Being Dead

by Jim Crace

  No doctor of zoology could be entirely unprepared, of course, for the changes on the coast. These two had read the newspaper reports and seen estate plans. They’d signed petitions to protest against the ‘luxury development of valued public grounds’. Yet, even without the intercession of architects and builders, they would not have expected the foreshore and its hinterland to remain exactly as it had once been. Zoologists have mantras of their own: change is the only constant; nothing in the universe is stable or inert; decay and growth are synonyms; a grain of sand is stronger and more durable than rock. If cities could be transformed by wear and tear and shifting tastes, despite their seeming permanence, then something as soft and passing as the landscape could be flattened and reshaped in just one night, by just one storm.

  So they did not expect to discover the old farm road unchanged after thirty years of storms. It would not have a surfacing of manac husks or a garnishing of cattle dung. There were no working farms or fields any longer in the neighbourhood. The only crops these days were mortgages and weeds. It was most likely that the road would be pinched and overgrown like the magic and neglected lane of fairy tales. There would be an overhang of pines and heavy shade. Death’s ladder to the underworld. Their way might well be blocked by rotting trunks and thickets. Instead, they came out of the trees into a harsh and blinding sky, too tall and blue and punitive, above a shocking corridor of clearances. Construction had begun. The soil was stripped of trees in a swathe of flattened, tyre-pocked earth, twenty metres wide. Great stones and roots were sheared and pushed aside like dry moraines as if an earthen glacier had carved a passage through the land. These were the early, heartless makings of the service drive which, once surfaced, would give access to the lorries and the builders. Later, the drive would be upgraded to a civic motorway to serve the seven hundred homes of Salt Pines, the landscaped, gated enclave (‘convenient for both the airport and the city’) that would, within a year, begin to house the region’s richest and most nervous businessmen.

  Celice and Joseph shook their heads. Such were the miracles of man. They walked a few metres along the intact edges of the corridor but then retraced their steps when they were blocked by mounds of debris. Where should they cross? Where was the public path? ‘Somebody should complain,’ said Joseph, knowing that the somebody would not be him. ‘Where are we supposed to go?’

  They had to shade their eyes against the sun to search the far side of the clearance for a footpath sign or some clue of how they could proceed towards the coast. There was no remaining evidence of any of the summer cottages that had once lined the farm road. The string of small freshwater ponds, breached and punctured by the bulldozers, had either drained away or had been buried under soil. Occasionally, from the direction of the airport road, there was the harsh percussion of a dumper truck delivering its clinker or its gravel for the new highway, or granite aggregate for the building raft on which Salt Pines would float. The sand alone would not endure the weight of all that taste and money.

  It was Celice, with better eyesight than her husband, who spotted the arrowed way-marker, tacked to a pine trunk, which showed the forward route of their disrupted path. But she and Joseph were nervous and reluctant to cross the open ground. They felt like trespassers. The clearance was intimidating, like some contested border from their youth. A DMZ, scorched clear to keep defectors in or out. A no man’s land, to hold the easts and wests, the norths and souths apart. The Germanys and the Koreas. The Vietnams. It looked as if there ought to be guard turrets, land mines, Alsatian dogs and barbed tripwire. There were, in fact, two planes above the trees; one high, circling airliner and, at five hundred metres, a single-engined trainer, snooping directly overhead and looking as if it might release at any time a bomb, a canister of gas, a parachutist. Even if Joseph and Celice were not spotted by the plane, snipers would pick them off if they were mad enough to walk out from the undergrowth. Only animals were safe. Wood crows and pickerlings hopped across the naked soil. Rats ran along the flooded lorry ruts to feed on roots and bulbs. Two hispid buzzards – lovers of the open motorway – sat waiting in the pine tops for the carnage that would come. Celice did not regard the clearance as a metaphor, a thick and earthy line between their futures and their pasts. She merely was depressed by what they’d found and would have turned around and gone back home if she had had the choice. If her husband hadn’t been so keen to reach the coast, she would have died in bed.

