New Animal by Ella Baxter (speed reading book .TXT) 📕

I pull on the thin gloves and squeeze a large dot of each product onto the back of my hand, then roll a short-haired brush through it before dabbing it evenly across Jennifer’s knuckles.

For suicide cases I prefer to start where the injury is located because that’s where people will be looking. For necks I use scarves and turtlenecks. For wrists I use flowers as a prop so that nothing is showing. Every single person who comes to her funeral today will approach her coffin and look at her wrists. I think it’s human nature to want to look at wounds. It must be.

‘Great colour,’ Vincent says, placing his hand on the edge of her coffin. ‘You know, before all the legal regulations and blah blah bullshit, I used to get on the tools and do all this myself.’ ‘You were useless,’ says my mother. ‘Ham-fisted.’

‘That’s not true,’ he says. ‘You used to say to me, Only you are allowed to do my face when I’m gone. Don’t let anyone else touch me.’

‘That was before Amelia was qualified. Until then I had to come in here and blend every day. Every day, Vincent. You gave them all red apple cheeks.’

I change brushes and try to keep my full attention on Jennifer. There are only two shades of nail polish you can use in my opinion, and I get the sense that she is more of a cappuccino than a blushing coral. I’ll paint her nails last, then spray them with a varnish dryer. I glance around the room, trying to locate the crate of nail supplies.

‘Name one person I did that to,’ Vincent is saying.

‘Lucas Reid,’ my mother replies immediately.

He waves his palm through the air like a metronome. ‘That was thirteen years ago, Josie—thirteen years ago.’

‘Completely unrecognisable,’ my mother says, shaking her head and clasping her hands together under her chin.

Vincent had set Mr Reid’s face a few shades darker than necessary. I remember my mother piling navy chiffon around his face and lighting him from the side, while Judy frantically scattered gladioli around the base of the casket as a distraction.

‘I really need to focus if you want her to be ready in time,’ I tell them.

Vincent bows deeply in my direction. ‘I’ll leave it to the expert then.’

‘I’ll go too,’ my mother says before gesturing to the irises. ‘Slip three under her hands when she’s ready.’

‘I know what to do,’ I say, as she follows Vincent out the door. As soon as it closes behind them, I release a breath I didn’t realise I was holding.

Finally. Just her and me.

Are her hands comfortable? I mimic the placement to test it.

What about her head? The hairstyle can’t look too matronly. Is she natural enough? Do the eyelids look strained? I tilt her chin. Where would she have liked her head to go? I move it again.

I wish that the people closest to her could see what I do. Then perhaps they could feel that dark things aren’t actually always so dark. Dead things. Bone things. Blood and skin and matter things. It’s now natural that she is this still. That she turns a different colour. That parts of her harden. But to the people who knew her and loved her most, it feels better to know that all her openings are sealed shut. Give her face a fresh coat of paint, and put her in a dress that she never even moved in.

As I shift Jennifer’s body into a more natural position, I wonder if her mother is organising a bathroom renovation that she probably can’t afford. The aunt would organise it. Aunts always spring into action at times like this. They are the ones we argue with the most because they seem to channel all their suffering into creating a space for their siblings to mourn. Aunts write the emails. Aunts haggle over the prices. Aunts are titans in this industry. While holding her sister up, the aunt would be liaising with plumbers and tilers. She would demonstrate the right way to glance around the bathroom, ignoring the dark ring of blood marking the tub, and the rest of the family and the subcontractors would follow her lead with relief.

My concentration is broken by my mother calling out to Judy as she drags the vacuum out of the cupboard. She turns it on, and the high-pitched wail of it merges in and out of harmony with her rendition of ‘Delta Dawn’ as she shunts it across the hallway carpet. There’s a loud thump as she knocks the vacuum head into one of the sofa chairs, almost as if using it as a point to push off from. Judy has joined in with the singing and they both hold a long note together, before my mother voyages so far into the next room that the cord disconnects from the socket and the wailing stops.

As I brush make-up across Jennifer’s face, I wish I could tell her what today will entail. How important it is for her people to see her like this, how they need to witness this image of her at peace before they can begin to feel peace themselves. I want to tell her that people sitting in front of her coffin will be angry and confused by what she did, and that these feelings will be magnified by her three dull cousins singing ‘In the Arms of an Angel’. I want to tell her that a woman can take another woman’s weight, and that my mother will find her mother and lead her away from it all. They will stand together in front of the apricot trees outside, with their backs to the other mourners, and my mother will point to the trees and tell Jennifer’s mother that each of these trees loses everything.

Leaves. Flowers. Fruit. Until it’s nothing but sticks under the sky.

She’ll say this part again.

No leaves. No flowers. No fruit.

Her message is significant,