Being Dead

17

Birdie volunteered to run down to the beach to check that Festa, Joseph and Celice were indeed safe and to let them know about the fire and what was lost inside the study house; their clothes and bags, their notes and books, the promise of their doctorates. Birdie could hardly refuse the task: he was the fittest of the three and, actually, the only one with any shoes. He’d used the heels to knock the glass out of the bunk-room windows for their escape.

Hanny and Victor would have to make their unheroic ways barefoot across the manac fields towards the shanty village. A second visit, less triumphant than the first, in search of borrowed clothes and shoes, and a telephone to call the Institute, the airport and the fire brigade. If this wind picked up, so might the embers of the study house. Then they’d have a forest or a scrub fire to account for, and even houses in the village might be lost. A trembling thought.

Their comrade Birdie was a scarecrow, leaping down the steps, two at a time, through the stands of flute bushes, until he reached the farm lane and the ponds. He wore only a white T-shirt, fly-fronted pyjama bottoms from which his penis pecked and nodded like a finger puppet as he ran, black ankle boots, no socks. He smelt of smoke and sweat. His hair was matted. He’d never felt before so cinematic and so wholly ludicrous. He knew where on the coast he would find his three colleagues. He had himself helped Festa rake in the seaweed for her medical and nutritional studies one afternoon. She’d recompensed him with her kisses just the night before, although, despite his best endeavours, she was not yet quite ready to allow his tongue to penetrate her lips or his hand to dip into her clothes. And he had twice spotted Joseph and Celice in the shallows further up the coast, towards the jutting foreshore of the bay.

The route was simple and mostly downhill: the pines, the marshes and the dunes, the coastal track, the wide expanses of the beach, the splashing run along the shore towards the figures in the tide, the distant, bending plume of ash. He hadn’t felt so fit for months, despite the ankle-rubbing boots and the remains of a smoke-laden headache. He was pumped up by all the thrilling chemicals of shock. The effort brought it home to him. Death had been near; he had been fortunate. He’d never been so fast or spirited, so oddly close to nausea and joy. How glorious he would appear to Festa as he called to her, half naked and half Hollywood, an envoy bearing messages and running from the fire towards the sea.