Authors: Sarah Masters
"Yeah, it was the van. Some bloke got out. Probably just a geezer looking for a lost dog or whatever."
"You believe what makes you happy, boy, but I'm telling you, they've spotted you somewhere. They're checking you out. Your haunts. Reckon you ought to start sleeping elsewhere in future. Places you ain't never been before."
Pete shuffled back to his spot beside the oil drum.
The boy stared at the car park for a long time. He'd be safe here for tonight, wouldn't he? If Pete didn't mind him snuggling up, he'd be all right.
Turning, he walked over to Pete and slid down the wall beside him. When the old man fell asleep, he'd lean into him then.
The sounds of the river trickling past and the occasional plop of water dripping from the bridge ceiling became something for the boy to focus on for a while. It wasn't long before the memory of that van infiltrated his mind, though, and he rolled Pete's words around in his mind, weighing up his options.
"Pete?"
"Yeah?"
"My name's Fraser. Fraser Croft."
Russell stood beside a half-dug grave, the red cup of his Thermos in hand, the flask wedged between his feet. Coffee steam warmed his cold nose and cheeks, not to mention his chest, as the hot liquid went down. Working outside in this kind of weather was a bitch, what with the nip in the air and frost harsh enough to freeze your fingers. It wasn't so bad while he was doing the actual digging. The cab of the great yellow machine parked at the head of the grave at least provided a little warmth, despite the heater being a bit fucked and only working when it had half a mind.
He took another sip and stared at the sky. The clouds looked too heavy to stay up there, like they'd fall any second if they filled with any more rain. Didn't look like it'd be long before the damn things burst, drenching the ground and possibly mucking up all his hard work—an hour so far gouging a rectangle out of the earth, ready to hold a body and casket in two day's time.
While Russell finished his coffee he thought back to another time, when he'd worked in a different graveyard in a different town. One night had changed his whole life, with him having just finished digging a grave and some strange bloke appearing, telling him to dig it deeper. If he hadn't, Russell would have been seriously hurt—the man made no bones about that.
"You'll be needing that shovel a while longer,” the male voice had said, its timbre low and menacing.
Russell remembered a twig cracked, and the shuffle of footsteps filtered into the hole where he'd been about to climb the ladder to get out.
"Who's there?” he'd said, one foot on the lowest ladder rung, hands gripping the sides.
"Never you mind."
The footsteps came closer, and the shape of the man moved, picking up the shovel. He speared it into the grave. It landed beside Russell, the handle leaning toward him. Russell made out a guy in a black raincoat, the belt cinched tight at the waist. A baseball cap sat tight to his head, the brim pulled low, and he wore dress trousers and pointy-toed leather shoes.
The man instructed Russell to dig and in no uncertain terms told him if he didn't, there'd be trouble. Like Russell could refuse with what looked like a pistol pointed at him. After he'd finished, he returned to the little hut where he stored his tools, and prepared to leave the graveyard, vowing never to tell anyone what had happened.
But he hadn't been able to resist one more look back as he'd locked the cemetery gates.
He peered through the iron bars and watched the man and one other deposit a body in the grave. Russell was torn between fucking off home and calling the police, but the man's threats had scared him into silence.
"Jesus,” he said now, the memories sending a chill down his spine.
He glanced about, laughing quietly. What had he expected, the guy to turn up again? Here? He hadn't seen hide nor hair of him since that night, and he'd moved to this new town with Toby, the guy who had been placed in the grave.
It's not every day a bloke finds a man buried under a shitload of dirt, then falls in love with him, but there you go. No one can say my life hasn't been interesting.
He and Toby had been here over a year now, settling into a place where they knew no one and no one knew them—or at least Russell didn't think anyone had recognised them. Maybe the newspapers here in Wraxford, a little out-of-the-way place near Newcastle, hadn't covered what had happened that night down south. Who knew?
