by Jim Crace
Now every time her own phone rang she expected it to be the doctor, though part of her expected, too, a version of the phone call her colleague at the university had received the month before. That secretary’s boss, the Academic Mentor, would never show up at her desk again, embarrassed by the typing and phone calls that he caused. He’d killed himself. Joseph’s secretary could not shake from her head the image – much discussed amongst the office staff – of the body in the car, the hose, the rain, the radio.
She dialled the doctor’s home and mobile phones again at midday and when she came back from lunch at two o’clock, first in sets of twenty rings and then a more determined thirty. Still no reply and still no messages of explanation or apology on her answerphone, though both Joseph and Celice had full timetables during the afternoon. The secretary would not panic yet. All in good time. There’d be an explanation, probably. Some muddle-up of messages, her fault – at least, she always was expected to absorb the blame. A scrambled or a misdelivered fax. An unavoidable diversion. A bungle over dates. The doctor had been away for two days anyway, on ‘fieldwork’, she’d been told. Some delay was not entirely surprising. There’d been a little accident; the doctor was a clumsy man. His car had let him down, perhaps. It would be foolish – and the doctor would be embarrassed – if she were to phone the hospitals just yet. Or contact the police on such a modest pretext. Four hours? That was nothing. Not in a week when there’d been sunshine. It was not their job, they’d say, to round up absentees.
At ten to six that evening, now anxious beyond reason for the welfare of a man she did not even like, Joseph’s secretary phoned his daughter, Syl, at her apartment, six hundred kilometres from the coast. An answering-machine. Had everybody in that family disappeared? She left as calm a message as she could, ‘Are your parents visiting? We were expecting them today,’ and ended, ‘It’s nothing, obviously. They’ve not got home from where they’ve been. But do call back tomorrow morning after nine, if you have any word of them. Or I’ll phone you.’
Syl was a waitress at a studio restaurant. The MetroGnome, next to the concert hall. She was ‘the bald and brittle one’, half liked, half feared by both her colleagues and the customers, mostly musicians. She was the sort they’d overtip, dismiss as rude, then try to date.
She called her parents after midnight when she returned from work, too full of wine to put it off till morning. In fact, she’d never phone them unless she was fortified with wine or beer. She wouldn’t chance the call if she had taken bouncers, swallowed Eden pills or smoked a joint. Bad shit, loose tongue. But drink always sweetened her. She needed to be sweet to risk her parents’ anxious and invasive voices. She left the phone unattended on the rug and let it ring for several minutes to give one of them time to wake and stumble out of bed. Her father, normally, should still be up and reading at that hour. Her mother was the sleeper. Syl allowed him time to reach the end of his page, find his house shoes, make a meal of walking to the passageway. She crossed her fingers for him not to answer. He was always at his most reproachful after midnight. Why was she calling so late? Had she been drinking? (Yes, yes, why not?) What was she reading now? What was she doing with her life? (Not wasting it on books. Not rusting in a lifeless town.) It’s been six months. When could they expect to see her in the flesh? (Don’t even ask. Don’t bully me. I hate the coast.)
But when neither of her parents picked up the phone, Syl was more irritated than relieved. The secretary’s imperious message on the answer-phone (‘Do call back tomorrow morning after nine’) had reached into her life without invitation and nudged it. She was rocked. Of course her parents were not visiting. They’d not been asked. They’d never seen her apartment. And if they did show up to nose around, they’d not like what they’d find, her waitressing, her shaven head, her unmade bed, her disregard for everything, her clothes, particularly her unembarrassed appetite for men. Why not take lovers, given half the chance? Why not work through the string sections and then the brass? You can’t make mayhem when you’re dead.
So Syl wasn’t pleased not to have reached her parents. She was six hundred kilometres away from home and yet was asked to take responsibility for a problem that her father’s secretary and brain-box colleagues at the Institute had evidently failed to solve. Her parents hadn’t shown up for work. So? What was she expected to do at this great distance, in the middle of the night? Divine for them with a magic needle and a map?
