Being Dead (14 page)

‘What was the last date he filled in?’ asked Geo. The architect was brighter than he looked.

She tried to turn the pages but they tore like cotton wool. ‘It’s far too wet to read.’

‘What will you do?’

‘I’ll put it in the airing room to dry.’

‘No, what will you do . . . you know, to find out where they’ve gone?’

‘I’ve no idea. What should I do? I’m not the police. What would you do?’ She thought her tone of voice made it clear that he should not reply.

‘You’ll have to ask the neighbours what they know. That’s first. Call up your relatives. Have you got any brothers or sisters?’

‘No. I’ve only got an uncle left. And about a hundred second cousins. Look, let me work it out . . .’

‘Phone the uncle. He might have heard from them.’

‘He’s in New York. I haven’t seen him since I was about six. He and my father haven’t talked for years. Any other inspirations?’

‘Well, phone their friends.’

Syl shrugged. She couldn’t put a name to any of their friends. She lived her life, not theirs.

‘You’ll have to check the hospitals, then. I’m sorry, but the city morgue as well. And go down to the police. Ask them to look out for the missing car. What’s wrong?’

Syl made a face at him. She hated lists. She hated Things to Do. How many days of visits would that be? How much in pirate taxi fares?

‘I’ll need a taxi, then, for all your bright ideas,’ she said.

‘There’s one outside.’

‘I’m broke.’

‘OK. I don’t always have to charge. Not friends. It’s Saturday tomorrow. I’m free to please myself.’ He concentrated on his coffee-cup. He did not want to catch her eye, although he was content to stand out of the rain and watch the water spread across her shaved head and plaster her shirt across her breasts.

‘That’s good, my ferryman, my pheromone,’ she said. She’d let him stay. He was the interfering sort who’d do exactly what he was told. Here, in another life, would be a fantasy come true, a chauffeur on command, a menial, a parlourman.

‘How free are you to stay the night with me? I hate this house.’

They spent the night in her own bedroom – or, at least, the room that once was hers – forced together by the narrow mattress and the single sheets. Her parents had decorated since she’d left and had taken down the galaxies of luminous stars that she had stuck on the once blue ceiling. Now the Sky at Night was white and bare. The drawers and cupboards, the novel-heavy shelves of her girlhood, were empty and disinfected, like in the cheap rooms of a boarding house.

She could not sleep. Too tired and too uncomfortable. In her own apartment, she would have had some wine to help her cope with her disquiets, but her parents were not drinkers. All they had was an old and sticky bottle of honey ‘rum’. No alcohol. Sober as she was, however, Syl had not needed to fake any sexual ardour with her driver. Stress and agitation, as she’d discovered on many occasions, were unexpected aphrodisiacs. So were acquiescent and dull men. She must have shocked and baffled him twenty times – and not only when she called him Charon. She brushed his penis with the stubble of her hair. She made good use of the stiff tuft below his underlip. She made his wrist and fingers ache. She made him wait. She took the opportunity to flood her parents’ house with noise. But afterwards, when he was sleeping, it seemed that making love had changed and calmed her. The urgency had gone out of the search for her parents. The shadows were no longer Stygian. Death had no mystery. Anxiety had been unsexed. Now she was simply annoyed to be at home. This was a failure at her age, surely, to end up in the room were she had been a child.

In the tranquillizing darkness of the house, with sticky Geo wrapped around her back in her too narrow bed, the panic of her journey to the coast, the hasty ripping up of her own life and job, seemed idiotic and premature. She’d come more than six hundred kilometres, back to a town she hated, simply because her father’s secretary had whistled. Her ‘doctors’, after ‘a couple of days’ fieldwork’ – she didn’t know ‘exactly where’ – had not turned up for work. So what? Hoorah, in fact. At last, a sign of mischief! Syl had always thought her parents loved work too much. They’d broken free for once.

Celice and Joseph had been thoughtless, possibly. But this can’t have been the first time they’d gone away and not informed her or their colleagues. They’d driven somewhere in the car, a little holiday, perhaps, and overstayed. No mystery in that. There was a simple explanation for all this derangement. Her parents were too middle-aged and dull to suffer accidents or die before their time, like mountaineers or poets.

