Seafield Crem was a chunky art deco 1930s build, tall thin windows and columns, half covered in spreading vines like it was partly organic. Dorothy took a breath and got out, smoothing her skirt and tugging on the hem of her jacket. Archie opened the rear of the hearse as the family spilled out of the car behind, three men arching their backs, a woman keeping her head down, nose pressed into a tissue. This was Gina O’Donnell’s family – dad, brother, sister and her husband. The sister, Orla, had organised the funeral, her dad too distraught to handle the details. She was brunette with green eyes and a sharp tongue, a hard look on her face, but then that was probably the circumstances. Dorothy was a little surprised they hadn’t gone bigger on the viewing and ceremony, being Irish, but no two funerals were the same, no two people experienced grief the same way.

Dorothy went to Orla as the men and Archie pulled the coffin along the rollers in the hearse and eased it onto their shoulders. At least they had enough people. Dorothy would have to think about that for future services, with Jim gone they had one less person to shoulder the weight. Dorothy had done it occasionally when she had to, but she was seventy now, she couldn’t carry the weight of the dead forever.

Orla let out a gasp when she saw the coffin. Dorothy put her hand on Orla’s arm then felt a sudden, overwhelming wave of emptiness sweep through her. She pictured Jim’s burning body in the garden then flashed to an imaginary funeral, all the people they’d buried and burned in the last five decades standing in a colossal 85cathedral, smiling and applauding as the man who committed them to death was carried into the place in a bright-red coffin on the shoulders of the babies they’d buried, the foetuses, the stillborn, the teenage suicides and car-crash victims and overdoses and murders and stupid mistakes and even more stupid accidents, drownings, electrocutions, stabbings, decapitations, bodies crushed and impaled, bloated and dismembered, scooping up the pieces from a railway line or an industrial blender, skulls flattened by concrete blocks or masonry, rib cages and pelvises crushed by articulated lorries, a never-ending sea of death and destruction, and Jim was at the head of it all, had dealt with it his whole life and now it was Dorothy’s turn.

She felt her legs go from under her and collapsed, stroking the fabric of Orla’s skirt as she went down. She lay on the hard ground, the palms of her hands scraped and sticky with flecks of gravel where she’d put them out to protect herself.

The four men with the coffin stared. Archie clearly wanted to run over and help but if he released his corner of Gina’s coffin, the whole thing would unbalance.