Being Dead

by Jim Crace

  Noon

  It was not the easy and pleasant walk that he had promised her. There was a level, waymarked track down to the coast, but Joseph and Celice had to clamber through the man-made hillocks on the margins of the widened airport road and skirt the recent piles of building aggregate to reach the high backshores where once the study house had been. Instead of beaten scrub, the soil was loose and gravelly. The rubble-loving undergrowth tore at their trouser legs. Somewhere, below these engineering dunes, Celice had first seen Joseph, almost thirty years before. He’d slipped and pulled the muscles in his back. The other men – it didn’t seem like yesterday – had had to help him with his antique, boned suitcase. Consumed by fire. The well-worn path that the six students had followed then had disappeared over time, of course. There was no longer any need for it. No study house, no path.

  Celice was breathless, not only from the effort of the climbs on such a sun-wrecked day but also with apprehension. The blackened wreckage of her past was far too close – six hundred metres from the air-conditioned comforts of their car. She’d never found the time or felt the impulse to return before. Not cowardice, just caution. Why take the risk? Why resurrect bad memories? It isn’t true that murderers are drawn back to the scene of crime before the blood has dried. They only dare go back when age has toughened them.

  Celice was not a fool. She knew her thirty-year timidity had not been rational. Yet the fire had singed and carbonized her past. She was in no doubt of that. She could hardly bear even to recollect her first meeting with her husband, his singing voice, the sprayhoppers, their first love-making, because an image of the smoking study house would soon impose itself. With Festa’s blackened face, her toasted hair. And Festa’s melted voice.

  Celice hadn’t witnessed a single flame of the actual fire, of course. She’d been . . . elsewhere. Impossibly alive and joyful. By the time that she and Joseph had finished with each other at Baritone Bay, the fire had used up all the wood and was only ruminating smoke. The almost naked ornithologist, running in black boots and his nightwear along the coastal track, had found them – caught them – consummated, arm in arm, coming from the dunes. ‘Thank God,’ he’d said, and almost hugged them with relief. ‘Where’s Festa?’

  Celice could still recall her easy shrug. She hadn’t cared where Festa was. But some days, now and ever since, that’s all she thought about. Where Festa was. Her thirty years of being dead. The life in parallel to hers that Celice’s colleague never led. The uncompleted doctorate. The unbegun career. The unique progress never made in the medical and nutritional uses of seaweed. The man not found, the children she’d not have, the house, the undemanding life. The middle years of that enraging voice and spongy laugh. The thinning of the thick, loose hair. The fattening. The chance encounters with Celice, once in a while, on the street or at the annual conference on seaweed studies, ‘It’s Festa, isn’t it? . . . How’s life with you? I haven’t seen you since . . .’ All murdered by a coffee pan or by a toppling cigarette.

  It was a flinty task for Celice even to imagine herself back at the study house, as she’d last seen it, standing, trembling, with another calming cigarette and facing down across the black and silvered ruin towards a smoke-smudged sea. Her lungs, already stressed by their uphill running from the coast, had been raw with wood ash. She’d yelled out Festa’s name, both at the house and at the countryside around, until her voice had failed. But no one answered her – and no one ever would. Her colleague and room-mate was buried underneath the smouldering tent of timbers. It was too hot to peer more closely and look for signs of skull and bones or rake the ash for Festa’s confirmation ring, her watch, her silver bracelet and her teeth.

  Joseph had come forward to put his arm around her waist. But she had waved him back. It was his fault, this fire, this death, as well as hers. Love was to blame, and passion. Passion such as theirs, brief as it was, was strong enough to shake the balance of the natural world, and test its synchronicity. Where there is sex, then there is death. They are the dark co-ordinates of one straight line. Grief is death eroticized. And sex is only shuffling off this mortal coil before its time to plummet to the post-coital afterlife. Celice’s haste to rush out of the house and take command of her new love so early in the morning was bound to set the flame. That is a scientific view.

