Being Dead Read online

  The waiting gull, a greater intellect, was too nervous of the bodies in the dunes to help itself, just yet, to any of their titbits on display, the wet and ragged centres of their wounds, the soft flesh of their inner legs, their eyes, the pink parts of their mouths. It bridled its wings and stretched its neck at them, regurgitating its noisy tempers as if its throat was blocked by stones, expecting these two irritated giants to spring to life like resting seals and drive it off.

  The gull became less cautious when, after several timid sorties, the bodies failed to strike at it. It pecked at one of Celice’s shoes, which had been tossed a little distance from their patch of grass. It lifted Joseph’s underpants, misled by what it took to be the smell of fish. It found a piece of broken biscuit that had dropped from the granite wielder’s mouth. Then it went to work and started on the unexpected feast of crabs, which were already labouring through their exaggerated countrysides towards the corpses. More violent death. The sudden downward beating of a beak.

  Crabs and swag flies were too numerous in the dunes of Baritone Bay – and too innocent – to be cautious. Numbers made them safe as certainly as lack of numbers had made Joseph and Celice vulnerable. The flies lined up like fishermen along the banks of the bodies’ open wounds. They settled mainly on Celice. She had been the more abused, struck seven times around the face and head. ‘Seven times killed,’ they’d say. Her hair was matted with wet blood and the syrup of her brain. One cheek was flattened by the pounding impact of the granite. Two teeth were cracked, longways. Her facial artery, that superficial lifeline from the carotid, which climbed over her lower jaw to supply the colour to her cheek and feed the brain with oxygen, had been tom in two. Blood had spread across her throat and shoulders and soaked invisibly into her summer jacket. There were dark patches on the grass and sand. Blood does not keep its livery for long. Celice was blackening. It looked and felt as if she’d been pelted with molasses. Her body made good pickings for the glucose-hungry flies.

  Celice – an age ago – had put a hand up to her face, to close the wounds or stem the flow, perhaps, or to protect her dizzy looks, her high cheekbones, her somewhat furrowed lips, her acne-purpled chin, the blood-filled lines around her mouth, her teeth. The hand was stuck in place by blood.

  She’d landed on a shoulder first, then toppled sideways. The more damaged half of her face was shielded now – too late to do her any good – by grass and sand. Her upper body was still neatly dressed for her day out: the black woollen jacket, a white, rough-weave T-shirt with the quill-and-inkwell logo of a bookshop on the chest in blue, a padded brassière. Then she was naked to her toes. The swag flies found it easiest to feast on the blood in her hair or to settle in the swampy bruises on her neck and gums or at the damage to her hands. They fed in clinging multitudes. Loose knots of flies. They made black balls of wings and antennae amongst the clots, as weightless and as dry as tumbleweed. There’s not a creature drier than a fly, as any small boy with a match and candle can testify. Some flies strayed round the bare flesh of her lower body, settled in the hair between her legs or at the tuck of her anus, but found few pickings. There wasn’t any source of blood below the shoulders of her jacket. Celice’s hair, though, within an hour of her death, began to seem more lively than it ever had in life.

  Her husband, though his body was less bloody than Celice’s and his face was only bruised, had wounds and lesions right across his chest and abdomen, plus the rifting, open fracture on the right side of his skull. The spittle at his mouth was red and succulent. His left shoulder-blade was broken; his arm was dislocated. He’d not been protected by any clothes, other than his watch and spectacles. And a wedding ring. So when he fell on to his back, his legs apart, his fat and puckered testicles were on display. They’d split and tom with the impact of a heavy shoe. The swag flies browsed his chest and swarmed between his legs. They gleaned the urine and picked at the semen lacquer on his inner thigh.

  The crabs, when they arrived and climbed the gradients of flesh and cloth, did not compete with the flies for blood. They grazed for detached skin and detritus, the swarf and dross and jetsam of animals with lives cut short.

