A Graveyard Visible

by Steve Conoboy

  44

  Caleb used to watch how other people did it, wondering if there was a right way and a wrong. He soon learned that there are as many ways as there are people. There’s a lady who comes every week to change the flowers on her mother’s grave. She spends a while fussing with them, trying out different arrangements before standing back, nodding in satisfaction, then walking away. There’s an old gent that Caleb spots on occasion, he brings a foldable stool, and sits with his wife for a time, and with his head bowed he talks quietly, and if anyone walks past he nods and says hello. He’s said hello to Caleb a few times. There’s the young guy who turned up and tipped half a bottle of whiskey onto a grave and drank the rest himself, ranting at God before staggering away. There are the families who come and don’t know what to do, except for the really young who run and play. Those who fuss over the state of the grave. Those who stand and do nothing. Those who are ashamed of their tears. Those who look around to see who’s watching.

  He’s seen all of these people doing it their own way, and still he wonders if there’s a right way, a way that will be heard.

  45

  Cross-legged on top of the grave, Caleb presses his hands against the inscription on the stone and says ‘Hi, Mum.’ He tries to say it from his heart, to push the words through himself and onwards to wherever Mum might be. He sits upright, hands clasped as if in prayer, and he looks at her name as if it’s her face. ‘I think I’m in a whole bunch of trouble. I can’t tell Father about it because, well, you know what he’s like. He’ll just shout at me on and on, and say coming up here all the time’s made me demented, like when I was seeing all those shapes that time. I don’t even know how to tell him about it anyway. Him or anyone. I’m not sure I could even tell you if you weren’t…you know.’ The sky is piled high with bloated clouds. In front of him, past the gravestone, the great oak tree shudders. ‘I don’t know how to get out of it, Mum. This isn’t like when I was getting into all those fights just after you died. There was an obvious way out of that. I had to stop, that was it. But this…it’s happening anyway, whether I stop or not.’ He pauses. One of the deep-downs is coming. They always do when he sits here cross-legged and talking. The deep-downs are the secrets he’d never tell the living. ‘I need you, Mum. I need you here, more than ever. It’s not fair. You’d hate me for saying this, but I don’t care. I’d swap if I could. I’d swap Father for you. All he does is put me down. I know his life would be easier if I wasn’t around, and my life would better if he wasn’t and you were. There. I’ve said it. And I’m not taking it back, I’m not.’ The oak’s leaves shake at him, like they tremble at his petulance, like it’s a force that should be denied.

  This time he manages to let go of the anger. He doesn’t let it take over. Whether Mum can hear him or not, Caleb doesn’t like these times to be spoiled. ‘I wish you’d answer. I wish you’d find a way.’ The squeeze of her arms around him; his ribs ache for it. ‘I suppose once you’re up amongst the stars there’s no easy way back down.’ He immediately feels bad for saying that. It’s a cheap shot.

  There’s that bitter voice, though, the one that lives alongside the deep-downs, and that voice says it’s a shot she deserved, and that it’s okay to say these things here, it’s really okay, because where else can they be said?

  A raindrop spatters on the bridge of his nose, another on the back of his hand. The boy scowls at the swollen, bulging sky. It’s never looked so heavy. It will break soon, and there will be a deluge. He always feels like there’s so much more to say, but can never quite work out what that more is.

  He hates that.

  ‘I can’t work out what the point is, Mum,’ he says, and then the spitting flecks of water make way for the rain proper, and there’s no more to be done here.

  46

  She’s getting all kinds of hell. She could make it stop quite easily. One sentence would do it, a short sentence at that. But she won’t. She’ll never tell. Let them suffer. Let it drive them mad. Let them stare at their light-maps and all their other tricksy atomic manipulations and wonder why none of them work.

  Granddad hasn’t the faintest idea that she might know where Neuman is. How could she? Silly little Misha knows nothing about anything. He’s too busy blasting her for roaming the town in the middle of the night. Crosswell dropped her in it, of course. Bitter old bastard. The fattening slob had waited until she was certain that he’d forgotten all about it, then seconds before heading out the door, he gave Granddad a ‘By the way…’

  Granddad looks older than ever. It’s like his clock’s been ticking a lot faster lately.

