A Graveyard Visible

by Steve Conoboy

  313.15m x 341.6m

  Caleb wishes he hadn’t done such a good job of remembering those numbers. They’re now laser-burned into the meat of his brain. He tries to think of stupidly catchy songs to overwrite the data, but nothing comes. He still hasn’t got rid of it when the rain eventually stops early evening, fat cloud-clumps roving off to wring themselves out further west. He’s been stuck in the house all day. There has been nothing to do but stay in his room, staring out of the window. It’s the only place in the house where he isn’t likely to cross paths with Father. He has to get out there, into the freshly lit outdoors. To do what? Anything. Nothing in particular. Look around. Be somewhere other than the house.

  As he pulls his trainers back on, Father calls to him, ‘Your grandfather’s been on the phone. He’s after a hammer. Take one from the toolbox. Tell him I want it back tomorrow. The old goat should have one of his own.’ He follows this by droning about how useless Gramps is and why does he have to keep ringing at the worst possible times, and Caleb blocks it out. None of it is of any use to him. He’s heard a thousand variations before, and each time makes him feel a little worse.

  He hates it.

  He also kind of hates visiting Gramps. It’s not as fun as it used to be. He’s getting a little strange. Tells odd stories. Asks weird questions. Says things from the middle of non-existent conversations. He’s still nice. He’s still Gramps.

  Sort of.

  He lives a few streets over, a very short walk. Father hasn’t ventured near in four years.

  Caleb tries the door. It’s unlocked as usual, so he lets himself in. ‘It’s just me, Gramps.’

  The answer comes from the kitchen at the far end of the hall. ‘Why do you say that every time? Just. It’s just me. Like you’re nothing to be excited about.’ All of his trains and carriages are lined up on the dining table. He picks one up, sprays it with polish. ‘Make people think that maybe you are exciting. It’s me. I’m here. Strong, like that. You use the word just, you allow people to adopt the position of disappointment. Oh, it’s just him, they say to each other. We’ll forget about him and see who comes in next.’ He sets to rubbing the model train carriage with a dirty tea towel.

  The smell of polish is more prevalent than oxygen in the room. It burns Caleb’s nostrils. ‘I didn’t mean it the way you’re saying it. I just meant…’

  ‘Doesn’t matter what you meant, it matters what it sounds like. Sound is more important than meaning.’

  Caleb frowns. This sounds like a normal conversation, but Caleb’s only been in the house for about a minute and feels that he’s wandered into slightly wobbly territory. ‘I brought the hammer,’ he says. It sounds like a normal thing to say. ‘He wants it back tomorrow.’

  ‘I suppose I should thank him for his generosity.’ Gramps picks up another carriage, gives it a hefty spray. ‘I’ll have the trap finished by morning.’

  ‘Still haven’t caught him?’

  Gramps almost drops the carriage. ‘Don’t call it him! It’s it! You’ll start with calling it a him, then you’ll be giving the filthy vermin a name, and then we’ve got real problems!’ Caleb makes an effort not to roll his eyes. The subject of the mouse is a particularly strong agitator for Gramps. ‘Never give it a name! That would make it feel at home. And if one of them feels at home, the others will follow.’ He’s eyeballing the skirting boards, looks ready to swing train segments round like clubs. ‘I keep him on his toes so he never feels settled. Won’t touch poison, the little bugger. But I’ll get him. This trap will be foolproof.’

  ‘Him.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You told me not to say “him”, but you just did. You said, “I’ll keep him on his toes”.’

  The confusion pushes Gramps’s wrinkles all together. ‘Did I? Blast! How did he…it. It! How did it get under my defences? This is exactly what I’ve been talking about, Caleb. Even I can slip up.’ He selects the carriage he was dealing with when Caleb arrived, starts polishing it again. ‘You must always think about what’s coming out of your mouth, and what it means. Get yourself some cream soda. It’s in the fridge. You’ll be doing me a favour if you drink it. It’s turned against me in recent years. Gives me tremendous wind power.’

  Caleb opens the fridge. There’s cherryade, and no cream soda. He hates cherryade. He doesn’t really want a drink anyway. ‘You’re running out of milk, Gramps. You want me to get some from the corner shop?’

