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The following day, I cycled around the cemetery’s western perimeter road. The previous night there had been a force-eleven gale with gusts of up to 135-kilometres an hour. I slept through it. In its aftermath, the litter bins and gutters were full of crippled umbrellas; bent spokes and ragged fabric poking out of them. There was a pink one in a puddle on the main road that looked like a dead animal or the aftermath of a traffic accident. Dead leaves had been swept into sodden heaps. The trees looked torn and naked. I cycled past old family vaults; felt as if I was on the surface of a ball rolling within a ball, the great curved sky caressing the earth. There was a profound tranquillity; grass and graves bathed in an uncanny light. The silver of fall was turning to winter gold and Hamburg — garlanded in frosted leaf-mould — was nostalgically familiar. There was a yearning in its colours; all I needed now was the sound of snow underfoot and Hamburg’s traditional smells (sugared almonds, liquorice, smoked fish) and I would be back in 1984 at the beginning of my relationship with Opal Hush. The low rumble of a passing bus faded into the distance. A raven sprang like a hooded thief into the undergrowth. Over the hilltop trudged a ragged, bedevilled figure, bent to the wind. She crossed the road in front of me. It was the Cruel Countess. She was some way off but I could hear creaking and the shearing of limestone; the friction of straining limbs. She was alone. And she was singing Bessie Jackson’s Shave ’em Dry in a croaky voice, humming the tune and weaving the mumbled lyrics in between: “I got nipples on my titties big as the end of my thumb, I got somethin’ ’tween my legs’ll make a dead man come.” I felt the urge to call after her: “Just tell me the truth! What’s going to happen to Opal and me?” She did not acknowledge my presence and, by the time I had reached the point where she had crossed, there was no sign of her. A little farther on was the empty limestone plinth upon which I had first seen her. Where was the wretched couple, the boy and girl? *
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