Being Dead (17 page)

Yet this was not a haunted place, as it turned out. The study house was fertile ground for rock shrubs and carbon-loving plants. The bunk room and the common room were oblong beds of stoveweed and pyrosia, the green bells of the one almost a perfect match for the high bracts of the other. The last remains of bricks, masonry and walls were colonized by nettles, brambles, buddleia and mortar roses. The house was razed but the architect’s blue building plans were still adhered to by the plants. What roof beams had survived the fire and years, were skeletal, stripped of all the charring, tapered by erosion, and clad in the reds and greens of timber algae.

Celice stepped across the porch stone and walked into the middle of the common room, next to the almost buried sink. The doorway to the veranda was now two heaps of weed. There was no evidence of any building on that side of the house. The scrubby backshore plants, the hollow-stemmed flute bushes and the thorns had colonized the long rectangle of the glass veranda and were growing deeply. Celice could not reach the spot where she and Festa had spread their mattresses and sleeping-bags, and shared their cigarettes. She squatted on her heels and peered beneath the bushes. What did she expect? Some bones? A snake? A woman, sitting up in bed? The red glow of tobacco? The odours of a barbecue? A scream? The sudden ending of her guilt as if the study house had pardons to give out?

The smell was only vegetation and the sound was only leaves and stalks. All she found to show that there had once been shelter here were shards of grey and thinning glass, a riddled piece of corrugated iron, and what could be the rusting helix of a mattress spring. She was tempted to say something to Festa, but did not. She might have, if she’d been by herself. An apology, perhaps. A reassurance of some kind. But Joseph was in hearing range. He wouldn’t understand. Men had no emotional imagination, she had found. That’s why he hadn’t felt the guilt she’d felt. That’s why the death of Festa had been so readily survived by him. Perhaps, that’s why men were more stable than the women she knew. They accepted the eerie truth of life and death, that one is passing and the other is conclusive. We live, we die, we do not need to understand. There are no ghosts to lay. There is just ash and memory.

Celice was still shaking and a little nauseous when she walked back through the denuded common room to join her husband for the walk down to the coast. She took deep breaths. The anticlimax had been shocking. How little she had felt. How tearless she had been. How mute the ruins were.

‘Not what I expected,’ she said. ‘So much has grown here. I thought it would be bleak.’ She should have known – a doctor of zoology – that vegetation would have buried all the past, that death would be absorbed.

Mondazy wrote, ‘Our Books of Life don’t have an end. Fresh chapters are produced though we are dead. Our pages never terminate. But, given time, the paper yellows, then turns green. The vellum flesh becomes the leaf.’

Syl would not speak to her conscripted driver as they drove through the slums and hinterlands of their drenched coastal town that Sunday afternoon. No one about. It seemed, at times, as if they were travelling through still photographs. Life as it always was, fixed in its frame, just there at just that time. No one had died, or ever could.

Syl was in a spiteful mood and sitting in the back. Her lover ought to know exactly what his status was. He was too vain and immature to comprehend that his raw caresses in her mother’s bed, his constant touching of her arm, his sudden, uninvited kisses were not a welcome comfort. They were his taxi fares. She drummed her fingers on her knees. But Geo was already accustomed to her early-morning tempers and her surprising appetites at night. He’d never known such cruelty and boldness or guessed how stimulating they could be. He watched her through the rear-view mirror: she sat with her legs drawn up and her head against the side window of his car, looking at the empty streets, the timber yards, the shuttered bars, the occasional clinker lorry going to and from the Salt Pines building sites. He knew she was defying him to make a sound. Thank goodness Geo was a willing soul, and so naïve. He thought he understood her need for silence and her constant irritation. Anxiety, of course. Grief and fear. And the irresistible drama of the spotlight. He could not blame himself for her fixed mouth and her turned head.

They parked at the visitors’ centre, where Joseph and Celice had parked, five days before, and from where their car had almost certainly been stolen. The lot was almost full. The building had been taken over by the police as its headquarters. There were squad jeeps, a catering trailer, a radio van with its aerial raised, and the unmarked cars of the detectives lined up across the gravel. Four Sunday anglers in an open jeep were being turned away by the uniformed auxiliaries guarding the entrance to the centre. The coast was closed. Except to planes. The police were powerless to close the skies. Two Dorkers and a noisy One-One-Eight, piloted by weekend hobby fliers, were stunting in the thermals off the bar.

