There are so many graves. It is hard to imagine the town producing enough people to fill the vast space, but here they are spreading out in front of us, the great and the good of Herne Bay from the nineteenth century to the present day.
I shudder as we pass the church, squat and unremarkable in its neat grassy plot, remembering how, as a child, the smell inside that place would make me feel sick. Every part of it, from the clammy troughs of holy water at the entrance, contaminated by strangers’ hands, to the claret carpet that snaked its way from the aisle up to the altar, felt like it was closing in on me. When the priest finally uttered the words, ‘Go, the mass is ended,’ I would clamber across the parishioners, clutching my chest as I ran for the door. Sitting in that church was the closest thing to being buried alive that I could imagine. Yet, for my mother, it was comfort and salvation; the place where her grief could be soothed with incantations threaded along the beads of her stark white rosary. I never understood that.
Paul catches me looking up at the ugly building.
‘I used to bring your mum here,’ he says. ‘Before she went into the home.’
‘She couldn’t get enough of the place,’ I reply with a half-laugh. ‘Used to bring us here every week when we were kids. Never on Sundays for morning mass like most people, but Saturday night, because that was when the priest heard confessions.’
‘Yes, it was always Saturday night,’ says Paul. ‘I’d wait for her in the car and she would be hours in there. I used to wonder what terrible sin she’d committed to make her confess every single week. I mean, your mum was one of the gentlest, kindest women I’ve known. What could she have felt so guilty about?’
I shrug my shoulders.
‘Who knows, but she’d had a lot of grief to deal with. Maybe talking to the priest helped.’
‘Yeah, maybe,’ says Paul.
We walk on as row upon row of headstones open out before us. I recognize the older ones, the ones crumbling and caked in lichen that date back to the 1800s.
‘I don’t know about you,’ says Paul, frowning as we step through them, ‘but when I go I want to be cremated. A nice neat dispatch.’
‘Me too,’ I say. ‘I’ve already stipulated it in my will.’
‘I should do the same,’ says Paul. ‘Then there’s no confusion.’
We walk through the older graves and my stomach contracts when I see a familiar name.
‘Alexandra Waits,’ I say, stopping at a moss-covered stone. ‘Still here.’
‘What are you talking about?’ asks Paul. ‘Who’s Alexandra Waits?’
‘She’s the girl with angel wings,’ I say, pointing to the ornate sculpture atop the grave. ‘When I was little I used to scare myself by imagining I could see ghosts in this graveyard. I particularly liked this stone because of the wings and the fact that the little girl was my age. I used to sit here and talk to her, tell her my problems.’
‘That’s a bit weird, Kate,’ says Paul, laughing awkwardly.
‘It was probably all the gothic stories I was reading,’ I say, running my fingers over the gnarled wings. ‘But, seriously, I always felt calm when I came and sat with Alexandra. It felt like she was really listening.’
‘Like your mum and her priest,’ says Paul.
‘Yeah, I suppose so. I used to hide out here while the mass was going on. Sometimes I even had a sneaky cigarette.’
‘Always the rebel,’ says Paul.
‘Hardly.’
‘How old were you?’
‘About eleven,’ I reply. ‘I would sit for hours and imagine what kind of life Alexandra had lived, what she looked like. I guessed she would have had dark hair like me and that she liked writing, but because it was the 1800s and she was just a girl no one took her seriously. So she threw herself into the sea, because if she couldn’t be a writer then it was no use living any more. That’s the story I came up with anyway.’
‘It’s a good story,’ says Paul. ‘Though she probably died of TB like everyone else in those days.’
‘Yeah, I guess,’ I say. ‘The last time I visited her I got scared out of my wits. I was being silly and trying to summon her by repeating her name over and over: “Alexandra Waits, Alexandra Waits.” And I heard someone say my name. My full name.’
‘You serious?’ says Paul, frowning. I can tell he’s uncomfortable with all this.
I nod my head and look back at the angel wings, remembering the terror of that evening and how I ran all the way back to the church, looking over my shoulder to see if Alexandra was chasing me.
‘That’s really creepy,’ says Paul, shuddering. ‘I hate anything like that. Makes me go all funny.’
He stumbles as we leave the old graves behind and I smile. I didn’t realize he was so easily scared.
‘There’s no need to worry,’ I say as we head towards a cluster of new graves. ‘Sally told me, years later, that she’d followed me out of the church and hidden behind a tree. It was her voice that scared me half to death.’