Free Fly in the Ointment by Anne Fine

shocked. I sat in silence as he spread his huge hand to swivel my worksheet to face him. ‘Not like you, Lois.’
    Had he spotted a mistake? He swung a plump trousered leg across the corner of my desk. It was as if some schoolteacher had suddenly decided to park himself more comfortably while he ran through theprinciples of long division one more time with some dim pupil. ‘Lois, what’s up? The ladies are telling me you’re in an awful state. Your figures are all over. And you’ve been crying.’
    I hadn’t made that massive effort to get up and come in, just to throw things away. ‘It’s nothing, Trevor.’
    â€˜It must be something.’
    â€˜No,
honestly
.’ (The very word set off the urge to lie.) ‘It’s only that I’m terrified of dentists, and I’ve an appointment for tomorrow morning.’ Catching his startled look, I added pathetically, ‘The only reason I haven’t told you yet is because I’m still thinking of skipping it.’
    His face cleared. ‘Skip the dentist because you’re scared? Oh, Lois, that won’t do.’ Turning to Audrey and Dana, he offered them the excuse to admit that they’d been listening. ‘Which of you two is going to take poor Lois out for a drink after work? Give her some Dutch courage?’
    Thank God, neither admitted to being free. Promptly at half past five I closed down my computer and crept away, crippled by shame. It seemed to me my stupid lie had robbed poor Malachy of his last shreds of dignity. Linking his funeral to something as trivial as a trip to the dentist, even in words alone as an excuse for absence, wasnothing short of despicable. An insult to my son. But then again, right from the moment the officers had arrived on my doorstep with the bad news on their faces, everything I’d done and thought and felt had been unswervingly contemptible. I had to face the fact that over the last few days, when any decent woman would have spent her hours grieving properly, I’d spent mine being angry with my own father, and trying to conjure out of nowhere a sheer impossibility: a cast-iron explanation for not even trying to let another father know the date and time of his son’s funeral.
    Brains can’t be tamed, though. And early in the morning, as I was pulling everything out of my closet – black shoes, black bag, black dress, black coat – the lid fell off that small discreet brown box I’d thrown in sheer exasperation to the back.
    Out of it fell not just the bright-red wig, but the solution.
    Simple. Foolproof.
    â€˜I’m sorry, Stuart. But I didn’t know about the funeral either. Ask anyone who went, and they will tell you that I wasn’t there.’

11
    THE WIG-MAKER HAD done a better job for me than she would ever have thought. I wore a pair of rimmed glasses, kept my head down to let the partially tamed red curls cover my face, and waited until the last minute before getting out of my car and hurrying across to the chapel.
    I can’t think what I must have been expecting. A pack of drug-dealers with vulpine smiles? A host of tarts, all tottering on high heels and showing a deal too much skin? Maybe an empty chapel, with no one sitting there except my father.
    A respectable number of people were spread across the pews, all looking comfortingly normal. I recognized one or two of Malachy’s old mates from school: a lad with hair the colour of marmalade that flopped around so much it looked more like a wigthan my own; another boy I’d always thoroughly disliked but who, in his sharp grey trousers and bright white shirt, might even have been able to convince me that in the years since I’d last seen him he had turned over a new leaf. There was a pew crammed altogether too tightly with girls. Almost without exception their hair was more garish than mine, and the whispers of one or two of them kept inappropriately approaching