Being Dead

15

Syl took the Friday train down to the coast, a seven-hour journey of mostly sleep and fields. It ended, late afternoon, in heavy rain, then heavy traffic during the cheap, unlicensed taxi ride to the hillside neighbourhoods in a moonlighting student’s car. Her pirate fare, he said, would help to educate an architect. ‘No tip for that,’ she muttered to herself.

They reached the family home in fading daylight. The house, one of only three on an unmetalled side road above Deliverance Park, was dark and silent from outside, no light or radio or music. The window shutters had not been lowered but her parents’ car was missing from the rattan-covered port. Syl was relieved. No car, no bodies in the house, at least. If her parents were not at home, there was still the probability they would return intact from their field trip, from their untypical delays, so that the squabbles with their daughter could begin.

Syl was nervous, nevertheless, of the empty rooms. A family home is always full of alarming corners and portentous doors, and places that are frightening to pass or face. She’d have to overcome her contempt for student architects. She asked the taxi driver — he said his name was Geo and that he was in no hurry — to come with her to check the house. And then to have a coffee or a beer, if he had the time. Who knew what she might find inside? Whatever happened, she wouldn’t want to find it on her own, or have to open doors, or have to spend the evening alone without the usual comforts and distractions. Geo was convenient, as well as reasonably presentable, already mesmerized, and (she realized at once) doggedly compliant. She’d put him to good use. She might even require him to stay all night. He could prove to be a bore. His Zappa underlip, his drystone necklace and his little self-regarding name were evidence of that. But at least his car would be useful.

They parked at the bottom of the garden steps and ran up to the porch through splashing rain. Syl’s hands, she was surprised to find, were trembling. She blamed it on the shaking tensions of the journey and the night of drink and dreams. She could not credit herself with any family feelings but she could hardly put the key into the lock. Geo had to do it for her. He was tense and shaking too, but for lesser reasons.

Syl took deep breaths. What had become of her? Where was the irritated, stalwart girl who only yesterday had dumped the MetroGnome in what seemed at the time like the shedding of a straitjacket? Now she felt as if her skin was too tight, that she could split and burst at any moment. This was a familiar sensation. She’d often trembled in this porch, and at this door. She’d often failed to fit the key into the lock. It was the outer chamber where, as an adolescent, she’d always had to sober up, compose her hair and clothes, rub the wildness and the chemistry from her euphoric and expanded pupils, hide her habits and her purchases, and try to reach her bed before her father, book in hand, could peer out of his room to say, ‘You’re late,’ or ask, infuriatingly, if she had had ‘an interesting evening’. To cross this threshold was to cross the Styx. Sins were discovered there, and questions asked. She would be judged. Now, no longer adolescent, in this brief shelter from the rain, the image of the Styx was doubly relevant and chilling. Something ancient and intuitive was telling her that she was entering the chambers of the dead. This was the gateway to the underworld. Geo was her ferryman. She’d have to call him Charon from now on.

The threshold of the house was swollen. The front door jammed, as ever, and Syl had to show her driver where to push to ease it open. The darkness of the house fell out into the darkness of the street. She called out cheerily from the open doorway, switching on the porch, the landing and the stairway lights, one at a time. Not panicking. They did not want to alarm anyone, particularly themselves, if anyone was there. She filled the empty spaces with her father in his dressing-gown, her mother crossing the upper landing with her hair wrapped in a towel. She even hoped to hear them say, ‘You’re late.’

No sound, except the drumming of the rain and those disgruntled mutterings that houses always make when lights come on.

Otherwise, everything seemed as it had always seemed, the must of books, the jackets hung across the banisters, the line of little country rugs along the wooden floor on which she’d loved to slide and ride when she was small, the pile of shoes, the pile of magazines, the bicycle her mother never used, the shadow-loving potted fern, the frame of family photographs, the clean and cooking smell of placid lives. Syl gathered up the mail from the floor and stacked it on the bottom stair. Then, holding on to Geo’s jacket like a child, she started looking in the rooms. Downstairs first. The living room. The kitchen. The clutter room. The garden studio. The storage cupboard. No signs of life. Not even moths or mice. And then the upper floor.

