I had been contemplating trying to find my own grave, to pay a sort of homage to myself. If I was cremated then I suppose I would be looking for one of those walls of stone plaques that they put the containers behind – or rows of small stones set in the earth. But I don’t know for certain that was what Mum and Dad did with me – maybe they had my ashes scattered somewhere else: that field, perhaps, where the photograph of the three of us was taken when I was a baby. They might have thought of another place where we had all been on holiday when I was young, somewhere I can’t even remember but where our little triangular family was happy. As far as I’m concerned, they had the right to scatter me wherever might have brought them comfort – I don’t care if it was in their local Sainsbury’s or around the daffodil bulbs in the garden.

An elderly man enters through the gates and passes clean through me as he makes his way down the path. He is tall and stooped, wearing a white baseball cap and clutching a small bouquet. He takes a right turn down the first path he comes to. He may be stooped but he walks briskly, with a slight stiffness in his gait – he knows where he is heading. He felt not so much as a shiver as he went through me. People avoid cemeteries because they think they are full of ghosts but I’m right here in the middle of the path and they can’t even tell.

What is here? I contemplate it briefly. Even if this is where my ashes are to be found, they aren’t me. The skeletons in the ground around me aren’t anybody either. Our bodies are just the husks we live in – they mean nothing once we have left them, I know that for certain now. The reverence the living accord dead bodies is nothing more than sentiment – respectful and proper sentiment, yes, and I understand why it is necessary, but sentiment nonetheless.

Above me, in a tree, a bird flutters its wings. I look up and see the smaller branches at the top of the tree moving against the white sky but the bird has flown away. There are no spirits here, I’m sure of it; I would be able to sense them. The dead don’t bother haunting graveyards – they are the last places on earth they need to haunt. The living do that job for them with their messy combination of grief, desire, imagination. There is nothing in this cemetery. It’s just an empty field.

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