Jim Crace - Being Dead

The crabs had gone. Celice and Joseph were not fresh enough for them. And though the swag flies had deposited more eggs in the couple’s open cavities, most of the flies had now departed, kept away first by the covering of wind-borne sand that was embalming Joseph and Celice and then by the busy presence of the police. The forensic officers had hoovered out the maggots, ‘making them presentable’, before the daughter came.

Syl was too touched by the gentle nakedness and disposition of her parents to stop herself from sobbing. Sobbing on the edges of the sea as she had so many times before when Joseph and Celice were too far out to reach. The policewoman who had been standing outside was summoned. A job at last. She put her coat round Syl’s shoulders and laid her arm too heavily across her back.

The body sheets had been pulled across again without Syl noticing, but she had got a snapshot printed in her mind. She’d not remember all the wounds, the gull damage, the black dry blood. It was her father’s hand wrapped round her mother’s leg that haunted and delighted her. It looked as if the leg and arm were keeping them earthbound.

‘They didn’t drown?’

‘That’s right, they didn’t drown,’ the detective said. ‘Somebody with a rock.’

‘A murderer?’

A nod.

‘Who, then?’

The policeman shrugged. He meant, Maybe we’ll never know.

‘You’ve no idea?’ insisted Syl. ‘Do say!’

‘Mondazy’s Fish,’ he said — the old phrase, meaning Fate. The usual crap.

‘Show me their faces one last time. I’ll be OK.’

Her parents seemed oddly young and flourishing, in this second, edited glimpse of them, through half-shut eyes. Their skin was stretched. Her father’s forehead was unlined. Her mother’s underchin was firm. But there was something else that made them young, Syl realized. The very manner of their deaths. For violent death is usually the province of the young. Slow wasting is the property of age. And there was none of that. They were, indeed, quite handsome in their fast dilapidation; despite the damage and the wounds, they had not surrendered any of their nature or their character. They’d not depersonalized. They were uplifting in their way, and oddly calm. Here was a suicide of sorts, because her parents had escaped those last, geriatric shudders — convulsions was too strong a word — which dog a person from the womb. Yet this was also something happier than suicide. No evidence of anger, sorrow or despair. No farewell note. No self-inflicted wounds. No legacy of spite. No last regrets. They had departed from their world while there was still good health to keep them sweet and their old age to look forward to with hope. Syl had to allow them this at least: her parents had surprised her this one time. Not just their murder. Nor their nakedness. But that they had the power, on their deaths, to flush her heart — too late — with love. It was the light touch of his finger on her leg.

‘Don’t move my father’s hand,’ she said.

Syl could not arrange the funeral at once, and flee the coast, as she would have liked. The bodies, according to the detective, would have to stay inside the tent until the Monday. Forensics had to do their work and the police preferred to keep the corpses where they were until they’d checked each grain of sand, each blade of grass for clues. Then the magistrate would need to come to issue a certificate of removal. It all took time. And magistrates are not at work on Sundays. So Syl, instead, asked Geo to drop her at the Mission Church at the harbour in the town centre. No need to wait for her, she said. She didn’t know how long she’d be. She’d make her own way home. A slim excuse for getting rid of him. Her parents had been married at this church and Celice had always said that it would be a happy final resting-place. Syl needed time alone. She would light a candle, sit in semi-darkness and concentrate on what their deaths might mean.

The Mission Church was busy with a service when she arrived, so she sat outside on the commemorative benches made from the timbers of wrecked ships and carved with the names of lost seamen and waited for the worshippers to leave. The world went on. It orbited through space. There were the usual markers of the day. A sinking sky. The sound of motor-cars. The muted Sunday clatter of the port. And, finally, the sound of people singing hymns, their voices raised against the universe, as thin as water and as nourishing.

It wasn’t difficult for Syl, with that accompaniment, to recall the image of her parents, side by side and murdered on a bed of grass, her ankle in his hand. She tried to let the hymning voices pick up the bodies from the dunes and take them to the kingdom of their verses, amongst the heavens and eternities, into the everlasting peace. But it was obvious that these were voices and these were verses that had not got the muscle to displace a single leaf, let alone pass sinners into paradise. Her father’s songs, for all their mawkish sentiment, were far more powerful. Love songs transcend, transport, because there’s such a thing as love. But hymns and prayers have feeble tunes because there are no gods.

By the time the worshippers were coming out, Syl had lost her need for solitude and candles. She walked away, a member of the parting congregation, euphoric and dismayed at once, and only praying that her life would have as much love as her parents’ had.

Syl had not asked herself the greater question yet. She was too young to need the death-defying trick of living in a godless and expanding universe, its gravity dispersing by the second, its spaces stretching and unspannable, its matter darkening. Life is. It goes. It does not count. That was the hurtling truth that comes to rattle everyone as they grow up, grow old. Syl need not worry for a while.

But she had at least an answer to the lesser question. How should the dying spend their time when life’s short portion shrinks with every waking day? She’d walked to see mortality that Sunday afternoon and found her parents irredeemable. Her gene suppliers had dosed shop. Their daughter was the next in line. She could not duck out of the queue. So she should not waste her time in this black universe. The world’s small, breathing denizens, its quaking congregations and its stargazers, were fools to sacrifice the flaring briefness of their lives in hopes of paradise or fears of hell. No one transcends. There is no future and no past. There is no remedy for death — or birth — except to hug the spaces in between. Live loud. Live wide. Live tall.

She could not ape her parents’ life. She would not merely turn her back against the coffin-hurtling streets and focus only on the minutes in the room, the light that makes an oval of the square, the half-filled diary open at the week, the music on the stereo, the kettle heating on the stove, the photos poked between the mirror and its frame, the dancing page, the other person breathing in a chair, still life. She would, instead, embrace the warmer fevers of the world. Their deaths were her beginning.

These have been unusual days, she thought, as she walked back towards the empty house, her house, through first the wide catalpa-lined avenues of the centre then the gaunt, less pungent streets of the inner suburbs. I am bereaved and liberated at one stroke (a dozen blows). There isn’t anything beyond me now. There isn’t anything I cannot think about, or say.

She would make plans. Bright days ahead.

7.05 a.m.

Joseph was out of bed early on the morning of his death. He was always up before Celice. He took his breakfast out to the greying, sapwood deck behind the house, and found just sufficient space for his chair in that trapezium of light where the first sun of the day, if there were any, stretched across the boards. This was where his own father, twenty years before and sitting in the same sunlight, had been killed by a stroke, and where, a thousand times when she was small, his daughter had climbed on to her father’s lap, her bony bottom on his bony knee, to beg for breakfast from his tray, and a song. Syl loved to listen to him saying things in song, in his mad, comic bass, that he could never say in life. Those were the only times he made her laugh.