Grandma's Funeral
Copyright© 2010 by Oz Ozzie
Chapter 4: The Resurrection
While he was in there, Steph took the temperature of the crowd, and found that it didn’t have one.
It was all over the place. There was no single thing the two hundred of them were feeling, because there was no way to feel a single thing about this. Some of them had gone back to weeping — real weeping now, grandma’s-in-the-fire weeping. Some of them were arguing, low and urgent, about whether it could possibly be true. Some were filming it. One of the uncles had his hands on his knees like a man who’d run a race. The stranger in the good coat was being held upright by two people he’d never met. And quite a few of them had simply stopped, gone blank, stood there with their faces open, because Grandma is dying at her own funeral right now was a sentence that would not turn into a thought no matter how many times you ran at it. Steph kept trying it herself, and it kept not working. The words were all ordinary words. They would not go together.
It felt like a very long time. It was probably ninety seconds.
Then Geoff came back out.
Empty-handed.
He came out through the side door at a fast walk, bent low, and straightened up in the clear air and pulled his mask off, and his face was doing something complicated, and the crowd surged forward into the cordon again and he put up one black-gloved hand and stopped them dead.
“The coffin’s empty, ” Geoff called out, over the noise of the fire, in a voice with something raw in it. “I got the lid off it with the axe and there’s nothing in it. Nobody’s in there. Nobody’s been in there.” He looked at all of them, and then he said the rest of it, the part that had got into his voice. “So every single one of you has been played for fools. Including me. I just went in there, for that.”
And behind him, with a sound like the world clearing its throat, the first section of the church roof came down into the nave in a rolling tower of sparks.
Geoff didn’t even look round at it. “So get back behind the lines,” he said. “You idiots.”
And they did. For once in their collective lives, they did exactly as they were told, and shuffled back off the blackening grass to the lawn and the catering tables and the cold tea, and regrouped there in a loose, stunned herd, and tried to work out what had just happened to them.
The coffin was empty. It went round and round. Empty the whole time. There was never anyone in it. So where — And then, fast on its heels, the worse question, the one that turned the day inside out: so what did Grandma do? What has she actually done to us? Somebody said the funeral director’s name. Somebody else said, hadn’t he been down by the limo, swearing about the manure? He had. And where was he now? They looked. Nobody could find him. The funeral director, the man who’d run the whole thing, had been there twenty minutes ago going purple about the shit on his hearse, and now he was simply gone, vanished off the lawn, and the gap where he’d been standing felt, suddenly, enormous.
And in the middle of all of it, Aunt Edna — who had eaten the hummus, who had been retching into a bin not ten minutes before her grandmother’s coffin turned out to be empty — looked around at the burning church and the lost crowd and the vanished director, and asked the only honest question left.
“What,” she said, “am I supposed to feel now?”
Nobody answered her, because nobody knew. That was the truth of it. Two hundred people stood on a lawn in their funeral blacks and not one of them had the faintest idea what they were supposed to feel, because there was no feeling that fit — grief was wrong, relief was wrong, anger was wrong, they were all wrong, and the right one hadn’t been invented. Nor did anybody have the slightest idea what came next. What do you do, after this? There was no after this. Nobody had ever been here before.
Steph didn’t know either. She stood at the edge of them with her phone in her hand, the way she always did when she didn’t know what to feel, waiting for the chat to tell her how to feel it, to make it funny, to make it bearable, to do the one thing it had never once failed to do.
The chat was silent.
Nothing. Not a word, not a joke, not a fun fact. The trusted ten, the filthiest funniest most fearless room in the family, the only voice that had kept its feet through the whole impossible day — even they had nothing. Their talent for making baloney out of anything had finally met the one thing it could not touch, and it had simply stopped, gone dark, like everything else.
Steph put the phone away.
For the first time all day, there was nothing left to say about it. There was only the fire, and the empty box inside it, and two hundred people learning, all at once, that the woman they had come to bury had never been there at all.
The magpies, who did not care about any of this, were still working the catering.
And one of them — fat, glossy, entirely committed — chose this moment to take exception to the three men in dark suits standing too near its sandwiches, and dropped out of the sky at the nearest one with the full shrieking fury of a magpie in the season, going for his head.
What the mafioso did, on pure reflex, was draw his gun and fire at it.
Twice.
He missed twice, because nobody has ever hit a stooping magpie with a handgun, and the magpie peeled off untouched and indignant and went back up to the powerline to plan its next attempt, and two hundred grieving people flinched at the double crack and then turned, as one, to stare at the man standing in a churchyard with a smoking pistol in his hand, having just opened fire on a bird.
There was a silence.
