Whilst Beth and Izzy were away travelling the world, experiencing new continents and cultures, touching the far corners of the globe, we went to John Lewis to look for a new kitchen sink bowl.

And it was there, in the household accessories department, that we found it – ‘The One’. The kitchen sink bowl that stood out from all the other competing bowls. The bowl that rose above the beige. The ultimate bowl. The uber bowl.

It was displayed alone, set apart from the others, as if it needed its own space on the shelf because it simply could not compare to the rest.  It sat there as if lit with a glowing halo. It was a bowl like no other. This one, and this one alone stood out because … it had its own plug hole. 

With just a mere twist of the wrist, you could extract a centrally placed plughole to allow it to self-drain, thus expelling the soiled water instantly to the sink drain beneath it. The genius of its design was it negated the need for the extra exertion that was usually required, of having to pick up the bowl by its side to tip the contents down the plug hole.

‘Ha!’ I thought. 

They may have headed off to see far flung sunsets and feel sands as soft as snow between their toes.  They may be making new, ever lasting friendships whilst exploring the vastness of this gorgeous world with just a backpack on their backs. They may be staring in awe and wonder at unreal, orangey sunrises and infinite, watery horizons. They may be being startled by the many and varied, intangible wonders of the world and of the people they meet, the places they stand and the air they breathe.

But we had a new sink bowl.  Oh yes we did.

I carefully carried the immaculate glowing, perfectly moulded plastic kitchen accessory to the cashier’s desk to pay its ‘never knowingly undersold’ price. Worth its weight in gold.

This was to be a radical shift in our home life.  A departure from the conventional ways of washing up. A new way of conceiving the very idea of washing up. Our new sink bowl’s unique design would have such a profound, life changing impact, that I knew, on their return home, that I would need to carefully and painstakingly instruct them both on its operational procedure and demonstrate the self draining benefits it would bring to their young lives.

Ok, maybe I’d let them get a shower and change first.

I kid you not, this was the level of change that I foresaw in my world.

As people filed out of the church at the end of Beth and Izzy’s funeral ‘One Day Like This’ by Elbow rang out. Its sweeping refrain resounded through eaves and arches, looped to keep it going long enough, we hoped, to allow enough time for everyone to leave. 

We’d decided we didn’t want a ring of bells as an exit sound – I’m not even sure it would have been allowed even if we’d asked – but certainly, no ominous church organ chords. Instead, we chose an indie rock anthem in F major. A wantonly optimistic refrain for us to ceremoniously file out to, through the lines of oak pews filled with people, with standing room at the back of the parish church.

“It’s looking like a beautiful day.”

Everyone there was, I’m sure, utterly lost, reeling in the very visceral shock of it all. We’d just been to Izzy and Beth’s funeral. Their FUNERAL, ffs.

‘Throw those curtains wide!

One day like this a year would see me right.’’

Everyone set incomprehensibly adrift, heads spinning with the surreal magnitude of it all. Stunned, as I remember it, to a looming silence, as we all filed out.

‘Throw those curtains wide!

One day like this a year would see me right.’’

Days before, Trace and I had sat together in our little home study, forcing ourselves to plan this god-awful event; this unbearable, this stupid, this thrust upon us, unthinkable thing.  

The structure of the service had, with a little loosening of the Church of England liturgy – thanks to the amiable parish priest, started to take what felt like it’s natural shape – something that included as many of their closest friends as possible, to help their young broken hearts grieve and say what they could of what their grief meant. And it had to include music, we knew that for sure. 

Over the coming days, squirrelled away in our study with Spotify, the music seemed to fall naturally into place. Each track seemed poignantly placed, organic, meant to be, at that particular moment in the ceremony – and mostly, easy to agree between us. Each an instinctive, heart wrenching choice. The playlist – simply called ‘Service’ – is still on my Spotify playlist to this day. 

And then, seemingly out of nowhere, came ‘One Day Like This’.