  Here in the dunes – with Celice’s spread body, her rustling hair, her husband hanging from her leg, as centrepiece – was a fine display to illustrate the annual fieldwork lecture that she gave, normally with slides of putrefying seals or tide-abandoned fish, to the faculty’s new and squeamish students: ‘Anyone who studies nature must get used to violence. You’ll have to make yourselves companionable with death if any of you want to flourish as zoologists.’ She meant that fear of death is fear of life, a cliché amongst scientists, and preachers too. Both know that life and death are inextricably entwined, the double helix of existence. Both want to give life meaning only because it clearly has none, other than to replicate and decompose. Hard truths.

  ‘You’ll need to swallow two long words,’ Celice would say, and write SENESCENCE and THANATOLOGY on the teaching screen. Natural ageing. And the study of death. ‘Senescence is the track on which most creatures run their lives. Including us. Not all creatures, of course. Amoebolites and monofiles enjoy eternity. Unless they are destroyed by accident or predators. Enjoy eternity? Is that the word? Experience eternity, perhaps? Endure? Even that denotes too great a consciousness.’

  Later in their study year, her students would encounter monofiles under the microscope, splitting apart like oil in water, reproducing by fission. Two of the same. Then four. Then eight. Then sixty-four. And all their DNA identical. No deaths. No corpses. Evermore.

  A more indulgent lecturer than Celice, less disciplined, more abstract, might ask the class to wonder if that single-celled eternity was paradise or hell. To break in two and not to die. To multiply and yet remain ourselves for ever, world without end. To spread and stretch and colonize and build until there’s nowhere left to stand except on someone else’s shoulders, until the world is swollen like a boil and fit to burst. ‘Death is the price we pay for being multi-celled,’ was all she’d say. ‘Our tracks run out eventually . . .’ More slides. ‘These dusk bugs die within a single day, for every bug must have its day as you well know. This land tortoise, still living in Mauritius, has a sailor’s name and date carved in its shell. Nicholas Surcouf. 1803. Two hundred years old at least. And these . . .’ A photographic slide from 1910 of four young women sitting on a bench with a uniformed man spread out on the grass, a cushion for their feet. ‘. . . are almost certainly dead. Life’s only, say, up to ninety years for creatures such as you and I. We’re less than turtles. We have to die before they do. We must. It’s programmed that we will. Our births are just the gateway to our deaths. That’s why a baby screams when it is born. Don’t write that in your notes. They who begin to live begin to die. It’s downhill from the womb, from when the sperm locates the egg and latches on.’

  Celice would take the last slides from the projector, let them contemplate the startling square of light, then add, ‘You’re dying now. Get used to it!’ before she hit the switch to put the room in sudden darkness.

  ‘So, then,’ she’d say to her assembled ghosts, as she went round to lift the blinds and let the daylight in, ‘we have you here for three years, and maybe five if you go on to doctorates. This is Natural Science. Prepare for death and violence. I’m not suggesting that you go to student bars and pick a fight or frequent the cemeteries. We’ll take you to the forest or the beach. You only have to turn a log or rock to see at once more violence and more death than you’ll discover in a hundred years of, well, life at this university, despite the instincts of the hard-pressed teaching staff when dissertations aren’t handed in on time. Enjoy yourselves.’ She’d close her book with a bang, at this, her practised, closing joke. ‘I don’t believe that any student’s perished at my hands. Yet.’

  Not true, Celice.

  7

  Celice was stretched out on the veranda when she first heard Joseph singing. Too long and big-boned for the camping mattress, she had hardly
slept. She’d always been a poor sleeper. She’d spent the small hours of her adolescence pinned awake in a dormant house, with nothing for her lullaby but dyspeptic plumbing, clocks and the incessant industry of mattress springs. Fear of dreams, her mother said. But it was simpler than that. The faster a wheel is spuming, the longer it will take to come to rest. Celice, the speediest of wheels, was too quick-witted, eager, swift to give and take offence, too mercurial, impulsive, brisk and fretful for easy sleep. She was too occupied by life that first night of her study week to let it go.

  Festa, though, an idle wheel, had fallen asleep at once, untroubled. She was wearing earplugs and the hood of her sleeping-bag against the noise and cold. Her heavy breathing was infuriating. So was the rattling wind. So were the men. All four of them. All men.

