Nice Day for a Picnic Read online

  “No, Daddy can’t come home today,” she said in response to Tim’s questions.

  Impossible to stay angry with a man who no longer spoke, or even blinked.

  “He does want to see us, but he’s too ill.” She stroked her son’s hair. “Yes, sweetheart, I know. I miss him too.”

  The feast of the dead

  by

  Richard Farren Barber

  Maddy carved a path through the grey headstones, balancing on the concrete surrounds that marked out each plot. She came dressed for the occasion – Gothed up, as my dad described her when he was balancing antagonism with being down-with-the-kids. She wore her black coat, the one that skimmed the ground above her Doc Martens. When she walked her coat scissored open to reveal a purple skirt and black tights that accentuated her stick-thin legs.

  Maddy glanced at the two of us huddled together on the dirty rug. “Budge up.” She dropped to the rug before we had a chance to move and it was a close call whether she would end up in our laps or on the ground. She emptied her pockets of chocolate bars and a couple of oranges and added them to the basket.

  “She'll come,” Maddy said.

  I wanted to tell her to take the blinkers from her eyes, but it wouldn't have made any difference because Maddy would never hear a wrong word about her beloved Julie.

  It was all fucked up. I loved Maddy. Maddy loved Julie, and Julie... well Julie was so busy loving herself that there was no room for anyone else in that cold, cold heart of hers. So I kept my mouth shut.

  Hannah glanced at me, but she kept her silence too and took a drag from the cigarette smouldering to ash in her free hand.

  I checked my watch. I assumed that Hannah and Maddy were both aware of the time. It explained the lack of conversation. That sense of waiting for something to happen.

  The church doors opened with a bang that spread over the graveyard. The sound of the emerging congregation rose – whispered conversations and the scratch of shoes on gravel.

  “What if they come this way?” Hannah asked. I didn't reply and I could tell Maddy already knew that Julie's grave was on the other side of the church. I'd done a circuit early in the morning, coming across the open hole with its plastic grass at the edge. I assumed Maddy had done the same.

  Over the tops of the graves I watched a crowd dressed in black coats and hats shuffling out of the church. Julie's brother was near the front and as he walked he looked behind him. I wondered if he was looking for us, if he knew we were down here waiting for Julie to come back.

  The crowd dragged him out of sight. I recognised many of the other mourners; mostly friends of Julie's parents and a handful of strangers I assumed were relatives. I wanted to cross the grass and join them. Show my respects. I assumed Julie's mother had noticed that none of us had made the service.

  The voice of the priest drifted over. Occasionally his words were lost beneath the response from his congregation and I could imagine Julie lying in her silk-lined coffin, rolling back and forth inside her wooden box. She would hate his empty words – ‘modern religion’ she called it.

  The image of Julie, dead Julie, rotting Julie, was strong. I tried to remember when I had agreed to this, but the decision was lost in the blurred emotions of the previous week. I felt like I’d been tricked into coming here – by Julie or Maddy, I wasn’t sure which. The make-up and the clothes weren’t important, not now. It wasn’t what we looked like that made us who we were, it was how we acted. Hiding behind a gravestone while a priest chanted incarnations over the body of one of my friends did not seem to me how I wanted to behave.

  “I thought you didn't believe in this,” I said.

  “I don’t,” Hannah said. “But Julie did.”

  That was low. A punch to the stomach. You are supposed to be my friend, I thought, but I didn’t say anything, and at least Hannah had the decency to look ashamed.

  “She was obsessed. You said it wasn’t healthy.” I thought about the hours spent in Julie’s bedroom surrounded by crusty library books marked with hundreds of scraps of paper. The breathless way she flicked between a paragraph in one book to something in the next and then jumped to a crap website densely packed with text. She found connections that didn’t exist, but it was too easy to get caught up in her enthusiasm and it was only a small stretch of credibility to believe.

  Maddy just sat there. Not even looking in my direction. It’s funny... there’s a fine line between love and hate. A really fine line and sometimes it’s not possible to know which side of the line you’re walking. I looked at Maddy and I wanted to scream at her to shut up. She wasn’t saying anything and yet I still wanted to scream at her and blame her for everything that had happened, even though I knew it had been Julie’s decision.

