St Emmanuel’s is a beautiful church, less for what it is than what it isn’t. It isn’t grand and it isn’t pretentious. The pulpit doesn’t look like a Charlton Heston movie set. Though large, its dark panelling and original rough-hewn pews evoke a quaint colonial air. There is an authentic sense of modern history about the place, as though the walls have absorbed many a sermon, many desperate prayers, which in other churches merely bounce off the shiny tiles and gilt edges.
Harvey’s first girlfriend, Wendy, had once given him a head job in the confessional box and he tries not to think about this as he moves down the centre aisle to take a seat at his father’s funeral.
Predictable Beam drama had consumed the day’s beginnings. Penny had discovered a spelling error in the funeral booklet and raced into her shop at 6am to redo the entire thing and print off new copies. Harvey had stayed behind at her house to mind the kids, innocently mentioning to Naomi via text message that he was struggling to find appropriate funeral wear in their cupboards. Appalled that Penny was letting the children attend at all—A funeral is NO place for kidz!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!, she’d texted back (and he’d winced at the spelling and the excessive exclamation)—Naomi had then vented her exasperation to their mother. Lynn had subsequently had words with Penny, who in turn phoned her husband to instruct him, not for the first time, to find a job in another fucking town.
At some point in the morning, Naomi had decided that she needed to speak at the funeral. She would be emotional but she could do it. Harvey had no idea why this had suddenly become a compelling necessity and he didn’t dare ask. But it meant that Matt was ordered to get the kids out of the house while Naomi wrote frantically on the home computer, grief pouring out of her in the unedited blur of a late school assignment.
Matt had turned up at Penny’s, his three boys in tow, and with Penny absent, the two men had let both sets of children go nuts on the computer while they shared a funereal beer in place of breakfast.
‘I don’t know why she feels she has to speak at the funeral,’ Matt had said to Harvey at Penny’s kitchen table. ‘And she won’t be able to do it. She won’t. And she’ll tear strips off herself for months and we’ll all duck for cover. And then she’ll read an inspiring quote somewhere and decide she needs to become a personal trainer for disabled people. And we’ll all ride that wave.’
Harvey had laughed. ‘But you do love her?’ he asked, feeling suddenly protective of his sister and her many aborted plans and wild emotions.
And Matt had put his beer down on the table for emphasis and looked at Beam square on and said: ‘God, yes, Harvey. I love your nutty sister an unspeakable amount.’
At this, Harvey had chinked his beer against Matt’s and knew that this would probably be the high point of the day.
Within minutes, he was attending to Suze’s own funeral drama: a missing shoe. Apparently she’d packed a pair of high-heeled black shoes in her luggage but only one shoe had survived the flight. ‘Fucking baggage handlers,’ she’d said to Harvey over the phone. ‘All criminals.’ Harvey had replied, helpfully he thought, that it was more likely that she’d only packed one shoe by mistake because it seemed an odd thing for a baggage handler to pilfer just one shoe and Suze had responded by telling him she had had some very serious second thoughts on their wedding day.
Harvey had rung his mother for a suggestion on where Suze might buy a pair of appropriate shoes on short notice and Lynn had responded with undisguised curtness: ‘She’s going shoe shopping? Before a funeral?’ Unbelievable.
Beam suddenly turned over the thought in his mind that his own mother really didn’t like the mother of his children. That possibly she’d been feigning affection all along and how had this fact never presented itself to him before? They’d always been polite on the phone.
Beam desperately wants today to be over.
In the midst of all this, he had called Grace to ask if she was coming to the funeral. If she’d made up her mind. In recent days she’d said she was undecided and would make a call on the day. She felt weird about Suze being there, about his kids being there, about Bryan, all of it. But she knew Harvey wanted her at the church—he’d made that clear in the ocean and in a dozen text messages since. Even though they wouldn’t be sitting together, he would know Grace was there. This person who is not family and who likes Harvey even though she has a choice in the matter. It’s a selfish request and he knows that.
But Grace didn’t answer her phone this morning and so now, as Beam walks along the church aisle ahead of Suze, Jayne and Cate, and behind someone he suspects is an aunty, he is feeling slightly sick.
St Emmanuel’s is about half full—so much for Bryan’s standing-room-only expectations. Harvey takes a seat flanked by Cate and Jayne a few rows from the front. Ahead of them are Naomi and Matt with Lynn in between them, and ahead again is Penny, Simon and their boys.