I’ve no idea where the idea came from – neither of us is particularly an Elbow fan, I don’t even follow them on Spotify. I think I’ve only got The Seldom Seen Kid, the album that features ‘One Day Like This’ in my ready-to-be-stolen-by-Beth CD collection. And there was no obvious emotional or personal connection, like there was with Mr Hudson’s ‘Forever Young’.

‘Throw those curtains wide!

One day like this a year would see me right.’’

But somehow the words, the chords, the chorus, the refrain, despite of, or maybe even because of, their perpetual optimism and love of life and of ‘living in the moment’ seemed the very right, very perfect and very poignant choice. It somehow summed up Beth and Izzy – their zest, their youth, their love of life.  Their so adorable, so kissable faces.

F                                         Eb

So throw those curtains wide!  

Bb                                          

One day like this a year, see me right!

And at the same time, it summed up the dogged optimism we knew we had to somehow muster, to actually try to carry on with life without them. 

The title ‘How to Choose the Music for your Children’s Funeral’ sounds, I have to admit, a bit like click bait, but After Weeks 2 and 3, the earthy order of events, the ceremonies of death, the rituals of passing had to be faced up to, whether we were up for it or not.  And that included choosing the music for their funeral.

I feel sure that, should we have been rendered utterly incapable of doing it ourselves, the Church of England would have nobly stepped in. Times like your kid’s funeral, that’s what a parish vicar’s for, right? Even if we weren’t actually part of his parishional flock or had ever met him before.

The C of E would have, I’m sure, plumped for one of the firm favourites in the order of service guidebook to funeral music – hymns to be heartily sung ‘after Opening Prayers or interspersed throughout the service’ – I quote. Hymns like ‘He who would valiant be (To be a pilgrim)’ or the equally rousing ‘Lord of all hopefulness’. Something solemn, stirring, if a tad bombastic.

But we didn’t want that, we knew that for sure, because Beth would never have allowed it. Ever.

However, annoyingly, neither of them had had the foresight to leave us a last will and testament or any written instructions or guidance on their desired ceremonial proceedings or, more to the point, any musical directions.  

Other than one.

Wind back time just a handful of weeks (to Sunday 10 January 2016, to be precise) and we were driving over the Pennines to take them to MAN Terminal 1, with their South East Asia backpacks safely stowed in the boot of the car.

Trace was in the front, I was driving, Beth and Izzy were in the back.

As we crossed Ladybower dam and met the snaking curve of the hills that rise and descent towards Manchester, Beth started one of her ever familiar macabre banters – her effervescent, surreal, mind churning conversation openers. Memorable other openers included ‘would you rather have a monkey’s arms or a monkey’s brain?’

‘If we die when we’re travelling, I want you to play Highway to Hell at my funeral.’

‘Play what?’ I said.

‘AC/DC, Highway to Hell.’

At that point, in what was typical of me ‘Before’, I totally switched off.  It was a stupid, pointless conversation anyway. Silly, ridiculous thing to think about. Disengage with the conversation. Drift off. Think about something or nothing.

Thus, self-muted, I have no recollection whatsoever of what Izzy offered up, if she offered up anything at all, which I’m sure she did. I just concentrated on driving the car over the winding Snake Pass. Stupid conversation. Focus on the here and now, the steering wheel, brake, accelerate, brake, accelerate. Bloody hills.

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Looking back at it now, the music we ended up choosing for their funeral was a vivid and violently spontaneous outpouring of our emotions. Of our unfathomable shock at what was happening. 

But it was also our heartfelt response, felt through our streaming tears and sleepless nights, to their joy and their love of life.

They had so much light, so much life, so much love in them and ahead of them.

---

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Sorry Beth, we didn’t play Highway to Hell. 

So, readers, go play it now. 

Go on.

For Beth. 

Play it loud.

Play it very, very loud.

