“No…no…I…”
“No?! Well you’d better start thinking about dying, you prick, because one more sick-day and you’re out on your skinny little ass! Do you know how hard it is to get a job these days? Do you?!”
“Yeah,” Paul groaned.
“Yeah, well then maybe you should be more careful about when you decide to drink yourself interesting, don’t you sort of fucking think?!”
“I know…”
“Yeah, you know…I can replace you quicker than it’ll take to flush your career down the shitter, Paul. I can and I will!”
Paul rubbed his eyes. The pills had hardly worked at all. This whole day seemed set up to murder his soul.
He winced. “Come on, Clive. This isn’t what you think. I wasn’t out partying or anything like that. I was home. I was alone. I just had a bad day yesterday.”
“We all have bad days, buttercup, that doesn’t mean you get to sit around at home throwing your snot around the room like little fucking basketballs when you’re supposed to be in the office!”
Colourful. Real nice.
“You don’t remember?” he asked.
“Remember what, dipshit?”
“I had that thing…”
“Thing. What fucking thing? Are you under the impression that the term ‘thing’ is unilaterally assigned to one item or situation, Paul, or do you just think I’m a goddam psychic?”
“I told you all about it last week, remember? The funeral…”
The line went silent for a moment.
Paul held his breath.
He knew he’d been pushing it this year. IT positions were hard to come by in today’s work climate, and there was no shortage of desperate and dedicated graduates waiting in line to scoop up the positions from morons like himself who couldn’t or wouldn’t see how good they had it.
He was counting on the fact that Clive had a heart, even though the man had shown no signs of it previously.
There was a sigh on the other end of the line.
“Right…” Clive said. “I remember.”
“Okay.”
“Okay nothing. You’ll be in here an hour earlier tomorrow or I’m gonna do what I have to do, mate. This is a business, do you understand?”
“I do.”
Clive’s voice had noticeably softened.
“How’re you holding up?”
“I’ve been better.”
“I bet. Can’t be easy on you, mate, losing your girlfriend like that.”
“It’s not.”
“How’d it happen? Was she ill?”
“It was an accident.”
“Jesus. Car crash?”
“Something like that.”
“Mother of all fucks, that’s hard. Listen, I’m sorry I was so rough on you back there. Anybody would tie one on after that sort of shit show, just try to stay on top of things, okay?”
“I will. I’ll be back in tomorrow. Early.”
Clive huffed. “No, no…fuck that. We’re stuck for staff but I’ll find someone who can cover. Take a few days. I get so caught up in the shit over here that I plum forget that you folks have lives too, sometimes.”
“It’s cool.”
“It’s not cool at all. You’re a dick, Paul, but that doesn’t mean I get to be a bigger one.”
“Listen, if it’s okay, I’m gonna go rest up a bit…”
“It’s fine. You go for it.”
“Thanks.”
“Again, I’m sorry for your loss. You take care.”
“Thanks, Clive, I will.”
Paul let his boss hang up, lowered his head down onto his lap, and cried.
The words played over in his head like a broken vinyl record.
It was an accident. It was an accident. It was an accident.
By eleven o’clock in the evening, the hangover had all but passed. The last shards of his migraine still stabbed behind his eyes, but Paul felt as close to human as the day would allow.
Having slept the day away in a fugue-like fog of numbing pain and listless nightmares, he made his way from the couch to the light switch. The sun had fallen hours ago, and now the only light by which to see was that cast by the sickly orange streetlights outside his living room window. Something about their colour always made him feel depressed inside. He wondered, not for the first time, whether the local council had purposely made the streetlights that morbid, dirty orange simply to deflate the spirits of the Glasgow populace even more than they already were.
They certainly seemed to want the people miserable; that was hard to dispute.
Reaching the light switch, he pushed it down with his thumb and sighed as the room came to sudden, welcome life. He was surprised to find the place looked relatively tidy, considering how drunk he’d been last night. Before hitting the switch, Paul had half expected to find himself stood amidst a bomb site.
The room was near spotless, besides the one lonesome glass and the near empty bottle of Old Grouse whiskey sat on the table.
He thought back to the state of his bedroom; the vomit - the stink - and decided it could wait. He was feeling a little better, but not that much better.
The bedroom would still be there later.
Besides, now that it was dark, Paul had someplace he needed to be.
Someplace he’d meant to go last night. Too much alcohol and not enough food in his stomach had thwarted that idea. Tonight, though, he’d do what he’d planned, and do it right.
He’d let nothing get in his way.
NO PLACE FOR PEACE
Paul sat behind the wheel, peering out across the quiet street. His fingers tapped nervously on the cold plastic of the steering wheel as he scanned the area surrounding the small cemetery.
No one in sight.
Not a living soul.
He was unsurprised, as the day’s constant bombardment of icy cold rain had driven most right-thinking souls indoors long ago, and at this hour, the cold was near numbing. His breath plumed out in tiny wisps as he searched the nearby housing estate for any signs of life. All the windows were dark, the blinds were all closed. The residents of Bothwell had settled in for the night, sheltered from the merciless onset of winter’s wrath, curled up in beds together.
