HENRY HUNTER
1832–1902
UNTIL THE DAY BREAK
AND THE SHADOWS FLEE
He’s not comfortable being this near the grave again, the one Misha and her friends dug up last night. He scribbles down the inscription, then backs away until two rows of the dead stand between him and that cursed pile of earth. Caleb can’t recall ever being this jumpy. Every shudder of a breeze-brushed branch is a Neuman charging out to strangle him. Every fluttering bird is a suit swooping over to grab him and bury him alive. His nerves jump like night-time crickets.
Stop being such a coward, he tells himself. Misha would just laugh.
And why does he care what that stupid graveyard girl thinks? She’s dangerous; she got him into all this.
‘That’s not even true,’ he says in a whisper, afraid to wake anyone. ‘I came here in the first place, and I came back.’ He didn’t like that admission. He didn’t want to think about what it meant. Instead he drew a diagram. Notepad turned sideways, he puts Hunter’s grave in the centre, a tiny rectangle with a number one in it, puts a ‘1’ beside the inscription he’d just jotted down. Then he traces his way back to Easton’s grave, traces his way back two days, and has it really only been two days? Honestly? Time surely lies. He fills in a portion of the plots between Easton and Hunter, ‘2’ and ‘1’, leaving a thin space between each row for the barely-there pathways, and already he can see that he’ll need a bigger piece of paper. Even at this small scale he can’t hope to fit everything on.
Another inscription catches his eye.
That’s number ‘3’, jotted and numbered. Like the other two, nothing else. No mention of beloved wives, husbands or anyone. Just the message, which to Caleb almost sounds like an invite. COME, it says, ‘TIS NOT TOO LATE. Caleb would love a better world. His world’s been no good for too long.
The next stone along is completely illegible, but the next one over? That interests Caleb too.
JANE AND THOMAS MOORE
’68 AND ’80
ON THAT BRIGHT ETERNAL SHORE
WE SHALL MEET TO PART NO MORE
The words resonate where he beats and breathes. They mean more than they say, he thinks. It’s a sentence of hope. It hopes that there’s an eternal shore to be found. It hopes that, even though Jane and Thomas’s time together in this life has ended, they will meet again. It hopes that if there is another place and if they find each other, there will be nothing more that can come between them. It hopes for an end to misery. And what happened to Thomas? Did an accident take him, or were twelve years without his Jane beyond his ability to endure, so at the end he gave up?
Caleb can’t choose which is worse. To be Jane and have happiness and your partner so suddenly gone and replaced with darkness, or to be Thomas and live after she’s gone. To endure. To battle on through time as your memories slip back, away. Would he find her harder to remember? Would she fade? What about the places they went together, the things they did, the moments they had, moments so vivid they could never be gone…
Two weeks ago Mum’s face wouldn’t come to Caleb. He’d run from the house after one of Father’s longer tirades, a rant about mouldy cups hidden under beds, and there was only so many times Caleb could hear that he was useless and lazy before the tears came. He had promised himself that he’d never let that man see him cry again, not after what happened at Mum’s funeral, so he ran, and he kept on going until he had no more go left, finding himself at the far end of the sports field. He sat hard on the grass, and wept, and hoped that by the time he went home Father would have decided that he couldn’t take any more of his waste-of-space son and be long gone. It hadn’t been anything like this when Mum was alive. There had been laughter in the house. It had been a fun place. A home.
Caleb tore up tufts of grass, throwing them as he shouted a stream of swear words, all the things he’d been storing up to hurl at Father. The thought of Mum stopped him. She wouldn’t want to hear him going on like that. She’d have given him that look, the disappointed one that cut him deep. And he couldn’t picture it. Mum’s face wasn’t there. Not just the disappointed version either. The pleased one, the concerned one, bored, excited, tense, tired, proud, and fretful, none of the expressions that yesterday had been so familiar to him were anywhere to be found in his memories. He thought hard of the places they’d been. He closed his eyes so that the present-day world couldn’t overlay his recollections. He made himself concentrate on all the colours and all the names of the flowers in the gardens of Pernicious House, the names and where they could be found, and the words of the songs that Mum would sing when they were alone, and was he really remembering her voice properly. Was that the way she sounded? He could remember colours, smells, names, and songs, and so many little details, so why was the most important one gone? Why wouldn’t she come back? Why couldn’t he summon the image of her face?
Father was right about him. He was useless, a waste of space. He couldn’t even keep the simplest promise in the world, one that he made to his own mum.
At the graveside, as she lay alone in her box, Caleb had promised that he would never forget her.
He would think about her every day, about their walks, their days out, their curl-ups on the sofa as she read books and he flicked through comics in Saturday morning sunbeams. She was so clear to him, always shining.
And he’d let her go. He’d promised that he’d keep her forever, and then he let her go.
He wanted to punch himself in the head. He couldn’t think of any other way to numb this pain.
He ran to his grandfather, begged him to pull out all the photo albums, and he stared hard at every single picture of Mum, absorbed them. The curve of her cheek, the slope of her nose, the set of her chin, the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, he pasted her back into those walks, days out and curl-ups on the sofa. Gramps brought him a cup of tea and asked what was wrong and he said nothing, it was all okay now, except it wasn’t, not quite. It couldn’t really be okay, could it?
What kind of son forgot his own mother’s face. Perhaps he was turning into a cold creature, like Father. A genetic failing, an irreversible process. It’s not Time chewing up his memories, it’s his own DNA rejecting them.
Pain in his scalp. He’s pulling at his hair again. Clumps of it gripped in his hands. He lets go, opens his eyes to see splashes of pain-stars disrupting his vision, unclenches his tight jaw. His chest and neck are fierce-hot. His lungs feel swollen, inflamed. He looks around self-consciously. There’s no one in sight, no one’s seen him acting oddly, unless they’re spying from somewhere secret. There are a lot of places for a girl to spy from, but at least he feels alone. That’ll have to be enough.
He needs a break.
He goes to sit with Mum.