Reckon I'd still be there now if I hadn't turned and looked through those gates, seeing what those men had done. I'd have shit myself that those men would come back, but I don't think I'd have left town if—
Yeah, he'd gone back into the graveyard once the men had gone, finding Toby buried in mud, still alive. And thank fuck he had, because Russell would never have found the guy dreams were made of and started a new life with him. Well, Toby wasn't exactly dream-guy material, everyone had their idiosyncrasies, but he was close enough to perfect for Russell.
He smiled, flicking his cup free of coffee droplets and screwing it back on the flask. His break was over—"Only fifteen minutes, and make sure you don't go a minute over!” Reginald, his co-worker always said—and he needed to dig down a few more inches before this grave was done. Reginald was just as bad as George, the old fella Russell had worked with before, except Reginald was younger.
"You'd think he was fifty the way he acts. Tosser.” Scowling, Russell climbed up into his digger and stuffed the flask into his rucksack. Not long now until lunch, and today he had a tuna baguette, packed to bursting with the stuff.
His mouth watered at the thought, and Russell shut the image of food from his mind. No sense in thinking about what he couldn't eat yet. Reginald would undoubtedly know Russell had eaten before his actual lunch break. The bloke had a habit of knowing shit like that. Had a habit of knowing many things he shouldn't, come to think of it.
Starting the digger, Russell went about finishing the grave on autopilot, his mind wandering back to the past. He'd told himself he wouldn't do this, harping on about what had gone before, but finding Toby's flatmate, Sasha, stabbed to death with a carving knife the night he'd rescued Toby from the grave wasn't exactly something you could forget in a hurry. Especially when whoever had killed her had never been caught. Especially when you still had nightmares about it.
The blood. The shape of her body on the floor. The blood. They way the knife handle stuck out of her. The blood...
It could have just been some random killing, couldn't it? A coincidence that Toby had been beaten up the same evening after he'd tried to stop some men bullying a young kid. That when they'd caught Toby, they'd drugged him with something or other and dumped him in that grave.
Could
it have been coincidence?
Russell huffed out a breath. He didn't know, and not knowing was what always got him thinking back. They'd moved to Wraxford, him and Toby, wanting to start afresh, where no one knew them as the blokes in the newspaper, the one with the article about them finding Sasha. Some prick reporter had snapped their picture without them knowing as they'd left the police station after giving statements. The following day, their faces had been splashed in full colour on the front page. Toby had almost shit himself at that. Reckoned whoever had killed Sasha, and whoever had drugged him, would never let sleeping dogs lie.
They could hardly stay in town then, could they, so they'd done a moonlight flit, letting the coppers know where they'd gone in case the men were caught and Russell and Toby were needed for any resulting trial.
No policeman had contacted them, and each day Russell checked the local paper of their old town online, coming up blank on any news the men had been caught.
It wasn't good to always have to look over your shoulder, but what else could they do? Also, Russell had wondered if it'd been a good idea that he'd gone straight back to work as a gravedigger. If those men were on the lookout for them, if they were
really
bad blokes, it'd stand to reason they'd have contacts in various towns, ones sent to check out the cemeteries for signs he worked there.
"Fuck all I can do about that now. If they come, they come,” he muttered, reversing the digger away from the now-finished grave and driving it onto a pathway that separated two expanses of grave-dotted grass.
Reginald would be along shortly to make sure Russell had finished in the allotted time he'd given him. Like George, Reginald was a lazy bastard, leaving all the hard work to Russell. All the guy did was mow the damn grass, lay out the fake grass around the graves, and place huge boards over the top so no one fell into the hole while it was left unattended. Russell dug the graves, weeded around all the plots, ensured the gravestones were set in the correct place when they arrived, and everything else their bloody job entailed. Paperwork, orders, and whatnot.
Once a mug, always a fucking mug.
He smiled at the thought of what Toby would have said to that: Only you can stop people taking the piss. You let them, that's what the problem is. Tell them to fuck off, and they won't keep doing it.
I'd like to see Reginald's face if I told him to fuck off, but I don't want to lose my job. And I would. No way would his dad allow me to speak that way. Probably why Reginald gets away with what he does, having his dad as our boss.
