by Jim Crace
She went back to her bed and listened to him calling for her through the letterbox. A pretty sound, she thought. Syl, Syl. Syl, Syl. The sort of sound you’d make if you were stroking a cat. But she was never tempted to go down. She didn’t want to be his cat. She’d slept with him three times already and she had more than paid her fare. She waited for his tapping to become less tentative, and then a hammering. His anger shook the house, but she was all the more unreachable. He would be certain she was there, inside and listening. He had, she knew, a right to be annoyed. She half expected pebbles at her window, a note wrapped round a stone; or to see his looming, rueful face pressed up against the window-glass. But he gave up quite quickly and drove away.
Again she was in Rio and she slept. The phone, which rang ten minutes after midnight, was not her parents getting through. She could not even dream they were alive. It was, of course, Geo again. The phone bell even had his plaintive ring. It wasn’t hard to guess how he had passed the hour since he’d driven off. Either he was calling from the corner of a bar, enraged by drink and his unrewarded hankerings. Sex is the wasp trapped in the jar. Or he had gone back to his home – she’d never even asked him where he lived, but still with his parents, she was sure – and was sitting, sober and resentful, in their dark hallway, ready to beg and to berate when she picked up the phone: ‘I thought I might come round,’ and then, ‘You thankless bitch.’ She let it ring. And so did he. At last, she had to go downstairs to disconnect his call. She left the handset dangling. She’d be engaged all night.
Syl didn’t try to sleep again. She’d had enough. She walked about the house, her mother’s night-coat wrapped around her shoulders, and turned on every light, upstairs and down. Perhaps the lights would help her face the truth of her bereavement, and her guilt. She’d often daydreamed they were dead. And now they were. She still found satisfaction in their deaths – they represented Goa and Berlin. She was to blame. For wanting it. For having too little love for them. For being less than they had hoped. For being thankless, lazy, hard.
She went again into her mother’s room, pulled back the sheets and stared at the bed, looking for the trigger of some tears. She opened all the cupboards and the drawers, spread a hand across her mother’s underclothes, inspected the unopened packet of cigarettes she found buried underneath, picked up her combs and necklaces, sniffed the cordite smell of hair on her brush, stared at the wedding photograph. But she felt nothing. Everything was too familiar. She opened Calvino’s Antonyms. Her mother read the oddest things. And then the book that Syl herself had bought her father, The Goatherd’s Ancient Wisdom. The book mark was a funeral card. A name she didn’t recognize. The Academic Mentor at the university. ‘Rejoice, for he has woken from his troubled dream,’ it said. Another idiotic card. She dropped it, like she’d dropped the others, in the bin.
Her father’s room was half the size, and cluttered. Again she pulled back the covers on the bed. A pair of patterned socks. And, pushed between the mattress and the footboard, there was a glossy magazine of photographs, called Provo – the grinning natural world in two-page spreads. Syl bent to look beneath the bed. His shoes. Some scientific journals. A coffee-cup. A tray of rocks. His binoculars. She ran her hand along the spines in his bookcase.
Finally she went downstairs into the kitchen, the most anonymous of rooms. Still nothing in the fridge to eat and drink. She’d have to go next door again, when it was morning, to beg some bread and cheese from her neighbour. For now the little drop of gleewater in its square bottle on the high shelf was worth the reaching after all. She was her father’s height and shorter than Celice. She had to climb on to a chair. She blew the dust off the bottle’s epaulettes, removed the stopper and drank the quarter measure without coming down off the chair. Too sugary. But energizing. There was a small round glass jar with a gold screw top hidden behind the spirit glasses at the back of the shelf, no bigger than a tangerine. Its contents looked like tiny yellow stones or shells. She took it down and held it to the ceiling light. Small rodent bones, perhaps. Misshapen pearls. Something from her mother’s lab. Something they’d picked up on the beach, and kept, and hidden.
Syl unscrewed the cap and tipped the contents on her palm. They hardly weighed a gramme and felt as moist and soft as orange pips. They were all teeth, some as tiny and enamelled as a grain of rice, others larger, and contoured, spongy and pitted at their dentine caps but jagged and with the stringy residues of blood pulp on their roots. Milk teeth or ‘fairy dice’. The sweet incisors, canines, molars of a girl.
