Being Dead (8 page)

The storm cleaned out their bodies. Much of the blood that had coagulated around their wounds was now reliquefied and thinned to pinkish grey. The rain loosened and washed off most of these weaker stains. It dislodged, dissolved, the clots. Celice’s jacket was saturated. Her shirt was black with rain. The water and the cold wind of the storm had some benefits, though. The rotting of the bodies was retarded for an hour or two during night. Bodies decompose most quickly when they’re dry and warm, and when insects are at work, taking off the waste. But even the weather and the night could not delay the progress of death by much. Their lives were irretrievable, despite the optimistic labours of the nails and hair to add their final millimetres. Joseph, normally so meticulous, was stubble-faced.

He and his wife were also waterlogged, two flooded chambers, two leather water-bags. Nothing in the world concerned them any more. They’d never crave a song or cigarette or making love again. At least their deaths had coincided. There can be nothing lonelier than to outlive someone you are used to loving. For them, the comedy of marriage would not translate into the tragedy of death. One of them would never have to become accustomed to the absence of the other, or need to fix themselves on someone new. No one would have to change their ways.

This was not death as it was advertised: a fine translation to a better place; a journey through the calm of afterlife into the realms of instinct and desire. The persons had not gone elsewhere, to blink and wake, to sleep and salivate in some place distinctly other than this world, in No-reality. They were, instead, insensible as stones, imprisoned by the viewless wind. This was the world as it had always been, plus something less which once was doctors of zoology.

By Wednesday noon, a gloomy day, their bodies were as stiff as wood. A full day dead. They had discoloured, too. The skin was piebald. Pallid on the upper parts. Livid on the undersides. What blood remained had gravitated downwards to suffuse their lower vessels with all its darker wastes. Celice, her nose still pressed against the grass, was purple-faced. Her downward-flexing knees and upper thighs were black as grapes. Her buttocks were as colourless as lard.

Joseph, dead on his back, was white-faced and purple-shouldered. His lips, though, were drawn and blue, his gums had shrunk, so that his teeth appeared to have grown a centimetre overnight. His nose had sunk into his face. His tongue was also blue – the child in him had sucked its pen. Already he was losing form, though not enough, just yet, to make him animal or alien. Had anybody stumbled through the dunes and half glimpsed the bodies there, they might still have thought the couple were only sleeping, as lovers do, and hurry on, not wanting to look back on such a private place.

The light of day had thinned the rain, though there was almost uninterrupted drizzle until the afternoon. The storm had shifted sand during the night and banked it up against the bodies on one side. Already they were sinking in. Celice’s discarded shoes and Joseph’s remaining clothes were soaked and almost buried. The wind had lifted his shirt and carried it along the dune gully and into the stretched branches of a sea thorn. It was their flag.

By four the rain had stopped, although the sky stayed overcast and dull. Again the crabs and rodents went to work, while there was light, flippantly browsing Joseph and Celice, frisking them for moisture and for food, delving in their pits and caverns for their treats, and paying them as scant regard as cows might pay a turnip head.

So far no one had even missed Joseph and Celice. They were not expected back at work till Thursday. Their daughter, Syl, would not phone until the weekend, if she remembered. The neighbours were used to silence from the doctors’ house. So their bodies were still secret, as were their deaths. No one was sorry yet. No one had said, ‘It’s such bad luck.’ They’d perished without ceremony. There’d been no one to rub their skin with oils or bathe and dress the bodies as they stiffened. They would have benefited from the soft and herby caresses of an undertaker’s sponge, the cotton wool soaked in alcohol to close the open pores. No one had plugged their leaking rectums with a wad of lint, or taped their eyelids shut, or tugged against their lower jaws to close their mouths. No one had cleaned their teeth or combed their hair. The murderer, that good mortician, though, had carried out one duty well. He had removed their watches and their jewellery. There was a chance, depending on the wind and sand, that even their bones might not be found or ever subjected to the standard rituals and farewells, the lamentations, the funeral, the head-stones and obituaries. Then they’d not be listed with the dead, reduced by memory and legacies. They’d just be ‘missing’, unaccounted for, absent without leave. His hand could hold her leg for good.

