2. Miss Frobisher.

A QUESTION OF TIME Part2

The first thing that upset Colin Wharton once he’d come started to come to terms with being dead was the nature of his funeral. It was in a church, and he was chapel. The clergyman was pompous with a well rehearsed pulpit voice, and he liked the trivial, especially if it could be laughed at. But then, he was no longer in any position to complain or laugh at anything, or even cry, lying there in the cheapest coffin his mother could afford, and that had involved a loan from an insurance company.

Yet for no reason he could understand he was part of the grieving assembly, friends and relatives he’d never heard of praying over the remains of a thirteen year old boy who ought to have had all his life before him rather than have it cut so cruelly short by a Land Rover. There he was looking on, sitting next to his blessed mother and adopting a praying position with his hands together, and, yes, almost actually praying.

He turned to his mother, noted the tears, the paleness of her face (she usually rubbed a little too much rouge into her cheeks), and nudged her.

She felt something. Not a nudge perhaps, but she felt something. She reacted with an irritable expression masking her grief for a sudden moment.

“This is no joke, mum,” he murmured, hoping to establish a means of communication with the blessed woman.

“I don’t know who you are, but please go away,” she hissed into the space where his face was.

“That’s not nice, not knowing your own son,” he replied.

“I know him. The b*****d’s dead.” That was what she hissed back, obliging the clergyman to frown in her direction.

“Well he was,” she continued with a somewhat subdued hiss, “I never knew who his father was but he weren’t the man I was on the cusp of me taking to holy wedlock with!”

So that explains it, thought Colin as he leaned against a weeping willow only yards away from the yawning hole where the temporal part of him was going to spend eternity decomposing. Not married, so I’m a b*****d! I rather like that. It takes away all the baggage I might have had to live with and presents me with a whole load of new possibilities. He might even have been an alien…

The little parade of weeping men and women, led by the bored clergyman, was making its way behind the coffin bearers as they soberly tried to ignore the odd drips of body fluids that somehow managed to seep out of the cheap coffin.

More churchy words in a sombre very manicured voice. I wasn’t even chapel, he concluded, if there was any great big designer in the skies it most certainly didn’t have a beard. What good would that have been? If you’re going to create everything under every sky, why would you include facial hair that can be so annoying? I mean, I was starting to sprout a few wispy curls on my chin, and I hated them. I was saving up for my first razor…

And he had been.

He wandered between a variety of relatives he’d never met. Some of them were genuine and others were professional mourners who spent the better half of their lives comparing notes on the quality of funeral suppers.

“Did you know the boy?” he asked an elderly woman who most certainly hadn’t.

“Who said that?” she squeaked.

“Me,” he confided in her, “the last mortal thought…”

“Help!” she shouted, “It’s a graveyard and there are spirits all around us! The dead are rising to ask questions, oh mercy me, mercy mercy me!” and she started to scuttle off.

Which provoked the clergyman to come to an unrehearsed ending and the rest of the mourners to slowly wander off.

“Well well well,” muttered the whatever it was of Colin Wharton as he settled in his chair in the school room where Mr Harris beat history into as many stinging fingers as he could., “who would have thought that a simple statement of who I was would cause so much mayhem.”

Mr Harris was ushered into his classroom by the headmaster.

“Boys,” the latter began, this is the last time you’ll be taught by Mr Harris because he’s leaving us even though the term is far from being over. But he’s been appointed to an advisory body that will tell us all what to do when it comes to understanding our roots. So collect your equipment, Mr Harris, and we’ll all say goodbye to you and meet your replacement in due course, Miss Frobisher…”

The young woman who sidled into the room, nervous and smiling at the same time, looked at Colin’s seemingly vacant seat because, after all, the boy who normally sat there was decomposing in the church yard.

“Did you do this?” she asked him.

“It was either that or be flogged by him,” Colin told her. “Are you dead too?”

“Of course I’m not, what a silly question! I’m a historian!”” she smiled back at him.

“Well that’s a turn up for the books,” he said to his mother, who chose that moment to start ignoring him as she struggled with a few pots at the kitchen sink, a habit she preserved intact until her own sad demise forty three years later.

“Be like that,” he muttered grumpily, “see if I care! After all, I’m a b*****d. You said so, and I rather like it. Maybe I’m an alien b*****d. Maybe my father was a little green man from Mars. Wandering the streets, was he? Keen on finding how the human race reproduced with such unbelievable alacrity, and taking your knickers off to find out?”

“There’s one thing you’ll really have to come to terms with,” Miss Frobisher said from her seat behind the teacher’s desk, “and that is there aren’t any little green men on Mars! I reckon you’d best pop upstairs to your bed, and have a good long think about the most likely colour of aliens.”

“Has Mr Harris got the sack?” asked Ian Ganderson, “because if he has it’s about time too.”

“I’m not saying that he has, and I’m not saying that he hasn’t,” almost laughed the pretty young history teacher, “but let me put it like this: he’ll not be back to torment any of you boys again. Not even you, Colin Wharton.”

There was a sudden hush

“But Colin’s dead!” a chorus of shocked murmurs filled the air.

“So I’ve been told,” she said, “and the sooner he realises that the better for all of us.”

© Peter Rogerson 01.06.21

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