Jim Crace - Being Dead

Yet there still was love, the placid love that only time can cultivate, a love preserved by habit and by memory. Their tree had little rising sap, perhaps, but it was held firm by deep and ancient roots. Old, lasting love. Celice had never doubted it. Their marriage had initiating strengths. A great sustaining wave, no matter how old, is more than most couples can boast of and enjoy. Her husband angered her, perhaps, from time to time. Most of the time, in fact. He was too weak and watery. And she was disappointed with herself. But their beginnings were indelible and strong. Joseph could still evoke for her — infrequently — those sentimental choruses, that great subversive bass, that guiding star, that midnight bride, the peaking of her body and the song in that far, haunted place. When they were young.

Yet this was not a haunted place, as it turned out. The study house was fertile ground for rock shrubs and carbon-loving plants. The bunk room and the common room were oblong beds of stoveweed and pyrosia, the green bells of the one almost a perfect match for the high bracts of the other. The last remains of bricks, masonry and walls were colonized by nettles, brambles, buddleia and mortar roses. The house was razed but the architect’s blue building plans were still adhered to by the plants. What roof beams had survived the fire and years, were skeletal, stripped of all the charring, tapered by erosion, and clad in the reds and greens of timber algae.

Celice stepped across the porch stone and walked into the middle of the common room, next to the almost buried sink. The doorway to the veranda was now two heaps of weed. There was no evidence of any building on that side of the house. The scrubby backshore plants, the hollow-stemmed flute bushes and the thorns had colonized the long rectangle of the glass veranda and were growing deeply. Celice could not reach the spot where she and Festa had spread their mattresses and sleeping-bags, and shared their cigarettes. She squatted on her heels and peered beneath the bushes. What did she expect? Some bones? A snake? A woman, sitting up in bed? The red glow of tobacco? The odours of a barbecue? A scream? The sudden ending of her guilt as if the study house had pardons to give out?

The smell was only vegetation and the sound was only leaves and stalks. All she found to show that there had once been shelter here were shards of grey and thinning glass, a riddled piece of corrugated iron, and what could be the rusting helix of a mattress spring. She was tempted to say something to Festa, but did not. She might have, if she’d been by herself. An apology, perhaps. A reassurance of some kind. But Joseph was in hearing range. He wouldn’t understand. Men had no emotional imagination, she had found. That’s why he hadn’t felt the guilt she’d felt. That’s why the death of Festa had been so readily survived by him. Perhaps, that’s why men were more stable than the women she knew. They accepted the eerie truth of life and death, that one is passing and the other is conclusive. We live, we die, we do not need to understand. There are no ghosts to lay. There is just ash and memory.

Celice was still shaking and a little nauseous when she walked back through the denuded common room to join her husband for the walk down to the coast. She took deep breaths. The anticlimax had been shocking. How little she had felt. How tearless she had been. How mute the ruins were.

‘Not what I expected,’ she said. ‘So much has grown here. I thought it would be bleak.’ She should have known — a doctor of zoology — that vegetation would have buried all the past, that death would be absorbed.

Mondazy wrote, ‘Our Books of Life don’t have an end. Fresh chapters are produced though we are dead. Our pages never terminate. But, given time, the paper yellows, then turns green. The vellum flesh becomes the leaf.’

Syl would not speak to her conscripted driver as they drove through the slums and hinterlands of their drenched coastal town that Sunday afternoon. No one about. It seemed, at times, as if they were travelling through still photographs. Life as it always was, fixed in its frame, just there at just that time. No one had died, or ever could.

Syl was in a spiteful mood and sitting in the back. Her lover ought to know exactly what his status was. He was too vain and immature to comprehend that his raw caresses in her mother’s bed, his constant touching of her arm, his sudden, uninvited kisses were not a welcome comfort. They were his taxi fares. She drummed her fingers on her knees. But Geo was already accustomed to her early-morning tempers and her surprising appetites at night. He’d never known such cruelty and boldness or guessed how stimulating they could be. He watched her through the rear-view mirror: she sat with her legs drawn up and her head against the side window of his car, looking at the empty streets, the timber yards, the shuttered bars, the occasional clinker lorry going to and from the Salt Pines building sites. He knew she was defying him to make a sound. Thank goodness Geo was a willing soul, and so naïve. He thought he understood her need for silence and her constant irritation. Anxiety, of course. Grief and fear. And the irresistible drama of the spotlight. He could not blame himself for her fixed mouth and her turned head.

They parked at the visitors’ centre, where Joseph and Celice had parked, five days before, and from where their car had almost certainly been stolen. The lot was almost full. The building had been taken over by the police as its headquarters. There were squad jeeps, a catering trailer, a radio van with its aerial raised, and the unmarked cars of the detectives lined up across the gravel. Four Sunday anglers in an open jeep were being turned away by the uniformed auxiliaries guarding the entrance to the centre. The coast was closed. Except to planes. The police were powerless to close the skies. Two Dorkers and a noisy One-One-Eight, piloted by weekend hobby fliers, were stunting in the thermals off the bar.

Syl, it’s true, was indulging herself. After the stifling doldrums of the drive with Geo it was a sudden and an unexpected stimulant to be the centre of so much respectful attention. She’d only had to tell one of the guards, ‘I’m the daughter,’ for the makeshift barrier to be lifted and for their car to be conducted in as if its occupants were honoured guests, dignified by their proximity to death. She liked the way that no one tried to stare at her. They looked down at their shoes as she walked by. She was the Empress of Japan, foremost and unapproachable. To catch her eye with theirs would be a violation.

This was unusual for Syl — the deference of uniforms. Usually her dress, her age, the way she spoke, her hard-cropped hair would trigger animosity from the police, and a bag search. Now, for once, she could savour their sombre bustle, their measured urgency, their lowered eyes and voices. She could enjoy herself. That’s the blushing ambiguity of deaths and, particularly, of dramatic deaths like this. The closest family, the principal mourners are oddly happy with themselves, and stirred. Their hearts — and social niceties — may call for frenzies of despair, an ululating epilepsy, collapse, hysteria, but their brains dispense instead a cocktail of euphoric chemicals to bolster them against the shock and rage. Adrenalin cannot discriminate. The stimulant and tranquillizer pumps usurp the promptings of the heart. They make death seem invigorating, and erotic. Syl felt — bizarrely — closer to laughter than to tears. She was excited, almost glad, to be the daughter of the dead, to be so irritated, and so estranged from Joseph and Celice, to be so mean and careless with the ferryman, yet seem so dutiful, capable and strong to all the uniforms. The awful truth had not sunk in. The deaths were still not real. She only fell apart once she’d descended fifty metres of the track and saw the world’s most mournful sight, the wide expanse of wind-whipped beach and sea, the inter-tide.