Being Dead (2 page)

It must have seemed her leg had moved, a shrug of skin, a spasm of muscle, enough to dislodge some calf-sand and to shake the longer grass under her foot. Joseph tried to bark and squeak her name. His arm was heavy and numb, dislocated at the shoulder. The air seemed too thick to penetrate with anything as soft as flesh. Yet somehow, fortified by his self-pity, Joseph found the will and the adrenalin to reach across towards his wife. He wanted to apologize. He had to twist his wrist against the broken angle of his arm and weave his fingers through the heavy air. His hand – bruised a little when the wedding ring was stolen – dropped on to the stretched flesh of her lower leg, the tendon strings, the shallows of her ankle. Blood from his damaged knuckles ran over her skin but not enough to glue his hand in place. He spread his fingers and tried to grip a solid bone to steady himself. He had to stop his body being swept away, by wind, by time, by continental drift, by shooting stars, by shame.

Her skin was warm, so Joseph might have taken this as confirmation that his wife was still alive, that she might get up off the grass at any moment, collect her clothes and go for help. He could afford to sleep. He started on a dream. An anxious dream in which he’d left his daily ledger out on the deck one morning, on the breakfast table. A careless oversight. It could well rain and wash away his ink, the records of his life. His pages would be turned to pulp. Or else they might be found and read by strangers.

At what point had the life – curmudgeonly, distracted, timid and thick-skulled – gone out of him? Joseph’s heart was squirming like an angler’s worm, refusing to be reconciled to the awaiting deep, but weakening with every beat. The fish would rise and take it soon. Mondazy’s celebrated fish. But the agony did not belong only to the heart. Every pod and pocket of his body played its part, at its own pace, in its own way. Joseph was being gathered in by death, cell by cell by cell. He came to be half of himself, and then a quarter of himself, and then a fraction of himself, which was too small to measure. The music and the mayhem had all gone. His more-than-half-an-hour had elapsed.

They say that hearing is the last of our proficiencies to die, that corpses hear the rustling of bed sheets being pulled across their faces, the early weeping and the window being closed, the footsteps on the wooden stairs, the ruffian departing, the doctor’s scratchy pen. That is why our generation talks so quietly in the dying room. And that is why the
quiverings
of old were not a waste. The body hears the widow and the child, the rattle of the chimney-pot, the
quiver
sticks, the life unravelled backwards through the night.

The final sound that Joseph heard was his own bark. His face was grey-white, sheenless, dulled. He was still sweating and his penis was erect, not filled with blood and passion but stiffened by the paroxysms of his muscles. Cruel fate. His limbs and face still twitched, a reflex to the blood’s acidity. His larynx was convulsed. The sound he made was not a rattle or a whoop, but more like the call of foxes, or else a gull, or else the unresponding kick-start of a motorbike. Within a moment of the bark – and the few retreating cub squeaks that followed it – Joseph stared up at the day with flat, toneless eyes. Again, no breath, no memory.

Joseph and Celice were irretrievable. Do not be fooled. There was no beauty for them in the dunes, no painterly tranquillity in death framed by the sky, the ocean and the land, that pious trinity, in which their two bodies, supine, prone, were posed as lifeless waxworks of themselves, sweetly unperturbed and ruffled only by the wind. This was an ugly scene. They had been shamed. They were undignified. They were dishonoured by the sudden vileness of their deaths. Only their faces were expressionless. No one could tell what kind of man he was, what type of woman she had been. Their characters had bled out on the grass. The universe could not care less.

Should we expect their spirits to depart, some hellish cart and its pale horse to come and take their falling souls away to its hot mines, some godly, decorated messenger, too simple-minded for its golden wings, to fly them to repose, reunion, eternity? Might we demand some ghosts, at least? Or fanfares, gardens and high gates? Or some dramatic skyline, steep with clouds? The plain and unforgiving facts were these. Celice and Joseph were soft fruit. They lived in tender bodies. They were vulnerable. They did not have the power not to die. They were, we are, all flesh, and then we are all meat.

Joseph’s grasp on Celice’s leg had weakened as he’d died. But still his hand was touching her, the grainy pastels of her skin, one fingertip among her baby ankle hairs. Their bodies had expired, but anyone could tell – just look at them – that Joseph and Celice were still devoted. For while his hand was touching her, curved round her shin, the couple seemed to have achieved that peace the world denies, a period of grace, defying even murder. Anyone who found them there, so wickedly disfigured, would nevertheless be bound to see that something of their love had survived the death of cells. The corpses were surrendered to the weather and the earth, but here were still a man and wife, quietly resting; flesh on flesh; dead, but not departed yet.

