Being Dead (16 page)

There were the bodies of two euthanasists, as well. And what remained of a young man and his wife who had set light to their small room.

The clerk pulled open the last remaining drawer for Syl. This was the murderee, a rich young man with narrow lips and the tussock hairstyle that had been fashionable five years before. She shook her head. Nobody had resembled either of her parents.

‘Then they’re not dead,’ he said. ‘If they were dead they’d have a drawer by now. Come on.’ He took them to the discharge room and called into the Tannoy for someone to bring a gurney and a cardboard casket for the sister’s body. He filled in a release form and, when the body was brought in, accompanied the women and the corpse into the service elevator. He let the sister speak. They always wanted to speak as soon as he pulled back the railing doors to make the draughty, ponderous descent to the loading bay. He only had to smile and nod. He didn’t have to listen.

‘She was my only sister,’ the woman said to them both, but mostly fixing Syl with her wet eyes. ‘She’d only taken a toothbrush from its cup. It must have weighed like lead. Tore the muscles in her arm and chest.’ They’d heard her cry in pain, she explained. It took her down. She’d hit her chin on the sink, and almost bit her tongue in half. Her niece saw her body, on the floor, then her bloody mouth. The niece had been a nurse, so guessed the aunt had had a brain haemorrhage. She did not try to activate her lungs or heart. It was too late, anyway. They couldn’t even prise the toothbrush from her grip. There was the blood. Then the dreadful smell of Fish. And everybody realized that she was gone for good. ‘To think, she never had a day off sick in all her life. And then, fuff, fuff, she’s . . . you know, done for.’

Syl held the woman’s arm, to steady her for the descent. The clerk kept well away until they reached the basement. Then he took charge of the gurney again, and helped to lift and slide the casket into the brothers’ hired van. They slipped him money, for his help. ‘Good luck,’ he said, and muttered, ‘Give her a decent send-off.’ The woman and her sons were almost smiling when they drove away. Everybody was relieved to have the body in the house the night before the burial, lying in its own bed in its own home, amongst its things.

‘What should we do?’ asked Syl.

The clerk, standing at the elevator gate, just shrugged. He’d like to have her warm and naked on a slab, his scissors slicing through her polymura coat. ‘We’ve looked,’ he said. ‘There’s nowhere else. Go to the police. Check up at all the hospitals.’

‘We’ve done all that.’

He closed the gate and pointed through the concertina’d bars up the ramp to the street. ‘That way.’ And then – you could never know your luck with a woman like her – he added, ‘Do call again!’

By the time that Syl was half-way up the ramp the clerk had already found the little bag of Eden pills. He popped a couple underneath his tongue. They were as easily absorbed as sugar. So once he’d reached the morgue to log out the woman’s body from his register, the new pills had begun to have their topping up effect. Nothing mattered any more. His little pills could conquer all the stench and tedium of death. They shrank the afternoon.

‘She’ll not be long,’ he said to Geo. The idiot was still sitting on the waiting bench, as chained and patient as a dog. You’d see more vigour in the fridge, the morgue clerk thought, and spent a mean and happy half-hour before the couple finally found each other and departed from his life if not his fantasies.

That night, Syl conquered death by sleeping with her driver once again. It had been a wearing day. She could not spend the evening alone. She’d rather tolerate his proprietorial love-making for a second time, his too-long fingernails, his inexperience, his lack of enterprise. It was a necessary sacrifice, and soon dispatched.

This time – an awful and pre-emptive sin – they took her mother’s bed. Dry sheets. More space. But as she prepared to let her ferryman help himself to her, the phone rang in the hall. Her chest went tight. She had to gasp for breath – what had become of her disdain for family? – and run out on to the landing. She could only stutter nonsense when she picked up the receiver, trembling and naked in the moonlit house. Good news or bad? Please let there be a parent on the phone. It was the police, of course. They’d found the car, downtown, abandoned in a bank car park. A thief had taken out the radio-cassette, but otherwise no damage. No sign of any accident or forced entry. No keys. There was a receipt for parking on the dashboard, timed and dated Tuesday noon, for the open ground next to the visitors’ centre beyond the airport road out at Baritone Bay. ‘Is there any reason you can think of why your parents would go there?’

