Jim Crace - Being Dead

She might have shivered anyway, even if she had been dressed for winter, even if the day were sunny, even if the policewoman who was now discreetly trailing her had done what she was tempted to and taken off her uniform jacket to lend to her odd charge. After all, Syl was expecting to encounter death, and death is cold and damp. She should expect the temperatures to drop the closer she got to the place where her parents had been found. That’s why churches are so cold. That’s why the snow in graveyards seems to last much longer than the snow in streets. That’s why the northern conifer does well in cemeteries. That’s why you have to wear an overcoat and dress in black even for a summer funeral. The grave yawns Arctic air.

Syl had not paid much attention when the woman officer had said, ‘We have a policy at any scene of a crime.’ But as she walked, concentrating now on the path and trying not to notice the Salt Pines stretch of coast, the spreading sky, the sea complicit with the sands in its damp shades, the words popped back into her mind. The ‘scene of crime’. What crime? She hadn’t thought there’d been a crime except, perhaps, the taking of her parents’ car by some soft, opportunist teenager who couldn’t find a taxi fare; and the theft of a radio. She hadn’t dreamed or feared a crime. She’d feared the logic of the sea. She’d dreamed their classic executioner was Fish.

Her escort crossed the gap and joined her when they reached the narrow path that left the coastal track and led into the dunes. The police had marked a route with canes and paper flags. The two women had to follow it exactly. It took them round the outside of the dunes, across the headland rocks and then, a sharp left-angle, inland, on wooden boards.

Syl had not expected so many policemen. She’d hardly ever seen as many in one place, except at riots on the television or at parades. There was a group in forage uniforms spread about amongst the dunes, searching every clump of grass, turning over every piece of drift. There were civilian attendants talking into mobile phones, and forensic investigators, wearing protective cotton overalls and gloves.

Nor had she imagined that there’d be a tent. A small marquee, in fact. Thick green canvas with the city’s logo stamped on its side. At first Syl took it to be a catering tent for the policemen, the sort she’d seen at fairs, sports events and town carnivals. It was, she quickly realized, sheltering the bodies. And protecting the ‘scene of crime’. Syl hugged her elbows tightly. She and her escort were the only living women there.

‘Where are they?’ Syl asked the policewoman, wanting confirmation.

‘They’re coming.’

‘I mean my parents!’ The answer froze her to the bone.

‘Inside,’ she said. ‘The tent. You have to wait. They’re making them presentable.’

Syl was suddenly so faint and breathless that she had to sit down on the lissom grass, her back to the tent, and look for comfort in the dunes. There was none. A police photographer was taking pictures of a torn white shirt stretched out like a flag in the branches of a thornbush. She sat as still as possible, so still that she could feel her heartbeat in her toes.

At last a man her father’s age came out of the tent, holding a purple sacados and a cardboard box. ‘Recognize this?’ he asked. No introductions or formalities. Syl shook her head at the blackening blood prints on its leather shoulder strap. ‘Or these?’ A pair of women’s shoes. Again she shook her head. ‘The phone?’ He held up a clear plastic bag with a black mobile phone inside.

She peered at it. ‘I couldn’t say,’ she said. ‘They’re all the same.’

‘Is that your parents’ number?’ He pulled the plastic tight and pointed to the line of digits written on the tag.

‘I can’t remember,’ she said. ‘That is my father’s handwriting, though. He does his fives like that.’

‘Or this?’ A rain-soaked copy of the Entomology , bloodstained.

‘They did subscribe.’

He didn’t show her the granite club they’d found, tossed in the grass and almost picked clean of the blood and human tissue by the crabs and flies, though he was tempted. He didn’t mind the public face of grief and shock. It was reassuring and appropriate. He was not one of the new school who considered mourning and weeping little better than masturbation. A daughter, in circumstances such as this, ought to be hysterical. His daughter would be, he hoped. It was her right. It was her duty. This woman, though, was far too sensible and rational. Too furtive and controlled. Too studenty and cropped. Too underdressed for such a solemn task.

‘OK, let’s have a look inside,’ he said, taking her arm. ‘Hold on to me.’

‘No thanks.’ She was used to such men, from her waitressing. She pulled her arm free, and stepped a pace away. Once he had turned his back on her, she followed him into the tent. The usual canvas smells were absent. There was no scent of cloth or waterproofing, just the odours of damp grass, with iodine, formaldehyde, and sweat. Any daylight that succeeded in penetrating the canvas was thin, green and ghostly.

It was warm inside. Out of the wind. There were four younger men already there, olive-faced and business-like. The older one who’d summoned her just said, ‘The daughter,’ then, ‘The lights.’ Two hanging fluorescent lamps stuttered into life for a few moments then shed their hard sheen on to a spread of improbably long white sheets laid out on the sloping grass inside the tent at Syl’s feet. The beds of sloping lissom grass seemed dulled now that the ghostly green had been supplanted by mechanical light.

‘It’s only the faces,’ the detective said. ‘We’ll make it very quick. Just nod. Or shake your head. We’ll do the woman first.’ He bent and turned back the top sheet and the refrigerating blanket, put there to keep the bodies cold and fresh. Celice.

Syl had only an instant’s view. It was her mother, much reduced, but unmistakable. Her face was cheek down, turned sideways, resting on the pillow of the grass. Her mouth was swollen and her skull collapsed. Her best front teeth were grinning, cracked from root to tip. Her skin was indigo. The hair was dappled with dead blood.

‘Just nod or shake your head,’ he said again.

‘It’s her.’

‘And now the man, if you’re ready?’ He knelt on the grass further down the array of sheets, looking at Syl, waiting for her to compose herself, hoping for some high response.

She was composed. She felt relieved, in fact. The pressure was reduced. Nothing could be worse than this, so there was nothing more to fear. ‘I want to see it all,’ she said. ‘Not just the face. Take all the sheets away.’ He did so at once, pulling the sheets and refrigerating blankets up towards himself and gathering them against his chest. She nodded twice. Then shook her head in disbelief. The doctors of zoology. The lost and secret couple, Joseph and Celice, on their sixth day of grace. At last, the mystery. At last, the solace of the world’s worst thing.

A trained mortician or pathologist, used to the pus and debris of exploded tissue, the ruptured membranes leaking lymph, the killing fields of murdered cells, might find a thousand signs of disassembly and decay on Joseph and Celice’s cadavers. Their eyeballs were already liquefying and their faces were enlarged. Their skin was blistered on the undersides. Their innards were so bloated from the by-products of decomposition — methane and ethium — that their nostrils, ears and open wounds had been made frothy by exuding gas.

But at the distance that their daughter viewed them from, in that exaggerated light, they seemed less troubled than they had even that morning when they’d been found in natural light. Except for the typical glaucous bruises above the small intestine, their livid colours had calmed down, more blue than purple, more grey than green. They had even tanned and darkened a little in the sun. And the hours of rigor mortis had long passed. Their arms and legs no longer stuck out like mannequins. Joseph’s one wild sign, death’s unkind erection, had reduced. Their bodies were unstiffened and fell into the hollows of the grass, like sleepers fall into the cushions of a bed, relaxed and rounded, fitting in.