Farewelling Pádraic Molloy

Maisey tied black ribbons around the necks of the cats, even the ones from next door.  None of them were pleased and some struggled, even the ones with a reputation for being affectionate.

It’d been three days before someone had asked after Pádraic, like, where the fucking hell was he?  And where had the fucking cats been, like, not pestering for full fucking food bowls and all? 

But you can’t place our family like chessman on a calendar.  We pluck at time as you would a tatty ball of hat elastic.

Pádraic had been in his shed, tinkering with the solar battery; some holy grail quest of eking out optimum voltage.  He electrocuted himself, and once the battery drained, the cats started eating him; well, just around the parts of the entry and exit burns.  His favourite screwdriver was still clenched as a green-handled triumph in his hand.

 ‘Of all the things to happen on such a nice Green day,’ said Maisey.

A Green day was always a good day in our family.  We’d all been made to read Hildegard of Bingen as children. 

Maisey did all the arrangements: the police, the funeral directors, dealing with the inquisitive neighbours asking about the lingering barbecue smell, and once the computer was working, the emails.  The Sad Tragedy of Pádraic hadn’t affected the mains supply or the dial-up modem.  The 384 chip simply needed time to gather its thoughts.

It was Maisey, looking taller and gaunter in her black witch outfit who often differentiated between Sad, Bad, Mad, and Glad Tragedies on the unholy days and worked what spells she could.  If the cats were cooperative, the spells seemed to go smoother.

 ‘Didn’t you fail in your fourth year of Witch School ?’ we would say to her if the magic didn’t appear.  We all knew Witch School only ran to three years.

In our family we never hoped for much, however, a wake was a special event, so this time we expected big things from Maisey.  If we were praying people, we would’ve been doing more of that, too.

We left all the arrangements to Maisey.  She seemed to cope.

 ‘Are you doing fine?’ we’d say, as suggestiveness amongst us never went astray as a tactic.

 ‘Yes,’ Maisey would say, even if she was standing red-eyed in a corner. 

 ‘Are you thinking of that dismal final year of your witch school?’ we’d say sympathetically in tap-room sing-song.

On the day of the wake, Maisey was still morose and had gone to the bathroom several times, the pretext being of cleaning her teeth.  She assured us that all of the family would be there and she wanted clean teeth for it.  Her mouth was her one and only best feature though the rest of her ensured she had never been kissed, or perhaps only by the cats.

On her last visit to the bathroom, she checked her watch and spat a mouthful of froth onto the mirror.  She watched as the speckles of spearmint turned as ashen as the unburnt parts of Pádraic, and from these immundus loci, from somewhere beyond the backyard realm of the mirror, the unrecognisable ancients incarnated.  There was no real way of knowing whether they were of our family or hopeful strays like some of our cats.

It made no difference to Maisey and her splattering spell of summoning.  The ancients ignored her, despite her tenuous blood-tie to these eager ghosts.  She shrugged and continued unreeling a length of dental floss that would have delighted a hangman. 

The ancients stepped over the cats ranked at the bathroom door and walked out to the lounge room where we were all waiting and they eyed the cake and then the beer.  We knew at once they were family.  They accepted their black ribbons into outstretched pale hands; one even enquired if it was silk.

No one wanted to do the necessary urging and you have to give a girl some time, but as soon as Maisey was finished purging her teeth, we could make a beginning and the ancients could stop being perplexed with polyester haberdashery.  One remarked it was in poor taste that the thin, cheap ribbon Maisey had purchased resembled electrical cable.

Uncle Fess said it had all been carefully themed, so there.

 “Times have changed, fellas, not like when Oliver Cromwell was a-walloping us,’ he said, ‘no more candles and pretty plaster Virgins.’

He drained his glass and saluted with it quite empty which was allowable in our family as we’d all known lean times.

 ‘So boys and girl,’ he said with infused gravitas, ‘amen and nunc et in hora mortis nostrae.’

Once Uncle Fess started on his fondness for fragments of the Latinate mass, we directed the conversation from the dire state of our family finances to the safer topic of what a useless witch Maisey really was.

 ‘She can cobble together a decent enough eulogy,’ said Uncle Fess. He was tall and gaunt, and was as ignorable as Maisey, though he remembered how much practice she had and how much he enjoyed a family funeral.

The cats were taking no notice of either us or the ancients, only Maisey.  They were restive because they were locked in the lounge room along with us all and it was elbow room only, so close we were wedged and cosy and drinking unusually slowly.  This wake wouldn’t overspill into the street as an obligatory family brawl.  Maisey had put a tray of kitty litter under the dining table we’d lugged in as Pádraic’s resting place, so the cats, reassured, kept preening the cooked meat odour from their fur.   Maisey finally came in from the bathroom wiping her mouth and someone stabbed the play button of the tape recorder and Albinoni’s Adagio hissed into being.

Only then did the cats do their wincey whiskery thing, turning their faces away from Maisey as we traded our ribbons for cake and whisky.