ‘Eeuw.’ Usually accompanied by that two-fingers-down-the-throat gesture.
3. ‘So, okay, when you were small did you pull the wings off flies?’
I wish I could make people understand. It’s not torture. Quite the opposite. I love my job. And is it really so strange?
Think of it this way. I’m an organiser. An event planner. A good listener. A shoulder to cry on. A public speaker. A negotiator. A seamstress. An accomplished multi-tasker. A stylist. I can remove a stain from almost any fabric, I’m a dab hand with a make-up brush, and I’m full of good advice. For example: never wear lip gloss when you’re scattering ashes.
When the unexpected happens, I am expected to rise to the occasion. And I do.
Do I touch dead people? Yes, of course.
What do they feel like? Mostly, they feel cold.
Am I weird? I don’t think so …
I’m just a typical millennial who enjoys shopping, movies, holidays and – mysteriously – housework. I probably keep myself to myself a bit too much but I’ve always enjoyed my own company and I’ve never been great in a crowd.
More than anything else, I’m proud to be an undertaker. Not to mention enormously proud to be opening my own shop. It’s the biggest leap of my life and it still seems unreal – particularly when you think that until recently, I was a semi-disgraced ex-employee.
My life started to go pear-shaped late last year when the business I worked for, a firm of undertakers run by the original owner’s great-great-great-grandson, was taken over by a huge funeral group with headquarters in New York and branches on every continent.
As soon as the deal was done we were summoned to meet our new manager, Jason Chung. ‘Nothing’s going to change,’ he promised us.
But everything did.
Being accountable to a manager who’d never even carried a coffin was a huge change in itself. And that was just the beginning.
My former boss, the great-great-great grandson, was gone in a matter of weeks. He quit the day our new owners announced that from now on we would only be offering headstones made from Chinese granite, a decision that was all about profit rather than the best interests of our clients.
Even while two sets of lawyers continued to argue about whether or not the name of the family firm could be removed – it’s there to this day, because the new owners know the public prefer to deal with supposedly genuine local firms – our professional vocabulary began to change. At staff training sessions, words like ‘care’, ‘service’, ‘respectful’ and ‘time of need’ were cast aside in favour of sentences that were strong on ‘sales’, ‘targets’, ‘commission’ and ‘underperforming’.
That sort of mindset makes me want to throw up. In fact, at a subsequent regional training day, I was overheard during the coffee break saying something to that effect – how was I supposed to know it was Jason Chung’s mother standing behind me? – and my comments resulted in me being sent to Siberia.
Not the place. Even though the new owners have business interests all over Europe, so far as I know, the people of Russia are not yet obliged to be commemorated with slabs of Chinese stone. No, Siberia was our name for the back office. To call it an office was actually an insult to offices.
Thanks to Jason’s mother’s need to overshare my private conversation, I spent ten days there, closeted in a small windowless space that used to be a store room, with only the low throb of the mortuary fridges on the other side of a thin partition for company.
Jason himself cloaked my punishment with a mirthless smile. ‘This is an excellent opportunity for Nina to focus on her administrative skills without any risk of distraction,’ he told everyone.
In practical terms that translated as one mountain of paperwork swiftly followed by another. A cross between school detention and prison. Gloria insisted my incarceration breached several employment laws, and since she’s almost a qualified lawyer she’s probably correct.
Then again, my solitary confinement wasn’t entirely bad. I enjoyed breaking the office-hours monotony by going through all the product catalogues and samples that got sent to us in the post. I didn’t usually get to see these – although I have stacks of them now – so it was interesting to discover you could pick up a third-hand hearse for under four grand. Which I seriously considered once I got into the preparations for Happy Endings, although in the end I splashed out on a simple pale blue van with my business name and contact details discreetly on the side and a properly equipped interior from a company that was offering a cheap finance deal. I think it looks uplifting yet still properly respectful.
Happy Endings may be a shoe-string start-up, but if it weren’t for what happened on my final day at work, it probably wouldn’t exist at all. So I shall always be grateful Jason Chung’s mother is a sneak.
