Jim Crace - Being Dead

But when neither of her parents picked up the phone, Syl was more irritated than relieved. The secretary’s imperious message on the answer-phone (‘Do call back tomorrow morning after nine’) had reached into her life without invitation and nudged it. She was rocked. Of course her parents were not visiting. They’d not been asked. They’d never seen her apartment. And if they did show up to nose around, they’d not like what they’d find, her waitressing, her shaven head, her unmade bed, her disregard for everything, her clothes, particularly her unembarrassed appetite for men. Why not take lovers, given half the chance? Why not work through the string sections and then the brass? You can’t make mayhem when you’re dead.

So Syl wasn’t pleased not to have reached her parents. She was six hundred kilometres away from home and yet was asked to take responsibility for a problem that her father’s secretary and brain-box colleagues at the Institute had evidently failed to solve. Her parents hadn’t shown up for work. So? What was she expected to do at this great distance, in the middle of the night? Divine for them with a magic needle and a map?

Syl’s irritation, though, could not entirely mask an intuitive disquiet. She sensed disruption at the gate. She was the sort herself not to show up, to let her colleagues down, to stay out late, to cheat on friends and debts, to keep no one informed, to let the phone sing to itself, but not her parents. They did not stay out at all at night. They never had. They were day birds, clucking hens, efficient, punctual, timid, dull. Sober as milk. Impossible to be with for more than an hour without succumbing to a rage.

She dialled again. They ought to be at home and picking up one of the phones. She let it ring and hunted for another drink and something sweet to eat. Her concern was not yet for her parents’ welfare. It was mainly for herself, her hard-fought liberty. Breaking free to live a life without accomplishments so far away from them had not been easily achieved. She didn’t want to be tugged back into their rigid, clerkish lives, that too-close ocean smell, or even made to see the family house, those same old rooms, those same old books, those meals. If they would answer now, then Syl was safe. If they did not, she’d have to turn the hourglass and let the sands run back towards her past.

She tried their mobile phone, while she sat on the lavatory with the door open, a can of Chevron beer in her hand and with her own phone, chirruping on its extended lead, between her feet, in the cradle of her knickers. The moonlit bay was at the far end of the line. If only owls and bats could answer phones.

Syl waited for an hour — twelve tracks of a Ruffian Rock CD; ten irate wall knocks from the woken man next door — and phoned again, both phones, the house and then the dunes. She was both startled and relieved to hear at last the mobile phone respond, and then a voice. A woman’s voice. But her relief was short-lived. She’d only reached the company’s recorded message, ‘The user’s phone is disconnected. Please try again later.’ The far-end battery, damp and exhausted by more than two days of stand-by, had failed at last. Try as she might, their daughter could not get the trilling phone again. It was maddening — though appropriate emotionally. ‘Not getting through’: that had been the story of Syl’s relationship with her parents since she’d left home. Her phone could ring a thousand times and not begin to break into their silences.

Instead she phoned the MetroGnome. The owners had gone home, of course, and just as well. She left a message, aided by the wine and beer she’d drunk. She’d retired from waitressing, she said. They’d have to find another girl. She didn’t want to slave at tables any more. She had some better things to do. Their food was poisonous. So were the clients. The MetroGnome was such a stupid name. ‘Don’t phone,’ she added, pointlessly. ‘I’m not even here. I’m gone. ’ she didn’t want to add ‘. back home.’

That night, Syl’s dreams were wild and accurate. Beer dreams. She even dreamed of death and nudity — the pauper’s Freud. Her parents’ bodies had been found, bolt upright in their car. Two heart-attacks. In one dream they’d been driving when they died and the car had left the road, hovered in midair, burst into flames. Freeze-frame. A death by Hollywood. In others, Joseph and Celice were blind behind the wheel. They had been found reduced to ash and smoke. They had been found ten metres from the car, thrown clear, a message for their daughter in their hands: ‘We were so disappointed by your life.’ They had been found strapped in their seats, with no clothes on, unmarked. They were like storm-tossed, stranded seals, washed in the shallows of the sea, drowned by the roar of waves and motor-cars.

Syl had to shake herself awake. But when she fell asleep again, ten minutes later, she was pestered by the same recurring dreams, the flying car, the petrol flames, the naked couple blanketed by windscreen glass and bricks and sea. The more she slept the more her parents’ public nakedness would play its comic, unforgiving part.

But it was telephones that really troubled her. In these nightmares the telephone was just beyond their reach, on the rear seat of the car or at the bottom of her mother’s bag. Or else the telephone was in their hands but not responding to their stabbing fingers. Nothing they could do would stop the ringing or put them through. Or else the telephone was melting in the heat, or sinking, twenty metres down.

In other dreams, it was Syl’s own phone that sounded. It seemed to wake her up but was not ringing when she reached for it. As soon as she dropped back to sleep it rang again. Or it was ringing in the hall outside the bedroom Syl had had when she was small. If only she could get to it in time, if only she were tall and brave enough to reach the phone she’d hear her parents talking from their mobile begging for her help. ‘Say where you are,’ she said. But all she heard was, ‘Try again. Please try again.’ Her parents’ pulses failed. Their batteries expired, and they were disconnected from her calls.

The waking dream, sidelit by dawn: her father phoned his daughter in the final moments of his life. Had she been drinking, he wanted to know. What was she doing with her life? What books? What plans? When could they hope to see her in the flesh? He could not say exactly where he was.

By Friday dawn the rain was back, not Wednesday’s undramatic, blood-releasing drizzle but lashing downpours. Its moisture was so ambient and insinuating that it found its way into the tightest wallets of the town and made the banknotes damp. This rain was bruising, bouncing, saline. It crusted all the cars with rust. It silvered Joseph and Celice.

In fact, Rusty City used to be the tourist nickname for the town in their student days. Or Wetropolis. Summer heat, trapped by the surrounding rim of dead volcanoes, sucked up the sea — still does, though no one comes to see it any more — and spread it thinly through the streets. Even in the winter there were fogs and frets, lasting until dusk, lasting sometimes weeks on end. There was, and is, a metre and a half of rain each year. Up to Celice’s chin and up to Joseph’s eyes. And constant windborne spray. ‘The windscreen wipers must persist with their condolences across the weeping windows of our cars even when there is no rain,’ Mondazy wrote (the Academic Mentor’s perfect epitaph), in the years when the town and coast were wild enough to attract visitors. Tourists could buy postcards of traffic in the rain, with his words printed underneath.

Sometimes, as now, there were tidal floods. But in those days there were no concrete breaks and barriers to keep the water back. The floods would chase along the lower town with street deliveries of wrack, eelgrass and crabs. We have fins, the citizens would boast. Our girls have seaweed ribbons in their hair, and gills.