Jim Crace - Being Dead

The threshold of the house was swollen. The front door jammed, as ever, and Syl had to show her driver where to push to ease it open. The darkness of the house fell out into the darkness of the street. She called out cheerily from the open doorway, switching on the porch, the landing and the stairway lights, one at a time. Not panicking. They did not want to alarm anyone, particularly themselves, if anyone was there. She filled the empty spaces with her father in his dressing-gown, her mother crossing the upper landing with her hair wrapped in a towel. She even hoped to hear them say, ‘You’re late.’

No sound, except the drumming of the rain and those disgruntled mutterings that houses always make when lights come on.

Otherwise, everything seemed as it had always seemed, the must of books, the jackets hung across the banisters, the line of little country rugs along the wooden floor on which she’d loved to slide and ride when she was small, the pile of shoes, the pile of magazines, the bicycle her mother never used, the shadow-loving potted fern, the frame of family photographs, the clean and cooking smell of placid lives. Syl gathered up the mail from the floor and stacked it on the bottom stair. Then, holding on to Geo’s jacket like a child, she started looking in the rooms. Downstairs first. The living room. The kitchen. The clutter room. The garden studio. The storage cupboard. No signs of life. Not even moths or mice. And then the upper floor.

Syl was most fearful when they reached the closed door of her mother’s bedroom. Closed doors were always ominous, but when her mother’s door was closed it meant, Do Not Disturb, I have a migraine, or I’m sleeping; I’m lying in the dark with Father in my arms; I’m in a temper, let me be; I am cocooned.

Syl hesitated. She even knocked, but then went in behind the taxi driver. In the few split seconds before Geo found the lamp switch and the room was snapped alive by light, she still had time to mistake the twisted shadows and misread the grey shapes on the bed.

Now, at last, there was some evidence of recent life. There was an almost empty tea-glass and a dish, the fruit rinds harvested by ants and sugar flies, on the bedside table. Her mother’s cotton nightdress lay across the pillow. The bed was still unmade. One of the windows was wide open and two days of intermittent rain, dripping from the blinds, had made a wet patch on the floorboards and the rug. The bedclothes and the coverlet were damp. A book — Calvino’s Antonyms — was on the floor. Another — The Goatherd’s Ancient Wisdom , which she’d bought her father for his birthday, mostly to annoy him — was on the dresser under a pot of orange house spurge.

Their wedding photograph was on the wall. Syl had looked at it a thousand times before. Her parents seemed so old in it, even though they had only been in their twenties. Her age now. They were not flattered by the wedding suits or by the hard light of the flash. She stared at it as if their faces would reveal a clue. Do faces in a photograph transform on death? Were their smiles a little more fixed and thinner now, as if their mouths had reached the point beyond which there is no going on?

The studio bed in her father’s room was unmade, too.

Syl checked her parents’ desks and the telephone table, but they hadn’t left a note of explanation for their absence. Why would they? And there was nothing on the memo pad to suggest where they had gone, no names or dates or numbers. She could not find the mobile phone, either, though she turned back all the cushions on the chairs, its usual hiding-place. They must have it with them, wherever that was. She went to see if their suitcases had been packed and taken. They had not. She opened all the mail. No clues. Just junk and bills.

Finally, while Geo made coffee for them both, Syl went outside, through the garden studio and down the slippy wooden steps. Garden rain’s more welcoming and warmer than the rain in streets. She’d left every light on in the house so the deck and yard were brightly illuminated. The remains of her father’s last breakfast were still on the tray next to his garden chair. His cup and saucer were filled with rain. The wooden veneer on the tray had swollen, split and lifted. Some stiffened mango peel and a mango stone were scattered on the boards. The peeling-knife had rust along its blade and tiny spiders nesting in the hollow of its clasp. All that remained of a cheese brioche was some glazed dough stuck to its wrapper. The birds had finished off the rest.

Syl was draining water off the tray when Geo called. Her coffee had been poured.

‘Anything?’ he asked, looking down on to the deck.

She shook her head. ‘What’s that? Underneath the chair.’

Her father’s ledger. It was soaked, the pages corrugated by the damp, the ink reduced to winter pinks and blues. Peach blue, like Chinese porcelain.

‘His day book.’ That was unlike her father, to let a book get wet, particularly this one.

‘What was the last date he filled in?’ asked Geo. The architect was brighter than he looked.

She tried to turn the pages but they tore like cotton wool. ‘It’s far too wet to read.’

‘What will you do?’

‘I’ll put it in the airing room to dry.’

‘No, what will you do. you know, to find out where they’ve gone?’

‘I’ve no idea. What should I do? I’m not the police. What would you do?’ She thought her tone of voice made it clear that he should not reply.

‘You’ll have to ask the neighbours what they know. That’s first. Call up your relatives. Have you got any brothers or sisters?’

‘No. I’ve only got an uncle left. And about a hundred second cousins. Look, let me work it out. ’

‘Phone the uncle. He might have heard from them.’

‘He’s in New York. I haven’t seen him since I was about six. He and my father haven’t talked for years. Any other inspirations?’

‘Well, phone their friends.’

Syl shrugged. She couldn’t put a name to any of their friends. She lived her life, not theirs.

‘You’ll have to check the hospitals, then. I’m sorry, but the city morgue as well. And go down to the police. Ask them to look out for the missing car. What’s wrong?’

Syl made a face at him. She hated lists. She hated Things to Do. How many days of visits would that be? How much in pirate taxi fares?

‘I’ll need a taxi, then, for all your bright ideas,’ she said.

‘There’s one outside.’

‘I’m broke.’

‘OK. I don’t always have to charge. Not friends. It’s Saturday tomorrow. I’m free to please myself.’ He concentrated on his coffee-cup. He did not want to catch her eye, although he was content to stand out of the rain and watch the water spread across her shaved head and plaster her shirt across her breasts.

‘That’s good, my ferryman, my pheromone,’ she said. She’d let him stay. He was the interfering sort who’d do exactly what he was told. Here, in another life, would be a fantasy come true, a chauffeur on command, a menial, a parlourman.

‘How free are you to stay the night with me? I hate this house.’

They spent the night in her own bedroom — or, at least, the room that once was hers — forced together by the narrow mattress and the single sheets. Her parents had decorated since she’d left and had taken down the galaxies of luminous stars that she had stuck on the once blue ceiling. Now the Sky at Night was white and bare. The drawers and cupboards, the novel-heavy shelves of her girlhood, were empty and disinfected, like in the cheap rooms of a boarding house.

She could not sleep. Too tired and too uncomfortable. In her own apartment, she would have had some wine to help her cope with her disquiets, but her parents were not drinkers. All they had was an old and sticky bottle of honey ‘rum’. No alcohol. Sober as she was, however, Syl had not needed to fake any sexual ardour with her driver. Stress and agitation, as she’d discovered on many occasions, were unexpected aphrodisiacs. So were acquiescent and dull men. She must have shocked and baffled him twenty times — and not only when she called him Charon. She brushed his penis with the stubble of her hair. She made good use of the stiff tuft below his underlip. She made his wrist and fingers ache. She made him wait. She took the opportunity to flood her parents’ house with noise. But afterwards, when he was sleeping, it seemed that making love had changed and calmed her. The urgency had gone out of the search for her parents. The shadows were no longer Stygian. Death had no mystery. Anxiety had been unsexed. Now she was simply annoyed to be at home. This was a failure at her age, surely, to end up in the room were she had been a child.