Being Dead

20

Syl would not speak to her conscripted driver as they drove through the slums and hinterlands of their drenched coastal town that Sunday afternoon. No one about. It seemed, at times, as if they were travelling through still photographs. Life as it always was, fixed in its frame, just there at just that time. No one had died, or ever could.

Syl was in a spiteful mood and sitting in the back. Her lover ought to know exactly what his status was. He was too vain and immature to comprehend that his raw caresses in her mother’s bed, his constant touching of her arm, his sudden, uninvited kisses were not a welcome comfort. They were his taxi fares. She drummed her fingers on her knees. But Geo was already accustomed to her early-morning tempers and her surprising appetites at night. He’d never known such cruelty and boldness or guessed how stimulating they could be. He watched her through the rear-view mirror: she sat with her legs drawn up and her head against the side window of his car, looking at the empty streets, the timber yards, the shuttered bars, the occasional clinker lorry going to and from the Salt Pines building sites. He knew she was defying him to make a sound. Thank goodness Geo was a willing soul, and so naïve. He thought he understood her need for silence and her constant irritation. Anxiety, of course. Grief and fear. And the irresistible drama of the spotlight. He could not blame himself for her fixed mouth and her turned head.

They parked at the visitors’ centre, where Joseph and Celice had parked, five days before, and from where their car had almost certainly been stolen. The lot was almost full. The building had been taken over by the police as its headquarters. There were squad jeeps, a catering trailer, a radio van with its aerial raised, and the unmarked cars of the detectives lined up across the gravel. Four Sunday anglers in an open jeep were being turned away by the uniformed auxiliaries guarding the entrance to the centre. The coast was closed. Except to planes. The police were powerless to close the skies. Two Dorkers and a noisy One-One-Eight, piloted by weekend hobby fliers, were stunting in the thermals off the bar.

Syl, it’s true, was indulging herself. After the stifling doldrums of the drive with Geo it was a sudden and an unexpected stimulant to be the centre of so much respectful attention. She’d only had to tell one of the guards, ‘I’m the daughter,’ for the makeshift barrier to be lifted and for their car to be conducted in as if its occupants were honoured guests, dignified by their proximity to death. She liked the way that no one tried to stare at her. They looked down at their shoes as she walked by. She was the Empress of Japan, foremost and unapproachable. To catch her eye with theirs would be a violation.

This was unusual for Syl — the deference of uniforms. Usually her dress, her age, the way she spoke, her hard-cropped hair would trigger animosity from the police, and a bag search. Now, for once, she could savour their sombre bustle, their measured urgency, their lowered eyes and voices. She could enjoy herself. That’s the blushing ambiguity of deaths and, particularly, of dramatic deaths like this. The closest family, the principal mourners are oddly happy with themselves, and stirred. Their hearts — and social niceties — may call for frenzies of despair, an ululating epilepsy, collapse, hysteria, but their brains dispense instead a cocktail of euphoric chemicals to bolster them against the shock and rage. Adrenalin cannot discriminate. The stimulant and tranquillizer pumps usurp the promptings of the heart. They make death seem invigorating, and erotic. Syl felt — bizarrely — closer to laughter than to tears. She was excited, almost glad, to be the daughter of the dead, to be so irritated, and so estranged from Joseph and Celice, to be so mean and careless with the ferryman, yet seem so dutiful, capable and strong to all the uniforms. The awful truth had not sunk in. The deaths were still not real. She only fell apart once she’d descended fifty metres of the track and saw the world’s most mournful sight, the wide expanse of wind-whipped beach and sea, the inter-tide.

