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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.

  ‘Try not to think of him like that.’ Liv took her hand and Ali wished it helped.

  ‘Why not? It’s what he was at the end. And I did nothing. Nothing. I just keep thinking of the times when he needed me, and I couldn’t even bring myself to kiss him because I was so …’ she searched for the word ‘… so afraid. God, I’m a monster. There’s literally no other word for me. I’m a monster. Who ignores their dad when he’s so goddamn helpless? Running around pretending to be pregnant and loving life on the ’gram?’

  ‘Ali, please don’t do this to yourself … you did everything you could … you were up there all the time …’

  She doesn’t understand. Ali stared down at their hands, gripped in her lap. She doesn’t realise.

  ‘You don’t get it, Liv. I deserve to feel like shit. I am shit. All these people are right.’ Ali waved her phone.

  ‘Ali. They are internet trolls. You can’t read this stuff – it’s self-harm. I will take that phone away right now,’ she threatened.

  ‘I should be reading it. It’s the truth. They’re not trolls, all the stuff they’re saying is true.’ Ali flicked open her inbox. ‘I am a “selfish, lying cunt”. I am. The way I treated my dad … That’s just fact, Liv.’ Ali wasn’t sure why she was getting ratty but at least feeling angry was feeling something. Better than this frightening, fathomless ache. She stood abruptly. ‘I need to get the pamphlets from the printer before the funeral car comes. Will you come with me? We’ve got a couple of hours.’

  ‘Anything you want, pal.’ Liv took out her phone. ‘Do you wanna do a to-do list? Always makes me feel better.’

  Ali managed a grin. Liv’s devotion to to-do lists was verging on pathological.

  ‘Yep, sounds comforting. I think I’m going to need several. One for the funeral, one for the public shaming and one for the unplanned pregnancy.’ Ali laughed grimly. ‘I’ll dictate on the way to the printer.’

  They slipped through the uncles, some of whom were now singing ‘The Banks of My Own Lovely Lee’, while two others were having what looked to be a middle-aged attempt at a fist fight. Ali’s cousin Lily looked bored as she weakly tried to pull them apart.

  ‘John-John brought up the Christmas Turkey Debacle of ’76,’ she explained, rolling her eyes.

  The funeral sesh was hardcore, so much daytime booze and feelings. They headed for the door just as Mini began calling her from upstairs.

  ‘Jesus, keep going,’ Ali muttered to Liv, jogging down the front steps into the misty April day and jumping into Mini’s car. Liv hastily buckled her seatbelt as Ali slammed into gear and lurched forward, up the narrow road and away from the house.

  Indicating right, Ali started towards the cluster of shops in the nearby village. ‘Look, let’s to-do list me. It’ll take my mind off things.’

  Liv opened her PimpMyList app and created three new lists.

  Funeral

  Public Shaming

  Pregnancy

  ‘Let’s go from least to most complicated,’ Liv suggested, while Ali scouted for a spot to park near the printer’s. ‘Funeral. Let’s put printer’s on here so we can tick it off – that always feels good. Outfit?’

  ‘I’m wearing it.’ Ali backed into a spot outside the off-licence. Parallel parking while making a funeral to-do list is an advanced level of adulting, she mused.

  ‘Is moody Lou Reed smoking a spliff appropriate funeral attire?’

  ‘I’m one of the chief mourners. I could wear a black mankini and people would have to put up with it.’

  They headed into the printer’s and joined the queue for collections.

  ‘So, I suppose “public shaming” and “pregnancy” kind of intersect,’ Liv said cautiously. ‘People today are going to have heard about Fake BumpGate, Ali.’

  Liv was right, of course. In the last few days, Ali had mainly been around the North American branch of the family but, in just a few hours, she’d be facing down a huge crowd – most of whom had surely heard some version of the story by now.

  They stepped forward to the desk.

  ‘I’m collecting for Jones,’ Ali said and took the hefty envelope proffered. She hugged it to her chest to protect it from the light drizzle as they went back outside.