The unfamiliar sound of Mario’s indicator as I turn left at the mini roundabout at the end of our road. Click click, click click. Metallic but oddly comforting. This is Mario’s maiden voyage on a so routine, 10-minute road trip to my parent’s house.

A well-worn third of a turn of the steering wheel to the left, followed by a routine gear shift from second to third, to make steady progress up the slight gradient towards the traffic lights that separate a small collection of local shops. Then, with the fortune of a green light, Mario goes straight on, and I make a nonchalant glance at the oncoming traffic in case of someone’s unexpected decision to turn right in front of my right of way.

Mario cruises up the hill, taking naturally to this habitual road routine.

At the next left turn, I make only a cursory glance to my right towards the potential oncoming traffic. I know, I just know, that, nine times out of ten, I can turn left and accelerate without any opposition from the right. After all, these are slow, suburban S10 roads. And its only early afternoon on a Friday – no need for other road users to make haste.

Almost every school day Friday, I’d make this same, routine journey to pick Izzy up from my mum and dad’s, who had in-turn routinely picked her up from school and taken her back to theirs. Here at granmas, from single digit primary to double digit aspiring teen, Izzy would play Monopoly with my mum until she won and have my dad blow raspberries into her neck to make her squeal with delight.

Today though, I take this well-trodden path for the first time in Izzy’s Mario, not to pick Izzy up but to break the awful, unspeakable news.

Today, I change gears in the same familiar places, I accelerate, turn the wheel left, then right, then left, then right. I take the same short cuts, the same side streets I’ve taken for years.

But today, I need to do it with haste. I need to do this right now because the clock is ticking. I know my mum spends her days looking at the world from her iPad seeing its comings and goings from the BBC homepage. And I’m in a race with global news operations. I simply have to be there to tell her myself, so she doesn’t get to know from the Internet.

Finally, the last right turn and I indicate to pull up onto the curb in front my parents’ driveway. I turn off Mario’s engine. I take the key out. I reach for the door handle and step out onto the tarmac. I press the key to lock the car.

I walk up to my parent’s front door and go straight in without ringing the bell.

We were late for our flight. We were cutting it fine, but we were there. We’d made it.

Trace, Izzy and I hurried towards the expectant final call checking desk and as we neared, I pulled out of the top pocket of my jacket our three passports. At the desk, I fumbled in vain to open all three passports on their respective photo page. 

But then I stopped trying. An overcoming sense of calm swept me. We’d made it. We were there, there was no need to panic anymore.

I laid our passports on the counter for the checking desk clerk to deal with.

She smiled with a steady professional ease and scooped them up in a flash of pink polished fingernails, from the beige vinyl of the check-in desk.

It was then that I noticed that Izzy’s passport, sandwiched between mine and Traces, wasn’t, in fact, her passport anymore. The dense, red and gold embossed official document that, split seconds earlier I’d pulled from my pocket and placed reassuringly on the check-in desk, had been replaced by a piece of folded up, crumbled at the edges A4 paper.

The check-in clerk unfolded the sheet of paper and looked down at a black and white photocopy of Izzy’s passport, open at the photo page.

I stood back for a moment, unnerved and unsure of myself. I’d just handed her all three passports, right? Out of my top right pocket, where I’d put them earlier? To make sure of a speedy check-in?

I glanced at Trace and Izzy stood beside me, to confirm my reality. They were both stood right there, both panting for breath from the anxiety of our late arrival as much as I was. And I’d just given her all 3 of our passports.

The check-in clerk smiled. ‘It’s ok’, she said, ‘as long as there’s two, it’s all covered’.

I didn’t question it. It was a massive relieve. We would still be on our way. We all thanked her, gathered our baggage and headed for security.

It turned out we were flying from a tiny airport, really no more than an airfield. A handful of small propeller planes sat stationary, as we were escorted at pace onto the runway by a nervous looking besuited male airport assistant towards our awaiting plane, its propellers already fired up for take-off. Trace was just ahead of me, striding towards the aircraft and Izzy was just behind me, ladened down with the stuff she’d wanted to bring with her, clutched to her chest, as well as rammed full in her backpack.

