The Magpie Effect - The Magpie Chronicles Book 1 (#Wattys2015)

Chapter 23

The gates materialized out of the trees before me; iron jutting into the ruddy brown canopy. The colours of death, of decay, were perhaps the most captivating. The sky cut irregular white polygons into the blaze of orange. Weathered iron and browned, waning leaf met in a deathly embrace.

The bouquet of flowers in my hands was a stark contrast to the abundance of withering wilderness that surrounded me as I passed through the gates and entered Thousands Cemetery. The silence was absolute, as pure as water drawn from the lips of a mountain. I'd never heard anything like it.

Finding Mona's plot was easy. I entered the same way as I'd done before, so it was simply a matter of navigating my way through all the old graves and crypts and passing through the wooded cloister to emerge into the newer section. Mona's grave was near the hood of trees that boxed this section in. The whole cemetery was stitched together like a patchwork quilt.

There was nobody around. Sundays, I'd always thought, were the busiest days for the dead. The day when flowers were set, wreaths laid, weeds uprooted and tears departed. But not today. The living and the dead, it seemed, remained in their designated territories.

I came to a standstill before Mona's grave. It was, of course, completely devoid of any gifts or memorials, despite it being the thirtieth anniversary of her death.

I didn't know what I'd been expecting, really. Perhaps I'd secretly been anticipating a whole charade of Delaney's come to mourn the passing of their relative, her mother and her sister and her sister's children, who hadn't even known her.

With a sigh, I set the flowers down across her grave. Maybe it just got easier to accept things after a certain amount of time. Or maybe people just forgot. Either way, my head felt heavy with grief.

The sound of voices snapped me out of my trance. I whipped around just in time to see a pair of figures emerge from the cloisters through which I'd just come. One of them was small, huddled, the other only just taller but gesturing in a way that made me think of Aunt Vera and Vivian.

I froze. What were they doing here? How had they found me? They were headed directly in my direction.

I snatched up the flowers and, ducking around Mona's grave, came to a stop a couple of rows in front. I was crouched over the plot of somebody called Marjorie. Her grave was much better kept than Mona's, and the flowers that somebody seemed to have recently put there had only just begun to wilt. I set about pretending to tend it, plucking up blades of grass every here and there so that I appeared busy.

The strangers stopped at Mona's grave, only metres behind me. I could feel their presence, like a bubble of existence colliding with my own. I went about rearranging the flowers.

"The grass has grown," one of them said. It was a weathered voice, wrinkled like paper. My heart ceased up; I could only venture a guess at whom it belonged to.

"Of course it's grown, mum, it's been years," the other replied. This voice was hearty, one that sounded like it laughed a lot. Her daughter, I assumed.

"I know, I know," said the mother. She stopped to cough, and I heard the jarring thud of the daughter slapping her back. "Stop it, Ada. I'm not a child."

"You're telling me," the woman said, and she began to laugh. "You're eighty-bloody-nine!"

The mother responded with silence. Eventually, the woman's laughter trailed into nothingness. I could imagine their gazes dropping to the grave before them, a sense of amalgamated sorrow sweeping over them like a curtain.

"I still think about her, you know," the mother said.

"I know. Me too."

"Every single day."