  The drinkers had been late back from the bar, as they’d predicted. It was well past midnight and the world was already tumbling east on its home run when they finally found the heavy, ornamented gate to the unlit study house. They were malt-and-hop buffoons, stumbling against the outside steps and fly-doors and, once they’d got inside, crashing against furniture and each other. The more they crashed the more they laughed, the clumsier they were. The tallest one, Hanny, spilt kerosene and dropped matches before he managed to produce, first, a blue fire on the floorboards, then a clownish tap-dance to stamp out the flames, and, eventually, some lamplight.

  The coarse beer from the village bar, served from living barrels (microbes, yeast mould, malt weevils, flies) had left them drunker and more bilious than usual. Their sense of balance was destroyed. Their stomachs were so light and volatile they’d floated up, like helium balloons, into their throats, and would rise further, given half an opportunity, a squeeze, a cough, or – God forbid – a yawn. It seemed a reckless effort just to bend, or sit, or even tilt their heads. They dared not go to bed, though it was late. It was too dangerous to sleep. The bunks would sink and spin like fairground rides. They’d never keep their evenings down. They’d flood their pillows and their sleeping-bags. There was no choice. They could not sober up before they went to bed so they’d have to fight off sleep with first some coffee and then the bottled beer that Celice and Festa had brought back from the village. The sweeter, gaseous bottled beer would steady them and keep them conscious till the morning. So they thought.

  Celice could smell the brewing coffee and hear the fizz of malt gas as they untopped their bottles and flicked the caps across the room. She was tempted to get up and join them. If she could not sleep, she could at least have some of the beer she’d partly paid for. She liked to have her elbows on a table late at night, even if the company was as infuriating as these three men. She could beg a cigarette, at least. Perhaps she could persuade them to explain their lack of manners in the bar; rich boys had no excuse. What stories had they heard? How was their meal? What mischief had they got up to once she and Festa had been sent away? What had they made of those appalling girls?

  She wriggled out of the sleeping-bag, pulled on some socks and her long sweater and, lit by moonlight, felt her way along the veranda to the door into the common room. She was not embarrassed to show her legs or uncombed hair, or smell of bed. This was their second chance.

  The men had been whispering and laughing like dormitory boys. The squeak of the door hinge silenced them at once. Their three faces, hard lit by the table lamp and turned awkwardly towards Celice, were fearful and unsmiling. Expecting ghosts, perhaps. Or Matron. Their eyes were hard. Birdie and Hanny put their hands up to their mouths when Celice’s face broke into the lamplight and she was recognized. Victor laughed, and said, ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ she replied. She was ready either for a row or for some amusement. What were they grinning at?

  Celice had met such grins before. Here was the same mixture of blushes and bravado that her younger cousins had displayed when they’d been smoking their father’s cigarettes or looking through blue magazines. (‘Pink magazines’ was Celice’s more accurate description.) She sniffed for cannabis. No sign of it, though there was something acrid in the air, other than tobacco and the kerosene. There was nothing on the table top she shouldn’t see, just beer bottles, coffee-cups and elbows. The men did not seem to be hiding anything. Except themselves. All three had drawn back from the light.

  ‘Come on, what’s going on?’ she said, and as she spoke she placed the smell, the lavender, the peppermint, the aftershave, the odours of those bright-clothed girls on their high stools and their high heels, back at the bar. Beyond it all there was the faintest yeasty and metallic scent of sex.

  ‘I see,’ she said. There was good reason for their blushing silence, the grins and their retreat into the shadows. These very adolescent graduates had guilty consciences. They’d been ‘poking turnip through the hedge’, what rich boys do to village girls and goats. They’d paid to go back with the truck tarts to their shanties on the airport road. Their thwarty eyes, their hands on mouths, the smell revealed as much. Celice had not expected that, when she had left them at the bar. She had expected them to boast and flirt and drink, but not to buy. That was too bestial, too devious. She pulled her sweater down to hide herself. It was too soon for them to care about her anyway, her hair, her legs, the smell of bed. These men had spent themselves on prostitutes.

  Celice had been naive, she knew. She should have guessed exactly what the ‘boys’ were planning for themselves once they were unobserved. Why else would they have crowded round the bar’s high table and been so short with Festa and Celice? Why would the men attempt to sleep with clever maiden graduates or even flirt with them, when they could purchase girls like those tough teenagers, and nothing to negotiate except the price? No wasted time discussing doctoral theses. No massaging of spines. No kissing, even. And no boundaries. Money is the whoremonger, to quote Cornelius. Cash fornicates with any open purse.