  I sat down on the edge of the rug, as far away from Maddy as I could. I felt like I’d lost, even though this wasn’t about winning or losing. When I spoke the words barely escaped my throat, “For Julie, you understand?”

  “How long until dark?” Hannah asked.

  “Four hours.” Maddy didn’t look at her watch and I assumed that she was counting down every minute.

  I stared at the headstone at the top of the grave and listened to the drone of the priest. Julie’s mother let out a wail that was raw pain and I wanted to go over there and find some words to comfort her. I wanted to explain. But I was a coward; I hid and waited until the funeral was over and night had fallen on the cemetery, and then I walked with Maddy and Hannah to finish what we had started a week ago.

  -

  The plastic grass around the edge of the grave was gone. The yellow earth mover was absent. The pit had been filled and a mound of black earth rose above the ground as if there was no more room now that Julie and her coffin were buried.

  It hadn’t occurred to me that they would fill the grave so quickly. As soon as I saw the mound I understood how unprepared I was for this whole thing.

  Maddy had. As we stood around the edge of the grave she produced three rusted shovels stolen from some old garden shed. She must have brought them to the graveyard earlier in the day. The wooden handle of mine was crackled and splintered and it ripped into the palm of my hand.

  We worked in silence. I tried to find something to distract me. I thought about helping out at the shelter for abandoned dogs. I thought about a family holiday in Wales and one in Cornwall and I tried to recite every element of the periodic table, but after Oxygen and Helium and Hydrogen I drew a blank.

  After just a couple of minutes I was sweating through every pore. Beside me, Hannah wheezed like she was running a marathon. But at the head of the grave Maddy was silent; and the only reason I knew she was still with us was the rhythmic thud and thump of each spadeful of dirt she pulled from the earth. The muscles in my arms and shoulders pulled tight. I stepped down into the pit to dig deeper. Six foot is a long way down. I wiped sweat from my brow and replaced it with black dirt. I paused to take a rest and tried not to think that I was standing on top of Julie. In the dark of a June night the minutes and hours merged together.

  When the blade of my shovel hit the lid of the coffin I was in a trance, maybe even half asleep. The report ran up my arms and into my shoulders. I couldn’t think of anything appropriate to call out, so I stopped digging and Hannah did the same. For a moment the churn of Maddy’s efforts continued: chunk, thud, chunk, thud, and then she too fell silent.

  Cold pricked at the sweat on my forehead. My muscles trembled. My arms shivered. I looked down but it was too dark to see what lay beneath my feet. Maddy walked over and scratched the blade of her shovel over the surface so that I heard once more the sound of metal against wood.

  I wanted her to say something. I wanted to break the silence. Instead Maddy dropped to her knees and started to push away the remaining dirt. Each breath came short and hard.

  I backed away. The digging sounded like fingernails on wood and it summoned an image of Julie inside her coffin, ripping past the lining to attack the underside of the lid. I imagined b
lood-streaked fingers where her nails had bent and broken in her desperate need to escape. I was holding my breath and the claustrophobia of being trapped underground pressed down upon me.

  I breathed out. A long, shuddering sigh. I couldn’t spend another moment in the confines of Julie’s grave so I scrabbled out and hid a few feet away. From where I sat the grave was a pool of darkness within an ocean of black. I heard Hannah and Maddy’s endeavours but knew nothing more until a sharp metal clang sounded, followed by the taste of chemicals at the back of my throat. They had managed to prise open Julie’s coffin.

  At first I didn’t realise Maddy was talking to me. Some part of my mind insisted that it had to be Julie, back from the dead. My thoughts were sluggish. It was only when I understood the words that I realised it was Maddy: “There’s a torch in my coat pocket.”

  The light dripped over the soil and onto Julie’s face. I thought we’d picked the wrong grave because I didn’t recognise her. Shorn of all her make-up and dressed in a bizarre blue-print dress, she looked like a model from a Next catalogue.

