‘I better go inside,’ she said eventually. ‘Find out how the dead are doing.’

Craig leaned his weight into the wall. ‘Are you really a funeral director now?’

‘Someone has to help Mum.’

‘You’re a good daughter.’

‘I don’t know about that.’168

‘And a really good mum.’

Jenny laughed. ‘How drunk are you?’

Craig shifted his weight from one foot to the other, that old nervous energy still trilling through his muscles. ‘I’m just trying to imagine you as one of the coffin bearers. Have you been working out?’

He reached out and pretended to squeeze her bicep. She thought about coffins, then her dad on the funeral pyre, his flesh melting away and his body fluids evaporating, the meat of him dissolving into ash and dust and blown away. She felt a knot in her belly then suddenly she was crying, covering her face with her hands, ashamed.

‘Hey,’ Craig said.

He wrapped his arms around her and she pushed into his shoulder, could smell the CK One he still wore after all these years, and the familiar smell of his sweat underneath. The combination made her dizzy as she sobbed and imagined her tears falling on stony ground, being evaporated by sunshine into the clouds to mingle with her dad’s atoms, combined forever in the water cycle, keeping plants and animals alive, keeping ocean currents flowing, passing through the bodies of whales and sharks and giant squids.

She lifted her head away from his shoulder, eyes still closed, and felt the stubble of his chin and his lips against hers, and she pressed against him, suddenly years younger, and he kissed her back and she pushed her tongue into his mouth and leaned her body into his and tasted her own tears which had slipped down her cheek and she was twenty years old and had her whole life ahead of her and she was kissing a boy and her dad was still alive and she had nothing to worry about, not a care in the world and everyone she loved would live forever.

After too long, she pulled away and stepped back. She looked at her feet.

‘That was a mistake.’ She couldn’t look straight at him, like he was the sun low in the sky.169

‘Sure.’

‘I should go.’

‘Yeah.’

She nodded to herself, still tasting him on her lips, the echoes of his touch on her back, tear stains on her cheeks. She turned and went inside to see how the dead were doing.

170

33

HANNAH

‘Babes, you’re crazy,’ Indy said.

Hannah rubbed the back of her neck then ran a finger along the reception desk.

‘I lost it,’ she said. ‘He has to know something about Mel but the police don’t seem bothered.’