extract #5

I grew up by the town cemetery. Our house was one of the new ones that were built at the top end of it. My mother told me that a friend of the family marked the house for us when it was under construction while on the way to the funeral of the man everyone suspected he'd murdered.
The estate was brand new then. X marked the spot of our house. It was a newly built scheme and families had been emptied out of the slum tenements at the foot of the brae and put here half way up the hill on the old toll road to Glasgow.

I could see the cemetery from my bedroom window. Just down the toll road was a copse of sycamores, a bit of greenery among the pebbledash of the scheme, and fringing the trees was a burn following its course downhill to the river below.

Beside the burn was an old cottage where the witch lived. No-one had seen her for a while but everyone knew that it was no coincidence that it was her house that sat at the top gates watching over the cemetery. She was 200 odd years old, though some said she was just 150.

The cemetery was our playground, we scattered into the garden of the dead and hid and chased and tried to catch each other through the gravestones. Some crossed themselves each time they ran across a grave to escape a chaser, fearful of an arm punching through the topsoil to drag them into the underworld to be damned for eternity.

There was a stone angel in the oldest part of the cemetery and we would tell stories that terrified and excited us. One of the angel's arms had broken off and Davie said it broke off and killed the husband of the woman buried there. He had come to ask forgiveness for fucking her sister. He got none.

This night a boy from Kelburn, a wild and dangerous part of town at the bottom of the cemetery, seemed to step out of the deep shadows of the surrounding gravestones.

My granny doesn't like you being here, he said.

 We all looked at each other and giggled nervously .

"So fuck!” said Davie.

Shoosh!, he said. She'll hear . The burn passes her house and flows right under here. She floats the dead away if they deserve it. She leaves the ones who don't. She can drown you if she likes..

It was true: her cottage sat where the burn met the old toll road. The water passed under the road through a large concrete drainage pipe about 5 foot in diameter. The pipe carried the water under the cemetery and eventually all the way down the hill and into the Firth.

You can waddle open-legged down the pipe for about 100 feet, a foot either side of the water’s flow, until it turns a corner. Where it turns there is a ledge where we would perch and shout our echoes up the way to the cottage, or down the way to the cemetery. We would sit up there getting off with each other as the water slooshed by. We called it The Tunnel Of Love.

We loved to spy on the cottage to see if we could catch a glimpse of the witch inside. Everyone knew about her, but no-one had seen her. One darkening afternoon, with the sound of the burn in spate after days of rain, the lights already on and buried beneath the heavy curtains of the cottage, we were crouched down watching when Davie suddenly spoke all our minds, “Something’s fuckin watching us. I can feel it.”
Catriona was already crying...