Being Dead

10

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?

Mark well the harbour with your light.

For I’ll be steered across the bar

to you, by candlelight.

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.

Celice rested for a while on the dune ridge, sitting on an empty phosphate sack, regretting that she had not brought some fruit, a flask of coffee and a cigarette. Climbing the sand had been hard work and she was breathless. Clearly — and surprisingly — she was not as fit as Joseph, who was already knee deep, wading at the water’s edge. She wished she had binoculars.

When she finally reached the sand gully, which led down to Joseph on the beach, she did not turn to join him, as she had imagined, as she would have liked. She carried on along the track towards Baritone Bay. Was she embarrassed? Afraid of more rebuffs? Or cautious? She told herself it wasn’t rational to follow his every step like some schoolgirl. She’d frighten him. It would be subtler, sexier, simply to coincide with him by accident, preferably later in the morning when she had recovered from the lack of sleep and from the hurried walk. Besides, the period of resting on the ridge, alone, the views, the detail of the land, the sour ocean smell, the melancholy drama of being young and unattached and not quite warm enough, had reminded her how joyful it could be to have the landscape to herself. She put a Latin and a common name to all the plants and birds she saw. A family game. By naming them, she doubled their existence and her own. This was the pleasure of zoology, to be the lonely heroine of open skies and specibags. Science, romance, oxygen. A potent brew.

Of course, she was embarrassed by herself. What had she been thinking, to leap from her mattress at dawn and rush off in pursuit of this curmudgeon? Just because the other men preferred the village girls to her. Because she hadn’t waved at him. So what? Because he hadn’t snooped amongst her clothes. Because his voice was fine and, as she had discovered, climaxing. Because her heart and body told her to. Because there was an escalating and persuasive case for running to him through the surf like some starlet from the fifties. She was bewitched. She could imagine being old with him. His was her pillow face. But no, to join him on the beach at once would be unwise. Unsubtle, anyway. What would she say to him? What could a man who hadn’t even spoken to her yet reply?

By the time she’d overcome her agitation, by walking as quickly as she could away from Joseph, Celice had reached the eastern hem of Baritone Bay, which projected from the flatter coastline in a half-circle. A balcony of sand. She knew, from photographs and textbooks, about its celebrated cuspate forelands and its capes, its dunefield of crested peaks, which looked, from the coastal path at least, and in that demi-light, like the work of an obsessive architect who didn’t know when he should call a halt. Beyond the dunes, the surf was hitting rocks, making bursts of spray. This might be a good place for research. If there were rocks and currents, there might be seaweeds.

There were the usual thorns, a few tinder trees, a single juniper and some wind-wedged thickets of vomitoria, flagging their distorted branches on the land rim of the dunes. But once Celice had crossed into the dunefield proper, the sand was unenriched by any loam or soil. Most of the vegetation that she could see was low-growing. It hugged and stabilized the shifting dunes, stunted, stretched and cowering. This was a landscape built and moved by a wind that chased the sand up facing scarps and let it fall on leeward slopes.

Celice had started work already. She’d got her notebook out and was listing species. On the more protected landward side of the dunes, she noted broom sedge, spartina grass, redstem, firesel and cordony. But as she walked further out on to the bay the dunes began to concentrate — though not exclusively — on patchy beds of lissom grass, that misplaced lawn, suburban green most of the year, as spongy and as welcoming as moss. Its Latin name? Festuca mollis. In places she could see, exposed by fallen sand, its tangle of roots and rhizomes, half a metre deep and flourishing on salt and wind and on the gritty, spice-rack nutrients of sand.

Celice did not try to cross the dunes. That was hard work, particularly in surfboots. And dunes are frightening for women on their own. Too many secret corridors and cul-de-sacs. She skirted round them and headed for an outcrop of thwarted rock at the near end of the bay, half covered by the tide and half revealed, where she could see the shadow of seaweed and where there should be bladder flies for her to study and collect. The milky morning light, which had been curdled by an unconvincing sun, diffused by mist and cloud, was turning purple grey. The once-blank sea was beryl green. The colours were unearthly, did not last, and within five minutes had been blown away.

