—12—
The funeral was tasteful and small. With the Restonians and Brett and myself, the total number of mourners made less than ten, though many angry tears were shed, especially by Ferdinand. The owner of the Restonia arrived by proxy, in the form of the company lawyer. He sidled up to Brett and tried to engage in small talk, using words like 'cool', meaning, in the lawyer's case, that he had been taking lessons in acting human from his teenage daughter, but they hadn't worked. Brett ignored him, concentrating instead on the rest of the funeral experience.
As it was, the funeral had been necessarily delayed due to all the messy bureaucratic hang-ups caused by Jim's naughty, naughty death.
Mr Hartshorn and Miss Lily forbore the strain with the patience and good-humour always wished for in the upper strata of society, but so rarely demonstrated.
Thus, the Restonia put itself out, slavishly, to fulfil our every whim (and hopefully, avoid any whim we creative artistic types and our lawyers might entertain, of suing the place for gross negligence, illegal entry, mental pain and suffering, and a range of other reasons such as 'outrageous invasion of our peaceful working environment').
One thing is absolutely certain. If it were not for Brett's intervention (at my instigation), Justin Abernathy as well as his aides would have been finding their meals out of gutters. They knew, and had known for years, that to Jim, that gym was a nectar-filled flower to a bee. He had been caught on a gym before, and in a very similar position to the one he achieved when he finally had too much fun for one day, and ruined ours.
He had been put on probation after 'the DeGraff incident', when the weight of his muscle-bound body tore a chandelier from the ceiling in the DeGraff's suite—an antique Bohemian chandelier they took with them everywhere for luck. It shattered when it fell, and was a source of continuing stress to Blakely White, the toady lawyer, as the DeGraffs mulled over 1) the shock of finding a man half-hung and wholly unconscious, when you get back to your suite from an evening conducting Opera, and 2) an even greater worry—the upward-spiralling value of good-luck lost.
So the entire staff at the Restonia was vociferously grateful to us and eloquently horrified at the shock to our beings upon our discovery, waking fresh from slumbers on a lovely mid-day full of promise—Jim's stiff, room-temperature corpse. Our peace was shattered, our creativity sapped, and our persons inconvenienced by the representatives of and tedious formalities of police and legal procedures.
The Restonia, its owners and its friends we never met wanted to get Jim settled and the past forgotten—or if not forgotten, thoroughly forgiven. So with a maximum of privacy and a minimum of red tape, in a relatively short time, which means eventually (or if you are obsessive about minor details, two months—which makes, counting on your fingers, a rancid day in January) the last formalities hanging around Jim's death were put to rest, and Jim was declared Free.
He was taken out of the fridge, suitably packaged, and the funeral, at last, began.
Everyone thanked us for our graciousness, even as the mourners shed their tears of anger at the beautiful, wilful boy, lost too early in life.
Some lovely personal statements were read, the most beautiful, by Ferdinand. Then a person no one knew uttered what I guess was the basic service providers' minimum: two minutes of vaguely ecumenical words ending with a burst of something vaguely musical, signalling that the funeral directors wanted to be left alone.
We left as Jim's coffin went through the crematory gates to be burned to a pile of ash, bone, and little metal bits.
'Too bad,' Justin said, as he glanced back. 'He would have enjoyed this part.'
'Too right,' sniffed Ferdinand, 'Doesn't seem right.' And he broke into fresh tears. 'Keen as mustard he was, just for a bit of excitement.'