Being Dead

by Jim Crace

  The plane did not pass over them. It stayed and grumbled in the dunes. Its engines idled, then picked up and roared again whenever there was any wind. The nearer that Celice and Joseph got to the jutting foreland of the bay the louder it became. Of course, they realized quite soon what they were witnessing. Not an aeroplane. It was the celebrated baritone, the voice that everybody said could bring bad luck. Someone’ll die. There’ll be a month of gales and rain. There’ll be a ghost.

  Celice and Joseph were bombarded by a hundred sounds. The deeper that they got into the dunes the less the roar resembled aircraft engines and the more it shaped itself like fire or hymns or thunder. Each step produced new scenes. First there was a furnace blast, and then the foghorn of a grounded ship, a sonic boom too soon for superjets, a pair of warring clouds. Finally the air drift picked up speed and steadied long enough for the sound that gave the bay its name to settle in – the humming fugue of men in churches, exercising their voices before a funeral or tuning up their instruments, choir practice from an organ loft. Celice and Joseph thought the sea was booming, that the baritone was coming off the tide, but when they climbed a dime peak to look, the sea was flat and quiet. Yet the higher they climbed the louder were the notes, and every time the wind picked up the lower was the compass of the song. This was the baritone of mourning and of saxhorns, sepulchral, pessimistic, deep. If they’d had any sense, if they had been less scientific and self-occupied, they would have run, as any small child would. They would have run upwind across the open shore and then uphill towards the safety of the study house to wrap their sleeping-bags around their ears.

  But Joseph and Celice were scientists in love. They would not run away, with superstition at their heels. Their hearts were set on lesser things. They knew it would not be a grand enough response to crooning landscapes just to say, as almost doctors of zoology should feel obliged to say, ‘There is a natural explanation for the voices that we hear. There’s no such thing’ – that reassuring phrase again – ‘as bad luck in a natural world’. But they thought it just the same. The baritone might be a proper subject for scientific study, but it was not unnatural. They were not the types, even in their current, heightened mood, to be impressed or daunted by the portent readers and the phenomenologists who made false patterns out of chaos, who said, for instance, ‘If there’s a heavy dew tonight, there’ll be fine weather in the morning.’ Or, ‘When the sapnut trees are cropping heavily it means the coming winter will be punishing, hard winds, long storms, deep frosts.’ Or that expressions on the face of the moon presaged the fortunes of the infants born that night. A frowning moon would produce a class of melancholic kids. Or that the baritone meant death or gales or ghosts.

  Our doctors of zoology or anybody who understands the mundane manners of the world, its rigid, sequenced protocols, would counter with the dulling truth that dew, sapnuts, the faces of the moon, can only show conditions that have passed. The earth is not a visionary and can’t be blamed for what’s ahead. It is retrospective, like the lovers would become, in those long years before the two of them were dead and dying in this place, before they were required to pay a heavy price for their nostalgia. It is the past that shapes the world. The future can’t be found in it. So heavy dews will indicate only that the sky has been clear and conditions favourable for the deposition of dew. A glut of sapnuts is a sign of nothing more than that the preceding spring and summer were good for Juglans suca trees. And so it is with singing salt dunes. They do not predict the fast-advancing misfortunes of the world. They merely say, ‘Conditions are correct for singing.’

  And so it was that morning for Joseph and Celice. Conditions were correct for singing, that is all. The sand was still a little moist from sea spray, dust free and already warmed above 16° centigrade by the sun and by the heat retained from the previous day’s fine weather. The surface sand grains on the dune slopes were well rounded, as required, and coated with a layer of silica – otherwise this would have been known as Tone Deaf Bay, not Baritone, producing a cacophony of frequencies and not the coherent and acoustic wave of singing. There was, as well, the optimum direction and velocity of wind. And there had been a catalyst, someone, some fleeting thing, a gull, a fox, a slipping dune, to start the salt sand moving and allow the famous baritone to croon. The singing only signified the scientific present and its past.

