Keeper

Keeper

Don't waste life in doubts and fears; spend yourself on the work before you, well assured that the right performance of this hour's duties will be the best preparation for the hours and ages that will follow it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

It’s big enough to be an actual necropolis, Southern Cemetery. Big enough to really be a city of the dead and not just a suburb tucked away on the outskirts. Though I suppose it was on the outskirts once, between two towns on the main road out from the smogged city centre. Where the land was still cheap enough to buy for planting people in. All the tired, used up people from the factories and the mills. They had to go somewhere. So they put them out here.

But now the houses have crept right up round the iron railings and they’ve even chucked up a row of retirement flats along one side, with what the brochures somewhat euphemistically call a “park view” over the toothy queues of headstones. The Co-op hearse practically running a shuttle service from their back door to our front gate, poor buggers.

I often thought they should have given it a better name. It is what it is, I know – but couldn’t they have called it something a bit grander? Or prettier? The rows upon rows of headstones, most of them dating from the late 1800’s onwards. They’re just like miniature versions of the terraced back-to-backs that their occupants spent their lives in. East Street and Factory Hill, Cotton Lane and North End Road. Perhaps they would have preferred to end their days with a nicer address, the kind of address they might have picked out for their retirement – Willow Acres, Yew Tree Gardens. Even something exotic -- La Llorosa Walk, Clytemnestra Fields. That’s just me being fanciful, though. Too much book-learning to be a glorified parky, that’s what my Mam used to tell me. Used to say she didn’t pay for all the uniforms and school trips so I could end up a gravedigger. I’m not, though. Never have been. They use machines for it now, of course. Used to take two men best part of a day, by the time they’d filled it back up again.

Problem is, cemetery is an ugly word. Smacks of dust and ash and grey skies – all the worst side of things and none of the best. Jamjars of twigs changed once a year if they’re lucky. Plastic wreaths on the autumn bonfires, sending out thick belches of smoke that roll across the grass like breakers. Looking round this place on a drizzly autumn afternoon you can see why the posher ones go elsewhere, nowadays. Trundling up the motorway to the villages in the hills, graveyards laid out fifty years ago and still half-empty now nobody can afford to buy the houses up there and people don’t have eight kids each. Plenty of room for the incomers in their boxes. Nice views. Peaceful.

Peace. That’s something in short supply round here now. The central plots all filled up generations back and now they’re crowding into the verges, the greenbelt that was designed originally as a no-mans-land between the living and the dead. Put there to ensure that people on the road weren’t rubbernecking at funerals and that young widows having a quiet weep weren’t having to look up over the headstones at happy couples strolling past and pushing prams. A boundary of green grass and yew trees. Probably the only time that most of them saw anything bigger than a dandelion was when they came here. Laid out when gardeners and groundskeepers could still be found. A cool green sanctum, in a city where the ground was all cobbles, flags and dust.

You’re lucky if you get a thin scree of sickly privet and a couple of feet between your toes and the iron railing nowadays, if you end up in the cheap seats. It’ll be shut soon, this year or the year after. Exisiting Grave Owners Only. Which means: bunk in with Grandpa, or bugger off somewhere else.

Nobody takes their hats off, as the cars swing in through the gates. People cutting up the cortege, beeping the horn. You hear all sorts of stories. Not to mention the muggings. And worse. Nobody here at twilight any more. Hardly anyone on their own. They come in expedititions, little old dear with her handbag clutched tight, guarded by two or three beefy sons and an Alsatian, all of them looking over their shoulders and the dog barking at every cracked twig. You wouldn’t believe the amount of stuff there is to clear up. Needles. Smashed glass and used jonnys draped over the rhododendrons. Every now and then a sleeping bag rolled up and tucked away that someone never came back for, damp and growing mould. Can’t put that sort of thing on a bonfire. They give off fumes. Carcinogenic, apparently.

It’s never completely quiet, even on a good night when there’s not someone jumping in over the padlocked gates and causing trouble. There’s always the traffic, thrumming in from the arterial roads. Taxis cutting through on a shortcut although they’re not meant to, that road’s meant for hearses only and they know it, the sly buggers.

Sweeping the torch in high arcs – not so much as to see where I’m going, I could do my rounds blindfolded – but also to give the junkies a chance to hunker down before I get too close. I don’t much fancy getting into an argument with one of them, trying to chuck them out. They’ve got knives, maybe even guns some of them. I suppose they know I haven’t got anything worth taking, nothing they could sell, because I’ve never had any real trouble with them, anyway, aside from clearing up the mess they leave behind. I just see them every now and then, sprinting between the stones or wandering around muttering to themselves. A few months ago there was a girl killed but I didn’t hear anything – it was right across in the west quadrant, on the other side from where I was checking the padlock on the East Gate. I don’t know what I could have done anyway. It was in the papers. I found one left on a bench a couple of weeks later. Three or four of them, apparently, and even in my younger days I wasn’t much of a pugilist.