He glances about the front of the church at the other attendees, a few of whom look faintly familiar. A cousin called Tom, a teacher from his old high school called Mrs Dalton (Beam has no idea of her connection with Lionel), Aunty Faye (who is not really his aunty), Hugh Traynor (What is he thinking?), and the city librarian with the French surname. Bryan is at the front of the church, talking earnestly with the priest.
Beam wonders if any of the other guests are ‘professional mourners’, people who surreptitiously attend funeral services to sate either morbid curiosity or unquenchable pathos. He knows this to be a thing, having done a talkback segment about it a few years ago. An open-casket viewing is the money-shot for these people. Many are even bold enough to attend wakes, counting on clueless mourners to assume their legitimacy. Some with less disturbing intentions are just lonely souls in search of human connection and free hugs from strangers.
Harvey would happily pay any one of them to take his place today.
He glances toward the back of the church (no sign of Grace) and then turns his attention to the priest, a man in his early seventies at best, shiny face sprouting from a swathe of heavy cloth and sashes. He is looking out over the congregation, an ambitious term for this lot, Harvey thinks, and unmistakeably the man looks disappointed. Surely he must see, on days like this, a collection of disconnected people for whom religion is just scaffolding for major life events, nothing more.
Music is playing, he can’t tell from where. It sounds like a choir or possibly just the ‘choir’ button on an organ. Do organs exist anywhere outside of churches these days? Beam suddenly recalls that the family who lived beside the Beams for most of his younger years were the proud owners of an organ, and Harvey had got to play it once. He couldn’t believe that you could just press a button and a drumbeat started, masking all the imperfections of any attempt at melody. Beam had thought it pure genius and clearly the way of the future—death to the piano! He’d been one of the first people to buy a Beta video recorder too.
And he is thinking about anything now really to avoid thinking about this funeral.
One last look back to the entrance and, yes, he sees her. Grace in a navy dress takes a seat in a pew behind the last of the gathering. He tries to catch her eye, wants to thank her with a smile, but she is focused on her feet and possibly being invisible.
The service finally begins, fifteen minutes late according to Harvey’s phone, which he quickly flicks on ‘silent’ lest Murphy enacts his law. Maybe Bryan’s private words to the priest were to allow some time for additional mourners to arrive. But save for Grace, there are no late arrivals.
Let’s just get on with it.
Harvey looks down at his left knee just as Cate puts her hand on it. To his right, Suze has both Jayne’s hands wrapped within hers. He is so grateful that they are here, that they know what Harvey needs sometimes better than he. For a second he feels a surge of pride, a heart swell that quickly slips into its more familiar guise: the sense that when it comes to keeping a family, Harvey has somehow got away with it so far. One more child and the odds are one would have hated him.
Father Steven introduces himself over the sound of the organist having a coughing fit and slipping out a side door. In fact, all the church doors are wide open—it’s another broiling, airless Shorton day—and the effect is a steady backdrop of cars going past and trucks working through their gears and the occasional cacophony of birds. Reminders, if any were needed, that even when a life ceremoniously ends, the world keeps rolling on and, broadly speaking, doesn’t give a shit.
Harvey senses movement to his right and feels a tap on his shoulder. It’s Suze reaching behind Jayne to get his attention. She is all mouth-gestures and dancing eyebrows. Is she here? he finally understands her as saying. The nurse? And Harvey shrugs in a hadn’t-even-occurred-to-me way.
Suze glares at him, quickly and all too aware of the circumstances, but still right through his eyeballs to the back of his skull.
Beam thinks, She will find her. She will find her and she will make an immediate appraisal. An appraisal that she will subsequently refine within a relatively short space of time but ultimately come back to because Suze loyally trusts her first instincts and always has.
Harvey looks properly at the casket for the first time. His father in a box with flowers on top. Flowers chosen by whom? Most likely Bryan. Maybe the funeral organisers or maybe the church. He wonders how much organisational minutiae he has been left out of in recent days. He could have formed an opinion on flowers if pressed.
‘This is so weird,’ Cate whispers to Harvey.
‘What is?’
‘Everything,’ Cate says. ‘Funerals. They’re just so weird.’
‘I guess so,’ Beam says, not really sure which things are most presenting themselves as odd to his daughter. But he envies it, this third-eye perspective inherent to Cate’s generation. He was never one to question rituals and traditions, things presented as part of life by people who had been around longer. Cate, however, and the young radio producers he has worked with in recent years share a cool suspicion about pretty much everything, especially if it predates social media.
