Being Dead (19 page)

But she had at least an answer to the lesser question. How should the dying spend their time when life’s short portion shrinks with every waking day? She’d walked to see mortality that Sunday afternoon and found her parents irredeemable. Her gene suppliers had dosed shop. Their daughter was the next in line. She could not duck out of the queue. So she should not waste her time in this black universe. The world’s small, breathing denizens, its quaking congregations and its stargazers, were fools to sacrifice the flaring briefness of their lives in hopes of paradise or fears of hell. No one transcends. There is no future and no past. There is no remedy for death – or birth – except to hug the spaces in between. Live loud. Live wide. Live tall.

She could not ape her parents’ life. She would not merely turn her back against the coffin-hurtling streets and focus only on the minutes in the room, the light that makes an oval of the square, the half-filled diary open at the week, the music on the stereo, the kettle heating on the stove, the photos poked between the mirror and its frame, the dancing page, the other person breathing in a chair, still life. She would, instead, embrace the warmer fevers of the world. Their deaths were her beginning.

These have been unusual days, she thought, as she walked back towards the empty house, her house, through first the wide catalpa-lined avenues of the centre then the gaunt, less pungent streets of the inner suburbs. I am bereaved and liberated at one stroke (a dozen blows). There isn’t anything beyond me now. There isn’t anything I cannot think about, or say.

She would make plans. Bright days ahead.

7.05 a.m.

Joseph was out of bed early on the morning of his death. He was always up before Celice. He took his breakfast out to the greying, sapwood deck behind the house, and found just sufficient space for his chair in that trapezium of light where the first sun of the day, if there were any, stretched across the boards. This was where his own father, twenty years before and sitting in the same sunlight, had been killed by a stroke, and where, a thousand times when she was small, his daughter had climbed on to her father’s lap, her bony bottom on his bony knee, to beg for breakfast from his tray, and a song. Syl loved to listen to him saying things in song, in his mad, comic bass, that he could never say in life. Those were the only times he made her laugh.

The condemned man did not eat much. He was the supper not the breakfast sort. He had vanilla coffee on that day, some mango and a cheese brioche, too stale to finish. He’d arranged the food – together with a peeling-knife, his Cardica pills, his daily ledger and a pen – on a featherwood tray as neatly as an airline meal, as if he needed to remind himself of his sparing moderation and his discernment, his high blood pressure hardly helped by all the coffee that he drank, his growing singleness. He exercised his finger joints, battled with his morning cough, waited for his head to clear. He was, as usual, tired.

But not even Joseph could fail to be diverted by the sun. The radio had promised fine weather for a change. He’d make the most of it. Many people in the town on that day would make the most of it. They would invent aching backs and flu, sudden funerals to attend or urgent business somewhere away from their desks and yards so that they could reward themselves with a dry day or two off work. The parks and public lawns could be their offices. The restaurants would be packed out.

We know exactly what Joseph did. He phoned the Institute at 7.25 a.m. and left a message for his secretary on their answerphone. He had some fieldwork to complete, he said, and would not come into his office until early Thursday morning. She could telephone him on the mobile if she needed to, but only ‘urgent things’. This was his final contact with the world at large, the last time that his voice was heard. He’d started off the day by telling lies. He felt both nervous and excited. He wrote a one-line, optimistic entry in his ledger and, warming in the sun, imagined how he and his wife might pass the day.

Once he had dressed, showered and succumbed to a second coffee, Joseph took a glass of tea and a dish of sliced fruit to Celice in her bed. A tender treat? An uncomplicated invitation to the pleasures of the sun? No, he hoped to give her more than breakfast. His breathing was already thin and papery with desire for her. A little lie, a little sun, some mango and a pill, an overdose of caffeine, an unexpected holiday is all it takes to make a man feel amorous.

Their rooms were separate and had been for more than twenty years, since Syl was born in fact and had demanded a share of her mother’s pillow every night. Even when Syl was a teenager Joseph had not returned to Celice’s bed for sleep. He said it was because he did not like the smell of her tobacco, but did not want to spoil the pleasure that she took in a breakfast cigarette. He hadn’t gone back to the room four months before when she had given up her smoking, though. Privately, they both acknowledged that they had become too shy and selfish to accommodate the patterns of each other’s sleep, or tolerate a squeaking bed, or share the coverlet.

