Being Dead (12 page)

Sometimes, as now, there were tidal floods. But in those days there were no concrete breaks and barriers to keep the water back. The floods would chase along the lower town with street deliveries of wrack, eelgrass and crabs. We have fins, the citizens would boast. Our girls have seaweed ribbons in their hair, and gills.

Even death (according to the town’s resurrected folklore – Mondazy’s work again) was watery. ‘We call it Fish,’ he wrote in his final memoir, published more than thirty years ago. ‘It swims, we say, a silent, unforgiving predator that comes at night out of the sea and speeds into the shallow, less resistant moisture of the streets. Fish comes and takes your father and your mother from their bed. All that you’ll hear, as souls depart and make their spirals of displacement in the clammy air, is the shivering of fins.’ Sometimes, his superstitious readers and adherents used to say, Mondazy’s Fish would show itself only as silvering across the corpse, or by its smell. Death was hardly visible. Yet it was already in the room. And it would leave its wake of scales and mucilage across the sheets.

Fish, for a while, used to take the blame for every death in town. It swam, to the accompaniment of rain on roofs, through bedrooms and through wards where cancer, heart-attacks, old age and strokes had outwitted the nurses and their drugs. It called on people who had drowned in their pyjamas, amongst the reefs and corals of their furniture. Ten times a day it heard the parting rattle in the rusty throats of asthmatics, or hurried to attend a child struck by a car in the sudden blindness of a pavement-hugging cloud, or stayed to witness doctors write, ‘Pneumonia’, as cause of death for some damp pensioner whose lungs were water-bags when everybody knew the cause of death was Fish.

Fish couldn’t boast of many sailors drowned at sea. In those days Rusty City was a tourist, not a fishing, town. (It’s neither now.) Only visitors chose to dine on seafood so there wasn’t much call for fishermen or fish ‘chauffeurs’. But they were bound to lose some people to the waves each year. There was always some outsider who wanted to run along the front at high tide in a storm to take a photograph of pouncing seas. Or see if he could race down the now-demolished jetty, touch the flagpole at the end, and return to his companions before the next wave came. Two months before Celice and Joseph’s study week a couple tried to save their dog when curling water swept it from the town beach. The woman went into the water, fully dressed, reaching for the dog’s lead. When Fish found her, up the coast a few hours later, the sea had stripped her of her clothes. She was a nearly naked body wearing only shoes, her fingers wrapped around the dog’s red collar, and neither of them quite dead yet. Fish had to flap and wriggle over frothing rocks to brush their lids with its dispatching fins.

Wise people in Wetropolis, who did not want to die until they were old and ready for it, stretched nets across the headboards of their beds, or wore a fishhook on a chain around their throats. Even today, long since Mondazy resurrected Fish, there are still a few surviving men and women in the town who won’t eat fish at all or let a fish inside the house, not even in a tin to feed their cats. They remember what happened at the Pisces restaurant, down at the port, in 1968. Nine diners at a wedding feast and a waiter died. Fish came and poisoned them. It was a massacre. The bride did not survive to join her husband on the honeymoon.

These same wise people in Wetropolis might find in Joseph and Celice, on their fourth day of putrefaction in the dunes, much evidence of Fish. Their deaths seemed watery, as if they had been swept by curling breakers off the beach and dumped. They had both dissolved and stiffened. They were becoming partly semi-fluid mass and partly salted drift; sea things. They even smelt marine, as corrupt and spermy as rotting bladderwrack or fish manure.

There was, of course, their silvering, as further evidence that Fish had been. It was its watermark. In that dawn light and that hard rain and at a passing distance, the corpses would have looked like shiny human earrings made by fairy silversmiths and dropped by giants, two shards of fallen ice, two metal leaves, two scaly sculptures beaten out of tin and verdigris’d with mildew and with mould.

Even if the light were blocked, there would still appear to be a jewelling to their bodies, where life’s soft pink and death’s smudged grey conspired to find the silver in between. And there’d still be a tracery of lucent white where snails and slugs had made enamel patterns on the flesh with their saliva trails. These would be the patterns, surely, that Mondazy had described, the wake of scales and mucilage where gasping Fish had wriggled on its fins across the dunes to touch their skin.