  Who ought to take responsibility at times like this? There always has to be a volunteer. When the airport hydrant, two firemen and a policeman had arrived to dampen the embers and begin the search for Festa’s remains, the two men there – Celice’s lover and the ornithologist – said they could not suggest or even guess how the fire had started. It was a mystery. They had no theories so they could accept no guilt. But Celice, not noticeably self-sacrificing in lesser matters, was eager for the blame. Embraced it, actually. She knew her only shelter was the truth. She half remembered seeing the kerosene lamp under the table, she admitted to the policeman. She couldn’t say whether or not it was still alight when she’d got up and hurried out that morning.

  ‘Let’s get this right. You left a lamp to bum all night? Underneath a wooden table?’ The policeman’s prejudices were reconfirmed. Here was a science graduate with a fine accent and no expenses spared who hadn’t yet found out that wood was combustible and that flames were hot. ‘That takes the prize,’ he said. But there was more. Celice could not stop confessing, despite Joseph’s restraining touch in the small of her back. That was a touch she hated all her life. She would not hide behind white lies or plead ignorance like him. She told the policeman, then, about the boiling coffee pan and her smouldering, toppling cigarettes. She’d later write to Festa’s parents, repeating all her burning truths. She’d admit the same again in court for the inquiry judge.

  Now, middle-aged and only half as reckless as she’d once been, Celice was hiding in her husband’s wake as he pushed through the undergrowth of untrimmed shrubs to the side of the study house’s tumbled western wall. Joseph had been behind her as they’d crossed the rubble hills. But he had taken too many opportunities to help her on the loose earth and the gradients by spreading his fingers flat across her bottom and pushing. This was a lover pushing her, looking for the acquiescent flesh, and not a simple helping hand. She was annoyed. What had come over him? Could he not guess how tense she was? Or how angry she remained at his dishonest and restraining touch that age ago?

  Sometimes she feared that there was nothing grand in their relationship, nothing to secure her loyalty or admiration, even, since that first encounter with his singing voice, that great sustaining wave on which her love had surfed for almost thirty years. Where had been the zest since then? Where, indeed, had been their common ground? She had become the pepper to his salt. They were the fruit of different, and opposing, trees.

  So many times she’d asked herself, Why had their love proved troublesome? Celice could count the ways. First, she was a warrior by nature, unafraid of battle, quick to raise her fists. Her husband was an appeaser, loath even to raise his voice. She was assaulted and defeated, when they argued, by his lazy patience and his infuriating tact. After any argument she was mostly angry for one week. And he was eloquently hurt for two. Second, as she grew older, she wanted company and friends; he was unsociable and courted privacy. Next, she was dissatisfied with her life; he was only anxious about his. She wanted everything to get better; he was nervous that all the hard-earned certainties might disappear – he’d lose his health, his work, his monkish peace of mind. She had no fear of death. He cowered from it all the time, and lived his middle years with one foot on the bottom rung of a descending ladder, ready for the looming fall, the streak of blood in his urine, the tell-tale black deposits on the toilet paper, the colonizing lumps and swellings that he seemed to search for twenty times a day, the sharp pains in the arms and chest, the sudden stroke. He had become obsessed with symmetry: two legs aching was old age; one leg aching was a clot, arthritis or a growth. Lastly, he saw their marriage as a success; she was unsatisfied by it. Despite their ea
rly promise and ambitions they had not left as many marks upon the world as she had hoped. One daughter was the only product of their lives – and one that was not promising, pretended to no plans, and had fled from the family home as if it were a prison cell. Celice’s audit of herself and her long years with Joseph was not uplifting. Their legacy, she’d be the first to say, would be less than their inheritance.

  Yet there still was love, the placid love that only time can cultivate, a love preserved by habit and by memory. Their tree had little rising sap, perhaps, but it was held firm by deep and ancient roots. Old, lasting love. Celice had never doubted it. Their marriage had initiating strengths. A great sustaining wave, no matter how old, is more than most couples can boast of and enjoy. Her husband angered her, perhaps, from time to time. Most of the time, in fact. He was too weak and watery. And she was disappointed with herself. But their beginnings were indelible and strong. Joseph could still evoke for her – infrequently – those sentimental choruses, that great subversive bass, that guiding star, that midnight bride, the peaking of her body and the song in that far, haunted place. When they were young.

