Our number is sadly depleted

Manny was sure of it, it was the same church Stella and Arthur had married in, forty years before. He knew it, even if Arthur insisted it wasn’t.

“That was Saint Stephen’s, in Hampstead.”

“Are you sure?” said Manny. “It looks the same. So they changed the name?”

“Manny, how many times? This is Wimbledon. We’ve lived in Wimbledon for twenty years.”

“I always told you not to move south of the river.”

Arthur threw up his hands. They had both turned 68 that year, but they still argued like they did when they had first met at school at 15 – with Manny never backing down, always convinced he was right even when he was so clearly wrong, and Arthur always allowing himself to be drawn in, never remembering until it was too late that Manny never gave up. “You’re right Manny, same church.”

“Full circle,” he said, reaching out and clutching his friend’s elbow with a sudden intensity. “It always comes full circle.”

They took a look at each other. Manny’s glasses were now so thick his eyes were the size of egg yolks behind them, his paper-thin skin had sunken so far into his cheeks you could see the outlines of his remaining teeth, and the few hairs on his head were so frail the wind next to Stella’s grave seemed likely to blow them away. Arthur was only a little better – his eyes weren’t so bad that he needed glasses all the time, and he had most of his hair, but he had been unable to prevent his chest from becoming worrisomely convex and his knees only allowed him to stand for half an hour or so at a time. Yet each looked at the other and swore: “I’ll never let myself get that bad.”

“Rossie didn’t make it huh?” said Manny, looking around at the small crowd by the grave.

“Our number is sadly depleted. Rossie is having the tumour cut out of his stomach.”

“Or the stomach cut out of his tumour,” Manny laughed darkly. “Comes to us all. Still, it was a good service.”

“She didn’t really believe.”

“Hedge your bets that’s what I say. Hey look, look what I have.”

Manny pulled out a photograph from his pocket. It showed the two of them and their friends on a beach holiday a long, long time ago, all smiling at the camera with their own teeth, smooth skin and happy, untroubled eyes.

“Lucky bastards,” said Manny. “There’s Stella, right there.” He pointed to a slim, good-looking girl with dark curls, dressed in a swimsuit and flanked by two skinny young men, both with their arms around her, but one much closer than the other. “There’s you, look, looks like you’re leaning in for a kiss!”

“That’s you Manny.” Arthur corrected him. “I’m on the left.” Manny pulled the photo away from his friend and held it up close to his glasses. If there had been any spare blood in his frail form, he would have been blushing.

“Yeah, that’s right. And look, there’s Rossie.” A fair-haired head was poking out from behind Arthur’s left shoulder, just enough to be in shot but looking a little disembodied.

“And there’s Horatio.” Arthur joined in, pointing at a well-built man on the far left, standing with his hands on his hips in a pair of tiny shorts.

“Poser,” said Manny.

“You remember we said, with a name like Horatio Hodgkiss, he’d never die?”

“His parents gave him immunity from death, just with a name like that,” agreed Manny.

“Didn’t stop the heart attack though.”

“Or the HGV.”

“That was a bad end. Come on, let’s get out of here.” Arthur turned. Looking round at the congregation, he made it clear it was time to go. The nephews, nieces, cousins and friends of his dead wife filed past him and towards the exit. When they were all on their way, Arthur waited for the final mourner.

“Manny, time to go.”

Manny looked away from his friend and down into the grave. “You go first.”

“She’s my wife Manny. I should be last.”

“I won’t let you.”

“What?”

“I said I won’t let you.”

“Why the hell not?”

Manny hopped from one foot to the other, he was clenching and unclenching his fists and breathing heavily. “Don’t you remember? You remember who left last at Alice’s funeral?”

“No, why should I remember that?”

“Henry, it was Henry. He was there for a good ten minutes after we left, in the rain”

“So?”

“And what happened to Henry three months later?”

“He died of pneumonia. “

“Yeah? And who was last at Henry’s funeral?”

“I don’t know Manny. I don’t remember this stuff.”

“It was Eve. I had to go get her and pull her away.”

“Eve’s not dead Manny.”

“As good as!” Manny folded his arms and turned away from his friend. With the way the glasses magnified his eyes, there was no hiding tears if they came. “She doesn’t know where she is, when she is, fucking who she is. She’s long gone Arthur.”

“So you’re saying if I leave last I die next?”

“It’s bad luck, that’s all. Let me take this for you, please.”

Arthur reached over and put his hand on his friend’s shoulder. He tried to pull him round but Manny wouldn’t budge.

“All right Manny, take all the time you need.”

“I’ll be right along that’s all.”

Arthur turned and walked away. When he had gone some distance Manny took a deep breath and turned back to the grave. He lowered himself gently down to kneel beside it. Then he reached inside his jacket pocket and pulled out a small wooden chest.

“I kept them all,” he whispered. “Every letter you wrote to me. Every time you told me it was never going to happen again, I looked over each and every sentence, each and every word, each and every pen stroke, looking for a reason not to believe you. And I always found it didn’t I? Even as the years fell away, just fell away like they’d never been at all, like nothing had ever happened. I kept writing to you, Stella, kept hoping. He saw you first, that was all – and rules were rules. It should have been me, though – everyone knew that. It should have been me.”

Manny dropped the chest in the grave, took off his glasses and wiped the tears away with a rough, calloused hand. Everything before him disappeared in a greeny-brown smudge of colour, a world without definition, without edges, with everything bleeding into everything else, and nothing recognisable anymore, nothing his tired brain could form a reality from, no patterns to recognise, no objects to be defined. He pushed his hands against his bent knee and brought himself slowly to his feet. Then he wiped more tears from his cheeks before putting his glasses back on and once more temporarily forcing order on the world. He headed towards the exit. Two minutes later he was in the car with Arthur.

“Looks like I’m next then,” Manny said as he struggled to fit the seat belt into the lock.

Arthur looked his friend in the eyes, and saw the great white orbs coruscated with red webbing. No, there never was any hiding it.

“Maybe you’re right Manny,” Arthur said, taking the belt out of his friend’s hands and clicking it safely home. “Maybe it should have been you, after all.”