It was as if they had been struck by lightning but the thunder, separated from its faster twin, had yet to come with its complaints to shake and terminate the bodies lying in the grass. Time was divided into light and sound. There was a sanctuary for Joseph and Celice between the lightning and the thunderclap. Such were their six days in the dunes, stretched out, these two unlucky lovers on the coast.

This is our only prayer: May no one come to lift his hand from her leg. Let thunder never find its voice. Hold sound and light, those battling twins, apart. There is a meadow that separates death’s chilly gate and the tumbling nothingness beyond, in which our Joseph and Celice are lying, cushioned by the sunlight and the grass, and held in place by nothing firmer than his fingertip.

Celice was Joseph’s senior by eighteen months. A good deal taller than him, too. Once or twice a year when they were obliged to entertain at home, it was Celice who had to reach up for the spirit glasses and the candle set on the cupboard shelf, or, in the spring, cut back the topmost branches on the fessandra bushes that screened them from their neighbours. On tiptoes, she could unscrew and change lightbulbs. She could reach high corner cobwebs with a dusting stick and spin grey candyfloss.

‘I’m not tall enough,’ was her husband’s once-amusing excuse for being idle while she was not. Close the windows, Joseph, she might say. Tidy up those books, for goodness sake. Write to your brother in New York. ‘I’m not tall enough.’

Celice’s reach was greater than her husband’s in all but one respect. In their younger, more outgoing days, when he had had a drink or two and she had shamed him into singing, then he could be astounding. He had the voice of someone twice his size. His tone, so hesitant and quiet in conversation, so inefficient in the lecture room, was magisterial in song. Alcohol and lyrics made him eloquent and confident in ways that talk, with all its set responses, never could.

Joseph’s eloquence, it must be said, was out of date, untrained. All the songs he knew he’d learned from his parents. These were dance tunes, sentimental standards, love ballads, patter songs, the sort of music we all resort to after midnight, when the lights have failed. Gas-lamp melodies. Moonlit songs. Joseph would be the only one in any company to remember all the words. He might have hardly opened his mouth in conversation all evening, but he’d still be singing when everyone else, having faked a verse or two, had fallen silent. Then he’d raise his voice and perform his unembarrassed solo, plunging (if the music would allow) through the registers so he could finish with the last line of a chorus on a comic bass. He loved to reach and hold the gravest notes.

This was his party trick.

It was a trick that, for Celice, more than compensated for his lack of sociability or size. Joseph’s singing undermined the other men. It left them ill-at-ease, dismayed and dull. Their wives would lift their chins, part their lips, loll their tongues, made wishful by the music. They’d watch Celice’s little doctor of zoology with dawning understanding of why it was their men seemed so silent and reduced. He could sing – a phrase Celice had heard applied to a Russian balladeer and loved to use about her husband – like a sea cave, turning ocean into sound. She could not sing herself, even after a drink. But otherwise she was the greater of the two.

She’d certainly been the greater of the two when they’d first met and measured up against each other, on this same coast, those almost thirty years ago. The sapless 1970s. They had been staying at the study house, six young biologists and oceanographers (one from each of the colleges and centres attached to the Tidal Institute of which Joseph, finally and predictably, became director). The study house was on the solid backshore, twenty kilometres from town and more than a kilometre above the dunes at Baritone Bay. They slept in sleeping-bags, the four men in the bunk room at the back, Celice and her one female colleague on mattresses on the veranda.

Celice had not attached herself to Joseph at once. There’d been no instant passion when they met. They were too alike, and had too much in common to be passionate. He hardly spoke on that first day. He hardly moved, in fact. He’d slipped and pulled the muscles in his back on the short walk from the airport road to the study house. One of the other men had had to help him with his boned and metal-cornered suitcase, an inelegant antique and the cause of too much fuss, they all agreed. Joseph, typically, had been the only one to arrive without a rucksack.

