Chapter 3: The Death

The Death

And the strangest thing happened, which was that they went.

A second ago they had been trying to kill each other. Now there was a wall of fire up the side of the church and a granddaughter’s voice coming out of the speakers like the voice of God, and every single one of them stopped being furious at the same instant and started being frightened at the same instant, and the two hundred people who could not agree on anything agreed, immediately and without discussion, on the door.

Which was the problem. Because there was, more or less, one door.

The big double at the back, and only one leaf of it open, the other still latched, and in front of the open one a trestle table of memorial bloody flowers that someone had set across the gap like they were trying to bottle the family in, because that was the only space left that didn’t already have flowers. The crowd hit it and stalled, bunched, started to climb up its own back, and Steph — up the front, above it all — watched the press build toward the place where presses turn into the thing you read about afterwards.

Then the country took over from the town.

Because half this room had fought grass fires with wet hessian bags, and a good few of them carried a CFA pager, and to people like that a fire was not a reason to lose your head — it was a Monday. Down the back, Michael and Terry just picked the flower table up between them, the whole groaning trestle of lilies, and pitched it bodily out the open door into the outside, and the bottleneck doubled and the crowd began, properly, to move. And over on the side wall Trevor had got both hands on the old side door, the one nobody used, the one that had been painted shut since about the Hawke government — and was throwing his shoulder at it, again, and again, swearing in a steady professional rhythm, until something gave with a crack like a shot and a second way out opened up into the churchyard.

And the front of the church, where the old people were — the ones who couldn’t move fast, who’d been sat closest to the coffin and furthest from the doors — the front of the church did the thing that, much later, Steph would hold onto as one good decent moment in the entire day. Nobody left them. Michael and Terry came back — back, into it, against the flow — and got a chair-lift under old Mrs Tehan, who hadn’t walked unaided since the nineties, and carried her down the aisle between them; and when there were more than they could manage, Jeffry and James waded in and did the same, the secret millionaire and the functioning drunk, hauling the ancient and the slow out of a burning church with their good suits ruined, not a word of complaint out of either of them. For about ninety seconds, this terrible family was the best family in the world. Then they were out, and it stopped, but it had happened.

Steph came down off the dais and went up the aisle last, or near enough, herding the final stragglers ahead of her. And going, she clocked things, the way you do, flat and useless and too late.

No alarm. The church on fire and not one bell ringing — and it took her a second, and then it didn’t: the power. Trevor had turned half the building off to kill the feedback, I’ve turned everything we don’t need off, and somewhere in everything-we-don’t-need had been the alarm. And the sprinklers — she looked up and they were there, a neat run of brass heads down the length of the old ceiling, somebody once upon a time had done the right thing and put them in — and not one of them was doing a single thing, and she stood there for half a second genuinely not understanding why, water right there over a fire and the fire just burning, before she gave up and filed it with everything else she didn’t have time for. The fire had stopped being a flare and become a fire, settled into the corner now, chewing up the wall lining with a low steady roar, in no hurry, like it knew it had the place to itself.

She stopped at the door and had a proper look back.

Nobody. Not a soul. Two hundred people and an entire funeral, and the church was empty of every living thing — empty except for all their stuff, which they’d left exactly where it sat: the orders of service face-down on the pews, the handbags, the good coats, somebody’s walking frame, and the crates. The Bunnings crates. Stacked along every wall and tucked under every pew, dozens of the identical black things, holding the hymn books and the urns and the spare everything, sitting there in the smoke, going nowhere.

And the coffin.

Steph looked at the coffin, alone in the middle of it all, and then she went out the door.

Outside, the first thing she saw was an aunt flapping a tea towel at the catering table, shooing off the magpies — three of them, fat and unbothered, that had come down on the sandwiches the second the caterers abandoned their posts and went inside to find out what all the shouting was. They’d done a fair bit of damage already. The aunt flapped; the magpies hopped sideways a polite distance and waited, the way magpies do, for her to give up.

Steph walked out past her, across the grass, to where the rest of them had gathered — out in front of the reception hall where the food and the urns and the bunting were, the whole two hundred of them spilled across the lawn in their funeral blacks, turning now to look back at the church. And something happened to the crowd as it stood there, a settling, a kind of falling-quiet. The fury had gone out of them. The fire had reached into all of them and turned the dial back to the start, back past the brawling and the secrets and the shouting, all the way back to the thing they’d actually come here for, which was that Grandma was dead, and this was her funeral, and her funeral was burning to the ground with her still inside it. Somewhere a woman started to cry, properly, for the first time all day. It was, almost, a funeral again.

Steph stood among them and caught her breath and let herself feel it, just for a second — the realest the day had been.

Her phone buzzed against her leg.

She looked. Of course she looked. And — standing on the grass in front of her grandmother’s burning funeral, with her own family in ruins all around her — she thumbed a reply, because it was the chat, and the chat was the only place left that made any sense, and then she put the phone away and made herself look at where she actually was.

The kids were on the playground. Off to the side of the reception hall there was a little council playground — swings, a slide, one of those spring-mounted ducks — and a dozen of the smaller cousins were on it, shrieking, swinging, entirely and gloriously untouched by any of it, too young to have been told a single one of the day’s secrets and far too busy to watch a church burn down. Somebody’s children, living in the one square of the afternoon where nothing had gone wrong.

Closer, a knot of uncles had their heads together, working the important question. CFA’s coming, someone’s rung them — but what the bloody hell happened in there? How does a church just go up? Steph could have told them. She knew exactly how a church just goes up: it goes up when your cousin’s got a bottle of whisky hidden in his good jacket, the way he always did, to get him through the family stuff — and he goes down in a brawl, and the bottle goes with him, and the glass and the spirit hit the floor right where a candle’s already falling. That was all. That was the whole of it. But she kept walking, because that was a thread that led straight back to Nick, and Nick had enough coming.

Down past the cars, she found the smell before she found the sight: a mountain of fresh cow manure, a good metre high, dumped not on the funeral limousine but on it’s bonnet and just in front of it and all down one side, a glistening brown alp blocking the entire mouth of the carpark.

Yeah, Steph thought, looking at it. That’s about right. That’s the day. A great steaming pile of shit, aimed at the family, missing, and blocking the only way out. You couldn’t have planned it better if you’d tried, and someone, she was starting to understand, very much had.

And standing near it, going an interesting colour, was her Uncle Robert. She’d had to be introduced to him before the funeral.

“He was supposed to put it on the limo,” Robert said, to nobody, in the tone of a man watching a plan come apart. “I said, the limo. On it. Not in front of —”

Then he heard himself. Steph watched him hear himself, watched it cross his face that two hundred people had just been told he’d arranged this and he had now, helpfully, confirmed it out loud. He shut his mouth. It was much too late.

Off the other way, Trevor was standing with his head tipped right back, staring up at the burning roofline with an expression of pure professional grievance. “There’s sprinklers,” he was saying to anyone near him, wounded, baffled. “There’s sprinklers in there. I’ve seen them. Why didn’t the bloody sprinklers go off?” Nobody answered him. Steph didn’t either, though she’d been wondering the same thing, and would go on wondering it for a while yet.