Being Dead (11 page)

‘There is no wind.’

For once the air above the bay was crystal clear, no clouds to moan about, and even a visible horizon, eye-liner blue, where usually the trading of the ocean and the sky produced a grey mist. Good weather brings bad luck, as everybody knows. Misfortune is a hawk, most likely to surprise us when the visibility is good. Death likes blue skies. Fine weather loves a funeral. Wise, non-scientific folk would stay indoors on days like that, not walk along the coast, beyond the shelter even of a tree. The doctors of zoology were ill-informed. They didn’t understand the rigours of the natural world. If sprayhoppers could not survive the changes on the coast, then how and why should they?

On Thursday at eleven in the morning, Celice and Joseph’s mobile phone rang in the pocket of her jacket. Its body-smothered pulse was hardly audible. Insects could be louder and more persistent. Its batteries were running down. The ringing sent a feeding gull into the air, protesting at its interrupted meal with downward flagging wings, and half expecting to discover the rare treat of a fat cicada. It flapped and dithered above the corpses only for a moment. By the fourth trill of the phone the gull had dropped again on to Celice’s abdomen and was tugging at the lace of skin it had already picked and loosened. Her skin was tough. In two days she had lost her moistness and her elasticity.

The caller, Joseph’s secretary, let the mobile ring ten times – she was meticulous – then ten times more before she put her handset down. It was baffling and annoying that her boss had not shown up at the curriculum meeting that he himself had convened at the Institute for ten o’clock that morning. She’d already phoned his home and got no reply. She’d attempted to reach his wife, the mystical Celice, at the university. Also missing, from her seminar for senior biologists. Joseph’s secretary knew that she should not try to contact him on his mobile phone, except for ‘urgent things’. That had been his clear instruction. Well, this had been urgent. And alarming. Still was. The curriculum committee, including two vexed professors, a governor and a busy-bored official from the Education Consulate, all equally competitive in their impatience, had been demanding ‘updates’ and explanations by the minute. Now that she had failed to get an answer even from the mobile, all she could provide for the doctor’s guests, as they grew stern and restless in the conference room, was coffee and apologies. It was not like the doctor to be late or absent, she said. Ill-mannered, yes (she didn’t say). Remote. Distracted. But never late. You could always rely on his prompt and taciturn presence at meetings. At half past ten, at her suggestion, the committee drifted off, peeving and frowning at the secretary as they passed through her room to collect their coats and umbrellas. It was a rare event: the opportunity to tut at the director of the Institute without any fear of his uncompromising response.

The secretary had her usual rota of tasks to take her mind off the disruptions of her day. There were the departmental diaries to arrange, memos to be typed and sent, letters to be filed or redirected, redundancies to organize. Normally she’d activate the divert on the office phone till lunch so she could concentrate on all the paperwork and take grim pleasure in her unavailability. But cutting off her phone that day, she felt, wasn’t politic. At worst it could be taken as a snub towards her absent boss.

When she had tried to reach him on the phone, she had not sensed the ringing of an empty room. In her many years of making calls she’d developed the instinct for telling from the far end resonance if there was anybody there, not answering, ignoring her. There had been someone there, not answering, she’d thought, when she’d dialled the doctor’s mobile. Its arpeggio was no dead end. Somebody heard the ringing, could not reach the phone, was in the bath, or still in bed, or on the toilet stool. And would phone back.

Now every time her own phone rang she expected it to be the doctor, though part of her expected, too, a version of the phone call her colleague at the university had received the month before. That secretary’s boss, the Academic Mentor, would never show up at her desk again, embarrassed by the typing and phone calls that he caused. He’d killed himself. Joseph’s secretary could not shake from her head the image – much discussed amongst the office staff – of the body in the car, the hose, the rain, the radio.

She dialled the doctor’s home and mobile phones again at midday and when she came back from lunch at two o’clock, first in sets of twenty rings and then a more determined thirty. Still no reply and still no messages of explanation or apology on her answerphone, though both Joseph and Celice had full timetables during the afternoon. The secretary would not panic yet. All in good time. There’d be an explanation, probably. Some muddle-up of messages, her fault – at least, she always was expected to absorb the blame. A scrambled or a misdelivered fax. An unavoidable diversion. A bungle over dates. The doctor had been away for two days anyway, on ‘fieldwork’, she’d been told. Some delay was not entirely surprising. There’d been a little accident; the doctor was a clumsy man. His car had let him down, perhaps. It would be foolish – and the doctor would be embarrassed – if she were to phone the hospitals just yet. Or contact the police on such a modest pretext. Four hours? That was nothing. Not in a week when there’d been sunshine. It was not their job, they’d say, to round up absentees.

