Stumbling. Legs refuse commands. Head won’t lift. His only desire is to curl into a small ball. Someone drags him on, though. A very insistent someone who won’t let go. He feels like something’s thundered through him, a corrosive substance that swept into his system and left nothing undamaged. His breathing is weak; he can’t get enough air.
Questions surface.
He tries to ask one, but his lips are unfamiliar and his tongue is slack. It drains from his mouth in a monotone slur.
‘What are you on about now?’ Misha. That voice belongs to Misha. The graveyard girl.
He shrugs her off. Needs a seat. Raises his head long enough to see a rickety-looking fence. He slumps against it. ‘Neuman. Where?’
‘We should really keep going,’ she says. She looks nervous, which is a first.
‘Where is it?’
‘Back there somewhere. In the gardens.’
Propping himself up, he looks around and behind him. ‘That’s…’
‘Daisy Hill. We’re on the opposite side to the chapels. These are the rambling trails that cut along behind the gardens.’
‘And they lead into the graveyard.’
‘The back end, yeah. Where no one goes, except Granddad. It’s where he keeps all his bits of wood and other rubbish. It’s a pretty good place to hide out.’
‘Who from?’ He doesn’t think he should be interested, but he is.
She shrugs. ‘Anyone. Everyone.’
‘Like Vic Sweet?’
She’s about to tell him to shut up, to mind his own business, go to hell, something like that. It’s in the hooded way she looks at him. The way she turns away, the way her shoulders draw up. She looks down into that eight-ball. It reminds him of when he was eight himself, holding Brown Ted, looking into those big plastic eyes for answers. They were so big, so open, that there had to be something in them, some explanation. There never was, though. Caleb was left with the never-ending why.
Some questions never have an answer, he thinks, no matter how hard you shake the ball.
She doesn’t turn back to him, but she talks. ‘You’ve got to get away from it sometimes. All the crap. All the hate. Because you really feel it. It’s like a pressure, a crushing pressure. You feel it here.’ Misha runs a hand along her shoulders, the nape of her neck. ‘Makes it hard to shrug off when it’s always here.’ A hollow laugh at her own joke. ‘My granddad can be so dumb sometimes, you know. I made the mistake of telling him about Vic once. He said that Vic didn’t really hate me; he couldn’t because hate’s too strong an emotion. Hate’s a vicious thing, he said. It’s harmful; it wants to hurt. Kids don’t know enough to hate that much, he said. Well that’s what Vic wants, him and his friends and others like them. They want to hurt me bad, and they want it more and more, and I don’t think they can help it. They know I deserve it, for what I am. And it’s right, isn’t it? Life would be better if I wasn’t around. I’m not wanted. I can’t even do what Granddad wants me to do.’ She stares at the distant trees of Pernicious House. The only lights to be seen are the so-far-away stars. ‘It gets a bit heavy, like I might snap. So I go to one of my forgotten places, and I stay there for so long that I can start to believe that it’s the only place that’s real, and I’m totally and completely alone. That’s kind-of scary, and kind-of okay. It makes me ache when I think of everyone and everything else disappearing, it’s painful, and I like it. That’s where I go, that’s what I do.’ Finally she looks at him. No cocked head or arched eyebrows. She’s almost defiant. ‘You’ve got to be careful with questions, Caleb. Sometimes you end up getting an answer.’
Instead of telling her to shut up, that he didn’t want to hear any of that, that he can’t cope with that stuff, he says something else. ‘My mum told me a dumb thing once as well. She said that when we die we all go up to the heavens, every one of us, and that each star is another soul. She said it was a fact and she could prove it. The soul is energy, and energy can’t be destroyed, it just changes forms, and without a body to hold it then the soul has to go somewhere, so up it goes to join all the others and become a star. It made a lot of sense when I was little. I liked the idea. We’d all be up there, even the pets.’ Caleb swings his feet as he sits on the fence. He starts to shiver as the chill of after-midnight sets into his skin. ‘She died a few months after she told me that. I’d look up at the sky, whenever the stars were out. They all looked the same. Some brighter than others, but they were all just dots. It didn’t seem right that when we’re dead we become a random scatter of dots in the night. It was pointless her being up there if I didn’t know which one she was. I couldn’t work out why I couldn’t recognise her. It’s my mum’s soul. I should know it. I should recognise it the way people point out constellations. I wanted to say, there’s Mum, there she is just above Orion’s Belt.’ He looks up. There’s an unending sea of black crystal above him, imperfections twinkling. ‘I read up about stars. A star is a huge ball of gas held together by gravity. They’re really hot at the centre, and when they heat up they shine. It’s a load of hydrogen turning into helium. Nothing about souls. Just gas. I asked my d…father about it. ‘Mum said we all become stars.’ He said to me, ‘Your mother also said she’d be around forever.’ She told us all lies. She’s not up there with all of them, and there’s not much of her in the grave now either, is there?’ He wants to throw things. ‘It was a stupid lie, a stupid thing to say. And after I found out that stuff about stars, I kept reading. I couldn’t stop myself. The universe is bigger than we’ve got any hope of imagining, and it’s expanding so everything’s getting further away from everything else. Between all of that is this dark matter stuff, and that’s what most of the universe is made up of. So there’s all this dark matter up there and it’s all spreading out, and look at us. We’re all living on this one planet. There are no other planets that we know of that have got life on them. Planet Earth is like the odd one out. The only one with life. All the others have got nothing. This planet is a mistake. We’re not meant to be. That’s why I sleep on the garage roof. I can’t help it. I look up into the sky and all this stuff’s in my head and I try to look at it all differently and I can’t. I sleep on the garage roof. It’s what I do.’
This is where she’s meant to laugh and call him a whacko, then walk away. She doesn’t. ‘Where do the souls go, then?’
He yawns. ‘Bed, if they’ve got any sense.’
She sits on the fence beside him. ‘Come on, seriously, tell me.’ She’s so intense, so close. ‘Because what you’re saying is that there’s nothing. But you don’t believe that. You visit your mum, like, all the time, so you must think there’s something. And after what’s happened tonight…’
‘I don’t know what’s happened tonight, I don’t get any of it. I don’t know what that Neuman thing is, and, and I don’t care about it, I just want to be left alone to do what I do. I just want to be bored and ignored and visit my mum if I want to.’ He looks towards the moonlit graveyard, tries to figure out where Mum is; he’s lost his bearings. He talks to cover the absence of all other sound, and he talks low because the night demands it. ‘I go because that’s where she is, and I have to go somewhere. Whatever’s left of her is there. She’s not in the house anymore. That place is dead. There’s memories and stuff, but… There’s a stone with a name on it, so I talk to that.’
He’s noticed that she never looks away when he talks. Her attention is total. ‘That’s not all there is. It’s not just a stone.’
Caleb’s feeling like he’s tipping over. ‘We’re not going back after that thing, are we? I don’t think I can do it. It’s so late and I’m so tired, and I know we were going to and I know why, but I really can’t.’
Misha swings her legs over to the graveyard side. ‘We’d best go round the bottom of the hill. Crosswell could still be out messing around with light-maps, and you don’t want to bump into that old loser, trust me.’
At this ungodly hour he’d trust pretty much anything as long as it gets him home.