We opened the door and stepped out on to the wet tarmac. After the warm interior of the taxi, pulsing with music and the throb of the engine, I gasped at the cold and silence, like plunging into freezing water. The lights in the gatehouse were out. If there was a night watchman, he was asleep. We made our way over to the gatehouse, and having identified a likely drainpipe I hitched myself up, found a foothold in the brick and stepped over the metal spikes, turning gingerly in the air and slithering down the other side to land in a heap on the grass. Jessica followed, and her long lithe body swarmed over the fence without the huffing and wobbling that had characterized my climb. It felt right to come and see Francis in this transgressive fashion. We were ghouls; we were vampires. We were breaking in to visit our friend; this was not some empty daylight pilgrimage with a handful of lilies but a proper eulogy to our time together. The thumping of my heart and the breathless chuckle that escaped me as we looked at each other on the ground made me think of how I had felt with him. We turned around and looked at the graveyard stretching out before us. It was not an old churchyard scene stocked with yew trees and suggestive shadows, but many acres of sanitized plots arranged like a military memorial at the site of some great massacre. The headstones were not uniform – some glittered slightly in the light of the street as the yellow rays caught mineral flecks in brown marble; some were solid white stained with birdshit; some had flat tops and some rounded; there were crosses and angels and stars of David in a square by the right-hand wall – but all occupied the same size plot. The cemetery had been conceived on a grand scale, and was meant to service the city’s needs for generations. It covered many acres.

‘Can you remember where he’s . . . where we can find him?’

‘I’m not sure, I think I might be able to,’ I said. I knew exactly where he was, but I still wanted to hide from her the full extent of my knowledge, the detail in which I remembered the past.

I led us on to the broad tarmac road that stretched down the centre away from the gatehouse. The surface was perfectly even, having only ever known the stately roll of a hearse. The verge was neatly kept. The path led up a slight incline and, after several minutes’ walking, we came to a memorial garden arranged at the top of the hill. Trees rose up around the path – they had been planted as an aid to sadness, arranged in a hollow semicircle. They were evergreen trees and, though they did not look as desolate as the bare trunks lining the highway, their foliage blocked out the sky. As we moved away from the lights of the street, the darkness began to change. Beyond the trees it was no longer the comforting city shadow that bleached the colour from objects, leaving them a grimy yellow but with their shapes intact. It was real blackness, an obstacle to movement. I was afraid suddenly that I might not find the way after all. Jessica drew closer to me, or perhaps I drew closer to her. We closed ranks in the face of the night. I noticed that despite the difference in the length of our strides our footsteps had begun to fall in time. The only sound was the tread of our shoes on the tarmac and the wind in the trees. A large swath of cloud appeared between the trunks. I got my bearings, and knew that when we came through it we would be very close to Francis’s grave.