Joseph rose early on the first morning of the study week, even though he’d only slept since three. He could easily manage on four or five hours of rest a night. He was used to making up the loss during the day, often napping with a newspaper on weekend afternoons or, at the Institute, snacking on sleep while other students were at lunch, in bars. He was not comfortable in bars.

He meant to catch the rising tide on a gently sloping beach. He had to hurry. High water was at eight. He hardly washed – just his face with cold tap water and dish soap at the kitchen sink. He pulled on – for luck – his fieldwork T-shirt with Dolbear’s formula (for estimating air temperature by the frequency of insect stridulations) emblazoned on the chest and back.
He cleaned his teeth with his forefinger, drank cold coffee from one of last night’s cups, and went noiselessly outside in semi-darkness. He was as furtive as a burglar, and with good reason.

Joseph had only to cut across the flagstones to the gate in the study-house yard, ten metres at the most, to find the steps and path down to the coastal track and make his escape without disturbing any of the sleepers with his footsteps. But he was tempted by a longer route, to walk through the unattended ferals of what once had been a fine maritime garden and circle the house from the rear. He wondered what the women looked like, sleeping.

Festa did not interest him. She was a trinket. Just the woman to divert the dull and photogenic men who would share his bunk room for the week – if, that is, they could control their first-night appetites for drink and village life. But the taller one – Cecile? Celice? Cerice? a French name anyway – was not their sort. They’d find her odd. And she would find them tedious, he hoped. But, surely, she’d be Joseph’s natural ally. She was a stray, like him. Strays pack with other strays.

Joseph had never been a flirt. Not once. ‘I’m far too short to flirt.’ So he was surprised how much this woman had enthralled him in those few minutes when they’d met the day before. He admired the way she dressed, the boots, the jeans, the dissident hair. He liked her face, her unmasked skin, her unplucked brows, her gallery of battlemongering frowns and winces, which seemed to hold a private dialogue with him. He’d leaned against the doorway to the common room, making too much fuss about his hardly injured back, so that he would have the excuse to stand and watch her while she put her clothes and books away, while she stretched to hang her coat or bent to close a drawer. Her heavy, shapely thighs were centimetres from his waist. She wasn’t beautiful. She was provoking, though. She was, he knew instinctively, his only chance.

Joseph should have introduced himself at once. She seemed ready to be spoken to. She had challenged him several times to contribute some small remark, just by looking at him steadily – if such a shifting face as hers could be described as steady – when he must have seemed rudely silent. But he would not, and could not, compete with such unfettered, garrulous companions. He knew his weaknesses: his looks, his social skills, his impatience. He knew his strengths as well. He’d bide his time. He’d take her by surprise.

His was the grandest vanity. He thought she’d be attracted to him more if he stayed out of sight. She’d find his faked indifference a magnet and a challenge. So he didn’t speak to her on that first afternoon. He lay down on his bunk and napped. He didn’t go with them on their shopping expedition to the village or – an easy sacrifice – to the bar. He was not there when the women came back to the study house that night. He’d forced himself, despite the cold and dark, to walk down to the shore, dead at that hour, and then, on his return, to invent moths, foxes, owls and sea bats to justify his curious excursion. And now he wouldn’t be there when his five colleagues got up in the morning. So he would make a mystery of himself, and she would need to solve him.

Festa and Celice were not sleeping when Joseph, carrying a wet-pad for his fieldwork notes and wearing the high surf boots provided at the centre, reached the dark end of the veranda, pressed himself against the outer wall, hidden by the building frame, and peered at the women through the age-ochred glass. Both of them had been woken by the first hint of daylight and by the drumming of the kitchen tap. Joseph washing. The veranda was not screened or curtained, and the roof was mostly timbered glass. Festa had shuffled her mattress and her sleeping-bag towards Celice’s and they were sharing a cigarette, sitting with their backs against the planking wall and warming their faces in the smoke. They were too stiff and half asleep to talk.

