Given what happened to me, I can’t imagine my parents would have buried my remains. Burial is for whole bodies – they would not have wanted to preserve the state I was in. Rendered to ash, I would be able to mingle with myself. Cremated, I would become whole again.

*

The day after I have sat in on Ruth and Andrew’s therapy session, I head out of the centre of Peterborough on the Eastfield Road, to the cemetery. I used to walk up this way sometimes on my way to see my parents, then take a left down Newark Avenue.

The gates stand open – the cemetery is long and thin and people often drive down to the far end. The speed limit is 10 mph and there are signs everywhere warning you not to leave valuables in your car because there have been so many breakins. They lock the gates at 4 p.m. in winter and it’s only an hour off that. The light is still full, the sky white, but not for long. On my left, there are the older graves beneath the trees, mottled grey stones, some green with moss, all on a slant, the lettering indecipherable from here. The newer graves are to my right, black granite and bright gold lettering and coloured plastic flowers, sometimes toys and balloons. On this side, there is a stretch of empty grass about a hundred metres long before you get to the rows of new interments but the cemetery is almost full now, as though the graves are creeping closer and closer to the iron railings. I have an image of them flowing over, out onto the road, into the living world.

My father grew up in Wisbech but his family moved to Peterborough when he was in his teens. My grandparents on his side are buried here somewhere, Resting, Reunited. I remember helping Dad pick out a new headstone for them, only a year or so before I died myself. The old one had become cracked and discoloured and Dad wanted to replace it. I couldn’t find that grave now if I wanted to, or Uncle Ted’s, not without my dad here or a map – I am remembering how big the cemetery is, the extent of it as it stretches up alongside Eastern Avenue. You could walk around for hours.

Looking out across the graves I feel a certain desolation but not in the way that living people do – it isn’t this array of tombstones spread out before me, this demonstration of the power of death. It’s the pointlessness of it all: worshipping a lump of stone, a place in the earth. What does it matter?