  But Joseph and Celice were becoming less scientific by the minute. They were becoming more disposed to take the baritone not as a sign of bad luck but as a blessing. They would not say the earth had moved for them, but they could claim that the landscape had broken out in song and was arousing them, and was embracing them.

  They had, in fact, not even touched each other so far that morning. He’d seen her almost naked through the veranda windows and had been terrified. She’d pulled her nightshirt high above her head. There were three sudden triangles of hair, her armpits and her crotch, and then the dropping of her head hair, springing back in place as the shirt’s tight neckband cleared her forehead. She’d turned away before he had a chance to see her breasts. He’d caught an instant only of her narrow waist, her perfect eighteenth-century back, the age of flesh and dimples. She’d bent to pick the clothes out of a drawer. Then her body disappeared again, beneath a modest working shirt, and she became the wader on one leg pulling on a pair of pants, her socks, blue jeans, black jumper, walking boots. She’d turned and waved at him. He’d never been so shocked or fearful. He was a small boy at the blind summit of a roller-coaster ride, poised at the limits of control, his stomach in his mouth, and no retreat.

  He had not dared to take her hand as they’d walked down to Baritone Bay. One fingertip, one uninvited touch, and she would disappear, he thought. And she had not attempted to touch him either. Touch is too obvious. She walked ahead. She let her body swing. She let him watch. She knew she was the centre of his universe. She wanted, if she could, to leave this small man giddy. He’d have a heart-attack. The earth would swallow him. He’d have a fit and bite his tongue in half. He would be speechless when she’d done with him.

  Celice only touched him when they’d topped the outer dune to listen to the ululating orchestra of sand. She knew she’d have to overcome his nervousness and inexperience. She had to take command. She stood behind him and let the tumbling sand beneath their feet topple them together. She put both hands on his hips as if to steady herself. Quite innocent. Quite sisterly. But then she pressed her chin and mouth against his head and smelt the musty mushroom of his scalp. The sudden pressure seemed to clear his lungs of oxygen. He gasped and buckled under her, a man with just one bone. She had to hold him round the waist to stop him falling. Her fingers dug into his clothes, first at the side and then around his abdomen. She pulled up his shirt,and found the space between his belt and navel. Room enough for her slim wrist.

  He winced, and shook. He doubled up. ‘Cold hands,’ he said.

  ‘Good pastry,’ she replied.

  Joseph was indeed sent giddy. He pressed his back into Celice’s chest. He turned his face towards her. An awkward angle. His mouth was lifted, open, pink. He was a greedy little bird. She fed him fat worms with her tongue. She had to duck her knees and tip her head to find his mouth with hers.

  The lissom grass was irresistible, the perfect blanket, velvety and sensuous. Celice and Joseph fell on their knees and pulled each other’s trousers down. She stretched her toes beyond his toes when they made love. She liked her Joseph all the more for being small. She liked to be the wrapper, not the wrapped. And he was clearly more than happy to be eclipsed by her, to have his light shut out by her descending shapes, to have his breathing blocked, his ears absorbed into her mouth, to earn the wet and grateful puppy kiss across his fingertips when finally he dared to touch between her legs.

  No one could say their love was cautious. Love on that day was bold. Joseph was not as reckless as she’d hoped he’d be. But she enjoyed his shaking passion and the way – once he had found his voice – he glorified the parts of h
er he liked, the wonder of her springy hair, the girlish, modest chest, the way her skin was coloured in its contours, summit white but darker in its crevices, at her throat, her armpits, under her breasts, her torso, the inside of her thighs. She showed him where to linger and what to leave alone. He even rubbed her back and neck, and kissed, as she requested, every vertebra. But still he was no maestro of the spine. Nor was he in control of her. It can’t have helped that he was trembling with desire and that his senses of timing, balance and direction had deserted him. Or that he was attempting to make love to her still shackled by his underclothes and jeans. She should have guessed how green he’d be, how inexperienced, how lacking in technique. He was not the Casanova of her dreams. It was, though, thrilling to imagine what he might achieve when he became her lover, night on night, when he had learned to direct his energies more accurately. This first time, though, she’d do her best for him. She’d sacrifice herself.

