Jim Crace - Being Dead

Finally, they visited the central police station. Syl did her best to alarm the duty officer with how reliable and punctual her parents usually were. ‘They’re the ones who always let you down,’ he said. He took descriptions of her parents and noted the registration number of their car. He searched his VDU, but no reports were listed.

‘They’ll show up,’ he promised. And then, an agile contradiction, ‘Check they haven’t turned up at the city morgue.’

Birdie volunteered to run down to the beach to check that Festa, Joseph and Celice were indeed safe and to let them know about the fire and what was lost inside the study house; their clothes and bags, their notes and books, the promise of their doctorates. Birdie could hardly refuse the task: he was the fittest of the three and, actually, the only one with any shoes. He’d used the heels to knock the glass out of the bunk-room windows for their escape.

Hanny and Victor would have to make their unheroic ways barefoot across the manac fields towards the shanty village. A second visit, less triumphant than the first, in search of borrowed clothes and shoes, and a telephone to call the Institute, the airport and the fire brigade. If this wind picked up, so might the embers of the study house. Then they’d have a forest or a scrub fire to account for, and even houses in the village might be lost. A trembling thought.

Their comrade Birdie was a scarecrow, leaping down the steps, two at a time, through the stands of flute bushes, until he reached the farm lane and the ponds. He wore only a white T-shirt, fly-fronted pyjama bottoms from which his penis pecked and nodded like a finger puppet as he ran, black ankle boots, no socks. He smelt of smoke and sweat. His hair was matted. He’d never felt before so cinematic and so wholly ludicrous. He knew where on the coast he would find his three colleagues. He had himself helped Festa rake in the seaweed for her medical and nutritional studies one afternoon. She’d recompensed him with her kisses just the night before, although, despite his best endeavours, she was not yet quite ready to allow his tongue to penetrate her lips or his hand to dip into her clothes. And he had twice spotted Joseph and Celice in the shallows further up the coast, towards the jutting foreshore of the bay.

The route was simple and mostly downhill: the pines, the marshes and the dunes, the coastal track, the wide expanses of the beach, the splashing run along the shore towards the figures in the tide, the distant, bending plume of ash. He hadn’t felt so fit for months, despite the ankle-rubbing boots and the remains of a smoke-laden headache. He was pumped up by all the thrilling chemicals of shock. The effort brought it home to him. Death had been near; he had been fortunate. He’d never been so fast or spirited, so oddly close to nausea and joy. How glorious he would appear to Festa as he called to her, half naked and half Hollywood, an envoy bearing messages and running from the fire towards the sea.

It would have been a busy week for death even without Syl’s parents. One hundred and twenty-seven new bodies had been registered at the city morgue before the clerk went off for lunch. And Fish would send a further seventeen in the afternoon when the clerk came back to work, puffed up as usual at that time on a Saturday by barbiturates. He’d already reached the fourth level of disinhibition and euphoria by swallowing two Eden pills with his lunch-time beer. Now he was chewing Go gum to take away the smell of onions, cigarettes and alcohol. Cadavers and lunch do not mix well, he had been told a hundred times by the duty doctor. A morgue worker should be as sweet-breathed as a dentist or a prostitute. A belching clerk should not deal with the deceased and their bereaved. Whispered sympathies to widows and to widowers — and to daughters who had lost both parents in a single day — could not come laden with the stench of food and nicotine and still appear sincere.

But the clerk was not, yet, the sort to seem sincere even when his breath was sweet. He resented working in the morgue. It showed. He hated having to dispense his sympathy to strangers. Like most young men, he had no time for death or grief. The bodies had no poetry. He was too sharp and fun-loving, he thought, to waste his life on them. The duty doctors were a bunch of fools to think that lunch and cadavers do not mix well and that a belching clerk should not deal with the deceased and their bereaved. You’d think the duty doctors had never touched a cadaver. The dead don’t talk — but bodies belch for hours after death. A woman bends to kiss her husband for the final time. Despite the warnings of the morgue attendant — sweet-breathed or not — she puts a little weight upon his chest, and is rewarded with the stench of every meal she’s cooked for him in forty years. The morgue could sound, at times, as if a ghoulish choir was warming up, backed by a wind ensemble of tubas and bassoons. It could smell as scalpy, scorched and pungent as a hairdressing salon. The breath of these cold choristers was far worse than the onion breath of clerks. But no one said that bodies weren’t sincere. There’s nothing more sincere than death. The dead mean what they say.

The morgue clerk ran his finger down the register, as usual, not fearful of what he might encounter but half expecting and half hoping to find a name he recognized. Fish might oblige him with a neighbour, say, or some young man who’d been a good friend at his school, or one of his many neglected aunts. Anything to break the tedium of work. He’d find his own name on the list one day, one of the duty doctors had warned him. Enfin , a name to make his heart stand still. Sincere, at last.

It was the clerk’s job to record the deceased’s name on its last form, the place of birth, the date of death, the cause, a doctor’s signature, the registrar’s smudged stamp, a job number, a label, and then to check the disposition of the bodies on his charts so that he could allocate a storage space. It was full house, that weekend matinée, when Syl came looking for her parents, preceding them in fact. The refrigerated drawers, other than the ones that were being cleaned or serviced by the techs, were all occupied. Some would become empty again after two o’clock when relatives could claim their deceased and buy the regulation cardboard casket in which to bear the body home.

Syl and Geo were the first inquirers after lunch. The woman’s parents had gone missing, she explained, the usual dreadful trepidation on her face. They’d like to check amongst the dead, if that was possible. ‘Sent by the police,’ the man added, as if such information made a difference. The clerk ran his fingers down the list of dead again. No Joseph or Celice. Were any of the bodies in the morgue unidentified?

‘Plenty,’ said the clerk. ‘You want to look? Wait there.’ He popped another Go gum in his mouth and offered one to Syl. Not to the man ‘sent by the police’. He was attracted to the woman’s new-mown hair and her unruly face. A potent combination. The libertine, the nun. Here was a face that knew no bounds. He’d find the time and opportunity to go with her up to the fridge. Without the man, of course.

Syl and Geo sat and waited, without speaking, for more than half an hour until a woman in her sixties, with her two sons, arrived. She rang the handbell on the ledge outside the clerk’s room. ‘My sister died,’ she said, when he pulled back the glass. ‘They took her for an autopsy.’

He checked the number on her form against his charts. ‘She’s here. Upstairs.’

‘Where can we bring the van?’

The clerk told the brothers how to find the basement entry to the morgue, then called the woman and Syl to follow him. ‘Sorry, you have to be a blood relative,’ he lied to Geo. ‘She won’t be long.’ He led the women up the stairs, not speaking, to the storage rooms. He found the sister’s name again on the inventory but no one had written down the drawer number. ‘You’ll recognize her, will you? If we look. ’