  ‘What if you’d had an accident out there, alone in the dark? What then? Would you roll your eyes or shrug as you lay bleeding in the street, Misha? Would you think yourself so very clever as the bone jutted from your leg and there was nobody around to help you? And these are not the worst things that could happen to you. There are men who look for opportunities…’

  And there’s a revenant lurking at Pernicious House, she thinks. A monster hidden in plain sight.

  She watches through the window behind Granddad, watches Caleb retreat from his mother’s grave as rain splashes the glass. She should have been up there listening to him instead of in here being a disappointment. She liked to hear the things he talked about. She liked to ask Eight the questions that Caleb never got an answer to. She can only imagine the conversation she’s missed out on because of Crosswell and his big mouth.

  ‘Are you even listening, Misha? You never listen! How many times do I have to tell you? All of your problems are because you refuse to listen! Why such a clever girl can’t concentrate for more than five minutes is beyond me. You could be so much if you would only do as I ask…’

  ‘I don’t want to!’ It bursts from her, this anger. A shaken bottle exploding. ‘I can’t do it and I don’t want to! I just want to be left alone!’

  ‘Before long there won’t be a choice!’ He snatches Eight from her hands, and hurls the ball across the room. The shelf it hits bursts into pieces, dropping its books in a tumble. ‘The foolishness has got to end! We can… You can do something great, something important. You can help us change things, you know that.’ He finds her single hot tear hard to look at. The sigh wheezes in his chest, and he goes to retrieve Eight. ‘Crosswell is right about you,’ he says, and the words are strained. ‘But that doesn’t mean he has to stay right.’ He checks Eight over before placing it on the table. ‘Only one thing is happening today. We’re getting Neuman back. We can’t leave the revenant out there. It will ruin everything. If it’s seen…’ The world weighs him down, and right now she hates him. That’s the way of it. ‘Don’t think you’re wandering off today. We’re putting an end to that. Today you light-weave and spirit-link and any other damn thing I can think of that might help us put things right, and we’ll do it before Crosswell does.’

  Misha doesn’t have the energy to argue with him anymore.

  47

  Through rain-lashed glass the figure is distorted and featureless. Gramps watches it, hands in his pockets. ‘That fellow’s been standing there for about half an hour. Just standing there like that, in this weather. And people say I’m wrong in the head.’

  Caleb got bored with watching the not-moving man after a minute. He’s lolling on the sofa and staring through the news on the telly. ‘Any crisps, Gramps?’ He’s not really hungry. He only asks because it’s a question he usually asks.

  ‘Your favourites, salt and vinegar, in the cupboard. You know you can just get them, no need to ask.’

  ‘Yeah, Gramps. I know.’ And Caleb knows that he’ll ask next time anyway, and Gramps will tell him not to like he always does. Caleb checks the snack cupboard, finds no salt and vinegar, only cheese and onion. Cheese and onion is his favourite. ‘Gramps, do you ever see weird stuff up at the graveyard?’

  ‘What do you mean by weird? This fellow’s certainly odd. I mean, you wouldn’t in this weather, would you?’

  Caleb roots aro
und in the fridge, finds some drink called sarsaparilla, decides to give it a try. It’s the least adventurous thing he’s done in forty-eight hours. ‘Weird, Gramps. Like… I dunno, things that don’t look right.’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  Caleb pours himself a glass of the strong-smelling drink, and tries to ignore the slight tremble in his hands. ‘It’s where all the dead people are, isn’t it? So if anything’s going to happen anywhere, that would be the place, I guess.’ He tastes the sarsaparilla. He reels back from the rich aniseed flavour and vows never to touch it again. Not all adventures are worth having.

  ‘So, it’s ghost stories you’re after, is it? There’s a suitcase on the kitchen table. Bring it in for me, would you?’ Caleb wonders if there’s actually a link between ghost stories and the suitcase, or if Gramps is having another of his blips, but he does as he’s asked. The suitcase is heavy, and he ends up dragging it into the front room instead of carrying it.

