News Where You Are

17

Frank found it harder each time he went to locate his father’s headstone. He visited the cemetery so rarely that the rows of graves expanded in vast leaps between each visit. They proliferated faster and further than Frank ever managed to predict, always leaving him struggling to navigate his way around the featureless landscape. Once his father had been a pioneer, breaking new ground for the dead on the far west of the cemetery, but now he had been overtaken by legions of newer recruits advancing steadily down the gentle slope.

After fifteen minutes of wandering, he found his father’s stone looking nothing like he had remembered it, in a place he wasn’t expecting. It was a dark, flecked, rose colour, not the black he had thought. In front of the imposing stone was a plot-sized rectangle of stone chippings, surrounded by a low chain. Frank had no idea what that was supposed to be; he lacked any understanding of cemetery aesthetics. He thought of it as a kind of front garden to the headstone’s house and it seemed ridiculous to him. Were the loved ones supposed to put deckchairs on the shingle and admire the stone? Perhaps lay a towel down on it and recline there just a few feet above the deceased?

He’d always felt resentment at the idea that this was the place he was supposed to reflect on his father, that this anonymous plot was where he should care. He felt no connection there. In his experience the only thoughts that cemeteries inspired were of the physical remains beneath the ground, not the lives that once animated them. The sole reason he came, albeit occasionally, was that to not come, to allow the grave to fall into total neglect, would suggest an utter lack of respect or care for his father. It would make a false statement. As it was, the plot looked pretty bad compared to its near neighbours. The bottom of the stone was caked in dried grass cuttings and blackened stalks poked from the holes of the mildewed flower container.

Today would have been his father’s eighty-fourth birthday, though the date was as meaningless as the location. He didn’t think of his father any more or less on certain days. It was just habit that he came on this day, a habit started by his mother and continued now by him. What he remembered about the visits with his mother was the silence. They would stand by the grave saying nothing. Frank would wonder what he was supposed to feel. He would look at his mother’s face and find no clues there.

He looked at the headstone now, picked from a brochure of similar stones, made in a factory in Wales, and reflected that as his father’s buildings were torn down, there was every chance this mass-produced slab would be the only monument left bearing his name.

He knew he should clean the stone. Should walk over to the stand pipe, splash water over his shoes as he tried to capture the sputtering flow in a plastic bottle and then labour with whatever tissues and old business cards he could find in his pockets to remove the worst of the accreted dirt, but he felt himself paralysed. He was trying to will himself to move when his phone rang, making him jump. The cheery tone, always grating, seemed particularly out of place in the setting. He fumbled in his pocket to silence it quickly:

‘Hello.’

‘Hi, Frank, it’s Jo from the coroner’s office. Is this a bad time?’

‘No, it’s fine. Actually I’m at a cemetery.’

‘That’s appropriate … Oh no. Are you at a funeral? I’ll call back.’

‘No, no — no funeral. There’s no one else here.’

‘Then why are you whispering?’

Frank hadn’t realized he was. He tried to speak in a normal voice. ‘Sorry. I don’t know.’

Jo laughed. ‘You’re not going to wake them up, you know.’

Frank looked around at the massed ranks of headstones and tried to ignore the sense of disapproval he felt radiating from them. ‘What’s up?’

‘That guy you were asking about. Michael Church.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Well, I just thought I’d let you know that the postmortem’s been done. Nothing really to report — heart failure.’

‘Oh — okay, thanks for letting me know.’

‘We’ll hold off on the burial, though, until the search for next of kin is completed.’

‘Have the police got anywhere, do you know?’ He heard Jo blow smoke.

‘Ah, Frank — you know what it’s like. They have pretty limited resources — I mean they’ll give him a reference number, they’ll look for paperwork, but you know there’s not going to be some dogged investigator pounding the streets and knocking on doors. He lived in local-authority housing and there’s no estate, so there’ll be no probate researchers getting involved. If you’re interested, you should look into it. I mean you already know he was once a friend of your mate, which is more than anyone else knows. Maybe you could find something out.’

‘Yeah, I wondered that. I didn’t know if it was stupid, though — I mean, if the police find nothing, why would I?’

‘Like I say — just because you have the time and the interest. I’m not trying to pressure you, but I just mean if you think you might find something out do it and don’t worry you’re going to get in the way of the police. I really don’t think there’s any danger of that.’

‘Okay, Jo, maybe I will.’

‘All right, well let me know if you find anything. It usually takes the police a couple of months before they give up and tell us to release the body. It’d be good to get someone at the funeral.’

Frank walked over to the nearest path and sat on a bench. He thought of Michael Church growing more and more isolated, occupying a progressively smaller space in the universe until finally he vanished altogether. It reminded him of the TV set they’d had at home when he was growing up. When you turned it off, the image would rapidly shrink down to a small white dot and then, after an unguessable interval of time, disappear. He knew, though, that the programmes were carrying on somewhere; he could just no longer see them. Sometimes he’d press his ear against the screen to see if he could hear the tiny voices of the television people hidden by the dark glass. For a moment he found himself doing the same now as he looked out upon the massed ranks of headstones, but all he could hear was the distant rumble of traffic.

He stretched and walked over to the stand pipe. He was eager to get out of the cemetery, to see Andrea and Mo, to go and push their way around a crowded shopping centre, to stake their place in the world, eat pizza, buy something they didn’t need and be among the living.