* * *
Other than a solitary porch light, there’s nothing at the church to stave off the growing darkness. Daniel leaves the door ajar to cast some light inside. The night air takes its cue to follow, gusting from the doorway across shuffling pamphlets to some unseen open window. If the church earlier had seemed unfriendly, then, starved of conciliatory sunlight, it now breathes open hostility, the woken air heavy with bitter-sweet mould spores that choke him, that race to settle on his lungs, that sting his eyes and nostrils. The deeper cold and damp grip his unprotected arms and neck, creeping down his back and locking his fingers. The sooner this job is done, the sooner Daniel gets his coat back.
Enough light still filters in through the glass to pick out the pews from the walkways. At first he takes the familiar route – down the centre aisle towards the altar table. He passes the row where just an hour ago he’d sat in freewheeling reminiscence. He’d have expected by now to have paid his graveside dues and be on his way home, to a warm flat and a well-earned tumbler of whisky. Little had he known that some drunken bum was even then violating his sacred plot. His first instinct had been to assume a connection; some deliberate targeting of that stone as a statement, or protest, or punishment, or revenge. Now he’s less sure. The guy could have been using the graveyard as a shortcut from Cooper’s Hill to Church Road and made it only as far as the hollow before blacking out from too much Millwrights Christmas cheer. Matters needed normalising again. Get the fucker off his hands, send the girl on her way and head home. Ritual absolution might need a rain check on this occasion; the next vigil in April could be a marathon, by way of compensation.
Nothing suggests itself as a makeshift blanket among the hard seating – no cushions or throws or standby rugs for the elderly. Not yet quite desperate enough to pilfer the altar cloth, he makes instead for the few doors that lurk in the shadows. The first and most promising, marked vestry, turns out to be locked. Two more doors opposite, leading to unnamed rooms, are also off limits. By the fourth, which opens only to a bare broom cupboard and electric meter, Daniel has made an almost complete circuit of the nave and is already wondering what the vicar will make of the stolen altar cloth with candlesticks left untouched, when something catches his eye beneath the table of evangelising pamphlets, visitors book and donation box: a bundle of old dustsheets heaped up against the wall. Grubby, paint-splashed and torn, they’re the likely leftovers from a recent graffiti clean-up. But did anybody promise the casualty fresh bed linen? And in any case, these are good and thick. Feeling triumphant, Daniel grabs the top two. The girl now gets to have her coat back as well. With one draped around his shoulders, the other thrust beneath an arm, he pulls on the door, gulps in the fresh air and is all braced to set off again when the porch light prompts him over the photo. Time to check whether there’s more to their patient’s story than mere alcohol abuse. The girl had indicated he may have been in a fight; he’d actually collapsed a good way from the path, and hadn’t his posture suggested some kind of fetishistic act?
Daniel feels in each pocket.
Nothing.
He thrusts his hands in deeper.
Fuck. The damn thing’s in his coat.
The girl, perched against a gravestone a meter or so from the patient, rises to her feet and smiles at Daniel as he brandishes the blankets in triumph. She watches him swap one with his coat, but hesitates as he squats down to roll the man off her coat and onto the second blanket.
“Oh, no, wait. Don’t do that. Better not move him again. I’ll take the other blanket.”
“As you wish.”
She shakes it out, folds it double and cocoons herself within its dappled white and grey folds. The effect is oddly transformative. She becomes at once both the forlorn young refugee and the wise old sage. Somehow it seems to capture the surreal nature of the whole past half hour. He tears his eyes away to look down at the man; he too has become otherworldly, so peacefully at rest beneath his snug blanket. So unthreatening, yet so easily a deception. Daniel feels for the photo.
“I’m going to the gate to see if there’s any sign of the ambulance,” he informs her, only half truthfully.
From the cemetery’s north gate the road runs sharply downhill to the right; the well trodden route homewards. The brow of the hill to the left, just meters away, leads towards town. A swan-necked streetlight cranes down from above as though keeping a watchful eye on Daniel’s moves.
Again he smoothes out the paper and holds it up to the light. The writing is no longer legible, the wet grass having caused the ink to run. Turning it over to check on the image, his heart misses a beat before taking a giant leap through his chest.
“Jesus H Christ.”
It’s simply not possible. He knows this scene.
“How the…”
He knows everyone in it. From long ago. The picture before him could so easily be just another of those snapshot memories that have hounded him all day. Three figures: a woman seated, a man standing at her shoulder and a small child to her other side. A background of dockland cranes, cargo, vehicles, crowds of workers. The photo does indeed embody a memory: a memory of being there when it was taken, looking on as the camera had looked on while his father, mother and brother Alex posed for the George family portrait.
“You little shit. How in fuck’s name did you get hold of this?”