Celice spent an hour lifting red wrack clear of the water and removing buoyancy sacs with a pair of scissors. She cut three sacs from each frond of weed, one from the base where it was anchored to the rock, one from the middle where the weed was at its widest, and one from the tip. She placed the samples as best she could — her hands were cold and slippery from seaweed lymph — in labelled bags with seawater and air. That afternoon, if she could stay awake, she’d burst each sac to check the distribution of the flies. Once she’d survived the week and had returned to the laboratory, she’d drop whatever flies or eggs she’d found in vials of fixing alcohol and submit them to the magnifier. But now she had only to dip her hands into the sea and fish for weed. Here was a world in reassuring microcosm. Zoology was a far kinder companion than cosmology. How much more heartening it was to contemplate and bring about the capture of a bladder fly, like some great god, than to view the huge and distant streakings of the sky. How greater than the death of stars was this wet universe, its grains of sand and liquid films, its mites and worms too small to see but swimming, feeding, dying, breathing in massive miniature. These tide pools were a meditation, too. She was surprised by how calm and fearless she had become, staring at the shallows as the colours clarified. And hungry, too. Now (she fooled herself) she wanted only a shower, breakfast and ten cigarettes.

Of course, Celice would have to walk back to the study house along the shore past that other massive miniature, the figure in the tide. Would he be singing to himself, like her? When she drew close enough to wave and call to him, the only singers were the egrets and the gulls. Joseph seemed to be doing nothing more demanding than paddling in the shallows, kicking water like an only child. He stopped, stood straight, looked self-conscious yet again, and kicked another loop of water out to sea. For her.

Joseph’s subject for his doctorate was the marine cricket — though, as he explained to Celice as soon as she had shown him her seaweed specimens, it was neither ocean-going nor a true cricket. Its unscientific local name — the sprayhopper — was far more accurate. He wished, he said, that scientists would take more care with names.

He walked into the soft sand, just beyond a breaking wave, to make his point. A hundred marine crickets leaped at his legs, clicking at the effort. Joseph caught one of the creatures as it hit his boots and cupped it in his hands to show her.

‘Pseudogryllidus pelagicus,’ she said, and was disappointed when he did not seem surprised.

‘It isn’t beautiful,’ he said. His sprayhopper was granite grey, the perfect camouflage, and motionless, its back legs tucked and flexed. ‘But look, Cecile.’

Joseph half blew, half whistled damp air on to the insect’s legs. It disappeared.

‘Its only trick. My only trick,’ said Joseph. At last he looked at her, full face; a shy-triumphant smile. Quite handsome in a bookish way. ‘Otherwise it is entirely dull. Like me.’ He picked another sprayhopper from off his trouser leg and offered it to Celice. ‘You try. I bet you can’t.’ He dropped it on her palm. She blew on it. It didn’t disappear. She touched it with her fingertip and blew again. It did not move.

‘It’s dead.’

‘You’ve got no spit,’ he said. ‘Watch this.’

Joseph whistled wetly on to Celice’s palm. His breath was moist. The sprayhopper did what it did best. It winged Celice’s cheek and dropped on to the sand, five metres up the beach.

‘Don’t worry about him,’ Joseph said, as Celice wiped his phlegm off her palm on her trouser leg. ‘They never injure themselves. You can drop them from the roof of the Institute, that’s thirty-seven metres, and they’ll survive. I’ve tried. Though they can’t fly. The wing cases are fake. They’re tough, these guys.’ He stopped. He laughed. He dropped his voice. ‘They’re almost lovable. What do you think, Cecile?’

‘Adorable.’

‘Exactly so.’

Lovable, adorable. The words were in the air. Joseph should have built on them. Instead, unused to flirting, he blushed and scuttled back into zoology. He had been silent yesterday. Now, eager that Celice should not walk off, he was talking like a hobby-laden kid.