Harvey looks about the church, at the audience gathered for a dead host and a sexless man in a dress, at a group of people connected by one person’s mortality, quietly shaken by this reminder of their own. He decides Cate’s assessment is not unfair: funerals are weird.
A truck outside howls to an inelegant stop and Beam realises he is now on his knees and can’t remember getting there. Fortunately everyone around him is kneeling too. At least one person here must know what they’re doing, he thinks.
‘The reality of death,’ the priest says, ‘confronts us all today and it is this collective sorrow that brings us together.’
Father Steven looks out to the congregation and then somewhere well beyond them.
‘But there is something else that unites us today,’ he says.
Beam whispers quietly to his eldest daughter: ‘Obligation.’
‘It is faith,’ says the priest.
Harvey reaches into his jacket pocket, double-checks that his phone is off.
‘Faith opens our minds to the big picture … life, death, love and forgiveness. It gives us strength. It gives us hope for what lies beyond death. For Lionel’s next journey, beyond what we know.’
Harvey looks hard at his father’s casket. Christ. Let this be it. Journey over.
Father Steven moves on, through retribution, through sin, through grief and unconditional love. Through Serving the Lord and something about sheep. Through walking towards the Light and, Beam thinks to himself, being so blinded by it that you can’t see anything else for several minutes at a time.
Finally, having made his best fist at converting at least one of the hapless sinners in these ill-fitting pews, the priest introduces Bryan. And Harvey realises now, with a grinding twist of his gut, that this is what he has been silently dreading about today: a summation of their father by the only son permitted to get close to him. The laying bare of the Beam family’s wildly unequal playing field for everyone to publicly question and assess. One version of a dead man that will do nothing to explain the trail marks of Harvey’s adolescence.
Because if Beam is honest with himself, and he feels inclined to be today, it’s the numbers game that bothers him most. For it’s one thing for a father to let loose a child without explanation and certainly without regret, but it’s another entirely for a sibling to follow suit, for the two of them to be united in their disinterest. It just, well, it looks bad.
In his more morose moments, usually after too much red wine or on his birthday or both, Harvey again suspects he has given Lionel and Bryan more to jointly criticise than any poorly written thesis, more joy than they would ever wish to unpick in the name of family. Merciless assessments of Harvey’s intellectual failings might represent the ultimate in academic downtime. But then, when he has a clearer head, Beam is embarrassed to realise just how self-important the very idea sounds. And how unfair it is to assume that Bryan is just another version of their father, two peas in the proverbial, when really he doesn’t know Bryan at all.
Maybe Bryan’s whole life has sucked because he didn’t, couldn’t, fly away.
Beam’s brother steps up to the lectern, all elbows and loose paper. He looks nervous, but Harvey suspects there isn’t a ‘confident’ look in Bryan’s repertoire. Not once looking up from his notes, Bryan reads in an unbroken tone details about Lionel Beam’s life that, to Harvey (and surely everyone else here, he thinks), sound more like a job application than a eulogy.
Much of it Harvey hadn’t known: the multiple research awards, a Distinguished Professor prize, international citations, key speaker invitations and prestigious conferences. His father was undoubtedly an anomaly in a town whose highest educational option remains TAFE. Harvey briefly wonders why his father chose to stay here when he might easily have secured a position at a sandstone university somewhere.
Then, for no clear reason, Bryan reads a quote from Thomas Cromwell, who, as he explains to the presumably unenlightened gathering, was chief minister to King Henry VIII. Harvey briefly recalls his father’s PhD dissertation being about the Tudor period. Bryan reads: My Prayer is that God give me no longer life that I shall be glad to use mine office in edification, and not in destruction.
Suze catches Harvey’s eye and mouths a none-too-subtle What the? Beam shrugs back at her.
Bryan continues: ‘Before and of course during his rich academic life, the legacy of which will endure to the benefit of generations of historians and students, Lionel raised a family including myself and two daughters, Penny and Naomi, and they themselves have children of their own.’
To Harvey’s left, he sees Cate’s hands turn upwards in her lap in a what-the-hell? fashion.
Bryan’s pace now quickens. ‘And so,’ he says, ‘Lionel Beam dies a grandfather and sadly not a great-grandfather, although great he most certainly was. As a father, Lionel believed in discipline, respect and honesty, and we as children are the beneficiaries of that approach. Society is the beneficiary of that approach and all who execute it.’
