Jim Crace - Being Dead

‘Let’s go. On to Baritone,’ her husband said, once they had walked the whole length of the beach and she was turning to retrace their route. He spoke as lightly as he could, blocking her. He tugged her jacket lapels.

‘What for?’ Celice raised an eyebrow. Her husband was too breathless and attentive. She didn’t need a cricket on her palm to read his mind.

‘I think the tides might run more lightly there,’ he said. ‘We have to see at least one sprayhopper now that we’ve driven out. There has to be a colony on the bay. Surely.’

‘We have to? Why the we? You go. Anyway, it’s rocky on the bay. You’ve less chance finding any there than here.’ Celice’s feet and back were aching. Her shoulders and her wrists were stiff. Her heart was full of Festa. She would rather sit down on the shelf of shells and pebbles and watch the breakers for the afternoon than risk the vagaries of sex. But Joseph tugged her by the sleeve. She hated that. ‘Come on,’ he repeated. ‘We’ll have our picnic there. Out of the wind. Who knows? We might persuade the dunes to sing.’

‘There is no wind.’

For once the air above the bay was crystal clear, no clouds to moan about, and even a visible horizon, eye-liner blue, where usually the trading of the ocean and the sky produced a grey mist. Good weather brings bad luck, as everybody knows. Misfortune is a hawk, most likely to surprise us when the visibility is good. Death likes blue skies. Fine weather loves a funeral. Wise, non-scientific folk would stay indoors on days like that, not walk along the coast, beyond the shelter even of a tree. The doctors of zoology were ill-informed. They didn’t understand the rigours of the natural world. If sprayhoppers could not survive the changes on the coast, then how and why should they?

On Thursday at eleven in the morning, Celice and Joseph’s mobile phone rang in the pocket of her jacket. Its body-smothered pulse was hardly audible. Insects could be louder and more persistent. Its batteries were running down. The ringing sent a feeding gull into the air, protesting at its interrupted meal with downward flagging wings, and half expecting to discover the rare treat of a fat cicada. It flapped and dithered above the corpses only for a moment. By the fourth trill of the phone the gull had dropped again on to Celice’s abdomen and was tugging at the lace of skin it had already picked and loosened. Her skin was tough. In two days she had lost her moistness and her elasticity.

The caller, Joseph’s secretary, let the mobile ring ten times — she was meticulous — then ten times more before she put her handset down. It was baffling and annoying that her boss had not shown up at the curriculum meeting that he himself had convened at the Institute for ten o’clock that morning. She’d already phoned his home and got no reply. She’d attempted to reach his wife, the mystical Celice, at the university. Also missing, from her seminar for senior biologists. Joseph’s secretary knew that she should not try to contact him on his mobile phone, except for ‘urgent things’. That had been his clear instruction. Well, this had been urgent. And alarming. Still was. The curriculum committee, including two vexed professors, a governor and a busy-bored official from the Education Consulate, all equally competitive in their impatience, had been demanding ‘updates’ and explanations by the minute. Now that she had failed to get an answer even from the mobile, all she could provide for the doctor’s guests, as they grew stern and restless in the conference room, was coffee and apologies. It was not like the doctor to be late or absent, she said. Ill-mannered, yes (she didn’t say). Remote. Distracted. But never late. You could always rely on his prompt and taciturn presence at meetings. At half past ten, at her suggestion, the committee drifted off, peeving and frowning at the secretary as they passed through her room to collect their coats and umbrellas. It was a rare event: the opportunity to tut at the director of the Institute without any fear of his uncompromising response.

The secretary had her usual rota of tasks to take her mind off the disruptions of her day. There were the departmental diaries to arrange, memos to be typed and sent, letters to be filed or redirected, redundancies to organize. Normally she’d activate the divert on the office phone till lunch so she could concentrate on all the paperwork and take grim pleasure in her unavailability. But cutting off her phone that day, she felt, wasn’t politic. At worst it could be taken as a snub towards her absent boss.

When she had tried to reach him on the phone, she had not sensed the ringing of an empty room. In her many years of making calls she’d developed the instinct for telling from the far end resonance if there was anybody there, not answering, ignoring her. There had been someone there, not answering, she’d thought, when she’d dialled the doctor’s mobile. Its arpeggio was no dead end. Somebody heard the ringing, could not reach the phone, was in the bath, or still in bed, or on the toilet stool. And would phone back.

Now every time her own phone rang she expected it to be the doctor, though part of her expected, too, a version of the phone call her colleague at the university had received the month before. That secretary’s boss, the Academic Mentor, would never show up at her desk again, embarrassed by the typing and phone calls that he caused. He’d killed himself. Joseph’s secretary could not shake from her head the image — much discussed amongst the office staff — of the body in the car, the hose, the rain, the radio.

She dialled the doctor’s home and mobile phones again at midday and when she came back from lunch at two o’clock, first in sets of twenty rings and then a more determined thirty. Still no reply and still no messages of explanation or apology on her answerphone, though both Joseph and Celice had full timetables during the afternoon. The secretary would not panic yet. All in good time. There’d be an explanation, probably. Some muddle-up of messages, her fault — at least, she always was expected to absorb the blame. A scrambled or a misdelivered fax. An unavoidable diversion. A bungle over dates. The doctor had been away for two days anyway, on ‘fieldwork’, she’d been told. Some delay was not entirely surprising. There’d been a little accident; the doctor was a clumsy man. His car had let him down, perhaps. It would be foolish — and the doctor would be embarrassed — if she were to phone the hospitals just yet. Or contact the police on such a modest pretext. Four hours? That was nothing. Not in a week when there’d been sunshine. It was not their job, they’d say, to round up absentees.

At ten to six that evening, now anxious beyond reason for the welfare of a man she did not even like, Joseph’s secretary phoned his daughter, Syl, at her apartment, six hundred kilometres from the coast. An answering-machine. Had everybody in that family disappeared? She left as calm a message as she could, ‘Are your parents visiting? We were expecting them today,’ and ended, ‘It’s nothing, obviously. They’ve not got home from where they’ve been. But do call back tomorrow morning after nine, if you have any word of them. Or I’ll phone you.’

Syl was a waitress at a studio restaurant. The MetroGnome, next to the concert hall. She was ‘the bald and brittle one’, half liked, half feared by both her colleagues and the customers, mostly musicians. She was the sort they’d overtip, dismiss as rude, then try to date.

She called her parents after midnight when she returned from work, too full of wine to put it off till morning. In fact, she’d never phone them unless she was fortified with wine or beer. She wouldn’t chance the call if she had taken bouncers, swallowed Eden pills or smoked a joint. Bad shit, loose tongue. But drink always sweetened her. She needed to be sweet to risk her parents’ anxious and invasive voices. She left the phone unattended on the rug and let it ring for several minutes to give one of them time to wake and stumble out of bed. Her father, normally, should still be up and reading at that hour. Her mother was the sleeper. Syl allowed him time to reach the end of his page, find his house shoes, make a meal of walking to the passageway. She crossed her fingers for him not to answer. He was always at his most reproachful after midnight. Why was she calling so late? Had she been drinking? (Yes, yes, why not?) What was she reading now? What was she doing with her life? (Not wasting it on books. Not rusting in a lifeless town.) It’s been six months. When could they expect to see her in the flesh? (Don’t even ask. Don’t bully me. I hate the coast.)