Remembering a friend with The Fall, sequins, and a poem

The funeral cortege pulls into the car park by the waste ground where Blockbuster video used to be. A few stores still survive: Home Bargains, Iceland and a big Barnardo’s charity shop. On the corner stand the shop volunteers. Some are weeping. They are crying for Sue. Sue volunteered there; this is her funeral.

I wonder what those coming to buy Chicken Fingers and Jaffa Cakes (both on special offer this week), make of it all. It is profoundly moving. It is not dissimilar to the kind of radio sketch I might have written with Sue.

It’s my duty to perform the eulogy. I am wearing Sue’s skimpy gold sequinned top under my white shirt and black tie. It is the top she would strip down to, to close her shows with a display of tap-dancing enhanced by eating a Swiss roll.

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I meet a bunch of Manchester comedians I used to hang out with regularly. This was the first place where I felt part of the comedy scene, even though London was my home. For 25 years, I stayed at the house Sue shared with Carl every time I played anywhere in the north west. It was company that I felt truly comfortable with. We laughed a lot.

Midge the celebrant does a magnificent job of summarising the many things Sue was and, as Sue was a great fan of rude words and filth delivered with innocent eyes, it is an 18-certificate ceremony.

Sue was a single mum. I’ve known her daughter Eliah since she was 12 years old and for her and for Sue, I want to create something as absurd and mad as the comedy we loved and the jokes we made each other laugh with.

I take to the lectern with a slight change in dress; I am now wearing Sue’s kimono over my suit and tie. The lectern is next to a plaque for Oswald Mosley (not that one).

I conclude by stripping down to Sue’s sequinned top and getting the congregation to sing On The Trail of the Lonesome Pine. My friend Chris tells me that I look like the landlord of a 1970s gay bar calling last orders. I scramble to pick up my discarded clothing and return to my pew.

Happy Feet comes through the speakers and I know I am not the only one who expects Sue to burst through the wicker of her coffin and start dancing.

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The undertaker bows to the coffin, then spins around and does a little dance routine. Like any good funeral, we wish Sue could have been there to see it. I think she would have loved this celebration of her life and personality. Sometimes when someone dies, my first thought is, “but we haven’t finished talking yet”. This time it is “but we haven’t finished laughing yet”.

On the way out, we take a pebble from Sue’s vast collection of stones. She loved looking at the shapes and patterns of nature. We retire to the Klondike Club and eat egg rolls while The Fall, her favourite band, blares from the speakers.

The next day is the Gorton and Denton by-election, the constituency that Sue lived in. She would have been so happy that Hannah Spencer, plumber and compassionate human being, won a resounding victory. One of her hobbies was shouting at right-wing news hacks, and I am sure she would have enjoyed the spectacle of whining from the sore losers who seemed to feel the Green Party cheated by making more people want to vote for them.

I read this poem at Sue’s funeral. I hope you have time to look at the pebbles today.

On the beach 

I find a library

Each stone I hold

Each shape I turn

I find stories – 

some truth

Some myth 

Some mischief

I stare at them

Inscrutable

I don’t have the reading glasses required

So I turn to my friend Sue

Who wears the spectacles of science

She tells me of the pebbles’ path

Both past and destiny

And then

With a hag stone

We turn to the monocle of myth

Our pattern-seeking mind finds a face

Smuggler, pirate or buccaneer soul

Trapped in stone

Waves crash our minds into the sadness of the Selkie

And a Kraken waiting just beyond the skyline

Driftwood sea smoothed into dinosaur bones

And other marionette megafauna

The mermaid’s purse pickpocketed by the seaweed

Coffee calls our cold hands

As the stones call for our attention

“The tide will take me

Don’t you want to hear my tale”

And shivering we stay

Enraptured

And hear the hag stone laugh.

Robin Ince is a broadcaster and poet.

Ice Cream for a Broken Tooth: Poems about life, death, and the odd bits in betweenby Robin Ince is out now (Flapjack Press, £12).

You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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