She was amazed how delicate you could be with a JCB digger. The yellow livery gleamed in the sun as the driver gently lifted the final dirt off the two coffins in the hole, placed it in the pile to the side. Hannah hugged Indy next to her, rubbed her hip. No words could express how Hannah was feeling, or how Indy must feel, or her grandparents, sitting on a bench two graves down, watching stony-faced in several layers of clothes.
The digger receded and a small crane pulled up. A workman in a hi-vis vest, shorts and hard hat jumped into the wide hole and guided the chains around the first coffin. After some back and forth he slid out of the hole and gave a signal, and the crane lifted Indy’s dad out. His casket swayed once it was free of the hole as if he was enjoying his newfound freedom after years underground.
Hannah saw Indy’s chest rise and fall. She turned and tucked some of that green hair behind her ear. It wasn’t necessary, just a demonstration of love.
‘Careful.’ This was Esha from the bench, one hand clasped in her husband’s fist, the other waving at the workmen. ‘That’s my boy.’
This was all pretty unbearable. The workman placed a steadying hand on the coffin corner and guided it to a flatbed truck, where two tarpaulins were spread out. The crane driver was less delicate than the digger guy, and the casket dropped a few feet before stopping just before the back of the truck. Indy gasped.
‘Fuck’s sake,’ Hannah said under her breath.
Esha shouted to Hannah. ‘Do they know what they’re doing?’
It was deliberately loud – enough for the workmen to hear.
Eventually Pratik Banerjee was safe on the truck, one guy wrapping the casket in the sheet, the other guiding the chains back into the hole for Giva.
‘You OK?’ Hannah said.
‘I’m fine.’
She wasn’t, of course. Hannah nuzzled at Indy’s cheek with her nose, the kind of thing you do with a kid. She wanted to let Indy know she was here, like Einstein nuzzling your neck when you’re tired. But she also just wanted to touch Indy’s skin, to feel that she was solid in this world, she was real.
It had already taken so much effort to get here. Dorothy pulled some strings at the council to get a quick exhumation licence. It had involved a solicitor, sheriff, cemetery administrator, feasibility certificate then finally a Warrant to Disinter, which Hannah had in her pocket. Hannah could’ve done with some of Dorothy’s wisdom right now, she’d carried out a few exhumations in her time. Or she could’ve done with some of Mum’s nihilistic energy, swearing her way through the ridiculous idea of digging up bodies only to burn them.
Hannah thought about her visit to José’s place. The new message was troubling, Olivia’s admission more so, but José’s obsessive behaviour was the most worrying. She knew something about obsession, had lost it after her dad escaped from prison. But the year since had given her perspective, crucial distance to realise how lost she’d been, just like José was. If someone was really ghosting him with this shit they were in danger of fucking him up permanently. But she wasn’t sure how to help. She wanted to disprove him but the technical aspects of the data were a little beyond her. He’d emailed the data to her along with an explanation of systematic errors, biases and corrections, all the caveats scientists put on their information. It still looked like an alien message to her.
She thought about the planets José talked about, one made of diamond, another completely black. One raining sapphires and rubies. She looked at the blue sky above Edinburgh, gravestones gleaming in the sun, trees throwing dappled light over corners. She wondered if anyone asked for a grave in the shade, keep them cool as their bodies decayed to mulch and loam.
Giva’s coffin was dancing in the air just as her husband’s had until the worker grabbed a corner and guided it.
‘It’ll be over soon,’ Hannah said, touching Indy’s arm.
Indy shook her head and looked at her grandparents, like statues of elderly angels grieving the dead.
‘But it’s never over, is it? The way I feel without them.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I wasn’t having a go at you.’ Indy waved at her mother’s coffin being lowered onto the truck. ‘All this has dug up a lot of stuff.’ She laughed and pointed at the hole in the ground. ‘Literally. I never got to say goodbye, not really.’
Hannah would forever be annoyed that she wasn’t at Indy’s parents’ funeral. It was a year before they became a couple. It was obscene now to think of a time when Indy wasn’t in her life. A parallel universe, one of the multiverse options where she and Indy never met, where Hannah was still alone in the cosmos, nothing to stop her floating off into her latest obsession like José. The darkest timeline.
Hannah played with the engagement ring on her finger, felt the comfort of it.
‘We should get married,’ she said, looking Indy in the eye.
Indy laughed. ‘We’re already engaged.’
Giva’s coffin was wrapped in tarpaulin on the back of the truck. The crane had reversed away and the digger was back, filling in the hole as if nothing had happened. Esha and Ravi got up slowly from the bench, supporting each other.
‘I mean we should get married as soon as possible.’
Indy stared at Hannah then at her grandparents holding hands, then at the truck with her disinterred parents on the back.
‘OK,’ she said.