In the past five days, in between disbelief at her father’s death and planning the funeral, she’d sent lengthy texts and voicenotes pleading with Sam to talk to her. And nothing. He’d blue-ticked every single one but not a word back – torture, 2019-style. Sometimes in the elaborate showdowns she waged in her head at night, she wanted to retaliate. ‘I didn’t tell you the baby was yours. You just assumed after the timing fit our botched Tinder date. And you insisted you wanted to be part of it,’ she’d go, on the defensive, then she’d hear how she sounded. Completely batshit.
Of course, everyone online thought she was completely batshit too. Screengrabs of the fateful pic she’d drunkenly posted after Blake Jordan’s announcement at the Glossies showing a positive pregnancy test had trended online in the last few days. There were even memes of it going around, the haphazard caption ‘So excited to officially announce my pegnancy’ had been ripe for mockery.
‘TFW you’re fake pregnant but too stupid to spell it right’ read one meme. Someone had even added the word ‘pegnant’ to Urban Dictionary. The definition read: ‘A dumb whore who lies about being pregnant for attention.’
Sighing, she pulled up her inbox again, deleting the one from Prime Time and scanning the hundreds of other emails. She hadn’t opened any but the subject lines were vitriolic. ‘You deserve to die’ and ‘Women like you are why victims of abuse are not believed’. The deluge of hate had been relentless. Still, coinciding, as it did, with the death of her father had given Ali a sharp shock of perspective. Her whole Insta-scheme was mortifying but, let’s face it, trivial when compared with the stark brutality of death.
On the less demented end of the inbox spectrum were countless riffs on ‘Termination of contract’ and ‘Ambassadorship revoked’ from the many brands she’d worked with during her brief spell as Ireland’s hottest up-and-coming mumfluencer. At least there was no need to email any of the PRs with some cobbled-together excuse – the one upside of cataclysmic public disgrace.
I’m clutching at straws, she thought as she dragged herself out of the bed and began trawling through her bag for something to wear.
Ali’d spent the last five days locked in some bizarre alternate funeral dimension, sitting around the kitchen in her mum’s house with a constantly rotating cast of family and friends drinking tea and boozing at odd hours of the day and night, fortified with endless rounds of boiled ham and gross mayonnaisey salads. At this stage, all she wanted to do was go home to the house she shared with Liv.
Her mum, Mini, had entered a strange phase of grief that involved becoming bizarrely fixated on tiny details like the socks Miles was to be cremated in and ignoring massively important decisions such as where to even have the funeral. Mini had hired and fired several priests (Ali hadn’t even known you could do that) before deciding that an actor friend of Miles’s would ‘MC’ the funeral.
‘That’s not a thing,’ Ali had tried to protest but gave in when she realised that she had far more important things to talk Mini out of, such as the six pallbearers wearing chef whites in honour of Miles’s career as a restaurateur.
‘Fine, fine, you want him to have a boring “normal” funeral. Fine, the boys can wear suits. But we’re keeping Eric on MC duties. He’s already finalised the soliloquy.’
‘You mean … eulogy?’ Ali was iffy.
‘I mean soliloquy.’ Mini was steely, holding Ali’s gaze.
While Mini focused on the more esoteric aspects of the funeral, Ali had become the production manager of the entire affair, traipsing around pricing horrific, carb-heavy buffets in bland hotels that Miles would have detested.
Ali was relieved that it was all going to be over in a matter of hours and the Mini madness would hopefully end. Then it would be on to the far more complicated task of sorting out her life. She knew people baby-proofed their home ahead of a new baby’s arrival. She’d need to baby-proof her whole bloody life. She flashed on the shambolic state of her room in the house she shared with Liv. Before, she’d like to think her discarded half-eaten takeaways and empty booze bottles stashed everywhere said ‘insouciant wild child’ but, aesthetically, the vibe was probably a bit more ‘cry for help’. How on earth would a baby fit into that picture?
She shook the question from her head. First things first, get Miles sorted. Then tell Mini about the baby. Then tell Sam. Then get on with figuring out how to work a baby and pretending everything was fine.
My speciality, she thought ruefully.
Now among the posters and relics of her teens, Ali pulled off her pyjamas and slipped on her dad’s old Velvet Underground tee-shirt that she’d cut into a crop top. She zipped up the simple black pinafore dress she’d chosen. It was definitely weird, she decided, having eight different Harry Styles watching you get dressed for your father’s funeral.
‘Liv’s here, Ali!’ she heard Mini call from downstairs.
Thank God. Ali pulled on her Docs, headed out the door and down to the kitchen. Not the kitchen of her childhood, they’d had it redone. Now it was a kind of glass-box-style extension – practically a mandatory addition to affluent Dublin homes during the boom years. Its sleek lines and stark atmosphere jarred with the rest of the house, which was still all sagging sofas and warm wood panelling, the shelves stooped under the weight of books and records.
Liv was backed up against the concrete-topped island, a plate of boiled ham already in hand, being booze-bullied into wine by Ali’s aunt Eleanor.
‘Is it even 10 a.m. yet?’ Liv murmured helplessly as Eleanor thrust the enormous glass of white into her hand.
‘This is how the Irish do funerals,’ one of Mini and Eleanor’s distant cousins told her, apparently not realising that Liv, her dark skin and brown eyes courtesy of Meera, her Indian mother, was Irish. He was part of the American contingent, who had arrived late last night and played the piano till 3 a.m. Ali’d met each of them about a million times, but they had all coalesced into a freckly mass of middle-aged, Irish American man meat.
Ali drew Liv away to the farthest corner of the kitchen, where they could avoid the funeral chat in which the main topic of conversation seemed to be who else had recently died.
‘I’m counting down the hours till we can go home,’ Ali whispered to Liv. ‘At least you can drink through this misery.’
‘Yeah, it’s definitely taking the edge off the mourning,’ Liv agreed. ‘How are you doing?’
‘I don’t really know. I feel really numb about Dad. I just can’t keep it straight in my head that all this has happened. Any of it. I feel like the last months weren’t even real. I wish they weren’t real. I keep thinking of all the times I sat up in his room at the nursing home just reading the internet until it was time to go. Some days, I’d barely look at him, Liv.’ Ali stared at the picture of Miles on the wall above them. Miles on his wedding day, squinting into the sun with confetti in his shaggy blond hair and a flower in the lapel of his grey jacket. ‘He’s my age there.’
‘You look so like him, it’s crazy.’
‘That’s not how he looked at the end.’ Ali had a flash of his cracked lips and blank eyes. This grief pain was something new and horrible. She wanted to cry and scream but felt paralysed.