I turn, I walk away at last. It’s only the thick taste of hate that lets me. As if I need to go and puke.
Look what you did to her, look what you made her do.
Even as I walk I feel the tug, the pluck at my back.
But don’t be fooled. It’s only a grave. Don’t look round—a last glance, as at some abandoned victim. The roses like a blotch of blood.
Don’t be fooled by the words you think you hear, whispered, icy.
“Go on, walk. You can do that, can’t you? You’re free, you’re glad. But you haven’t got her yet, have you? Not exactly. Eight more years, if you’re lucky …”
Keep walking, close your ears.
But is that where he is in any case, in that grave behind you? Is that where the dead are, locked up in their graves—prisoners in their cells as well? Aren’t they the freest ones of all, watching us maybe, wherever we go, like perfect unseen detectives, when we think we come to stare at them?
“So you can’t ever walk away, not from me, can you? And you haven’t got her yet. Eight more years … You poor sad bastard.”
But I reach the line of trees and feel safe. Out of range, in the clear. Only a grave, only a slab of stone.
From the region of the crematorium, the sound of car doors shutting. One party leaving, another arriving—even in the time I’d been standing there.
And it’s only the old, old question, the common question. How long have we got? What’s our sentence? Eight, nine years …
My God, there was a time when a year yawned for ever, it was time you could waste. Now it works both ways: only eight years.
“When I come out, George, you won’t want me. I’ll be years older, you won’t want me.”
“It’s not like that, it doesn’t work like that.”
(It would work on his side, if it did.)
I breathe deep, the black taste subsiding—thank God for this crisp bright air. And now it’s past mid-morning, there’s even a faint hint of warmth when you lift your face to the sun, like warm water in a cold glass.
I walk on. Twenty to twelve. Time on my hands, even allowing for the drive to come. I find a litter bin and get rid of the balled-up wrapping paper. The cemetery is a grid of paths and plots that someone must have planned once, like you plan a town. But not far from the crematorium is a separate laid-out garden, a wall at one end, facing south—a terrace beneath, with benches. In summer the wall must be a mass of climbing plants. Even today it looks like it’s being granted a brief midday bask.
Women in the Tanning Centre, doing both sides. The sun in my empty office, touching my desk.
I sit on one of the benches, hands in coat pockets. A graveyard tramp. Beyond the flower beds, through more lines of trees, the ranks of graves. But they’re okay, seen at a distance, seen all together: harmless gravestones taking the sun. They’re almost reassuring, these well-behaved guests, given their space here in the land of the living.
Who on earth are they all?