Through ‘some function of convergent evolution’, he explained, his much-loved little beetle, its body shorter than a centimetre from end to end when fully grown, had developed the exaggeratedly long and sharply angled back legs of the cricket family, which allowed it, ‘at their sudden straightening’, to leap out of view and out of danger. He upturned another specimen and held it, pedalling air, between his thumb and forefinger. ‘You see? Its rear legs are more than twice its body length. They have to be. Look where it feeds.’

He showed Celice the waiting sprayhoppers lining up at the furthest reaches of the water, where it had left its spumy hem along the beach. At the next wave, triggered by the air pressure and the spray, they would take their sea-flushed prey — sand lice, salt nits — in their short pincers, flex their legs and fly five metres up the beach, beyond the highest tonguing of the tide. They were absurd.

‘It’s not the best of lives,’ he said. ‘It’s like living in the gutter of a motorway, feeding off tyre-mites, from speeding cars.’

‘The seashore’s better than a motorway. It’s lovely here. It’s beautiful,’ Celice replied. She’d never found a place more beautiful. She’d never been obsessed like this before.

Joseph shook his head. He’d always shake his head when she was fanciful. He’d shake his head at her for almost thirty years. ‘It’s beautiful for us. Zoologists have all the fun. They’ve no idea, these little guys. They only eat and hop and die. Even after dark. Whenever it’s high tide. Most of them only last a day or two. Kaput! The gulls and jetfish get them, if they escape the waves. It’s jump, jump, jump, and salt nits for the ones that survive. They couldn’t give a damn about the scenery.’ He picked crickets off his clothes and dropped them on the sand. ‘Sometimes I wonder what they’re for. They have no point.’

‘They seem to keep you entertained,’ she said.

‘Ah, yes. That’s what evolution has been for, to keep the zoologists happy.’

Joseph leaned across and took two crickets off her collar and another from her hair. This was the first romantic moment of their fife. He found a final cricket, caught in her clothes, and placed it on his palm. ‘Another go, Cecile,’ he said. ‘Blow wet.’

For the next thirty years Celice would mock Joseph for this first courting speech: ‘Blow wet, Cecile.’ She would perfect quite a comic anecdote to torture him. She reproduced his voice, the little lectures that he gave, his uninvited spit (their first exchange of body fluid), the uncorrected insult of her misheard name. She was Cecile for him until he was reproved later that evening by Festa.

‘Your father and his sprayhoppers were the most unromantic creatures I’d ever met,’ she’d say, when her daughter, then eight years old, first demanded to know how her parents had met. ‘I should have drowned him there and then. He could have kissed me if he’d wanted to. Instead, I got. ’ and here she would present her parody of Joseph ‘. “The marine cricket is a beetle, actually. Fully equipped. You see the double set of defunct wings, its antennae and its segmented abdomen? Not boring you, I hope. It’s not a cricket at all, in point of fact. I do wish scientists would take more care with names, Cecile.” ’ This was a story that their daughter loved.

Actually, Celice had been oddly charmed at the time by Joseph’s revelations on Pseudogryllidus pelagicus and touched that he had bothered even to misremember her name. She was flattered that he had shared his studies with her. It felt as if they were exchanging intimacies.

But most of all she liked his playful trick of showing how the sprayhopper could launch itself at will, his will. This was so typical of him. This was the man’s appeal. He was a lurking conjuror. Not worth a second glance, you’d think, until he pulled his doves and rabbits from his sleeves, until he startled everyone with song, or challenged them with riddles, or sent a stone-dead insect flying through the air with just a puff of breath.

He was still pondering the sprayhoppers’ eccentricities when he and Celice began to walk, ankle deep in flushing water, amongst the living filters, the molluscs and the siphons, back along the shore towards the study house, for lunch. The selvage of the tide was cold and phlegmy. All along the shore the drenching sand was tossing crickets in the air.