Jim Crace - Being Dead

It was just as well that Geo wasn’t there to put his arm around Syl and make things worse. He hadn’t taken much persuading not to walk with her along the coast to inspect the bodies. He was a little squeamish. She’d rather be alone, she said. He understood. He would have kissed her there and then, as she escaped the car. To do so would establish his lover’ status in the eyes of the police. How jealous they would be if they could know how that cropped head had burrowed into him. Besides, he would not wish to be mistaken for a cousin or a neighbour, or spot-fined for operating an unlicensed cab. He’d pursed his lips and tipped his head towards her. But she had pressed her fingers on his chest to keep his face away. Syl was relieved to leave him in the car park, a bruised look on his face, like a disappointed spaniel denied its exercise. She’d go alone, the orphan on the coast. But one of the officers inside the centre had instructed a policewoman to accompany her. Now with the first sight of the sea and her first tears Syl wanted privacy even more. Emotion was embarrassing. She told her escort that she was not needed. The woman, probably no older than Syl herself, just nodded. ‘But we have a policy,’ she said, ‘at any scene of crime.’

‘I have a policy, as well.’ Quite what it was, Syl didn’t know, unless it was always to argue with a uniform.

So they agreed a compromise. The policewoman would follow twenty metres behind, a stalking guard, an aide, but not a companion. Syl could be the Empress of Japan again, embarking on her solitary wake.

The call to the coast had come at midday while Syl was sitting on the deck at home, in her father’s chair, still in her mother’s dressing-gown and waiting for her hired hand to bring some cake and coffee. She’d heard the phone: ‘You answer it,’ she shouted. Geo wrote the message down like some dull waiter and brought it out to her. Two bodies had been found by police dogs in the salt dunes at Baritone Bay. Near where they must have parked the car. Could she come out at once? Identify her mother and her father?

How would Syl cope?

At first she coped by pouring all her scorn on Geo. ‘Was that all?’ she asked. Hadn’t the police said anything about the cause of death? He shook his head. A lifelong dope. ‘You didn’t think to ask, of course. A mere detail.’

He didn’t need to ask, in fact. Syl knew. She’d always known. That was why her first glimpse of the sea that afternoon had summoned those first tears. This was her parents’ programmed death. They’d drowned at last. That was the only likely way that Celice and Joseph would die before their times. They drove too carefully to crash their car, except in dreams. Her mother had weaned herself off cigarettes. They hardly drank. They touched their toes ten times a day. They ate like scientists, a perfect balance between their carbohydrates and their nutrients, their vitamins and oils. They’d not take any risks. They did not walk down unlit streets with glinting jewellery or watches, or chance the dangers of the park at night. No one would do them any harm. They did not walk down stairs without a firm grip on the banisters. Dear God, what stagnant lives they led.

But her parents were shoreline zoologists who never could resist the chance of poking about in the tides and shallows of the coast. Syl had spent a solitary childhood on the shore, bored with a picnic and a book, praying for beach games, sandcastles and other girls, while Joseph and Celice had rummaged in the water, crying out — so annoyingly — whenever they discovered a rare weed or felt the sand beneath their feet palpitate with some shy fish.

Oddly, they’d never taken her to the Baritone coast in all their years of beachcombing. Her mother had not liked that stretch. But all the other shores and bays, the Mu, the Horseman Rocks, Tiger Crab Bay, Cape Shoals were chillingly familiar and frightening. She’d not forgotten the first time that she’d stood, aged eight, the beach’s only castaway, to watch the panavision of her tiny parents washed out by the widest tide, their footings gone, their arms held up for help.

Too often they had overstayed the welcome of the sea and were left stranded on a bar or chevronned by the waves or caught by muscular and unrelenting tides. She’d had to witness from the sand, the shingle or the rocks their minutes of exquisite panic while they forged a chest-deep route around the current or flailed between the reefs. Syl well remembered sitting once with her mother in the dilapidated ribs of an abandoned fishing boat while Father was out ‘sifting’ in his waist boots. Her mother said, ‘He’s too far out!’ and started calling, ‘Joseph! Joseph!’ The tide had turned and her father, struggling against the heavily backing water and its tumbling undertow, had lost his balance. Her mother was half-way down the beach and Syl was crying, an already broken-hearted little girl, a hater of the sea, before her father struggled to his feet again. Then he was floating. They could see his boots, like two seal heads. They had to leave it to the waves to bring him in. Thank heavens it was a rising tide. He came ashore, soaked to the skin. He stood spitting sea-water and coughing while her mother screamed at him, ‘You could have drowned! Then what?’

Syl had been ashamed to catch herself wondering how her friends would have reacted if Father had been killed. She’d be the centre of attention for a term. She’d have time off school. Everyone would treat her like a sick princess. She’d have to have a hat to wear at Father’s funeral. Their empty house would fill up with relatives and neighbours. Maybe the uncle from America would come. She’d have the noise and fuss she’d always hankered for. But not from her father.

It was not difficult, then, now that Baritone Bay was in her sights, for Syl to picture all the details of her parents’ deaths. Theirs was a comeuppance earned, deserved, by thirty years of paddling. She could imagine how her mother had run down the beach again, tossing his name out across the water as if it were a lifebelt: ‘Joseph! Joseph!’ Her father — older now and not as fit — had disappeared. Weighed down, perhaps, by heavy boots which, once they filled with water, were like leaden legs. He had not surfaced when the legendary seventh wave had hit him. Celice had stood — Syl put her there — with the water at her feet, studying the sea, waiting for it to reveal the sodden shadow of a struggling man, a bobbing head, an arm, a boot. The sea was shadowless for far too long. Her mother would have paddled in up to her knees. Then, perhaps, she might have seen his body rolling in the breakers like a log or else she might have heard a sinking call, half gull, half man. And so she’d waded in up to her thighs, her chest, her chin. She’d gone too deep herself. She might even have reached and touched his clothes. She could have caught hold of his arm and tried to pull him to the beach. But they were being tugged by weed and he was wet and heavy. He’d pulled her under with him. Her feet were well clear of the sand. For once her height and weight were not a help. The seaweed could not carry her. She dared not let him go and try to save herself. Now there was no one on the beach to rescue them. No little girl. All that remained was for the bodies to be carried out and back, for a tide or two, until a high and kindly sea had tossed them on the shore at Baritone Bay and rolled them to the edges of the dunes for dogs to find. Syl could expect, once she had walked to Baritone Bay, to find their bodies bloated by sea-water, draped in weed, their hands and faces grazed by sand, and bruised by all the ocean’s buffeting.

Syl wasn’t really dressed for walking. She’d thrown on the same clothes that she’d been wearing the day before at the morgue: a concert shirt, black jodhpur leggings, slip-on shopping shoes. In the car she had been uncomfortably hot. Now, with still a couple of kilometres to walk before she reached the bay she was beginning to regret that she had not paused to find one of her mother’s jackets and a stouter pair of shoes before she’d left her parents’ home. The sea breeze had a chilling edge to it and she was shaking uncontrollably. She clasped her arms around herself, clutching her elbows with the opposing hands, and hurried along the coastal track. She looked as if she’d just popped out for bread.