  Joseph and Celice began their trespasses. The wind and sun had dried and baked the surface of the soil above soft, ankle-deep mud, but that top layer was as thin and friable as pie crust, too thin to support two heavy mammals. They left deep footsteps in the soil, and the soil made its mark, too, on their shoes and on the bottoms of their trousers. ‘Now what else?’ remarked Celice, meaning that there could be worse ahead. They might spend the afternoon wading through the mud of endless building sites. Their outing – post study house – had not begun well.

  But once they’d reached the continuing path and had made their way through the remaining forest pines, salt marshes and lagoons (perfect for the planned golf-course: golf balls float best in brackish water) and had cleaned their shoes by climbing in the loose sand of the first dune ridge, all evidence of Salt Pines disappeared. From the summit of the dunes the wounds and scars were masked by trees. Even the clank of trucks and dumpers was absorbed. The training plane had gone elsewhere. Here was their first view of the coast; the wine-deep, sad, narcotic sea.

  They slid down the sand scree to the coastal plain, which sloped towards the scrubshore. Beyond were the dunefields of Baritone Bay. The plain was hardly touched, as yet, by progress or ‘landscaping’. There would be a resort village there in time, they knew. A marina, too, and a granite esplanade with shorefront restaurants and cycle tracks. But these would not be started until, phase one, the houses were complete and there were influential residents to overcome the reservations of the more sentimental town governors. Someone had built a small stone jetty, with a boat winch at the top. It ran from the coastal track, across the shore, to the low-water mark. That was something new since their last visit together. And, where once there had been natural barriers of shore grass and a prairie of low vegetation, there were now sand fences to secure the beach, and lines of erosion bags arranged in chevrons to protect against shoreface recession. It seemed, as well, from the way the tides were running, that the disposition of the offshore spits and shoals, bars and channels had been redesigned. Friction and accretion, flooding, overwash and deposition had made fresh patterns. The ocean has a thousand crafts.

  Fifty metres offshore there was a new, elongated ridge of sand, which broke the waves and robbed the plunging breakers – their crest curls wrapped round tubes of air, like brandy snaps – of their dramatic energy. They reached the beach, emasculated and at a lesser angle.

  At the far end, where Joseph had once sent phlegmy – and seductive – crickets flying, the shore had lost its shallow gradient to thirty years of spilling and collapsing seas. The waves had pushed the sand higher up the beach and dumped a steep and arching shelf of pebbles and shells.

  ‘They’ll not like that,’ said Joseph.

  This could be disappointing. They almost ran along the whole length of the beach, from west to east, looking at the hem of breaking waves, hunting for sprayhoppers in the tide’s spumy residues, turning the piles of coal shells with their shoes to disturb any living fugitives. But nothing jumped for them, even though they’d timed their visit perfectly. The tide was high and running in. They should be ankle deep in crickets.

  ‘Not even one,’ said Celice.

  ‘One’s not enough. One never lasts.’

  Joseph was not entirely surprised. As soon as he had seen the steepened disposition of the shore he knew conditions would be wrong for Pseudogryllidus pelagicus. He’d predicted as much in his long-forgotten doctoral thesis (grandiloquently titled Patience and Blind Chance: A Natural History of the Sprayhopper). They were so specialized and so
discriminating that they would be unable to adapt quickly enough to the fickle disposition of the waves. Blind chance had brought bad luck. ‘Too steep for them,’ he said. ‘They need a good flat beach with running tides. That’s life.’

  That’s life, indeed. But it had always been his private fancy that crickets, hoppers and beetles would withstand anything that life could toss at them. They were the grand survivors of the natural world. They were the nimblest of all insects. They were better-equipped than almost any other creature to endure extreme conditions. One had only to keep up with reports in the Entomology to know that there were furnace beetles, impervious to glowing coals. There were polar crickets, which lived in permafrost, and blind cavehoppers, which flourished on the limescaled rims of underground pools and listened for their tiny prey through four ears mounted on their knees. There were bugs that feasted on the hot and sticky gas tars at the back of cookers, or navigated sewerage pipes, or chewed electric cables.