  ‘You going on holiday?’ he asks. ‘You never mentioned it.’

  ‘No holidays for me. Lift it up onto the sofa for me, Caleb. My back’s not what it used to be.’

  Caleb reckons his back won’t be much use either if he has to keep lugging this thing about. It lands with such a thud that he fears the sofa will snap in half. It’s probably rammed full of train carriages. The old man’s hobby has really got out of hand in the last few years. The boy plumps down beside the case, but Gramps doesn’t yet come away from the window.

  ‘We have senses, don’t we, Caleb? We use them to interpret the world around us. We use them to make judgements, to choose what to do next. If you see a car coming towards you, you will step out of its way. Without sight, you might hear it coming instead. Without hearing, perhaps you will feel a change in the air itself. It’s that prickle along the nape of your neck; the one that always means run. Without any of these, what hope do you have? The car will hit you. You will be mown down. And there are a lot of cars out there.’ Caleb doesn’t know what he’s on about, but this doesn’t have the usual feel of a Gramps ramble, of those times when the old man has forgotten where the thread of a conversation lies and roots around in randomness. There’s a steel hereness to his eyes. Gramps has the thread; he has it good and tight. ‘Without sight or hearing or those prickles, it’s good to know that we can rely on others to drag us out of harm’s way. Can’t always rely on that, though, can we? What if that person sees, hears and feels the danger, but leaves us to face it? Sometimes we can be left in the headlights, Caleb, and only know it when we’ve been flattened.’

  Across the boy’s skin, goose bumps rise.

  Gramps perches on the end of his recliner. He can still glance out of the window from this angle. ‘There was a girl when I was seventeen. Back in fifty-five, this was. Evelyn.’

  ‘Grandma wasn’t called Evelyn.’

  ‘I know. As your father can’t be bothered to tell you anything of the world, I guess I must tell you what I can before all my marbles are scattered. There will be more than one love in your life. Your grandmother was my heart and soul from the moment I met her until the last second of our goodbye, and she left an ache in me that I feel to this day. But I existed for twenty-eight years before I met her, and twenty-eight years is a long time. Well, until you get to my age, and then it looks like the blink of an eye.’ And Gramps looks like a man cheated. ‘Your opening ten years are the ones of wonder; and your third decade is your first as an adult, with a man’s choices and burdens. But those years between? Those hold your first real tests, your challenges, and they show you who you are.

  ‘Much like you are being tested now.

  ‘I’d had what you kids call crushes before, fleeting fancies that brought me confusion and nervousness and little else. When I saw Evelyn, though, this willowy girl all long hair and smiles, all those childish uncertainties were swept aside. There was no confusion. I needed to know her. I stared as she stood in line for the pictures, oblivious to me, giggling with friends. There was joshing from my own mates, you know what mates are like when it comes to boys and girls, all the elbows and the whey heys. Before that day I’d always argued with them or pushed or got someone in a headlock when they started. That day, though, I let them jostle me and crack their jokes and I just smiled at it all.

  ‘I can’t remember what the film was. I don’t think I remembered it seconds after it finished. I spent the whole film working out what to say to this girl whom I’d never met, whose name I didn’t know, who was entirely a stranger to me. I could walk up to her and introduce myself, but that seemed a bit boring and official. I could persuade one of my friends to stroll past her with me and laugh on cue at one of my great jokes, but I couldn’t think of a joke and the friends I had were the kind to purposefully make a mess of a plan like that. I needed some brute to make a grab at her so I could step in and be her gallant knight, even though I’d never actually been in a fight. It seemed that it should be the easiest thing in the world to work this out, and yet I couldn’t find a solution to the puzzle.

  ‘All too soon we were piling out of the theatre, and I lost track of her. Around and around I looked and no sign of the willowy girl all long hair and smiles. It was a crushing disappointment. I convinced myself that I’d come up with the perfect opening line, one she couldn’t possibly resist and, in the style of the greatest romantic melodramas I’d been denied my chance to woo her. My first real teenage despair.

