the woman in 24
You come back holding a small plastic thing of milk
There are flowers, wreaths, things that look like cakes but also flowers
Just where the rubbish sits when it’s outside
Usually the third kind of rubbish, neither household nor recycling, but the unsorted
But now, flowers, and a man wearing a long fancy coat with maroon aspects
Oh I say, who is this for, he says the woman in twenty-four
It may as well be another country
The only person I know on that floor is the woman who plays her music insanely loud
When she is on drugs
not the cause of death, I hope
The cars
The hearse, four men, all dressed up, they put flowers on the top of it, above the coffin part. How will they stay on you think, then they put these little black bungy ropes across the top of the flowers, the cream puffs, the little stand. There are metal bars either side to clip on to. Funeral cords. On the side of the coffin it says NAN.
The family comes down. The daughter, I assume, heavy, she is very sad, you can see it, her tread, the slowness, weight. She stands in the cold and puffs her cheeks to sigh like the cherub-clouds in paintings of the sky.
The men in their ritual attire perform a little ceremony, the forgotten key workers.
One wearing a hat holds another hat in front of the hearse, he taps his cane; the others bow. The family arrives; mostly women, their long hair. One of the men hugs the daughter.
By the fifth car, it’s a minicab, and from front to back the cars go down in order of grandeur, the hearse is like a Rolls Royce hearse, or like the “Rolls Royce of Hearses,” whichever hearse that is.
The man with a cane walks in front of the cavalcade and they depart. A single magpie watched the whole thing, which would be a kind of pathetic fallacy or is that only weather, well the avian equivalent, and sometimes a bird is just a bird
And you take this photograph of this bag on wheels standing in the sunlight in the park because the faded black is luminous and a woman with a dog shouts at you, because she thinks it’s very strange that you are taking a photograph of her bag on wheels, you suppose, but you don’t say anything because what would you say sorry, I was just taking a photograph of your bag on wheels but she already knows that
And remember when you took this photograph of a stuffed fox at a market in the fields in France, and the woman whose stall it was shouted at you as well
And all your old photographs of people who are dead, people who you will likely never see again, unless it is to pass them by in the street, and there is no more sting, not the ones in your suitcase nor the ones on your screen
it could not have been otherwise
and it is already