I The Oratory of St James''s Cemetery in Liverpool has no windows along the whole length of its outer walls. Only a long rectangular skylight, its leaded panes half-mossed over, lets the winter sun reach down and touch the white marble statues staring blankly inside. A mortuary chapel, but long closed up, its coffered ceiling and tall, carved columns are mostly in shadow. Years ago, as the great homes of the city were pulled down stone by stone, the monuments of proud families (monuments of terracotta and marble and bronze) were hoisted here and locked away, and so the wealth of the city - wrenched from far-off lands and furnished from blood - was hidden, and so forgotten. And as the years went by, other things were hidden, too. Some (like the terraced slums of the poor and their washhouses) were razed, others (the orphanages and workhouses, the asylums and homes for the destitute) were emptied one by one, turned by sharp-suited businessmen into flats or bars or restaurants, where the names of the dead, engraved in plaques on newly pointed walls, were the climbing holds of a city once again dragging itself up out of its own grave. And so the churches and crypts were closed, and the docks shut down, and the shackles shipped and left on other shores, and the subterranean tunnels and the catacombs were filled in with stones, and the quarry was planted with oaks and with sycamores and with the bodies of the dead. And it was in this way that the ghosts of the city were parcelled off, ushered from the streets into derelict buildings, made to stand in exhibition cases, hurried into the pages of books and diaries, and folded away.

For, after all, ghosts can only live in the darkness; and once the dark places are closed up, their cast-iron locks bolted fast, it is easy for those who do not live with them to pretend that ghosts do not exist at all. Past midnight, one mid-January, standing in the church gardens, I felt the wind blow up from the River Mersey, weighted with Atlantic salt. It blustered up to the city, battering the red bricks of the warehouses on the dock, rattling the barred doors of the pump-house and the locks of the customs house. I heard it rush south-east between the empty units along St James''s Street, clapping the tattered flags of the old sailors'' church, and spinning frantically in the bell-turret of St Vincent''s. It rushed up the steep junction of Parliament Street, past the new-builds, over the waiting cars at the traffic lights, and there scurried down the tree-tunnelled sandstone path into the cathedral cemetery, resting, finally, in a swirl of leaves and a ripple of the spring water by the catacombs, unseen by anyone except a carved angel weeping over a nineteenth-century grave, and the lone figure of a man - me - kneeling and drinking from the water flowing in runnels down the old cemetery wall. I had come here to meet someone - a man I didn''t know, but who was somehow like myself. Above the cemetery gardens the terrifying neo-gothic cathedral loomed across the sky, its stained glass half-aglow even at night. I could almost feel the weight of its shadow, like a body bearing down on mine.

To venture into the graveyard, you have first to walk through a tunnel of hollowed rock, its walls lined with old grave-slabs and dripping with dank water filtered through the paving stones and tree roots overhead. And at the end of this, where hardly any light can be found after sundown, a little path winds fearlessly onwards between the holly and the yews and the leaning granite obelisks. Nearly a century has passed since the last body was interred here, and the lichen has spread over the tombs and into the once-neat etchings of names and dates and Latin mottos and platitudes both sentimental and heartfelt. Lichen over the staunch Victorian formalities of lives lived in stoicism and resignation, and into the carefully chosen testaments to numberless tragedies and joys given from mother to child, from husband to wife, from friend to friend and from lover to dearly missed lover. Years ago, a hearse tunnel, now capped with brick, brought carriages, one by one, down from the Georgian grandeur of Rodney Street into the cemetery, and now perhaps no one is old enough to remember these dead. At the centre of the cemetery, flowing down into a square pool between the laid-out gravestones, a little spring uncovered in the eighteenth century runs on, unperturbed, trickling over the luminous green growths of liverwort and algae on the bricked-up far wall of the plot. And on this January night, when the only living inhabitant of the graveyard is a single man drinking from the spring, anyone might come down and walk under the silvered boughs, hearing that gentle babbling stream, and imagine all the souls here, cooped up in the soil, passing from root to root, moving slowly in the underworld of the earth. At the heart of it all is water - its slow leak along the walls, its passage through all the plants and mosses and trees, its movement through the apertures of the shale embankments, its sheening under the moon on the marble of a family vault.

