no one else in the relatives’ room, just Bunny, stuck with an electric kettle, a jar of instant coffee and some well-thumbed magazines on a worn veneer coffee table – a couple of copies of Hello! from over a year ago and an old Sunday magazine colour supplement. So far he’d drunk several cups of cheap coffee and gleaned a lot of unnecessary information about the Swedish royal family (he hadn’t even known that they had one), not to mention how to throw an ‘elegant summer barbecue’. Could a barbecue be elegant? Bunny couldn’t remember when anyone had last invited him to one, elegant or not.
The ambulance and all the drama of A&E had seemed pointless to Bunny because he was pretty sure that Barclay had already left the planet when the St John Ambulance bloke was applying the defibrillator pads to his grey-haired chest in the crowded corridor outside his dressing room. He’d been helped, but not much, by the ventriloquist, who unexpectedly identified himself as the Palace’s official first-aider. ‘Barclay!’ he kept saying loudly to him. ‘Barclay! Barclay!’ as if he was calling a dog to come back.
Bunny scrolled idly through the photos on his phone. His only son had recently become a father. The new baby, Theo, had his own Instagram account, to which his daughter-in-law had reluctantly given Bunny access. There had been a christening, just before the start of the summer season. Everything was being done by the traditional book for this child – C of E service, full set of godparents, women in silly hats, the top tier of the wedding cake served up at the christening tea. His daughter-in-law was on high alert the whole time. Bunny suspected that she was afraid he would turn up in drag, the evil fairy at the cradle side, cursing her child with his questionable career choices. Of course he hadn’t, he’d worn his best Hugo Boss suit and a pair of brogues as polished as his almost bald skull, with not even a trace of Illamasqua foundation on his face.
‘It’s not that he’s a drag queen,’ Bunny had overheard his daughter-in-law whisper to someone over the ‘quiche fingers’. ‘It’s that he’s such a crap drag queen.’
‘Mr Shepherd?’
‘Yes?’ Bunny jumped up as a nurse entered the room.
‘Would you like to sit with Mr Jack for a while?’
Bunny sighed heavily. This must be some kind of etiquette for the dead. More pointlessness. ‘Yes, sure,’ he said.
He was quietly contemplating Barclay’s yellowing sunken features, wondering how long he had to stay before he could make a polite escape, when his phone rang. Bunny looked at the caller ID. It said ‘Barclay Jack’. Bunny frowned. He contemplated Barclay again. He was quite silent, the sheet tucked up around his chin. For a moment Bunny wondered if it was some kind of prank, but then Barclay wasn’t a prankster. And the entire hospital wouldn’t collude in some kind of elaborate Candid Camera gag involving a corpse. Would it?
Bunny stared intently at Barclay. No, he concluded, he was definitely dead. He put his phone cautiously to his ear and said, ‘Hello?’ but no one answered. ‘The rest is silence,’ Bunny said to Barclay’s corpse, for he was not a stranger to Shakespeare. You had to laugh, he supposed.
Catch of the Day
The Amethyst had been out since first light. She was a fishing boat with four Geordies on board. The men always chartered the Amethyst and the skipper treated them like old friends. They came two or three times a year and took their fishing seriously, although not so seriously that they hadn’t spent the previous evening in the Golden Ball getting plastered, giddily free of domestic duties. Their wives never came on these trips, they remained tethered to their homes further north, grateful to be avoiding the paralysingly tedious subjects of fish, real ale and the competing merits of the A1 and the Tyne Tunnel.
It was set to be a beautiful morning. The sky was full of marshmallow clouds that promised to melt away soon. ‘Going to be a lovely day,’ someone said, and there were murmurs of happy agreement. A flask of coffee was produced and the contentment settled in for the day.
Their lines were baited with squid. They were looking for big fish – cod, ling, pollock, haddock, maybe even halibut if they were lucky.
The cool morning air had almost succeeded in blowing away the effects of last night’s Sam Smith’s when the first of them felt a tug on