Noon

It was not the easy and pleasant walk that he had promised her. There was a level, waymarked track down to the coast, but Joseph and Celice had to clamber through the man-made hillocks on the margins of the widened airport road and skirt the recent piles of building aggregate to reach the high backshores where once the study house had been. Instead of beaten scrub, the soil was loose and gravelly. The rubble-loving undergrowth tore at their trouser legs. Somewhere, below these engineering dunes, Celice had first seen Joseph, almost thirty years before. He’d slipped and pulled the muscles in his back. The other men – it
didn’t
seem like yesterday – had had to help him with his antique, boned suitcase. Consumed by fire. The well-worn path that the six students had followed then had disappeared over time, of course. There was no longer any need for it. No study house, no path.

Celice was breathless, not only from the effort of the climbs on such a sun-wrecked day but also with apprehension. The blackened wreckage of her past was far too close – six hundred metres from the air-conditioned comforts of their car. She’d never found the time or felt the impulse to return before. Not cowardice, just caution. Why take the risk? Why resurrect bad memories? It isn’t true that murderers are drawn back to the scene of crime before the blood has dried. They only dare go back when age has toughened them.

Celice was not a fool. She knew her thirty-year timidity had not been rational. Yet the fire had singed and carbonized her past. She was in no doubt of that. She could hardly bear even to recollect her first meeting with her husband, his singing voice, the sprayhoppers, their first love-making, because an image of the smoking study house would soon impose itself. With Festa’s blackened face, her toasted hair. And Festa’s melted voice.

Celice hadn’t witnessed a single flame of the actual fire, of course. She’d been . . . elsewhere. Impossibly alive and joyful. By the time that she and Joseph had finished with each other at Baritone Bay, the fire had used up all the wood and was only ruminating smoke. The almost naked ornithologist, running in black boots and his nightwear along the coastal track, had found them – caught them – consummated, arm in arm, coming from the dunes. ‘Thank God,’ he’d said, and almost hugged them with relief. ‘Where’s Festa?’

Celice could still recall her easy shrug. She hadn’t cared where Festa was. But some days, now and ever since, that’s all she thought about. Where Festa was. Her thirty years of being dead. The life in parallel to hers that Celice’s colleague never led. The uncompleted doctorate. The unbegun career. The unique progress never made in the medical and nutritional uses of seaweed. The man not found, the children she’d not have, the house, the undemanding life. The middle years of that enraging voice and spongy laugh. The thinning of the thick, loose hair. The fattening. The chance encounters with Celice, once in a while, on the street or at the annual conference on seaweed studies, ‘It’s Festa, isn’t it? . . . How’s life with you? I haven’t seen you since . . .’ All murdered by a coffee pan or by a toppling cigarette.

It was a flinty task for Celice even to imagine herself back at the study house, as she’d last seen it, standing, trembling, with another calming cigarette and facing down across the black and silvered ruin towards a smoke-smudged sea. Her lungs, already stressed by their uphill running from the coast, had been raw with wood ash. She’d yelled out Festa’s name, both at the house and at the countryside around, until her voice had failed. But no one answered her – and no one ever would. Her colleague and room-mate was buried underneath the smouldering tent of timbers. It was too hot to peer more closely and look for signs of skull and bones or rake the ash for Festa’s confirmation ring, her watch, her silver bracelet and her teeth.

Joseph had come forward to put his arm around her waist. But she had waved him back. It was his fault, this fire, this death, as well as hers. Love was to blame, and passion. Passion such as theirs, brief as it was, was strong enough to shake the balance of the natural world, and test its synchronicity. Where there is sex, then there is death. They are the dark co-ordinates of one straight line. Grief is death eroticized. And sex is only shuffling off this mortal coil before its time to plummet to the post-coital afterlife. Celice’s haste to rush out of the house and take command of her new love so early in the morning was bound to set the flame. That is a scientific view.