  It didn’t matter, so he said, that after all her scheming and attention, his climax when it arrived was not a mighty one and hers was oddly short and shadowy, approaching and departing in one move. A shiver and a shudder; they were done. But were they satisfied? Entirely so. Not Eros manifest, perhaps. Not sent sublime by orgasms into the whirlpool of amnesia that poets claim – although it isn’t true – is like the absolute forgetfulness of death. But happy to their fingertips. And pacified. And sparkling. And more in love – it’s all that counts when all is said and done – than they had been before the sex.

  There must have been a moment when the baritone stopped singing. The salt dunes did not make acoustic waves all morning. Conditions changed. The wind came round and dropped. The perfect angle was reduced. The sand dried out. The lovers did not care or even notice, though. They were not listening to the reverberations of the land, but to their own.

  She wrapped herself around him afterwards. They were too deep to spot the distant, inland plume of smoke, or hear the calls of ‘Joseph! Celice! Festa!’ from the sprinting ornithologist. The dunes blocked out the world. They cuddled on the bed of lissom grass. They were the oddest pair, in their flat, hollow suntrap, hidden from the sea, with no idea of what the bay might have in store for them.

  23

  Syl was exhausted, naturally. It had been a day of walking. First along the coast and back. Then up from the Mission Church to the family house, a longer distance than she’d remembered from her childhood, but curative.

  The town looked and smelt its best at dusk. The grime and wear became invisible. Man-made illuminations showed only the good parts of the streets. The coloured bar lights had come on, in all their ripening shades from green to red, no blues, like strings of mangoes. The pavement stalls, their wares side-lit by lanterns from the town’s pre-electric past, were already trading Sunday treats: nut sticks, cocoa dips, candied fruit, doughnuts. The brochette salesmen raked the charcoal in their braziers. Each pulse of flame was their street cry. But, most of all, the dusk’s illumination came from the headlamps of cars in swinging, lighthouse beams. The corridors of quizzing light retracted and stretched out to sweep the legs and faces of the people on the street. The sleeping Sunday town was resurrected in the evening. It was a time for families and lovers.

  Syl would have gone into a bar or bought herself a cheese and pork brochette. She hadn’t eaten anything that day. She’d had to leave for Baritone Bay before the ferryman had had a chance to bring the coffee and the cake he’d promised her for breakfast. And she was cold. Still just a shirt. No coat or jumper. A warm indoors, some food, a beer, some company were what she needed. Even the fall-short, underreaching comforts of a brazier would do. Or a speedy taxi ride back home. But she had not brought any money from the house, and hadn’t had the nerve to borrow any from Geo. She’d have to starve. She’d have to walk. And she’d have to shiver all the way. A lively and romantic prospect, actually. It matched the way she felt about herself – an orphaned, independent woman, with empty pockets, empty stomach, cold and young, and passing through the bright and filling streets without a friend.

  It wasn’t long before Syl had left the Sunday carnival of crowds and lights. She crossed the river by the cycle bridge and followed the main boulevard out of the centre towards the hilltop houses where the artists, the academics and her parents lived. First there were the civic buildings, the pinkstone barracks and the regimental offices, the hotels of the Bankside district, the Geometric Gardens to hurry past. But then the streets were livelier again and Syl could peer down cul-de-sacs and into wayward tenements where students, conscripts, single men were dodging motorbikes and hesitating outside brothels, narrow bars and curtained doors, pretending to belong.

  It was completely dark when Syl approached the railings of Deliverance Park. She had either to undertake the long walk round to reach the stretch of unmetalled side roads and the family house, or break a rule her parents had imposed since she was young and risk the night-time trespass and the trees. ‘There isn’t anything beyond me now,’ she’d told herself, that afternoon, outside the Mission Church. ‘There isn’t anything I cannot do or say.’ So she climbed the railings, dropped down on to the sodden plant beds and sprinted off into the dark, sprinted off as she had always wanted to, euphoric and untouchable. She let out great whoops of liberation and defeat as she progressed, as she was bound to, across safe lawns on to a pine-shielded path, blacker and more feverish than night, owl-eyed and loveless. Heading for the house that had to let her in.