Sighing, Russell drove the digger up the path and over the mounded edge of grass to his left. He had another grave to dig before he could even think about lunch. He headed toward plot five hundred and nine, cursing the cold weather, because shit, there'd be an influx of dead folks in the coming weeks. Always were during the winter. Car crashes due to icy roads; old folks who couldn't afford to put the heating on; house fires where people placed their clothing to dry in front of a real blaze.
Damn depressing.
Parking the digger, Russell jumped out of the cab and pulled a ball of string and a tape measure from his pocket. He measured out the grave—an adult one, longer than the average—and marked the size by tying the string to small wooden stakes at each corner. Back in the cab, he started the engine and began again, digging yet another last resting place for some poor bastard who already lay in the morgue fridge, the probing inspection from the medical examiner long finished,
life
long finished.
Tell me why I chose this profession again?
He'd been unemployed for six months when the agency came up with his first grave-digging job. He hadn't exactly chosen it—he had no choice but to take the damn thing, being behind on his rent and finding what was left of his savings wouldn't quite stretch to keeping him fed for another week. Still, he'd found it wasn't so bad—and neither were the wages.
Rain splatted the windscreen in fat, intermittent plops, and he turned on the wipers at slow speed. The sky darkened, one minute light the next a ghastly dark grey that promised the rain would soon be a deluge. He could keep working for now—the rain would help soften the earth—but he'd rather be at home in the warm. Cold weather was one thing, but adding rain to it just made him feel miserable and downright pissed off.
Russell switched the wipers to high speed as the deluge he'd predicted came crashing down. Christ, the water oozed over the windscreen in one solid sheet, the wipers fighting to make their triangular peepholes and losing the battle. Unable to see to work, Russell switched the engine off and decided to wait it out. The weatherman had predicted rain, and although he hadn't quite got it right—"A light smattering of rain mid-morning, folks, then sunny skies all the way!"—Reginald could hardly expect Russell to keep working when he couldn't see what he was bloody doing.
Eating that tuna baguette tempted him. But if he couldn't see out the window, he couldn't watch for Reginald if he happened to come by ready to catch Russell. He leaned down to the footwell and fumbled around inside his rucksack, fingers skating over the clear wrap covering his lunch. It rustled. Lured him to rip it off. Instead, he grabbed his flask and poured out some coffee, telling himself if Reginald had a problem with that, then he could go fuck himself. The cab had already grown cold without the shitty heater on, and Russell needed to keep warm.
As he sipped, Russell wondered what Toby was doing in his warm office. Filing probably, or answering the phones. Toby did a bit of everything at Jacob & Sons, the local fruit and veg supplier. His lover didn't like his job either, but like they told one another almost once a week, at least they
had
jobs. Sometimes, Toby even drove the trucks delivering produce when they were shorthanded, walking the short distance from the high-rise office building to the warehouse a couple of streets away. Jack-of-all-trades, him, and that was handy. If he lost his job he could apply for another in any number of professions, providing work was available in Wraxford. Mind you, if they had to, they could apply for work in the nearby town of Malton if—
A shadow flitted past the windscreen. Russell necked his coffee and quickly screwed the cup back on his flask. Despite telling himself Reginald could go fuck himself, Russell didn't fancy an argument over him drinking coffee when he'd already had his break. He leaned down and jammed the flask in his backpack, sitting upright to find the shadow flicking back the other way, toward the cab door on his right. Bracing himself for Reginald to fling the door wide expecting to catch him at some misdemeanour, Russell held his breath.
A figure drew close to the side window, fuzzy through the slanting sheets of rain. He was sure Reginald had worn a red coat today and he wondered why the bloke hadn't got it on now. Maybe he'd put one of the cemetery-issue wax jackets on over the top when the rain had started. Maybe Reginald had been listening to the radio in their “staff room", an ancient, grey-bricked building on the other side of the graveyard, and heard that the weather wasn't going to let up and turn into sunny skies all the damn way. If it kept up like this, there was nothing much either of them could do until the rain stopped.