Occasionally, now that Syl had gone away (to lead – and waste – her own life, doing God-knows-what) Joseph went into his wife’s room in the evening, into her bed, but always left when she had gone to sleep. Celice required eight hours every night. She was making up for all the sleep she’d missed when she was young. Any less and she would be irascible all day. Joseph still only needed five or six hours, and he slept creakily, breathing like a dog, stretching, stumbling to the lavatory by moonlight four, five times a night. Sometimes he sat up wide awake at two or three o’clock, and read a further chapter of a book. He could never sleep if it was raining or if some merchant liner, idling in the fog, was sounding warnings on its horn. Once in a while he didn’t go to bed at all but stayed up with the bottle of Negrita gleewater he kept hidden on a kitchen shelf and a pack of cards, and listened to the radio on headphones. Lectures, news, debates. Not music, unless there was a recital of sentimental songs. He did not share his wife’s passion for the orchestra. Syl’s parents, her father and
maman
, were not compatible in bed or in the concert hall. Celice went to the concert hall and bed alone.

He must have hesitated, surely, when he stood and watched her sleeping, her ears still stuffed with cotton plugs, her eyes encrusted with the spongy detritus of sleep, her hair in tufts. She still looked tired. She was not yet the wife of his imagination, alert, sweet-smelling, crisply dressed, available. He knew she had no classes to teach on a Tuesday or a Wednesday and usually would choose to sleep till noon on her days off, happy to wake to an empty house, glad to have a spinster day. It was so tempting, though, to reach out and touch, or even to let drop his clothes and climb into the bed with her. But he was sensible, of course. He was a doctor of zoology and over fifty years of age. He knew he ought to let her sleep and tiptoe from the room. Perhaps he should drive off somewhere to enjoy the sun all on his own. She’d never know. She’d think he was at work as usual. He could do exactly what he wanted. That was – for a moment – his sun-fuelled fantasy. Go to a bar. Go to a show. Go to a prostitute – he’d like to pay for sex, just once, before he died. Sit out beneath the trees in Almanac Square while some young woman served him fish and vegetables, her body within reach. He could be foolish for a change. Be young for once.

Fat chance of that.

He coughed to wake her up, and to reawaken himself. He put her tea and breakfast on the bedside table. He placed her bookmark in her open book. He picked up a crumpled tissue and pushed it back beneath her pillow. He rescued her watch from the floor and laid it on the dressing-table – somewhere safe and visible where she would find it easily. Here was the splendid truth that so many men discover far too late, but he had known for years. He could be young and foolish only with his wife.

Joseph considered that it might be best to let her sleep till nine o’clock. She’d not complain at that. Or he could let the sunlight waken her, perhaps. He pulled the cord on the blinds so that they parted by a couple of centimetres. The streaming slats of sun, sliced into patterns by the blinds, spread across the cover of her bed in undulating bands. She did not wake, not even when he opened the blinds some centimetres more so that the light fell on her eyes. Her mouth dropped open and her wheezing nose was silenced, but still she slept.

Now he was anxious and impatient. Her tea would get cold. The weather would not last. Good fortune such as this is always fleeting. There would be clouds and mist ready to burst in on their day like spoiling boys. It was a waste (a phrase she hated) to let the day deteriorate while Celice slept. She would not thank him if he let her sleep through this.

Here was his plan. He should not be ashamed. They had some business on the coast. When they had read in the newspapers and seen in television reports that all the shorelands between the airport and Baritone Bay had been bought by a consortium of businessmen with plans for a holiday village and an estate of expensive houses their hearts had sunk. Here the rich would hide behind high walls and top their gates with barbed wire. The bankers and the businessmen would travel in and out, past guards, with the blinds down in their limousines. Think of the damage to the wildlife habitats, they said. The loss of beach and dunes.

