Jim Crace - Being Dead

At last — the sixty-seventh drawer — they found the woman’s sister. There was no label on her toe. But she was certain who it was, though shocked to see how wasted she appeared: ‘I’d been speaking to her just before she went. She sounded absolutely fine.’

The clerk came forward and put his arms around the women’s backs. Their opportunist comforter. He hardly touched the sister’s sobbing shoulders, but he spread his hand quite heavily across Syl’s waist. His lifted thumb could feel her body and her shirt through the thin polymura.

‘It’s not an easy time,’ he said. His little finger pressed her back.

‘Have we checked everything?’ Syl said. She shook his hand away.

‘Not quite.’ He led them to the coroner’s examination room where there were twelve more refrigerated drawers. These were the murders — only one ‘in stock’ that day — and, of course, the suicides that had outwitted Fish’s damp embraces. Eleven suicides. More than was proper for a town this size. There’d been an epidemic of self-loathing. Better to kill than to die. There was a woman rattling with pills. Two gassings. A poisoning. A short attempt at flight from the roof of an office building. A student hanging on her rope. This one had made a tape-recorded message regretting all the trouble she had caused. She’d left the cassette, now with the coroner, on a table top, level with her swinging knees. In the drawer below her — once, briefly, the penultimate resting place of the Academic Mentor — was a policeman who’d been caught shoplifting. A pair of trousers. Hardly worth the risk. He knew he’d be dismissed, no doubt of that. Imprisoned, even, as an example to any of his colleagues who might be similarly tempted. He’d lose his pension with his job. So he’d climbed the steps to the naval monument in his green parade uniform and finished himself with a shotgun, a bullet through his cap and head. The rumour was that someone long wanted by the police had been arrested for the death.

There were the bodies of two euthanasists, as well. And what remained of a young man and his wife who had set light to their small room.

The clerk pulled open the last remaining drawer for Syl. This was the murderee, a rich young man with narrow lips and the tussock hairstyle that had been fashionable five years before. She shook her head. Nobody had resembled either of her parents.

‘Then they’re not dead,’ he said. ‘If they were dead they’d have a drawer by now. Come on.’ He took them to the discharge room and called into the Tannoy for someone to bring a gurney and a cardboard casket for the sister’s body. He filled in a release form and, when the body was brought in, accompanied the women and the corpse into the service elevator. He let the sister speak. They always wanted to speak as soon as he pulled back the railing doors to make the draughty, ponderous descent to the loading bay. He only had to smile and nod. He didn’t have to listen.

‘She was my only sister,’ the woman said to them both, but mostly fixing Syl with her wet eyes. ‘She’d only taken a toothbrush from its cup. It must have weighed like lead. Tore the muscles in her arm and chest.’ They’d heard her cry in pain, she explained. It took her down. She’d hit her chin on the sink, and almost bit her tongue in half. Her niece saw her body, on the floor, then her bloody mouth. The niece had been a nurse, so guessed the aunt had had a brain haemorrhage. She did not try to activate her lungs or heart. It was too late, anyway. They couldn’t even prise the toothbrush from her grip. There was the blood. Then the dreadful smell of Fish. And everybody realized that she was gone for good. ‘To think, she never had a day off sick in all her life. And then, fuff, fuff, she’s. you know, done for.’

Syl held the woman’s arm, to steady her for the descent. The clerk kept well away until they reached the basement. Then he took charge of the gurney again, and helped to lift and slide the casket into the brothers’ hired van. They slipped him money, for his help. ‘Good luck,’ he said, and muttered, ‘Give her a decent send-off.’ The woman and her sons were almost smiling when they drove away. Everybody was relieved to have the body in the house the night before the burial, lying in its own bed in its own home, amongst its things.

‘What should we do?’ asked Syl.

The clerk, standing at the elevator gate, just shrugged. He’d like to have her warm and naked on a slab, his scissors slicing through her polymura coat. ‘We’ve looked,’ he said. ‘There’s nowhere else. Go to the police. Check up at all the hospitals.’

‘We’ve done all that.’

He closed the gate and pointed through the concertina’d bars up the ramp to the street. ‘That way.’ And then — you could never know your luck with a woman like her — he added, ‘Do call again!’

By the time that Syl was half-way up the ramp the clerk had already found the little bag of Eden pills. He popped a couple underneath his tongue. They were as easily absorbed as sugar. So once he’d reached the morgue to log out the woman’s body from his register, the new pills had begun to have their topping up effect. Nothing mattered any more. His little pills could conquer all the stench and tedium of death. They shrank the afternoon.

‘She’ll not be long,’ he said to Geo. The idiot was still sitting on the waiting bench, as chained and patient as a dog. You’d see more vigour in the fridge, the morgue clerk thought, and spent a mean and happy half-hour before the couple finally found each other and departed from his life if not his fantasies.

That night, Syl conquered death by sleeping with her driver once again. It had been a wearing day. She could not spend the evening alone. She’d rather tolerate his proprietorial love-making for a second time, his too-long fingernails, his inexperience, his lack of enterprise. It was a necessary sacrifice, and soon dispatched.

This time — an awful and pre-emptive sin — they took her mother’s bed. Dry sheets. More space. But as she prepared to let her ferryman help himself to her, the phone rang in the hall. Her chest went tight. She had to gasp for breath — what had become of her disdain for family? — and run out on to the landing. She could only stutter nonsense when she picked up the receiver, trembling and naked in the moonlit house. Good news or bad? Please let there be a parent on the phone. It was the police, of course. They’d found the car, downtown, abandoned in a bank car park. A thief had taken out the radio-cassette, but otherwise no damage. No sign of any accident or forced entry. No keys. There was a receipt for parking on the dashboard, timed and dated Tuesday noon, for the open ground next to the visitors’ centre beyond the airport road out at Baritone Bay. ‘Is there any reason you can think of why your parents would go there?’

Noon

It was not the easy and pleasant walk that he had promised her. There was a level, waymarked track down to the coast, but Joseph and Celice had to clamber through the man-made hillocks on the margins of the widened airport road and skirt the recent piles of building aggregate to reach the high backshores where once the study house had been. Instead of beaten scrub, the soil was loose and gravelly. The rubble-loving undergrowth tore at their trouser legs. Somewhere, below these engineering dunes, Celice had first seen Joseph, almost thirty years before. He’d slipped and pulled the muscles in his back. The other men — it didn’t seem like yesterday — had had to help him with his antique, boned suitcase. Consumed by fire. The well-worn path that the six students had followed then had disappeared over time, of course. There was no longer any need for it. No study house, no path.