With that Bryan appears to be finished. He folds his papers in half, nods to the priest, glances at Lionel Beam’s casket, and walks off the pulpit.
Harvey’s eyes don’t work. He blinks and blinks until the focus returns. His throat starts swallowing by itself. Feels as though he’s somewhere on either side of this moment, before when it couldn’t possibly happen and after when it just did. He feels someone’s hand on his shoulder and shakes it off. Briefly considers lifting both his legs onto the pew in front of him and kicking with the full force of his chest.
Cannot fucking believe it. And yet he should and he does and he knows he will. Over and over again, for all the years he has left. Harvey thinks: This changes everything. And I imagined none of it. Bryan’s final act of devotion to their father was Harvey’s humiliation.
Complete omission of his name.
Of his very existence.
In front of his own family.
In front of everyone.
And just as quickly as the fire roared into his head, it stops. And Harvey thinks, in spite of himself, in spite of the injustice that can’t be undone, It doesn’t fucking matter.
And this too: It never fucking did.
As he thinks this and wonders if he really means it, if any unbidden emotion can ever be truly trusted, Beam sees Matt clumsily work his way out of the pew in front of him and walk up to the lectern. The priest is there again, talking into his big book, and he looks up sharply at the interloper, at Matt looking certain and uncertain at the same time. And the two men exchange words that no-one else can hear and Father Steven recedes to the side of the pulpit and Matt stands squarely at the lectern. And speaks.
‘Hi,’ he says. ‘I’m Matt. Married to Naomi.’
Matt gestures to the location of his wife with a nod of his head.
‘I’m not part of the schedule on your booklet there and I hadn’t planned to speak, but Naomi isn’t quite feeling up to it, so yeah. Look, I didn’t actually know Lionel Beam very well and I don’t know that I was ever going to. But I sort of think every life should be celebrated and people should be remembered properly, and I think Bryan did a good job of outlining the many achievements Lionel had in his career. I actually didn’t know a lot about all of that academic stuff, so I guess one of Lionel’s qualities was that he was a fairly humble man. And I think there’s a lot to be said for humility.’
Harvey glances about for Bryan and finally spots him sitting on his own in one of the side pews flanking the stage. He is looking down at his hands, still holding his sheafs of paper.
Matt grips each side of the lectern now. He looks over at Naomi, who is now weeping with full shoulder-shudders.
‘I think,’ he continues, ‘that grief is different for everyone. And not just because some of us are tougher than others or just, you know, wired differently. It’s more because we all know different sides of a person.’
Harvey feels movement beside him. Suze is swapping places with Jayne, untidily for her patent efforts to do so unnoticed. She grabs Beam’s knee with her hand and squeezes it roughly. Less affection than a prediction of battle. Suze is angry and it’s firing out of her pores.
‘It’s okay,’ Harvey whispers to her and diverts her eyes to focus on Matt.
Matt continues: ‘Bryan’s version of his dad is different to Naomi’s, different to Penny’s, and vastly different to Harvey’s. I’m not sure that Harvey was mentioned in Bryan’s speech, but yeah. There was Harvey too and he’s a bloody champ.’
Matt now runs his hand, almost violently, through his hair. He might have expected Naomi to back out of speaking, Harvey thinks, but he clearly hadn’t planned to do it himself. His discomfort fills the church and Beam is immensely grateful for it.
‘Lionel and Lynn had four kids,’ he goes on. ‘Bryan, Harvey, Penny and Naomi, in that order. I don’t think Lynn was mentioned either, but yeah, Lynn was a big help to Lionel when he changed careers and she’s a terrific mum to his kids. She’s a terrific grandmum too. Because I think, look, I don’t know …’
Matt pauses here. Then says emphatically, ‘Shit.’ And immediately, ‘Sorry Father.’
The priest nods back with a wan smile.
Matt says: ‘Parenting is probably the toughest gig of all. I find it really, really hard and I don’t even do that much of it. The only easy bit, I think, is loving them. And it’s the first and most important thing we owe our kids, every single kid, in exchange for dragging them here. You meet people who didn’t get that love and you see that life is different for them. All the little things, they’re just … harder. And they make it harder too, for themselves, because no-one tells them not to.’
A ripple of wind moves through the church, ruffling restless shirtsleeves and Penny’s hard-won booklets.
