Trash - Andy Mulligan [55]
B24/8 would be the number of one of the concrete boxes.
Raphael: I remember Gardo looking at me and smiling, and then Rat gave me a hug because we’d cracked it again. We jumped down and came to a little broken doorway that let you into the other side. Right away, we saw a sign in the candlelight, high up on one of the grave-stacks. It said G9, so we moved past it, trying to work out the system.
It really was like a town: people lived in this part of the cemetery – they had houses there. There were little shanties built round the back of the grave-boxes. There were shacks up on top too – little huts and bits of plastic, and to get to them you climbed ladders. We could see kids running on the tops with a kite, getting it up into the typhoon breeze. So many people always, and it struck me again what my auntie used to say: there is nowhere people will not live.
We passed so many graves.
Saddest were the open ones – the ones that were broken open – and everyone knows that story, and I found myself looking away. Each little concrete hole costs the family two thousand-five for five years. You cannot buy a box, you see – you can only rent one. After five years you pay again, or the box is taken back. And people move away, or people spend the money, and sometimes the payment just doesn’t get made – so what happens? The sledgehammer is what happens. They break open the seal, and out comes the body. There’s a part of the cemetery where old bones are thrown and left to rot amongst the trash. Somebody’s child, or somebody’s grandma – out on the rubbish like a dog. The empty holes scared me, because nothing is more sad than that, and I didn’t want to look. They leave the bodies in there for a few weeks sometimes, hoping they’ll be claimed, because I guess nobody likes throwing people away like that.
Gardo.
I was working it out, though.
I led them round the back, and talked to some kids perched up on the grave-stacks. They pointed, and we found the track that was D, then C, then B, so then we came along, counting – fifteen, twenty and twenty-two. Four graves up, and there she was, we found her: Maria Angelico, wife of José Angelico, picked out on a little stone plaque. Raphael and me climbed up and leaned in to read, because the words under the name were small. The brightest light, they said, and I went cold, because those words were the ones we’d been following, and what we’d seen, and it was all coming together – we were close to the end. Around the words were scorch marks, from the candles that had been lit. Raphael read the words out to Rat, calling out loud because there were people everywhere and a lot of drinking going on and a lot of laughter. I looked at the box underneath, and I called that out too:
‘Eladio “Joe” Angelico,’ I said. ‘My good, good son.’
Raphael grabbed me and said, ‘We’re where we’re supposed to be! This is his boy.’
I said, ‘I know that.’ That was clear. But I was also thinking … What’s there to find? We’ve found the poor man’s family grave – is that really such a big deal now? This sad man, whose face we first saw when we found a wallet on the dumpsite … he loses his wife and his boy and we’re poking around, hunting his money? He couldn’t have hidden it here.
‘We’re where we should be,’ I said. ‘But he can’t have put it in a grave.’
‘I agree, ’ said Rat. ‘How would he do it?’
‘What’s that one there?’ said Raphael, looking up. ‘Is that his as well?’
He was looking at the stone above the man’s wife, and I had to climb higher up to see that one. It was clean and new, and the words were harder to read because the light was bad, so Rat handed me up a candle, and I figured them out slowly, Raphael helping.
‘Seeds,’ I said. ‘Something about those seeds again … Then it says: To har … vest. My. Child. It. Is … Something long, I can’t see.’
‘Accomplished,’ we said, together.
‘It is accomplished,’ I said. ‘It is accomplished. Love and … hope.