Chapter One
‘If anyone’s sober at the end of my wake, I’ll come back from the dead and kick your arse.’
Mum’s last words to me before she died were going through my head as I did my gaudy red tie up on the morning of her funeral. She was that sort of character, the life and soul, the heartbeat of our family. Things were never dull with Mum around. And she hadn’t wanted the last party in her honour to be dull either.
As these occasions tend to be, her funeral started off fairly sedately. The service was held at St Martins, the church Mum used to worship at, if you call singing carols on Christmas Eve worshipping. The service was fairly standard. The vicar did a good job, although he did struggle to pronounce Mum’s name. To be fair, Valerie Juniper Fazackerley isn’t the easiest name in the world to enunciate. Most people just called her Mrs F, which was what Dad eventually advised the holy man to do.
Mum was then buried at the attractively named Merton and Sutton Joint Cemetery. Dad will join her there at some point, but hopefully not any time soon. The turnout at her send-off would have pleased Mum. The requisite amount of close family and friends were there, suited and booted, most in black despite Dad having issued instructions to the contrary. A bunch of 1970s hippy musos turned up too. They added a bit more colour to proceedings, both in their dress and in their language.
‘What the fuck am I doing up at this time in the morning,’ John the bass player grumbled as he shook my hand outside the church. The musicians’ role was to play a passable version of Norman Greenbaum’s ‘Spirit in the Sky’ at the wake, a song many of the same faces had played at Mum and Dad’s wedding nearly forty five years previously.
We held the wake in the Morden Brook, the pub across the roundabout from the cemetery. The bar staff were great with our party, laying on free sandwiches and giving us our own room to be miserable in. They needn’t have bothered. At Mum’s instruction, we were less miserable than the pub’s regulars.
Mum was sent on her way with as much nostalgic story-telling and laughter as we could muster. There was our old neighbour, Gary, regaling us with tales of their shared youth. ‘Your mother was a right goer in her time, son. The stories I could tell you…’ No thanks, Gary.
Or there was Anna from the flower shop, an old school friend of Mum’s. ‘She always had her choice of the boys did your mum. She was the first one of us to get boobs. We were so jealous.’ Thanks for that, Anna. And there was Dad. ‘I’m going to miss the old bird. I’ll have to make my own hot chocolate when I go to bed tonight.’ His feelings obviously ran deep.
‘You did her proud, son,’ people who I had never met kept telling me as they scoffed another free sandwich. Half of them had probably never met Mum either. Even Louise, my wife who ran off with a librarian, popped in to pay her respects.
Six Lies Description:
How would you feel if, one day, you discovered everything you thought you knew about your family was a fabrication? Your mother wasn’t your mother, your father was a liar and your whole upbringing was a sham.
Confronted with this exact situation, Dave Fazackerley doesn’t feel great. It doesn’t help that he has just buried the woman he thought of as his mother. Or that his wife, his one true soulmate, recently jumped into bed with a librarian. Even his band, his only escape from reality, is going through a rough patch.
How will Dave respond? Will he discover the truth about his family? Will his band ever play a gig again? More importantly, can Dave entice his wife back from the arms of the book-dork or will he take a chance on a new love?