Syl was most fearful when they reached the closed door of her mother’s bedroom. Closed doors were always ominous, but when her mother’s door was closed it meant, Do Not Disturb, I have a migraine, or I’m sleeping; I’m lying in the dark with Father in my arms; I’m in a temper, let me be; I am cocooned.

Syl hesitated. She even knocked, but then went in behind the taxi driver. In the few split seconds before Geo found the lamp switch and the room was snapped alive by light, she still had time to mistake the twisted shadows and misread the grey shapes on the bed.

Now, at last, there was some evidence of recent life. There was an almost empty tea-glass and a dish, the fruit rinds harvested by ants and sugar flies, on the bedside table. Her mother’s cotton nightdress lay across the pillow. The bed was still unmade. One of the windows was wide open and two days of intermittent rain, dripping from the blinds, had made a wet patch on the floorboards and the rug. The bedclothes and the coverlet were damp. A book — Calvino’s Antonyms — was on the floor. Another — The Goatherd’s Ancient Wisdom, which she’d bought her father for his birthday, mostly to annoy him — was on the dresser under a pot of orange house spurge.

Their wedding photograph was on the wall. Syl had looked at it a thousand times before. Her parents seemed so old in it, even though they had only been in their twenties. Her age now. They were not flattered by the wedding suits or by the hard light of the flash. She stared at it as if their faces would reveal a clue. Do faces in a photograph transform on death? Were their smiles a little more fixed and thinner now, as if their mouths had reached the point beyond which there is no going on?

The studio bed in her father’s room was unmade, too.

Syl checked her parents’ desks and the telephone table, but they hadn’t left a note of explanation for their absence. Why would they? And there was nothing on the memo pad to suggest where they had gone, no names or dates or numbers. She could not find the mobile phone, either, though she turned back all the cushions on the chairs, its usual hiding-place. They must have it with them, wherever that was. She went to see if their suitcases had been packed and taken. They had not. She opened all the mail. No clues. Just junk and bills.

Finally, while Geo made coffee for them both, Syl went outside, through the garden studio and down the slippy wooden steps. Garden rain’s more welcoming and warmer than the rain in streets. She’d left every light on in the house so the deck and yard were brightly illuminated. The remains of her father’s last breakfast were still on the tray next to his garden chair. His cup and saucer were filled with rain. The wooden veneer on the tray had swollen, split and lifted. Some stiffened mango peel and a mango stone were scattered on the boards. The peeling-knife had rust along its blade and tiny spiders nesting in the hollow of its clasp. All that remained of a cheese brioche was some glazed dough stuck to its wrapper. The birds had finished off the rest.

Syl was draining water off the tray when Geo called. Her coffee had been poured.

‘Anything?’ he asked, looking down on to the deck.

She shook her head. ‘What’s that? Underneath the chair.’

Her father’s ledger. It was soaked, the pages corrugated by the damp, the ink reduced to winter pinks and blues. Peach blue, like Chinese porcelain.

‘His day book.’ That was unlike her father, to let a book get wet, particularly this one.

‘What was the last date he filled in?’ asked Geo. The architect was brighter than he looked.

She tried to turn the pages but they tore like cotton wool. ‘It’s far too wet to read.’

‘What will you do?’

‘I’ll put it in the airing room to dry.’

‘No, what will you do. you know, to find out where they’ve gone?’

‘I’ve no idea. What should I do? I’m not the police. What would you do?’ She thought her tone of voice made it clear that he should not reply.

‘You’ll have to ask the neighbours what they know. That’s first. Call up your relatives. Have you got any brothers or sisters?’

‘No. I’ve only got an uncle left. And about a hundred second cousins. Look, let me work it out. ’

‘Phone the uncle. He might have heard from them.’

‘He’s in New York. I haven’t seen him since I was about six. He and my father haven’t talked for years. Any other inspirations?’

‘Well, phone their friends.’

Syl shrugged. She couldn’t put a name to any of their friends. She lived her life, not theirs.

‘You’ll have to check the hospitals, then. I’m sorry, but the city morgue as well. And go down to the police. Ask them to look out for the missing car. What’s wrong?’