There was the slightest hint of flickering lights in a few of the homes, cast from television sets in bedrooms where the restless and the troubled sought comfort and solace in the mind numbing banality of late night shopping channels or pay-per-day porno channels. He imaged those poor devils tucked up in bed, listless, alone with their thoughts as the television mesmerised them, and he sympathised.
Sleep was a precious commodity in his life, too. It was a gift for the easy of mind and the quiet of heart. He was neither of these things.
All his thoughts were of Jane, lain down there in the cold, choking confines of her grave, beyond sound and light.
How could any man sleep knowing his love resided in such an awful place?
Were it not for the whiskey, he’d have been awake now for at least fifty hours. Probably more. The alcohol had done its work well, even if the fitful rest it inspired was paltry at best.
He sat there for a few more minutes, watching the street across from the old graveyard. It was entirely possible that he could be spotted if he weren’t careful. The desolate rain swept street looked, at this hour, like the last suburb on earth, populated by mere ghosts, but he was no fool. He knew that at any moment a car could pull in. A taxi, maybe, escorting home a drunken youth. A hardworking engineer, pulling into his driveway, weary to the bone from working the late shift to supply for his precious family.
Paul understood that even when all seemed safe and secure, and one’s path seemed lined with good fortune, it could all be torn away within the space of one breath.
After all, hadn’t that been what the world had done to his burgeoning romance with his Jane?
The rain pelted on the metal roof of his Renault like a million tiny fingers tapping to get in, as he gripped the wheel tight
and steeled himself for what he wanted, needed, to do.
The cemetery gates were shut for the night, of course, but he’d never intended to enter that way, anyway. Years spent playing in and around the old boneyard had afforded him a pretty solid knowledge of the land’s geography. Bothwell Cemetery was surrounded on all sides by trees, and other than the street to his right, there was no other line of sight for peering eyes to witness his venture. He would make his way around the wall to the left, far from the houses, and cut into the trees. He’d follow the wall all the way to the very rear of the graveyard, and there, just as he had with his friends when he was a child, he’d climb the six foot wall and slip over the threshold unseen and unheard. All he had to do was make it to the treeline without attracting attention, and that was looking increasingly simple.
It had been fun, sneaking into the creepy old cemetery as a child, but Paul had no illusions about such things now.
This would he harrowing.
When he’d been a kid, he’d never really feared ghosts, though he had courted the playful dread he’d felt in the graveyard with a sense of wide-eyed adventure.
Now, Paul knew that ghosts were real.
They haunted a man deep down in his soul, and their persistence was a thing to be truly feared.
Paul stretched, took one last look left and right, and opened the car door as quietly and as stealthily as he could.
By the time he’d reached the rear of the cemetery, the rain had ceased to fall. He was glad of it. He was already soaked to the bone, and the deluge had made the trip through the trees even more unpleasant than it would have been otherwise, and that was saying something. He’d walked in near complete darkness, too frightened to wield a torch as he manoeuvred his way through the thick foliage, occasionally bumping into the cold, wet trunks of trees or catching his clothes on thorns. He reckoned he’d have a few scratches to show for his efforts, come morning time, but Paul had bigger things on his mind.
He looked up at the cemetery wall.
It seemed somehow larger than it should in the darkness, and far more intimidating.
The small sliver of moonlight that broke through the clouds above was welcome, as he climbed the small ridge before the wall and reached up with both hands, clasping the top of the stone threshold. Sodden lichen clung to the stone, feeling like slime on his palms as he pulled himself up and onto the wall. It was harder than he’d imagined, much harder than it had been when he was a kid, despite him now being twice the height he’d been back then.
He briefly mourned the loss of his youth. That lithe young body had scrambled over this wall a hundred times and more, and never once had he been left breathless. Now, he felt fit to have a heart attack. He tried to fool himself into believing that the remnants of his hangover played some part in his struggle, but he knew that wasn’t the truth. Age was a bastard fixing to de-claw even the most ferocious lion.
And Paul was certainly no lion.
Sitting atop the wall for a moment, he fought to catch his breath. He looked out over the barely visible sea of graves from his perch, and felt that familiar pull of the uncanny. Surely no spirits would linger in such a depressing, lonesome place, but still…
A man’s mind played strange games.
The grass around the headstones glittered in the meagre moonlight, wet with rain, looking like little stars, as though the heavens had upturned and now the lights of the night sky resided on the earth. It was strangely beautiful. Peaceful, even. Were it not for the ominous silent stones that stood guard over the deceased - long dead and freshly buried, alike - he would have paused a little longer to revel in the moment.
But the stones did stand guard, and the dead did lie sleeping…and Paul had business here in the dark.
With a small grunt, he leapt off the wall and into the graveyard. He landed in a shallow puddle, cursing as the water flowed over his shoes and into his socks. Mud clung to his feet as he pulled himself free.
This was it.
He was here.
He was in.
