He Is Mine and I Have No Other. Rebecca O'Connor

      He used to walk by our house every day at the same time, up past Molly’s lane to the cemetery. No one took any notice of him so I didn’t much either.

      I went up there most days after school. It isn’t far – about two minutes up the road, past a derelict cottage where wrens nest and tufted sedge grows out the windows. Past a car park, big enough for twenty or thirty cars. They parked right down by our house, in on the grass verge, for the bigger funerals. There were people who went to every funeral in the parish – the same familiar faces time and again, quietly chatting to one another as they strolled behind the hearse.

      But he wasn’t one of those.

      I thought I knew the place like the back of my hand – the stories behind certain graves, like the orphans who’d died in the fire in town all piled in together, thirty-five of them, without names. And next to them two separate graves for the nuns. Little framed ghosts in their Holy Communion outfits with their jaundiced, freckled faces. Names worn away, railinged plots with whitethorn and wild rose, black-flecked marble, old plastic wreathes with moulding notes of love and condolence.

      It’s on a steep hill that leads down to the main road. At the top of the hill is a large stone cross on a block of slate. High black brambles behind that, thick with blackberries in late September, and behind those, fields for pasture. The prettiest plots are up there still, blanketed in snowdrops, and early spring primroses, and bluebells in May.

      It’s always cold, even in summer. The wind feels like it comes from off the dark surfaces of the lakes.

      I imagined sometimes I could see the sea off in the distance, though the coast is over a hundred miles away.

      An ink-dark line of yew trees runs down on the left, along the path from the car park. Down the middle of the cemetery is an unsheltered shale path; and a smaller muddy track, seamed with dock leaves and grass, cuts to the right, through the older part. I convinced myself they were splints of bone and teeth I could feel through the rubber soles of my shoes – small as chicken bones, some of them, like those of children’s hands or feet.

      A lone farmhouse, stuck to the top of a field beyond the road, used to offer the only glimmer of light between there and the next town over.

      The first time I noticed him was one of those evenings that sucks the light slowly out of things. He was off in the far corner, almost blotted out by the shadow of the trees. I sat still as anything beneath the stone cross, my knees pulled up to my chest, watching him, waiting for him to leave, but at the same time not wanting him to. He stood there for what seemed an age, his figure elongating, expanding in the darkness. Then he turned, scraping the heels of his shoes on the gravel, and walked towards the gate. No sign of the cross. No genuflection.

      I was frightened of him in a way – of his grief, his loneliness. He looked like the loneliest person on earth just then. I imagined he was the type of boy who wondered about things, as I did, who broke his heart wondering about things. Who felt inexplicably lonely hearing voices in the next room, or cattle off in the distance, or the sound of tyres on the driveway.