They say you tend to repeat yourself when you get older and I'm afraid it's true for me. I was scouring the internet yesterday looking for ideas for stories and found a site which promised 'prompts' to get writers started. One idea was to write about being a spectator at your own funeral. I wrote a terrific 800-word story, Outsider at a Funeral, which I had planned to publish on this site today.
However, there was a nagging thought bothering me: the idea seems familiar so I dug through the hard drive and there it was: Onlooker at a Funeral which I wrote in August 2023. I'll put that older one up today and save the updated version for another time.
Jacob was feeling quite pleased with himself. It was a clever move, disguising himself as a gardener; nobody ever paid any attention to the staff and, as long as he didn’t get too close to where the funeral was taking place, he was safe from discovery. He adjusted his hat and scratched his neck; wearing a false beard was a necessity but it was no fun.
Some of the words being spoken by the funeral director travelled to his ears, “.. to lay to rest, the mortal remains of our dearly-beloved, Jacob ….. sadly-missed by his loving wife, Sonya … dust to dust. If this weren’t a solemn occasion, Jacob might have felt like throwing up. The hypocrisy of it all! That witch didn’t have a kind word for him while he was alive, let alone a loving one. But now that he was presumed by all to be dead, she was all sweetness and light. Probably she was mentally counting her anticipated legacy. Isn’t she in for a surprise!
Jacob suddenly realised he was tired. This plan to convince his parasite of a wife that he was dead seemed simple when it occurred to him but putting it into practice was much more difficult than he had anticipated. He had no idea how many people he would have to bribe to make sure there were no holes in the plot, and he could not have imagined the number of fake documents he would have to pay for. In the long run, though, he knew it would all be worth it. When he and Tiffany started their new life together in their beachside villa on San Miguel Bay in the Philippines, life would be wonderful.
It was hard to pinpoint when everything started to go wrong with his marriage. When he and Sonya married, he had been a struggling lawyer trying to make a living in the cut-throat world of the big city. Sydney was a hard place to get a toe-hold in legal circles. Universities had discovered that educating lawyers was a good way to maintain their market share: there seemed to be a never-ending stream of applicants for the available places, there was no need for expensive laboratories, nor staff to run them, and the clean-cut, private-school educated students weren’t interested in student politics so caused no disruptions on the campus.
The problem came at the end of their education cycle: too many young, hungry, barely-trained legal practitioners hit the job market at about the same and there were just not enough available positions for all the applicants. Those who got ahead were often the ones who were most ready to cut corners.
It was a chance encounter at The Fortune of War pub in The Rocks which gave Jacob his start. Jacob had called in for a quiet drink after another day of trudging from one meeting to another trying to pin down a job. The fellow on the stool beside him might have been called a colourful character in a previous generation. He had a florid face topped by a narrow-brimmed hat, a prominent beer-belly and a loud, hectoring voice. He noticed Jacob nursing his beer.
“Cheer up!” he said. “You look like you’ve lost a fiver and found a threepenny-bit,” he said in a jovial voice. Jacob, unsure of the reference, still answered politely that he had just spent another fruitless day looking for a job. One thing led to another and Jacob found himself on the payroll of one of the best-connected crooks in downtown Sydney.
All that happened thirty years ago and Jacob knew that it was time to make plans for the next stage of his life. By any measure, he was wealthy and, to the casual observer, he had a loving wife and family, and a lifestyle to be envied, but Jacob could not imagine seeing out his remaining years like this. His children had grown up and left home so, in Jacob’s eyes, now was the time to make the move.
As in all things, Jacob planned meticulously. He had been transferring money overseas for many years, partly to avoid taxation but, in the back of his mind, there was always the thought that he might have to disappear in a hurry. He had bought property in a number of other countries but he was particularly attached to his little touch of paradise in the Philippines. In his mind, it could be a perfect bolt-hole if things came unstuck.
Lost in his thoughts, he failed to notice the ride-on mower coming up behind him. Nor did he hear the driver, ear-buds in, singing along lustily to the most recent blockbuster from Korea. The coroner said later that Jacob had stepped carelessly into the path of the mower and that it was clearly Death by Misadventure.
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