A lot of people that I started off liking, I have grown to hate. It has gone the other way too – I have grown to like some that I hated initially. But not this fella; I hated him from the first time I clapped eyes on him and that’s the way it stayed. People called him Ten-To-Two-Blue because he walked like Charlie Chaplin and he was always pissed off. I lived with him for two years – he was living with his sister, who I met at a bus stop where I proposed to her. We got married the next day and I moved in.

Within a week of moving in, I saved his life. We had gone for a walk by the harbour. He fell in off the top end where the fishing boats moored and fishermen cast away ripped nets beside the wall. He couldn’t swim. His head was under the water but his two hands were sticking out like they were waiting to catch a ball. I could still see his face under the lapping surface like I was looking into a dream-mirror. Then it felt like he was the one looking into the mirror and I was the reflection and it was me that was drowning. I didn’t like the feeling – that’s why I threw him the life buoy. It all felt like a dream.

For the following two years I had a recurring nightmare of his submerged face, looking at me through the glazed up mirror of the surface of the sea. I read that when the head of something goes under the water it then belongs to the sea and that it was bad luck to take back from the sea what belonged to it. I loved the sea but never went near the sea after that, never. Two years after I saved him, as he was sleeping, I pulled the duvet over his face like the waves going back over him, and shot him in the head. He didn’t even gasp for air.

There was a high wall at the bottom of the garden and on the other side of the wall was the graveyard. I could see it from his bedroom window, through the dirty yellow curtains with red flowers on them. There was a mist over the graves and the crosses looked like they were protruding up through clouds from a steepled, holy city. I’ve never been to Prague but that’s how I imagined it to look. I always wanted to go there. In the movies, after the actors kill someone they never know where to put the body – I thought it was obvious: bury him in the graveyard. No one looks for the dead amongst the dead. Nobody really wants to see the dead again. They only search for them in fields and along the beach when they have a faint glimmer of hope that they may still be alive – that’s why they are looking amongst the living.

I must have subliminally planned it all because my wife was away with visiting their mother. As she was going to be gone for a week, I stuck Ten-To-Two-Blue in the deep freeze with his knees hunched up like he was pretending to be a bomb, jumping into a lake.

I walked out onto the street and went past the front doors of our neighbour’s houses. I stopped at the gates of the graveyard and, as I entered, I looked overhead to the grey horseshoe column of stone that made up the gateway. The cemetery looked like a town hit by a bomb or a starved village drowned to the eaves. It was early morning; the sun was rising over the frosty grass. Two gravediggers were digging a fresh grave. I stood watching them digging until they had disappeared below the ground and only their shovels cut up into the air as they tossed the new-born soil on top of the pile at the side and the white clouds of their breath floated up, hung there, dumb like ghosts, and dissipated.

I went into the church and sat down in the warm bath of vacant silence. Fake gold and the amateur paintings adorned the walls and the altar. I closed my eyes and laid my head back. I heard a granny shuffling in – once you hear that sound, you never forget it. She halted at the side of my pew and edged in beside me. “The burial,” she whispered, “will be later today, at two. At two tonight,” she went on, after a short pause, “’cause that’s just it, some come and some go.”

We are all conspirators at the end of it all, I thought to myself, as I walked outside into the sunlight. The grave diggers were standing beside the barrow of fresh earth, smoking, laughing – only one was talking, but both were laughing. They both wore hats now, like farmer hats. The one who was listening wasn’t smoking much. He was holding the cigarette between his first and second fingers, flicking it steadily from behind with his thumb. He was also looking around, scanning across the rooftops of grey crosses taking in me at the cave-door of the church, though not with his head, just with his eyes. He wasn’t listening at all.

The day passed as days pass. I watched it darken from Ten-To-Two-Blue’s window, beside the yellow curtains, looking out as the mist covered the graves and the crosses, like church spires pointing out over cloud.

