Grandma's Funeral

She felt the room change.

It was a physical thing, like a draught coming under a door. A second ago they’d been sitting the way people sit through a funeral, half of them already thinking about the sandwiches. Now every single one of them was looking at her, and nobody was thinking about sandwiches. The listlessness had gone out of the room like water out of a pulled plug. They were all, suddenly, completely, paying attention.

So they knew. Some animal part of them already knew, before she’d said a word of it.

“So thank you, Grandma,” Steph said, quieter, “for asking me. Because it’s the right thing to do.”

She made herself keep going.

“When Grandma was young, she was a good-looking girl. Like me, she said.” A breath. “Her family was poor and her mother told her to use her looks to land a husband with money. So they sent her up to Melbourne to be seen, and they sent a young man from down the road along with her, to look after her. To protect her. He was four years older than she was. His name was George.”

She watched the older ones get there ahead of the younger ones.

“On the way home, on the train, when there was no one else in the carriage, he held her down and he raped her. And then he did it again, the next time, and the time after that, because he kept being the one sent to protect her. And when she fell pregnant, she told her own parents she’d fallen in love. Because that was the right thing to do. That was how you kept up appearances. And so she married him.”

The church was dead silent.

“So thanks, George,” she said, to the front row, to the photo, to the empty air where the man had been for the last fourteen years. “Thanks for that.”

Her hands weren’t quite steady. She put them on the lectern.

“I’m not going to pretend it was easy to hear. She told me a few weeks ago and I’ve barely slept since. It took everything I thought I knew about this family and turned it inside out. And I think that’s exactly why she wanted it said out loud. Because it mattered to her. At the end, with everything else gone, it was the thing that mattered.”

She found her sister’s face in the crowd, and her mum’s, white as paper, and made herself look somewhere else.

“And there’s a reason it mattered so much. Her name was Leila.”

A sound went through the older rows — not words, just breath, the noise a room makes when it flinches.

“Leila was Grandma’s daughter. Some of you knew her. Most of us never did, because she died long before we were born. She killed herself, when she was eighteen. And the reason —” Steph’s voice caught, and she took the second she needed. “The reason was that the same man who did that to Grandma did it to Leila as well. Her own daughter. That’s what Grandma told me. She told me he did it, and she told me to tell you, and so I’m telling you. He raped Leila, and Leila died.”

She didn’t look at the photo this time.

“I never met her. I wasn’t anywhere near born. But I feel like I knew her, somehow. I think a lot of us in this family know that feeling, even if it wasn’t her, even if it was something else. I feel her pain. I really do.”

She breathed.

“So here’s the last thing on this, and then I’ll move on. Grandma is not going to be buried here. Not in the family plot, not under the stone that’s already cut, not next to George. She asked me — she made me her executor so that I could make sure of it — she’s to be buried at Greenhill, where Leila is. With her daughter. Not with the man who raped them both. And I am going to make absolutely certain that she gets it. Because for once, somebody in this family is going to get what they actually wanted.”

She stopped.

It was going to get rough now. She could feel it coming up under the silence like a tide. They were all still staring at her, rigid, every face turned up, and here and there among them — Aunt Susan, old Uncle Peter, a couple of the others — there were people quietly, helplessly weeping.

She wasn’t even close to done.

---

What she had folded in her jacket, small against her ribs, was the proof. Grandma had written it all down years ago — the date at the top of the first page said 1997 — and the lawyer she could see at the back had handed it to her in a sealed envelope three days back, exactly like Grandma said he would. So it wasn’t a dying woman’s confusion. Grandma had meant all of this for twenty years. That was the thing that had settled it for Steph: that, and the million, if she was honest. But mostly, standing up here, the pages.

“Grandma asked me to do one more thing,” Steph said. “She asked me to tell you all the secrets. Every single one. To clear the decks. Because she reckoned it was the lies that were killing this family — not her, not Grandpa, the lies — and she wanted them gone before she went.” She looked out at them. “So that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to tell you everything she told me to.”

That wasn’t quite true, and she knew it as she said it. There were two things she was not going to say — two things that had sent her, white and shaking, into the police station in another town last week with Grandma’s pages in her bag, because the internet had told her she had to and because saying them out loud in a church would be its own kind of crime. She’d dealt with those her own way. The right way, she told herself. She just hoped it wasn’t going to cost her.