  ‘Hmm? No, no, I’ll do it myself later, gives me an excuse to get out of the house.’ He sprays more polish. It’s looking like a very good idea for Gramps to get air, and get it soon. He’ll be off his head if he stays in this atmosphere too much longer. Even with a window open, Caleb feels woozy. ‘I spotted you earlier, sunshine, going into that graveyard.’

  That fluttering tickle of guilt again. Not like he’s been trespassing or breaking some law; it’s like he’s been seen doing something private, something that’s his and his alone. ‘Uh-huh,’ he says, because it doesn’t commit to anything.

  ‘I wasn’t spying on you, kiddo,’ says Gramps, without realising how much worse that makes Caleb feel. ‘Just happened to be passing by the front room window, looking out at the rain. Saw you down the road, running through the gates. That’s our Caleb, I said, there he goes again.’

  It’s hard to know what to say, so Caleb doesn’t say anything.

  ‘Happen to see you going in there quite a lot. I’m not a spy; this is only what I see. Some of the grannies around here, they see you sometimes too. You know how it is with old people and graveyards.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ said Caleb, although he doesn’t know at all. He chews the corner of his bottom lip, wonders when it will be polite to leave.

  ‘Don’t suppose your dad knows anything about how often you’re going up there?’ A shrug is an honest answer. ‘I can’t imagine he’s changed his mind about you hanging around there. He won’t be happy, will he?’ It would be easy to tell Gramps that the man is never happy, so what difference would anything make? ‘Don’t worry, I’m not one for running around telling tales out of school. But do me a favour. Come with me a moment, will you?’ He leads Caleb to the front room, putting the highly polished train carriage into his pocket.

  In all of Caleb’s life, there’s only been one change to this room. It’s the same two sofas with the same bobble-fluffed throws he sat on when Grandma listened to him read aloud so slowly, so haltingly. The same pictures of places so old they’re out of time, in the same flowery frames. Same smiles, same wrinkles, only deeper as time moves on. Ornamental cats that have never moved, always stretching, rumps in the air. Same smell that always reminds him of Grandma, a small old woman who looked like she’d last forever and who faded and died once Mum was gone. It is preserved, this room. Caleb’s memories may well wait here forever. That is both warming and sad. It pulls at him, and confuses him.

  ‘Come on, Caleb, I want you to look out here. Lovely day now, wouldn’t believe it was tipping down earlier. It’s turned into the perfect summer’s day, hasn’t it? All the kids are out again. Look at them, down at the park there, swinging about like bloody monkeys.’ The park is at the end of the road farthest from the graveyard. There’s a metal climbing frame, spider-shaped. A fort that spits out children down its gleaming slide. A thing that spins. A thing that rocks. A thing that rocks and spins. ‘Look at all the fun they’re having. It’s full of life that place. And where is it you go? Up there, with the dead. In the rain. Do you see what I’m saying? Can you see the difference?’ The graveyard is at one end of the road, the park is at the other. That is the difference to Caleb. Opposites. Gramps’s voice goes into soft and caring mode. ‘I know your mum’s up there. I know that better than anybody. That’s my girl. And it’s alright to visit sometimes. It’s healthy and normal to do that. Sometimes. But death isn’t for the young, Caleb. That’s not healthy, that’s not normal. You’ve got to spend some time in the park. The air’s fresher there, my boy. You get what I mean?’

>   Caleb gives his smile, the one that reassures people, makes them think he’s listening.

  ‘Good. Now, you don’t want to be wasting your summer holiday on a crotchety old devil like me. Off you go. Just live!’

  There’s that word ‘just’ again.

  8

  He sits on the very top of the fort, back against the spire, while some girl screams at him to get down, it’s her turn. He blanks the grubby little nutter, figuring she’ll give up soon and find someone else to annoy. There are plenty of other kids around here for her to scream at. They whirl around in dervish swarms, hunting each other in swirling packs that disband every two minutes, and the noise is a senseless squawking mess. He hates it. The meaninglessness of it all. He wonders how they don’t give themselves headaches.