She counted them, pushing them across her palm with one finger. Nineteen. One short of a set. That must be the one, Syl thought, that she had lost at school when she was about eleven. She had been worrying it all day with her tongue and thumb and it had almost fallen out while she was in the music class. Her teacher had insisted that she spit it in the lavatory and swill the blood away with water from the toilet tap. That one tooth had not been saved. But her mother and her father had preserved the rest, this first sign of their daughter’s growing old.
Syl dropped her teeth back in the jar. Then, clutching it, she got down off the kitchen chair and went into the garden studio to curl up on the couch. Monday was approaching fast with its disjunctive ways. Monday rips the family apart. It sends its members off to work. It puts them on the bus and train and plane. She folded one hand round the jar of teeth and wrapped the other one around an ankle, spread her fingers on her lower leg, held herself in place with just her fingertips, dug bitten nails into her skin. She closed her eyes against the dawn to find out what it felt like to be loved and dead.
24
The brothers who ran the Salt Pines Company were happy to loan their sand jeep to the police. Although they hadn’t yet started building a single house, their marketing campaign was due to open in ten days’ time. Their brochures, already printed, had renamed the area Lullaby Coast, suggesting safety, retirement and the soothing presence of the sea. The murder of two respectable doctors of zoology on the fringes of the development could well suggest the opposite, that this was not a happy coast. It could suggest conspiracy as well. The doctors had publicly opposed the building scheme. Their names were on petitions. So the brothers would do what they could to remove the bodies from the dunes as speedily as possible and then persuade the police captain that a quiet, low-profile hunt for ‘the responsibles’ might well produce the best results for everyone.
Their driver took the vehicle along the coastal track then down the small stone jetty below the car park into the shallows of a receding tide where the sand was firmest and not too steeply banked. He would have liked to have accelerated and sent out loops of water from his tyres. Surf-driving. But this, he had been warned, would be the first, informal part of a funeral and he should drive the jeep as if it were a hearse. There were two empty coffins in the body of the jeep. So he kept the needle hovering at 10 k.p.h. and made the most of going through the waves as deeply as he dared, until he reached the first rocks of the bay and had to turn inland towards the dunes.
Two policemen showed him where to back and park. There were another two laying wooden duckboards along the sandy gully of the access dime, dull conscripts with unruly uniforms and minds. Three more men, in suits, and all with cigarettes, were standing like good golfing friends on the grass below the tent. The police detective. The magistrate. One of the brothers from Salt Pines. It looked as if they were expecting someone to come from the tent with a tray of drinks. Their conversation stopped when the thick green canvas had been loosened from its pegs and pulled off its shaking metal frame to show the sun-deprived rectangle of grass beneath. The tent had been up only since the Sunday morning. A day, that’s all. But already photosynthesis had stalled. The lissom green had slightly paled, like the skin below a sticking plaster.
Celice and Joseph were still hidden under sheets and their refrigerating blankets, but nothing could disguise the smell. Bacon, seaweed, hoof-and-horn, the sweet-death odours of burnt marmalade. Six days of
grace are more than anyone can bear. The three older men moved away and lit fresh cigarettes. One of the policemen – not allowed to smoke, but used to dirty work like this – handed round a tube of mints to his three colleagues and the driver. First they rolled the canvas up and jumped on it to pump out the envelopes of trapped air. Then they disconnected and took down the two fluorescent lamps from the top strut of the tent, and dismantled the twelve lengths of the frame. It took two men to drag the canvas down to the sand jeep. One other took the tent poles. The fourth carried the lighting battery. They returned along the duckboards with the two empty, wood-effect coffins on their shoulders. Provided by the city morgue, one standard issue for a man, a shorter one for a woman. The driver followed with the lids.
Filling the coffins would have been simple if the bodies had been laid on sheets, as well as covered by them. Then the policemen could easily make hammocks with which to lift and swing the victims into their boxes. But Joseph and Celice had not been moved, except by gulls and by the murderer, since they had died. The policemen would have to pull away their coverings and roll the bodies on to lengths of folded sheet. They put on plastic gloves. They did not want to touch the dead.
