Jim Crace - Being Dead

It was Fire not Fish that put an end to Festa. Some water might have saved her life.

Early, on her fifth day of research, the study house was hardly visible. A damp sea mist had dug more deeply into the land than usual. It had crossed the high, absorbent peaks of the inner dunes, depositing its slightly brackish dew into the sweet-water ponds and puffing its grey breath against the veranda’s clammy glass.

Inside, at seven in the morning, the hopeful doctors were all sleeping, even Celice. Their thesis tutor had visited the evening before for dinner and had expressed his broad approval of their field researches, if not their cooking. That night, when he had gone back to the Institute, they celebrated with four bottles of Van Paña and a drunken game of charades. They’d had to mime the names of animals. Joseph guessed the sprayhopper as soon as Celice puffed across her palm at him, like someone blowing kisses. The others seemed to take it as the natural order of the universe that Joseph and Celice would become attached, though they neither touched nor paid excessive attention to each other. Odd sticks to odd; that was the formula. The three men flirted only with Festa. In fact, at two in the morning, when everyone else had gone to bed and sleep, Festa and the ornithologist were still in the common room, kissing noisily.

It must have been one of those two, Joseph thought, who’d placed the kerosene lamp underneath the table and turned the flame down to its lowest setting for a more romantic light, perhaps, then left it burning through the night. He wasn’t even sure if he’d imagined it. When he’d got up at seven thirty the common room was almost bright with natural light. The feeble kerosene flame would not have been especially noticeable. It might, in fact, have been already dead. He’d only half noticed it before rushing out to circumnavigate the house and stand on the open ground outside the veranda waiting for Celice. Joseph wasn’t sure if there was any smell from charring wood. He should, he knew, have checked the lamp and turned it out if it was on, or moved it somewhere safe away from wood before he left the study house. ‘Maybe, even if I’d definitely seen a flame I’d not have turned it out,’ he admitted to Celice, years later, to comfort her. He was not the sort to interfere. He was preoccupied. Thank heavens that he didn’t say, ‘I’m far too short to play with fire.’

Celice had not seen anything, no fight, no lamp. She’d only seen Sprayhopper Man, waiting outside for her as she’d asked (‘instructed’ was the truer word, he’d say), half consumed by mist and half obscured by ochred glass.

The night before, Joseph had admitted — drink talks — that he’d spied on her through the veranda windows. Such an arousing liberty, Celice had thought, and one that she was impatient to repeat. ‘Come for me in the morning,’ she had said, when they had gone back to their beds. Indeed, he’d come for her, come into her, come with her a dozen times that night, in dreams. He’d sung for her. He’d played piano on the bone-keys of her spine. He’d held her in his palm and breathed on her and she had flexed and sprung her endless legs for him and tumbled in the air.

So when she saw him standing in the garden, beyond the glass, Celice was hungry to be loved. She did not try to hide herself, nor did she try to show herself. She just pulled down the sleeping-bag and stood up, naked on the mattress, as if she didn’t know that she had purposefully placed him there to watch her tug her nightshirt by its shoulders high above her head. For a few seconds, she was blinded by material and Joseph was enlightened on how her body looked. The pear. The pigeon. And the truth of it. The wisp and tuft of body hair. Her shoulders and her modest breasts. Her squabby hips. Her virtues and her blemishes. When her head and hair sprang out again into the light she half expected to find Joseph with his nose pressed to the glass. But — and this was touching and oddly arousing too — he had stayed exactly where he was, a soft-edged figure in the mist. She dressed for him. A shirt, no brassière. Some underclothes. Jumper, trousers, socks and walking boots. She put her fingers through her hair, a mermaid’s comb, and waved at him. For Celice this was the high point of their love.

How long had Festa been awake and watching her? (She’d never have the chance to ask.) But while Celice was sitting on her mattress tying her shoelaces, her room-mate suddenly sat up in her sleeping-bag, bleary-eyed and pastry-faced, and begged for one of Celice’s cigarettes. ‘I’m feeling awful,’ she said, and gave her irritating laugh. ‘My mouth’s a bird’s cage.’

‘I’m not surprised.’ Celice lit two cigarettes and handed one to Festa. ‘Go back to sleep,’ she said. ‘I’m going down to the bay with Joseph.’

‘You work too hard.’ It would seem that Festa hadn’t noticed the garden spy, thank goodness. ‘Are you going to make some coffee?’

‘I’m leaving now. We want to catch the tides,’ she lied. ‘I’ll put the water on.’

That’s exactly what she’d done. She had half noticed the lamp, she’d say, either underneath the common-room table or on top of it. She wasn’t sure. She had, she thought, taken her still burning cigarette with her into the common room. It was just possible that she had left it standing on its end on the veranda floor. That was her habit, balancing a narrow cigarette to knit its thinning scarf of smoke while she was busy doing something else. Or — so many oversights, so many ways to fail — she might have left the cigarette standing on the table by the sink while she splashed her face and filled the saucepan with water for Festa’s coffee. Or she might have stubbed the cigarette out in the sink. She was too hurried to take much notice. Two things were certain. When she left the study house on this, her grimmest day, Festa was half asleep and smoking in her bed. And there was a naked light below the saucepan on the unattended hob.

Here, then, were several possibilities. There was no evidence to say which one occurred. The study house — all wood and glass — was too badly burned for autopsies. The unextinguished lamp, left to burn all night and left to burn by Joseph, too, as he went out that morning, finally gave purchase to a second flame on the underside of the table in the common room. The wood had blackened, charred and finally surrendered to combustion. The flame was upside down and would not have burned for long if this had been a modern table, its polish and its lacquers emasculated by the safety rules of modern manufacturing. The timber of this table had been sealed by combustible varnishes, which were too old to liquefy when heated, but dried instead, went scaly, lifted from the wood in flakes and dunes, and let the flames migrate across the table’s underside.

Or else the unwatched hob, in a sleeping house, boiled off the water in the coffee pan until the pan itself began to cook. Its bottom would have enamelled first, bright greys and blues. Then the gas flames would have begun to spread. They’d have licked the sides and tongued the plastic handle of the pan. Pan plastic doesn’t melt. It flares. And if the heat becomes intolerable it turns the energy it cannot cope with into squibby detonations, which crack and spring with flames. The pan, unsteadied by the discharges, could have fallen off the hob and spread its molten metals on the boards.

Or maybe one of those nicely balanced cigarettes, which Celice might have left burning on the table by the sink, on the veranda floor, had toppled over to smoulder on the splintered wood in its sweet time. Or Festa might have fallen back to sleep and dropped her own kingsize, her first gasp of the day, on to her mattress to bake herself in man-made flaming fibres. Or she might have stumbled out to make her coffee from the boiling water and caught the lamp beneath the table with a toe on her way back to bed. The spilt kerosene would race across the floor. So would its chasing flame. Or else. Or anything. Or something different. The dead don’t speak. It could have started in a thousand ways.