  There was even a specialist cicada in South America (Entomology, vol. CXXI / 27) that fed and bred in diesel engines. It lived on emulsified fuel. Its common name? The grease monkey. It had first been identified in the 1970s in Ecuador. It was wingless, with short legs, designed for clinging, not for mobility. But it had travelled north and south, two thousand miles in less than twenty years, by diesel lorry and diesel train. Mechanical migration. It was now common in Mexico City and Brazil. Single specimens had turned up in engine blocks in Dallas scrapyards. Nature’s stories are the best, Joseph often said. ‘Except when you are telling them,’ his wife replied.

  ‘Whatever philosophical claims we might make for ourselves, human kind is only marginal. We hardly count in the natural orders of zoology. We’ll not be missed,’ Joseph, in a rare display of scientific passion, had told a student at the Institute when she had been too dismissive of the earth’s smaller beings. ‘They might not have a sense of self, like us. Or memory. Or hope. Or consciences. Or fear of death. They might not know how strong and wonderful they are. But when every human being in the world has perished, and all our sewerage pipes and gas cookers and diesel engines have fossilized, there will still be insects. Take my word. Flourishing, evolving, specializing insects.’ Here he resurrected his best line from his student thesis. ‘There will still be sprayhoppers . . . snatching their sustenance from the pincers of the waves.’

  Even now, with no sprayhoppers to be seen, the doctor did not doubt his general accuracy. On countless other, more mildly sloping beaches of the coast there would be many active colonies. He’d seen them himself, many times in recent years, on the Mu and at Tiger Crab Edge. It made no difference that he was not there today to witness them or endow them with a consciousness. (‘They couldn’t give a damn about the scenery, these little chaps.’) It was still a disappointment, though, to find that, on this shore at least, Pseudogryllidus pelagicus had disappeared.

  Joseph’s disappointment was not wholly scientific, despite his long-term fondness for the creatures and their connivance in his doctorate. The fantasy that he had nurtured since he’d watched Celice in bed that morning demanded sprayhoppers. They were his Valentine. They were his single rose. They were erotica. If he were to place Celice back amongst the dunes at Baritone Bay where they had once made love, so memorably, so hauntingly, so awkwardly, then first he had to lure her to the beach. So far, achieved. Though by a painful route. But then he needed some strategy more serpentine to take her from the melancholy of the charred remains into the clutching frolic of his arms. He’d need a Venus ladder of deceit, step over step. Something that was more discreet than kissing her or bursting into that old song she had loved, the words of which he could hardly recall. He’d thought the sprayhoppers would be his collaborators once again. He’d pick some off her white T-shirt, out of her hair, blow once more into her hand, set the little creatures flying through the air, and then, perhaps (an innocent progression), drop his spaniel tongue on to her open palm. (‘Another go. Blow wet.’) Would she then allow his hand to push into her black wool coat?

  But now unfeeling nature had thrown up a beach too steep for Valentines. This Venus ladder had had its middle rung removed. Time, though, had not destroyed the light. The universe had not expanded quite so fast. Nor had it robbed the spreading breakers of their sorcery. His wife, ahead of him, calf deep, her trousers up around her knees, was burnished, thinned and immatured by sunshine bouncing off the sea, the silver flattered by the gold. A fillet of her hair fell loose across her face, picked up and dropped by a conspiring breeze. A nape of neck. The waist-enhancing sacados. The tugging whiteness of her underclothes. The bottoms of her trousers wet with sea. A woman dressed in black and white; a landscape dressed in blue. No wonder Joseph was enhanced. Had Celice looked round at what was dogging her, she’d have as usual to give its Latin name as homo erectus or homo semens. Its common name bone slave or love-gone-wild or thrall.

  ‘Let’s go. On to Baritone,’ her husband said, once they had walked the whole length of the beach and she was turning to retrace their route. He spoke as lightly as he could, blocking her. He tugged her jacket lapels.

  ‘What for?’ Celice raised an eyebrow. Her husband was too breathless and attentive. She didn’t need a cricket on her palm to read his mind.