At any moment she expected to hear their old car in the street, their headlights flaring on her starless ceiling, and then the tumbling of the front-door locks as they came in and up the stairs to catch their daughter with a naked taxi driver in her bed. Here would be the slapstick answer to her father’s vexing question, ‘When will we get to see you in the flesh again?’

Syl was both tranquil and unnerved. She left her sleeping driver in her bed and went into her mother’s room, where she would be more comfortable and might sleep. She put on her mother’s nightdress and lay down on the near side of the bed where the sheets and the coverlet were dry. This would be a better welcome if they returned: they’d find their modest daughter, sleeping, and death ten thousand days away.

‘To what do we owe this honour?’ they’d say, sarcastic and delighted, too shy to hug. ‘What brings
you
home?’ Hardly anything, Syl would have to answer. That was the truth. Why had Syl come? To close the bedroom window, dry the tray and rescue Father’s ledger from the rain, to make piles at the bottom of the stairs of the junk and bills from their dull and geometric lives.

Her driver woke her, shook her arm, earlier than necessary the next morning and in a bleating mood. He’d woken in the middle of the night to discover she’d abandoned him.

‘Why did you go?’ He was standing at the foot of Celice’s bed, as peeved and naked as a child. ‘I thought you’d run away.’ Syl laughed. ‘I’ve only got your word for all of this,’ he said. ‘Some joke.’

‘That’s right, I made it up. This isn’t my parents’ house at all. They haven’t disappeared. It’s just to get you into bed and save on taxi fares. You’re such a catch.’ She reached across and switched on the radio, the news channel, and waved the ferryman away. He’d already tried to lift the bedclothes and when she’d pulled them back in place, had gripped her wrist. ‘No, there’s not room in here for you. OK? Have you had breakfast yet? See what there is. Go on.’

When he had gone – he
almost
slammed the bedroom door – she listened for radio reports of local accidents and deaths. There were a few – a lorry spill, three students in a car, a garage worker crushed – but none that matched. No doctors of zoology. No unattractive people of her parents’ age and learning.

Syl dressed and crept downstairs. She knew which two steps to avoid, which banister would squeak. She could see Geo kneeling in the kitchen, searching the cupboards for any edible bread. She went out in the drizzle in her father’s waterproof to call on the two neighbouring houses. There was no reply at the first, except from a dog. But at the second an elderly woman she did not recognize reported, ‘It’s been four or five days, at least, since I’ve seen your mother. Or your father. Last Sunday, I think. They’ve not been in the yard. Their bedroom window’s been hanging open. It was banging in the wind the other night. You’ve closed it now.’ How long had her parents’ car been gone? The woman didn’t know. ‘I wouldn’t recognize their car,’ she said. ‘What colour is it?’

Syl wasn’t sure herself. ‘Have you got any bread to spare?’ she asked.

Back at the house, a half-loaf richer, Syl placated Geo somewhat with a cheerful if mocking slap across his buttocks, then pulled a chair up to the phone. She tried her parents’ mobile again. The number, as before, was unobtainable. She called her father’s secretary. No reply, except the answerphone. The Institute was closed. Then she began to call the hospitals. The switchboards were not staffed on Saturdays. She was required to ‘Key the number of the patient’s ward’, or ‘Try again on Monday’, or ‘Dial four sevens for Inquiries’ and join the queue of other callers and the crackling, patience-testing music of Osvaldo Bosse.

It was tempting to get rid of Geo straight away. Already he was getting on her nerves. He was a whiner and a liability. She did not like the way he’d held her arm once he’d sniffed her out in Mother’s bed that morning. Nor his attempts to lift the coverlet and join her there. Then, once she had scrumped the half-loaf, he evidently thought she was obliged to get him breakfast. ‘I’ve given up waitressing,’ she’d said, and let him sulk. But now she guessed she’d better change her tune, at least till evening. If, as seemed likely, she couldn’t get through to the hospitals by phone, then a driver and his car would be essential for the day.

Then she’d dump him. (‘You’ll have to find yourself another girl. Your lovemaking is poisonous. Geo’s such a very stupid name. Don’t phone.’)

He was no longer in the kitchen when Syl went to make her peace. She found him in the garden studio, sitting in her father’s chair with coffee, an apple and an old newspaper. He’d rather die than have to toast himself some bread. He, surely, was the guest, the giver of free lifts, who should be fussed by her.

‘Sorry, Ferryman,’ she said.