  And that’s all he thinks of them because, through the trees at the edge of the park, over the roofs of the houses behind the trees at the edge of the park, there is the hill with the graveyard sprawled across it, and he’s watching it carefully, watching it like he might catch it out, might see it flex or stretch.

  He knows he won’t see a sudden moment of expansion. It must be a constant, gradual thing. Tiny increments. The universe does this. Forever expanding. Moving on and on. Such things can only be proved by measurements.

  313.15m x 341.6m

  If he gets the same numbers, or close (he’ll allow for errors), then Caleb will let it go. He will. But he must go back this evening, because he won’t rest.

  He has an alibi. Anyone asks what he’s up to, he’ll say it’s part of an art project for school. He’s going to try to make a scale model, that’s what he’ll say.

  And if Father doesn’t like any of it, that’s just tough.

  9

  ‘Do you see what I mean?’ the old man asks Misha, and he’s tapping parts of the diagram with a stubby finger. He lost the ends of each digit, up to the first knuckle, on his right hand. He tells people it was in an accident with a chainsaw, his own fault for letting his concentration drift. This story is exactly that: a tall tale. A lie. The truth is, as Misha knows, is very far from and much more dangerous than chainsaws. Granddad physically has to turn her head with his hand to get her looking in the correct place. ‘Please, Misha, focus. Here, at West Nine, everything is higgledy-piggledy. It creates an imbalance that’s hard to address, given current layout and numbers, but look closely here…’ The stub thumps an area halfway up the hill, not far from where she saw that Caleb earlier today. He’d be tiny seen from this angle, high above the large map, which spills over the table’s edges. Miniature Caleb stares at the miniature map-version of her. He doesn’t call her a name, doesn’t tell her to piss off, doesn’t demand anything of her. What he does is look puzzled. She feels an urge to push the mini-Misha closer to him. Mini might dig in her heels, but what chance would she have of resisting God-Misha’s will? An enormous hand will descend from the heavens and force her forwards, digging two thin ditches as she goes. Then she’ll be face-to-face with the funny little indie boy, and she’ll say…what? Should she tell him to stop snooping around? Should she ask what he’s looking for? Should she tell him to get on with it, do what everyone else does, call her Ghoul Girl or the Corpser or whatever else he needs to? Yes, call mini-Misha something horrible, give her a shove so that she falls and lands on someone’s flowers, then God-Misha can shake the land itself with her thunderous anger, and smoosh him under the heel of her palm.

  ‘Well?’ says Granddad. Misha’s gut squirms a little, because she can’t think of a fake answer. ‘You haven’t heard a word I said,’

  ‘That’s not true,’ she says, confident now that she doesn’t need to lie. ‘You said about layouts and numbers and the imbalance of it all.’

  Granddad shakes his head, rubbing at the deep wrinkles over his brow. Worry lines, Misha calls them. The more furrows there are, and the more they scrunch together, the more worried he is. And before he hides it all away, before he smooths his lines as best he can, before he puts on a thin smile that can’t hope to fool the way it’s meant to, Misha wishes she could be less of a disappointment to him. He’d never say it, but she’s not what he wants, expects or deserves.

  This knowledge is a long, slender needle of pain that eases a little further in every day, too slippery to pull back out.

  ‘I’m pushing too hard, I know. All these extra lessons…’

  ‘It’s a little bit like getting triple homework,’ she says, looking up at him through her swathe of lashes. It’s one of the looks she practices in the mirror. It works, filling out his smile.

  ‘No school, and I’m making you work harder than ever, eh? What a horrible old man I am.’

  ‘You are, Granddad. A real horror.’

  He rolls up the map. The large sheet of paper needs nimble work from both hands. ‘I bang on a lot, I know. But it’s important, my girl. You have to learn this, all of this, and we have to do all the boring bits like layouts and arrays before we can bring it all together…’

  ‘I know,’ she says, and she really does know, and even talking about how boring this stuff is makes her feel bored. ‘It’s just…nothing more’s going in, it’s like my head’s all full up.’

