Even from across the street, bending, leaning forward to peer beyond the passengers across the aisle, leaping up at the driver’s shout that this was where I needed to get off, grabbing my rucksack and the paper bag with the half-eaten sandwich – why do they always sneak mayo in these days? – I could see I was too late.
Those fairy lights – who had persuaded him to hang those? He hated Christmas and everything to do with it. That’s how – when – we’d met. Both escaping. Trying to escape.
Oh, not from here. He said he was on his way here, and when I said I’d never been he invited me. In a way which said if I cared to I’d be made welcome. Said the whole place was a welcoming one.
That I could believe. Not five minutes after I’d tried knocking at the thin, flimsy glass of the front, and had confirmed the emptiness; after I’d walked all the way round, standing on tiptoe trying to see inside through windows blotchy with rain-swept and mottled dust from the bare earth, the woman from next door came out and, after checking her washing, said to me, ‘You want a drink while you wait for the next bus? ‘Cos him, he ain’t ever comin’ back here.’
‘Do ... do you know where he went?’
She gestured with a tilt of her head. ‘Jus' down the road.’
I turned, looked, unable to pick out which house she might mean.
‘He’s in the graveyard. Be just bones by now.’
Photograph by Mike Handley, Greenville, Mississippi, posted on http://houseofwriters.ning.com/
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