A twig yanks the wig askew and I’m in a fighting pose and thrusting out a kick at nothing even as I’m laughing at myself and trying to rearrange the damn thing. If this were a training exercise I’d already have failed. I feel as if I’m getting twisted up in spider-silk as I push further through the tangle of spindly branches. I start hearing an unsettling sound, a keen-edged rhythm: like a saw finding purchase in wet wood. It takes a moment to realize that it’s me, getting myself scared, softly hyperventilating, making up spectral dangers when I should be fixating on the one very real danger that could be hiding nearby. I look left and right, horribly aware that each of the weathered headstones could conceal a threat. Ghosts of warm breath gather in the black air around my face, drifting away to mingle with the mist and the cold night air. I want to stop and light a cigarette, to pull out my lighter and gaze for a moment into the crimson flame; to cup my cold hands around it and suck in a breath of red fire. I feel as if I’m spiralling into a photographic negative. Nobody lays flowers here. Even in daylight there’s no colour to be found amid the greys and parchment whites. It has a fairytale feel and it’s hard not to start telling myself stories as the spindly black branches catch the breeze and start writing invisible script upon the low, breath-fogged dark. I think upon my children. Thinking, before I can stop myself, upon the twins. See myself on my back, my arms around the both of them, holding a big hardback book open in front of me. I’m reading fairy tales but I’m improvising; making up little sub-plots and giving the characters better motivation. Everybody has a distinctive voice and I’m damn good at pretending to be the evil witch, dropping down to a whisper and then erupting in a shriek, grabbing them both in a fit of tickles and laughter as they kick their legs and mummify themselves in blankets and bed sheets. They’re happy memories, though I wish they’d make themselves scarce. Thinking of Louis and Tamara inevitably causes me to slip into recollection of Stefan. He didn’t get past two years old and he’d been dead fifteen years by ’82, but the grief has never left me. Hadn’t then, hasn’t now. I don’t want it to. Grief’s something to cling to, isn’t it? An anchor or a lifebuoy or a big blue plaque. A connection. Nobody’s really gone when you’d give your own heart to bring them back. And it was the graveyard that did it. He used to love the little cemetery outside the tiny church in the village where he spent his short little life. I was a different person then, too – wife of a minister and lady of a manor house I didn’t know what to do with. We treated consecrated ground like our private play-park and it was there, amongst the gravestones and the wildflowers where I scattered his ashes when meningitis took him away from me and dimmed the light in my eyes.