Syl, it’s true,
was
indulging herself. After the stifling doldrums of the drive with Geo it was a sudden and an unexpected stimulant to be the centre of so much respectful attention. She’d only had to tell one of the guards, ‘I’m the daughter,’ for the makeshift barrier to be lifted and for their car to be conducted in as if its occupants were honoured guests, dignified by their proximity to death. She liked the way that no one tried to stare at her. They looked down at their shoes as she walked by. She was the Empress of Japan, foremost and unapproachable. To catch her eye with theirs would be a violation.

This was unusual for Syl – the deference of uniforms. Usually her dress, her age, the way she spoke, her hard-cropped hair would trigger animosity from the police, and a bag search. Now, for once, she could savour their sombre bustle, their measured urgency, their lowered eyes and voices. She could enjoy herself. That’s the blushing ambiguity of deaths and, particularly, of dramatic deaths like this. The closest family, the principal mourners are oddly happy with themselves, and stirred. Their hearts – and social niceties – may call for frenzies of despair, an ululating epilepsy, collapse, hysteria, but their brains dispense instead a cocktail of euphoric chemicals to bolster them against the shock and rage. Adrenalin cannot discriminate. The stimulant and tranquillizer pumps usurp the promptings of the heart. They make death seem invigorating, and erotic. Syl felt – bizarrely – closer to laughter than to tears. She was excited, almost glad, to be the daughter of the dead, to be so irritated, and so estranged from Joseph and Celice, to be so mean and careless with the ferryman, yet seem so dutiful, capable and strong to all the uniforms. The awful truth had not sunk in. The deaths were still not real. She only fell apart once she’d descended fifty metres of the track and saw the world’s most mournful sight, the wide expanse of wind-whipped beach and sea, the inter-tide.

It was just as well that Geo wasn’t there to put his arm around Syl and make things worse. He hadn’t taken much persuading not to walk with her along the coast to inspect the bodies. He was a little squeamish. She’d rather be alone, she said. He understood. He would have kissed her there and then, as she escaped the car. To do so would establish his lover’ status in the eyes of the police. How jealous they would be if they could know how that cropped head had burrowed into him. Besides, he would not wish to be mistaken for a cousin or a neighbour, or spot-fined for operating an unlicensed cab. He’d pursed his lips and tipped his head towards her. But she had pressed her fingers on his chest to keep his face away. Syl was relieved to leave him in the car park, a bruised look on his face, like a disappointed spaniel denied its exercise. She’d go alone, the orphan on the coast. But one of the officers inside the centre had instructed a policewoman to accompany her. Now with the first sight of the sea and her first tears Syl wanted privacy even more. Emotion was embarrassing. She told her escort that she was not needed. The woman, probably no older than Syl herself, just nodded. ‘But we have a policy,’ she said, ‘at any scene of crime.’

‘I have a policy, as well.’ Quite what it was, Syl didn’t know, unless it was always to argue with a uniform.

So they agreed a compromise. The policewoman would follow twenty metres behind, a stalking guard, an aide, but not a companion. Syl could be the Empress of Japan again, embarking on her solitary wake.

The call to the coast had come at midday while Syl was sitting on the deck at home, in her father’s chair, still in her mother’s dressing-gown and waiting for her hired hand to bring some cake and coffee. She’d heard the phone: ‘You answer it,’ she shouted. Geo wrote the message down like some dull waiter and brought it out to her. Two bodies had been found by police dogs in the salt dunes at Baritone Bay. Near where they must have parked the car. Could she come out at once? Identify her mother and her father?

How would Syl cope?

At first she coped by pouring all her scorn on Geo. ‘Was that all?’ she asked. Hadn’t the police said anything about the cause of death? He shook his head. A lifelong dope. ‘You didn’t think to ask, of course. A mere detail.’

