Remembrance Graveyard 17

I buy new flowers every week. They sit on the kitchen work surface, still wrapped up in their plastic and ribbon. I take the little price sticker off, peeling it carefully away from the packaging so it won’t leave behind any gummy residue, and keep the bouquet upright in a glass of water. Waiting.

Thirty eight bunches of flowers have already been thrown away. Most weeks I replace them as soon as they start to droop, wanting them to look their best, but if they’re sunflowers then I kept them until they go crisp and brown, shrivelling up until all that’s left is the brown head in the centre. I hate sunflowers, but they were her favourite flowers.

I call the hotline for the graveyard every Friday morning but nothing ever changes. It is always the same pre-recorded message.

Thank you for calling Remembrance Graveyard 17. If you are looking to visit the resting place of a loved one, we regret to inform you that the site is not currently considered safe for visitors. To sign up for updates, press one.

I press one every time but no updates ever come.

Each Thursday I make the two hour drive out to the graveyard. You can’t get close – high metal fences topped with rolls of barbed wire keep people three hundred metres away from the gates – but I am never the only one there. Underneath the signs zip tied to the fencing proclaiming the illegality of trespassing, there is a shrine. Framed photos of the dead are displayed in their hundreds. Someone has attempted to make a list of those who wait for us beyond the fence but some have no one left to remember them. All the flowers and candles and teddy bears that should have been directly laid atop resting places are piled up in a mass outpouring of grief. I can never bring myself to add my flowers to it, so far from where she lies.

Thursday is the day they test the ground. Amorphous figures in full hazmat suits are allowed through the otherwise bolted shut gates, taking with them equipment with which to gauge whether our loved ones are still leaching a deadly virus into the soil. There had been no time for lead coffins or concrete containers while burying the dead, health officials so keen to get the bodies of the infected underground. Remembrance Graveyard 17 is a mass grave. My daughter does not even have a plot.

I watch every week to be sure they’re still carrying out the testing. I didn’t doubt that the virus had been deadly – I had seen the death toll rise, the protective gear people would don before going outside. I’d had my child taken from me despite her not leaving the house for five months. Three years had been lost to it until they’d found a vaccine that worked. People received the injection, planes flew in organised gridlines over cities to spray the right concoction of chemicals to kill it off. We had slowly emerged from our houses.

Thirty-eight weeks ago, the president of the World Health Organisation had stood up and declared it all to be over. They had eradicated the virus. Shops and offices reopened and celebration concerts were organised, an explosion of culture and commerce that had been coiling up like a spring for three years. Like a jack in the box wound up for too long. Everything went back to normal except I was no longer a mother and I didn’t even have a place to grieve my child. While I would never know exactly where she was buried, I at least wanted to be closer than three hundred metres.

They’d built the Remembrance Graveyard 17 in the middle of nowhere because they needed the space. Nine thousand bodies are buried there, people from all walks of life and professions. All ages. There is equality in death after all. It is one of seventy three graveyards of its kind across the country, each of them the resting place of mothers, fathers, siblings, friends, children. I only ever visit Remembrance Graveyard 17, staring from three football pitches away at the ornate gates that have been constructed. It is more than just a covered over pit; they have it all ready. There are benches and a plaque, rose bushes slowly overgrowing the paths that had been laid. The Remembrance Graveyards will be a place of solemn reflection, they’d promised. We will turn these sites of necessity into peaceful gardens where the memories of loved ones will be cherished.

They had built them. Then they had surrounded them with chain link fences.

My route to work takes me past a churchyard. The neat rows of headstones are well-kept and often topped with flowers or letters to those who had not lived to see the virus. Their bodies are safe, unmarred by lethal blood. Anyone can walk in and kneel beside a plot and spend a moment with the loved ones they have lost. They can leave their bunch of flowers, while mine rot on a work surface.

The people in hazmat suits walk all the way from the chain link fence to the graveyard gates. The squeak of the metal hinges echoes across the chasm between them and me, and I let myself hope that this will be the week things change. While I wait for them to test their soil samples, I look for familiar faces. Margaret, who lost her wife. Kitty, the only survivor of a family of five. Theo, who had helplessly watched hundreds of his patients die in his care. Their names were all beside mine on the petitions to the government to do whatever it took to make the site safe, regardless of the cost. They couldn’t give us back the ones we’d lost, but they owed us access to their final resting place.

When I see that the scientists are packing up their equipment, I make my way over to their van. A cordon has been set up so they can walk straight up to it without contaminating any of the two dozen observers. From the barrier, I shout my question as they walk past.

“Can we go in?”

The scientists stop. We’d only ever been silent witnesses to their tests each week, watching them work and hoping the results would be the news we’d been hoping for. I’d never seen anyone speak to them. One of them turns towards me

“It’s getting better.”

His voice sounds inhuman, forced through layers of ventilation and filters, echoing around the interior of his suit before it fights its way out to me.

I feel hope. They never tell me what the results were when I send email after email, only that they are not good enough.

           “So-” I try, but the man cuts me off with that same robotic tone.

“Not this week.”

He leaves me standing there and returns to his colleagues, climbing into the van to be driven away to a decontamination facility. I look back at the chain link fence, at the promise beyond it. I have to buy another bunch of flowers.