The Groundskeeper Told Me Which Graves To Walk Past Quickly

I took a summer job cutting grass in a municipal cemetery, which is the best job I have ever had: quiet, useful, and nobody complains.

The groundskeeper was called Ivan and he had been there since 1983.

On my second week he walked me round with his diary, and in the back of it there was a list, in pencil, of about eleven plot numbers.

He said, "These ones, don't linger. Cut, and move on."

I laughed. He did not.

He was not a spooky man. He talked about drainage and mowers. He had a flask. He voted in every election and he complained about the council in the specific, loving way that only council employees can.

He said: "It's not that they're bad. It's that they're lonely, and lonely gets interested."

Plot 447 is a boy who died in 1911, aged nine.

I cut round 447 forty times that summer. Thirty-nine of them were nothing.

The fortieth was in August, at about half six in the evening, when the light goes gold and long, and I had the mower off because I was doing the edges by hand.

Somebody laughed. Behind me. Close — arm's length close. A child, laughing the way children laugh when a game is going well.

I turned round and there was nobody, and the cemetery was empty, and the gate was locked, and I was the only person in eleven acres.

And here is the bit I have never told anyone, because it makes me sound as though I want it to be true.

I said, out loud, without deciding to: "All right, all right."

The way you speak to a child who is tugging your sleeve.

I finished the edges. I went home. I did not tell Ivan, and Ivan never asked, but on the Monday he handed me a flask of tea I had not asked for, and he said, "You're all right, you are."

Ivan died in 2019. He is in the same cemetery, three rows from the gate.

I go every August. I never linger at 447. I always say hello.