An Odd Kind Of Wonderful

Chapter Twenty-One

    Raisa doesn't question this further, and this might be the moment I fall in love with the crazy forest faerie, but I'm too busy trying to decipher Sydney and Surrounds 1995 Edition to notice.

    "Where are we going?" I ask Raisa.

    "Cemetery." She answers shortly.

    "Why—?"

    "My dad thought the world was going to end," she says, and takes a left turn. "I just want to let him know I survived."

    -

    I've never had to go to a cemetery before. It's like an alien planet, almost, in a field where all the warriors of the galaxy are buried and left to rest, piles of stone and engravings marking where they lay. I feel intrusive, like I shouldn't be here, suddenly. Raisa parks outside the huge steel gates and there's a small argument between her and Joel about the correct turning-off-the-engine procedure. Once we're all out, she pats down her skirt and turns to the two of us.

    "So here's what's going to happen; it's going to be locked," she says, and rattles the padlock to demonstrate. "So I'm going to climb over it. As you can see, I've not got shorts or jeans on, so I'll ask you to turn your backs."

    Joel does, instantaneously, but I just cross my arms over my chest.

    "Nathan," Raisa narrows her eyes at me.

    "Yeah, alright," I smile and turn away. I leave it for thirty seconds, or what I consider an ample gate-climbing allowance, but before I can face her again Joel does. I hear a half-muffled squeal and the sound of hands flying for a steady grip on metal. Then, Joel's laughter. Raisa mutters expletives. I figure it's safe to turn back now. Raisa lies in the grass near the gate, her legs tucked up close to her chest and her hands holding her skirt down. "Bastards," she says, and I've never found that endearing until now.

    Joel's nearly dead with laughter, so I do as any gentleman would, and whack him on his forearm with the back of my hand. This does absolutely nothing.

    Raisa begrudgingly gets up, brushing grass stains from her clothes, and unlocks the gate. Joel tries and fails to hide his laughter. Raisa does exactly as I did and hits him, but this time it shuts him up. We walk in silence, par for the crunch and occasional dewy squish of the gravelly path and the early-morning grass. I feel even worse than I did—I read the names on the people's graves, and I recognise none of them. I feel as though I've burst into a funeral service in the middle of a eulogy and declared I was only there for the free tiny sandwiches.

    "Hartmann, Reed, Blake, Smith..." Raisa touches every gravestone with the tip of her finger as she passes it without reading it, as if ticking them off in her head.

    My spine chills with every step. In the middle of the cemetery there is a tree so large it must be over a hundred years old, evergreen and sprawling like long hair does when it's let down on someone's collarbones—like a waterfall of billions of peacock-coloured leaves.

    Even Joel is silent.

    Without a word, Raisa kneels down in front of one grave, smaller than the others. It's too dark to distinguish what the letters say, but Raisa pushes her sleeve up and matches her tattoo up with the tiny illustration on the stone. I hear Joel's feet shifting on the gravel. Raisa looks up at the two of us, her white hair falling in ringlets around her moonlit face. "I'm sorry. Can I—Can I have a second, please?"

    Joel waves a hand aimlessly as if to say, 'don't worry, I've got it' and I point to him to echo the sentiment. Joel fiddles with his pockets until a cigarette box appears. There's something ridiculously horrible about smoking in a cemetery, but I don't think he cares; he walks off in that uninterested way of his. I walk two steps back but it's like a force field and I can't risk going any further.

    "Are you going to stay?" Raisa asks.

    "I don't think I can go." I say, right into her pleading blue eyes.

    "Okay," Raisa pats the earthy ground next to her, and I fill the space. "But pinky promise you won't laugh, or cry, or show any emotion."

    I extend my pinkie finger, and we shake on it. "I promise."

    She takes the deepest breath I've ever seen anyone take. "Dad, I'm alive," she laughs. "I know you thought that tonight would be the end, at least for me, and I know that scared the shit out of you—sorry, I meant it scared you a lot—But I think the twenty-first century is working out pretty well from what I've seen of it. All the planes stayed in the sky, Dad, but I wish yours had. I met someone." She finds my hand and squeezes it. "His name's Nathan. Say hey, Nathan."

    "Hey, Raisa's dad." I say numbly.

    She pauses, as if writing a paragraph in her mind, proofreading and checking it over and over again—I can even see her eyes darting around underneath her eyelids. 

    "I really like him," is the conclusion. I feel my heart swell.

    If this were the indie movie I so sorely desire it to be, right now would find fit a sweeping aerial shot of the city as it staggers from skyscrapers to suburbia to the inhabited ground I kneel on. Maybe in the background I could have a beautiful swirling guitar track, with the sort of vocals Joel would produce, pure at first listen but layered with unknown emotions at the second and third. "He tried to..." she looks at me for approval, stunned in the moonlight, and I can't help but grant her. "He wanted to die. I don't know, he might still. I've been trying so hard to change his mind, but Dad, I don't think a mind like that can be changed. We've been wandering around like birds scavenging for crumbs on the foot path. Joel's here, too, but I don't know where he is." She extends her neck and scouts around. "Joel!"

    "Hi, Raisa's dead dad!" comes the far-flung reply.

    Raisa giggles at this. "Hi, my dead dad...I suppose you don't want to know about Nathan. Between you and me," she drops to a whisper, just for the rest of that sentence; "Even if Nathan dies tomorrow, I won't be too sad. I'll know his last night on the Earth was a brilliant one." She doesn't seem to be crying; her cheeks remain as pink as they usually are, and her eyes aren't wet, but a tear slips down from her chin. "I know you wanted to be cremated, but mum said you wanted to be buried, so there you are...Are there worms crawling in your armpits, like you'd always joke about?" She laughs, and more tears follow the first. "'No, Rosemary, I'd never want to be buried. All those bugs...I suppose you could bury me with some Mortein.'"

    "Rosemary?" I whisper, and read the last name on her father's gravestone: "Rosemary Hawthorne."

    "You remind me of that Pink Floyd song, the one on your shirt. We buried you...In that, not in a suit..."

    She's breaking, and when I trace her clavicle even her bones seem to shake. "You don't need to talk anymore," I say, and she takes my touch as gospel, leaning her weight on me until we both fall back on the grass, me and then her, without a word.

    "That was really brave," I mumble.

    She says nothing.

    That's okay, because I think she's already said it all.