  Yet this was not a haunted place, as it turned out. The study house was fertile ground for rock shrubs and carbon-loving plants. The bunk room and the common room were oblong beds of stoveweed and pyrosia, the green bells of the one almost a perfect match for the high bracts of the other. The last remains of bricks, masonry and walls were colonized by nettles, brambles, buddleia and mortar roses. The house was razed but the architect’s blue building plans were still adhered to by the plants. What roof beams had survived the fire and years, were skeletal, stripped of all the charring, tapered by erosion, and clad in the reds and greens of timber algae.

  Celice stepped across the porch stone and walked into the middle of the common room, next to the almost buried sink. The doorway to the veranda was now two heaps of weed. There was no evidence of any building on that side of the house. The scrubby backshore plants, the hollow-stemmed flute bushes and the thorns had colonized the long rectangle of the glass veranda and were growing deeply. Celice could not reach the spot where she and Festa had spread their mattresses and sleeping-bags, and shared their cigarettes. She squatted on her heels and peered beneath the bushes. What did she expect? Some bones? A snake? A woman, sitting up in bed? The red glow of tobacco? The odours of a barbecue? A scream? The sudden ending of her guilt as if the study house had pardons to give out?

  The smell was only vegetation and the sound was only leaves and stalks. All she found to show that there had once been shelter here were shards of grey and thinning glass, a riddled piece of corrugated iron, and what could be the rusting helix of a mattress spring. She was tempted to say something to Festa, but did not. She might have, if she’d been by herself. An apology, perhaps. A reassurance of some kind. But Joseph was in hearing range. He wouldn’t understand. Men had no emotional imagination, she had found. That’s why he hadn’t felt the guilt she’d felt. That’s why the death of Festa had been so readily survived by him. Perhaps, that’s why men were more stable than the women she knew. They accepted the eerie truth of life and death, that one is passing and the other is conclusive. We live, we die, we do not need to understand. There are no ghosts to lay. There is just ash and memory.

  Celice was still shaking and a little nauseous when she walked back through the denuded common room to join her husband for the walk down to the coast. She took deep breaths. The anticlimax had been shocking. How little she had felt. How tearless she had been. How mute the ruins were.

  ‘Not what I expected,’ she said. ‘So much has grown here. I thought it would be bleak.’ She should have known – a doctor of zoology – that vegetation would have buried all the past, that death would be absorbed.

  Mondazy wrote, ‘Our Books of Life don’t have an end. Fresh chapters are produced though we are dead. Our pages never terminate. But, given time, the paper yellows, then turns green. The vellum flesh becomes the leaf.’

  20

  Syl would not speak to her conscripted driver as they drove through the slums and hinterlands of their drenched coastal town that Sunday afternoon. No one about. It seemed, at times, as if they were travelling through still photographs. Life as it always was, fixed in its frame, just there at just that time. No one had died, or ever could.

  Syl was in a spiteful mood and sitting in the back. Her lover ought to know exactly what his status was. He was too vain and immature to comprehend that his raw caresses in her mother’s bed, his constant touching of her arm, his sudden, uninvited kisses were not a welcome comfort. They were his taxi fares. She drummed her fingers on her knees. But Geo was already accustomed to her early-morning tempers and her surprising appetites at night. He’d never known such cruelty and boldness or guessed how stimulating they could be. He watched her through the rear-view mirror: she sat with her legs drawn up and her head against the side window of his car, looking at the empty streets, the timber yards, the shuttered bars, the occasional clinker lorry going to and from the Salt Pines building sites. He knew she was defying him to make a sound. Thank goodness Geo was a willing soul, and so naïve. He thought he understood her need for silence and her constant irritation. Anxiety, of course. Grief and fear. And the irresistible drama of the spotlight. He could not blame himself for her fixed mouth and her turned head.