  ‘I should’ve included a formal statement in the funeral pamphlet.’ Ali sighed. ‘Something like “Ali recently changed her medication, prompting her to have a mild psychotic break … all over Instagram”.’

  ‘Well. You definitely weren’t in your right mind. Could you maybe reference it during the eulogy? Get it said and out of the way?’

  Ali laughed. ‘Just a quick sidebar? “I’d like to pause in the fond reminiscing and grieving for a moment to clarify that I was drinking and Instagramming heavily during recent months and I am deeply sorry for any of the harm I caused with my actions. Oh, and BTW, I’m pregs for real now!’’’

  Liv winced. ‘It’s jarring, you’re right. Maybe you don’t have to say anything at all about it to anyone today? Who’s going to grill the daughter of the dead man?’

  The words ‘dead man’ momentarily winded Ali as she sat in behind the steering wheel. Her dad was a dead man now.

  On the drive back to the house, she said little. She tightened her grip on the steering wheel and made the turn to her parents’ terrace. It was nearly time to go.

  ‘I haven’t even written the eulogy.’ Ali stared out to sea after she’d parked in front of her parents’ dove-grey house at the end of the row. ‘I’ve sat down a million times to do it but there’s nothing coming. It’s a bad idea to just wing it, right?’

  ‘Yes.’ Liv was firm. She rooted for a pen in the glove compartment and extracted a pamphlet from the printer’s package. Ali watched her decisively scribble across the back of it and hand it over. ‘Just say this.’

  My dad was the most wonderful father to me. I love him so much and I can’t believe he’s not here anymore. Thank you to everyone who came today to remember him as he was. I’ll never stop missing him. We’re all better for having had him in our lives.

  Ali swallowed hard to push back the tears. Crying didn’t help. If anything, she felt worse afterwards – raw and wrung out. This is grief, Ali was realising, there was no relief. You couldn’t just cry it out and feel better. How long was it going to be like this?

  Liv was on her phone, pulling up PimpMyList again. She added ‘Eulogy’ to the Funeral list and passed it to Ali. ‘Here, tick it off. It’ll help.’

  Ali pressed the screen to strike off the eulogy.

  It was oddly satisfying. She imagined wading through her myriad swirling problems and anxieties, striking off each one. She X’d out of the Funeral list, selected the Pregnancy list and added three items:

  Go to doctor.

  Tell Mini.

  Tell Sam.
r />   She added a question mark.

  Tell Sam …?

  Ali sat nervously in the front row of the Victorian chapel where Miles’s distinctly showbiz funeral was underway. She swallowed repeatedly but couldn’t seem to calm the swelling angst. Her throat felt tight and her breathing was constricted. Projected onto the wall in front of her was a scrolling slideshow of Miles’s life. Young, blond Miles looking rakish in a panama hat and flares in an impossibly sunny Stephen’s Green. Miles in a Breton tee squinting into the sunshine. Miles and Mini tanned and relaxed in a village in northern Spain.

  Baby Ali began appearing as the shoulder pads and bleached perms gave way to the grungier look of the early ’90s, the nostalgia-tinged Polaroids to the harsher, red-eye-strewn snaps of the pre-smartphone age. The slideshow was beautiful – she’d stayed up late hunched over her laptop lost in the old holidays and raucous house parties of her childhood putting it together. Between her and the projected scrolling feed, the coffin squatted heavy and dreadful.

  She snuck a look over her shoulder. It was terrible to be on show like this, in front of hundreds of people. She pulled in another laboured breath. She couldn’t quite get her lungs full enough. She was about to be called up. She’d folded and refolded Liv’s eulogy so much it was fraying at the creases. She flattened it down and scanned the words again.

  My dad was the most wonderful father to me. I love him so much and I can’t believe he’s not here anymore. Thank you to everyone who came today to remember him as he was. I’ll never stop missing him. We’re all better for having had him in our lives.