‘OK.’

‘I’m worried, see?’ She put her arms around his shoulders. ‘Shall we go?’

‘Go where?’

‘Go to the hospitals, I guess. And then go to the dungeons where the ghouls and corpses are. Frequent the graveyards and the tombs. Hang out at funerals.’ She did her best to cheer him up. She put her hand inside his shirt.

‘OK,’ he said, as flatly as he could.

But first Syl went upstairs to shower and then to make her mother’s bed. She had to clear away the breakfast-cup and plate, and remove her parents’ ghostly residues. She took the rain-soaked rug and coverlet from her mother’s bedroom and hung them in the airing room. Her father’s ledger was already dry and stiff. She was reluctant to look inside. This was his private space, and no child wants to read about a father’s secret world. Nevertheless, she held up the pages to the window light and let them hang open until she found the last completed page. The paper had expanded and the ink had lost its pigment, first to the rain, now to the heat. The ledger smelt of museums and the inside of briefcases. But still his final, corrugated sentence was clear enough. Such joyful, optimistic words, she thought. And reassuring. He’d written, ‘Tuesday. Far too fine for work.’ And then, ‘(In search of sprayhoppers!)’.

So Syl, with Geo too attentive and long-suffering at her side, embarked upon the oddest town tour that Saturday, driving in the wake of Fish through rain-dejected streets, with only one windscreen wiper functioning on his car, from clinic to hospital, the private and the public wings, hoping to find Joseph and Celice tucked up in bed with grapes and magazines. They ran up stairs, rode bed-wide lifts, and queued for clerks to hunt her parents’ names on screens and registers. They visited the wards of unclaimed, injured patients who might be Joseph or Celice, pulling back the curtains to see the damage that a car, a knife, a heart-attack or an overdose can do. All strangers.

Finally, they visited the central police station. Syl did her best to alarm the duty officer with how reliable and punctual her parents usually were. ‘They’re the ones who always let you down,’ he said. He took descriptions of her parents and noted the registration number of their car. He searched his VDU, but no reports were listed.

‘They’ll show up,’ he promised. And then, an agile contradiction, ‘Check they haven’t turned up at the city morgue.’

Birdie volunteered to run down to the beach to check that Festa, Joseph and Celice were indeed safe and to let them know about the fire and what was lost inside the study house; their clothes and bags, their notes and books, the promise of their doctorates. Birdie could hardly refuse the task: he was the fittest of the three and, actually, the only one with any shoes. He’d used the heels to knock the glass out of the bunk-room windows for their escape.

Hanny and Victor would have to make their unheroic ways barefoot across the manac fields towards the shanty village. A second visit, less triumphant than the first, in search of borrowed clothes and shoes, and a telephone to call the Institute, the airport and the fire brigade. If this wind picked up, so might the embers of the study house. Then they’d have a forest or a scrub fire to account for, and even houses in the village might be lost. A trembling thought.

Their comrade Birdie was a scarecrow, leaping down the steps, two at a time, through the stands of flute bushes, until he reached the farm lane and the ponds. He wore only a white T-shirt, fly-fronted pyjama bottoms from which his penis pecked and nodded like a finger puppet as he ran, black ankle boots, no socks. He smelt of smoke and sweat. His hair was matted. He’d never felt before so cinematic and so wholly ludicrous. He knew where on the coast he would find his three colleagues. He had himself helped Festa rake in the seaweed for her medical and nutritional studies one afternoon. She’d recompensed him with her kisses just the night before, although, despite his best endeavours, she was not yet quite ready to allow his tongue to penetrate her lips or his hand to dip into her clothes. And he had twice spotted Joseph and Celice in the shallows further up the coast, towards the jutting foreshore of the bay.

The route was simple and mostly downhill: the pines, the marshes and the dunes, the coastal track, the wide expanses of the beach, the splashing run along the shore towards the figures in the tide, the distant, bending plume of ash. He hadn’t felt so fit for months, despite the ankle-rubbing boots and the remains of a smoke-laden headache. He was pumped up by all the thrilling chemicals of shock. The effort brought it home to him. Death had been near; he had been fortunate. He’d never been so fast or spirited, so oddly close to nausea and joy. How glorious he would appear to Festa as he called to her, half naked and half Hollywood, an envoy bearing messages and running from the fire towards the sea.