‘So anyway,’ Matt says, his voice now sounding as if it’s about to expire, ‘you’re probably thinking, what does any of this have to do with Lionel Beam?’
He waits here for an answer from the audience, possibly hoping for something better than the one he has, which is, it transpires: ‘I dunno. Whatever you want it to. Just, you know, whatever.’
Then he fiddles nervously with the microphone, as though just noticing its presence for the first time, and the effect is to issue a violent stab of feedback throughout the hall. ‘God!’ Matt says, as frantic hands fly up to assaulted ears and Penny’s children squeal. Father Steven drops his head to the floor, to the feet he can’t see beneath his robes, exhausted by all of mankind.
But Matt is not apparently finished. ‘The more important thing I want to say up here is this,’ he continues. ‘We’re having a wake for Lionel Beam at my place and you’re all welcome. I’ve got stacks of home-brew and my neighbour, the nice one, not the idiot, lent me some chairs. Just follow someone from here who knows the way to my place. Make it around two o-clock-ish, though, or I won’t have cleaned out the garage and Naomi will rip me a new one.’
At this, a semi-generous whorl of laughter rises from the floor.
‘If you’re interested,’ Matt says, inhaling the laughter, ‘I’ll be taking a few tour groups through my bonsai shed from about four when the beer kicks in.’
Matt looks down at Naomi hopefully, and Harvey can’t see her response but he hopes that she’s proud of her husband. He hopes she understands.
And he hopes Lionel Beam, from his keynote position at the front of the room, heard all of it.
Harvey reaches behind Suze to tap Jayne on the shoulder, not because he wants to tell her something but because he wants to look back at Grace now without it seeming obvious to Suze.
Jayne mouths ‘What?’ and Harvey says, ‘You okay?’ and this gives him just enough time to furtively move his gaze to the rear of the church where he sees Grace. He sees the back of Grace leaving the church through the front door. She is walking quickly and with one hand raised to the side of her face. Is it possible she’s upset, Harvey thinks, on his behalf? Embarrassed?
Instantly he wants to text her but Suze’s presence has a bodyguard feel to it. All personal space has been exhumed.
Father Steven leads them now in a song, a hymn that squeezes twenty-eight lines of scripture into eight lines of music, like every hymn ever written. Nothing rhymes and not a single true note is struck by the collective warblers. Then he says a final prayer, and a grateful group ‘Amen’ rises to the high ceiling.
And it is done.
It is done.
Harvey checks now to see what he is feeling, just as he’s attempted at least once a day for the past five. Whether there’s been a change, any change at all from a dim nothingness. From an opaque sense of anti-climax and muted failure at the departure of Lionel Beam. Anything?
He isn’t sure. Maybe something has shifted, maybe it hasn’t. He’s starting to suspect that anger is the only emotion he’d readily identify in a line-up these days.
‘Right,’ says Suze, as the crowd starts to extricate itself from the narrow pews. ‘I’m talking to Bryan.’
‘No,’ says Harvey, tugging her sleeve to sit back down. ‘Don’t worry about it, Suze. Honestly, what’s the point?’
Suze’s cheeks flood crimson. ‘The point is that he’s completely fucked in the head and he made you look stupid, Harvey.’ She is madder than he’s ever seen her, at least in recent years. ‘He deliberately hurt you in front of everyone. What a … ’ and Suze flounders a little here, momentarily tempered by the expectations of the venue. But she gets there in the end with: ‘Cock. Just a right cock.’
Beam is about to try a different tack with his ex-wife, a sideways manoeuvre to prevent her from flying at Bryan like a winged monkey, but he is too late. Suze is off, marching purposefully in the direction of his brother, who is stood now beside their father’s coffin.
Harvey hurries after her, noting his mother’s worried gaze as he passes her seat. Feeling his sisters’ eyes on his back. Feeling his daughters stumbling behind. He is a step behind Suze as she reaches Bryan.
‘What the hell was that all about, Bryan?’ she says, gesturing manically in the direction of the lectern. ‘What exactly were you hoping to achieve there?’
Bryan looks oddly at Suze, as though he’s trying to place her, and Harvey suddenly remembers that it has been years (and maybe twenty hairstyles on Suze’s part) since the two of them have seen each other.
Finally Bryan says: ‘I’m sorry, Suzanne. What do you mean?’
‘Not including Harvey,’ she says, thrusting both hands in the air. ‘Not even mentioning that he was a son of Lionel’s too. Why would you do that?’