  It just feels so flaccid, she frowned, so bland and generic. There’s nothing of him in it or of what he did for all of us. What he did for me. She heaved in more useless oxygen and her lungs contracted weakly. This moment was lasting for ever. She looked up to check how the speaker ahead of her was going. It was Sean De Burca, an old theatre friend of Miles’s, who was taking up quite a lot of his allotted time with plugging his forthcoming play and name-checking the prestigious awards he’d won during his four decades in the business.

  ‘Of course, as you probably all remember, that was the year that we took the show to Albany and the late, great critic Harold Carthieu himself sat in the front row. I remember texting Miles about it. Carthieu was a bore, but his review was quite complimentary.’ Sean paused to fumble among his pages.

  ‘Christ, he’s brought the review with him.’ Mini’s voice was hot on Ali’s ear. ‘I never should’ve asked him. He’s trying to get funding for his new play, and this is as bald an attempt at a pitch as any I’ve ever heard. He’s practically reciting his CV.’

  Ali glanced around at the bored crowd apparently untouched by the moving tale of one ‘criminally underrated Irish theatre director’s trials and triumphs’.

  ‘He’s really losing them,’ Ali whispered back, indicating a snoozing Marcus, her dad’s old business partner, a few rows down, whose head was lolling on Liv’s shoulder as she tried to shrug him off.

  ‘So we plan to begin workshopping in mid-May, ahead of this year’s Dublin Theatre Festival, and I know Miles, always such a supportive patron of the arts, would have wanted any who feel they have the means to dig deep here today.’

  My God, I have to stop this! Ali pushed herself up to standing, feeling shaky and unmoored, and began to make her way to the podium, trying not to look at the coffin as she passed. Sean looked shocked at her muscling him gently out of the way but reluctantly relinquished the mic and backed off.

  ‘My father,’ Ali began, ‘would have wanted me to shut down that shameless hard sell, Sean!’ She threw a look over to Sean, who shuffled awkwardly. Ali gazed down the chapel and felt a pang at the size of the congregation. God, the things her dad would never see. This huge crowd of people who loved him, Mini sitting ramrod straight at the head of them all, staring unblinking at the coffin. Then Ali glanced down at herself. Inside her right now was a soon-to-be person, who would contain some tiny element of her dad. If the baby had her brown eyes, then it would have Miles’s brown eyes.

  ‘I wanted to prepare some words to say today but when I went to write them down, nothing came. In the end, my friend, Liv, wrote something for me but I guess it’s just that words don’t come close to … I guess I just never believed this would happen. I can’t believe he’s gone. He deserved to live. He deserved to live to see this, to see how much all of you loved him. This disease is so cruel – it robs the person of their memories and it robs us of them. I can’t believe I’ll never hear him singing in the car or arguing about who did the best Krapp’s Last Tape.’

  Ali looked at the coffin and tried to imagine Miles inside. This was the last time she’d be near his body and she couldn’t even kiss his cheek with the little sandpapery stubble and his Miles smell. ‘I wish I could tell you what an amazing father you were to me.’ Ali could feel her throat clogging with tears. ‘I wish I could tell you how much you mean to me and that I’ll miss you … every … day.’ The words were catching but she had to get them out. ‘I want you to know how much I love you. I want you to know I’m going to name this baby after you … And I’m going to be a mother you could be proud of. I swear to you.’

  When 400 people jolt with surprise and gasp in unison, it’s pretty loud. It wrenched Ali from her daze.

  Fuck. What did I just say?

  After the funeral service, the line of mourners seemed to be unending. Ali was pinned into an alcove in the church feeling hounded by sympathy and shaken by her own insanely cavalier baby announcement.

  Jaysus, forget Mercury, this baby is in retrograde: conceived during a social media hoax, the pregnancy test taken in a funeral home and now announced at the emotional climax of a eulogy. Poor baby Miles. Or baby Millie?

