Jim Crace - Being Dead

The waiting gull, a greater intellect, was too nervous of the bodies in the dunes to help itself, just yet, to any of their titbits on display, the wet and ragged centres of their wounds, the soft flesh of their inner legs, their eyes, the pink parts of their mouths. It bridled its wings and stretched its neck at them, regurgitating its noisy tempers as if its throat was blocked by stones, expecting these two irritated giants to spring to life like resting seals and drive it off.

The gull became less cautious when, after several timid sorties, the bodies failed to strike at it. It pecked at one of Celice’s shoes, which had been tossed a little distance from their patch of grass. It lifted Joseph’s underpants, misled by what it took to be the smell of fish. It found a piece of broken biscuit that had dropped from the granite wielder’s mouth. Then it went to work and started on the unexpected feast of crabs, which were already labouring through their exaggerated countrysides towards the corpses. More violent death. The sudden downward beating of a beak.

Crabs and swag flies were too numerous in the dunes of Baritone Bay — and too innocent — to be cautious. Numbers made them safe as certainly as lack of numbers had made Joseph and Celice vulnerable. The flies lined up like fishermen along the banks of the bodies’ open wounds. They settled mainly on Celice. She had been the more abused, struck seven times around the face and head. ‘Seven times killed,’ they’d say. Her hair was matted with wet blood and the syrup of her brain. One cheek was flattened by the pounding impact of the granite. Two teeth were cracked, longways. Her facial artery, that superficial lifeline from the carotid, which climbed over her lower jaw to supply the colour to her cheek and feed the brain with oxygen, had been tom in two. Blood had spread across her throat and shoulders and soaked invisibly into her summer jacket. There were dark patches on the grass and sand. Blood does not keep its livery for long. Celice was blackening. It looked and felt as if she’d been pelted with molasses. Her body made good pickings for the glucose-hungry flies.

Celice — an age ago — had put a hand up to her face, to close the wounds or stem the flow, perhaps, or to protect her dizzy looks, her high cheekbones, her somewhat furrowed lips, her acne-purpled chin, the blood-filled lines around her mouth, her teeth. The hand was stuck in place by blood.

She’d landed on a shoulder first, then toppled sideways. The more damaged half of her face was shielded now — too late to do her any good — by grass and sand. Her upper body was still neatly dressed for her day out: the black woollen jacket, a white, rough-weave T-shirt with the quill-and-inkwell logo of a bookshop on the chest in blue, a padded brassière. Then she was naked to her toes. The swag flies found it easiest to feast on the blood in her hair or to settle in the swampy bruises on her neck and gums or at the damage to her hands. They fed in clinging multitudes. Loose knots of flies. They made black balls of wings and antennae amongst the clots, as weightless and as dry as tumbleweed. There’s not a creature drier than a fly, as any small boy with a match and candle can testify. Some flies strayed round the bare flesh of her lower body, settled in the hair between her legs or at the tuck of her anus, but found few pickings. There wasn’t any source of blood below the shoulders of her jacket. Celice’s hair, though, within an hour of her death, began to seem more lively than it ever had in life.

Her husband, though his body was less bloody than Celice’s and his face was only bruised, had wounds and lesions right across his chest and abdomen, plus the rifting, open fracture on the right side of his skull. The spittle at his mouth was red and succulent. His left shoulder-blade was broken; his arm was dislocated. He’d not been protected by any clothes, other than his watch and spectacles. And a wedding ring. So when he fell on to his back, his legs apart, his fat and puckered testicles were on display. They’d split and tom with the impact of a heavy shoe. The swag flies browsed his chest and swarmed between his legs. They gleaned the urine and picked at the semen lacquer on his inner thigh.

The crabs, when they arrived and climbed the gradients of flesh and cloth, did not compete with the flies for blood. They grazed for detached skin and detritus, the swarf and dross and jetsam of animals with lives cut short.

Here in the dunes — with Celice’s spread body, her rustling hair, her husband hanging from her leg, as centrepiece — was a fine display to illustrate the annual fieldwork lecture that she gave, normally with slides of putrefying seals or tide-abandoned fish, to the faculty’s new and squeamish students: ‘Anyone who studies nature must get used to violence. You’ll have to make yourselves companionable with death if any of you want to flourish as zoologists.’ She meant that fear of death is fear of life, a cliché amongst scientists, and preachers too. Both know that life and death are inextricably entwined, the double helix of existence. Both want to give life meaning only because it clearly has none, other than to replicate and decompose. Hard truths.

‘You’ll need to swallow two long words,’ Celice would say, and write SENESCENCE and THANATOLOGY on the teaching screen. Natural ageing. And the study of death. ‘Senescence is the track on which most creatures run their lives. Including us. Not all creatures, of course. Amoebolites and monofiles enjoy eternity. Unless they are destroyed by accident or predators. Enjoy eternity? Is that the word? Experience eternity, perhaps? Endure? Even that denotes too great a consciousness.’

Later in their study year, her students would encounter monofiles under the microscope, splitting apart like oil in water, reproducing by fission. Two of the same. Then four. Then eight. Then sixty-four. And all their DNA identical. No deaths. No corpses. Evermore.

A more indulgent lecturer than Celice, less disciplined, more abstract, might ask the class to wonder if that single-celled eternity was paradise or hell. To break in two and not to die. To multiply and yet remain ourselves for ever, world without end. To spread and stretch and colonize and build until there’s nowhere left to stand except on someone else’s shoulders, until the world is swollen like a boil and fit to burst. ‘Death is the price we pay for being multi-celled,’ was all she’d say. ‘Our tracks run out eventually. ’ More slides. ‘These dusk bugs die within a single day, for every bug must have its day as you well know. This land tortoise, still living in Mauritius, has a sailor’s name and date carved in its shell. Nicholas Surcouf. 1803. Two hundred years old at least. And these. ’ A photographic slide from 1910 of four young women sitting on a bench with a uniformed man spread out on the grass, a cushion for their feet. ‘. are almost certainly dead. Life’s only, say, up to ninety years for creatures such as you and I. We’re less than turtles. We have to die before they do. We must. It’s programmed that we will. Our births are just the gateway to our deaths. That’s why a baby screams when it is born. Don’t write that in your notes. They who begin to live begin to die. It’s downhill from the womb, from when the sperm locates the egg and latches on.’

Celice would take the last slides from the projector, let them contemplate the startling square of light, then add, ‘You’re dying now. Get used to it!’ before she hit the switch to put the room in sudden darkness.

‘So, then,’ she’d say to her assembled ghosts, as she went round to lift the blinds and let the daylight in, ‘we have you here for three years, and maybe five if you go on to doctorates. This is Natural Science. Prepare for death and violence. I’m not suggesting that you go to student bars and pick a fight or frequent the cemeteries. We’ll take you to the forest or the beach. You only have to turn a log or rock to see at once more violence and more death than you’ll discover in a hundred years of, well, life at this university, despite the instincts of the hard-pressed teaching staff when dissertations aren’t handed in on time. Enjoy yourselves.’ She’d close her book with a bang, at this, her practised, closing joke. ‘I don’t believe that any student’s perished at my hands. Yet.’