Bryan looks down at his shoes, which Harvey once again notices are completely at odds with his otherwise conservative dress code. Are those tassels?
‘I’m sorry,’ Bryan says. ‘It’s just one perspective.’
Suze’s eyes widen, her red lipstick now a slash of fury. ‘Perspective is not fact,’ she says. ‘Fact is fact, Bryan. Lionel and Lynn had four kids. Just like I had two. There is no perspective on how many children exit a vagina.’
Of all the words uttered today, ‘vagina’ seems to ricochet most wildly off the oak panelling. Beam grimaces.
‘Suzanne, I didn’t write the eulogy,’ Bryan says. ‘I was just the one to read it out.’
Suze looks at Bryan in confusion, then quickly at Harvey, who is now looking at the casket to their right.
Beam gets it now. Understands what power would motivate Bryan to make himself look mean-spirited, or clearly wrong at the very least.
‘He wrote it,’ says Harvey, shrugging at the flower-draped box. ‘Dad wrote it.’
‘He asked me to read it,’ Bryan says, looking at Harvey with an uncertain expression that might be guilt or remorse or the absence of both. ‘It was the last thing he said to me.’
Beam looks at the creased sheafs of thin paper hanging limply in Bryan’s hands. Old man’s paper. Says to Bryan: ‘Hell of a dying wish.’
‘Yes,’ Bryan says, and Harvey wonders what it would feel like to punch him out right now, punch him hard. John Jackson style.
Possibly sensing Harvey’s unwelcome urge (Suze had once dragged him away from a sightseeing walk along The Gap because she correctly intuited Harvey’s silent compulsion to leap into its nothingness), his ex-wife now grabs his elbow to lead him back to their daughters and out of the church. She turns back to Bryan only once but directs her parting comment at Lionel Beam’s coffin.
‘What a fucker,’ she says.
A small crowd mills at the front of the church. Back-row attendees retreat on tiptoe to the car park. Streaky clouds cool the air and the footpath. Naomi is sitting on a stone step, Matt beside her, his arm around her shoulders. Penny’s husband is cradling their youngest while also appearing to inspect the tyres on a large ute.
Beam’s mother is deep in discussion with Penny, but as Harvey approaches it’s clear they are waiting for him. Suze peels away from Beam’s side just as a conversation with his mother appears unavoidable.
‘Harvey,’ she says, brushing some small apparent thing off her son’s shoulder. ‘I just don’t understand. What did you say to Bryan in the hospital? Why would he do that?’
And Beam blinks hard at his mother, at this request for an explanation, of all things.
‘Mum,’ Penny barks at Lynn. ‘It’s not Harvey’s fault.’
‘I didn’t say it was his fault, Penny. I’m just trying to understand why it happened.’
Penny throws her gaze upward. Her face looks as though it’s done a carnival of funerals today rather than just one. ‘Everything doesn’t have an explanation, Mum. People do shitty things all the time.’
At this, Cate steps up to her father’s side—Harvey hadn’t even realised both daughters were standing behind him (a blind spot he’d had since they’d been able to walk)—and she looks at her grandmother and then at Penny. She explains to them that Lionel had written his own eulogy, had asked Bryan to read it. That it was his ‘dying wish’, quoting her father directly, and in hearing her do so, Harvey is relieved he didn’t say many of the other things that had streaked across the windscreen of his forehead just minutes ago.
‘He didn’t need to do that,’ Penny says, shaking her head. ‘He shouldn’t have done that.’
But Lynn seems unconvinced, shaking her head slightly and glancing left and right to check, it seems, for onlookers. ‘Maybe he didn’t feel he had a choice,’ she says.
The air is abruptly split by the sound of a plane tearing low above their heads and Beam instinctively lifts his gaze to watch until it disappears or plummets without warning.
He can’t take it anymore, any of it, not today. Can’t have one more conversation like this. Can’t listen to the women of the Beam family unpick and rethread versions of reality that best marry with the way they’ve always seen things. Far from tending to wounds, they are simply reviewing the military strategy.
He leads Cate and Jayne away from the church, from the event he had presciently dreaded, and from Lionel Beam. He’ll be buggered if he’s going to the cemetery.
Beam has no idea where Suze is now. Or Grace for that matter. But he will not be following any hearse. He will not be filing any additional efforts today under the headings of obligation and respect. He is done with this.
‘Let’s get a milkshake,’ he says to his daughters.