Bod talked to Mr. Owens about this, and, after a few moments’ reflection, his father said, “It’s just women, I reckon. She liked you as a boy, probably isn’t sure who you are now you’re a young man. I used to play with one little girl down by the duck-pond every day until she turned about your age, and then she threw an apple at my head and did not say another word to me until I was seventeen.”
Mrs. Owens sniffed. “It was a pear I threw,” she said, tartly, “and I was talking to you again soon enough, for we danced a measure at your cousin Ned’s wedding, and that was but two days after your sixteenth birthday.”
Mr. Owens said, “Of course you are right, my dear.” He winked at Bod, to tell him that it was none of it serious. And then he mouthed “Seventeen,” to show that, really, it was.
Bod had allowed himself no friends among the living. That way, he had realized back during his short-lived schooldays, lay only trouble. Still, he had remembered Scarlett, had missed her for years after she went away, had long ago faced the fact he would never see her again. And now she had been here in his graveyard, and he had not known her…
He was wandering deeper into the tangle of ivy and trees that made the graveyard’s northwest quadrant so dangerous. Signs advised visitors to keep out, but the signs were not needed. It was uninviting and creepy once you were past the ivy-tangle that marked the end of the Egyptian Walk and the black doors in the mock-Egyptian walls that led to people’s final resting places. In the northwest, nature had been reclaiming the graveyard for almost a hundred years, and the stones were tipped over, graves were forgotten or simply lost beneath the green ivy and the leaf-fall of fifty years. Paths were lost and impassable.
Bod walked with care. He knew the area well, and he knew how dangerous it could be.
When Bod was nine he had been exploring in just this part of the world when the soil had given way beneath him, tumbling him into a hole almost twenty feet down. The grave had been dug deep, to accommodate many coffins, but there was no headstone and only one coffin, down at the bottom, containing a rather excitable medical gentleman named Carstairs who seemed thrilled by Bod’s arrival and insisted on examining Bod’s wrist (which Bod had twisted in the tumble, grabbing onto a root) before he could be persuaded to go and fetch help.
Bod was making his way through the northwest quadrant, a sludge of fallen leaves, a tangle of ivy, where the foxes made their homes and fallen angels stared up blindly, because he had an urge to talk to the Poet.
Nehemiah Trot was the Poet’s name, and his gravestone, beneath the greenery, read:
Here lies the mortal remains of
NEHEMIAH TROT
POET
1741–1774
SWANS SING BEFORE THEY DIE
Bod said, “Master Trot? Might I ask you for advice?”
Nehemiah Trot beamed, wanly. “Of course, brave boy. The advice of poets is the cordiality of kings! How may I smear unction on your, no, not unction, how may I give balm to your pain?”
“I’m not actually in pain. I just—well, there’s a girl I used to know, and I wasn’t sure if I should find her and talk to her or if I should just forget about it.”
Nehemiah Trot drew himself up to his full height, which was less than Bod’s, raised both hands to his chest excitedly, and said, “Oh! You must go to her and implore her. You must call her your Terpsichore, your Echo, your Clytemnestra. You must write poems for her, mighty odes—I shall help you write them—and thus—and only thus—shall you win your true love’s heart.”
“I don’t actually need to win her heart. She’s not my true love,” said Bod. “Just someone I’d like to talk to.”
“Of all the organs,” said Nehemiah Trot, “the tongue is the most remarkable. For we use it both to taste our sweet wine and bitter poison, thus also do we utter words both sweet and sour with the same tongue. Go to her! Talk to her!”
“I shouldn’t.”
“You should, sir! You must! I shall write about it, when the battle’s lost and won.”
“But if I Unfade for one person, it makes it easier for other people to see me…”
Nehemiah Trot said, “Ah, list to me, young Leander, young Hero, young Alexander. If you dare nothing, then when the day is over, nothing is all you will have gained.”
“Good point.” Bod was pleased with himself, and glad he had thought of asking the Poet for advice. Really, he thought, if you couldn’t trust a poet to offer sensible advice, who could you trust? Which reminded him…
“Mister Trot?” said Bod. “Tell me about revenge.”
“Dish best served cold,” said Nehemiah Trot. “Do not take revenge in the heat of the moment. Instead, wait until the hour is propitious. There was a Grub Street hack named O’Leary—an Irishman, I should add—who had the nerve, the confounded cheek to write of my first slim volume of poems, A Nosegay of Beauty Assembled for Gentlemen of Quality, that it was inferior doggerel of no worth whatsoever, and that the paper it was written on would have been better used as—no, I cannot say. Let us simply agree that it was a most vulgar statement.”
“But you got your revenge on him?” asked Bod, curious.