Celice, when she was finally exposed, was still chest down on the ground, her left cheek pressed into the lissom grass, her legs level with her husband’s face, braced and supported on their toes and knees. Her upper body, in its black jacket and grubby white T-shirt made her seem the greater and the less-dead of the two. Below the waist she was as thin and leathery as a hermit’s water-bag. The policemen did their best – but failed – to stop themselves from looking at her nakedness and at the chipped and flaking cherry red varnish of her nails.
Her husband’s posture seemed the comic one. No clothes at all to keep him respectable. He was as modest as a beast. He’d fallen on his back. His legs were spread. His cock and testicles were livid mushrooms growing out of dough. His left wrist was twisted against the broken angle of his arm. And his hand was still wrapped round the stringy folds and sinews of her lower leg. Still devoted, then. Still in touch. But not quite innocent.
The murdered couple, in the weeks ahead, in the newspapers, even at the funeral, would have to shoulder some of the blame themselves. Their bodies were too compliant, unprotesting, over-dramatized. Their deaths – though ugly and gratuitous – seemed, even to the policemen gathered in the dunes, partly deserved. Wilful, even. Why had they wandered from the track? Why had they taken off their clothes, at such an age, in such a place, if not to draw the devils and the monsters to the dunes? These victims had been accomplices in their own misadventure. If life was an express that hurtled between termini, then it had been their choice to quit the moving train before the final station had been reached and dash themselves against the flying stillness of the earth. They’d courted death. And death had been seduced. They wanted it, and so it came, a hock of granite in its obliging hand. The four young policemen disapproved, as all the neighbours and the colleagues would. These people had been irresponsible, to let themselves be robbed so easily of their ‘good deaths’. They should have laboured on until they’d reached the floating world of pain and age. They should have persevered and competed for the just rewards of death in bed.
The four young policemen, too close now to the pungent details of mortality to concentrate on anything but horrors of the flesh, were nauseous as they prepared to lift Celice and Joseph from the dunes. They coughed and gagged. They spat into the grass. They held their breath. Anything to keep the taste out of their mouths. This wasn’t worth the pay. They’d rather be on traffic duty, even. Nevertheless they had no choice but to tuck the two sheets under the corpses, one to Joseph’s left, the other to Celice’s right. Twisting their heads to take deep lungfuls of air, two men to a body, they had to kneel down on the grass, spread their fingers against the rocky outcrops of the skull, the shoulder, the hip, the knee, and pull these two unlikely lovers apart. On to the sheets. Into their boxes, the one too large, the other far too short. Under their lids, and out of sight. Now the policemen could stand up and sip the sweet sea air.
What happened to our only prayer, May no one come to lift his hand from her? The power of a prayer is only brief at best. For a moment only, his arm was stretched as he clung on. His skin adhered. But soon his hand departed from her, slipping from the ankle bone. His fingers were unwoven through the heavy air. The space between them grew and grew. His knuckles dragged along the ground. Her lower leg was left with just the indent of his kissing fingertip. Joseph’s body rolled towards the west. His wife went east. They came off the grass and on to cotton, then into wood-effect, then on to the flat bed of the sand jeep, along the beach and through the suburbs to the icy, sliding drawers of the city morgue, the coroner’s far room, amongst the suicides. Their bodies had been swept away, at last, by wind, by time, by chance. The continents could start to drift again and there was space in heaven for the shooting stars.
If there were any justice in the world, there would be thunder, now that our only prayer has been betrayed, now that the light of time has been reunited with sound, its faster twin. Or else, at least, the baritone should sing. Lift up your voice, the conscience of the land. Protest. Give us your arias of grief. But there’s no justice in the random and habitual parishes of death. The land is conscienceless. It has no ceremony. It cannot rise to the occasion, as people must, when there’s a funeral. The best that it could do was wash its heavy waters on the shore, and stir the dimes where Joseph and Celice had died with its grey wind and let the daylight pop and crack with smaller lives than theirs.
What was their final legacy? A rectangle of faded grass and, where the bodies had decayed for their six days of grace, a crushed and formless smudge of almost white where time and night had robbed the lissom of its green.