Syl made a face at him. She hated lists. She hated Things to Do. How many days of visits would that be? How much in pirate taxi fares?

‘I’ll need a taxi, then, for all your bright ideas,’ she said.

‘There’s one outside.’

‘I’m broke.’

‘OK. I don’t always have to charge. Not friends. It’s Saturday tomorrow. I’m free to please myself.’ He concentrated on his coffee-cup. He did not want to catch her eye, although he was content to stand out of the rain and watch the water spread across her shaved head and plaster her shirt across her breasts.

‘That’s good, my ferryman, my pheromone,’ she said. She’d let him stay. He was the interfering sort who’d do exactly what he was told. Here, in another life, would be a fantasy come true, a chauffeur on command, a menial, a parlourman.

‘How free are you to stay the night with me? I hate this house.’

They spent the night in her own bedroom — or, at least, the room that once was hers — forced together by the narrow mattress and the single sheets. Her parents had decorated since she’d left and had taken down the galaxies of luminous stars that she had stuck on the once blue ceiling. Now the Sky at Night was white and bare. The drawers and cupboards, the novel-heavy shelves of her girlhood, were empty and disinfected, like in the cheap rooms of a boarding house.

She could not sleep. Too tired and too uncomfortable. In her own apartment, she would have had some wine to help her cope with her disquiets, but her parents were not drinkers. All they had was an old and sticky bottle of honey ‘rum’. No alcohol. Sober as she was, however, Syl had not needed to fake any sexual ardour with her driver. Stress and agitation, as she’d discovered on many occasions, were unexpected aphrodisiacs. So were acquiescent and dull men. She must have shocked and baffled him twenty times — and not only when she called him Charon. She brushed his penis with the stubble of her hair. She made good use of the stiff tuft below his underlip. She made his wrist and fingers ache. She made him wait. She took the opportunity to flood her parents’ house with noise. But afterwards, when he was sleeping, it seemed that making love had changed and calmed her. The urgency had gone out of the search for her parents. The shadows were no longer Stygian. Death had no mystery. Anxiety had been unsexed. Now she was simply annoyed to be at home. This was a failure at her age, surely, to end up in the room were she had been a child.

In the tranquillizing darkness of the house, with sticky Geo wrapped around her back in her too narrow bed, the panic of her journey to the coast, the hasty ripping up of her own life and job, seemed idiotic and premature. She’d come more than six hundred kilometres, back to a town she hated, simply because her father’s secretary had whistled. Her ‘doctors’, after ‘a couple of days’ fieldwork’ — she didn’t know ‘exactly where’ — had not turned up for work. So what? Hoorah, in fact. At last, a sign of mischief! Syl had always thought her parents loved work too much. They’d broken free for once.

Celice and Joseph had been thoughtless, possibly. But this can’t have been the first time they’d gone away and not informed her or their colleagues. They’d driven somewhere in the car, a little holiday, perhaps, and overstayed. No mystery in that. There was a simple explanation for all this derangement. Her parents were too middle-aged and dull to suffer accidents or die before their time, like mountaineers or poets.

At any moment she expected to hear their old car in the street, their headlights flaring on her starless ceiling, and then the tumbling of the front-door locks as they came in and up the stairs to catch their daughter with a naked taxi driver in her bed. Here would be the slapstick answer to her father’s vexing question, ‘When will we get to see you in the flesh again?’

Syl was both tranquil and unnerved. She left her sleeping driver in her bed and went into her mother’s room, where she would be more comfortable and might sleep. She put on her mother’s nightdress and lay down on the near side of the bed where the sheets and the coverlet were dry. This would be a better welcome if they returned: they’d find their modest daughter, sleeping, and death ten thousand days away.

‘To what do we owe this honour?’ they’d say, sarcastic and delighted, too shy to hug. ‘What brings you home?’ Hardly anything, Syl would have to answer. That was the truth. Why had Syl come? To close the bedroom window, dry the tray and rescue Father’s ledger from the rain, to make piles at the bottom of the stairs of the junk and bills from their dull and geometric lives.