  ‘No more tonight, then,’ says Granddad as he slips the map back into a cardboard tube and puts the tube back with the stack on the sideboard. ‘Let’s have supper. There’s still some stew left in the pan.’ He shuffles away in his tatty slippers, looking for all the world like just another doddery old chap with his head partly in the clouds and partly in his memories.

  Misha trails off to flop onto her bed. She should be pleased. The torture is over for the evening. No more thinking about things that shouldn’t happen. But her eyes feel hot, and her lungs are clenching together. She saw it in Granddad’s face. She’s let him down again. All he wants is her attention, and she can’t even give him that. There is so much that is wrong with her. That’s why boys corner her by the bins. She is life’s mistake, and they sense it even if they don’t know it, and they know in their knuckles and toes that they must get rid of her. She’s so wrong that, even in her fantasy at the map, it was Caleb she smooshed before those boys. Caleb, who is yet to do her wrong.

  When Granddad calls for her to come get stew, she doesn’t hear, and he forgets, and she spends the rest of the night on her bed in her big, dark, dusty room, and her thoughts turn into dreams and her dreams are bad.

  10

  Before he climbs out of the window, Caleb takes one more look at the recordings he’s written down. The first

  313.15m x 341.6m

  has a time and date beside it: 3.15pm, August 2. The second set of results were recorded at 6.30pm.

  314.05m x 342.1m

  Even now that it’s getting late, when it’s easy to doubt himself, to believe that he made a mistake, he remains convinced that he was careful. He really was. He took his time, didn’t rush. No slips, no fumbles, not even any interruptions. His concentration had been absolute. According to these results, the graveyard has grown ninety centimetres in one direction, fifty in another, and has done so within three-and-a-quarter hours.

  He doesn’t realise how deep he frowns, how his face folds slightly in at brow and chin.

  He returns the jotter to the bottom of a pile of exercise books and papers in the bottom drawer of his desk. It’s not as if Father ever comes in here to root around, but Caleb feels protective of his odd and disturbing discovery. He not ready share it yet. He needs more. Not that he’d bother to share it with Father. Who knows what kind of withering abuse that would bring? There would be the classic sigh, then anything from a selection of possible verbal attacks. A bit of grief for bothering him with something so ridiculous, perhaps. Or accusations that Caleb must be up to no good, hanging around that graveyard again. A load of senseless shouting about acting dumb, about shameful behaviour, about this, about that. A combination of any or all of these responses is what Caleb could expect. Words like ‘honest’ and ‘really’ and ‘truth’ only ever ser
ve to rile Father up.

  Time for some fresh air. And a whole lot of space.

  Out of his bedroom window he goes, dragging his quilt and pillow with him. Across the slope of the roof he creeps, until he reaches the garage roof, and here he makes himself comfortable, using the quilt like a cocoon. He wriggles his head deep into the pillow.

  Straight up there’s one hell of a view.

  It’s another clear night. The stars are all sitting way, way back in the sky, and he hates it. Hates the way he’s drawn to this. Hates that he can’t stop looking, despite what it does to his insides. It aches him. It’s a dull thrum, a craving he struggles to understand.

  Look at it all. There’s so much in the darkness. It goes too far to think about.

  He’s one kid on one roof, in one town, in one country, on one planet, in one solar system. One. The stars don’t care about his sorrow, because they know nothing of it. All the way out there, so, so far, it wouldn’t matter to them. To them, or anyone else.

  They glitter at him, jewels at the bottom of oceans upon oceans, and he tries to feel the distance, get a sense of what endless actually means.

  Why is there so much of it, so much that it makes this planet tiny, a blade of grass in a swooping field? This one little ball with life smeared across it. Life that makes choices it thinks are important will have an impact on the grand scheme of things. The grand scheme is too, too big. People’s worries and miseries are all pointless because one day they’ll all be dead and gone and gone is forever and the universe will keep on going until it stretches itself into nothing and then that will be gone too.

  This single insignificant boy looks up into forever and knows those stars are not big burning eyes staring down at him. The stars are looking to where they are going. They’re leaving him more alone with every passing second.

  Look at me, he thinks. Look at me, just once.