Being Dead (7 page)

That’s
seven,
not counting Joseph. Joseph did not count. For when Celice recalled her adventures, Joseph was not on the list. Husbands are not adventures. Nor are they pickups to be enjoyed and then discarded. They are the custom of the house. They are the formula.

The truth is that mature Celice would rather have her cigarettes returned and, yes, some undemanded tenderness in the shape of books, opera CDs and house plants, than her old appetites. Lust had abandoned her; she had despaired of it – and there were times when irritation was the only passion that she felt. She was provoked not by her husband’s melting voice these days – although occasionally he tried to win her back with an old song – nor by his hand across her neck, but by his radio, the clutter that he left in every comer of the house, his acid hypochondria, his toiletries, his unselfconscious repetition of the facts.

Perhaps that’s why, although the day-long prospect of making love again to Joseph in the dunes had not much stimulated her so far, the five minutes that she’d spent, while he was absent, resuscitating her seven other men had already aroused her so much more. She closed both fists and unbent, erected, one finger at a time, rehearsing once again their kisses and their liberties. How giddy it had been to give herself to virtual strangers, to snatch some passion in the afternoon, to lie out naked on a hotel bed with Room Service attending to her spine and with, of course, a pack of Dortmundas open on the table top. Deep satisfaction was at hand when she was young. She only had to lift an arm and reach. The lips, the finger and the cigarette. How giddy it would be again – a little late in life, too late for him, alas – to be desired, just once, by someone other than her husband. There was, had been, a man. She did not want to put a name and face to him, her concert-going colleague at the university, so recently removed. But that had been her harmless fantasy for years. He could have been her number eight.

When Joseph came back to her rock, a little breathless and disappointed to report he couldn’t find or recognize ‘their spot’, Celice no longer cared.

‘It’s obvious,’ he was explaining. ‘It’s almost thirty years since we were here. And dunes migrate . . .’ He really was an irritating man.

‘Let’s just find anywhere,’ she said, to Joseph’s evident surprise. And his alarm, perhaps. She pulled her bag on to her shoulders and, carrying her shoes, walked off between two dunes with Joseph following, his heartbeat almost audible. She sensed his gluey eyes, as if she were a model on a catwalk, naked, clothed, a flick and shuss of skin and fabric. She was relieved to find she could willingly indulge his desires after all and even match them with some feelings of her own. A great relief. She hadn’t felt so much like making love for years. She had recovered her old self through memory, receding. A
quivering
of lovers from the past. The drumming rosary of fingertips.

These are the instruments of sex outdoors. You need good weather, somewhere dry to stretch out far from dogs and wasps, and no sense of the ridiculous. Celice wanted privacy, a place beyond the eyes of passers-by, though it was not likely they’d be spied or interrupted. Hardly anyone came out on to the bay, these days, now that the Baritone coast had been ‘released’, they said, for building. She was looking for a mattress of the lissom grass, which still flourished thickly on the leeward-sloping sand. She found one within a minute, not quite flat, pillowed at one end, a bit too sandy, but it would do. She was in a hurry, but still self-conscious in a way she hadn’t been in her mad months. Prehistory. She didn’t want to take off all her clothes, not in the hard sunlight, not in her fifty-sixth year. She pulled off her trousers and her underpants and folded them on top of her shoes. Still slim, waist up, and neatly dressed. The naked pigeon thighs. The balcony of fat around her navel. The strong and veiny legs. But she did want Joseph naked. She watched while he threw off his clothes. His penis was engorged but not erect, though she could tell from his dropped lip and his short breaths how earnest and absorbed he had become.

She faced him, put one hand across his shoulder and ran her other hand, her first five lovers, down his chest and abdomen. His retracted testicles were creased like walnuts, damp and warm to touch. She almost said he ought to lose some weight and do some exercise. But she had the sense to hold her tongue. These were fragile moments, soon betrayed. Too soon betrayed, in fact. For she had hardly touched him when he ejaculated. Fulsomely. The sudden shock of her cold hands, perhaps. Bad pastry. There was the usual groan of men his age, the disappointment and the pleasure in one go. So much for well-laid plans.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Celice said. And, indeed, it didn’t matter. It was comical, this failure to contain himself for once, this clownish tragic curtain call, this pantomime called sex. Her husband was a man who lived in fear of folly, denying his exquisite gift for folly all the time. She found that so endearing. You couldn’t call it manly, not with him. But it was lovable.