  Celice had seen enough French films. She could imagine the drab and low-lit rooms, the drab and low-lit girls, their skirts hitched up, the meretricious underwear, the unmade beds, and how these three would have been too drunk and overawed and pitiless to take their pleasures slowly. Perhaps they were the sort who’d never learn to take their time. Celice had had a narrow squeak. She might have ended up with one in her bed, and nothing to show for it. She stepped back out of the lamplight. Her legs were cold. ‘Keep quiet,’ she said, and closed the door on them. ‘We want to sleep.’

  ‘Keep quiet!’ she said again, perfecting the phrase, as she returned to her mattress. She bit her lower lip and dug her nails into her palms, resisting the temptation to kick her shoes across the floor, or tread on Festa’s outstretched hand, or scream. She’d sleep. She’d dream. She’d eat and work alone. She would not waste herself on any of these men. There’d be a week of silences. She’d hold them in contempt. She was too big and free for them. Too tough and odd. Too ugly-beautiful. ‘Shut up,’ she called out from the veranda. One of the men – smug Victor, she suspected – was trying not to laugh aloud, and failing. ‘Shut up. Shut. Up. We’re sleeping here.’ She had not felt so cruelly liberated for a year. Less preferred than prostitutes, indeed!

  It was soon after one o’clock, and Celice was still not sleeping, when Joseph – she’d forgotten Joseph – came back to the study house without colliding with the doors or furniture. The first thing that she heard of him was his small voice. Where had he been, the three men asked, more sober now, and more subdued. And why the torch? And why – some boyish comments here – the muddy knees?

  They jeered, of course, when Joseph said he’d only been walking along the coastal track into the dunes to watch the stars and see what nightlife he could find.

  ‘Nightlife? Oh, yes?’ said Hanny. ‘Was that nightlife in skirts? Nightlife with harry arses?’

  ‘Furry foxes.’ Joseph’s voice was careful and defensive; the brainy boy unused to body jokes. ‘And there were rock owls and moths and some fine sea bats. This big.’ He spread his hands.

  ‘Big tits,�
�� remarked the ornithologist. ‘Come on! You’ve not been prancing on the beach. You’ve found yourself a little farm girl . . .’

  ‘Some short-sighted little farm lass . . .’ Hanny squinted into the corners of the room, contorting his face and pursing his lips, acting the half-blind village nincompoop that Joseph might attract.

  ‘Sea bats. This big, as a matter of fact,’ insisted Joseph, unembarrassed by their drunkenness and delighted, even, by his own eccentricity. ‘I’m not tall enough for girls.’

  ‘What kind of person – as a matter of fact – goes bat-hunting . . . ?’

  ‘A zoologist,’ suggested Joseph. And then, more playfully, ‘You’ve seen some fauna of your own, no doubt.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Wild beasts. We’ve been riding wild beasts . . . !’

  ‘Well, that was foolish,’ Joseph said. ‘You took a risk. The light’s all wrong.’ And then, no warning, he began to sing, hardly lifting his voice as if his comic riddle and its innuendoes should not be heard beyond their yellow ball of lamplight. This was not intended for Celice’s ears.

  It isn’t safe to ride the beast

  When the light is in the east.

  All riders of the beast will die

  Unless the moon has crossed the sky.

  Be still while beast light’s in beast east,

  Bestow beast man with your best beast,

  For, once beast star bestrides beast sky,

  Beast moon bestirs and beast will die.

  Who dies? The beast? The sky? The moon?

  The light? The man?

  We’ll all know soon.

  Now they wouldn’t let him go to bed. ‘Again,’ they said. ‘And sing it fast, sing it fast, sing it fast.’ The little man was more amusing than they had expected. He could be the drunkest of them all, by far, even if he’d only drunk with bats and moths. They insisted that he take a bottle of ‘their’ beer and sit with them at the common-room table, staring at the ducking flame in the lamp. They wanted more of his exquisite nonsense.