Syl’s irritation, though, could not entirely mask an intuitive disquiet. She sensed disruption at the gate. She was the sort herself not to show up, to let her colleagues down, to stay out late, to cheat on friends and debts, to keep no one informed, to let the phone sing to itself, but not her parents. They did not stay out at all at night. They never had. They were day birds, clucking hens, efficient, punctual, timid, dull. Sober as milk. Impossible to be with for more than an hour without succumbing to a rage.
She dialled again. They ought to be at home and picking up one of the phones. She let it ring and hunted for another drink and something sweet to eat. Her concern was not yet for her parents’ welfare. It was mainly for herself, her hard-fought liberty. Breaking free to live a life without accomplishments so far away from them had not been easily achieved. She didn’t want to be tugged back into their rigid, clerkish lives, that too-close ocean smell, or even made to see the family house, those same old rooms, those same old books, those meals. If they would answer now, then Syl was safe. If they did not, she’d have to turn the hourglass and let the sands run back towards her past.
She tried their mobile phone, while she sat on the lavatory with the door open, a can of Chevron beer in her hand and with her own phone, chirruping on its extended lead, between her feet, in the cradle of her knickers. The moonlit bay was at the far end of the line. If only owls and bats could answer phones.
Syl waited for an hour – twelve tracks of a Ruffian Rock CD; ten irate wall knocks from the woken man next door – and phoned again, both phones, the house and then the dunes. She was both startled and relieved to hear at last the mobile phone respond, and then a voice. A woman’s voice. But her relief was short-lived. She’d only reached the company’s recorded message, ‘The user’s phone is disconnected. Please try again later.’ The far-end battery, damp and exhausted by more than two days of stand-by, had failed at last. Try as she might, their daughter could not get the trilling phone again. It was maddening – though appropriate emotionally. ‘Not getting through’: that had been the story of Syl’s relationship with her parents since she’d left home. Her phone could ring a thousand times and not begin to break into their silences.
Instead she phoned the MetroGnome. The owners had gone home, of course, and just as well. She left a message, aided by the wine and beer she’d drunk. She’d retired from waitressing, she said. They’d have to find another girl. She didn’t want to slave at tables any more. She had some better things to do. Their food was poisonous. So were the clients. The MetroGnome was such a stupid name. ‘Don’t phone,’ she added, pointlessly. ‘I’m not even here. I’m gone . . .’ she didn’t want to add ‘. . . back home.’
That night, Syl’s dreams were wild and accurate. Beer dreams. She even dreamed of death and nudity – the pauper’s Freud. Her parents’ bodies had been found, bolt upright in their car. Two heart-attacks. In one dream they’d been driving when they died and the car had left the road, hovered in midair, burst into flames. Freeze-frame. A death by Hollywood. In others, Joseph and Celice were blind behind the wheel. They had been found reduced to ash and smoke. They had been found ten metres from the car, thrown clear, a message for their daughter in their hands: ‘We were so disappointed by your life.’ They had been found strapped in their seats, with no clothes on, unmarked. They were like storm-tossed, stranded seals, washed in the shallows of the sea, drowned by the roar of waves and motor-cars.
Syl had to shake herself awake. But when she fell asleep again, ten minutes later, she was pestered by the same recurring dreams, the flyin
g car, the petrol flames, the naked couple blanketed by windscreen glass and bricks and sea. The more she slept the more her parents’ public nakedness would play its comic, unforgiving part.
But it was telephones that really troubled her. In these nightmares the telephone was just beyond their reach, on the rear seat of the car or at the bottom of her mother’s bag. Or else the telephone was in their hands but not responding to their stabbing fingers. Nothing they could do would stop the ringing or put them through. Or else the telephone was melting in the heat, or sinking, twenty metres down.
In other dreams, it was Syl’s own phone that sounded. It seemed to wake her up but was not ringing when she reached for it. As soon as she dropped back to sleep it rang again. Or it was ringing in the hall outside the bedroom Syl had had when she was small. If only she could get to it in time, if only she were tall and brave enough to reach the phone she’d hear her parents talking from their mobile begging for her help. ‘Say where you are,’ she said. But all she heard was, ‘Try again. Please try again.’ Her parents’ pulses failed. Their batteries expired, and they were disconnected from her calls.