  “Her mother dressed her,” Hannah said.

  “What did you expect?” I said. I wasn’t looking at Maddy but I could feel her bristle in the cool of the air. “She wasn’t going to dress her in lace and have the morticians black her eyes. She wanted her to be as far as possible from…”

  “…Julie,” Maddy said.

  “Goths,” I said. I’d heard Julie’s mother walk from the grave, wailing in sorrow. Who were we to judge her?

  I’d never seen a corpse before. All those twee “sleeping with the angels” slogans etched into the gravestones couldn’t hide the fact that Julie was dead.

  “Help me,” Maddy said. She put her arms around Julie’s body and I almost walked away. I wanted to scream at Julie but that was a week too late. I stepped back into the grave and touched Julie’s cool arm. We started to move her, stumbling within the confines of the narrow pit.

  Maddy spent too long trying to get Julie’s body into a position that could possibly be construed as natural. “Just leave it,” Hannah said quietly, and Maddy allowed Julie to slip back down so she was lying half out of the coffin.

  I dragged down the picnic hamper and unfolded the rug from the top. Hannah helped while Maddy just stood there watching the pair of us. The only contribution she made was to fetch a couple of rocks and use them to pin down the edges of the rug. I set out a four pack of Stella in the middle and rushed to pull out crisps and biscuits and whatever the three of us had managed to scrounge from home. I didn’t think that I would ever feel hungry again and the idea of sitting here and eating a feast with Julie’s corpse turned my stomach, but this was what Julie had wanted, the closest thing she had to a Last Will and Testament.

  I picked up a can of Stella and drained it. I glanced over the spread of food and I wondered when society had come to equate death with eating, or eating with death. I would have asked but that was Julie’s thing and it felt wrong talking about it with Julie lying there in her coffin.

  I tried to block out the stench of chemicals but every few minutes I was shocked by the taste of formaldehyde. I opened another can and took a drink simply to rid my mouth of the taste.

  Maddy held her can aloft. “To Julie.”

  Hannah murmured, but repeated the toast and I clinked the metal rim of my Stella against Maddy’s can.

  “What do we do now?” Hannah asked.

  “We wait.”

  I picked up a packet of crisps and tried to open them but the noise of the rustling packet was too loud. When Julie had spoken about the feast of the dead it had sounded exotic and important. Our cans of Stella and packets of Walkers crisps were mundane and it was impossible to imagine that they had any magical properties. I couldn’t imagine Julie travelling back from the afterlife for another Custard Cream.

  I wanted to look at my watch, but it felt disrespectful. I wondered how long Maddy would make us stay before she accepted that nothing was going to happen. The scene reminded me of some sick schoolgirl’s game of tea parties. I imagined Maddy picking up a small blue china tea pot and pouring water into small blue china teacups. There would be small blue china plates and dollies arranged around the edge of the play mat and it struck me that it wasn’t just Julie sitting there like a raggedy doll – we all were.

  In the gloom Julie looked no less alive than the other two; maybe her wish had come to pass. The sleeves of her dress had rucked up to the elbows to expose white scars on each wrist. I wondered what it felt like to be that sure of anything. I imagined her lying in her bath. Did she doubt even for a moment? I envied her certainty, even if she had been wrong. I remembered how excited she had been. How fascinated. How alive.

  “Don’t you get it? She’s not coming back!” I said to Maddy. It was her fault. I know; it made no sense. Julie had been the one holding the knife. But I blamed Maddy. Because she was there. Because she was still alive.

  I stomped away from the grave. I was crying before I reached the path. The details of the graveyard; granite headstones, marble surrounds and wrought ironwork, were distorted by tears. I needed someone to scream at, someone to blame. I leaned against the gravestone of Thomas McKenzie 1928-1973 You are Forever In Our Hearts and I wailed.

  I didn’t even like Julie. Not really. It had always been Maddy; Julie had just been part of the package, along with the black eyeliner and the leather-studded wristband. I wanted to laugh because I didn’t know why the hell I was crying.