25
6.10 a.m.
So this has been a quivering of sorts for Joseph and Celice. A day lived forwards has retrieved itself by fleeing from the future to the past. The dead are resurrected and they he in bed at backward-running dawn, with first light of a perfect summer’s day ducking and then dropping from the sky into the east, into the morning night. Ahead of them, the almost thirty years of married life, the more than twenty years before they met. The shrinking and retreating universe has left their deaths behind. They are not mortal any more.
Celice, in her wide bed, the shutters down, the silence broken by her whistling nose, is sleeping with the joyful certainty that Tuesday comes. Two days, alone, off work, with no alarm to wake her up and nothing she must do to fill her time except play music on the stereo, patrol the garden with her secateurs, walk down across the park, if it is fine, towards the shops, walk back to take some coffee and a cake at the Pavilion, toss crumbs amongst the birds, be free.
She is not restless in the least, or dreaming. Even her wheezing does not wake her up or nag her into turning on her side. She remembers in her subconscious exactly where her open book was dropped the night before and that her watch has slipped on to the floor. She will not roll on to the tasselled page-marker and crease it. She knows it’s fallen there, by her shoulder, almost hidden by the pillow. If she wanted to she could even reach out in her sleep to find at once the crumpled tissue pushed into the tucking of the bed, to blow her nose or wipe her mouth or simply grip as a comforter.
The coverlet is pulled up to her chin. Her eyelids perch and shiver in the shadows of her face, pale resting moths. Her hair is spread across the pillow she once shared – and quivering will let her share again – with Syl and Joseph. If she is troubled or distressed by anything, if she is guilty or annoyed, or if her back and shoulders are painful, it does not show while she is asleep. She is too deep. She is too far away.
Joseph is the restless one, the fidgeter, in his more narrow bed in his untidy studio. He has a day of work ahead. Two meetings and a seminar. Two papers to prepare. A faculty report. Already he’s aware of where he’ll hurt that day. His knee is troublesome, even while he sleeps. His colon a
ches. He’s having bladder dreams. He’s almost praying for the day to come. Then he can piss the pain away and end the nightmare that has been haunting him since his last visit to the lavatory at twenty-five past four.
He is an old man in his dreams, racked with pain and naked in a pauper’s bed. His hands are stiff. His fingertips have lost their sensitivity. All he can feel, when he has found the energy to push his hands beneath the sheets to try to reach and soothe the pain, is scaly skin. He has become pie-crust. It is a bore to be so old, and so condemned. But that – great age – is what he always wanted for himself. So here’s his most sombre wish fulfilled.
His dream has moved him to the geriatric ward. The blankets and the screens. They’ve plugged him in; a monitor, a catheter, a drip. He hears the trolleys in the corridor, the purring journeys of the hearse along embedded routes to one of death’s ten thousand gates, and doctors saying, ‘Let the old man die. The world turns mouldy otherwise.’
He calls her name, Celice. He does not want to die alone. He wants the blessing of warm light and the caressing touch of family. He wants the blinds pulled up, the candles lit, the shadows falling on his bed, the mutters of his people crowding at the door. He wants to hear the sobbing of his daughter and his wife and feel their fingers wrapped around his shin. Please, let them through, he whispers to himself. Then let me doze until you hear my half-completed breath and see the sweet narcosis of no dreams.
The house itself is stretching, creaky in the rousing wash of dawn’s first grey. The sun’s forehead is peeking at the day, its face still indigo from sleep, its cloudy head uncombed and tumbling its vapour curls on to the skyline of the sea. The birds are in the gardens now, throwing out long shadows from the peaks of trees. The town’s first trams are nudging through the streets in search of love. The first alarms are sounding in a thousand homes. The water taps are opened and the gas fires lit. The smells are coffee, bread and soap. A crabbing boat is labouring along the coast, to meet the light half-way, or chase it back whence it came. And Joseph and Celice are in their rooms, spreadeagled in their beds. No matter how they toss and turn, no matter what they dream, no matter what the milky dark may whisper in their ears, its promises, its threats and its assurances, they can’t avoid the coming and receding days of grace.