  They parked at the visitors’ centre, where Joseph and Celice had parked, five days before, and from where their car had almost certainly been stolen. The lot was almost full. The building had been taken over by the police as its headquarters. There were squad jeeps, a catering trailer, a radio van with its aerial raised, and the unmarked cars of the detectives lined up across the gravel. Four Sunday anglers in an open jeep were being turned away by the uniformed auxiliaries guarding the entrance to the centre. The coast was closed. Except to planes. The police were powerless to close the skies. Two Dorkers and a noisy One-One-Eight, piloted by weekend hobby fliers, were stunting in the thermals off the bar.

  Syl, it’s true, was indulging herself. After the stifling doldrums of the drive with Geo it was a sudden and an unexpected stimulant to be the centre of so much respectful attention. She’d only had to tell one of the guards, ‘I’m the daughter,’ for the makeshift barrier to be lifted and for their car to be conducted in as if its occupants were honoured guests, dignified by their proximity to death. She liked the way that no one tried to stare at her. They looked down at their shoes as she walked by. She was the Empress of Japan, foremost and unapproachable. To catch her eye with theirs would be a violation.

  This was unusual for Syl – the deference of uniforms. Usually her dress, her age, the way she spoke, her hard-cropped hair would trigger animosity from the police, and a bag search. Now, for once, she could savour their sombre bustle, their measured urgency, their lowered eyes and voices. She could enjoy herself. That’s the blushing ambiguity of deaths and, particularly, of dramatic deaths like this. The closest family, the principal mourners are oddly happy with themselves, and stirred. Their hearts – and social niceties – may call for frenzies of despair, an ululating epilepsy, collapse, hysteria, but their brains dispense instead a cocktail of euphoric chemicals to bolster them against the shock and rage. Adrenalin cannot discriminate. The stimulant and tranquillizer pumps usurp the promptings of the heart. They make death seem invigorating, and erotic. Syl felt – bizarrely – closer to laughter than to tears. She was excited, almost glad, to be the daughter of the dead, to be so irritated, and so estranged from Joseph and Celice, to be so mean and careless with the ferryman, yet seem so dutiful, capable and strong to all the uniforms. The awful truth had not sunk in. The deaths were still not real. She only fell apart once she’d descended fifty metres of the track and saw the world’s most mournful sight, the wide expanse of wind-whipped beach and sea, the inter-tide.

  It was just as well that Geo wasn’t there to put his arm around Syl and make things worse. He hadn’t taken much persuading not to walk with her along the coast to in
spect the bodies. He was a little squeamish. She’d rather be alone, she said. He understood. He would have kissed her there and then, as she escaped the car. To do so would establish his lover’ status in the eyes of the police. How jealous they would be if they could know how that cropped head had burrowed into him. Besides, he would not wish to be mistaken for a cousin or a neighbour, or spot-fined for operating an unlicensed cab. He’d pursed his lips and tipped his head towards her. But she had pressed her fingers on his chest to keep his face away. Syl was relieved to leave him in the car park, a bruised look on his face, like a disappointed spaniel denied its exercise. She’d go alone, the orphan on the coast. But one of the officers inside the centre had instructed a policewoman to accompany her. Now with the first sight of the sea and her first tears Syl wanted privacy even more. Emotion was embarrassing. She told her escort that she was not needed. The woman, probably no older than Syl herself, just nodded. ‘But we have a policy,’ she said, ‘at any scene of crime.’

  ‘I have a policy, as well.’ Quite what it was, Syl didn’t know, unless it was always to argue with a uniform.

  So they agreed a compromise. The policewoman would follow twenty metres behind, a stalking guard, an aide, but not a companion. Syl could be the Empress of Japan again, embarking on her solitary wake.

  The call to the coast had come at midday while Syl was sitting on the deck at home, in her father’s chair, still in her mother’s dressing-gown and waiting for her hired hand to bring some cake and coffee. She’d heard the phone: ‘You answer it,’ she shouted. Geo wrote the message down like some dull waiter and brought it out to her. Two bodies had been found by police dogs in the salt dunes at Baritone Bay. Near where they must have parked the car. Could she come out at once? Identify her mother and her father?

  How would Syl cope?

  At first she coped by pouring all her scorn on Geo. ‘Was that all?’ she asked. Hadn’t the police said anything about the cause of death? He shook his head. A lifelong dope. ‘You didn’t think to ask, of course. A mere detail.’