But actually their discomfort was mostly at the loss of somewhere packed with memories, the good and bad. Celice feared the place, its chilling winds, its unremitting sea, its ever-smoky sky. Joseph had been there on several occasions during the marriage, though not recently. Not, in fact, for nineteen years. There’d been a period, though, when he was younger, when he’d got to know it well. Sometimes, when he’d had an afternoon to spare and no one knew, he’d drive out to the coast alone, self-consciously, as if he had a private rendezvous. He’d walk along the track with his binoculars, inspect the shore, but always end up in the dunes, remembering, reliving if he could, his seduction by Celice. That startling day. That
once
. Those transformations on the beach.

He’d always wanted to return with her. Of course. The first encounters are the best. ‘Let’s go out to the bay,’ he’d suggested a thousand times, ‘for old times’ sake. Before we die.’ But she had not agreed, not once. She didn’t even like to reminisce in too much detail about the week when she and Joseph had met, their lovemaking – because to think about that week was to remind herself of Festa and the fire, how passion could be murderous, how love could set the flame. She’d blamed herself for almost thirty years, no matter what Joseph had to say: ‘Be rational, forget the past’; ‘It’s my fault just as much as yours’; ‘A fire can start in hundreds of different ways.’ He made no difference. Celice hoped never to have to go back there again.

But once the plans for Salt Pines had been printed in the newspaper – and once she’d heard about the Academic Mentor’s suicide –
never
became too real a word for her. Up to that point she’d had the choice to stay away, but once Salt Pines was constructed with its protected gates the choice would be removed. Perhaps the time had come to take control of what she might be guilty of, and not be ruled by it. She said to Joseph, lightly, as she left for work one day so that he wouldn’t have the chance to lecture her, ‘Maybe we ought to go out there. I think we ought to go. Before they build.’ He knew she only meant that they ought to see the burnt remains of the study house, to put Festa’s ghost to rest before the bulldozers erased the place where she’d died. A resurrection in the dunes was not part of her plan.

But Joseph lent a sympathetic pair of ears, for once. Of course, she should return and face the past, he said, while she pulled on her coat. He’d been saying so for years. But when he pictured it – as he would a dozen times a day in the ensuing weeks – he did not visualize them standing on a blackened wall throwing flowers where once there’d been a long veranda and Festa sleeping. Instead, he placed himself and Celice, young and naked, in the dunes, her shocking fingers pulling at his clothes. This Tuesday, with its rare sunshine, would be the perfect opportunity to lead his wife down from the study house again to the hidden chambers of the shore. He’d have to be discreet, of course. Their only stated plan could be a return to the scorched remains. But then, when that was done, he could suggest a hunt for sprayhoppers, perhaps. And then a picnic. Somewhere with soft grass, private and protected from the wind.

He took her hand and squeezed the fingers. Waking her was making love to her. ‘Celice, it’s warm,’ he said. ‘Too good to waste. Are you awake? Celice. Let’s make the most of it.’ He knew better than to shake her. She would already be annoyed with him. This was her room. This was her day. If she was touched again or shaken, she had the right to pinch the thin flesh on his arm. She was a worshipper of sleep and orchestras.

Finally she opened an eye to squint at him. Her husband was a shining, haloed silhouette. His body half obscured the sun. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked. Her voice had hardly changed in thirty years.

‘Come on, let’s make the most of it. It’s such a waste,’ he said again, as if she hadn’t already heard his aggravating little phrase. ‘Sit up. There’s tea. It’s warm outside.’

‘It’s warm in here.’

This, he knew, was not an invitation to get in. He wanted her to sit up in the bed. He hoped that if she did, she might stretch her arms, straight out from her shoulders in a crucifixion mime and make a little strangulated cry, a seagull yawn, to wake herself and clear her throat. Her nightdress sleeves were always loose – she did not like the claustrophobia of hugging clothes – and Joseph knew that when she stretched she’d make an open, hanging corridor of cloth below her arm for anyone to hold their breath and view her snubby breasts. He’d seen her do exactly that so many times before. He’d learned the trick of waiting with her breakfast at the bedroom door and calling her name. Sex was so underhand. He knew exactly where to stand to catch the light. She’d wake and stretch her unsuspecting arms for him. She did not disappoint him now. Stolen glimpses of his wife.