Already Dead(29)

Like so many parish churches, the churchyard at All Saints had been closed for burials many years ago. Bakewell’s four thousand residents would end up in this cemetery, or in the incinerator at Chesterfield crematorium. There were two chapels at the cemetery, one for Anglicans and one for Nonconformists, neither of them used any longer.

The arrangements had been in the hands of the local funeral directors, Mettams. All very traditional. Handfuls of earth scattered on the coffin. ‘We therefore commit the body of Elizabeth Anne Petty to the ground. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life.’

He supposed his family had been supportive. Well, of course they had. They were all there, Matt and Kate and their girls, and his sister Claire making an appearance. His Uncle John and Aunt Margaret had turned up, both of them well into retirement now and spending most of their time on cruises. The Eastern Mediterranean, Islands of the Caribbean. Their suntans looked out of place among the pale faces huddled in the rain.

When the crowd of mourners had dispersed, he still seemed to be there, a speck among the raindrops, gazing down on the freshly filled grave surrounded by a sea of mud. The ground had been churned by the feet of the mourners as they shuffled and stamped in the rain. Their departure had left a desolate quagmire where once there had been green blades of grass growing in the sun.

This wasn’t his world any more. Something was wrong with it, the whole earth was askew. He found he would often turn suddenly, twisting on his toes, holding his breath – thinking that if he was quick enough he might see Liz standing there, or catch a glimpse of her shadow passing from one room to another.

And then there were the lists. Even now, he would sometimes put his hand in his pocket, open a drawer or turn over a cushion and find a list. She’d made a lot of them, one for every aspect of their wedding preparations. They weren’t printed out, but written in her own neat hand, which made it worse. He didn’t have to read the words, but could recognise her personality in the curl of a ‘g’ or an ‘s’, the decisive ticks and crosses where firm decisions had been made. He could even identify the colour of the ink, her favourite electric blue ballpoint.

Table decorations, wedding breakfast menus, car hire companies. They were all listed somewhere. The options they’d once discussed were preserved on paper like the enigmatic remains of a distant civilisation, people long gone from the earth but for a few scraps of their hieroglyphics, perhaps significant at the time, but meaningless now, symbolic only of something lost. They were a glimpse into the past, a fragment of a world already dead.

He’d been trying to remember the last thing they’d said to each other. What had been their final words? He couldn’t recall. He knew all the words were there, deep in his memory, but he couldn’t dredge them up from the sludge. When he tried, all that he found were the more familiar images and sounds, the ones that recurred over and over in his nightmares, all the sensations from the minutes that had seemed like hours as the Light House burned around him. But Liz’s voice was missing from his recollection of those last few moments.

Sometimes it seemed the whole universe was outside, trying to get in. So many people called with their expressions of grief and pity that it became one long, meaningless howl.

Emotional numbness had set in soon after the funeral, his feelings becoming anaesthetised even as physical injuries racked his body with agony. It was as if he could only take a single kind of pain at any one time. The bodily anguish he couldn’t do anything to resist was pushing the psychological suffering out of his mind, and from his heart.

The human brain had functions that were still incomprehensible. One was its ability to filter out experiences and memories that it considered too traumatic, in order to protect sanity. The trouble was, he knew the physical damage would heal eventually. The sting of the burns would fade, the pain in his lungs would retreat into a background ache. And then his brain would turn off the filter and open the floodgates. When might that happen? Would he have any warning? Or would it poleaxe him in the middle of the street one day, or come crashing into his nightmares one night as he slept?

It was like having an anonymous stalker, a menacing shadow just waiting to pounce when he least expected it. No matter how often he looked over his shoulder, he would never see the darkness coming.

Cooper blinked and flinched, thinking a shadow had passed across his vision, flicking too close to his eyes. A fly, or a moth, or a speck of dirt thrown up by the rain. But there was nothing visible. Nothing real, anyway. Perhaps it was the first sign of that darkness.