“Go get dressed if we’re going to that funeral,” she says, shuffling to the table and thumping the photo album shut. “And for Christ’s sake, do something about that ungodly mop of yours.”

Allie insisted that I didn’t need to be at her mother’s funeral, but I know I do. Not for her, but for myself. I need to see grieving in action, and put some thought into how my grand farewell will go down. I haven’t been to a funeral since I left here. The healthy, wealthy Viva Rica chuggers and pushers I hung out with in Toronto don’t just up and die the way people do here. Or as people in my family, particularly, tend to do. The last funeral I went to was for my cousin Mitch, who hung himself my last year of high school. That one ended with Mama breaking up a drunken family brawl, after my aunt Audrey’s arsehole husband, Jeff, got loaded and told Mitch’s father, Gordie, that they should have buried Mitch in a nice dress because everybody in Town knew Mitch was “a cross-dressing poufter.”

Arsehole choice of words and timing aside, Jeff had a point. Everybody knew that Mitch wore dresses and makeup, and wanted to be a woman. That’s why they all called him Mitch the Bitch. I even gave him eyeliner lessons and loaned him slutty clothes. But there were doctors in Montreal who felt he was too “mentally unstable” to have the hormones and the surgery, so Mitch gussied himself up one night, sashayed out into the woods on the Old Trunk Road, and hung himself from a sturdy oak tree. Peggy called Mama when she heard about it on the scanner. Heard a cop snicker about the “tranny in the tree” as they cut my cousin’s body down. Peggy knew all the gory details, long before Uncle Gordie. She didn’t spare us any of them.

“Phew! Smells like a French whorehouse in here.” Peggy wheezes as she squashes herself into the back seat of Mama’s car. “Cheap perfume. Always reminds me of Gordie’s Mitch.”

In fact, I am wearing the same black dress to Reenie’s funeral that I wore to Mitch’s. I found it in my closet, nestled beneath a near empty bottle of CK Eternity, which I’ll have you know, Peggy Fortune, was not by any means cheap perfume in its day.

“Sure, everyone thought Mitch offed himself because of the cross-dressing transsexual thing, but I don’t buy that,” Peggy goes on. “Betcha he was hearing the voices, like Janice did. Woman voices. Telling them to do foolish things.”

“Nothing we can do about that now, is there,” Mama says curtly, eyes fixed to the road as she navigates the sharp bend onto the bridge and toward the foot of Ceilidh Mountain.

I turn around to remind Peggy how rude it is to speak ill of the dead, to remind her that I will haunt the fuck out of her if she talks about me like that when I’m gone. Then I notice the gaudy piece of jewellery pinned to her best funeral blouse. A glittering peacock brooch. From the Bargain Store. The one I tried to pocket when I was five and a half. The one I eventually saved up enough money to buy. It was supposed to be a present for my nanny, who loved shiny things even more than I did but never seemed to have anything beautiful of her own.