At ten to six that evening, now anxious beyond reason for the welfare of a man she did not even like, Joseph’s secretary phoned his daughter, Syl, at her apartment, six hundred kilometres from the coast. An answering-machine. Had everybody in that family disappeared? She left as calm a message as she could, ‘Are your parents visiting? We were expecting them today,’ and ended, ‘It’s nothing, obviously. They’ve not got home from where they’ve been. But do call back tomorrow morning after nine, if you have any word of them. Or I’ll phone you.’

Syl was a waitress at a studio restaurant. The MetroGnome, next to the concert hall. She was ‘the bald and brittle one’, half liked, half feared by both her colleagues and the customers, mostly musicians. She was the sort they’d overtip, dismiss as rude, then try to date.

She called her parents after midnight when she returned from work, too full of wine to put it off till morning. In fact, she’d never phone them unless she was fortified with wine or beer. She wouldn’t chance the call if she had taken bouncers, swallowed Eden pills or smoked a joint. Bad shit, loose tongue. But drink always sweetened her. She needed to be sweet to risk her parents’ anxious and invasive voices. She left the phone unattended on the rug and let it ring for several minutes to give one of them time to wake and stumble out of bed. Her father, normally, should still be up and reading at that hour. Her mother was the sleeper. Syl allowed him time to reach the end of his page, find his house shoes, make a meal of walking to the passageway. She crossed her fingers for him not to answer. He was always at his most reproachful after midnight. Why was she calling so late? Had she been drinking? (Yes, yes, why not?) What was she reading now? What was she doing with her life? (Not wasting it on books. Not rusting in a lifeless town.) It’s been six months. When could they expect to see her in the flesh? (Don’t even ask. Don’t bully me. I hate the coast.)

But when neither of her parents picked up the phone, Syl was more irritated than relieved. The secretary’s imperious message on the answer-phone (‘Do call back tomorrow morning after nine’) had reached into her life without invitation and nudged it. She was rocked. Of course her parents were not visiting. They’d not been asked. They’d never seen her apartment. And if they did show up to nose around, they’d not like what they’d find, her waitressing, her shaven head, her unmade bed, her disregard for everything, her clothes, particularly her unembarrassed appetite for men. Why not take lovers, given half the chance? Why not work through the string sections and then the brass? You can’t make mayhem when you’re dead.

So Syl wasn’t pleased not to have reached her parents. She was six hundred kilometres away from home and yet was asked to take responsibility for a problem that her father’s secretary and brain-box colleagues at the Institute had evidently failed to solve. Her parents hadn’t shown up for work. So? What was she expected to do at this great distance, in the middle of the night? Divine for them with a magic needle and a map?

Syl’s irritation, though, could not entirely mask an intuitive disquiet. She sensed disruption at the gate. She was the sort herself not to show up, to let her colleagues down, to stay out late, to cheat on friends and debts, to keep no one informed, to let the phone sing to itself, but not her parents. They did not stay out at all at night. They never had. They were day birds, clucking hens, efficient, punctual, timid, dull. Sober as milk. Impossible to be with for more than an hour without succumbing to a rage.

She dialled again. They ought to be at home and picking up one of the phones. She let it ring and hunted for another drink and something sweet to eat. Her concern was not yet for her parents’ welfare. It was mainly for herself, her hard-fought liberty. Breaking free to live a life without accomplishments so far away from them had not been easily achieved. She didn’t want to be tugged back into their rigid, clerkish lives, that too-close ocean smell, or even made to see the family house, those same old rooms, those same old books, those meals. If they would answer now, then Syl was safe. If they did not, she’d have to turn the hourglass and let the sands run back towards her past.

She tried their mobile phone, while she sat on the lavatory with the door open, a can of Chevron beer in her hand and with her own phone, chirruping on its extended lead, between her feet, in the cradle of her knickers. The moonlit bay was at the far end of the line. If only owls and bats could answer phones.

