Jim Crace - Being Dead

He’d always wanted to return with her. Of course. The first encounters are the best. ‘Let’s go out to the bay,’ he’d suggested a thousand times, ‘for old times’ sake. Before we die.’ But she had not agreed, not once. She didn’t even like to reminisce in too much detail about the week when she and Joseph had met, their lovemaking — because to think about that week was to remind herself of Festa and the fire, how passion could be murderous, how love could set the flame. She’d blamed herself for almost thirty years, no matter what Joseph had to say: ‘Be rational, forget the past’; ‘It’s my fault just as much as yours’; ‘A fire can start in hundreds of different ways.’ He made no difference. Celice hoped never to have to go back there again.

But once the plans for Salt Pines had been printed in the newspaper — and once she’d heard about the Academic Mentor’s suicide — never became too real a word for her. Up to that point she’d had the choice to stay away, but once Salt Pines was constructed with its protected gates the choice would be removed. Perhaps the time had come to take control of what she might be guilty of, and not be ruled by it. She said to Joseph, lightly, as she left for work one day so that he wouldn’t have the chance to lecture her, ‘Maybe we ought to go out there. I think we ought to go. Before they build.’ He knew she only meant that they ought to see the burnt remains of the study house, to put Festa’s ghost to rest before the bulldozers erased the place where she’d died. A resurrection in the dunes was not part of her plan.

But Joseph lent a sympathetic pair of ears, for once. Of course, she should return and face the past, he said, while she pulled on her coat. He’d been saying so for years. But when he pictured it — as he would a dozen times a day in the ensuing weeks — he did not visualize them standing on a blackened wall throwing flowers where once there’d been a long veranda and Festa sleeping. Instead, he placed himself and Celice, young and naked, in the dunes, her shocking fingers pulling at his clothes. This Tuesday, with its rare sunshine, would be the perfect opportunity to lead his wife down from the study house again to the hidden chambers of the shore. He’d have to be discreet, of course. Their only stated plan could be a return to the scorched remains. But then, when that was done, he could suggest a hunt for sprayhoppers, perhaps. And then a picnic. Somewhere with soft grass, private and protected from the wind.

He took her hand and squeezed the fingers. Waking her was making love to her. ‘Celice, it’s warm,’ he said. ‘Too good to waste. Are you awake? Celice. Let’s make the most of it.’ He knew better than to shake her. She would already be annoyed with him. This was her room. This was her day. If she was touched again or shaken, she had the right to pinch the thin flesh on his arm. She was a worshipper of sleep and orchestras.

Finally she opened an eye to squint at him. Her husband was a shining, haloed silhouette. His body half obscured the sun. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked. Her voice had hardly changed in thirty years.

‘Come on, let’s make the most of it. It’s such a waste,’ he said again, as if she hadn’t already heard his aggravating little phrase. ‘Sit up. There’s tea. It’s warm outside.’

‘It’s warm in here.’

This, he knew, was not an invitation to get in. He wanted her to sit up in the bed. He hoped that if she did, she might stretch her arms, straight out from her shoulders in a crucifixion mime and make a little strangulated cry, a seagull yawn, to wake herself and clear her throat. Her nightdress sleeves were always loose — she did not like the claustrophobia of hugging clothes — and Joseph knew that when she stretched she’d make an open, hanging corridor of cloth below her arm for anyone to hold their breath and view her snubby breasts. He’d seen her do exactly that so many times before. He’d learned the trick of waiting with her breakfast at the bedroom door and calling her name. Sex was so underhand. He knew exactly where to stand to catch the light. She’d wake and stretch her unsuspecting arms for him. She did not disappoint him now. Stolen glimpses of his wife.

So there was Joseph on the morning of his death, flushed already by the early sun and by the prospect of an outing with Celice, looking down along the cotton and the flesh towards the hollows and the beacons of her armpits and her chest, her blemishes, her moles, the rib bones of a woman thin with age, the smell of her — bedclothes and sweat — the smell of breakfast on a tray, her body sliced up by the sun into jagged bands of shade and light. He must have wanted there and then to pass his body down the sleeve and press his lips into her shadows and her silhouettes. He’d have to wait.

Baritone Bay and its backdunes were never popular with townies. That’s why the campaign to prevent the building of Salt Pines was bound to fail. Who cared about this odd and unattractive coast? The swimming there was dangerous: cross-tides and undertows. The winds were unpredictable. Either they were bursting from the sea, wet, salt-laden, cold, uncomfortable, or they were twisting with the contours of the coast to sandblast anybody mad enough to picnic on the shore or take their sweaters off. Even walkers kept away. Why make the detour over boulders, pebbles and dunes when the earth-packed coastal path was more direct and prettier? Families and swimmers would rather drive out to the city beach the other side of town, where there were strings of scalloped coves, soft sands, lifeguards, some timber restaurants and an attendant forest of cool pines where they could park their cars, ride bikes and horses, erect their tents, and light their barbecues. And where, of course, the only sounds were of people having fun.

In recent years even the peace and quiet of Baritone — its one undisputed attraction — had been destroyed by advances at the airport. Now there were jumbos coming in and out each day across the coast, and scatty little jets. They’d opened up a private field, for businessmen and amateurs. At weekends leisure pilots made a nuisance of themselves daredevilling the ocean and the sands. The spoilt and wealthy residents of Salt Pines would need tree screens and muffler windows or nerves of steel. The guards, the gatehouse and high walls could not keep out the din of aircraft.

But before the extensions to the runways in the early nineties the only passenger planes that could get in were Stols and Trilanders, light-bodied craft that needed only two hundred metres to take off, and less to land. The coast was quieter then.

Nevertheless, the rumbling that Joseph and Celice could hear, that morning almost thirty years ago when they crept from the study house for their first tryst, must be, they thought, a plane, a low and heavy one. And one so close to them as they walked out across the shore, the sprayhoppers flying at their feet, their footprints belching air and water in their wake, that its roaring engines seemed to come out of the dunes. They tried to spot some movement in the clouds, the tell-tale, sleepless winking of the plane’s red eyes. The grey straight ruler of a wing. They turned their heads and whirled about in the shallows to fix co-ordinates of sound and find the source of that low noise.

The plane did not pass over them. It stayed and grumbled in the dunes. Its engines idled, then picked up and roared again whenever there was any wind. The nearer that Celice and Joseph got to the jutting foreland of the bay the louder it became. Of course, they realized quite soon what they were witnessing. Not an aeroplane. It was the celebrated baritone, the voice that everybody said could bring bad luck. Someone’ll die. There’ll be a month of gales and rain. There’ll be a ghost.