Her lips set in a thin line.
I nodded.
A warm smile broke out. ‘Wonderful. I’ll report back next week.’ She swallowed a mouthful of tea before continuing. ‘So, how are things with you, dear?’
‘I’m fine, thank you. Same old, same old.’
‘You got anything fun planned for the weekend?’
Same questions week in, week out.
‘The usual.’
Same answers week in, week out.
She kept her eyes on me. ‘I do wish you’d surprise me one time and tell me that you were sky diving, speed dating or getting a tattoo.’ She chuckled at the face I pulled. ‘What? It’s good to mix things up a little, Grace.’
‘Hmm.’
‘I know you can’t escape death but you can choose to live, and it’s a lot more fun with a nice man by your side.’ She paused. ‘My neighbour was telling me about her niece who’s found a lovely chap on this other dating website, Tindem or something. Apparently there are tons of them for single people, all looking for the same thing.’
She probably meant love, but I couldn’t help being cynical about the other thing many people on dating sites were looking for. I tried to ignore her pointed stare and burrowed my eyes into the dove leaflet in front of me. It costs £30 more to release a white dove at a wedding than at a funeral. Same company, same dove and same service. I looked up from the leaflet. The colour of the font and the irregularity of the pricing irritated me. Anyway, I’d sworn off dating since my ex. Henry had well and truly broken my heart, and I didn’t much fancy putting it back out there to be broken further.
‘Grace? What do you think?’
I forced a smile. ‘Yep, I’ll look into it.’
‘You must. If I was a little younger, then I’d be on there too. You’ve got youth on your side, Grace, you need to use it before it fades. Right, I’d better be off. Got a lot to do.’ She rose to her feet with a struggle. Her joints cracked as she stood.
I handed her the macarons and helped her with her coat. Purdy’s ears pricked to attention the second the door opened.
‘Bye, Grace. Hope I don’t see you soon!’
I laughed politely. Same joke every week. I couldn’t take any offence. In my job, no one ever wanted to see me again. I wouldn’t want to see me again. I watched her carefully waddle down the steps and unfasten Purdy’s lead from the railing.
With a final wave, I went to check on Mrs Craig. My regular visits might not make any difference to her day, but they mattered to me.
A gust of icy wind cut through my winter coat as I waited for the temporary traffic lights to change. Amber pools of light from passing cars lit up the non-stop drizzle that fell from the heavy grey clouds. Darkness curled around me. Last week it had been bright sunshine; the row of forlorn daffodils at the roadside were presumably regretting their optimistic decision to pop open. I awkwardly used my elbow to press the button at the crossing. I’d been trapped there that morning on my way to work, forced to ignore two stocky men wearing grubby hi-viz vests who’d hollered to me from the scaffolding opposite. The workmen had long downed tools and gone home.
I’d stayed much later than I’d planned, working on the final prep for Mr Stuart’s big day next week. I hadn’t even realised what time it was. Finally, the traffic stopped and the beeps rang out. I still made sure to turn my head two, three times to check the coast was clear before I put a foot in the road. You couldn’t be too careful. I’d read recently that the number of road deaths had hit a five-year high.
‘Ah, here she is, our saving Grace,’ Raj bellowed as I walked into his shop.
‘Evening,’ I smiled.
‘Oh, wait!’ He held up a chubby hand and reached the other under the counter, which was covered in neat displays of chewing gum, reams of scratch cards and a plastic cabinet containing e-cigarette liquid. He pulled out a pocket-sized notebook and flicked through it.
‘OK, here we go.’ He cleared his throat and lowered his voice slightly. ‘Hello, Grace. How’s life?’
‘Fine, thanks.’
‘No!’
He made me jump. ‘What?’
He sighed loudly and ran a hand across his sweating brow. ‘Ah, wait. I’ve got it wrong. You’re meant to say how’s life and then I reply with, fine, pause, and how’s death! Geddit?’ He chuckled.
This was Raj’s thing. Since I’d bought the flat upstairs and he’d realised who his neighbour was and what she did for a living, he’d decided to use me as some sort of muse for his fledgling stand-up routine. A way to test out naff jokes and build up his material. It had been going on for years. If you asked him what he did he’d tell you he was a comedian, despite never performing for a paying audience in his life. His proper job was running the Minimart-post-office-deli. Every time a witty, or not so witty, one-liner came to him he’d immediately pull out his joke notebook and jot it down. Often I would ask him when he was going to actually perform this material at a stand-up night, but he’d always insist he wasn’t ready yet. I could understand why he was reluctant.
‘Good one,’ I smiled awkwardly. It was marginally better than when he insisted on saying ‘Good Mourning’ to me, heavily emphasising the mouuuurrning part, then doing a funny thing with his index fingers as if banging an imaginary drum in the air.
‘Oh, I’ve got another too. It came to me when I was helping Rani with the latest stocktake.’ He licked his lips and changed his stance as if standing under an imaginary spotlight. ‘Every year we get sent birthday cards, but how about a deathiversary card? They would really put the fun into funerals.’ He waited for my reaction.
Inside I cringed but, not wanting to hurt his feelings, I forced myself to clap weakly. ‘Ha, yeah, that would be, er, interesting.’
‘It needs a bit extra work that one. Oh, guess what!’
‘What?’
‘No, you need to guess!’
I pretended to look like I was deep in thought, clearly taking too long to come up with a suitable suggestion for this slightly tedious game.
‘Ok, I’ll tell you. You won’t get it anyway. Peter Kay messaged me back!’ He did this funny jazz hands thing and had his mouth so wide open I could see the fillings on his bottom row of teeth.
‘That’s, er, nice. Do I know him?’
‘He’s a famous comedian, Grace. He did that whole thing about garlic bread…’
I was still lost.
‘Never mind. He’s just, like, a big deal on the circuit. And now I guess I am too!’ He paused, the smile faltering slightly at my lukewarm reaction.
‘So how do you know this Peter King?’
‘Kay. I follow him on Twitter.’
I knew he was expecting me to match his levels of excitement.
He paused then scrunched up his face, thinking. ‘Well, he didn’t exactly message me. He liked a tweet. That joke I told you last week, how thinking about burial plots is the last thing you need.’
Twitter had never been my thing. From the looks of his timeline it was just him spamming comedians with some of his material. Also, I knew for a fact that Raj used a younger – and much more handsome – Bollywood actor as his profile picture. He’d shown me one time, when he’d tried to explain about likes and retweets.
‘But hey, when I do go on tour I can now say as liked by