Being Dead (23 page)

So, had it not been for the dogs, the residues of Joseph and Celice’s lives would have been tossed and tumbled in the dunes to nourish and renew themselves in different forms. They might have found a brief eternity below the sand, together at first, still touching, but soon they’d have to separate, to weave and drift into the unremarking sea, or sink into the clods and pebbles of the earth. A slower journey than a hearse. Slower than a glacier.

Instead, they left only a white and yellow patch of lissom grass (or angel bed, pintongue, sand hair, repose) where they had loved and died, framed by a tent-made rectangle of lesser green. The bodies had blocked out the light and flattened and indented the soft ground underneath. For almost six days the grass had had to live by root alone, scavenging for nutrients and minerals with its thin threads while its foliage was bleaching in the dark. Celice and Joseph’s long and heavy shapes had robbed the grass of its free energy and left a vegetable ghost. It was as if someone had thrown down a ship’s tarpaulin or dragged up a skein of seaweed into the dunes for use as fertilizer on the fields and then collected it, days later, to leave their soft denials in the grass. Each blade was tendril soft, as colourless and feeble as a day-old shoot, as lank and listless as cut straw. Some leaves were bent and scarred and some were tom. Others had been pressed into the sandy earth, to seem ingrowing, keen to burrow back. The worms and grubs that hated light had come up to the surface for a change to crawl and slide in these rare caverns, leaving their half-tunnels and their casts as decorations on the ground. The smell was like red wine; earthy, rich and fermenting.

But once the tent and bodies were removed, and once the unsustaining night had passed, the wounded lissom grass perked up. Hope springs eternal in the natural world. Its leaves and blades sprang straight again. They dragged their bodies from the gluey sand to face the morning. They latched their protein-eyes on daylight. They photosynthesized. The grass’s stored supplies of water and carbon dioxide conspired with the thin light of that misty, cloudy day to make its carbohydrates and put back into the world its by-product of oxygen. At last its bludgeoned chloroplasts could go about their work, capturing the energy of sunlight. They were the master craftsmen of the grass, the conjurors of chlorophyll. Gradually, as dawn was thickening, as day grew fat to slumber through the heavy afternoon, the pigments of the vegetable scar, its corpse stretched out across the grass, returned. By dusk the rectangle of time-paled lissom grass had gone. By dusk, next day, the ghost was sappy at its tips, and only yellow lower down where the leaves were closest to their stems. After that the lissom darkened, day after day. Spring green, then apple green. And bottle green. Envy green, and green as grass.

By final light on the ninth day since the murder all traces of any life and love that had been spilt had disappeared. The natural world had flooded back. The brightness of the universe returned. If there was any blood left in the soil from Joseph and Celice’s short stay in the dunes then it could only help to fortify the living murmur of the grass.

And still, today and every day, the dunes are lifted, stacked and undermined. Their crests migrate and reassemble with the wind. They do their best to raise their backs against the weather and the sea and block the wind-borne sorrows of the world. All along the shores of Baritone Bay and all the coast beyond, tide after tide, time after time, the corpses and the broken, thinned remains of fish and birds, of barnacles and rats, of molluscs, mammals, mussels, crabs are lifted, washed and sorted by the waves. And Joseph and Celice enjoy a loving and unconscious end, beyond experience.

These are the everending days of being dead.

If you enjoyed
Being Dead
, then you’ll love
Quarantine
, Jim Crace’s dazzling Booker-shortlisted novel about four travellers in the Judean desert.

The first chapter follows here
. . .

Miri’s husband was shouting in his sleep, not words that she could recognize but simple, blurting fanfares of distress. When, at last, she lit a lamp to discover what was tormenting him, she saw his tongue was black – scorched and sooty. Miri smelled the devil’s eggy dinner roasting on his breath; she heard the snapping of the devil’s kindling in his cough. She put her hand on to his chest; it was soft, damp and hot, like fresh bread. Her husband, Musa, was being baked alive. Good news.

Miri was as dutiful as she could be. She sat cross-legged inside their tent with Musa’s neck resting on the pillow of her swollen ankles, his head pushed up against the new distension of her stomach, and tried to lure the fever out with incense and songs. He received the treatment that she – five months pregnant, and in some discomfort – deserved for herself. She wiped her husband’s forehead with a dampened cloth. She rubbed his eyelids and his lips with honey water. She kept the flies away. She sang her litanies all night. But the fever was deaf. Or, perhaps, its hearing was so sharp that it had eavesdropped on Miri’s deepest prayers and knew that Musa’s death would not be unbearable. His death would rescue her.

In the morning Musa was as numb and dry as leather, but – cussed to the last – was gripping thinly on to life. His family and the other, older men from the caravan came in to kiss his forehead and mumble their regrets that they had not treated him with greater patience while he was healthy. When they had smelled and tasted the sourness of his skin and seen the ashy blackness of his mouth, they shook their heads and dabbed their eyes and calculated the extra profits they would make from selling Musa’s merchandise on the sly. Musa was paying a heavy price, his uncles said, for sleeping on his back without a cloth across his face. An idiotic way to die. A devil had slipped into his open mouth at night and built a fire beneath the rafters of his ribs. Devils were like anybody else; they had to find what warmth they could or perish in the desert cold. Now Musa had provided lodging for the devil’s fever. He wouldn’t last more than a day or two – if he did, then it would be a miracle. And not a welcome one.