“On him and on his entire pestilent breed! Oh, I had my revenge, Master Owens, and it was a terrible one. I wrote, and had published, a letter, which I nailed to the doors of the public houses in London where such low scribbling folk were wont to frequent. And I explained that, given the fragility of the genius poetical, I would henceforth write not for them, but only for myself and posterity, and that I should, as long as I lived, publish no more poems—for them! Thus I left instructions that upon my death my poems were to be buried with me, unpublished, and that only when posterity realized my genius, realized that hundreds of my verses had been lost—lost!—only then was my coffin to be disinterred, only then could my poems be removed from my cold dead hand, to finally be published to the approbation and delight of all. It is a terrible thing to be ahead of your time.”
“And after you died, they dug you up, and they printed the poems?”
“Not yet, no. But there is still plenty of time. Posterity is vast.”
“So…that was your revenge?”
“Indeed. And a mightily powerful and cunning one at that!”
“Ye-es,” said Bod, unconvinced.
“Best. Served. Cold,” said Nehemiah Trot, proudly.
Bod left the northwest of the graveyard, returned through the Egyptian Walk to the more orderly paths and untangled ways, and as the dusk fell, he wandered back towards the old chapel—not because he hoped Silas had returned from his travels, but because he had spent his life visiting the chapel at dusk, and it felt good to have a rhythm. And anyway, he was hungry.
Bod slipped through the crypt door, down into the crypt. He moved a cardboard box filled with curled and damp parish papers and took out a carton of orange juice, an apple, a box of bread sticks, and a block of cheese, and he ate while pondering how and whether he would seek out Scarlett—he would Dreamwalk, perhaps, since that was how she had come to him…
He headed outside, was on his way to sit on the grey wooden bench, when he saw something and he hesitated. There was someone already there, sitting on his bench. She was reading a magazine.
Bod Faded even more, became a part of the graveyard, no more important than a shadow or a twig.
But she looked up. She looked straight at him, and she said, “Bod? Is that you?”
He said nothing. Then he said, “Why can you see me?”
“I almost couldn’t. At first I thought you were a shadow or something. But you look like you did in my dream. You sort of came into focus.”
He walked over to the bench. He said, “Can you actually read that? Isn’t it too dark for you?”
Scarlett closed the magazine. She said, “It’s odd. You’d think it would be too dark, but I could read it fine, no problem.”
“Are you…” He trailed off, uncertain of what he had wanted to ask her. “Are you here on your own?”
She nodded. “I helped Mr. Frost do some grave-rubbings, after school. And then I told him I wanted to sit and think here, for a bit. When I’m done here, I promised to go and have a cup of tea with him and he’ll run me home. He didn’t even ask why. Just said he loves sitting in graveyards too, and that he thinks they can be the most peaceful places in the world.” Then she said, “Can I hug you?”
“Do you want to?” said Bod.
“Yes.”
“Well then.” He thought for a moment. “I don’t mind if you do.”
“My hands won’t go through you or anything? You’re really there?”
“You won’t go through me,” he told her, and she threw her arms around him and squeezed him so tightly he could hardly breathe. He said, “That hurts.”
Scarlett let go. “Sorry.”
“No. It was nice. I mean. You just squeezed more than I was expecting.”
“I just wanted to know if you were real. All these years I thought you were just something in my head. And then I sort of forgot about you. But I didn’t make you up, and you’re back, you’re in my head, and you’re in the world too.”
Bod smiled. He said, “You used to wear a sort of a coat, it was orange, and whenever I saw that particular color orange, I’d think of you. I don’t suppose you still have the coat.”
“No,” she said. “Not for a long time. It would be a wee bit too small for me now.”
“Yes,” said Bod. “Of course.”
“I should go home,” said Scarlett. “I thought I could come up on the weekend, though.” And then, seeing the expression on Bod’s face, she said, “Today’s Wednesday.”
“I’d like that.”
She turned to go. Then she said, “How will I find you, next time?”
Bod said, “I’ll find you. Don’t worry. Just be on your own and I’ll find you.”
She nodded, and was gone.
Bod walked back into the graveyard and up the hill, until he reached the Frobisher mausoleum. He did not enter it. He climbed up the side of the building, using the thick ivy root as a foothold, and he pulled himself up onto the stone roof, where he sat and thought looking out at the world of moving things beyond the graveyard, and he remembered the way that Scarlett had held him and how safe he had felt, if only for a moment, and how fine it would be to walk safely in the lands beyond the graveyard, and how good it was to be master of his own small world.
Scarlett said that she didn’t want a cup of tea, thank you. Or a chocolate biscuit. Mr. Frost was concerned.
“Honestly,” he told her, “you look like you’ve seen a ghost. Well, a graveyard, not a bad place to see one, if you were going to, um, I had an aunt once who claimed her parrot was haunted. She was a scarlet macaw. The parrot. The aunt was an architect. Never knew the details.”
“I’m fine,” said Scarlett. “It was just a long day.”