She made him sit between her legs, so that they both faced sideways to the sun. She made him eat his lunch. ‘You’ll need the strength.’ There was no rush. They had all afternoon to try again. She leaned her body on to his and wrapped an arm across his chest. If she wanted tenderness to precede the passion, then now she had her way. Joseph was not capable of both at once. So few men are. Passion is the work of seconds. You only have to make a god of what you most desire. But the gentler pleasures are built up over decades. She rubbed her knuckles down his spine.

‘I wonder if the bay will sing again,’ she said. ‘Remember?’

They waited, while Joseph ate some of his sandwich grumpily. He hardly dared speak. They listened for the baritone and waited for the flesh to recompose itself. She would have liked a cigarette. A pre-coital smoke. Instead, she kissed his scalp, his neck, his ears. She pushed her nose and lips into her husband’s thinning hair. She stroked his chest and brushed away the fallen sandwich crumbs. She reached between his legs and tugged his pubic hair.

‘Listen,’ Joseph said. He thought he’d heard some shifting sand, a humming voice, a body on the move, a discord in the wind. With any luck it was the dunes.

‘It’s not as if . . .’ Celice began to say.

They were not the first of their generation to die, of course. But they were early. Being middle-aged and cautious is no defence against Mondazy’s Fish. Its bite does not discriminate. None of its deaths is premature.

Seven months before, one of Joseph’s many cousins, on a business trip in Ottawa, had stepped off a pavement in too great a dash and was struck across the kneecaps by the swerving cab that he was hailing. The Licensed Taxi Owners of Ontario sent him home Refrigerated Air Freight, with their best apologies. Another cousin that Joseph hadn’t seen for twenty years and had never liked anyway, had died that spring. So had a neighbour’s son, Celice’s age, a bachelor, a cyclist. A heart-attack while he was out training. He hadn’t smoked or drunk since he was a teenager. He was birch thin and muscular. He’d not deserved to die. It was too soon, his mother said, as if death was like a pension, a rebuff that you had to earn.

The worst death-undeserved had been Celice’s lisping colleague at the university, the Academic Mentor of the Natural Science Faculty. He was the sort of man she liked, now that she was in her fifties. Unmarried, self-sustained, a reader and a concert-goer, always happy to discuss with her the news, the arts, the world beyond their work. She most admired his eagerness, the unjudgemental, solitary pleasure that he’d learned to take from simple things, his small and lively voice. It always thrilled her when he spoke her name. He was, she would have said, a man contented with himself. Except, three Saturdays before, he’d driven up to Broadcast Hill (an elevation most preferred by suicides) and parked out of the rain beneath the grey-black canopy of sea pines, which could be seen in spidery silhouette even from the port. They gave a high quiff to the sloping forehead of the town. He’d fixed a hose-pipe, borrowed from the bio lab, to his exhaust and into the car. When he was found next morning by the first Sunday jogger the windscreen wipers were still hand-jiving to the jazz tunes on the radio.

Celice should not have been so shocked or taken it so personally. The Mentor’s suicide was not a judgement on the world, on life, on her. It might have been nothing more than chemistry and genes. He was disposed to it, perhaps. This was his programmed death. A better death, she’d thought, despite her desperation, than the one that she was hoping for: a death doled out in microscopic instalments by senility, her tent repitched each day, a footstep nearer home. His suicide had saved him from old age. He’d stopped the stitches fraying in his life. He had departed from this earth intact, before his final fevers came and the lingering was over, the last weekend of snow or sun, the thinning blood, the trembling touch of strangers pulling down his lids. He’d died with all his futures still in place. His
will.
His
might.
His
could.
There were still concert tickets on his mantelshelf. His winter holiday was booked. He still had debts. The Mentor’s suicide, she could persuade herself, was neo-Darwinist.

But it was hard to take a coldly scientific view of sudden death when it concerned a friend, particularly when that friend was someone she could have loved. ‘Such bad luck,’ Celice had said to the Mentor’s sister at the funeral. Though luck, the bad and good, did not belong to natural history, and suicide was not a game of chance.

