They Who from the Heavens Came (The Wisdom, #1)

The funeral was held the following week, in an old crumbling church in a historical village Itzy’s father had apparently loved, near his home in Ashford. As it was in Kent, the journey had taken the girls over two hours from where they lived in Ealing.

The village was so small, it didn’t show up on most maps. It consisted of about twenty houses, a large green and the church, surrounded by an unsettling graveyard filled with moss-covered tombstones, most of which had been installed in the eighteenth century. Weeds grew over the stone rectangles embedded in the soil, obscuring the names of those who lay beneath.

Despite the modest setting, there must have been a hundred people at the funeral. The doors had to be left open so guests could throng around outside and listen from the graveyard. Itzy had no idea who most of the people were. She only recognised a handful as her father’s colleagues, those strange antisocial types who had accompanied him on his archaeological digs or worked with him at the university where he lectured, but weren’t exactly his friends.

She remembered some of them had awkwardly tousled her hair when she was a little girl, as if they’d thought that was what you were meant to do with children, but then promptly ignored her because they only knew how to speak about things that had been dead for millennia.

The crowd reminded her how well-liked Stephen had always been. People had regarded him as a genius of a different order, which had given him licence to be eccentric. No one had taken Myra seriously when she’d finally come out with her secrets. Stephen Loveguard? You must be making things up. Any friends Myra had once shared with Stephen had taken his side in the divorce, and any friends Myra had before Stephen had taken their leave long ago because he hadn’t approved of them.

At the front of the church, near the altar, was Gwen in a sombre mourning suit; the skirt stopped below her knees. She had the same black hair that ran in that side of the family, now pulled into a bun pierced with a glossy black chopstick.

Beside her was a woman Itzy only vaguely remembered from broken childhood memories: her father’s first love, but second wife, Evelyn Loveguard.

And beside her was Itzy’s brother.

Osiris.

Stephen Loveguard had walked out on his son before Osiris was old enough to walk himself. Otherwise, her brother might have escaped their father’s ridiculous names. Osiris and Itzel: surely that was some form of child abuse.

Itzy had once made the mistake of asking her father what her name meant. He’d been in an excitable mood at the time, frantically scribbling ideas in a notebook decorated in black and white splotches. She’d been nine then, going on ten.

‘You were sent to me,’ he had answered, ‘from the stars. You’re here to teach me things – to teach me the mysteries of the universe, of life. That’s all that matters, Itzy. That’s who you are.’

Then he’d held her gaze meaningfully, as if attempting to send some coded message into her head without speaking. More than that, he’d looked at her with awe and reverence, as though she might have been his redeemer.

Later, she’d looked up her name in one of her father’s books. As it turned out, Itzel was an old Mayan name. It meant ‘rainbow girl’, or something like that. She’d never identified with it. Rainbows were bright and colourful, while Itzy had always been drawn to darkness.

Osiris was the name of the Egyptian god of the dead. Itzy wondered if her half-brother used it in full, or if he shortened it to avoid getting beaten up. Not that he looked like he needed protecting, now that she could see what he had grown up to become.

When she’d last seen him, she had been ten and he twelve. He hadn’t been much taller than her. Boys tended to develop later, Myra had told her, back when she’d still had some of her wits about her. But even though Itzy had been big enough to knock him down, something in his expression had stopped her. He’d worn an air of haughtiness, like he didn’t just think but knew he was better than her – than anyone.

Stephen had once made a go at trying to bring his two families together. He’d picked up Itzy from the house they had once shared together, with Osiris in the passenger seat of the car, already replacing Itzy.

He had taken them to see a film that neither of them paid attention to and Osiris later declared was boring. Then they’d gone out to eat together, which had been painfully awkward. Later, Osiris had told their father he never wanted to see his supposed sister again. Then Myra had lost the plot, which got Itzy out of having to see her father.

Sometimes Gwen would tell Itzy what a good boy Osiris was; it was such a shame they hadn’t grown up together. She remembered him as a baby. She remembered when her brother left him behind.

Finally, Itzy had told her aunt she just couldn’t deal with hearing about her brother anymore. To know she might have shared something with him in another life, had things played out differently, was like being handed an enormous bar of chocolate only to be told that the second she took a bite, it would disappear.

Now, as she looked at Osiris from the side, Itzy found she could still see the old arrogance she remembered in him. It was woven into the straightness of his back, the lifted chin, the way he stared directly at the coffin while everyone else tried desperately to look absolutely anywhere else. From afar, at least, everything about him was severity and coolness.

Or was it shock?

