Jim Crace - Being Dead

If there were any justice in the world, there would be thunder, now that our only prayer has been betrayed, now that the light of time has been reunited with sound, its faster twin. Or else, at least, the baritone should sing. Lift up your voice, the conscience of the land. Protest. Give us your arias of grief. But there’s no justice in the random and habitual parishes of death. The land is conscienceless. It has no ceremony. It cannot rise to the occasion, as people must, when there’s a funeral. The best that it could do was wash its heavy waters on the shore, and stir the dimes where Joseph and Celice had died with its grey wind and let the daylight pop and crack with smaller lives than theirs.

What was their final legacy? A rectangle of faded grass and, where the bodies had decayed for their six days of grace, a crushed and formless smudge of almost white where time and night had robbed the lissom of its green.

6.10 a.m.

So this has been a quivering of sorts for Joseph and Celice. A day lived forwards has retrieved itself by fleeing from the future to the past. The dead are resurrected and they he in bed at backward-running dawn, with first light of a perfect summer’s day ducking and then dropping from the sky into the east, into the morning night. Ahead of them, the almost thirty years of married life, the more than twenty years before they met. The shrinking and retreating universe has left their deaths behind. They are not mortal any more.

Celice, in her wide bed, the shutters down, the silence broken by her whistling nose, is sleeping with the joyful certainty that Tuesday comes. Two days, alone, off work, with no alarm to wake her up and nothing she must do to fill her time except play music on the stereo, patrol the garden with her secateurs, walk down across the park, if it is fine, towards the shops, walk back to take some coffee and a cake at the Pavilion, toss crumbs amongst the birds, be free.

She is not restless in the least, or dreaming. Even her wheezing does not wake her up or nag her into turning on her side. She remembers in her subconscious exactly where her open book was dropped the night before and that her watch has slipped on to the floor. She will not roll on to the tasselled page-marker and crease it. She knows it’s fallen there, by her shoulder, almost hidden by the pillow. If she wanted to she could even reach out in her sleep to find at once the crumpled tissue pushed into the tucking of the bed, to blow her nose or wipe her mouth or simply grip as a comforter.

The coverlet is pulled up to her chin. Her eyelids perch and shiver in the shadows of her face, pale resting moths. Her hair is spread across the pillow she once shared — and quivering will let her share again — with Syl and Joseph. If she is troubled or distressed by anything, if she is guilty or annoyed, or if her back and shoulders are painful, it does not show while she is asleep. She is too deep. She is too far away.

Joseph is the restless one, the fidgeter, in his more narrow bed in his untidy studio. He has a day of work ahead. Two meetings and a seminar. Two papers to prepare. A faculty report. Already he’s aware of where he’ll hurt that day. His knee is troublesome, even while he sleeps. His colon aches. He’s having bladder dreams. He’s almost praying for the day to come. Then he can piss the pain away and end the nightmare that has been haunting him since his last visit to the lavatory at twenty-five past four.

He is an old man in his dreams, racked with pain and naked in a pauper’s bed. His hands are stiff. His fingertips have lost their sensitivity. All he can feel, when he has found the energy to push his hands beneath the sheets to try to reach and soothe the pain, is scaly skin. He has become pie-crust. It is a bore to be so old, and so condemned. But that — great age — is what he always wanted for himself. So here’s his most sombre wish fulfilled.

His dream has moved him to the geriatric ward. The blankets and the screens. They’ve plugged him in; a monitor, a catheter, a drip. He hears the trolleys in the corridor, the purring journeys of the hearse along embedded routes to one of death’s ten thousand gates, and doctors saying, ‘Let the old man die. The world turns mouldy otherwise.’

He calls her name, Celice. He does not want to die alone. He wants the blessing of warm light and the caressing touch of family. He wants the blinds pulled up, the candles lit, the shadows falling on his bed, the mutters of his people crowding at the door. He wants to hear the sobbing of his daughter and his wife and feel their fingers wrapped around his shin. Please, let them through, he whispers to himself. Then let me doze until you hear my half-completed breath and see the sweet narcosis of no dreams.

The house itself is stretching, creaky in the rousing wash of dawn’s first grey. The sun’s forehead is peeking at the day, its face still indigo from sleep, its cloudy head uncombed and tumbling its vapour curls on to the skyline of the sea. The birds are in the gardens now, throwing out long shadows from the peaks of trees. The town’s first trams are nudging through the streets in search of love. The first alarms are sounding in a thousand homes. The water taps are opened and the gas fires lit. The smells are coffee, bread and soap. A crabbing boat is labouring along the coast, to meet the light half-way, or chase it back whence it came. And Joseph and Celice are in their rooms, spreadeagled in their beds. No matter how they toss and turn, no matter what they dream, no matter what the milky dark may whisper in their ears, its promises, its threats and its assurances, they can’t avoid the coming and receding days of grace.

There was a tiger sky in the early hours of the morning — an orange wash of sun in mist behind a camouflage of black-grey, drifting stripes. The clouds were shredded by the wind. Later there would be rain, a middling tide and average temperatures. A dull and uninspiring day, except for a short storm in the afternoon when the sky would fill with lightning sprites and the sea would briefly turn to slate.

No one could tell that police had been at work, or what dramas had occurred the week before. Overnight, the weather and the sea had removed the spoors of the sand jeep, the duckboards and the policemen’s boots. There was no evidence of humankind. The bay had been abandoned to itself, in its last months before Salt Pines.

It is, of course, a pity that the police dogs ever caught the scent of human carrion and led their poking masters to the dunes to clear away the corpses for ‘proper burial’, so that the dead could be less splendid in a grave. The dunes could have disposed of Joseph and Celice themselves. They didn’t need help. The earth is practised in the craft of burial. It gathers round. It embraces and adopts the dead. Joseph and Celice would have turned to landscape, given time. Their bodies would have been just something extra dead in a landscape already sculpted out of death. They would become nothing special. Gulls die. And so do flies and crabs. So do the seals. Even stars must decompose, disrupt and blister on the sky. Everything was born to go. The universe has learned to cope with death.

So, had it not been for the dogs, the residues of Joseph and Celice’s lives would have been tossed and tumbled in the dunes to nourish and renew themselves in different forms. They might have found a brief eternity below the sand, together at first, still touching, but soon they’d have to separate, to weave and drift into the unremarking sea, or sink into the clods and pebbles of the earth. A slower journey than a hearse. Slower than a glacier.

Instead, they left only a white and yellow patch of lissom grass (or angel bed, pintongue, sand hair, repose) where they had loved and died, framed by a tent-made rectangle of lesser green. The bodies had blocked out the light and flattened and indented the soft ground underneath. For almost six days the grass had had to live by root alone, scavenging for nutrients and minerals with its thin threads while its foliage was bleaching in the dark. Celice and Joseph’s long and heavy shapes had robbed the grass of its free energy and left a vegetable ghost. It was as if someone had thrown down a ship’s tarpaulin or dragged up a skein of seaweed into the dunes for use as fertilizer on the fields and then collected it, days later, to leave their soft denials in the grass. Each blade was tendril soft, as colourless and feeble as a day-old shoot, as lank and listless as cut straw. Some leaves were bent and scarred and some were tom. Others had been pressed into the sandy earth, to seem ingrowing, keen to burrow back. The worms and grubs that hated light had come up to the surface for a change to crawl and slide in these rare caverns, leaving their half-tunnels and their casts as decorations on the ground. The smell was like red wine; earthy, rich and fermenting.