But she wasn’t going to say them here, and the trouble was, a few people in the room didn’t know that. A few of them had gone very still and very grey down in the pews, because they knew what Grandma had known, and they could see Steph up the front with the platform and the look on her face, and they thought it was coming for them. She could pick them out without trying. She knew exactly who they were. She made herself not look at them.

She started easy.

“James is a drunk.” She found her uncle near the back. “A good one — you’d never know it, he’s never once fallen over in his life — but he’s been quietly pickled since about 1995, so maybe keep the good whisky out of reach at the wake.” James, to his enormous credit, shrugged. Fair enough, the shrug said.

“Trevor does all the wiring in this church for free, which is lovely of him.” She let it sit. “And then he charges three times over for every cable and clip and roll of tape. Not just the church.” She looked round at them. “All of you. Every job he’s ever done in any of your houses. The lot of you have been done over by Trevor for years, and paid up smiling, because he’s family.” Trevor’s mouth fell open. His whole face went to outrage, wounded and pure, the face of a man who had never overcharged a soul for a roll of cable in his life. But this time a low mutter went with it — people doing sums, people turning to look at Trevor properly, people who’d just learned what the rewiring had actually been worth.

“Peter sells raw milk off the side of the truck. Unlicensed. To about half of you.” She let it land. “After he waters it down first.” Uncle Peter, church elder, looked her dead in the eye and gave her the finger, down low against his thigh where the priest couldn’t see. Bravado. But Steph saw the rest of him under it, the grey braced rest of him, waiting for the other thing — the thing she wasn’t going to say — and she moved on fast.

“Amy and Caroline have been together for years.” She kept it flat, no spin on it. Amy reached over and took Caroline’s hand, and the two of them lifted their chins at the room like a dare. Good for you, Steph thought. “And Harry didn’t leave for the mines because of some falling-out with his dad. He left because he found out, and he couldn’t carry it.” The two women’s faces dropped at that. That part wasn’t theirs to be proud of, and they knew it.

“My mum cheats at the cake fair.” That got the first real laugh — until they saw she meant it. “Every year. Bribes the judge with a bottle of gin, and has done since I was little.” Steph found her mother’s face in the second row and wished she hadn’t. Her mum wasn’t laughing. Her mum was looking at her like she’d been slapped — like of everyone in this whole church, her own daughter — and Steph had to look away from that one too, and it cost more than she’d reckoned on, and she put the cost of it away somewhere to deal with later.

“Uncle Jeffry isn’t broke. Jeffry’s rich. Won the lottery, what, four years back, and told almost nobody.” She found him. “He told a few of you, though, didn’t he. The right few. And ever since, that little circle’s been lending money round the rest of the family — your money, Jeffry’s money, can’t tell anymore — and calling in the favours when it suited them. A nice quiet bit of leverage over everyone who didn’t know.” She paused. “The lawyer’s in on that one too, by the way. Down the back. Ask him.” Jeffry found something fascinating in the middle distance and studied it very hard. A few heads near him did not. A few heads near him had gone the particular colour of people realising who’d had the whip hand all along. “Oh — and Jeffry owns the supermarket. The one that’s been quietly killing every farm in this room.” That one got its own sound. Farmers do not love the man who owns the supermarket. Even when he’s blood. Especially when he’s blood.

“Susan runs this church. Flowers, roster, morning tea, thirty years of it. Susan has never believed one word of any of it.” A noise went through the room. “And she owns a piece of the massage place a couple of towns over. The one with the sign.” Susan’s outrage could have stripped paint off a door — and under the outrage, the same grey thing as her brother, the same braced waiting. Steph kept her eyes moving.

“And while I’m on it. There’s a little committee. Grandma ran it, and when she got too sick, it kept running without her. Mary. Susan. Amy.” She named them slow, one at a time, watching each one’s face do the thing. “They decide who gets asked to what. Whose kids come to the christenings, who gets left off the list for the big do, who finds out about the lunch after it’s happened. For years. If you’ve ever wondered why you weren’t invited to something — wondered if you’d done something, lain awake over it — you didn’t do anything. You were just on their list.” The mutter was turning into something with edges now. “And it doesn’t stop at parties. You want a job in this town — at the shire, the school, the co-op — you want it to not quietly go to someone else? You want to be on the right side of those three. A lot of you have lost things you never knew you were in the running for.”

The room wasn’t quiet anymore. It had started somewhere around Jeffry and it was building — a mutter, then more than a mutter, people turning to each other, a voice somewhere saying that’s enough now, not loudly, not yet.