The waking dream, sidelit by dawn: her father phoned his daughter in the final moments of his life. Had she been drinking, he wanted to know. What was she doing with her life? What books? What plans? When could they hope to see her in the flesh? He could not say exactly where he was.
13
By Friday dawn the rain was back, not Wednesday’s undramatic, blood-releasing drizzle but lashing downpours. Its moisture was so ambient and insinuating that it found its way into the tightest wallets of the town and made the banknotes damp. This rain was bruising, bouncing, saline. It crusted all the cars with rust. It silvered Joseph and Celice.
In fact, Rusty City used to be the tourist nickname for the town in their student days. Or Wetropolis. Summer heat, trapped by the surrounding rim of dead volcanoes, sucked up the sea – still does, though no one comes to see it any more – and spread it thinly through the streets. Even in the winter there were fogs and frets, lasting until dusk, lasting sometimes weeks on end. There was, and is, a metre and a half of rain each year. Up to Celice’s chin and up to Joseph’s eyes. And constant windborne spray. ‘The windscreen wipers must persist with their condolences across the weeping windows of our cars even when there is no rain,’ Mondazy wrote (the Academic Mentor’s perfect epitaph), in the years when the town and coast were wild enough to attract visitors. Tourists could buy postcards of traffic in the rain, with his words printed underneath.
Sometimes, as now, there were tidal floods. But in those days there were no concrete breaks and barriers to keep the water back. The floods would chase along the lower town with street deliveries of wrack, eelgrass and crabs. We have fins, the citizens would boast. Our girls have seaweed ribbons in their hair, and gills.
Even death (according to the town’s resurrected folklore – Mondazy’s work again) was watery. ‘We call it Fish,’ he wrote in his final memoir, published more than thirty years ago. ‘It swims, we say, a silent, unforgiving predator that comes at night out of the sea and speeds into the shallow, less resistant moisture of the streets. Fish comes and takes your father and your mother from their bed. All that you’ll hear, as souls depart and make their spirals of displacement in the clammy air, is the shivering of fins.’ Sometimes, his superstitious readers and adherents used to say, Mondazy’s Fish would show itself only as silvering across the corpse, or by its smell. Death was hardly visible. Yet it was already in the room. And it would leave its wake of scales and mucilage across the sheets.
Fish, for a while, used to take the blame for every death in town. It swam, to the accompaniment of rain on roofs, through bedrooms and through wards where cancer, heart-attacks, old age and strokes had outwitted the nurses and their drugs. It called on people who had drowned in their pyjamas, amongst the reefs and corals of their furniture. Ten times a day it heard the parting rattle in the rusty throats of asthmatics, or hurried to attend a child struck by a car in the sudden blindness of a pavement-hugging cloud, or stayed to witness doctors write, ‘Pneumonia’, as cause of death for some damp pensioner whose lungs were water-bags when everybody knew the cause of death was Fish.
Fish couldn’t boast of many sailors drowned at sea. In those days Rusty City was a tourist, not a fishing, town. (It’s neither now.) Only visitors chose to dine on seafood so there wasn’t much call for fishermen or fish ‘chauffeurs’. But they were bound to lose some people to the waves each year. There was always some outsider who wanted to run along the front at high tide in a storm to take a photograph of pouncing seas. Or see if he could race down the now-demolished jetty, touch the flagpole at the end, and return to his companions before the next wave came. Two months before Celice and Joseph’s study week a couple tried to save their dog when curling water swept it from the town beach. The woman went into the water, fully dressed, reaching for the dog’s lead. When Fish found her, up the coast a few hours later, the sea had stripped her of her clothes. She was a nearly naked body wearing only shoes, her fingers wrapped around the dog’s red collar, and neither of them quite dead yet. Fish had to flap and wriggle over frothing rocks to brush their lids with its dispatching fins.
Wise people in Wetropolis, who did not want to die until they were old and ready for it, stretched nets across the headboards of their beds, or wore a fishhook on a chain around their throats. Even today, long since Mondazy resurrected Fish, there are still a few surviving men and women in the town who won’t eat fish at all or let a fish inside the house, not even in a tin to feed their cats. They remember what happened at the Pisces restaurant, down at the port, in 1968. Nine diners at a wedding feast and a waiter died. Fish came and poisoned them. It was a massacre. The bride did not survive to join her husband on the honeymoon.