Then one of the farmer uncles — old Col, an enormous, unbothered man who had not reacted to a single thing all day — looked at the little black pistol with an expression of profound agricultural contempt.
“Put that toy away,” he said. “Christ. You’ll take someone’s eye out.” He turned and started ambling toward the cars, unhurried, talking over his shoulder. “Hang on. I’ll go get a real gun. Show you how it’s done.”
And the mafioso stood there holding his drawn weapon, which had, in the space of fifteen seconds, gone from the most frightening object on the lawn to a thing a farmer had offered to show up with a better one, and you could see on his face that some load-bearing part of his understanding of the world had begun, quietly, to fail.
That was when Tom got there.
“Mate.” Tom — Constable Tom, who had escaped his aunts to the fire and was now being dragged back into policing the one actual crime on the premises — came across fast, hand out, furious. “Mate. Put it away. Put it away now.” He got right up into the man’s space, the way they train you to. “You are a dipshit. You have just discharged a firearm at a funeral. If that comes out again — if I so much as see it again — I will arrest you, I will charge you, and you will find out exactly how real the next twenty years are.” He jabbed a finger back at the lawn, at the family, at the whole impossible circus. “Do yourself a favour. Stick to the cosplay. Stand there and look scary in your little suit and your little glasses, and stop before you get yourself into trouble you can’t cosplay your way out of.”
The mafioso looked at him. The mafioso, a genuine and dangerous criminal, opened his mouth to explain that he was not, in fact, cosplaying — and then visibly understood that there was no version of that sentence which would help him, in this place, with these people, and shut it again, and put the gun away.
“Good lad,” said Tom, which Steph suspected the man had not been called in some time, and went back to his fire.
“Steph.”
She turned, and it was Aunt Susan, and Steph braced, because the last time Aunt Susan had spoken to her she’d called her a slut and thrown her out of a church.
But Susan’s face had changed. The fury was gone out of it, replaced by something that was trying, with visible effort, to be gracious. “I owe you an apology,” Susan said. “I do. I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve worked out what happened, and I was wrong about you. You didn’t do all that to hurt us.” A pause, in which Susan arranged the rest of it. “You got taken. That’s all. She got hold of you and she played you, the way she played everybody, only worse, because you’re young and you didn’t see it coming. None of us did.” And here came the part that was still Susan, the little upward tilt at the end, the pat on the head she couldn’t quite resist. “You’ll know better next time. Won’t you, love.”
And the strange thing was that Steph found she couldn’t argue with a word of it. Because it was true. She had been taken. She’d been played as comprehensively as a person could be played — flattered and hooked and pointed and fired, and she’d walked up to that lectern thinking she was the one who saw clearly, the one with the spine, and she’d been the easiest mark in the building.
“Yeah,” Steph said. “I did. As played as you can get, actually.” She meant it. It cost her something to say and she said it anyway. “You’re right.”
Behind Susan, the barbecue exploded.
Not badly — but Steph saw the whole thing over her aunt’s shoulder, the way you see the thing you’re not supposed to be watching. Christine’s hopeless boyfriend, Chris, who’d taken the BBQ because it kept him out of the family, had got bored of turning cheap oily sausages and had decided — for Christine, to make her laugh, watch this — to spray the aerosol oil straight at the flames. It worked. It worked beautifully. A two-foot rope of fire stood up off the hotplate, and Chris leapt back with his eyebrows gone, and Christine shrieked, and from forty metres away, without breaking stride, without even appearing to think about it, Geoff turned the high-pressure hose off the church and onto the barbecue.
The blast took the BBQ off its legs. It took the sausages into the next postcode. It took Chris off his feet entirely, and it took Christine — standing too close, in her good funeral black — full in the front, so that when the water cleared she was soaked to the skin, her white shirt gone transparent and clinging, and every eye that happened to be pointing that way got a clear look at the frankly magnificent lilac bra underneath.
Which was the thing that snagged Steph, even then, even there. Because Christine did not wear lilac. Christine wore grey, and navy, and the occasional brave beige; Christine was a dental student with a deadbeat boyfriend and a chainsaw-handed father, and Christine dressed like a woman keeping her head down. That bra — bright, pretty, deliberate, secret — belonged to somebody else, some Christine nobody at this funeral was supposed to know about.
Old Uncle Charlie, of course, was right there, having a very good look. Charlie was always looking. Charlie got about half a second of looking in before Christine’s father crossed the distance and dropped him with a single unhurried punch, and Charlie sat down hard on the grass going “what? what?”, and that was that.