  Hannah came to me though the gravestones, winding through the gloom like a wraith. I heard her footsteps before I saw her and just for a moment I allowed myself to believe that it was Maddy.

  I wiped my eyes on the back of my hand. I sniffed and it sounded so pathetic that I couldn’t stop myself from laughing.

  “We should have said something to her,” I said.

  “She wouldn’t listen.”

  “We didn’t try.”

  “But what if she was right?”

  The comment stopped any thoughts I had. If Julie found a way to come back? As certain as Julie had been about a life after death, I was equally sure that it wasn’t possible.

  “I want to believe,” I told Hannah. “I just can’t.”

  Maddy screamed. I started to run and Hannah followed and the pair of us ignored the paths and clambered over the uneven surface of the graves. Had Maddy fallen back into the grave and snapped an ankle? Her voice didn’t suggest that – it didn’t sound like pain but terror.

  The light from the torch washed over the scene, but from a distance all I could see was the open grave and the glow spreading out like some renaissance resurrection painting. I was nearly on top of the grave before I could see down into the pit.

  Julie stood in her coffin, her mother’s blue-print dress hanging off her bones. The sleeves of the dress fell below her wrists. She was dancing with Maddy, only Maddy was screaming in terror.

  Julie looked up at me. The whites of her eyes were bloodstained. She spoke in one of her internet-languages that I didn’t understand – a language resurrected from a time when people had a real understanding of the power of death – one of Julie’s proper religions.

  “Get her off me,” Maddy shouted. She batted at Julie with her hands and when that didn’t work she tried to back into the corner of the grave, but she tripped over the edge of the coffin and dropped to her knees. The noises Julie made grew louder. They sounded like chanting. Like a prayer.

  “Julie!” Hannah shouted.

  Julie turned. So she knows her own name, I thought. It wasn’t just the body; there was at least something of Julie still alive in there.

  “Corpus Sanctum,” she muttered. She had blood on her lips. Maddy’s blood.

  “Crazy bitch,” Maddy shouted. The sleeve of her leather jacket was tattered and I figured Julie must have bitten through to break the flesh there.

  Julie’s teeth were bloodstained. She was controlled. Measured. She bit into Maddy and I wondered if this had been he
r plan all along. It was one of the fundamental laws of nature: life comes from life. It wasn’t the food from the picnic that she needed to return from the dead. It was us.

  “בשר של חיים. To aíma sas gia ti̱ zo̱í̱ mou. Thank You. Jīvana kā upahāra. Nǐ de shēnghuó kuàng,” Julie said.

  Julie lurched at Maddy again. I looked around and picked up one of Maddy’s rocks from the edge of the rug and and held it above my head. I hesitated, because despite everything, she was still my friend, and I’d defy anyone not to pause before smashing out the brains of a friend. Maddy’s scream dragged me out of the moment. “Just do it. Knock her fucking head off.”

  I let the rock fall from my grip. It hit Maddy on the temple and she crumpled to the floor, collapsing into the silken embrace of the coffin.

  “What?” Hannah asked.

  I sat on the edge of the grave, my heels kicking against the soft clay of the walls. I listened to the sound of Julie eating and Hannah retching. When Julie was done she looked at me. I think she understood.

  Because Maddy was the love of my life. But Julie… Julie was eternity.

  dad and me and me and dad

  by

  Amelia Mangan

  I've just about finished my second slice of pie and I'm starting to get thirsty again. It's hot out here, maybe thirty degrees in the shade, and Dad's squinting up at the sky, trying to figure out what time it is. We left our watches at home. “You have to leave your watch at home,” he told me before we left. “If they hear the ticking, they won't come. Don't ask me why. Just how it's always been.”

  I'm looking across the red-and-white check cloth at the cooler, wondering if maybe Dad would let me have a beer. I only turned sixteen three months ago but this is a special occasion. I had champagne at my cousin's wedding, back when we got invited to things like that, and I was a lot younger then. I look like a grown man now, almost. I'm old enough to be here, so I figure I must be old enough to drink.