These same wise people in Wetropolis might find in Joseph and Celice, on their fourth day of putrefaction in the dunes, much evidence of Fish. Their deaths seemed watery, as if they had been swept by curling breakers off the beach and dumped. They had both dissolved and stiffened. They were becoming partly semi-fluid mass and partly salted drift; sea things. They even smelt marine, as corrupt and spermy as rotting bladderwrack or fish manure.
There was, of course, their silvering, as further evidence that Fish had been. It was its watermark. In that dawn light and that hard rain and at a passing distance, the corpses would have looked like shiny human earrings made by fairy silversmiths and dropped by giants, two shards of fallen ice, two metal leaves, two scaly sculptures beaten out of tin and verdigris’d with mildew and with mould.
Even if the light were blocked, there would still appear to be a jewelling to their bodies, where life’s soft pink and death’s smudged grey conspired to find the silver in between. And there’d still be a tracery of lucent white where snails and slugs had made enamel patterns on the flesh with their saliva trails. These would be the patterns, surely, that Mondazy had described, the wake of scales and mucilage where gasping Fish had wriggled on its fins across the dunes to touch their skin.
Viewed from closer up, there were colours and motifs on Joseph and Celice that Fish could never leave. A dazzling filigree of pine-brown surface veins, which gave an arborescent pattern to the skin. The blossoming of blisters, their flaring red corollas and yellow ovaries like rock roses. And in the warmer, gaping caverns – sub-rib, sub-flesh, sub-skull – the garish blues and reds and greens of their disrupted, bloated frames. They were too rotten now and far too rank to hold much allure for gulls or crabs. They’d been passed down, through classes, orders, species, to the last in line, the lumpen multitude, the grubs, the loopers and the millipedes, the button lice, the tubal worms and flets, the bon viveur or nectar bugs, which had either too many legs or none.
The swag-fly maggots had started to emerge on this fourth day from their pod larvae, generated by the putrid heat in Joseph and Celice’s innards. Long dead – but still producing energy! The maggots gorged and tumbled in the carrion, as balls
of rain as big as them and fifty times as heavy came down like meteorites to pound and shake their caverns and their dells. Death fattens us to dine on us. The maggots are the minstrels at his feast.
Joseph, like most zoologists, had been a faculty snob and hated botany. He thought the ‘plant men’ lived a lesser fife. He was the huntsman to their gatherers. Their only weapons were the plastic bag and trowel. But he was closer now to botany than he had ever been. His greater, living predators had gone, but the longer blades of lissom grass, gasping for the light, were bending over him like nurses. His body was a vegetable, skin and pulp and fibre. His bones were wood. Soon, if no one came to help, the maggots would dismantle him. Then his body could only be gathered up by trowels and put in plastic bags.
It would be comforting, of course, to believe that humans are more durable than other animals, to think that by some miracle (of natural science obviously) his hand and her lower leg remained unspoiled, enfolding and enclosed, that his one fingertip was still amongst her baby hairs, that her ankle skin was firm and pastel-grained, and that her toenails were still berry red and manicured. But death does not discriminate. All flesh is flesh. And Joseph and Celice were sullied everywhere. His fingernails were split and loosening. His hand was angular and void, a starched and empty glove. Her lower leg was little more than rind.
But the rain, the wind, the shooting stars, the maggots and the shame had not succeeded yet in blowing them away or bringing to an end their days of grace. There’d been no thunderclap so far. His hand was touching her. The flesh on flesh. The fingertip across the tendon strings. He still held on. She still was held.
‘We know that Fish will poison all of us one day,’ Mondazy wrote, in his death year. ‘We wait for it to push its nose into the corners of our house, our room. Too weak to move, we’ll watch it browse the mildewed woodwork and graze amongst the timber lichens, which grow as black as barnacles along the window-frames beside our beds, until it turns to cast its sideways eye on us. Our town is mouldering. We are eroded by the wind and salt and rain. We live in fear of water and of death.’