The Likely Resolutions of Oliver Clock

by Jane Riley

I had gone to bed with Marie and resolution number four on my mind, and woken up with it, and her, still there. It followed me into the shower, sprung out at me from my underwear drawer and plopped on to my toast as if it had morphed into marmalade.

Just imagine where I might be now, had I plucked a petal or two of courage.

was going to probe further but her phone rang and the opportunity got sucked out of the window and churned in the back of the rubbish truck that was lumbering off down the road.

The list went on. It even included sample phrases of condolence I suspected came from the insides of Hallmark cards. They were to be regurgitated, as Dad once told me, ‘when you can’t think of the right thing to say’.

I was thrilled to have cheered the wife of a dentist who would have been familiar with the mouths of most in the local community by suggesting we hand out dental floss with every order of service and offering Marie’s idea of featuring flowers in varying shades of white.

pondered whether to pretend I was inspecting the embalming room because of Roger’s recent laxness in tidiness and care, having recently left an apple core nestled into the wig of a ninety-seven-year-old lady, or offer her a bite.

The funeral business runs in our family like other families have a history of baldness, a tendency to gout or a predilection to buck teeth.

Surrendering to my fate seemed an easier, risk-free option.

My future was laid out for me like surgical instruments on an embalming table and that warmed my belly like a hot toddy with a generous glug of brandy.

had astute listening skills from having grown up sibling-free and child-shy.

Whereas Dad was like a strawberry cream chocolate with a hard exterior and soft inside, Mum was a chocolate toffee – hard all over. But I don’t think she was always this way. I’m sure when I was little and she was younger, there was something more gooey caramel about her.

I could have nibbled her ear if I’d wanted to. I forced myself to focus on everything but her very nibbleable ear: the wooden pews, the steps to the vestry, the collection box, the aisle.

Another sentence left dangling in the air like fog waiting to dissipate.

He was one of those guys who had the knack of attracting girls without even realising it. Or maybe he did and was calling their bluff, which seemed an all too complicated strategy to me. Whatever his tactics, he was brilliant at exuding charm and feigning indifference at the same time. Nonchalance was his middle name.

a cotton cardigan across her shoulders and a belt trying to find her waist.

But instead of a fresh sea breeze wafting inland I had to contend with still air thick with car exhaust, gusts of grime, Chinese takeaway fumes clawing at the footpath and tightly knit, paint-peeling buildings gasping skyward.

It was more of a green space tucked between terraces like the hyphen between two words.

A fresh wind made the loose bark on the trunk of a gum tree flap, as if applauding me for a day well done.

She gripped both my hands and we held ourselves together as the air around us thickened and solidified. Sounds eddied. Smells dulled. There was only me and Marie.

We understand that this is a person who is no longer themselves, that the person who was once there has gone. That what is left needs tending to, like we would a shell found on the beach whose inhabitant has moved house, which we want to keep, cleaned and washed. This is the part of life I am used to: the finale, the denouement, the punchline.

blundered my way through Marie’s final three months and her death like some stuttered, unfinished question, as if I were a sentence comprised of half-words, half-ellipses and multiple question marks. A terrible sentence that was meaningless, pointless.

Better to have more little laughs for longer than bigger ones for shorter.

For unrequited love and grief make awkward bedfellows.

I was a tyre with a puncture, a Mars bar wrapper without the Mars bar, the toast without the marmalade.

Regrets were accumulating like bills yet to be paid.

she burst into my office like an exploding jack-in-the-box.

Exclamation marks flew off her like cartoon expletives.

one of the problems with being a funeral director is that you see the dead at their best and the living at their most wretched.

Where I was sitting in a bubble of mutual adoration that no one could pop and where nothing else mattered but Marie’s love for me and my love for her. I flopped into an armchair and wallowed. I was a bee with a flower bed all to myself. I was a sommelier in a barrel of Penfolds Grange. I was a chocoholic in a lake of melted Mars bars.

‘It’s my cat.’ ‘Meow,’ I said, which I hadn’t intended to; it just came out.

When you become aware of your sense of smell and the smells around you, everything comes alive. Life comes alive.

In front of everyone, I was being committed to Latin American dancing lessons. My toes curled, my thighs tensed, the tiramisu cha-cha-ed in my belly. Help!

The following morning I shuffled around my flat like a slow-moving wombat with a headache.

I was suffering from day-after regret: the chunks of Camembert and alcohol-laced tiramisu that were still wedged in my belly, Andy’s generous servings of wine lounging in my frontal lobe.

rain sluiced the windscreen and shot water bullets at the car.

A torrent of rain waterfalled, thunder cracked.

The dregs of a hangover mixed with a dollop of panic and a serving of the doldrums.

It’s been as quiet as a fully booked morgue.’

A dying person gains regrets and loses dreams.

What’s dying supposed to feel like? If dying means endless crying, then I’ve died.

For the next hour I was pushed and pulled as if being made to shuffle dust around the dance floor like a vacuum cleaner, hip-touched disconcertingly by Ricardo and bossed about by Caroline as if I were a disobedient dog unwilling to be trained, but I gave it my all.

The smell of sizzling garlic from a nearby Italian restaurant spun out on to the road and threaded its way along the footpath, wound around road signs and suffocated a stray cat.

Her eagerness verged on overpowering, especially to young girls in knee-high socks who probably thought rigor mortis was the name of a rock band.

The egg white is now egg yolk.’

Then there were the entries where she talked about things we’d done together which I had forgotten about. Like the time we got lost going to visit a client in a nursing home. We were laughing so hard at our navigational ineptitude that, when we arrived, we had to wait a few minutes more in the car to regain a more respectful and sombre countenance.

It was always hard to tell but, as I was used to talking to cadavers, I wasn’t anticipating an obvious response. Eventually, the flame flickered and I took that as a yes.

Happy that Marie had given me her blessing, I decided to clean the fridge.

She emerged as if being spat out of a drain,

How she loved it. How I didn’t love it. It was draining trying to love things that didn’t love me back.

Desire was punching holes in my timidity.