Who ought to take responsibility at times like this? There always has to be a volunteer. When the airport hydrant, two firemen and a policeman had arrived to dampen the embers and begin the search for Festa’s remains, the two men there – Celice’s lover and the ornithologist – said they could not suggest or even guess how the fire had started. It was a mystery. They had no theories so they could accept no guilt. But Celice, not noticeably self-sacrificing in lesser matters, was eager for the blame. Embraced it, actually. She knew her only shelter was the truth. She half remembered seeing the kerosene lamp under the table, she admitted to the policeman. She couldn’t say whether or not it was still alight when she’d got up and hurried out that morning.

‘Let’s get this right. You left a lamp to bum all night? Underneath a wooden table?’ The policeman’s prejudices were reconfirmed. Here was a science graduate with a fine accent and no expenses spared who hadn’t yet found out that wood was combustible and that flames were hot. ‘That takes the prize,’ he said. But there was more. Celice could not stop confessing, despite Joseph’s restraining touch in the small of her back. That was a touch she hated all her life. She would not hide behind white lies or plead ignorance like him. She told the policeman, then, about the boiling coffee pan and her smouldering, toppling cigarettes. She’d later write to Festa’s parents, repeating all her burning truths. She’d admit the same again in court for the inquiry judge.

Now, middle-aged and only half as reckless as she’d once been, Celice was hiding in her husband’s wake as he pushed through the undergrowth of untrimmed shrubs to the side of the study house’s tumbled western wall. Joseph had been behind her as they’d crossed the rubble hills. But he had taken too many opportunities to help her on the loose earth and the gradients by spreading his fingers flat across her bottom and pushing. This was a lover pushing her, looking for the acquiescent flesh, and not a simple helping hand. She was annoyed. What had come over him? Could he not guess how tense she was? Or how angry she remained at his dishonest and restraining touch that age ago?

Sometimes she feared that there was nothing grand in their relationship, nothing to secure her loyalty or admiration, even, since that first encounter with his singing voice, that great sustaining wave on which her love had surfed for almost thirty years. Where had been the zest since then? Where, indeed, had been their common ground? She had become the pepper to his salt. They were the fruit of different, and opposing, trees.

So many times she’d asked herself, Why had their love proved troublesome? Celice could count the ways. First, she was a warrior by nature, unafraid of battle, quick to raise her fists. Her husband was an appeaser, loath even to raise his voice. She was assaulted and defeated, when they argued, by his lazy patience and his infuriating tact. After any argument she was mostly angry for one week. And he was eloquently hurt for two. Second, as she grew older, she wanted company and friends; he was unsociable and courted privacy. Next, she was dissatisfied with her life; he was only anxious about his. She wanted everything to get better; he was nervous that all the hard-earned certainties might disappear – he’d lose his health, his work, his monkish peace of mind. She had no fear of death. He cowered from it all the time, and lived his middle years with one foot on the bottom rung of a descending ladder, ready for the looming fall, the streak of blood in his urine, the tell-tale black deposits on the toilet paper, the colonizing lumps and swellings that he seemed to search for twenty times a day, the sharp pains in the arms and chest, the sudden stroke. He had become obsessed with symmetry: two legs aching was old age; one leg aching was a clot, arthritis or a growth. Lastly, he saw their marriage as a success; she was unsatisfied by it. Despite their early promise and ambitions they had not left as many marks upon the world as she had hoped. One daughter was the only product of their lives – and one that was not promising, pretended to no plans, and had fled from the family home as if it were a prison cell. Celice’s audit of herself and her long years with Joseph was not uplifting. Their legacy, she’d be the first to say, would be less than their inheritance.

Yet there still was love, the placid love that only time can cultivate, a love preserved by habit and by memory. Their tree had little rising sap, perhaps, but it was held firm by deep and ancient roots. Old, lasting love. Celice had never doubted it. Their marriage had initiating strengths. A great sustaining wave, no matter how old, is more than most couples can boast of and enjoy. Her husband angered her, perhaps, from time to time. Most of the time, in fact. He was too weak and watery. And she was disappointed with herself. But their beginnings were indelible and strong. Joseph could still evoke for her – infrequently – those sentimental choruses, that great subversive bass, that guiding star, that midnight bride, the peaking of her body and the song in that far, haunted place. When they were young.