  The front door stuck even worse than usual. The opening was snagged by letters, cards, condolences, all hand-delivered during the day. Word had already got around. The murder was made public. Syl took them to the kitchen, put on the cooking-duty cardigan, which was left hanging, as ever, on the larder hook, and started hunting for her supper. There was – Sod’s law – no food at home, except the breakfast cake, still lying on its plate and dried out by its hours of neglect. Nor was there any alcohol. Syl searched the kitchen cupboards again and her father’s room, but all she found were a set of spirit glasses and the lees of some gleewater in a square bottle, half hidden on a high shelf, out of harm’s way. Not worth the reach. The cake would have to do. She broke it into four dry pieces and started on the mail. Cards first, from neighbours mostly who hardly knew her parents. Photographs of clouds and aquatints of flowers with ornate fine lines from poets and the scriptures, being brave at the expense of death. ‘Life is the Desert,’ Syl was told in gold and silver italics. ‘Death is the Rendezvous of Friends.’ Or ‘Death’s a shadow, always at our heels.’ Or, It’s ‘our second home. The feast is spread upon its table. The Host is waiting at its door.’ Or ‘Death’s the veil which those who live call Life: They sleep and it is lifted.’ Or (from the sepulchre in Milan where Claudio Busi, the architect, is buried) ‘Death is nothing at all. I have slipped away into another room. All is well.’ Except, thought Syl, that there’s no slipping back.

  The letters were all handwritten, from her parents’ colleagues and the secretaries at the Institute and the university. For Syl, For Sil, With love to Sylvia, For Celice and Joseph’s daughter (‘Sorry, but we do not know your name’), To Cyl. All of them seemed fonder now of their two doctors of zoology than they had ever been in life. ‘Your parents were admired by all of us,’ they wrote. ‘They were devoted. Anyone could tell. They will be missed. It’s such a blessing, in a way, that they should have died in each other’s arms.’ And ‘They are irreplaceable.’

  It was as if Syl’s parents’ lives, which had seemed hidden and pale, illuminated by so few surface lights, at best a silhouette, only needed death’s bright torch to bring the passion and the colour out. Its beam had caught and fixed them now. Their histories were certain. No more to come. No more to add. Their dates were written down indelibly. Nothing could be changed or mended, except by the sentiment and myth of those who were not dead. That’s the only Judgement Day there is. The benefits of hindsight. The dead themselves are robbed of retrospect. They’re not required to make sense of their dea
ths.

  Syl dropped the letters and the cards in the waste-bin. She’d not reply. Life was too short. They’d understand. She gleaned the few cake crumbs off the table top with a wet finger. She stared out of the kitchen window at the dark and empty deck. She turned the taps on and off to check that the world was functioning. She was tired and hungry still and bored with home. It was not yet ten o’clock, but she would have to go to bed. What else was there to do?

  She started in her mother’s bed. She liked its space and the heavy coverlet. But it was unnerving to sink into the hollows of the mattress where the springs had been weakened by Celice and rest her head on pillows impacted by her mother’s thousand nights and one. So she moved into her own room for the first time since that Friday night with Geo, and only for the second time in two years. These hollows were her own. It was like the simple legend on the condolence card, ‘I have slipped away into another room. All is well.’ Indeed. All would be well. She’d stay until the funeral, that day of chores and crowds, of false handshakes and noise. Then her parents could be dead in silence. And she could sell the house. She’d take the money and herself abroad, to all the places that she’d underlined in atlases when she was young, to Goa, Sydney, Rio, Rome, Berlin.

  She was soon fast asleep. But not for long. Before eleven, she was woken by the same sound that she’d been half expecting on the previous night in this bed, the brakes and engine of her parents’ car, their headlights flaring on her bedroom walls, their hurried steps up to the front door, the key, the tumbling of the locks, the cold reunions. All there that night. Except there was no tumbling of the locks. Someone had left the headlights of a car on full beam, shining at the front of the house. Someone was tapping on the door with the metal of a key. Syl pulled two slices of the window screen apart and looked down at the porch. It was the ferryman.