Laden with iron, the water is sharp and metallic and tastes faintly of blood. Some in the city believe in its healing powers, and follow the words of the inscription carved above the spring, which speaks, in the voice of water, of the endless cycle of giving: Christian reader view in me An emblem of true charity, Who freely what I have bestow Though neither heard nor seen to flow. I, like others, held closer to a different truth: that the water contains the souls of the dead, trapped in the graveyard, and that it turns black, like blood, when boiled. Ghosts in the water, ghosts in the blood. Everything, once you start to look, is haunted. And so perhaps it was fitting that I came here that evening, unsure of where else to go, feeling lonely and shut out from the daylight world, the downward paths from Princes Park leading me on into this navel of the city. An unsettling place to be after dark, not so much for any fear of the dead, but of the living: the men I had seen huddling around a lighter, their square of tinfoil glinting; the occasional hunched figure wandering; a group of drunks walking the pavement of Hope Street, faces hot with wine. It would be tempting to say that it was a sense of communion that drew me into the gardens, a sense that down here, with the dead, was where I belonged - hollowed out, tired, looking for something in this wooded grove squat amongst the townhouses and the busy roads - but other urges drove me, too, on to the little spring, like a pilgrim to the underworld, my phone''s light held up to the darkness, my golden bough.

I met the man by the Huskisson monument. Unsure at first (who can tell if the lone man in the cemetery is the man you''re looking for, or the man you don''t want to find?), I leant against the bare wall of the tomb and feigned nonchalance, scuffing my heels into the mud. It was only two weeks since I had taken my boyfriend Elias to the airport for the last time. I had lived with him in Sweden, and he had fallen into a deep depression, one that went unchecked for too long. That depression dragged me in, too, proliferated into my life; and here I was, still in the middle of it, so numbed I was barely aware of its presence. After nearly five years, struggling through, we finally admitted that what we had could not be fixed. Too much damage had been done between us. We had been wrecked.

It was as though a force had come through the world, alighted on us, and conducted its strike to the ground. Saying goodbye, a fortnight ago, he barely cried as we hugged in the car park, but I was beside myself. I watched him walk off, trailing his suitcase, as the doors of the terminal opened then closed around him. Afterwards, I went to the woods just behind the airport and walked and walked, sitting by the streams and the waterfalls, lifting my head occasionally to say a pained ''Good morning'' to the passing walkers, taking the wet bodies of their dogs between my palms and stroking them as the tears streamed down my face. I remember two children running madly among the old oaks, putting their heads into the hollows of the trunks and shouting ''Hello!'' ''Hello!'' ''Hello!'' from the depths of their lungs, as though the god of the tree might wake up and answer them. Here, perhaps, I was doing the same thing: in a cemetery at night, meeting a man I didn''t know. Shouting into the hollow trunk of the world and hoping to see a face appear, to feel its touch, to hear its deep, sonorous reply. The man was tall, his body taut beneath his winter coat and jeans.

A kickboxing teacher, it turned out. Later, he would text me, asking if my name was Ryan. He had mistaken (whether accidentally or wilfully, I can''t tell) my face in the dark for that of one of his students. I suppose we are all, at some point, taking the face of some ideal lover into our mind and placing it like a mask on to the person in front of us. Maybe I was mistaking him, too, for another boy I once knew. Maybe this was my way of continuing his life, seeing him age into manhood, seeing him inhabit years he never would. If I closed my eyes, perhaps it was Jack I was with, or Elias, or another boy, or all of them merged into a new form. After some quiet introductions, he nodded towards a thicket of trees and started walking, keeping his distance.

I heard the clicking of his lighter as he lit a cigarette, watched him take a deep, slow drag and then exhale the blue smoke into the night-blue air. Then, as I reached him, fumbling: the belt unbuckled, the vertical sound of the zipper. All the time that I was on my knees, I could hear the trembling chain of the spring water clinking and splashing over th.