Viewed from closer up, there were colours and motifs on Joseph and Celice that Fish could never leave. A dazzling filigree of pine-brown surface veins, which gave an arborescent pattern to the skin. The blossoming of blisters, their flaring red corollas and yellow ovaries like rock roses. And in the warmer, gaping caverns – sub-rib, sub-flesh, sub-skull – the garish blues and reds and greens of their disrupted, bloated frames. They were too rotten now and far too rank to hold much allure for gulls or crabs. They’d been passed down, through classes, orders, species, to the last in line, the lumpen multitude, the grubs, the loopers and the millipedes, the button lice, the tubal worms and flets, the
bon viveur
or nectar bugs, which had either too many legs or none.

The swag-fly maggots had started to emerge on this fourth day from their pod larvae, generated by the putrid heat in Joseph and Celice’s innards. Long dead – but still producing energy! The maggots gorged and tumbled in the carrion, as balls of rain as big as them and fifty times as heavy came down like meteorites to pound and shake their caverns and their dells. Death fattens us to dine on us. The maggots are the minstrels at his feast.

Joseph, like most zoologists, had been a faculty snob and hated botany. He thought the ‘plant men’ lived a lesser fife. He was the huntsman to their gatherers. Their only weapons were the plastic bag and trowel. But he was closer now to botany than he had ever been. His greater, living predators had gone, but the longer blades of lissom grass, gasping for the light, were bending over him like nurses. His body was a vegetable, skin and pulp and fibre. His bones were wood. Soon, if no one came to help, the maggots would dismantle him. Then his body could only be gathered up by trowels and put in plastic bags.

It would be comforting, of course, to believe that humans are more durable than other animals, to think that by some miracle (of natural science obviously) his hand and her lower leg remained unspoiled, enfolding and enclosed, that his one fingertip was still amongst her baby hairs, that her ankle skin was firm and pastel-grained, and that her toenails were still berry red and manicured. But death does not discriminate. All flesh is flesh. And Joseph and Celice were sullied everywhere. His fingernails were split and loosening. His hand was angular and void, a starched and empty glove. Her lower leg was little more than rind.

But the rain, the wind, the shooting stars, the maggots and the shame had not succeeded yet in blowing them away or bringing to an end their days of grace. There’d been no thunderclap so far. His hand was touching her. The flesh on flesh. The fingertip across the tendon strings. He still held on. She still was held.

‘We know that Fish will poison all of us one day,’ Mondazy wrote, in his death year. ‘We wait for it to push its nose into the corners of our house, our room. Too weak to move, we’ll watch it browse the mildewed woodwork and graze amongst the timber lichens, which grow as black as barnacles along the window-frames beside our beds, until it turns to cast its sideways eye on us. Our town is mouldering. We are eroded by the wind and salt and rain. We live in fear of water and of death.’

It was Fire not Fish that put an end to Festa. Some water might have saved her life.

Early, on her fifth day of research, the study house was hardly visible. A damp sea mist had dug more deeply into the land than usual. It had crossed the high, absorbent peaks of the inner dunes, depositing its slightly brackish dew into the sweet-water ponds and puffing its grey breath against the veranda’s clammy glass.

Inside, at seven in the morning, the hopeful doctors were all sleeping, even Celice. Their thesis tutor had visited the evening before for dinner and had expressed his broad approval of their field researches, if not their cooking. That night, when he had gone back to the Institute, they celebrated with four bottles of Van Paña and a drunken game of charades. They’d had to mime the names of animals. Joseph guessed the sprayhopper as soon as Celice puffed across her palm at him, like someone blowing kisses. The others seemed to take it as the natural order of the universe that Joseph and Celice would become attached, though they neither touched nor paid excessive attention to each other. Odd sticks to odd; that was the formula. The three men flirted only with Festa. In fact, at two in the morning, when everyone else had gone to bed and sleep, Festa and the ornithologist were still in the common room, kissing noisily.

It must have been one of those two, Joseph thought, who’d placed the kerosene lamp underneath the table and turned the flame down to its lowest setting for a more romantic light, perhaps, then left it burning through the night. He wasn’t even sure if he’d imagined it. When he’d got up at seven thirty the common room was almost bright with natural light. The feeble kerosene flame would not have been especially noticeable. It might, in fact, have been already dead. He’d only half noticed it before rushing out to circumnavigate the house and stand on the open ground outside the veranda waiting for Celice. Joseph wasn’t sure if there was any smell from charring wood. He should, he knew, have checked the lamp and turned it out if it was on, or moved it somewhere safe away from wood before he left the study house. ‘Maybe, even if I’d definitely seen a flame I’d not have turned it out,’ he admitted to Celice, years later, to comfort her. He was not the sort to interfere. He was preoccupied. Thank heavens that he didn’t say, ‘I’m far too short to play with fire.’

