Jim Crace - Being Dead

In the tranquillizing darkness of the house, with sticky Geo wrapped around her back in her too narrow bed, the panic of her journey to the coast, the hasty ripping up of her own life and job, seemed idiotic and premature. She’d come more than six hundred kilometres, back to a town she hated, simply because her father’s secretary had whistled. Her ‘doctors’, after ‘a couple of days’ fieldwork’ — she didn’t know ‘exactly where’ — had not turned up for work. So what? Hoorah, in fact. At last, a sign of mischief! Syl had always thought her parents loved work too much. They’d broken free for once.

Celice and Joseph had been thoughtless, possibly. But this can’t have been the first time they’d gone away and not informed her or their colleagues. They’d driven somewhere in the car, a little holiday, perhaps, and overstayed. No mystery in that. There was a simple explanation for all this derangement. Her parents were too middle-aged and dull to suffer accidents or die before their time, like mountaineers or poets.

At any moment she expected to hear their old car in the street, their headlights flaring on her starless ceiling, and then the tumbling of the front-door locks as they came in and up the stairs to catch their daughter with a naked taxi driver in her bed. Here would be the slapstick answer to her father’s vexing question, ‘When will we get to see you in the flesh again?’

Syl was both tranquil and unnerved. She left her sleeping driver in her bed and went into her mother’s room, where she would be more comfortable and might sleep. She put on her mother’s nightdress and lay down on the near side of the bed where the sheets and the coverlet were dry. This would be a better welcome if they returned: they’d find their modest daughter, sleeping, and death ten thousand days away.

‘To what do we owe this honour?’ they’d say, sarcastic and delighted, too shy to hug. ‘What brings you home?’ Hardly anything, Syl would have to answer. That was the truth. Why had Syl come? To close the bedroom window, dry the tray and rescue Father’s ledger from the rain, to make piles at the bottom of the stairs of the junk and bills from their dull and geometric lives.

Her driver woke her, shook her arm, earlier than necessary the next morning and in a bleating mood. He’d woken in the middle of the night to discover she’d abandoned him.

‘Why did you go?’ He was standing at the foot of Celice’s bed, as peeved and naked as a child. ‘I thought you’d run away.’ Syl laughed. ‘I’ve only got your word for all of this,’ he said. ‘Some joke.’

‘That’s right, I made it up. This isn’t my parents’ house at all. They haven’t disappeared. It’s just to get you into bed and save on taxi fares. You’re such a catch.’ She reached across and switched on the radio, the news channel, and waved the ferryman away. He’d already tried to lift the bedclothes and when she’d pulled them back in place, had gripped her wrist. ‘No, there’s not room in here for you. OK? Have you had breakfast yet? See what there is. Go on.’

When he had gone — he almost slammed the bedroom door — she listened for radio reports of local accidents and deaths. There were a few — a lorry spill, three students in a car, a garage worker crushed — but none that matched. No doctors of zoology. No unattractive people of her parents’ age and learning.

Syl dressed and crept downstairs. She knew which two steps to avoid, which banister would squeak. She could see Geo kneeling in the kitchen, searching the cupboards for any edible bread. She went out in the drizzle in her father’s waterproof to call on the two neighbouring houses. There was no reply at the first, except from a dog. But at the second an elderly woman she did not recognize reported, ‘It’s been four or five days, at least, since I’ve seen your mother. Or your father. Last Sunday, I think. They’ve not been in the yard. Their bedroom window’s been hanging open. It was banging in the wind the other night. You’ve closed it now.’ How long had her parents’ car been gone? The woman didn’t know. ‘I wouldn’t recognize their car,’ she said. ‘What colour is it?’

Syl wasn’t sure herself. ‘Have you got any bread to spare?’ she asked.

Back at the house, a half-loaf richer, Syl placated Geo somewhat with a cheerful if mocking slap across his buttocks, then pulled a chair up to the phone. She tried her parents’ mobile again. The number, as before, was unobtainable. She called her father’s secretary. No reply, except the answerphone. The Institute was closed. Then she began to call the hospitals. The switchboards were not staffed on Saturdays. She was required to ‘Key the number of the patient’s ward’, or ‘Try again on Monday’, or ‘Dial four sevens for Inquiries’ and join the queue of other callers and the crackling, patience-testing music of Osvaldo Bosse.

It was tempting to get rid of Geo straight away. Already he was getting on her nerves. He was a whiner and a liability. She did not like the way he’d held her arm once he’d sniffed her out in Mother’s bed that morning. Nor his attempts to lift the coverlet and join her there. Then, once she had scrumped the half-loaf, he evidently thought she was obliged to get him breakfast. ‘I’ve given up waitressing,’ she’d said, and let him sulk. But now she guessed she’d better change her tune, at least till evening. If, as seemed likely, she couldn’t get through to the hospitals by phone, then a driver and his car would be essential for the day.

Then she’d dump him. (‘You’ll have to find yourself another girl. Your lovemaking is poisonous. Geo’s such a very stupid name. Don’t phone.’)

He was no longer in the kitchen when Syl went to make her peace. She found him in the garden studio, sitting in her father’s chair with coffee, an apple and an old newspaper. He’d rather die than have to toast himself some bread. He, surely, was the guest, the giver of free lifts, who should be fussed by her.

‘Sorry, Ferryman,’ she said.

‘OK.’

‘I’m worried, see?’ She put her arms around his shoulders. ‘Shall we go?’

‘Go where?’

‘Go to the hospitals, I guess. And then go to the dungeons where the ghouls and corpses are. Frequent the graveyards and the tombs. Hang out at funerals.’ She did her best to cheer him up. She put her hand inside his shirt.

‘OK,’ he said, as flatly as he could.

But first Syl went upstairs to shower and then to make her mother’s bed. She had to clear away the breakfast-cup and plate, and remove her parents’ ghostly residues. She took the rain-soaked rug and coverlet from her mother’s bedroom and hung them in the airing room. Her father’s ledger was already dry and stiff. She was reluctant to look inside. This was his private space, and no child wants to read about a father’s secret world. Nevertheless, she held up the pages to the window light and let them hang open until she found the last completed page. The paper had expanded and the ink had lost its pigment, first to the rain, now to the heat. The ledger smelt of museums and the inside of briefcases. But still his final, corrugated sentence was clear enough. Such joyful, optimistic words, she thought. And reassuring. He’d written, ‘Tuesday. Far too fine for work.’ And then, ‘(In search of sprayhoppers!)’.

So Syl, with Geo too attentive and long-suffering at her side, embarked upon the oddest town tour that Saturday, driving in the wake of Fish through rain-dejected streets, with only one windscreen wiper functioning on his car, from clinic to hospital, the private and the public wings, hoping to find Joseph and Celice tucked up in bed with grapes and magazines. They ran up stairs, rode bed-wide lifts, and queued for clerks to hunt her parents’ names on screens and registers. They visited the wards of unclaimed, injured patients who might be Joseph or Celice, pulling back the curtains to see the damage that a car, a knife, a heart-attack or an overdose can do. All strangers.