“Do you think Mum’s finished in the bathroom?”

“Why don’t you ask her,” said my sister to the garden and the rain.

Up the stairs, two at a time like before; a shit, a shave, and a shower and I’d be set, thinking a quick wank and a wash’d be better, suddenly wondering if my father could read my thoughts now.

The bathroom door was open, my mother’s door closed. In my room a clean white shirt lay freshly ironed on the bed, my father’s black tie next to it. I switched on the radio in the shape of a ship, David Essex promising to make me a star. I looked at my face in the wardrobe mirror and saw my mother standing in the doorway in a pink slip.

“I put a clean shirt and a tie on the bed for you.”

“Yeah, thanks Mum.”

“How’d it go this morning?”

“All right, you know.”

“It was on the radio first thing.”

“Yeah?” I said, fighting back the questions.

“Doesn’t sound so good does it?”

“No,” I said, wanting to lie.

“Did you see the mother?”

“Yeah.”

“Poor thing,” said my mother, closing the door behind her.

I sat down on the bed and the shirt, staring at the poster of Peter Lorimer on the back of the door.

Me thinking, ninety miles an hour.

The three car procession crawled down the Dewsbury Cutting, through the unlit Christmas lights in the centre of the town, and slowly back up the other side of the valley.

My father took the first car. My mother, my sister, and me were in the next, the last car jammed full of aunties, blood and fake. No-one was saying much in the first two cars.

The rain had eased by the time we reached the crematorium, though the wind still whipped me raw as I stood at the door, juggling handshakes and a cigarette that had been a fucker to light.

Inside, a stand-in delivered the eulogy, the family vicar too busy fighting his own battle with cancer on the very ward my father had vacated early Wednesday morning. So Super Sub gave us a eulogy to a man neither he nor we ever knew, mis taking my father for a joiner, not a tailor. And I sat there, outraged by the journalistic licence of it all, thinking these people had carpenters on the bloody brain.