‘Is that him?’ asked Devon. They sat in a pew second from the front, on the other side of the church. Devon had taken the aisle seat, to shield her friend from the stares she was getting from some of the other guests, as though she were a b-list celebrity they were considering taking tasteless photos of and sending to a cheap tabloid.

‘Yes,’ Itzy answered her friend.

Devon wrinkled her nose. ‘What got stuck up his –’

‘Friends,’ a priest interrupted the Mozart composition that had been playing – a favourite of Stephen Loveguard’s. He took his place at the podium up front. ‘Family. Let us begin.’

Itzy tried to concentrate on the priest’s words, but they floated in her vision and refused to assemble themselves into sentences that made sense. The fragments she caught made her dizzy.

‘…above all else, he was a family man.’

In fact, Itzy added in her head, he liked family so much, he had two.

‘He had deep belief….’

That he could get away with whatever he wanted.

‘…but he was a troubled soul.’

Aren’t we all?

It occurred to her that it was amazing Stephen was having a church funeral at all, bearing in mind he’d taken his own life. Maybe no one had told the priest.

Finally, after what felt like an interminable length of time, Devon squeezed her hand, letting her know the first part of the service was over.

* * *

They stood and waited their turn to say goodbye to the deceased. Itzy watched her beloved aunt approach the coffin. Gwen’s expression was unreadable as she leaned over and kissed her dead brother’s cheek. Then she stood sombrely, her cheeks marked with the tracks of tears, and stepped away.

Next was the wife. Evelyn. As expected, she wore black, but she had taken it one step further: the length of her limbs was shrouded in mourning colour. Even her throat was covered. She looked like she was drowning in grief.

Yet she held herself with formidable composure. Perhaps that was where Osiris had learned it from. She was nothing like Myra. Or maybe she was like the old Myra, before she’d had her heart smashed into a million pieces and decided to use drink as a way of gluing them back together.

Evelyn didn’t kiss the body. She glanced at it, her hands stoically clasped in front of her. Then she walked on, like she couldn’t bring herself to touch the thing that had once shared her bed every night.

It was Osiris’ turn. He stood very still over the body. For a hideous moment, Itzy had the insane thought that he was about to bend down and bite the corpse. Osiris surprised her by leaning over and dropping just the faintest kiss on his father’s forehead before moving on. Itzy thought she saw his posture bend under the weight of some undefined emotion.

Then nothing stood between Itzy and her father’s corpse. She felt eyes on her back, waiting to see what she did. Then she felt Devon’s hand on her shoulder. It strengthened her and stirred her forward to the mud-coloured coffin – all the better to blend into his new surroundings.

Stephen lay as if in deep sleep. It was strange to think he would never wake up. Itzy’s mind was filled with the happier images of childhood. The time he’d taken her kite flying in the park; he’d misjudged the wind and it had hurled their kites into a tree. Itzy had cried. Then Stephen had climbed the tree. The other parents had gaped, but he hadn’t cared. He’d clambered up the branches and yanked the coloured fabric out, and then hopped down onto the ground, crushing the grass with his weight. He’d brought the kite back to her and crouched down so they were at eye level. He’d stroked her cheek and said, ‘Don’t cry, Itzy. Daddy made it better.’

She recalled times when she had walked in on her parents cuddling on the sofa like a pair of teenagers. They would leap apart, some Freudian part of their brains telling them their child shouldn’t see them being affectionate, but Itzy had loved it. It was what she held onto when Stephen changed.

It didn’t just happen one day, or even gradually. It was like turning a light on and off. One moment, her father would bounce her on his knee and clap her hands together; the next, he would throw her off, not caring when she cried out after hitting her head on the tiled floor of the kitchen. One instant, he would kiss her mother like his life depended on it; the next, he would fling a kitchen knife in her direction, only missing her neck by inches.

Looking at her father now, it was hard to believe he’d ever been capable of such horror. He wore the face of Loving Stephen, the one who climbed into trees to rescue kites for daughters in distress. There wasn’t a trace of Hateful Stephen, who threw his family around like old dolls he’d outgrown.

That was what made it so hard. She wasn’t sure who she was saying goodbye to. This wasn’t Stephen. It was like a photograph; it couldn’t capture the whole person, just one angle. People were the sum of their movements, gestures, expressions, voices, everything. And Stephen was the sum of his moods. This body lying before her – it wasn’t her father. She didn’t know where her father was.

A scream filled her chest and she slammed her fist into her mouth to stop it from erupting. Devon gripped her other hand and dragged her away from the coffin.

A long time after, the lid was brought down, and the casket was taken outside to be put away forever.