Claire's dream

I stepped out of the castle just past dusk, the stones beneath my heels still warm from the dying light. Wrapped in a pale silk shawl, Charlotte walked beside me in silence. We didn’t speak, we never needed to when we were in places like this, the old places. Below us, the valley stretched into mist and fractured streets. It had been decided: she would not follow me down. We said nothing when she turned back, her figure swallowed again by the castle’s grand shadow. And I descended alone.

Teyran was not as I remembered. The road into the village was still called the same, but it was broken into unnatural fragments, each segment bridged by shopfronts that did not belong. JD Sports. Boots. A fake Pret A Manger. I passed through them not as a shopper but as a pilgrim lost in a parody. The village had become a collage of commercial ghosts.

My grandmother appeared somewhere between a discount Poundland and a florist with no flowers. No warning. She walked beside me like she had always been there. She told me she could not stay. She was headed to the great house on the hill, the one they said belonged to ancient names. She did not explain, only a kiss on the cheek, and she too vanished.

I continued until I reached the place I called home: a modest structure set beside the old aerodrome. From the windows, I could see the flashing silhouettes of planes overhead, each one tracked dutifully on my FlightRadar24 feed, as though movement elsewhere might explain my stillness.

Then the mourning bells. They were not bells, really, but a kind of groaning trumpet, slow and deliberate. I left for the funeral.

On the way, I passed the gates of the cemetery. A woman stepped out. Her dress was deep navy, and her face had collapsed in on itself with grief. She placed a coin into the hand of the mayor, who raised his hand, not to comfort, but to strike her lightly, with a ceremonial branch. She lowered her head, accepted it. She was no longer a widow. She was someone new.

I found my grandmother again near the field where the procession would begin. There were folding chairs and a podium. She nodded to me but said nothing. The air was dry, and the wind carried the scent of rosemary and ash.

The funeral of Pope Benedict XVI was not solemn. My grandfather led it like a cabaret show. He opened with the first lines of Michel Sardou’s “Salut,” and the audience laughed, not out of joy, but confusion. It was broken into acts. One for each decade of the Pope’s life, some narrated, some sung, some mimed. The applause was hesitant.

And then the cortège.

Three long, lacquered wagons drawn by black horses. The final one was glass, and inside, at the very front, lay the body of Benedict XVI, slumped in a cage, decomposing visibly. His face had gone green, sagging like melting wax. But the crowd didn’t notice. Or they chose not to. They clapped. They took pictures. Someone asked if there would be snacks.

And I stood there, watching, knowing I had been the only one to walk the broken street, to see the woman made new by grief, to notice that the Pope had died long before the ceremony began.