The Cemetery Diaries
Underground and Underworld
I’m the son my father never had, the boy my mother and sister wept over, the man who lost himself. I know what loss is like, better than most people, living and dead. Tonight, a piece of my grief is returned to the earth, for the roots of the pines and the peaceful, waving grasses to cherish. I carry you limp and finally vacant into the cold crypt, and lay you on one of the empty stone pews. This vault was cleaned out years ago, when the bodies buried under the church were exhumed and removed to the cemetery proper. This is your home now, the place where you alone belong. For eternity you will rest beneath the vaulted, sandstone church that sunrise and sunset fill with dancing, kaleidoscope beams. Choirs will sing cathedral sounds, plumbing aural infinity above your head, and you will listen, godless.
You watch me bury my mistake, an expression of guarded sympathy on your face. She and you look alike in some respects, the same creamy skin and tendriled curls. The main difference between you is the serenity in your eyes. Where her spring green irises were always tight and anxious, your eyes are sparkling pools, crystal blue flecked with pond-like specks of emerald, ringed all around with reeds of lashes. You blink, batting tears that slide down your colourless cheeks. I wonder whether they are for her or for him, your former protector, now skinned and bleeding, chained to the back of my bike. We’ll have to do something about that.
I emerge again into the primeval grey before dawn, when the streetlights cast greasy halos between sprigs of oak like Christmas candles poking through holly wreaths. Nobody else is out on the streets that border the car park. Nobody sees me heft the useless sack of chilled meat and carry it effortlessly to the back of the meditation garden. He will have no ceremonious goodbye, as you had. Nobody sees me prise the door to the groundskeeper’s shed and remove the shovel, its handle caked with mud. Only the crows and currawongs watch as the rusty spade breaks the compost and tosses mounds of it aside, until a gaping pit opens up between the thorny rose branches. I toss the long-dead body in and cover it without shedding a bead of sweat. To be a vampire is to be inexhaustible. I mop my brow more out of habit than necessity, showing human weakness, before I turn to face the purpling hills. Formerly, they were coal-black, but soon they will be blue, and finally pale, ashen-grey beneath a glorious revolution.
I face that vast, lightening sky, so much like the open sea, and know the balance of my strength and vulnerability. I know that I’m stronger because of the burdens I bear, the weight I carry inside me, that swells with each new day and is saddled again with each new, shining night. I shrug that weight up onto my shoulders, where the world should rest, where it both bows me and bestows me with mass that I can use to muscle forward. I am a cannonball, hurtling through time from the present to the past. I have gained so much momentum over the years, and I cannot be stopped. Electric shiver run up my body, because I burn so brightly. I will burn until I turn myself to ash, I know.
And so it’s time for a new adventure. I stick my shovel into the soil, and leave it upright, quivering. Somebody else can find it. It’s daybreak, but it’s a stinking hot, summer’s day, not a day for work, but a day for play. The streets will be melting, glued together with taffy-like tar and bubble-gum. In this weather, the seedy hangouts on the city’s underside will be crowded with people like us, pale and heat-adverse, taking refuge in the low-lit, back-lit world of smoke and mirrors. We take the bike down crowded streets filled with glass veneers, the tinted glass of car-windows and Ray Bans. The doors to the underworld are jammed into dirty archways, hidden where buildings jostle for space on the café strips and underneath the heritage bridges that now hold railway tracks. Looming, sandstone edifices complete with smog stains and gargoyles hide the best nightclubs, the kind that never close.
Soon enough, we’ve immersed in another world, a world where everyone wears our uniform, beaten leather, studded with spikes, big hair and wide, hoop earrings that catch pulsing lights. The waist-high nebula of smoke is from cigarettes, muddy lungs and smoke machines. Turbines push it across the dance floor, sticky with perspiration, loud with swimming sounds, strobe beats and blaring sirens. It’s the perfect place to hunt, but this isn’t where we come to take lives. It’s where we go to fit in.
You watch me bury my mistake, an expression of guarded sympathy on your face. She and you look alike in some respects, the same creamy skin and tendriled curls. The main difference between you is the serenity in your eyes. Where her spring green irises were always tight and anxious, your eyes are sparkling pools, crystal blue flecked with pond-like specks of emerald, ringed all around with reeds of lashes. You blink, batting tears that slide down your colourless cheeks. I wonder whether they are for her or for him, your former protector, now skinned and bleeding, chained to the back of my bike. We’ll have to do something about that.
I emerge again into the primeval grey before dawn, when the streetlights cast greasy halos between sprigs of oak like Christmas candles poking through holly wreaths. Nobody else is out on the streets that border the car park. Nobody sees me heft the useless sack of chilled meat and carry it effortlessly to the back of the meditation garden. He will have no ceremonious goodbye, as you had. Nobody sees me prise the door to the groundskeeper’s shed and remove the shovel, its handle caked with mud. Only the crows and currawongs watch as the rusty spade breaks the compost and tosses mounds of it aside, until a gaping pit opens up between the thorny rose branches. I toss the long-dead body in and cover it without shedding a bead of sweat. To be a vampire is to be inexhaustible. I mop my brow more out of habit than necessity, showing human weakness, before I turn to face the purpling hills. Formerly, they were coal-black, but soon they will be blue, and finally pale, ashen-grey beneath a glorious revolution.
I face that vast, lightening sky, so much like the open sea, and know the balance of my strength and vulnerability. I know that I’m stronger because of the burdens I bear, the weight I carry inside me, that swells with each new day and is saddled again with each new, shining night. I shrug that weight up onto my shoulders, where the world should rest, where it both bows me and bestows me with mass that I can use to muscle forward. I am a cannonball, hurtling through time from the present to the past. I have gained so much momentum over the years, and I cannot be stopped. Electric shiver run up my body, because I burn so brightly. I will burn until I turn myself to ash, I know.
And so it’s time for a new adventure. I stick my shovel into the soil, and leave it upright, quivering. Somebody else can find it. It’s daybreak, but it’s a stinking hot, summer’s day, not a day for work, but a day for play. The streets will be melting, glued together with taffy-like tar and bubble-gum. In this weather, the seedy hangouts on the city’s underside will be crowded with people like us, pale and heat-adverse, taking refuge in the low-lit, back-lit world of smoke and mirrors. We take the bike down crowded streets filled with glass veneers, the tinted glass of car-windows and Ray Bans. The doors to the underworld are jammed into dirty archways, hidden where buildings jostle for space on the café strips and underneath the heritage bridges that now hold railway tracks. Looming, sandstone edifices complete with smog stains and gargoyles hide the best nightclubs, the kind that never close.
Soon enough, we’ve immersed in another world, a world where everyone wears our uniform, beaten leather, studded with spikes, big hair and wide, hoop earrings that catch pulsing lights. The waist-high nebula of smoke is from cigarettes, muddy lungs and smoke machines. Turbines push it across the dance floor, sticky with perspiration, loud with swimming sounds, strobe beats and blaring sirens. It’s the perfect place to hunt, but this isn’t where we come to take lives. It’s where we go to fit in.