  ‘I think the tides might run more lightly there,’ he said. ‘We have to see at least one sprayhopper now that we’ve driven out. There has to be a colony on the bay. Surely.’

  ‘We have to? Why the we? You go. Anyway, it’s rocky on the bay. You’ve less chance finding any there than here.’ Celice’s feet and back were aching. Her shoulders and her wrists were stiff. Her heart was full of Festa. She would rather sit down on the shelf of shells and pebbles and watch the breakers for the afternoon than risk the vagaries of sex. But Joseph tugged her by the sleeve. She hated that. ‘Come on,’ he repeated. ‘We’ll have our picnic there. Out of the wind. Who knows? We might persuade the dunes to sing.’

  ‘There is no wind.’

  For once the air above the bay was crystal clear, no clouds to moan about, and even a visible horizon, eye-liner blue, where usually the trading of the ocean and the sky produced a grey mist. Good weather brings bad luck, as everybody knows. Misfortune is a hawk, most likely to surprise us when the visibility is good. Death likes blue skies. Fine weather loves a funeral. Wise, non-scientific folk would stay indoors on days like that, not walk along the coast, beyond the shelter even of a tree. The doctors of zoology were ill-informed. They didn’t understand the rigours of the natural world. If sprayhoppers could not survive the changes on the coast, then how and why should they?

  12

  On Thursday at eleven in the morning, Celice and Joseph’s mobile phone rang in the pocket of her jacket. Its body-smothered pulse was hardly audible. Insects could be louder and more persistent. Its batteries were running down. The ringing sent a feeding gull into the air, protesting at its interrupted meal with downward flagging wings, and half expecting to discover the rare treat of a fat cicada. It flapped and dithered above the corpses only for a moment. By the fourth trill of the phone the gull had dropped again on to Celice’s abdomen and was tugging at the lace of skin it had already picked and loosened. Her skin was tough. In two days she had lost her moistness and her elasticity.

  The caller, Joseph’s secretary, let the mobile ring ten times – she was meticulous – then ten times more before she put her handset down. It was baffling and annoying that her boss had not shown up at the curriculum meeting that he himself had convened at the Institute for ten o’clock that morning. She’d already phoned his home and got no reply. She’d attempted to reach his wife, the mystical Celice, at the university. Also missing, from her seminar for senior biologists. Joseph’s secretary knew that she should not try to contact him on his mobile phone, except for ‘urgent things’. That had been his clear instruction. Well, this had been urgent. And alarming. Still was. The curriculum committee, including two vexed professors, a governor and a busy-bored official from the Education Con
sulate, all equally competitive in their impatience, had been demanding ‘updates’ and explanations by the minute. Now that she had failed to get an answer even from the mobile, all she could provide for the doctor’s guests, as they grew stern and restless in the conference room, was coffee and apologies. It was not like the doctor to be late or absent, she said. Ill-mannered, yes (she didn’t say). Remote. Distracted. But never late. You could always rely on his prompt and taciturn presence at meetings. At half past ten, at her suggestion, the committee drifted off, peeving and frowning at the secretary as they passed through her room to collect their coats and umbrellas. It was a rare event: the opportunity to tut at the director of the Institute without any fear of his uncompromising response.

  The secretary had her usual rota of tasks to take her mind off the disruptions of her day. There were the departmental diaries to arrange, memos to be typed and sent, letters to be filed or redirected, redundancies to organize. Normally she’d activate the divert on the office phone till lunch so she could concentrate on all the paperwork and take grim pleasure in her unavailability. But cutting off her phone that day, she felt, wasn’t politic. At worst it could be taken as a snub towards her absent boss.

  When she had tried to reach him on the phone, she had not sensed the ringing of an empty room. In her many years of making calls she’d developed the instinct for telling from the far end resonance if there was anybody there, not answering, ignoring her. There had been someone there, not answering, she’d thought, when she’d dialled the doctor’s mobile. Its arpeggio was no dead end. Somebody heard the ringing, could not reach the phone, was in the bath, or still in bed, or on the toilet stool. And would phone back.