Jim Crace - Being Dead

But once they’d reached the continuing path and had made their way through the remaining forest pines, salt marshes and lagoons (perfect for the planned golf-course: golf balls float best in brackish water) and had cleaned their shoes by climbing in the loose sand of the first dune ridge, all evidence of Salt Pines disappeared. From the summit of the dunes the wounds and scars were masked by trees. Even the clank of trucks and dumpers was absorbed. The training plane had gone elsewhere. Here was their first view of the coast; the wine-deep, sad, narcotic sea.

They slid down the sand scree to the coastal plain, which sloped towards the scrubshore. Beyond were the dunefields of Baritone Bay. The plain was hardly touched, as yet, by progress or ‘landscaping’. There would be a resort village there in time, they knew. A marina, too, and a granite esplanade with shorefront restaurants and cycle tracks. But these would not be started until, phase one, the houses were complete and there were influential residents to overcome the reservations of the more sentimental town governors. Someone had built a small stone jetty, with a boat winch at the top. It ran from the coastal track, across the shore, to the low-water mark. That was something new since their last visit together. And, where once there had been natural barriers of shore grass and a prairie of low vegetation, there were now sand fences to secure the beach, and lines of erosion bags arranged in chevrons to protect against shoreface recession. It seemed, as well, from the way the tides were running, that the disposition of the offshore spits and shoals, bars and channels had been redesigned. Friction and accretion, flooding, overwash and deposition had made fresh patterns. The ocean has a thousand crafts.

Fifty metres offshore there was a new, elongated ridge of sand, which broke the waves and robbed the plunging breakers — their crest curls wrapped round tubes of air, like brandy snaps — of their dramatic energy. They reached the beach, emasculated and at a lesser angle.

At the far end, where Joseph had once sent phlegmy — and seductive — crickets flying, the shore had lost its shallow gradient to thirty years of spilling and collapsing seas. The waves had pushed the sand higher up the beach and dumped a steep and arching shelf of pebbles and shells.

‘They’ll not like that,’ said Joseph.

This could be disappointing. They almost ran along the whole length of the beach, from west to east, looking at the hem of breaking waves, hunting for sprayhoppers in the tide’s spumy residues, turning the piles of coal shells with their shoes to disturb any living fugitives. But nothing jumped for them, even though they’d timed their visit perfectly. The tide was high and running in. They should be ankle deep in crickets.

‘Not even one,’ said Celice.

‘One’s not enough. One never lasts.’

Joseph was not entirely surprised. As soon as he had seen the steepened disposition of the shore he knew conditions would be wrong for Pseudogryllidus pelagicus . He’d predicted as much in his long-forgotten doctoral thesis (grandiloquently titled Patience and Blind Chance: A Natural History of the Sprayhopper ). They were so specialized and so discriminating that they would be unable to adapt quickly enough to the fickle disposition of the waves. Blind chance had brought bad luck. ‘Too steep for them,’ he said. ‘They need a good flat beach with running tides. That’s life.’

That’s life, indeed. But it had always been his private fancy that crickets, hoppers and beetles would withstand anything that life could toss at them. They were the grand survivors of the natural world. They were the nimblest of all insects. They were better-equipped than almost any other creature to endure extreme conditions. One had only to keep up with reports in the Entomology to know that there were furnace beetles, impervious to glowing coals. There were polar crickets, which lived in permafrost, and blind cavehoppers, which flourished on the limescaled rims of underground pools and listened for their tiny prey through four ears mounted on their knees. There were bugs that feasted on the hot and sticky gas tars at the back of cookers, or navigated sewerage pipes, or chewed electric cables.

There was even a specialist cicada in South America ( Entomology , vol. CXXI / 27) that fed and bred in diesel engines. It lived on emulsified fuel. Its common name? The grease monkey. It had first been identified in the 1970s in Ecuador. It was wingless, with short legs, designed for clinging, not for mobility. But it had travelled north and south, two thousand miles in less than twenty years, by diesel lorry and diesel train. Mechanical migration. It was now common in Mexico City and Brazil. Single specimens had turned up in engine blocks in Dallas scrapyards. Nature’s stories are the best, Joseph often said. ‘Except when you are telling them,’ his wife replied.

‘Whatever philosophical claims we might make for ourselves, human kind is only marginal. We hardly count in the natural orders of zoology. We’ll not be missed,’ Joseph, in a rare display of scientific passion, had told a student at the Institute when she had been too dismissive of the earth’s smaller beings. ‘They might not have a sense of self, like us. Or memory. Or hope. Or consciences. Or fear of death. They might not know how strong and wonderful they are. But when every human being in the world has perished, and all our sewerage pipes and gas cookers and diesel engines have fossilized, there will still be insects. Take my word. Flourishing, evolving, specializing insects.’ Here he resurrected his best line from his student thesis. ‘There will still be sprayhoppers. snatching their sustenance from the pincers of the waves.’

Even now, with no sprayhoppers to be seen, the doctor did not doubt his general accuracy. On countless other, more mildly sloping beaches of the coast there would be many active colonies. He’d seen them himself, many times in recent years, on the Mu and at Tiger Crab Edge. It made no difference that he was not there today to witness them or endow them with a consciousness. (‘They couldn’t give a damn about the scenery, these little chaps.’) It was still a disappointment, though, to find that, on this shore at least, Pseudogryllidus pelagicus had disappeared.

Joseph’s disappointment was not wholly scientific, despite his long-term fondness for the creatures and their connivance in his doctorate. The fantasy that he had nurtured since he’d watched Celice in bed that morning demanded sprayhoppers. They were his Valentine. They were his single rose. They were erotica. If he were to place Celice back amongst the dunes at Baritone Bay where they had once made love, so memorably, so hauntingly, so awkwardly, then first he had to lure her to the beach. So far, achieved. Though by a painful route. But then he needed some strategy more serpentine to take her from the melancholy of the charred remains into the clutching frolic of his arms. He’d need a Venus ladder of deceit, step over step. Something that was more discreet than kissing her or bursting into that old song she had loved, the words of which he could hardly recall. He’d thought the sprayhoppers would be his collaborators once again. He’d pick some off her white T-shirt, out of her hair, blow once more into her hand, set the little creatures flying through the air, and then, perhaps (an innocent progression), drop his spaniel tongue on to her open palm. (‘Another go. Blow wet.’) Would she then allow his hand to push into her black wool coat?

But now unfeeling nature had thrown up a beach too steep for Valentines. This Venus ladder had had its middle rung removed. Time, though, had not destroyed the light. The universe had not expanded quite so fast. Nor had it robbed the spreading breakers of their sorcery. His wife, ahead of him, calf deep, her trousers up around her knees, was burnished, thinned and immatured by sunshine bouncing off the sea, the silver flattered by the gold. A fillet of her hair fell loose across her face, picked up and dropped by a conspiring breeze. A nape of neck. The waist-enhancing sacados. The tugging whiteness of her underclothes. The bottoms of her trousers wet with sea. A woman dressed in black and white; a landscape dressed in blue. No wonder Joseph was enhanced. Had Celice looked round at what was dogging her, she’d have as usual to give its Latin name as homo erectus or homo semens . Its common name bone slave or love-gone-wild or thrall.