Syl waited for an hour – twelve tracks of a Ruffian Rock CD; ten irate wall knocks from the woken man next door – and phoned again, both phones, the house and then the dunes. She was both startled and relieved to hear at last the mobile phone respond, and then a voice. A woman’s voice. But her relief was short-lived. She’d only reached the company’s recorded message, ‘The user’s phone is disconnected. Please try again later.’ The far-end battery, damp and exhausted by more than two days of stand-by, had failed at last. Try as she might, their daughter could not get the trilling phone again. It was maddening – though appropriate emotionally. ‘Not getting through’: that had been the story of Syl’s relationship with her parents since she’d left home. Her phone could ring a thousand times and not begin to break into their silences.

Instead she phoned the MetroGnome. The owners had gone home, of course, and just as well. She left a message, aided by the wine and beer she’d drunk. She’d retired from waitressing, she said. They’d have to find another girl. She didn’t want to slave at tables any more. She had some better things to do. Their food was poisonous. So were the clients. The MetroGnome was such a stupid name. ‘Don’t phone,’ she added, pointlessly. ‘I’m not even here. I’m gone . . .’ she didn’t want to add ‘. . . back home.’

That night, Syl’s dreams were wild and accurate. Beer dreams. She even dreamed of death and nudity – the pauper’s Freud. Her parents’ bodies had been found, bolt upright in their car. Two heart-attacks. In one dream they’d been driving when they died and the car had left the road, hovered in midair, burst into flames. Freeze-frame. A death by Hollywood. In others, Joseph and Celice were blind behind the wheel. They had been found reduced to ash and smoke. They had been found ten metres from the car, thrown clear, a message for their daughter in their hands: ‘We were so disappointed by your life.’ They had been found strapped in their seats, with no clothes on, unmarked. They were like storm-tossed, stranded seals, washed in the shallows of the sea, drowned by the roar of waves and motor-cars.

Syl had to shake herself awake. But when she fell asleep again, ten minutes later, she was pestered by the same recurring dreams, the flying car, the petrol flames, the naked couple blanketed by windscreen glass and bricks and sea. The more she slept the more her parents’ public nakedness would play its comic, unforgiving part.

But it was telephones that really troubled her. In these nightmares the telephone was just beyond their reach, on the rear seat of the car or at the bottom of her mother’s bag. Or else the telephone was in their hands but not responding to their stabbing fingers. Nothing they could do would stop the ringing or put them through. Or else the telephone was melting in the heat, or sinking, twenty metres down.

In other dreams, it was Syl’s own phone that sounded. It seemed to wake her up but was not ringing when she reached for it. As soon as she dropped back to sleep it rang again. Or it was ringing in the hall outside the bedroom Syl had had when she was small. If only she could get to it in time, if only she were tall and brave enough to reach the phone she’d hear her parents talking from their mobile begging for her help. ‘Say where you are,’ she said. But all she heard was, ‘Try again. Please try again.’ Her parents’ pulses failed. Their batteries expired, and they were disconnected from her calls.

The waking dream, sidelit by dawn: her father phoned his daughter in the final moments of his life. Had she been drinking, he wanted to know. What was she doing with her life? What books? What plans? When could they hope to see her in the flesh? He could not say exactly where he was.

By Friday dawn the rain was back, not Wednesday’s undramatic, blood-releasing drizzle but lashing downpours. Its moisture was so ambient and insinuating that it found its way into the tightest wallets of the town and made the banknotes damp. This rain was bruising, bouncing, saline. It crusted all the cars with rust. It silvered Joseph and Celice.

In fact, Rusty City used to be the tourist nickname for the town in their student days. Or Wetropolis. Summer heat, trapped by the surrounding rim of dead volcanoes, sucked up the sea – still does, though no one comes to see it any more – and spread it thinly through the streets. Even in the winter there were fogs and frets, lasting until dusk, lasting sometimes weeks on end. There was, and is, a metre and a half of rain each year. Up to Celice’s chin and up to Joseph’s eyes. And constant windborne spray. ‘The windscreen wipers must persist with their condolences across the weeping windows of our cars even when there is no rain,’ Mondazy wrote (the Academic Mentor’s perfect epitaph), in the years when the town and coast were wild enough to attract visitors. Tourists could buy postcards of traffic in the rain, with his words printed underneath.