Celice had not seen anything, no fight, no lamp. She’d only seen Sprayhopper Man, waiting outside for her as she’d asked (‘instructed’ was the truer word, he’d say), half consumed by mist and half obscured by ochred glass.

The night before, Joseph had admitted – drink talks – that he’d spied on her through the veranda windows. Such an arousing liberty, Celice had thought, and one that she was impatient to repeat. ‘Come for me in the morning,’ she had said, when they had gone back to their beds. Indeed, he’d come for her, come into her, come with her a dozen times that night, in dreams. He’d sung for her. He’d played piano on the bone-keys of her spine. He’d held her in his palm and breathed on her and she had flexed and sprung her endless legs for him and tumbled in the air.

So when she saw him standing in the garden, beyond the glass, Celice was hungry to be loved. She did not try to hide herself, nor did she try to show herself. She just pulled down the sleeping-bag and stood up, naked on the mattress, as if she didn’t know that she had purposefully placed him there to watch her tug her nightshirt by its shoulders high above her head. For a few seconds, she was blinded by material and Joseph was enlightened on how her body looked. The pear. The pigeon. And the truth of it. The wisp and tuft of body hair. Her shoulders and her modest breasts. Her squabby hips. Her virtues and her blemishes. When her head and hair sprang out again into the light she half expected to find Joseph with his nose pressed to the glass. But – and this was touching and oddly arousing too – he had stayed exactly where he was, a soft-edged figure in the mist. She dressed for him. A shirt, no brassière. Some underclothes. Jumper, trousers, socks and walking boots. She put her fingers through her hair, a mermaid’s comb, and waved at him. For Celice this was the high point of their love.

How long had Festa been awake and watching her? (She’d never have the chance to ask.) But while Celice was sitting on her mattress tying her shoelaces, her room-mate suddenly sat up in her sleeping-bag, bleary-eyed and pastry-faced, and begged for one of Celice’s cigarettes. ‘I’m feeling awful,’ she said, and gave her irritating laugh. ‘My mouth’s a bird’s cage.’

‘I’m not surprised.’ Celice lit two cigarettes and handed one to Festa. ‘Go back to sleep,’ she said. ‘I’m going down to the bay with Joseph.’

‘You work too hard.’ It would seem that Festa hadn’t noticed the garden spy, thank goodness. ‘Are you going to make some coffee?’

‘I’m leaving now. We want to catch the tides,’ she lied. ‘I’ll put the water on.’

That’s exactly what she’d done. She had half noticed the lamp, she’d say, either underneath the common-room table or on top of it. She wasn’t sure. She had, she thought, taken her still burning cigarette with her into the common room. It was just possible that she had left it standing on its end on the veranda floor. That was her habit, balancing a narrow cigarette to knit its thinning scarf of smoke while she was busy doing something else. Or – so many oversights, so many ways to fail – she might have left the cigarette standing on the table by the sink while she splashed her face and filled the saucepan with water for Festa’s coffee. Or she might have stubbed the cigarette out in the sink. She was too hurried to take much notice. Two things were certain. When she left the study house on this, her grimmest day, Festa was half asleep and smoking in her bed. And there was a naked light below the saucepan on the unattended hob.

Here, then, were several possibilities. There was no evidence to say which one occurred. The study house – all wood and glass – was too badly burned for autopsies. The unextinguished lamp, left to burn all night and left to burn by Joseph, too, as he went out that morning, finally gave purchase to a second flame on the underside of the table in the common room. The wood had blackened, charred and finally surrendered to combustion. The flame was upside down and would not have burned for long if this had been a modern table, its polish and its lacquers emasculated by the safety rules of modern manufacturing. The timber of this table had been sealed by combustible varnishes, which were too old to liquefy when heated, but dried instead, went scaly, lifted from the wood in flakes and dunes, and let the flames migrate across the table’s underside.