  Mini had raised a single terrifying eyebrow in the tense seconds after Ali’d announced her forthcoming loinfruit from the altar. When Ali’d returned to her seat, numb from the shock of what she’d just done, Mini’s eyes remained fixed on the coffin as she muttered, ‘I don’t even know where to begin with that, Alessandra. I guess we’ll discuss it when we’re not about to cremate your father.’

  Fair, Ali’d thought.

  ‘Ali, such a beautiful speech.’ Maura Lane, an eminent theatre actress, gripped her shoulders. ‘It had everything, pathos, vulnerability and then the payoff of the baby character. Your father would be so proud, you really produced this whole incredible … homage to him.’

  Oh God, they all think I timed that on purpose. With the guts of her parents’ friends being artists and theatre luvvies, really was it any wonder she wound up a fantasist on Instagram?

  ‘Em, thanks …’ Ali was pulled into a vice-like hug and swore she could feel her bones clicking. Over the black velvet shoulder of Maura Lane, Ali could see her friend Kate looking awkward in the solemn condolence line. They were mates, though during Ali’s Insta-rise things had become strained between them. Kate had been trying to make the influencer thing happen for herself for ages and was understandably jealous of Ali’s sudden success. After Ali’s lies had unravelled, Kate’d texted a couple of times, but Ali hadn’t been able to string a response together.

  Maura disengaged from the hug. ‘Ali, I must go. The director of the Abbey is over there,’ she murmured, a determined networking grit having entered her voice. She adjusted her hair and smoothed her cape. A bold energy, wearing a cape to the funeral of an acquaintance, thought Ali watching Maura go as Kate stepped up and limply hugged her.

  ‘So now you are pregnant?’ She peered at Ali through the tangle of lashes. Her Insta-face looked particularly garish in the context of a funeral. Ali felt bad. She’d sat around talking about the ‘pregnancy’ with Kate, knowing full well that Kate was madly jealous of her growing following. Ali’d no idea how Kate’s own bid for Insta-fame with her account, @ShreddingForTheWedding, was even going. She’d been too wrapped up in herself.

  ‘I’m sorry, Kate, I really am.’

  ‘But, like, which is it? Are you pregnan
t? Were you this whole time? What is going on?’ Kate looked quietly seething, though she kept glancing around, conscious she was supposed to be offering her sympathies. ‘Like, I’m really sorry about your dad and all, but seriously, you know what they’re saying online, right? Prime Time approached me about taking part in a panel to discuss the “Ali’s Baba Scandal”. Everyone is talking about this’ – she leaned in and hissed – ‘and now you’re here still lying about it, at your dad’s funeral.’

  ‘I’m not lying. Not anymore. Look, I am pregnant. I just found out a few days ago. Ask Liv, she knows. And I don’t know what I’m going to do but please, please don’t go on Prime Time. I can’t take that on top of everything.’

  Kate drew back, appearing to consider this, when Marcus slipped in front of her and gathered Ali into his arms.

  ‘Ally Pally! You did wonderfully. Miles would’ve been so proud of you.’

  Ally Pally had been her dad’s name for her. She narrowed her eyes – clearly, he was trying to get in with her so he could get on with boning her mother. Mini and Marcus had been on the verge of going on a date just a couple of months before, though with all her Insta-bullshit, she hadn’t even asked Mini what happened, she realised guiltily.

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’ Ali extracted herself. ‘Excuse me, I need to get some air.’

  Where was Liv? She needed a buffer from all these funeral people. She couldn’t get two paces without being sucked into vortex after vortex of people emoting. Though now, after the baby bombshell, the mood had taken a turn for the better.

  ‘Ali! You’re glowing. What a wonderful, joyful thing to have to look forward to!’

  ‘Devastating about Miles but wonderful news about the baba. Mini must be thrilled!’

  Everyone seemed much better equipped to deal with the bizarre baby news than the dead man in the box.

  Ali finally broke free of the chapel, squeezing through a side door to the graveyard outside. She was about to ring Liv when she spotted her gesturing wildly at a very tall and ornate monument – an angel crouched on a large engraved plinth.