Jim Crace - Being Dead

Syl dropped her teeth back in the jar. Then, clutching it, she got down off the kitchen chair and went into the garden studio to curl up on the couch. Monday was approaching fast with its disjunctive ways. Monday rips the family apart. It sends its members off to work. It puts them on the bus and train and plane. She folded one hand round the jar of teeth and wrapped the other one around an ankle, spread her fingers on her lower leg, held herself in place with just her fingertips, dug bitten nails into her skin. She closed her eyes against the dawn to find out what it felt like to be loved and dead.

The brothers who ran the Salt Pines Company were happy to loan their sand jeep to the police. Although they hadn’t yet started building a single house, their marketing campaign was due to open in ten days’ time. Their brochures, already printed, had renamed the area Lullaby Coast, suggesting safety, retirement and the soothing presence of the sea. The murder of two respectable doctors of zoology on the fringes of the development could well suggest the opposite, that this was not a happy coast. It could suggest conspiracy as well. The doctors had publicly opposed the building scheme. Their names were on petitions. So the brothers would do what they could to remove the bodies from the dunes as speedily as possible and then persuade the police captain that a quiet, low-profile hunt for ‘the responsibles’ might well produce the best results for everyone.

Their driver took the vehicle along the coastal track then down the small stone jetty below the car park into the shallows of a receding tide where the sand was firmest and not too steeply banked. He would have liked to have accelerated and sent out loops of water from his tyres. Surf-driving. But this, he had been warned, would be the first, informal part of a funeral and he should drive the jeep as if it were a hearse. There were two empty coffins in the body of the jeep. So he kept the needle hovering at 10 k.p.h. and made the most of going through the waves as deeply as he dared, until he reached the first rocks of the bay and had to turn inland towards the dunes.

Two policemen showed him where to back and park. There were another two laying wooden duckboards along the sandy gully of the access dime, dull conscripts with unruly uniforms and minds. Three more men, in suits, and all with cigarettes, were standing like good golfing friends on the grass below the tent. The police detective. The magistrate. One of the brothers from Salt Pines. It looked as if they were expecting someone to come from the tent with a tray of drinks. Their conversation stopped when the thick green canvas had been loosened from its pegs and pulled off its shaking metal frame to show the sun-deprived rectangle of grass beneath. The tent had been up only since the Sunday morning. A day, that’s all. But already photosynthesis had stalled. The lissom green had slightly paled, like the skin below a sticking plaster.

Celice and Joseph were still hidden under sheets and their refrigerating blankets, but nothing could disguise the smell. Bacon, seaweed, hoof-and-horn, the sweet-death odours of burnt marmalade. Six days of grace are more than anyone can bear. The three older men moved away and lit fresh cigarettes. One of the policemen — not allowed to smoke, but used to dirty work like this — handed round a tube of mints to his three colleagues and the driver. First they rolled the canvas up and jumped on it to pump out the envelopes of trapped air. Then they disconnected and took down the two fluorescent lamps from the top strut of the tent, and dismantled the twelve lengths of the frame. It took two men to drag the canvas down to the sand jeep. One other took the tent poles. The fourth carried the lighting battery. They returned along the duckboards with the two empty, wood-effect coffins on their shoulders. Provided by the city morgue, one standard issue for a man, a shorter one for a woman. The driver followed with the lids.

Filling the coffins would have been simple if the bodies had been laid on sheets, as well as covered by them. Then the policemen could easily make hammocks with which to lift and swing the victims into their boxes. But Joseph and Celice had not been moved, except by gulls and by the murderer, since they had died. The policemen would have to pull away their coverings and roll the bodies on to lengths of folded sheet. They put on plastic gloves. They did not want to touch the dead.

Celice, when she was finally exposed, was still chest down on the ground, her left cheek pressed into the lissom grass, her legs level with her husband’s face, braced and supported on their toes and knees. Her upper body, in its black jacket and grubby white T-shirt made her seem the greater and the less-dead of the two. Below the waist she was as thin and leathery as a hermit’s water-bag. The policemen did their best — but failed — to stop themselves from looking at her nakedness and at the chipped and flaking cherry red varnish of her nails.

Her husband’s posture seemed the comic one. No clothes at all to keep him respectable. He was as modest as a beast. He’d fallen on his back. His legs were spread. His cock and testicles were livid mushrooms growing out of dough. His left wrist was twisted against the broken angle of his arm. And his hand was still wrapped round the stringy folds and sinews of her lower leg. Still devoted, then. Still in touch. But not quite innocent.

The murdered couple, in the weeks ahead, in the newspapers, even at the funeral, would have to shoulder some of the blame themselves. Their bodies were too compliant, unprotesting, over-dramatized. Their deaths — though ugly and gratuitous — seemed, even to the policemen gathered in the dunes, partly deserved. Wilful, even. Why had they wandered from the track? Why had they taken off their clothes, at such an age, in such a place, if not to draw the devils and the monsters to the dunes? These victims had been accomplices in their own misadventure. If life was an express that hurtled between termini, then it had been their choice to quit the moving train before the final station had been reached and dash themselves against the flying stillness of the earth. They’d courted death. And death had been seduced. They wanted it, and so it came, a hock of granite in its obliging hand. The four young policemen disapproved, as all the neighbours and the colleagues would. These people had been irresponsible, to let themselves be robbed so easily of their ‘good deaths’. They should have laboured on until they’d reached the floating world of pain and age. They should have persevered and competed for the just rewards of death in bed.

The four young policemen, too close now to the pungent details of mortality to concentrate on anything but horrors of the flesh, were nauseous as they prepared to lift Celice and Joseph from the dunes. They coughed and gagged. They spat into the grass. They held their breath. Anything to keep the taste out of their mouths. This wasn’t worth the pay. They’d rather be on traffic duty, even. Nevertheless they had no choice but to tuck the two sheets under the corpses, one to Joseph’s left, the other to Celice’s right. Twisting their heads to take deep lungfuls of air, two men to a body, they had to kneel down on the grass, spread their fingers against the rocky outcrops of the skull, the shoulder, the hip, the knee, and pull these two unlikely lovers apart. On to the sheets. Into their boxes, the one too large, the other far too short. Under their lids, and out of sight. Now the policemen could stand up and sip the sweet sea air.

What happened to our only prayer, May no one come to lift his hand from her ? The power of a prayer is only brief at best. For a moment only, his arm was stretched as he clung on. His skin adhered. But soon his hand departed from her, slipping from the ankle bone. His fingers were unwoven through the heavy air. The space between them grew and grew. His knuckles dragged along the ground. Her lower leg was left with just the indent of his kissing fingertip. Joseph’s body rolled towards the west. His wife went east. They came off the grass and on to cotton, then into wood-effect, then on to the flat bed of the sand jeep, along the beach and through the suburbs to the icy, sliding drawers of the city morgue, the coroner’s far room, amongst the suicides. Their bodies had been swept away, at last, by wind, by time, by chance. The continents could start to drift again and there was space in heaven for the shooting stars.