Celice, who wasn’t generally a fashion votary or even style-conscious, had found the suitcase irritating. It declared its owner to be a boned, inelegant antique himself. In these, her most disquieted and unhappy months, Celice could find no time for innocents like Joseph. She wanted to be courted by loud and tall and handsome men. She had the choice of three.

While the other five students were unpacking, jockeying for the better bunks and mattresses and negotiating where to store their clothes, Joseph had stood in the doorway to the common room, stretching his back and speaking not a word except to say that he preferred to leave his ‘oddments’ where they were. Strapped and locked inside the suitcase. Celice judged him to be cold, spoiled and snobbish, and hadn’t minded in the least when, while the rest of them were trading boasts and backgrounds over coffee, he’d gone to lie down on the remaining and least favoured bunk to nurse his back.

On the first afternoon, they all walked across the backlands and the grey fields of manac beans into the shanty village (long since demolished for the road and an estate of villas) where there was a truck bar and a store. They’d fill their rucksacks with provisions for the week and get to know each other over beers. All of them, except Joseph, that is. He remained in the bunk room when his five colleagues were preparing to go out. When they called him, he said he’d better stay behind and ‘fix things up’. And rest his back. He couldn’t trudge through fields. Not in his state. He wasn’t tall enough, he said. ‘He isn’t tall enough to piss on his own shoe,’ one of the men whispered. Their stifled, guilty laughter broke the ice.

Celice presumed – and she was partly right – that Joseph couldn’t stand their company. He didn’t want to walk in such a frothy group or be exposed to their good humour or their cigarettes. He’d always hated cigarettes. He wasn’t interested in going to a store. Food wasn’t worthy of his attentions. He was too serious and grand for meals. She could imagine his unfinished plate, his wine-glass hardly touched. Certainly he wouldn’t be at ease in a village bar, having to drink alcohol or endure their conversation. She’d already marked him down as what she called a castaway, someone who’d lost or never knew the trick of being sociable, a single set of footprints in the sand. She didn’t care for him at all. She’d been a castaway herself.

Celice didn’t really trust him, either. His damaged back, she guessed, was a sham. It was an old man’s or a shirker’s malady. No one had actually seen him slip. He didn’t seem in any pain. She looked around the study house before they left on their shopping expedition. She noted anything that Joseph might try to ‘fix’ while they were away. He might clear the coffee-cups, for instance. Or sweep some of the sand out of the house. Or prepare the kerosene lamps. Or tidy the disarray of bags and boots inside the veranda where Celice and her colleague, Festa, had yet to unroll their mattresses. He might, at least, lay out their beds for them. If he did not, she would make some light remark at his expense when they returned.

She even checked the disposition of the two ill-fitting drawers in which she’d stored her trousers, shirts and skirts, her notes and books, her purse and diary and her underclothes. The upper drawer was flush. The lower was misaligned, protruding by a centimetre on the left. She’d know if he’d been snooping. She’d snoop, of course, if she were left alone. What might she find inside his antique case? Snooping was the human thing to do.

Celice was glad to leave the study house. Already her companions were showing off, splashing through the marshy undergrowth, more like teenagers than the finest students of their faculties. This outing would be fun. She liked the effortless company of easy-going men. It didn’t matter that the shortest and least attractive of the four had decided to stay behind. It made her feel more carefree and awakened to be one of only two women in such intensive company. Joseph would have watered down the mix.

Festa was more demure than Celice, cherry-faced and warmly brimming, with thick, loose hair and an enraging voice, low-pitched and deferential to the men. She wore makeup, even for the walk across the fields, and did her best to overuse her spongy laugh.

Once they had crossed the backlands to the drier fields and could walk along the tractor track, five abreast, it was only Festa who was flirted with. The talk, at first, was dull and predictable, all about the study projects they’d been set and what the prospects for employment were, once they had achieved their doctorates. Two of the men – Hanny and Victor, pampered sons of businessmen – were working on shore crustaceans and could expect to be taken on by Fishery Research, a job for life. Or failing that, they could take over from their fathers in heavy imports and construction. The third, and most attractive, was an ornithologist, ringing and recording seajacks. ‘I’m not employable,’ he said, but no matter, his family had money. Festa was a biochemist, studying the medical and nutritional uses of seaweed. The three men seemed to find that subject fascinating and full of prospects. They quizzed her on the tests she would conduct, and offered help with raking in her specimens. She told them all the local seaweed names in Latin, making, Celice noticed, two mistakes.