Jim Crace - Being Dead

Actually, Celice had been oddly charmed at the time by Joseph’s revelations on Pseudogryllidus pelagicus and touched that he had bothered even to misremember her name. She was flattered that he had shared his studies with her. It felt as if they were exchanging intimacies.

But most of all she liked his playful trick of showing how the sprayhopper could launch itself at will, his will. This was so typical of him. This was the man’s appeal. He was a lurking conjuror. Not worth a second glance, you’d think, until he pulled his doves and rabbits from his sleeves, until he startled everyone with song, or challenged them with riddles, or sent a stone-dead insect flying through the air with just a puff of breath.

He was still pondering the sprayhoppers’ eccentricities when he and Celice began to walk, ankle deep in flushing water, amongst the living filters, the molluscs and the siphons, back along the shore towards the study house, for lunch. The selvage of the tide was cold and phlegmy. All along the shore the drenching sand was tossing crickets in the air.

1.20 p.m.

Joseph and Celice did not attempt to leave the ruins of the study house by the garden wall on their day off. They were too middle-aged and stiff for clambering. The flute bushes below the wall, through which Joseph (with Celice, belatedly, at his heels) had crashed all those years before, were now impenetrable. Besides, they understood too well the mantra of historians: the past can be revisited but only fools repeat it. Joseph, it’s true, would play the fool that afternoon if given half a chance. Why else was he walking with Celice towards the dunes except to be a bad historian? But he would not steer his wife across the wall and force her through the flute bushes towards their past just yet. That would be sentimental and transparent, as well as bruising. He was not fool enough to think their youth, in all its details, could be repeated quite so readily. Nor was he blind to Celice’s inner turbulence. The study house was not an easy place for her. Her mood was sombre, close to tears.

They took, instead, the unromantic route, through what had been the yard gate. The gate itself — wrought-iron irises, made in the 1920s, and valuable — had been stolen off its hinges years before. Most of the granite flagstones had been lifted from the yard. But the steps through the undergrowth were still in place, though collapsed in parts and slippery with vegetation. Celice held on to Joseph’s shoulders as they descended in single file towards the old farm road. It was the first time she’d volunteered a touch all day.

No doctor of zoology could be entirely unprepared, of course, for the changes on the coast. These two had read the newspaper reports and seen estate plans. They’d signed petitions to protest against the ‘luxury development of valued public grounds’. Yet, even without the intercession of architects and builders, they would not have expected the foreshore and its hinterland to remain exactly as it had once been. Zoologists have mantras of their own: change is the only constant; nothing in the universe is stable or inert; decay and growth are synonyms; a grain of sand is stronger and more durable than rock. If cities could be transformed by wear and tear and shifting tastes, despite their seeming permanence, then something as soft and passing as the landscape could be flattened and reshaped in just one night, by just one storm.

So they did not expect to discover the old farm road unchanged after thirty years of storms. It would not have a surfacing of manac husks or a garnishing of cattle dung. There were no working farms or fields any longer in the neighbourhood. The only crops these days were mortgages and weeds. It was most likely that the road would be pinched and overgrown like the magic and neglected lane of fairy tales. There would be an overhang of pines and heavy shade. Death’s ladder to the underworld. Their way might well be blocked by rotting trunks and thickets. Instead, they came out of the trees into a harsh and blinding sky, too tall and blue and punitive, above a shocking corridor of clearances. Construction had begun. The soil was stripped of trees in a swathe of flattened, tyre-pocked earth, twenty metres wide. Great stones and roots were sheared and pushed aside like dry moraines as if an earthen glacier had carved a passage through the land. These were the early, heartless makings of the service drive which, once surfaced, would give access to the lorries and the builders. Later, the drive would be upgraded to a civic motorway to serve the seven hundred homes of Salt Pines, the landscaped, gated enclave (‘convenient for both the airport and the city’) that would, within a year, begin to house the region’s richest and most nervous businessmen.

Celice and Joseph shook their heads. Such were the miracles of man. They walked a few metres along the intact edges of the corridor but then retraced their steps when they were blocked by mounds of debris. Where should they cross? Where was the public path? ‘Somebody should complain,’ said Joseph, knowing that the somebody would not be him. ‘Where are we supposed to go?’

They had to shade their eyes against the sun to search the far side of the clearance for a footpath sign or some clue of how they could proceed towards the coast. There was no remaining evidence of any of the summer cottages that had once lined the farm road. The string of small freshwater ponds, breached and punctured by the bulldozers, had either drained away or had been buried under soil. Occasionally, from the direction of the airport road, there was the harsh percussion of a dumper truck delivering its clinker or its gravel for the new highway, or granite aggregate for the building raft on which Salt Pines would float. The sand alone would not endure the weight of all that taste and money.

It was Celice, with better eyesight than her husband, who spotted the arrowed way-marker, tacked to a pine trunk, which showed the forward route of their disrupted path. But she and Joseph were nervous and reluctant to cross the open ground. They felt like trespassers. The clearance was intimidating, like some contested border from their youth. A DMZ, scorched clear to keep defectors in or out. A no man’s land, to hold the easts and wests, the norths and souths apart. The Germanys and the Koreas. The Vietnams. It looked as if there ought to be guard turrets, land mines, Alsatian dogs and barbed tripwire. There were, in fact, two planes above the trees; one high, circling airliner and, at five hundred metres, a single-engined trainer, snooping directly overhead and looking as if it might release at any time a bomb, a canister of gas, a parachutist. Even if Joseph and Celice were not spotted by the plane, snipers would pick them off if they were mad enough to walk out from the undergrowth. Only animals were safe. Wood crows and pickerlings hopped across the naked soil. Rats ran along the flooded lorry ruts to feed on roots and bulbs. Two hispid buzzards — lovers of the open motorway — sat waiting in the pine tops for the carnage that would come. Celice did not regard the clearance as a metaphor, a thick and earthy line between their futures and their pasts. She merely was depressed by what they’d found and would have turned around and gone back home if she had had the choice. If her husband hadn’t been so keen to reach the coast, she would have died in bed.

Joseph and Celice began their trespasses. The wind and sun had dried and baked the surface of the soil above soft, ankle-deep mud, but that top layer was as thin and friable as pie crust, too thin to support two heavy mammals. They left deep footsteps in the soil, and the soil made its mark, too, on their shoes and on the bottoms of their trousers. ‘Now what else?’ remarked Celice, meaning that there could be worse ahead. They might spend the afternoon wading through the mud of endless building sites. Their outing — post study house — had not begun well.