poor woman, deep in shock on the worst day of her life – someone who was expecting a baby and had no regular income – should take out a payday loan?
I had no idea what to say.
‘By now I am very worried.’ Anna looked me in the eyes. ‘Mr Chung says that in England a cheap funeral costs about eight thousand pounds. That is correct, yes?’
‘No.’ My single word came out as a whisper, because I could barely trust myself to talk at all.
A weak smile. ‘So I do the right thing. When Mr Chung says he will fetch an application form for me to pay for the funeral I run away. I need time to think. But then I fall over outside your shop. And then you come. Like you are running away also. And you fall over me.’
I reached across the table and squeezed Anna’s hand. ‘I’m so glad that happened,’ I said. ‘Mr Chung … Mr Chung hasn’t worked for our firm for very long. Please accept my apology for your … your experience with him. I hope you will allow me to put things right. Here’s what we’re going to do.’
I began by reassuring Anna that she didn’t need to get herself into debt to give Grigor a respectful funeral. She might even be entitled to a government grant to help cover the costs. But then I realised she was no longer listening.
She was staring at Jason Chung. Marching towards us, a trail of plump raindrops scattering in his wake. His suit looked as though it was midway through an intensive wash cycle, and he was angrier than I’d ever seen him.
‘Mrs Kovaks,’ he said. ‘Found you at last. So glad Nina’s been looking after you.’ A meaningful glare in my direction. ‘Let me escort you back to the office, so we can sign those forms and ensure your husband has the dignified funeral he would have wanted. I’ve settled the bill,’ he added. ‘Coffees on me.’
So Jason Chung shepherded us out of the deli as if we were two felons under arrest. We were waiting for a gap in the traffic so we could cross the road when a cab pulled over a few yards in front of us and its passenger got out.
‘Quick!’ I grabbed Anna by the hand and dragged her into the taxi. ‘Just drive straight ahead,’ I ordered the driver. The cab had stopped on double red lines, so he didn’t need to be told twice.
As our getaway vehicle sped away, I turned round in time to see my boss’s furious face. His clenched fists were high in the air and he looked almost as though he was doing a rain dance.
In other circumstances I might even have laughed.
That’s what I said that night, when I told Gloria the story of Anna Kovaks. ‘In other circumstances, I might even have laughed. Jason was bouncing up and down on the spot, waving his arms around as if he was putting a curse on me! Or a spell to make everyone believe that the more you love someone, the more you need to spend on their funeral.’
‘So the whole thing was what you might call an R-I-P off?’
Gloria said it as though it were a pun I hadn’t heard before. I scrubbed the cast-iron orange saucepan that went with my dad to the Falklands War (and came safely home again) even harder, removing the final traces of our bolognese supper.
Truth be told, I was a bit irritated. If Gloria hadn’t wanted to know what happened to me at work that day, she probably shouldn’t have asked. On the one hand, we both knew she was only making a rhetorical enquiry before launching into tonight’s instalment of her Disastrous Relationship with Thrice-Wed Fred. But just this once, Fred's latest crimes could surely wait until we’d resolved something more serious.
My entire life.
I’m the first to admit I haven’t exactly cracked the work–life balance thing. It’s almost all work – not least because whenever there’s the faintest whiff of romance in the air, I tend immediately to think about my husband’s funeral. The only place my life is properly rounded is at the hips.
Gloria, to her credit, realised from my tense posture at the sink that despite my light-hearted remark about Jason, his behaviour towards Anna was no laughing matter. The two of us had shared a home long enough for her to know what I was going to say next.
‘So you’re going to resign,’ she pre-empted me.
‘What else can I do?’
‘Let’s back up a moment,’ Gloria said. ‘You did absolutely the right thing, taking Anna to the no-frills funeral services in Putney. Eight hundred and fifty quid as opposed to thousands of pounds she simply didn’t have.’ Gloria rose from the kitchen table and headed for our emergency supplies cupboard.
This was definitely going to be a two-bottles-of-wine Wednesday.
‘I take it Jason will release the body?’ she asked.
An invisible hand grabbed my stomach and twisted. Until then, I’d completely overlooked – repressed, more likely – the fact that the bloke who started up his budget cremations business because he was scandalised by the cost of his own mother’s funeral would need to liaise with my employers if he was going to have Grigor’s body to cremate. I folded a damp tea towel into quarters, gave the glass hob a quick polish, then sat down at our kitchen table and reached gratefully for my fresh glass of wine.
‘Jason won’t have any choice,’ I said. ‘Which means I need to hand in my notice first thing tomorrow. Otherwise, I’m as bad as he is.’
‘What about the others? Surely when you tell them what happened, they’ll help you take Jason to task? Force him to behave properly from now on.’
As if.
Our staff turnover had been horrendous since the business was sold. Apart from a couple of the senior drivers, I’d been there longer than anyone else. Five years.
The newcomers seemed to have bought into Jason’s marketing-speak: monthly sales targets and promises of big bonuses. For all I knew—
No, surely it was impossible that everyone except me was up-selling in the worst possible way?
‘I’m not certain I can count on anyone for support,’ I said. ‘So the only question is, how much do you get on the dole these days?’ I managed to sound a lot less frightened than I felt, as I started to face up to the true cost of my good deed. Ah well, I’d experimented with just about every diet in the universe, so perhaps the Poverty Diet would succeed where the rest had failed.
‘I won’t be out of work for long.’ It was a promise to myself as much as to Gloria, although I was already wondering where my next job was coming from. Independent funeral companies were becoming an endangered species, and my battle charge towards the moral high ground, in flagrant defiance of corporate policy, was unlikely to impress any of the big chains – none of which I had ever wanted to work for anyway.
Gloria broke into my alarming thoughts. ‘Sweetie, I’ve been telling you for three years,’ she said. ‘You pay me too much rent.’
Gloria is – not to put too fine a point on it – rich. Which is to say, Gloria’s dad is an ex-banker whose name was never far from the headlines a few years ago, usually alongside words like ‘disgraced’ and ‘fat cat’. These days, he seems to spend most of his time playing golf and gently taking the piss out of his adored only child for choosing to work at a community law centre. ‘Sins of the fathers are one thing,’ he’d chided last time he visited, ‘but surely you could do good in a more lucrative way? There’s plenty of women eager to pay handsomely for good divorce lawyers.’
This house, the house we live in here in Kentish Town, was Gloria’s eighteenth birthday present. (Imagine that. I thought I was really privileged when Mum and Dad celebrated my coming of age with driving lessons.) And since the community law centre no longer has any budget for staff, my rent money is what Gloria lives off. Topped up by her trust fund, admittedly. Then again, for someone who needn’t work at all if she chose not