The Ned Wood Archive

The days of fate were strong for you danced you far from me

One evening it was just me and Gav going to eat and, for some reason, Gav says he wants to explore and turns left rather than right outside the hotel. It’s mostly posher houses, so I don’t think we’re going to find any grub. He keeps on wandering and we come to these park gates. The park’s closed, but he has an uncharacteristically adventurous impulse and squeezes through the gates. Perhaps he’s trying to prove something to me. He turns and calls me to follow. I ask him what he’s found.

“It’s a necropolis,” he says.

Now I can’t always understand him because I haven’t got used to his accent yet, so I get him to explain. Apparently, we’ve arrived at the City of the Dead. You know, like in the Clash song: all the windows stare ahead and the streets are filled with dread. Gav doesn’t know that song either. He explains about the necropolis. It’s a graveyard, but really atmospheric. It’s like Rock Cemetery near Forest Fields, but is much more overgrown. We feel like explorers discovering a Mayan temple in the jungle.

“Do you think we’ll find any treasure buried here, Gav?”

“Don’t want to disappoint you, Ned, but there’s probably not even many bodies staying here. Burke and Hare probably nicked them.”

Nothing here has changed for years. We walk past old stone headstones, some with ornate carvings, old urns, small obelisks, celtic crosses, pillars, and other monuments; reading the names where we can make them out, even though they, none of them, mean anything to us. The ivy has grown everywhere. All over the stones. All over the monuments. All across the ground which causes us to trip up in places. There’s a walled building that we can’t find an entrance to. There are shaded avenues overgrown with green that we struggle to walk through. There are stones and stones and stones. Standing stones and fallen stones, like a hundred kids have each attempted to rebuild Stonehenge.

Then she appears in front of me. Standing facing me with her left arm towards me. It’s that girl I saw in the Circus Bar. The one on the wall with the smile and the eyes. And those wonderful eyes are looking at me. And that wonderful smile is smiling at me. She’s got a flower or a branch in her left hand as if she wants me to take it. Her long simple dress drapes from her shoulders to her feet and her strong elegant wings are folded neatly behind her back. She’s been stood in this patch of the cemetery for a hundred years waiting just for me.

“Do you think anyone will miss her if we take her home, Gav?”

He’s not there. I retrace my steps as best I can and find him sat on a lump of stone. I want to tell him about the angel, but he gets his question in first.

“Ned. Let me ask you something. You’re a geologist, right?”

“Yep.”

“What’s this?”

He stands up and lets me look at the stone he was sat on. It’s a boulder, maybe two foot wide, a foot and a half high. Like a foot stool. Grey. Crystalline. Granite. I’d recognise those crystals anywhere. 

“Looks like a lump of granite. It don’t look like a gravestone or anything, though. It’s just been left there hasn’t it?”

“Let me ask you something else, Ned. If you wanted to carve something to last, wouldn’t you use something like this?”

“if you wanted to carve something into a hillside, like maybe a tunnel or a cave, you’d choose sandstone or sommat soft. Like under Nottingham or places like that. Fact, there’s probably caves under Edinburgh too.

“For a gravestone or something you wanted to keep, though, this would be good. It’s pretty tough, so it’d keep its shape. That cross, there, is granite. Won’t they be teaching you this stuff, soon? Aren’t you going to be an engineer?

“Yeah, I thought so,” said Gav, a couple of sentences behind, not answering my question.

“Anyway,” I continue, “the fancier stuff is limestone. Like, if you wanted an angel, for instance. Let me show you what I’ve just found.”

But he’s got up and walked off, not listening. Not telling me what he’s thinking either. Not explaining any more. As usual.