It was just as well that Geo wasn’t there to put his arm around Syl and make things worse. He hadn’t taken much persuading not to walk with her along the coast to inspect the bodies. He was a little squeamish. She’d rather be alone, she said. He understood. He would have kissed her there and then, as she escaped the car. To do so would establish his lover’ status in the eyes of the police. How jealous they would be if they could know how that cropped head had burrowed into him. Besides, he would not wish to be mistaken for a cousin or a neighbour, or spot-fined for operating an unlicensed cab. He’d pursed his lips and tipped his head towards her. But she had pressed her fingers on his chest to keep his face away. Syl was relieved to leave him in the car park, a bruised look on his face, like a disappointed spaniel denied its exercise. She’d go alone, the orphan on the coast. But one of the officers inside the centre had instructed a policewoman to accompany her. Now with the first sight of the sea and her first tears Syl wanted privacy even more. Emotion was embarrassing. She told her escort that she was not needed. The woman, probably no older than Syl herself, just nodded. ‘But we have a policy,’ she said, ‘at any scene of crime.’

‘I have a policy, as well.’ Quite what it was, Syl didn’t know, unless it was always to argue with a uniform.

So they agreed a compromise. The policewoman would follow twenty metres behind, a stalking guard, an aide, but not a companion. Syl could be the Empress of Japan again, embarking on her solitary wake.

The call to the coast had come at midday while Syl was sitting on the deck at home, in her father’s chair, still in her mother’s dressing-gown and waiting for her hired hand to bring some cake and coffee. She’d heard the phone: ‘You answer it,’ she shouted. Geo wrote the message down like some dull waiter and brought it out to her. Two bodies had been found by police dogs in the salt dunes at Baritone Bay. Near where they must have parked the car. Could she come out at once? Identify her mother and her father?

How would Syl cope?

At first she coped by pouring all her scorn on Geo. ‘Was that all?’ she asked. Hadn’t the police said anything about the cause of death? He shook his head. A lifelong dope. ‘You didn’t think to ask, of course. A mere detail.’

He didn’t need to ask, in fact. Syl knew. She’d always known. That was why her first glimpse of the sea that afternoon had summoned those first tears. This was her parents’ programmed death. They’d drowned at last. That was the only likely way that Celice and Joseph would die before their times. They drove too carefully to crash their car, except in dreams. Her mother had weaned herself off cigarettes. They hardly drank. They touched their toes ten times a day. They ate like scientists, a perfect balance between their carbohydrates and their nutrients, their vitamins and oils. They’d not take any risks. They did not walk down unlit streets with glinting jewellery or watches, or chance the dangers of the park at night. No one would do them any harm. They did not walk down stairs without a firm grip on the banisters. Dear God, what stagnant lives they led.

But her parents were shoreline zoologists who never could resist the chance of poking about in the tides and shallows of the coast. Syl had spent a solitary childhood on the shore, bored with a picnic and a book, praying for beach games, sandcastles and other girls, while Joseph and Celice had rummaged in the water, crying out — so annoyingly — whenever they discovered a rare weed or felt the sand beneath their feet palpitate with some shy fish.

Oddly, they’d never taken her to the Baritone coast in all their years of beachcombing. Her mother had not liked that stretch. But all the other shores and bays, the Mu, the Horseman Rocks, Tiger Crab Bay, Cape Shoals were chillingly familiar and frightening. She’d not forgotten the first time that she’d stood, aged eight, the beach’s only castaway, to watch the panavision of her tiny parents washed out by the widest tide, their footings gone, their arms held up for help.

Too often they had overstayed the welcome of the sea and were left stranded on a bar or chevronned by the waves or caught by muscular and unrelenting tides. She’d had to witness from the sand, the shingle or the rocks their minutes of exquisite panic while they forged a chest-deep route around the current or flailed between the reefs. Syl well remembered sitting once with her mother in the dilapidated ribs of an abandoned fishing boat while Father was out ‘sifting’ in his waist boots. Her mother said, ‘He’s too far out!’ and started calling, ‘Joseph! Joseph!’ The tide had turned and her father, struggling against the heavily backing water and its tumbling undertow, had lost his balance. Her mother was half-way down the beach and Syl was crying, an already broken-hearted little girl, a hater of the sea, before her father struggled to his feet again. Then he was floating. They could see his boots, like two seal heads. They had to leave it to the waves to bring him in. Thank heavens it was a rising tide. He came ashore, soaked to the skin. He stood spitting sea-water and coughing while her mother screamed at him, ‘You could have drowned! Then what?’