Joseph could not see their faces very well, except from time to time when one of them drew on the cigarette and spread a brief light on a nose or chin. Otherwise the women were just silhouettes, though the outline of Celice’s broad head was unmistakable. He dared not rub the glass to clean away the grime and mould. Glass whispers when it’s touched by spies. But he pressed his eye a little closer to the window-pane to watch Celice’s chest and shoulders. She could be naked above the thick skirt of her sleeping-bag, or swathed in shirts and tops. It was too dark to tell. He waited for the revealing illumination of the cigarette or a match, perhaps. He hoped to glimpse her flaring throat and her ignited breasts. But he was disappointed. More nose and chin, and nothing that he shouldn’t see. Here was a chance, though, to reveal himself to her. He’d walk along the path below the veranda steps as innocent and large as life, and wave, in passing, at the women in their beds.

He’d say, whenever they looked back – not often – or whenever they reminded each other how they’d met, a not entirely happy memory, that he had won her with that single wave, as open a display as any peacock tail, and irresistible. He had only to lift his hand, beyond the glass, and Celice would get up and follow him. The night before, when he was sitting in the common room, he’d sung only for her, not for the men or Festa. He’d heard her calling out, ‘Keep quiet!’ and then the silence of her eavesdropping. He’d sung the first verse loudly then dropped his voice, to make her hold her breath and listen. Singing was his greatest eloquence. It went through walls. How could the other men compete with such a voice? What was the benefit in being tall and handsome if they couldn’t be admired through wooden panels, or at night? ‘Attend my tide,’ he’d sung to her. ‘I’ll not be far from your bedside.’ He knew that she would join him on the shore. It was not arrogance. It was simply the self-regarding optimism of the young. This was life’s plan. The tide would make white chevrons round their boots.

So Joseph walked out from his hiding-place on to the open ground in front of the veranda. He stopped and stared through the windows at the women. He coughed and shuffled until he saw their heads align with his, and then he waved, a bit self-consciously, before climbing the tumbled garden wall and dropping out of sight.

Celice did not wave back at him. She had determined to be unsociable for the six remaining days. The men had kept their noise up through the night and even when, in the early hours, they’d finally retreated to their bunks, the timber study house had creaked so badly in the exchanging temperatures of night and day that Celice imagined, when she dozed, that she’d been abandoned in a sinking ship.

She should have waved, of course. She could hardly blame Joseph for her disrupted night. He was not drunk or germinating a venereal infection like his room-mates. Nor had he proved to be the icy castaway that she’d imagined. In fact, he was amusing. She’d heard the laughter from the common room. And he could sing. What were the words?

If only men were sentimental like their songs.

She really should have waved.

She really ought to get to work. That, at least, would be her good excuse for jumping up, stubbing out her half-smoked cigarette and rushing after him. She had her studies to pursue.

Celice got dressed without washing, not even splashing her lips and eyes at the sink. She collected her own wet-pad and her own surf boots as well as a field kit and some specibags, and followed Joseph, first round the building and then over the garden wall that he had inexplicably favoured above the yard gate for leaving the grounds of the study house. At least she’d not be there when the others stumbled from their bunks. She wouldn’t have to tolerate their belches or minister to their headaches. She’d not have to witness Festa and her makeup bag.

Joseph’s tracks through the snapped masts of the flute bushes and, later, in the mud and sand were easy to follow. It was exciting, dogging him, looking for the evidence of his big boots, and discovering for herself the layers and faces of the coast. He’d descended to a roughly surfaced farm lane, strewn with manac husks. It edged the backlands, skirting a line of freshwater ponds, to serve the few surviving wind-stripped summer cottages, mostly used by anglers. He’d then cut off towards the coast along a signposted path through forest pines and salt marshes before climbing the ridge of the inner, non-salty dunes. A first sight of the sea and the jutting foreland of Baritone Bay.

Celice could see Joseph now, going eastwards on the coastal track through flats and thickets towards the bay. She waved at his back. A late reply. He left the track and walked across the scrubshore on to the beach, still colourless and grainy in the residues of night. The dawn was low and milky, no hint, so far, of blue or green. What little light there was had spread to waterlog the sky.