I have no idea what to expect when I get there. Part of me doesn’t even want to think about the realities of going to a funeral arranged by a local authority because they have been unable to find anyone who wanted to step up. It is painfully, painfully close to home. I try to tell myself it would be different for me. Of course it would be different. I tell myself that Dad at least would make sure things were taken care of. I tell myself that Charlie—

The bus jolts over a pothole in the road and my head bumps sharply against the glass of the window. We’re right at my stop. I scramble to my feet and call out to the driver. He opens the doors and I stumble off, pulling out my phone. The crematorium is further from the bus stop than it looked on the map and I arrive there only minutes before the ceremony is due to start.

My heart leaps when I make out a knot of people clustered by the entrance: three women and a man. There are people here, after all. As I get closer, I place one of them. The woman from the flat above who passed us on that very first day, as I stood outside flat sixteen hearing the radio play on and on, with the bailiffs, with no idea then what we were about to find. And the other three must be tenants from Munroe House as well. Neighbours who never reported her absence, who didn’t realize she was dead.

I catch the woman’s eye and she seems to recognize me too but before I can introduce myself or say anything, the door opens and an usher is waving us all inside.

It is such a small room. They must have chosen this one especially. They must have assumed that barely anyone would attend, because they arranged it so quickly, because efforts to engage relatives came to such a quick dead end. The thought of it crushes the air from my chest. The awful sadness of it, the painful horror. For a moment I really don’t know if I can go in, but it would be so much worse to turn away now.

The five of us enter. A single wreath of flowers lies on top of the coffin. The neighbours must have brought it. I am empty-handed. I wish fervently that I had brought a bunch of flowers too. A CD player somewhere pipes Pachelbel’s Canon, a default, all-purpose piece of music.

And other than the coffin and the usher and the minister, there is no one else here.

The group of neighbours cluster in one of the middle rows. I don’t know what to do with myself, where to sit. In the end, I perch on the end of a row, behind, fumbling in my pocket to switch off my phone.