‘It wore her out,’ said John, and he seemed to see her with her piled plaited hair and her long straight dress and the consumption in her face. He saw the young husband mourning among those five bread-and-butter-fed children, the crepe on his hat, the black coat. Under a sky like this, the sun a white puddle in layered cloud, he came with the clergyman and the mourners and the coffin-bearers to lay her in the earth. The flowers withered in the biting wind – or did they bring flowers to funerals then? He didn’t know, and not knowing broke the vision and brought him back to the clink of spade against granite, the smell of Marlon’s cigarette, Gilly talking, talking, as boringly as an old woman of her aches and pains only he was talking of sex.

They 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.

‘When’ll we get it over with?’ Marlon faltered, coming close to the stove, coughing a little.

‘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.’

‘You can’t do that,’ said Marlon. ‘There’s the dead people in there.’

‘So what? There was dead people round the edges, but they took them up. They done something – what they call it, John?’

‘They deconsecrated the ground.’

‘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?’

‘’Course they did. You didn’t think they was under there, did you?’

‘Then where’ll they be when the Day comes? How’ll they lift up the stones and come out?’

‘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.’

‘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.