Nevertheless, somebody should have briefed the Speaker at the funeral that he was lecturing a congress of biologists and that he should avoid such words as paradise, eternity and God. ‘You might consider the spiritual reputation of the sea pine under which our departed brother parked his car and sheltered from the rain,’ the Speaker had told the mourners, including both the author of a standard text on tree classification and a Chetze Prize-winning botanist. ‘We know it as the Slumber Tree. In the scriptures it was called Death’s Ladder. Because its seeds are poisonous. But also because its branches touch the heavens and its roots are deep. They reach into the underworld. And so it is the tree of choice. Choose sin or virtue. Descend into the eternal darkness. Or ascend into the presence of Almighty God. Anyone who knew our brother, for whom we have gathered here to commemorate and celebrate, also knows which choice he made throughout his life. He scaled the highest branches of the pine.’

That night, both irritated and intrigued by such absurdity – a pine is shallow-rooted and not poisonous, there is no underworld – Celice had taken down the book their daughter, Syl, had sent her father for his irritable amusement on his birthday.
The Goatherd’s Ancient Wisdom.
Page 68, ‘A Sorcery of Trees’. She found, to her surprise, that she was partly wrong about the pine.

The Goatherd’s wisdom was, she read, that ‘Travellers who could not find the money for a bed and had to pass their nights outdoors should prefer the blanket of the thorn before all other trees, And so stay free from harm.’ Those ‘fools and giddy-heads’ who slept below an olive branch would wake up with a headache, ‘lasting for a week’. To nap beneath a fig was to risk hot dreams. Curl up in the roots of oak – and be rewarded with diarrhoea. And, yes, the Speaker’s prejudice, you’d have eternal slumbers if you lay down underneath the pine.

She read out the passage to Joseph, but he was less affected by the Mentor’s death. Indifferent and dismissive, she’d have said. ‘Goatherds should know about such things,’ was all that he could summon. ‘They’ve nothing else to do all day but sleep under trees.’ But, as Celice was to discover when she read on in bed that night, there was some pleasing science buried in the lore. A lengthy footnote by the Goatherd’s modem editor showed why the ancient prejudices were not absurd or idle. ‘The acid nature of the thorn is not hospitable to fungi,’ he observed, “but mushroom pickers should be warned of other trees.’ The migraines and the dreams, it seemed, the never-ending slumbers and the shits were what they’d get from symbiotic fungi growing trader olives, figs and oaks, or from the rings of coffin fungus living under pines. ‘ ‘‘Come to the pines, you suicides,” ’ he quoted, ‘ ‘‘and dine on these grey buttons in the earth. They’ll box you up and bury you . . . New pines will grow where blood is spilt; though it be human, animal or from the wounds of clashing skies, their thirsts are never satisfied.” ’

Not strictly true. Not scientific on the whole. But this was wisdom widely honest in a way that Celice found comforting. As she imagined it, there was no hose-pipe and no car. There was just the Mentor on his back, awaiting her, the wispy canopy of pines, the deadly buttons on the ground, a ladder leading to his underworld and hers, and everlasting sin.

According to the Goatherd’s wisdoms, then, it should have been entirely safe for Joseph and Celice to lie down on the lissom grass amongst the salt dunes of Baritone Bay. The nearest pine was a kilometre away, but there were sufficient sea thorns there to make their slumbers ‘free from harm’. Had Celice read on, amongst the Goatherd’s later observations (page 121, ‘Green Favours’) she would have found good news about the lissom grass itself. The Goatherd listed all its common names, sweet thumbs, angel bed, pintongue, pillow grass, sand hair, repose, and then the luck that it could bring to fishermen and lovers if they tied a snatch of it to their bonnets or their nets. Good fishing with the lissom grass was guaranteed. There was no ancient promise of misfortune for any ‘fools and giddy-heads’ who rested on its cushions, no ladders to the under or the upper world to tempt Celice and Joseph from their second day of grace.

Their tenant crabs dispersed once it was dark. Their flies stayed put, lodging in the damp recesses of the wounds, until the early hours of the Wednesday when an undramatic storm ran down the coast to chase the starlit sky away and flush the warmth out of the night. No noise or gusts or lightning, just relentless water smudging ocean into land, and steady wind. Even the gnawing rodents that had crossed the dunes to feed on the unusual prize of human carrion could not endure the beating rain or the chilling blocks of air that squeezed it from the sky. They fled back to their burrows. The three sets of footprints leading from the coastal path into the dunes, the one set leading out, were quickly washed away. The
Entomology
was soaked. The flattened grass where they had walked, resuscitated by the rain, sprang straight again.