‘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.
40
After she pushes Caleb through one of the gaps in the far end of the fence, Misha drags herself back through her window and slumps into bed. She doesn’t take off her muddy slippers. The grown-ups are still awake and agitated, going back and forth over the Neuman issue in the front room. She should, perhaps, tell them where Neuman is. She should, probably, go in there and let Granddad know what happened. But she doesn’t want to. She asked Eight why she didn’t want to.
IT DOES
N’T MATTER
Her last few minutes of consciousness are a swirl of thoughts, and they’re all about why Neuman went to Pernicious House. She thinks she can work it out, but it slips away before she can grasp it.
41
The quilt was heaped and waiting for him on the drive when he got home. He dragged it back up onto the garage and into his room. His sneaky night out hadn’t been discovered. Caleb’s fairly certain he knows why he got away with it. To be found out, somebody has to be looking, somebody has to care.
Mum would’ve known something was up. She had this sense of her son, of when he might be up to mischief.
She knew him.
He’s overtired. Head too heavy, legs too twitchy, can’t find that sweet spot to sink into the mattress. He hovers, then, in half-sleep, the blurry borderlands where his dreams are trying to pull him further in, trying to lull him even though he’s still aware of their shifting wrongness, their tricks and deceits. It’s that house and its gardens, and some of this is true memory, slices of hazycoloured recordings, of unending days with Mum that ended too quickly, and he can taste the breeze, air that’s always sweeter on this side of the gates. And he’s running, he can feel his skinny legs fleeing. But he slows, he stops, the house too large, extra stories, more windows, and it’s infinite black like compacted storm clouds. It’s okay, though, because Mum takes his hand and leads him on. There are no gardens. It’s the graveyard; Daisy Hill flattened and spread out towards the horizon. Mum sits on one of the graves, takes her notebook and pen from her bag, and beckons Caleb over. His breathing accelerates and he refuses to go. Her eyes are hollow. She’s empty. And the land tilts down, like the props holding it up just got kicked out, and as the earth drops the graves explode, and Caleb jumps wailing out of the dream, clutching handfuls of his sheets. He buries his face in the mattress, pillow on the floor somewhere, and cries.
42
It’s late. The morning got up without him and left him behind. The only time he’s ever been in bed after eleven was when he had the flu. Caleb aches as he gets up, like his limbs have been glued down to his mattress for hours. His neck is braced-in-a-rollercoaster stiff. Dreams have attacked him all night, and he feels worse than before he dragged himself home.
Clouds are already gathering. They’re deep, heavy and stacked; a dark inverted version of Daisy Hill. Looking at it gives him the shivers. He thinks of hollow eyes and bursting graves. He thinks of Neuman, and people in suits.
He has to go up there, though. He has no answers, only confusion.
He dresses quickly, tries not to panic about whether or not Neuman is still in Pernicious gardens and what she might be getting up to. Whatever happens, he’s not going up there, he’s not hunting that thing again. Let Misha and the suits go hunting.
With any luck that might be exactly what they’re doing. He might just get himself a bit of space to do some investigating.
43
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.
A S MCLEAN
1822–1897
COME MY FRIENDS
‘TIS NOT TOO LATE
TO MAKE A BETTER WORLD
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 abou
t 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.
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