All the Living and the Dead

by Hayley Campbell

‘Because I work here, people ask me if I believe in ghosts,’ says Dave. ‘I categorically do not believe in ghosts, but you do see ghosts every day in this place. It’s the people who are visiting, day after day, and they’re alive and kicking but they’re so bereaved that all they’ve got left is coming here and going to the gravestone and standing there.’ Dave tries to befriend them, these ghosts, when he’s out in the cemetery tending to the grounds. There’s the guy with the deck-chair and the newspaper. The mother and son who do a lap of the cemetery daily and read the Quran at the bottom of the garden. But it’s the widowers he struggles with: the old men who travel up on the bus and stand alone in the wind or rain. He says he can’t help but create stories about them, imagining a nagging guilt in the man who buys his dead wife expensive flower arrangements three times a week that Dave, days later, has to put in the bin. It eats at him. He suddenly looks exhausted just talking about it. ‘Eventually you end up avoiding them, because you know they’re going to suck the life out of you just by saying hello.’