Jim Crace - Being Dead

Celice did not try to cross the dunes. That was hard work, particularly in surfboots. And dunes are frightening for women on their own. Too many secret corridors and cul-de-sacs. She skirted round them and headed for an outcrop of thwarted rock at the near end of the bay, half covered by the tide and half revealed, where she could see the shadow of seaweed and where there should be bladder flies for her to study and collect. The milky morning light, which had been curdled by an unconvincing sun, diffused by mist and cloud, was turning purple grey. The once-blank sea was beryl green. The colours were unearthly, did not last, and within five minutes had been blown away.

Celice spent an hour lifting red wrack clear of the water and removing buoyancy sacs with a pair of scissors. She cut three sacs from each frond of weed, one from the base where it was anchored to the rock, one from the middle where the weed was at its widest, and one from the tip. She placed the samples as best she could — her hands were cold and slippery from seaweed lymph — in labelled bags with seawater and air. That afternoon, if she could stay awake, she’d burst each sac to check the distribution of the flies. Once she’d survived the week and had returned to the laboratory, she’d drop whatever flies or eggs she’d found in vials of fixing alcohol and submit them to the magnifier. But now she had only to dip her hands into the sea and fish for weed. Here was a world in reassuring microcosm. Zoology was a far kinder companion than cosmology. How much more heartening it was to contemplate and bring about the capture of a bladder fly, like some great god, than to view the huge and distant streakings of the sky. How greater than the death of stars was this wet universe, its grains of sand and liquid films, its mites and worms too small to see but swimming, feeding, dying, breathing in massive miniature. These tide pools were a meditation, too. She was surprised by how calm and fearless she had become, staring at the shallows as the colours clarified. And hungry, too. Now (she fooled herself) she wanted only a shower, breakfast and ten cigarettes.

Of course, Celice would have to walk back to the study house along the shore past that other massive miniature, the figure in the tide. Would he be singing to himself, like her? When she drew close enough to wave and call to him, the only singers were the egrets and the gulls. Joseph seemed to be doing nothing more demanding than paddling in the shallows, kicking water like an only child. He stopped, stood straight, looked self-conscious yet again, and kicked another loop of water out to sea. For her.

Joseph’s subject for his doctorate was the marine cricket — though, as he explained to Celice as soon as she had shown him her seaweed specimens, it was neither ocean-going nor a true cricket. Its unscientific local name — the sprayhopper — was far more accurate. He wished, he said, that scientists would take more care with names.

He walked into the soft sand, just beyond a breaking wave, to make his point. A hundred marine crickets leaped at his legs, clicking at the effort. Joseph caught one of the creatures as it hit his boots and cupped it in his hands to show her.

‘ Pseudogryllidus pelagicus ,’ she said, and was disappointed when he did not seem surprised.

‘It isn’t beautiful,’ he said. His sprayhopper was granite grey, the perfect camouflage, and motionless, its back legs tucked and flexed. ‘But look, Cecile.’

Joseph half blew, half whistled damp air on to the insect’s legs. It disappeared.

‘Its only trick. My only trick,’ said Joseph. At last he looked at her, full face; a shy-triumphant smile. Quite handsome in a bookish way. ‘Otherwise it is entirely dull. Like me.’ He picked another sprayhopper from off his trouser leg and offered it to Celice. ‘You try. I bet you can’t.’ He dropped it on her palm. She blew on it. It didn’t disappear. She touched it with her fingertip and blew again. It did not move.

‘It’s dead.’

‘You’ve got no spit,’ he said. ‘Watch this.’

Joseph whistled wetly on to Celice’s palm. His breath was moist. The sprayhopper did what it did best. It winged Celice’s cheek and dropped on to the sand, five metres up the beach.

‘Don’t worry about him,’ Joseph said, as Celice wiped his phlegm off her palm on her trouser leg. ‘They never injure themselves. You can drop them from the roof of the Institute, that’s thirty-seven metres, and they’ll survive. I’ve tried. Though they can’t fly. The wing cases are fake. They’re tough, these guys.’ He stopped. He laughed. He dropped his voice. ‘They’re almost lovable. What do you think, Cecile?’

‘Adorable.’

‘Exactly so.’

Lovable, adorable. The words were in the air. Joseph should have built on them. Instead, unused to flirting, he blushed and scuttled back into zoology. He had been silent yesterday. Now, eager that Celice should not walk off, he was talking like a hobby-laden kid.

Through ‘some function of convergent evolution’, he explained, his much-loved little beetle, its body shorter than a centimetre from end to end when fully grown, had developed the exaggeratedly long and sharply angled back legs of the cricket family, which allowed it, ‘at their sudden straightening’, to leap out of view and out of danger. He upturned another specimen and held it, pedalling air, between his thumb and forefinger. ‘You see? Its rear legs are more than twice its body length. They have to be. Look where it feeds.’

He showed Celice the waiting sprayhoppers lining up at the furthest reaches of the water, where it had left its spumy hem along the beach. At the next wave, triggered by the air pressure and the spray, they would take their sea-flushed prey — sand lice, salt nits — in their short pincers, flex their legs and fly five metres up the beach, beyond the highest tonguing of the tide. They were absurd.

‘It’s not the best of lives,’ he said. ‘It’s like living in the gutter of a motorway, feeding off tyre-mites, from speeding cars.’

‘The seashore’s better than a motorway. It’s lovely here. It’s beautiful,’ Celice replied. She’d never found a place more beautiful. She’d never been obsessed like this before.

Joseph shook his head. He’d always shake his head when she was fanciful. He’d shake his head at her for almost thirty years. ‘It’s beautiful for us. Zoologists have all the fun. They’ve no idea, these little guys. They only eat and hop and die. Even after dark. Whenever it’s high tide. Most of them only last a day or two. Kaput! The gulls and jetfish get them, if they escape the waves. It’s jump, jump, jump, and salt nits for the ones that survive. They couldn’t give a damn about the scenery.’ He picked crickets off his clothes and dropped them on the sand. ‘Sometimes I wonder what they’re for. They have no point.’

‘They seem to keep you entertained,’ she said.

‘Ah, yes. That’s what evolution has been for, to keep the zoologists happy.’

Joseph leaned across and took two crickets off her collar and another from her hair. This was the first romantic moment of their fife. He found a final cricket, caught in her clothes, and placed it on his palm. ‘Another go, Cecile,’ he said. ‘Blow wet.’

For the next thirty years Celice would mock Joseph for this first courting speech: ‘Blow wet, Cecile.’ She would perfect quite a comic anecdote to torture him. She reproduced his voice, the little lectures that he gave, his uninvited spit (their first exchange of body fluid), the uncorrected insult of her misheard name. She was Cecile for him until he was reproved later that evening by Festa.

‘Your father and his sprayhoppers were the most unromantic creatures I’d ever met,’ she’d say, when her daughter, then eight years old, first demanded to know how her parents had met. ‘I should have drowned him there and then. He could have kissed me if he’d wanted to. Instead, I got. ’ and here she would present her parody of Joseph ‘. “The marine cricket is a beetle, actually. Fully equipped. You see the double set of defunct wings, its antennae and its segmented abdomen? Not boring you, I hope. It’s not a cricket at all, in point of fact. I do wish scientists would take more care with names, Cecile.” ’ This was a story that their daughter loved.