I don’t know what she was doing walking round here on her own. Probably no better than she ought to be. She looked a wide-eyed little scrap of a thing, though, in the papers. An old school photograph. Tie on crooked. I didn’t realise they’d started letting girls in. Member of this society, that club. It’s a shame, really. But what are they going to do? Hire a team of armed police to cut the grass? They haven’t the money to keep the city centre safe, let alone the bloody graveyards. I kept an eye on the schedule after it happened, to see whether they were going to bring her here, but they didn’t. I don’t suppose you’d want to bury somebody where they died. It wouldn’t seem right, exactly.

There were the usual complaints afterwards. People asking why more wasn’t done, when were they going to fit cameras on the railings, sort out a proper security team. It’s just me and the other chap, these days. Or nights, rather. There are cameras, a few of them, but buggered if I know how to make them point at the right places. He spends most of his time snug in his shelter anyway. Glances at the screens every now and then. He doesn’t look much younger than me.

No, doesn’t surprise me that he didn’t see nothing. Though I would have thought that stupid great slavering dog of his must have done. It hears me coming a bloody mile off. He’s not like the lads I used to train up. They’d have been over there like a shot. Used to take pride in their work – Davey and Mike, even Johnno although you couldn’t really rely on him to do rounds on his own, he needed someone keeping an eye on him.

Every path, four times a night. That’s what I used to tell them. We used to vary the rounds. Keep the dossers on their toes. This new chap’s one of those outsourced workers, comes from some agency. They put one on to do the work of four and they wonder why they can’t keep anyone on the job.

I suppose on what he’s getting paid it doesn’t seem worth playing the hero. Can’t blame him, really. You never got this sort of thing happening twenty years ago. If people jumped the railings it was to kip down under a tree somewhere, out of the wet. Maybe take your sweetheart for a shiver and a cuddle. Not a few times I’ve had to step on a branch, deliberate, to give them a chance to get their keks back on. It wasn’t like now. People didn’t come in here to murder people and shoot themselves full of drugs.

We used to turn a blind eye, sometimes, if we found one of them tucked underneath one of the monuments on a rainy night. You’d only do it if you were desperate, I always thought, sleep in here if you didn’t have to. City of the dead. For the dead.The living were always more like guests here. Now with the overcrowding and the disturbances and the wandering about it’s difficult to keep track of who’s who.

There are some parts of the job that I still enjoy. I’ve always liked helping people. I know the place like the back of my own hand. And they need my help, most of them who come in here. They come in with maps and diagrams, looking for a long-lost relative, or the person who built one of the big buildings in the city or wrote a book or invented something. The paths in here can get people muddled – long and straight, and all looking the same, and the rows of statues and stones play tricks with your eyes, pretending to be a landmark you can navigate by when really the Co-op churned out six or seven hundred of that same style of granite urn in the forties and you’ve got yourself all turned round by looking at the wrong one.

Sometimes they just need the map flipping over and suddenly they glance down and there’s the one they’re looking for. It’s important for them to be the ones that find it, I think. It makes them feel better about the whole thing, makes them feel like they’ve got a little bit of control over it all. I usually just give them a nudge here and a hint there, wait until we’re almost standing on top of the poor bugger they’ve come to see. Once I even knocked a hankie out of a woman’s hand so she’d bend down to pick it up and read the words carved underneath it. She was that shortsighted; she’d never have realised otherwise.

I understand what people need in those sorts of situations. I don’t hang around once they’ve found it. It’s very emotional for some of them. Seeing your own name carved onto a stone is always a shock, even if it’s not your stone. It looks so permanent. Makes people think about things they spend most of their lives trying to forget. I try and tell them. It’s nothing to worry about. It happens to us all. But they never listen. Or perhaps they just don’t believe me.

Some of them bring things. Flowers. Pictures. Teddy bears sometimes, although strictly it’s against the rules. They want to talk, even the ones who don’t believe in anything afterwards, even the ones who’ve never set foot in a church or a synagogue in their life. A synagogue being a Jewish church. We’ve a lot of Jewish in here, with a special section marked off with stars on the pillars. I try not to discriminate. Once they’re in the ground there’s no difference, after all. We’re all bones once we’re in the ground.

The ones that come here to find their dead think they can say something to the person lying there and feel better. The newspapers call it closure. Bring them a bunch of flowers and make everything alright. Sometimes I feel like asking them to pop the bloody Flymo in the back of the Volvo, do a spot of mowing as they commune with the ether, but that wouldn’t be professional. The fact is there’s too much bloody grass to keep on top of with those jokers the council sends round in a white van every blue moon. They’re only scheduled for a half-day’s mowing so it’s the new bits first, the ones where the gold letters haven’t rubbed off and there’s still bumps in the soil, and a quick whizz round the sides of the paths if we’re lucky. I try to do my bit but really, it’s impossible. Brambles. Nettles up to your knees. Even if all the lads were still here it’d take us months to get everything tidy. But I do my best. I have to. And I could never move on from here. Whole place… well, it’d fall to pieces.

Look, there’s me. Nice piece of granite, that. All paid for in advance. The lads all came. Hadn’t seen them in years but there they were, Davey, Mike, Johnno crying like a wee lad. I wished I’d put some by for a round at the pub, afterwards. But they went their separate ways. Johnno with some lass. I thought for a minute maybe he’d settled down, like, but she introduced herself to Davey as his carer so I suppose not.

I left the rest to the hospital. Christies. They did their best, after all. And you can’t take it with you.