  ‘It didn’t last long.

  ‘I tripped in the lobby. A small stumble. My shoelace was undone. I bent to tie it, and in my abject misery completely forgot about rule number one. Before stooping to tie shoelaces, always check the location of your so-called mates. That’s how I ended up with a toe rocketing up my backside. It came from Eddie, seizing an increasingly rare opportunity to deliver what we called a “ring sting”. I’ve never felt anything like it, before or since. Ed must have taken one hell of a run-up, because I actually shot out of the movie theatre entrance like I’d been fired, bent double, from a cannon. There was even a loud cracking sound, made me think my buttock bone had snapped in half. I crashed headfirst into someone, knocked them flat on their face, and landed with my head on their bum cheek.

  ‘It was, of course, the willowy girl with the long hair. I couldn’t yet see her face, but the smiles seemed a lot less likely. You ever heard people say how they wanted the ground to swallow them up? That wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to stop existing. I wanted to blink out, like I’d never been on Planet Earth at all. That way I wouldn’t be able to hear all the laughing. There was a lot of laughing, and hooting. I jumped up to my feet, went to help her up, but her friends pushed me back like I was some kind of robber. I was nothing but shame from head to toe. Every inch of my skin glowed red. I was never, ever, ever going to live it down.

  ‘She brushed herself off, and turned to look at me. Even without the smiles she was a knockout. She lifted her eyebrows the tiniest fraction. It was a question. Did I have any kind of explanation for my behaviour? For some reason I couldn’t find the truth, that my friends were idiots. It was like I’d forgotten everything. My wish to stop existing had only got so far as wiping my memory. It was a long few seconds of saying nothing. Really long. Oh boy, did it stretch out! I had to say something before my head popped clean off my shoulders, so I cleared my throat, which was the loudest and ugliest noise I ever made, and I said, “That’s not normally where I put my head”. She said that she was glad to hear it, and one corner of her smile was back. I was one lucky boy. The object of my desire had a sense of humour. I asked if she was hurt while clutching at my own backside, which felt like I’d been sitting on a bomb when it went off. She looked at my strange pose and asked if I needed to go anywhere particularly quickly. That set off all the laughter again, mine included.

  ‘As simply as that, we were talking, this whip-smart girl and me. We only shared a few minutes, as she’d made stern promises to get herself straight home, but such wonderful minutes! I lived off them for a full week.
I had to. She said she’d be at the flicks same time next Saturday, and I spent seven days convincing myself she’d be there, no she wouldn’t, yes she would, no she wouldn’t.

  ‘She was there. We sat next to each other. I don’t remember that film either. We whispered the whole time. Close, so I could smell her hair. Everything was wonderful, Caleb. The days were a little bit brighter for a while. But it all went wrong, you see.’

  48

  Crosswell’s driving round the same slick streets and seeing nothing but blurs through the rain. It’s a waste of time, and all he’s doing is waiting for the call that says it’s too late and Neuman’s been discovered or killed someone or whatever. He’s been cruising for hours, sick of his life. The damned thing can’t have disappeared, there’s something they’re doing wrong, a fault in the weave. Anger swarms through his thoughts. The old coot thinks he can fix it with that dumb girl, and Crosswell yells in wordless frustration as he passes Pernicious House for the third time

  49

  where the lights are still out and there’s a hole in the gate and there’s a Neuman slumped against a tree trunk and although she can’t see it directly, she stares in the direction of

  50

  the graveyard, where a girl is ignoring another of many diagrams as a stubby finger taps at the parts of greatest importance, and it’s all meant to make sense. They’ve gone over positioning and stacking and the mysterious subject of convergence, and Granddad’s recapped incantations and the Reach and the confusing topic of Intra-Corporeal Transference. She knows she is supposed to take it all in, this girl. She should take it all in and do something with it. Granddad’s said as much about a gazillion times. But she wants to run away. She’s just a girl. A girl in a graveyard across the road from