He’s through the north gate, legging it back to where the man is lying. He’s tearing off the workman’s sheet and roughly rolling him onto his back – this man, this bastard – who’d had in his grubby little mitts something so dearly personal to Daniel. A man he doesn’t even know. Some creepy, stalking, pervert of a man. The girl is crying out for him to stop, demanding to be told what’s happened. But Daniel has no mind to answer, no longer the will to confide in any outsider. He doesn’t know this woman any more than he knows this stinking tramp. He needs her to go. This is just between the two of them. He can’t think with her around. The photograph, when had he seen it last? In an old album somewhere. In with his mother’s stuff at the back of his wardrobe. So this is a second print from the same negative. It must be. Mustn’t it?
Unless this bastard has just been ransacking his flat.
The woman is becoming frightened and angry. “Please, stop,” she protests, “leave him alone. He’s going to be okay. The ambulance won’t be long. Don’t upset yourself, he’ll be fine. You… you saved him, alright?”
But Daniel is now too distraught to respond to such babbling. In his mind he is already sprinting home to the crime scene: a break-in while he’s been daydreaming in church, every surface in his house fouled by this man’s touch, indelibly smeared with his prints. Drawers in disarray, clothing disturbed, boxes dragged out and opened. Nowhere left unmarked. Utterly exposing. Everything he owns will have to go.
Perhaps it was that incident a few months back; the day he’d come home from work to find the broken window, the trail of boot marks across the floor and the neatly coiled turd on his carpet. The CDs, the telly, his clothes, they’d all been left untouched – none of it worth stealing (he’d assumed) and the ‘gift’ was his punishment for that. The landlord had blown Daniel’s deposit on fitting bars to the windows, even eventually on cleaning his carpets. At the time, that seemed to be an end to it.
But perhaps this photograph was what the thief had really been after.
Surely that bloody ambulance should have arrived by now. How long since the girl telephoned? She’s returned the man to his side, and is crouched protectively over him, watching Daniel like a hawk. He steps away. He paces. He pulls at his hair, repeatedly looking back for any change. He mumbles and curses. He returns to the north gate, scans the road both ways and hurries back. Once more he picks over the imagined crime scene at home and checks his watch for the umpteenth time.
It takes them twenty minutes to arrive. Twenty minutes – from a station not three streets away; two paramedics, one old and one young, sauntering towards them, sharing a joke. They’d not ev
en bothered with sirens. Daniel’s ‘So, what’s so funny? You want this bugger to die, or what?’ does not go down well. The younger of the two calls him sir as though it meant arsehole, and informs him there is no need to take that attitude. The girl does her best at peacemaking. “He’s very upset,” she offers quietly. From that moment, the men speak only to each other and to the unconscious casualty until they have him securely blocked and on the stretcher. Then one of them says, “And you’re quite sure neither of you know him.”
Daniel suddenly can’t recall the face, isn’t even sure he’s actually studied it properly. He pushes forward.
“Give us a minute. I want another look.”
There is a moment then of absolute stillness. A broken network of stares. The ambulance men’s eyes fix upon Daniel’s. His burn into the steel cold face on the ground. The victim’s eyes stay dead to the world. Only the girl catches the soft hiss of Daniel’s in-breath. The others only see him shake his head, a reflex they take to be their signal to leave.
“Call A&E in the morning, if you’re concerned,” the older one suggests, as they raise the man. And then they are gone. Ambulance doors are slamming behind the hedge and the engine firing. Still no sirens.
Daniel has slumped himself against the nearest gravestone, feeling his whole body go into shock, a thousand contradictions swirling in his gut and tumbling through his brain, rebounding off the solid wall of reason. At first the girl waits in silence, and then finds her moment to speak.
“You recognised him at the end, didn’t you?”
He nods weakly.
“So, who was he?”
He glances at her finally, catching in her eyes a fear that he knows must mirror his own. In one gesture he wants to both push her away and to take her in his arms. Recalling that face is like staring into a lake. The blooded forehead, the sunken eye sockets, the dark rings around the lids, the deep channels in the skin, the matted hair, the heavy stubble, they all distort the features like ripples on the surface. But through it all, without a shimmer of doubt, reflects back the ghost of his own face.
“It was Alex. My brother.”
The girl stares wide-eyed, speechless, then rounds on him sharply. “What?? Your brother? Your brother? Well then… for heaven’s sake… why didn’t you say something? We could have gone with them!”
“No, no, no. It looked… I’m sure it was him. But… but it can’t be.”
A hundred fresh pictures are suddenly shaken from that battered shoebox of memories. For the first time Daniel sees his brother across the playground amid a crowd of school friends. He’s watching him chase a football around the garden lawn and catches his profile up front in the passenger seat of a car, staring transfixed through the side window. And again the two of them are tearing along the cliff path, with the keel of a boat down in the water. Their mother is running too. This newly unfolding past throws a cloak around him and the girl’s voice sounds far off.
“Sorry, I don’t quite…”
He can’t possibly stay here. He forces himself off the stone, turns his back on the girl with a short laugh and strides away.
“It can’t be. That’s all. Alex is already dead. He’s been dead for twenty-four years.”