He didn’t need to ask, in fact. Syl knew. She’d always known. That was why her first glimpse of the sea that afternoon had summoned those first tears. This was her parents’ programmed death. They’d drowned at last. That was the only likely way that Celice and Joseph would die before their times. They drove too carefully to crash their car, except in dreams. Her mother had weaned herself off cigarettes. They hardly drank. They touched their toes ten times a day. They ate like scientists, a perfect balance between their carbohydrates and their nutrients, their vitamins and oils. They’d not take any risks. They did not walk down unlit streets with glinting jewellery or watches, or chance the dangers of the park at night. No one would do them any harm. They did not walk down stairs without a firm grip on the banisters. Dear God, what stagnant lives they led.

But her parents were shoreline zoologists who never could resist the chance of poking about in the tides and shallows of the coast. Syl had spent a solitary childhood on the shore, bored with a picnic and a book, praying for beach games, sandcastles and other girls, while Joseph and Celice had rummaged in the water, crying out – so annoyingly – whenever they discovered a rare weed or felt the sand beneath their feet palpitate with some shy fish.

Oddly, they’d never taken her to the Baritone coast in all their years of beachcombing. Her mother had not liked that stretch. But all the other shores and bays, the Mu, the Horseman Rocks, Tiger Crab Bay, Cape Shoals were chillingly familiar and frightening. She’d not forgotten the first time that she’d stood, aged eight, the beach’s only castaway, to watch the panavision of her tiny parents washed out by the widest tide, their footings gone, their arms held up for help.

Too often they had overstayed the welcome of the sea and were left stranded on a bar or chevronned by the waves or caught by muscular and unrelenting tides. She’d had to witness from the sand, the shingle or the rocks their minutes of exquisite panic while they forged a chest-deep route around the current or flailed between the reefs. Syl well remembered sitting once with her mother in the dilapidated ribs of an abandoned fishing boat while Father was out ‘sifting’ in his waist boots. Her mother said, ‘He’s too far out!’ and started calling, ‘Joseph! Joseph!’ The tide had turned and her father, struggling against the heavily backing water and its tumbling undertow, had lost his balance. Her mother was half-way down the beach and Syl was crying, an already broken-hearted little girl, a hater of the sea, before her father struggled to his feet again. Then he was floating. They could see his boots, like two seal heads. They had to leave it to the waves to bring him in. Thank heavens it was a rising tide. He came ashore, soaked to the skin. He stood spitting sea-water and coughing while her mother screamed at him, ‘You could have drowned! Then what?’

Syl had been ashamed to catch herself wondering how her friends would have reacted if Father had been killed. She’d be the centre of attention for a term. She’d have time off school. Everyone would treat her like a sick princess. She’d have to have a hat to wear at Father’s funeral. Their empty house would fill up with relatives and neighbours. Maybe the uncle from America would come. She’d have the noise and fuss she’d always hankered for. But not from her father.

It was not difficult, then, now that Baritone Bay was in her sights, for Syl to picture all the details of her parents’ deaths. Theirs was a comeuppance earned, deserved, by thirty years of paddling. She could imagine how her mother had run down the beach again, tossing his name out across the water as if it were a lifebelt: ‘Joseph! Joseph!’ Her father – older now and not as fit – had disappeared. Weighed down, perhaps, by heavy boots which, once they filled with water, were like leaden legs. He had not surfaced when the legendary seventh wave had hit him. Celice had stood – Syl put her there – with the water at her feet, studying the sea, waiting for it to reveal the sodden shadow of a struggling man, a bobbing head, an arm, a boot. The sea was shadowless for far too long. Her mother would have paddled in up to her knees. Then, perhaps, she might have seen his body rolling in the breakers like a log or else she might have heard a sinking call, half gull, half man. And so she’d waded in up to her thighs, her chest, her chin. She’d gone too deep herself. She might even have reached and touched his clothes. She could have caught hold of his arm and tried to pull him to the beach. But they were being tugged by weed and he was wet and heavy. He’d pulled her under with him. Her feet were well clear of the sand. For once her height and weight were not a help. The seaweed could not carry her. She dared not let him go and try to save herself. Now there was no one on the beach to rescue them. No little girl. All that remained was for the bodies to be carried out and back, for a tide or two, until a high and kindly sea had tossed them on the shore at Baritone Bay and rolled them to the edges of the dunes for dogs to find. Syl could expect, once she had walked to Baritone Bay, to find their bodies bloated by sea-water, draped in weed, their hands and faces grazed by sand, and bruised by all the ocean’s buffeting.