And off to the side of all of it, old Col came back from the cars with his lever-action rifle, looking for the magpie, found it long gone, and — with the unbothered competence of a man who has handled firearms his whole life and was never going to do anything stupid with one — worked the action to clear it, pocketed the rounds, and stood the empty rifle against the reception-hall wall, where it stayed, harmless and enormous, a quiet rebuke to the little black pistol that had started all this. Nobody gave it a second glance. It was the most natural thing on the lawn.
“Anyway,” Susan was saying, because Susan had not come over here to watch a barbecue, “the money.”
And there it was. Steph almost laughed. The apology, the I was wrong about you, the pat on the head — all of it had been the run-up to this, the warm-up act, and here was the main event arriving right on cue. Susan hadn’t come to say sorry. Susan had come because Steph was the one person at this funeral who’d been in the room with the lawyer and the contract and the number, and Susan wanted to know where the money was.
“There’s no money, Aunty.”
“There’s a million dollars, you said so yourself —”
“I said Grandma told me there was. It’s Grandpa’s money, if it’s anyone’s — old money, from back when, the kind of money you don’t ask where it came from.” Steph watched Susan’s eyes change at Grandpa and don’t ask where it came from, watched her file it, watched her want it more. “Proceeds of crime, basically. She said. I don’t know where it is. I don’t know if it’s real. The only thing I know for certain is that I’m not getting it. Am I?” She heard how flat it came out, how final. I’m not getting it. The truest sentence she’d said all day, handed to the one person on the lawn guaranteed not to care. “If you want to chase it, go talk to the lawyer. The one down the back. He’s the one who reckons he can put his hands on it.”
She watched Susan work it. She watched her aunt run the whole thing — the dead criminal grandfather, the dirty money, the lawyer, the niece who swore she had nothing — and she watched Susan arrive, reluctantly, grindingly, at the conclusion that there was nothing more to squeeze out of Steph, because Steph genuinely didn’t have it. You could see the moment it landed. You could see Susan lose interest in her in real time.
“The lawyer,” Susan said. “Down the back.”
“Down the back.”
Susan half-turned to go, and then she didn’t go. She stood there a moment longer, and something worked in her face, and Steph realised there was a second question coming, the one Susan had really been carrying, underneath the money, all along.
“Why didn’t you say mine.”
Steph looked at her.
“All of them, you did. Trevor, Peter, the lot. You stood up there and you read out everybody’s. But not mine.” Susan’s voice had gone careful, almost quiet, and there was something terrible in it, because it wasn’t relief. It was closer to grievance. As if being left out were the insult. As if she’d have preferred Steph to say it. “You knew. Grandma would’ve told you. So why didn’t you say mine. Was it the last?”
And there it was — Susan standing on the grass in front of a burning church asking, more or less, why her own incest hadn’t made the list. Steph couldn’t make sense of that - why would she bring it up? Was she offended to have been overlooked? Was she fishing for something? What? Was this a loose end she needed to control?
“I couldn’t, could I,” Steph said.
“Course you could. You said everything else.”
“No. I couldn’t say that one.” Steph held her eye, and kept her voice flat, because flat was the only way to say it. “Because that one’s not gossip, Aunty. That one’s a crime. And if you know enough to say it out loud then that’s mandatory reporting. To the police.” She let it sit. “So I didn’t say it here.”
It took Susan a second. Steph watched it arrive — watched the woman hear where the weight had landed in that sentence, on the one small word, here, and understand what it meant that Steph had been careful to say here and not at all. It meant Steph had said it somewhere. It meant there was a file now, and a date, and a process, and no version of the afternoon’s chaos that could burn it down. The eulogy Susan had been dreading was the small exposure. The quiet one had already happened, days ago, in an office, with Steph’s name on it.
Susan didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything to say. The colour went out of her face in a way that had nothing to do with the money anymore.
Susan stood for a few seconds, frozen. Then she turned to Steph and said, “You’ve hung me. And us. The whole family, really. And you think that you’re so clean. But Molly. And Michelle. Well: good luck to you.”
The cut, and the cut was intended in Susan’s tone, laced with contempt.
Steph replied in the only way she knew how: “Reckon I’ll get hung for the molly, then,” but it was said to Susan’s back. Well, the chat would’ve loved it, though they’d never hear that one.
And then Susan was gone, leaving Steph with the slowly growing realisation that maybe what she’d done had more ramifications than she thought. A much bigger deal. But Molly? That wasn’t really breaking the law. Not meaningfully. And the cousin thing? Tom had been in on both from the start.
But whatever. She’d done the sensible thing, was all. You don’t walk away from a million dollars because of who somebody’s brother turned out to be — nobody would, none of the people now deciding she was a monster would have either. The dice was cast.
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.