It was Miri’s duty to Musa, everybody said, to let the caravan go on through Jericho towards the markets of the north without her. It couldn’t travel with fever in its cargo. It couldn’t wait while Musa died. Nor could it spare the forty days of mourning which would follow. That would be madness. Musa himself wouldn’t expect such waste. He had been a merchant too, and would agree, if only he were conscious, God forbid, that business should not wait for funerals. Or pregnancies. Fortunes would be lost if merchants could not hurry on. Besides, the camels wouldn’t last. They needed grazing and watering, and there was no standing water in this wilderness and hardly any hope of rain. No, it was a crippling sadness for them too, make no mistake, the uncles said, but Miri had to stay behind, continue with her singing till the end, and bury Musa on her own.

She’d have to put up stones to mark her husband’s passing and tend his grave until the caravan returned for her. She would be safe and comfortable if she took care. There was sufficient water in skins for a week or so, and then she could locate a cistern of some kind; there were also figs and olives and some grain, some salted meat and other food, plus the tent, the family possessions, small amounts of different wools, a knife, some perfume and a little gold. She’d have company as well. They’d leave six goats for her, plus a halting donkey which was too slow and useless for the caravan. Two donkeys then. Both lame, she said, nodding at her husband.

Nobody laughed at Miri’s indiscretions. It did not seem appropriate to laugh when there was fever in the tent, though leaving Musa behind, half dead, was a satisfying prospect for everyone. With luck, they said, Musa would only have to endure his suffering for a day or two more. And then? And then, when Miri had done her duty to her husband, they suggested, there would be habitations in the valley where she could, perhaps, seek refuge. She might find a buyer for the gold; take care, they warned, for gold can bring bad luck as well. Or she might employ the goats to buy herself a place to stay for her confinement – until the caravan had a chance to come for her and any child, if it survived. Eventually, she’d have the profits from her husband’s merchandise which they would trade on her behalf, the sacks of decorated copperware from Edom, his beloved bolts of woven cloth, his coloured wools. She smiled at that and shook her head and asked if they imagined that she was a halting donkey too. No, no, they said; why couldn’t she have more faith in their honesty? Of course there would be profits from the sale. They would not want to say how much. But she might be rich enough to get another husband. A better one than Musa anyhow, they thought. A smaller one. An older one. One that didn’t he or use his fists so frequently, or shout and weep and laugh so much. One who didn’t get so drunk, perhaps, then sit up half the night throwing pebbles at the camels and his neighbours’ tents, pelting goats’ dung at the moon. One that didn’t stink so badly as he died.

They promised they would return by the following spring, one year at the latest. But Miri understood there’d be no spring to bring them back, no matter where they went. They’d make certain that their winters didn’t end. Why would they come so far to reclaim the widow and the orphan of a man who’d been so troublesome and unpredictable? Besides, they wouldn’t want to lose the profits they had made. Not after they had held them for a year. No, Miri was not worth the trip. That was the plain, commercial truth.

So Miri let them go. She spat into the dust as they set off along the crumbling cliff-tops to the landslip where they could begin their descent. Spitting brought good luck for traders. Deals were struck with a drop of spit on a coin or in the palm of the hand or sometimes even on the goods to be exchanged. Spit does better business than a sneeze, they said. So, if anyone had dared to look at Miri, they could have taken her spitting to be a blessing for their journey. But no one dared. They must have known that she did not wish them well. They’d given her the chance to change her life, perhaps. But inadvertendy. No, Miri despised them for their haste and cowardice. Her spitting was a prayer that they would lame themselves, or lose their cargoes in the Jordan, or have their throats sliced open by thieves, their eyes pecked out by birds. She felt elated, once the uncles and their animals had gone. Then she was depressed and terrified. And then entirely calm, despite the isolation of their tent and the nearness of her husband’s death. She would not concern herself with the practicalities of life. Not yet. Women managed with much less. For the moment she could only concentrate on all the liberties of widowhood – and motherhood – which would be hers as soon as he was dead.

Praise for
B
EING
D
EAD

‘Jim Crace’s new novel confirms his extraordinary talent’

Daily Telegraph

‘
Being Dead
is a blindingly good and original novel. Crace’s is a unique voice, and we are lucky to have it’

Financial Times

‘A classic, has the elements of a thriller but becomes something much deeper’

B
LAKE
M
ORRISON
,
Independent on Sunday

‘An extraordinarily moving love story . . . a fictional universe in which death doesn’t negate – it invigorates’

Observer

‘A swirling symphonic celebration of the glory of the natural world . . . His work is among the most original in contemporary fiction’

The Times

‘One of the best books written since the death of Beckett’

Evening Standard

‘A stunning novel, ambitious and full of haunting imagery. The prose is hypnotic’

New Statesman

‘An extraordinary work of imagination – witty, precise, immaculately written’

A. A
LVAREZ
,
TLS

‘A hypnotic story, full of laconic grace and a seductive subtlety’

Sunday Express

‘Deals with a difficult and somewhat unpopular subject and renders it with grace and a calm, eerie beauty’

C
OLM
T
ÓIBÍN
,
Guardian

‘Shocking because it is filled with truth. It feels like a classic already’

Time Out

‘In a word, a masterpiece, a most accomplished and profound one at that . . . an outstanding novelist . . . Jim Crace has shown that rumours about the demise of the British novel are exaggerated’

Yorkshire Post

Being Dead

J
IM
C
RACE
is the prize-winning author of eleven books, including
Continent
(winner of the 1986 Whitbread First Novel Award and the
Guardian
Fiction Prize),
Quarantine
(winner of the 1998 Whitbread Novel of the Year and shortlisted for the Booker Prize) and
Being Dead
(winner of the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award).

A
LSO BY
J
IM
C
RACE

Continent

The Gift of Stones

Arcadia

Signals of Distress

Quarantine

The Devil’s Larder

Six

The Pesthouse

All That Follows

Harvest