At 2am I took Ten-To-Two-Blue out of the freezer then slid him easily down the hallway, eyes locked on him him, dragged him out the back door and down the garden and managed, after standing on the bench, to get him over the wall and dropped him onto the grass at the side of the graveyard. He landed the same way that a table would, on its back, legs upward. Then he toppled over slowly onto his side. I got the spade and the ladder from the shed and climbed over, hauled the ladder up and climbed down into the graveyard.

I didn’t want to bury him anymore. I was sick of him. I wanted to go back in time and unsave him. The grass, in the torchlight, looked like it was sprinkled with sugar. He lay on the grass, frozen into the shape of a question-mark. The bullet hole looked like a third eye, a mark of clairvoyance; a black hole that held no future – a doomed onwards to which his twisted face gave testament to. I turned the torch off and dragged him across the gravel but he jarred against the loose stone. It was nearly impossible as I was trying to hold the spade as well. I gripped him at his crooked knees and heaved him over my shoulder, against my face, a double coldness of death and ice; a question-mark-cross. I was thinking about the futility of flesh, the broken absurdity of free will. A night-bird shrieked out as it flew, its shrill call echoing through the icy silence.

I found the freshly dug grave, lidded over again and began digging. I breathed heavily and stopped listening then; I set myself to hear nothing further, thinking of the gravedigger that wasn’t listening either, that just stood there scanning the tops of the crosses like he was overlooking the spires of an old city that used to be holy, somewhere like Prague. A giant with bent leg up on the shoulder of the spade like it was a rooftop looking out over the crosses that rose up into the sky, from a hundred churches; church towers, like the hilted handles of knives with the blade driven in between the ribs of streets; holy streets where enlightened ones wonder how it ever happened, how this city conceived its own idea of life and death and the great universe washing over everything like a hidden tide.

I dug and I dug, till the walls rose over me, deeper and deeper, yet all the while I stood with the gravedigger that didn’t listen, our heels on the shoulders of roofs looking over the crosses that rose into the sky from a steepled city. I told jokes and we both laughed, though he wasn’t listening. He held his cigarette between his first finger and his middle finger and flicked it with his thumb from behind. I was the talker beside him, and me laughing too with the digging done. Then I was back at the church, back in the pew with my eyes closed and my head back in the warm bath of vacant silence, back hearing the granny shuffling up the aisle and edging in beside me and saying again, the burial will be tonight, at two tonight. The thud of wood brought me back to where I really was, in darkness, hemmed in by the root-walls. I looked up. It was like looking up from an alleyway – a thin canal of sky.

I used the spade as a ledge for my foot, to get myself out, away from the bone-carpet – a capsuled, wood and ivory network of unlived dreams under the skyline of crosses. I lowered Ten-To-Two-Blue in on top of the coffin. In the torchlight, he was the colour of red wine. A stolen question mark that belonged to the sea, whose bones the sea would never get. When I stood at the side of the grave, he looked like a young lady, head turned and looking away, her exposed soft neck dreaming of a tender hand.

I filled it in and went back to the wall at the bottom of the garden. I climbed back up the ladder, threw the spade over and sat on the ridge and looked back over God’s steepled acre. The mist covered the frosty grass like a filter that could sift through the severed earth and net whatever was spectral about Ten-To-Two-Blue to drag his submerged phantom back to the sea. And with him all that was holy.

In grey light, mist moved over the grave-tops. The dawn was edging to the side of the world as though breathing heat into the double coldness of darkness and night; as though holding the earth close to its face, as though carrying it over its shoulder in the rising waters of the engulfing universe and even though drowning itself and always belonging to the sea thereafter, holding it up with outstretched arms, like a caught ball, over the ruthlessness of the waves, knowing also that it was alone, that it had no dream-double standing in safety on the pier, where sailors cast their ripped nets beside the wall; and no reflection standing  there dumbly willing to throw the life buoy even though its madrugada’s head has gone under and now belonged to the sea.