Everybody laughs through their tears. Hankies flying, tissues being taken out of handbags and passed along the pews.
‘So, my darling boys,’ she continues, ‘you three are my most precious people in the whole entire world and I’m not ready to say goodbye to you. Beneath these wigs I’ve taped envelopes to every head. Each month I want you to remove a wig, place it on your head, open these envelopes, read my notes, and remember me. I’m always with you. I love you all and thank you for the happiest, most blessed beautiful life a woman, wife, mother and grandmother could wish for. Thank you for everything.
‘PS,’ she blows a kiss, ‘I love you.’
Ciara grabs my arm and slowly turns to look at me. ‘Oh my …’ she whispers.
The screen goes black and everybody, everybody is crying. I can’t imagine how her family feel after this. I can’t look at Ciara. I feel sick. I feel dizzy. I feel like there’s no air. Nobody is paying the slightest attention to me but I feel self-conscious, as if they all know about me, and what Gerry did for me. Would it be rude for me to leave? I’m so near to the door. I need air, I need light, I need to get out of this claustrophobic suffocating scene. I stand and steady myself on the back of the pew then walk towards the door.
‘Holly?’ Ciara whispers.
Outside, I suck in air, but it’s not enough. I need to move away, get away.
‘Holly!’ Ciara calls, hurrying to catch up with me. ‘Are you OK?’
I stop walking and look at her. ‘No. I’m not OK. I’m definitely not OK.’
‘Shit, this is my fault. I’m so sorry, Holly. I asked you to do the podcast, you didn’t want to and I practically forced you, I’m so sorry, this is all my fault. No wonder you were avoiding her. It all makes sense now. I’m so sorry.’
Her words somehow manage to steady me, it’s not my fault for feeling like this. This happened to me. It’s not my fault. It’s unfair. She’s offering sympathy. She hugs me and I rest my head on her shoulder, back to feeling weak and vulnerable and sad. I don’t like it. I stop myself. My head snaps up.
‘No.’
‘No what?’
I wipe my eyes roughly and charge towards the car. ‘This is not who I am any more.’
‘What do you mean? Holly, look at me please,’ she pleads, trying to meet my eye as I look around wildly, desperate to sharpen my focus, desperate to get things in perspective.
‘This is not happening to me again. I’m going back to the shop. I’m going back to my life.’
The skill I discovered when I began working with my sister, after the magazine I worked for folded, is that I’m good at sorting. While Ciara is a magnificent creature when it comes to dealing with the aesthetic, beautifying the shop and placing each item in a place of importance, I could happily, and do quite happily, spend long days in the stockroom emptying boxes and bin liners of the things people no longer want. I get lost in the rhythm of it. These actions are particularly therapeutic in the days that follow Angela Carberry’s funeral. I empty everything on to the floor, sit down and go through the contents of handbags and pockets, sorting the precious from the trash. I polish jewellery until it sparkles, shoes until they shine. I dust off old books. I discard anything that’s not appropriate: dirty underwear, odd socks, used handkerchiefs and tissues. Depending on how busy I am, I can be nosy and get lost in studying receipts and notes, trying to date the last use of the object, understand the life of the person who lived with it. I run the clothes through a rinse wash, I use a steamer to smooth wrinkled fabric. I treasure anything of value: money, photographs, letters that should be returned to their sender. As far as possible, I make detailed notes of who owns what. Sometimes the possessions will never be reunited with their owner; those who have dropped boxes and bags off without contact details are just happy to be rid of their clutter. But sometimes I manage to matchmake. If we don’t feel we can sell the product, if it’s not right for Ciara’s vision, then we repackage them and give them to charities.
I take what’s old and make it new and I’m rewarded by the belief that there is value in my work. Today is a good day to get lost in a cardboard box filled with possessions that became objects as soon as they were dropped into the bag. I lift a box of books from the stockroom and carry them to the shop floor. Again I sit on the floor, wiping covers, folding back dog-eared pages and flicking through the pages for bookmarks of value. Sometimes I find old photographs that are used as bookmarks; mostly I don’t find anything, but every find is important. I’m lost in this world of sorting when the bell rings above the shop door.
Ciara is across the other side of the shop battling with a disarmed and beheaded mannequin as she tries to squeeze a polka-dot tea dress onto its body.
‘Hello,’ she greets the customer warmly.
She is better with customers than I am. I focus on the products when given the choice and she focuses on the people. She and Mathew opened the shop five years ago after they bought it as a house on St. George’s Avenue in Drumcondra, Dublin. The front of the house already had a floor-to-ceiling window built in, from its former life as a sweet shop. They live upstairs in a flat. As a second-hand shop on a quiet terraced street, we don’t attract much in the way of passing trade, but people travel to get here, and the local university provides plenty of students as customers, lured by the cheaper prices and the cool factor that comes with wearing vintage. Ciara is the star of the shop, hosting evening events, attending trade fairs, contributing to magazines, and a sometime-TV-presenter of breakfast television fashion slots, displaying the latest arrivals to the shop. If she is the heart of this shop, Mathew is the brains who handles the accounts, runs their online presence and oversees the technical side of the podcasts, and I’m the guts.
‘Hello,’ the customer, a woman replies.
I can’t see her, I’m hidden behind a display unit, sitting on the floor. I’m already zoning out and allowing Ciara to do her thing.
‘I recognise you,’ Ciara says. ‘You spoke at Angela’s funeral.’
‘You were there?’
‘Yes, of course. Angela was a fantastic supporter of the shop. My sister and I were there. We’ll miss her, she was a powerhouse of a woman.’
So now I’m listening.
‘Your sister was there too, you say?’
‘Yes. Holly, she’s … busy at the moment.’ Ciara uses her smarts and remembers that I will not wish to speak to this woman, as I have not wanted to speak about the entire funeral episode since it happened two weeks ago.
I did what I said I would do. I returned to the shop, I went back to my life, I tried not to think of what happened at the funeral for one second, but inevitably I did. I can’t stop thinking about it. Angela was clearly inspired by my experience with Gerry’s letters to do the same for her family in her final weeks, this I understand, but what I don’t understand is her business card. What on earth was she intending on doing with the PS, I Love You Club? Over the past few weeks I’ve wanted to know and I didn’t want to know and yet, here I am, not wanting to be seen but wanting to hear at the same time.
‘Did Holly …’ The woman abandons her question. ‘My name is Joy, pleased to meet you. Angela loved this shop. Did you know this is the house she grew up in?’