The Fever Tree and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

always stopped work at four now the dusk came early. ‘Nights are drawing in,’ said the foreman, brewing tea, filling up with dog ends the can Gilly had found in the grave.
    â€˜When’ll we get it over with?’ Marlon faltered, coming close to the stove, coughing a little.
    â€˜Depends on what we’ve got to get over,’ said the foreman. ‘Digging a bit here, clearing a bit there. My guess is that council fellow’ll come round one of these days and say, That’s it, lads, now you can leave it to the squirrels.’
    Gilly was looking at his calendar, turning over the November nightdress girl to the December Santa Claus girl. ‘If I had my way they’d level it all over, the centre bit, and put grass down, make the whole place a park. That’s healthy, that is. Somewhere a young kid could take his girl. Lover’s Lane Park, that’d be a good name. I’d like to see real birds there, not them bloody crows.’
    â€˜You can’t do that,’ said Marlon. ‘There’s the dead people in there.’
    â€˜So what? There was dead people round the edges, but they took them up. They done something – what they call it, John?’
    â€˜They deconsecrated the ground.’
    â€˜Hear what John says? He’s educated, he knows.’
    Marlon got up, the cigarette clinging to his lip. ‘You mean they dug them up? There was others and they dug them up?’
    â€˜â€™Course they did. You didn’t think they was under there, did you?’
    â€˜Then where’ll they be when the Day comes? How’ll they lift up the stones and come out?’
    â€˜Here, for Christ’s sake,’ said the foreman, ‘that’s enough of that, young Marlon. I don’t reckon your mum’d better take you to church no more if that’s what you come out with.’
    â€˜They must come out, they must come and judge,’ Marlon cried, and then the foreman told him sharply to shut up, for even he could be shaken by this sort of thing, with the darkness crowding in on the hut, and the heart of the cemetery a black mound horned by the spires of the chapel.
    John wondered what church Marlon went to, that of some strange sect perhaps. Or was it only his incomplete brain that distorted the accepted meaning of the Day of Judgement into this version of his own? The resentful dead, the judging dead, lying censorious in the earth.
    For his part, he had at first seen the cemetery as no more than a wooded knoll and the stones no more than granite outcroppings. It was not so now. The names in inscriptions, studied by him quietly or derisively read out by Gilly, evoked images of their bearers. James Calhoun Stokes, 1798–1862, Merchant of this City; ‘Upright in all his dealings, he stood firm to meet his Maker’. Gilly had an obscene rendering of that, of course. Thomas Charles Macpherson, 1802–79, Master Builder; ‘Blest are the Pure in Heart’. Lucy Matilda Osborne, 1823–96; ‘Her submissive duty to her husband and devotion to her sons was exceeded only by her pious adoration of her God’. John saw them in cutaway coats, in bombazine gowns, or night-capped on their deathbeds.
    But Marlon saw them as a magisterial procession. Listening, watching, waiting perhaps for the ultimate outrage.
    â€˜What a load of old cobblers! You’ll be down there yourself soon, all the fags you get through in a day.’ Gilly sat on a toppled stone, laughing. He had been telling John more about the casino man’s wife, trying to find among the statues they had piled up one whose figure might be comparable to hers. Britannias, muses, embodiments of virtues or arts, they lay prostrate, their blank grey or bronze faces all staring upwards at the clouded sky.
    â€˜What are we going to do with them?’ Marlon said in the voice that was as desperate when he asked about trivialities as when he gave his prophet-like