And no one and nothing had seen him come, save for perhaps a clichéd owl or two, perched amidst the branches.
It was a strange thing, being stood there. Almost like he’d stepped back in time. There’d always been that moment of true fear as he leapt from the wall as a boy. It was the sense that, if something supernatural did happen, there’d be no quick escape.
It was also the thrill of having committed an elicit act.
The cemetery was closed, yet here he stood, ten years old and thirty in the same moment.
It was near exhilarating.
To his left stood the ceramic bust of a watchful angel, staring with stone eyes down on the bones of the buried. Paul figured it was supposed to bring comfort to the mourners who frequented the plots of their loved ones, but the effect it had on him was one of disconcertment. It inspired no comfort at all.
In fact, it was downright eerie.
To his right, a park bench sat lonesome in the gloom, as though waiting for a warm body to give it purpose. Paul imagined how many crying, hurting souls had sat upon its wooden seat, their whole world torn asunder as they wept for their dead.
This was a place of sadness.
There was no solace here.
Jane deserves so much better than this shit, he rued.
It was becoming something of a mantra.
He turned from the empty bench, soaked by a million raindrops and a million more tears, and looked ahead.
The army of headstones looked back. He felt his stomach turn, and chided himself for his base superstition.
Not far back there, in the gloom, perhaps ten rows from where he stood, Jane was waiting, cold and wet and alone.
And Jane deserves better.
A LONELY DWELLING
The flowers around her grave were already dying.
They hung limp, burdened by the elements, as though in mourning themselves. Above them, Jane’s headstone was little more than a black shadow. The small embossed image of her smiling face invisible. He reached forward and ran his hand along the etching, those farewell words still inspiring a futile anger in his heart.
He hated the idea of here lying down there under that thick mud, all alone. Her loved ones were tucked up in bed, and here she lay, forgotten, pushed aside by their dreams and soon to be eclipsed by their need to move on. Soon, he thought, no one would come to her grave with flowers set to die besides her parents. They’d maybe say a prayer in their quieter moments or enjoy a memory, but it would be of no comfort to poor Jane.
She would lay here, night after night, with only silence and isolation as her companions, six feet under the world while the future pulled the living forward.
It was unbearable.
“I miss you,” Paul said, looking at the fresh soil. “I miss you and I need you. I can’t go on without you, baby. I just can’t. No one understands. No one loved you like I do. Not even your mum or your dad. No one. It was you and me, Jane. It was always you and me.”
Tears clouded his vision as he fell to his knees.
The storm-softened soil seemed to welcome him as it soaked through his jeans. Paul reached forward with cold hands and let the mud engulf his fingers.
She was so close, yet so far away.
Any trepidation he’d felt when entering the old cemetery was gone.
All that remained was his grief.
He wept openly for Jane and for himself, as he clutched the mud between his numb fingers, making fists in his frustration.
Paul closed his eyes and allowed the pain free reign, resigning himself to it, embracing it as best he could. It fuelled him for his purpose. It drove him. It owned his will just as sure as the girl buried below had owned his heart.
“This is no place for you, Jane,” he whispered through shuddering hitches of grief. “No place at all. You’re a bright, beautiful light, and this place is so fucking dark.”
Paul’s hands clenched tighter; the mud seeping from between his digit
s like sludge. “I’m taking you home, baby…”
Paul began to dig.
TRUE LOVE WILL FIND YOU IN THE END .
Four days had passed.
She lay beside him in bed.
Though the sun had risen, the perpetual cloud cover ensured that it was still dark outside. The little light that penetrated his bedroom felt wonderful. Later, when the day had fully begun, they would start anew, but for now, he wanted to revel in the moment. Embrace that wonderful sense of peace and tranquillity that could only be felt when lain beside the one you loved.
He caressed her face, ignoring the cold that clung to her skin like smoke. The hardness of her flesh did nothing to deter him, as his fingers roamed the contours of her beauty. As he traced her lips, his fingers ceased their travels. He let them rest there, pressed against her mouth as though she was kissing them. Such a shame that those rose-red, full lips had turned to a shade of muted blue.
The broken teeth that remained attached to her skull seemed to peek out from the darkness of her mouldering mouth like insects from their lair. He probed deeper, easing apart her cold lips, and ran his fingers across the jagged edges of the shattered teeth.
She’d had such a beautiful smile.
For obvious reasons, it had been a closed casket funeral, yet the undertaker had clearly worked hard to preserve her prettiness.
The shine that lay on her face from make-up process lent her a serene beauty that was exhilarating. Her skin was a little hardened, but no less wonderful to touch.
Having pushed open her eyelids when they arrived home after their long journey from the graveyard, he now stared into their depths, mesmerised by their dull, dead glow. The light that had shone there was long gone, and all the colour had faded to a milky, almost sickly grey. They’d began running a little, too. A clear slime, not unlike semen, had started to seep from the sides of her eyelids only the previous night. It wasn’t much, not yet, but it stained the pillow as though she’d drooled in her sleep.
Love Lies Dead Page 2
