Ugly Girls Aren't Pretty. (A short story)

Ugly Girls Aren’t Pretty.

Sitting down to write this I wonder whether I should do it like my old English teacher would have wanted me to. To start with the big picture and focus in. But this story has no big picture, no greater meaning. It won’t span over hundreds of pages, I won’t get cramp writing it, because it is short. It is a small picture, a frozen moment in time that will be mounted in a cheap boutique frame and stood, taking up very little room on a mantelpiece somewhere, it will be noticed only occasionally by the observant.
She would have wanted me to tell you about what the weather was like that day. That the sky was thick with huge lazy rain clouds rolling ominously overhead. About the bitter wind wrenching the remaining brittle autumn leaves off of a skeletal tree. But to be honest I can’t remember what the weather was like, whether the air was buzzing with the promise of heavy rain and terrifying bellows of thunder. It could have been sunny, it didn’t matter to me. I have always been British but I don’t share that fixation with the weather that the nation seems so proud of.
It didn’t matter, I had walked the short way to the graveyard getting hot and sweaty in a long raincoat Caroline had forced me to wear. My mother’s grave was near the south entrance and it was the thirteenth anniversary of her being in that cold ground. The small bunch of supermarket bought flowers in my hand was testament to that.
My mother and I had never been close. When I lived with my parents we were a family and did what families did. No more but no less. For instance Sunday lunch, an event I never looked forward to but neither did my parents. We sat and ate and talked about the weather. After I left to live in the inadequate dormitories of my university, Hull, I would come home for the holidays but avoid the house if I could. Staying out late with friends or inviting people round so that I did not have to sit awkwardly on the sofa clutching a cooling mug of tea and watching the conversation rapidly deteriorate to comments about the weather.
I nodded to my father’s grave as I passed, I would be seeing him in June. He had had the decency to hold on another seven months till summer before following my mother into that gaping hole. People had said it was morbidly romantic, that he couldn’t live without her and I supposed in a way they’re right. My mother did everything for him; I was surprised he managed seven months cooking for himself. When I sit and think about it, I didn’t know why I do it. Come every year with the same bunch of seasonal flowers to that small slab of granite engraved with the standard name, date and vague homage. ‘Beloved wife and mother’. When I was angry, and I used to be angry a lot back then I laughed about how it should have been ‘Beloved slave and stranger’ but I suppose that’s unfair.
I heard the sobbing first, before I looked up and noticed the man stood almost directly beside me hunched over a chillingly recent grave. ‘David Jennings 1991 – 2008. A son taken too soon.’ Were the words carved into that stone. The man was about my age but his hair was decidedly more grey. His moustache was almost white, and thin tears rolled out of heavily wrinkled eyes. I suppose I would say that those eyes sent shivers down my spine, that the ice blue desperation called out to me, that I would remember them forever along with the feeling of sorrow and loss that sent shockwaves through my dreary and un-passionate existence. My English teacher would have had a field day. But I can’t and all I recall is an over whelming feeling of embarrassment, both for the man and for myself. It would have stopped there but the man caught my eye and smiled weakly. I nodded in his direction and quickly looked at my feet hoping to appear engrossed in my own private grieving.
‘Hello’ he said, his voice pathetic and weak but unmistakably directed at me. As I said I may not be obsessed with the weather but I am British and could not bring myself to be rude.
‘Hello’ I said back and to my utter horror the man got to his feet. I saw great muddy stains on the knees of his trousers.
‘It’s a bitch isn’t it’ he offered, wiping away his tears with the back of his hand. I pretended to understand and nodded again, terrified and awkward, thrown completely off balance by this uncalled for familiarity.
‘My son’ he pointed at David’s grave.
‘He was going to be eighteen in January’ I paused wondering if he was going to go on. He didn’t so I prompted, more afraid of the silence than of this man’s unbridled grief.
‘How did it happen?’ he looked at me.
‘Nothing special, four of them, all boys naturally, the car was just going too fast, they all died instantly of course’ he trailed off as if that small conciliation of a quick and painless death was enough. He ran a rough hand through his ruffled, un-kept hair.
‘You know’ he began and stopped, searching for the words sucking in a great lungful of air through clenched teeth.
‘You know, if I’d had a little more time with him, just a little more, if I could go back, to before the accident to do one more thing, do you know what I would have done?’ his manor was polite and casual as if we were neighbours chatting over a white picket fence, and not strangers talking over graves.
‘What would you have done?’ I asked, genuinely interested to see what nugget of wisdom he was about to pass on.
‘I would have sat him down and told him’ another pause and another search for words as fresh tears collected in his tired eyes.
‘Told him it was al bollocks, that sometimes the best option is to lie through your bloody teeth and that ugly girls just aren’t pretty.’ He laughed dryly to himself and coughed before wandering away, hands in his pockets. I looked down at the factory grown flowers wrapped in shiny plastic hanging limply in my hand and turned back towards my mother’s grave wishing I were clever enough to say something profound to the nothingness. After a time I just felt stupid, lay the flowers on her grave and told her I loved her, and hoped that dad wasn’t giving her too much of a hard time in heaven. Then it started to rain and I made not to tell Caroline at dinner as I walked back to the house still feeling hot and sweaty.