It turned out we were walking through unkempt, dry long grass, rather than the usual pristine tarmac of a runway. There were no painted yellow lines on a smooth grey surface to guide us, no orange plastic barriers to heed our way. And what made matters worse, with all the baggage I was carrying, (as with Izzy, I too was laden down with baggage) I had to loop my foot around one holdall bag and drag it along the grass.

I was thinking, why isn’t this guy helping me? Why’s he not offering to pick up the bag I’m having to drag along the ground with my ankle? Why’s he not helping Izzy with her luggage too?

My iPhone alarm goes off. It’s a slow, pulsing ring tone, designed to gently wake me up from sleep.

I breathe, then I breathe again.

I look at the window blinds and clock that the sun’s up. It’s light, it’s mid-May. All the environmental signs confirm my iPhone’s previous assertion. It’s 7am and I’ve been dreaming.

I lie in bed and carry on breathing. Breathing.

It’s like my day brain is still processing things, still coming to terms with the reality of a mid-May morning. It’s like it needs a little more time to adjust before my dreaming brain shuts down.

In the few minutes it takes for one brain to handover to the other, one to clock-off and the other to clock-in, I lie in bed and hold on dearly to the few precious moments I have left of being awake when it still feels like Izzy is really here. I cling onto that feeling, that momentary proximity, not ever wanting to let go, as my sleeping brain begins to shut down and my day brain takes over. She’s here. She’s there. She’s stood right next to me at check-in. She’s running alongside me to get on the plane.

I get up and go downstairs to make coffee. Trace is already up, no doubt from another restless night. I take over coffee and lie at opposite ends of the sofa with her, still half asleep. We play with the dogs, both competing for our attention, our fingers running through their fluffy, lockdown coats.

As I tell Trace about my dream, still rich and wooing in my head, I think, is this like brain defragging?

In the early days of having a PC, I’d periodically have to defrag my hard drive. Defragging would shift and reorganise files, bits of code, software installations, upgrades and the like and move them around to make more space on the hard drive. It was a like having a good old tidy up, a clear out and a reshuffle of all that was there.

The defrag programme would take some time, even overnight, to weave its sorting magic. And sometimes I’d sit and watch as tiny square dots moved around and grouped together, opening-up space for new files and new memories to replace them, whilst sorting out and making sense of the old fragments – the electronic particles that had been scattered, moved or discarded.  Fragments were shown as red, green or blue dots, shuffling, sorting and aligning themselves.

Until this morning’s dream, I’d never really given their photocopied passports that much thought.  But thinking about it…

At a Manchester airport freight hanger, seven days after they died, seeing two coffins with passports photocopied at the photo page, taped to the top of each. Daffodils placed beside by their pictures by a thoughtful member of the ground team.

An airport. Passports missing. A recurring motif. Of course.

Red dots that need defragging, assimilating.

I really, seriously,

really, genuinely, please believe me,

don’t want to be,

where I was and where I’ve been.

And where, I’m afraid to say,

I think I still am, right now,

So to speak, as it were.

Where I’m scared I’ll be,

Where I’ll forever be.

No, seriously, I don’t, genuinely.

Really, honestly.

No, seriously,

I really want to be

Really, really want to be,

Somewhere else

Somewhere different, completely different.

From here on in.

Seriously.

This is one of many of Izzy’s spontaneous selfie portraits.

When, in the early days of the investigation and a South Yorkshire Police request to access to Izzy and Beth’s phones (for the record, Beth’s iPhone remains to this day unopened and unaccessed – no-one could guess her passwords and Apple didn’t/don’t help) when we first tapped into Izzy’s camera phone, I said to Cagney:

”They just look like holiday photos”.

“They are.” she replied, bluntly, but softly.

So here’s just one of many from Izzy’s camera phone.

