Chapter Two

The van halted in a car-park near the crematorium.
After a fashion the men slowly clambered out and huddled around in the freezing air. Wordlessly the driver handed them scraps of paper and they began to drag shovels and tools from the back of the van.
Ryan and Frank had already headed up the rise of a hill and got to the co-ordinates on their paper. There was still no daylight. With torches they surveyed the ground.
The grass was caked in frost. The blades shattering as Ryan marked out the lines with his shovel. He then lifted it and tried to sink it into the ground. It felt like he was trying to carve his way into granite. His hands ached from the impact.

'Gonna need a fuckin' pick-axe to get anywhere with that.' Stated Frank, who was more concerned with lighting up a fresh tab.
'Well, get one then! I wanna be done and this cut out before daylight.' Ryan spat back.
Frank grumbled as he went back towards the van.
'Fuckin ' useless piece o'...no time even for a decent gasper in this arsehole shit job...'

Finally there were signs of the sun. The lightened sky was striped with the heavy grey clouds that had remained all night. Frank chipped away at the outline with the pick-axe while Ryan followed him, shovelling to deepen the cut.
By dawn, the whole area was overcast and shrouded in fog. Ryan and Frank had dug a rectangle about eight feet long but it was barely an inch deep. There was over five feet still to go. Plus they had another three to dig out that day. It had been a desperate couple of weeks all told.

Roselawn was a Victorian invention, more or less. Overcrowding in the churchyards of city parishes by the 1800s had meant that for fresh burials to take place, occupants of an existing grave had to be dug up and would be simply thrown away. Given the strong belief that the body needed to be intact and properly buried in consecrated ground in readiness for its resurrection on the Day of Judgement, this practice was unacceptable.
And so came the idea for the cemetery. A large area of land which could hold a vast number of burials, usually outside the city, which was itself the focal point with its own church, rather than the other way around.
It worked brilliantly, although the arrival of cremation did strip it of its original purpose.
There was no future in it. Ryan and Frank knew that, being members of one of the last 'manual' grave-digging crews. The JCBs were coming in and did the work in a quarter of the time. Change, as ever, inevitable.

By mid-morning the ground had softened some and pace could quicken to the point where they had two graves dug at lunch. Frank alternated between cigarettes and bites out of a ham sandwich. Ryan just sipped thermos coffee as he read one of his favourite books while sitting on the dug out earth.
It was a biography of Vincent Van Gogh and was his third run through it. The bit that really got his attention was about why Van Gogh had killed himself. The book's theory stated that Van Gogh had got to the point where he was overwhelmed by the abundance of infinity. He could look at a cob of corn and not just perceive every piece of corn but the cells that made up each piece and then the atoms that made up each cell and on to the molecules. And it wasn't just this awareness of abundance becoming infinitely smaller; it was how the cob was just one of a great number on a planet that, compared to the size of the infinite universe, didn't even register any size at all.
So unable to deal with this awareness and, more importantly, feeling unable to paint it, his mind went and he committed suicide. Only that wasn't instant. He lingered on for a few days and to a dying man that would have been infinity itself.
Ryan was fascinated at how this concept of the 'infinite abundance' of things had destroyed man such as Van Gogh when he was quite aware of it and could handle it. This was the only thing which fired up any interest in him.

Frank finished his sandwich. It was time to go back to work and dig more graves.