Jim Crace - Being Dead

No one could say their love was cautious. Love on that day was bold. Joseph was not as reckless as she’d hoped he’d be. But she enjoyed his shaking passion and the way — once he had found his voice — he glorified the parts of her he liked, the wonder of her springy hair, the girlish, modest chest, the way her skin was coloured in its contours, summit white but darker in its crevices, at her throat, her armpits, under her breasts, her torso, the inside of her thighs. She showed him where to linger and what to leave alone. He even rubbed her back and neck, and kissed, as she requested, every vertebra. But still he was no maestro of the spine. Nor was he in control of her. It can’t have helped that he was trembling with desire and that his senses of timing, balance and direction had deserted him. Or that he was attempting to make love to her still shackled by his underclothes and jeans. She should have guessed how green he’d be, how inexperienced, how lacking in technique. He was not the Casanova of her dreams. It was, though, thrilling to imagine what he might achieve when he became her lover, night on night, when he had learned to direct his energies more accurately. This first time, though, she’d do her best for him. She’d sacrifice herself.

It didn’t matter, so he said, that after all her scheming and attention, his climax when it arrived was not a mighty one and hers was oddly short and shadowy, approaching and departing in one move. A shiver and a shudder; they were done. But were they satisfied? Entirely so. Not Eros manifest, perhaps. Not sent sublime by orgasms into the whirlpool of amnesia that poets claim — although it isn’t true — is like the absolute forgetfulness of death. But happy to their fingertips. And pacified. And sparkling. And more in love — it’s all that counts when all is said and done — than they had been before the sex.

There must have been a moment when the baritone stopped singing. The salt dunes did not make acoustic waves all morning. Conditions changed. The wind came round and dropped. The perfect angle was reduced. The sand dried out. The lovers did not care or even notice, though. They were not listening to the reverberations of the land, but to their own.

She wrapped herself around him afterwards. They were too deep to spot the distant, inland plume of smoke, or hear the calls of ‘Joseph! Celice! Festa!’ from the sprinting ornithologist. The dunes blocked out the world. They cuddled on the bed of lissom grass. They were the oddest pair, in their flat, hollow suntrap, hidden from the sea, with no idea of what the bay might have in store for them.

Syl was exhausted, naturally. It had been a day of walking. First along the coast and back. Then up from the Mission Church to the family house, a longer distance than she’d remembered from her childhood, but curative.

The town looked and smelt its best at dusk. The grime and wear became invisible. Man-made illuminations showed only the good parts of the streets. The coloured bar lights had come on, in all their ripening shades from green to red, no blues, like strings of mangoes. The pavement stalls, their wares side-lit by lanterns from the town’s pre-electric past, were already trading Sunday treats: nut sticks, cocoa dips, candied fruit, doughnuts. The brochette salesmen raked the charcoal in their braziers. Each pulse of flame was their street cry. But, most of all, the dusk’s illumination came from the headlamps of cars in swinging, lighthouse beams. The corridors of quizzing light retracted and stretched out to sweep the legs and faces of the people on the street. The sleeping Sunday town was resurrected in the evening. It was a time for families and lovers.

Syl would have gone into a bar or bought herself a cheese and pork brochette. She hadn’t eaten anything that day. She’d had to leave for Baritone Bay before the ferryman had had a chance to bring the coffee and the cake he’d promised her for breakfast. And she was cold. Still just a shirt. No coat or jumper. A warm indoors, some food, a beer, some company were what she needed. Even the fall-short, underreaching comforts of a brazier would do. Or a speedy taxi ride back home. But she had not brought any money from the house, and hadn’t had the nerve to borrow any from Geo. She’d have to starve. She’d have to walk. And she’d have to shiver all the way. A lively and romantic prospect, actually. It matched the way she felt about herself — an orphaned, independent woman, with empty pockets, empty stomach, cold and young, and passing through the bright and filling streets without a friend.

It wasn’t long before Syl had left the Sunday carnival of crowds and lights. She crossed the river by the cycle bridge and followed the main boulevard out of the centre towards the hilltop houses where the artists, the academics and her parents lived. First there were the civic buildings, the pinkstone barracks and the regimental offices, the hotels of the Bankside district, the Geometric Gardens to hurry past. But then the streets were livelier again and Syl could peer down cul-de-sacs and into wayward tenements where students, conscripts, single men were dodging motorbikes and hesitating outside brothels, narrow bars and curtained doors, pretending to belong.

It was completely dark when Syl approached the railings of Deliverance Park. She had either to undertake the long walk round to reach the stretch of unmetalled side roads and the family house, or break a rule her parents had imposed since she was young and risk the night-time trespass and the trees. ‘There isn’t anything beyond me now,’ she’d told herself, that afternoon, outside the Mission Church. ‘There isn’t anything I cannot do or say.’ So she climbed the railings, dropped down on to the sodden plant beds and sprinted off into the dark, sprinted off as she had always wanted to, euphoric and untouchable. She let out great whoops of liberation and defeat as she progressed, as she was bound to, across safe lawns on to a pine-shielded path, blacker and more feverish than night, owl-eyed and loveless. Heading for the house that had to let her in.

The front door stuck even worse than usual. The opening was snagged by letters, cards, condolences, all hand-delivered during the day. Word had already got around. The murder was made public. Syl took them to the kitchen, put on the cooking-duty cardigan, which was left hanging, as ever, on the larder hook, and started hunting for her supper. There was — Sod’s law — no food at home, except the breakfast cake, still lying on its plate and dried out by its hours of neglect. Nor was there any alcohol. Syl searched the kitchen cupboards again and her father’s room, but all she found were a set of spirit glasses and the lees of some gleewater in a square bottle, half hidden on a high shelf, out of harm’s way. Not worth the reach. The cake would have to do. She broke it into four dry pieces and started on the mail. Cards first, from neighbours mostly who hardly knew her parents. Photographs of clouds and aquatints of flowers with ornate fine lines from poets and the scriptures, being brave at the expense of death. ‘Life is the Desert,’ Syl was told in gold and silver italics. ‘Death is the Rendezvous of Friends.’ Or ‘Death’s a shadow, always at our heels.’ Or, It’s ‘our second home. The feast is spread upon its table. The Host is waiting at its door.’ Or ‘Death’s the veil which those who live call Life: They sleep and it is lifted.’ Or (from the sepulchre in Milan where Claudio Busi, the architect, is buried) ‘Death is nothing at all. I have slipped away into another room. All is well.’ Except, thought Syl, that there’s no slipping back.

The letters were all handwritten, from her parents’ colleagues and the secretaries at the Institute and the university. For Syl, For Sil, With love to Sylvia, For Celice and Joseph’s daughter (‘Sorry, but we do not know your name’), To Cyl . All of them seemed fonder now of their two doctors of zoology than they had ever been in life. ‘Your parents were admired by all of us,’ they wrote. ‘They were devoted. Anyone could tell. They will be missed. It’s such a blessing, in a way, that they should have died in each other’s arms.’ And ‘They are irreplaceable.’