Izzy is her energy infused self, snapping a cheeky selfie, knowing Beth is in the background, having one of her quiet, contemplative moments, as she oft would. It’s just a split second snapshot, a spur of the moment record of just one tiny fragment in time.

Now, and with such uncommonly, unfettered access, the picture encapsulates so much of their relationship, their sisterly bond, their easy, comfortable connection with each other and of their own, so dearly precious personalities.

I so, so wish I didn’t have such unfettered access. But I do.

I just miss them.

God, I miss them.

On Tuesday, March 1st 2016, I looked up at the sky, took a picture with my camera phone and posted it on Instagram.

The last picture I’d posted had been on Thursday, February 25th, 2016 – a punch bag hanging in a private members club in London. I liked the way it had been hung and lit, like a piece of art – maybe it was a piece of art?  It was my last picture Before.

I’d taken pictures between Friday, 26th February and the following Tuesday, 1st March, but I’d not posted any of them. I  don’t remember making a conscious decision to abstain from Instagram. I guess it simply didn’t cross my mind at the time.

Today, Wednesday,  26th February 2020,  I looked up again and took another picture of the sky,  standing on pretty much the exact same spot I’d stood, 4 years previously.

But now I know
There is no antidote for you
(Mr Hudson, 2019)

The plot was, I’d admit, pretty darn predictable, nothing to write home about. The lumbering, stuttering script didn’t help and the casting was pretty obvious and somewhat contrived, with a smattering of B list Hollywood names, no doubt paid over the odds to draw the audience in.

But, it was still a film and a film that we’d paid good money for. So, I for one was willing to forgive its failings; put them to one side, concentrate on what there was of a storyline and, well, see it through.

Izzy, on the other hand, was much less forgiving. She yawned loudly and stretched out on the green sofa, rather elaborately raising both her arms and legs simultaneously whilst sighing loudly. She curled in her knees to her default sofa, fetal position and checked her phone, gathering as if from nowhere. In my peripheral vision I could see the blue white glare illuminating her face, her eyes scanning the screen rapidly and her thumb moving in fluid, well rehearsed flicks and occasionally dashes.  I tried to focus my eyes on the TV screen, willing myself to concentrate on the film’s dubious storyline and not to get distracted by Izzy’s counter screen activity.

 

‘I mean, really…’  Izzy piped up.

She lowered the arm that held her phone, so that her face, illuminated by her App interface, was cast into shadow. She stretched out her phone arm languidly over the living room floor, as she laid curled up on the green sofa and starred intently at the TV screen.

‘It always starts off well, then there’s some kind of disaster but this actually turns out to pull people together, then there’s a battle or a chase or fight that seems to end well at first, but then something bad happens again that needs defeating, before you finally get to the end, that ultimately makes you happy.’

These weren’t Izzy’s exact words, nor is it an accurate analysis of any specific Hollywood genre story arc.  But it represents well our familiar, nay, ritualistic TV dinner tableau – Izzy in her PJs, stretched out on the green sofa with her iPhone in hand, yawning and critiquing.

She could pull apart the story arc of all the TV and films we watched, with the exception of ‘Made in Chelsea’ which was sacrosanct, beyond analysis.  Maybe it was her A Level media studies that did it? Maybe it was because she watched alot of TV? Maybe it was just that she was gobby – comfortable in her own skin. Strangely, she could offer her acid criticism whilst at the same time being utterly engrossed, like she knew she was being carried along a story arc, but wanted to be taken along with it.

But no matter how poorly the story was told, how predicable the plot, or how overpaid the actors, it would always come to an end. There was always a conclusion. Always an end. The credits would roll. And time for bed.

No one tells the story of what happens after.

We still watch TV.  We still eat our supper in front of media channels and streaming services. And we still watch the good, the bad and the binge worthy, as well as the utterly forgettable and unfathomably shite.

But there’s less criticism, less critique. And the green sofa lays bare, pillows puffed up. Still and silent.