31 December 2027
Friday. Last shift of the year. Did the sums.
Plots disturbed: every night we were open, two. Lids put back: all of them. Thermoses: one, still undented. Cats: one, fatter. Rakes: one in Northbridge, one sent to Sydney, one packed off to Melbourne, none of them as good as the one I started with.
The staff keep their own tally, a proper one, of which pairs got out quickest. It’s up on the wall and on the computer. I don’t follow it. Mine’s simpler: if the soil’s been moved, they’ve been and gone, and I get the rake.
People still ask me how they do it, the ones who get out. Six years in and I still couldn’t tell you. Never looked. Never asked. A groundskeeper who knows the way out of a coffin is in the wrong job.
Fireworks over the city at midnight. Tuppence hated them. I raked the plots by their light and put the kettle on for next year. Tally for the night: two. It’s always two.
— H., groundskeeper
