Preservation Read Free

it is, that Jan has loved the mother she could never please. ‘What happened?’
    ‘Heart. She was a bit out of breath last week. That’s all. Anyway, are you two going to do the honours for me?’
    And then Jan unfolds the plan. Leonie is in a funeral parlour. There hasn’t been a notice in the paper, so first of all they need to see to that, and then she wants her mother to have a proper funeral. There’s a lawyer who has told her there’s money for it. Jan doesn’t know if she’ll be allowed to go or not, but she’s got her fingers crossed. Before the funeral there must be a viewing of her body. Leonie still had old friends and they’ll need to say goodbye. The viewing part is important, something Leonie was in the habit of doing when people died. She liked funerals. For the viewing she must have a nice dress.
    ‘I’m sure she’s got nice clothes in her wardrobe,’ Sabrina says. ‘She always had lots of clothes.’
    ‘You have to get past this lawyer first. Apparently the house is all locked up. Anyway, she’d let herself go, not like the old Leonie. She told me last week her latest hairdresser was so over her. That’s probably what killed her — she’d run out of new hairdressers to try.’
    Jan wants them to go to a particular boutique and pick up a dress that Leonie had told her about on that last visit. It was, as she described it, the most gorgeous dress she’d ever seen: a label dress, black with a puffed skirt and a peacock at the waist, with feathers trailing down the front. The kind of dress she would have loved to wear when she was young, and now never would, or not in this life. Leonie in her true colours, an exhibitionist at heart. All that gear she got togged up in. The fems never really took toher — she was too much of a girl. And a boys’ girl at that. But she will wear it, Jan says fiercely, just this once. She has got one of the guards to phone the shop and ask them to hold the dress. It’s waiting for them to pick up. She is so relieved the dress is still there, but at the price, this is perhaps not surprising.
    ‘How much?’ says Sabrina.
    ‘Two thousand three hundred,’ says Jan without a flicker. ‘Will your credit cards stand it? You can go halves. It’s only for a couple of days.’
    ‘Hullo,’ says Elsa, on a sharp intake of breath.
    ‘You lay her out in it, and then you take it back after the viewing. They can pop her in something else when they close the coffin. Be sure to leave the label on when you take it back to the shop.’
    ‘Oh no,’ says Elsa, ‘no, you can’t do that.’ Elsa’s mother had been a corsetiere in a department store. She’d told Elsa about the way customers did dreadful things and tried to return clothes that were grubby and you could see they’d been worn. Undergarments at that. Filth, her mother used to say. We wore rubber gloves to deal with some of that stuff.
    ‘I’m not asking you to pay for it,’ Jan says. ‘Just treat it like a loan. Somebody in here told me how it’s done.’
    ‘But it’s not right,’ says Sabrina.
    So Jan reminds her then, reminds both of them. How they always said they’d stick together. About the night they stayed over with those boys, and she’d told their mothers they’d been at her place, and the way Elsa’s mother had rung to check, because she didn’t really trust Jan, and besides they weren’t in the habit of staying at Jan’s place, and her daughter was such a good girl, and Jan had sweet-talked her into believing they were all asleep already, and told her what they had watched on television, only it was Jan who had sat by herself and watched that programme, not knowing where they were, or even that they had gone out with the boys, and lain awake all night worrying that she should really have told Elsa’s mother in case they’d been raped and murdered.She says all of this in a flat relentless tone, not really looking at them, just going on and on. She raises her eyes to Sabrina.