Here’s what happened on that last day.
I’d spent most of the morning on the phone, unenthusiastically informing recent clients that by completing a customer satisfaction survey they could win a weekend in Devon. Then, having finished with the post, I moved on to the next batch of papers, and discovered a pile of burial applications in need of processing. They were going to take me at least forty-five minutes – always supposing the Wi-Fi in Siberia wasn’t playing up again – and I was so not in the mood.
It was a quarter to one, fifteen minutes before my lunchbreak was supposed to start, and I was feeling peckish. I’d been trying to stick to the 5:2 diet and this was one of the days when I was not required to starve myself.
I straightened the applications, grabbed my coat and umbrella – the April showers were in full flood – and prepared to make a dash for the deli next to Queen’s Park tube station.
I knew that if Jason saw me leave so early, he’d do that annoying looking-ostentatiously-at-his-Rolex-while-tapping-the-glass thing that was supposed to remind me he’s the boss. Happily, he was nowhere in sight and by the time I got safely beyond the reception desk I was weighing the relative merits of tuna and cucumber on sourdough versus a jumbo salt beef hot wrap. And a chocolate orange cupcake, of course. Or maybe the vegetarian choice: a trio of chocolate orange cupcakes.
There was only the door standing between me and seven hundred calories, and I flung it open, umbrella at the ready. This particular April shower had turned into a full-blown downpour and the raindrops were bouncing off the pavement so hard I could actually hear them.
It must have been the thought of my lunchtime cupcake that made me fail to look where I was going. I stepped onto the street and literally fell over a woman for whom the phrase ‘drowned rat’ could have been invented.
She was sitting – slumped was probably more accurate – in the doorway.
Before I could apologise and ask if she was okay, I realised she was anything but.
And before I could speak the woman grabbed my leg and looked up into my face. She was about my age, dressed in a jacket and skirt that looked as though they’d been left out to drip-dry. Her pretty face was framed by two bedraggled blonde tendrils and her mascara was in ruins.
The pressure on my leg increased. ‘Please,’ the woman sobbed. ‘You have to help me.’
3 (#u72c9106b-a016-5231-93c5-2f50ea8165e8)
‘So two years we are here. My husband Grigor and me. We are sad to leave home but things are better in England …’
Whenever I think about the drowned rat – her name is Anna – which is often, I am grateful I took an early lunchbreak that day. It’s as if fate decided our two paths needed to collide.
Sitting in the deli with her, I had remembered her story right away. ‘Grigor Kovaks,’ I said. ‘I read about it—’ I stopped myself from reciting the details of the horrific accident that had left Anna’s husband in hospital with life-threatening injuries.
‘Yes, Grigor. My lovely Grigor.’ Her smile was so full of love it pierced my heart. ‘We find a flat in Camberwell and Grigor works nights for a bank in Canary Wharf. Security guard. And I am a cleaner. Then three weeks ago, on the Tuesday, Grigor is offered an extra shift, and of course we say yes.’
I listened carefully. It’s so important not to interrupt. Being there for someone at the worst time in their life, letting them tell their own story in their own way, can make it just a tiny bit better.
‘He is so proud of his bicycle,’ Anna continued. ‘Cleans and polishes it like it is a sports car. He needs his bike. The fares on your underground, they are so expensive. Not like in Budapest … After the accident I am living more or less at the hospital. Grigor stays in the coma. He looks asleep and I keep waiting for him to wake up. But nothing. And … last night I agree with the doctors that the machines are turned off. Then later the nurses were so kind but I could not speak to them. I need a little time on my own. So I go to the hospital chapel to pray for my man and when I come back to the ward, Grigor is not there.’ Anna started to cry. Fortunately, the deli was filling up fast, and nobody took any notice of us.
She took a sip of her now cold espresso, composed herself, and continued. ‘And that is when they tell me he has been taken already to the funeral place. Your funeral place.’