Syl had been ashamed to catch herself wondering how her friends would have reacted if Father had been killed. She’d be the centre of attention for a term. She’d have time off school. Everyone would treat her like a sick princess. She’d have to have a hat to wear at Father’s funeral. Their empty house would fill up with relatives and neighbours. Maybe the uncle from America would come. She’d have the noise and fuss she’d always hankered for. But not from her father.

It was not difficult, then, now that Baritone Bay was in her sights, for Syl to picture all the details of her parents’ deaths. Theirs was a comeuppance earned, deserved, by thirty years of paddling. She could imagine how her mother had run down the beach again, tossing his name out across the water as if it were a lifebelt: ‘Joseph! Joseph!’ Her father — older now and not as fit — had disappeared. Weighed down, perhaps, by heavy boots which, once they filled with water, were like leaden legs. He had not surfaced when the legendary seventh wave had hit him. Celice had stood — Syl put her there — with the water at her feet, studying the sea, waiting for it to reveal the sodden shadow of a struggling man, a bobbing head, an arm, a boot. The sea was shadowless for far too long. Her mother would have paddled in up to her knees. Then, perhaps, she might have seen his body rolling in the breakers like a log or else she might have heard a sinking call, half gull, half man. And so she’d waded in up to her thighs, her chest, her chin. She’d gone too deep herself. She might even have reached and touched his clothes. She could have caught hold of his arm and tried to pull him to the beach. But they were being tugged by weed and he was wet and heavy. He’d pulled her under with him. Her feet were well clear of the sand. For once her height and weight were not a help. The seaweed could not carry her. She dared not let him go and try to save herself. Now there was no one on the beach to rescue them. No little girl. All that remained was for the bodies to be carried out and back, for a tide or two, until a high and kindly sea had tossed them on the shore at Baritone Bay and rolled them to the edges of the dunes for dogs to find. Syl could expect, once she had walked to Baritone Bay, to find their bodies bloated by sea-water, draped in weed, their hands and faces grazed by sand, and bruised by all the ocean’s buffeting.

Syl wasn’t really dressed for walking. She’d thrown on the same clothes that she’d been wearing the day before at the morgue: a concert shirt, black jodhpur leggings, slip-on shopping shoes. In the car she had been uncomfortably hot. Now, with still a couple of kilometres to walk before she reached the bay she was beginning to regret that she had not paused to find one of her mother’s jackets and a stouter pair of shoes before she’d left her parents’ home. The sea breeze had a chilling edge to it and she was shaking uncontrollably. She clasped her arms around herself, clutching her elbows with the opposing hands, and hurried along the coastal track. She looked as if she’d just popped out for bread.

She might have shivered anyway, even if she had been dressed for winter, even if the day were sunny, even if the policewoman who was now discreetly trailing her had done what she was tempted to and taken off her uniform jacket to lend to her odd charge. After all, Syl was expecting to encounter death, and death is cold and damp. She should expect the temperatures to drop the closer she got to the place where her parents had been found. That’s why churches are so cold. That’s why the snow in graveyards seems to last much longer than the snow in streets. That’s why the northern conifer does well in cemeteries. That’s why you have to wear an overcoat and dress in black even for a summer funeral. The grave yawns Arctic air.

Syl had not paid much attention when the woman officer had said, ‘We have a policy at any scene of a crime.’ But as she walked, concentrating now on the path and trying not to notice the Salt Pines stretch of coast, the spreading sky, the sea complicit with the sands in its damp shades, the words popped back into her mind. The ‘scene of crime’. What crime? She hadn’t thought there’d been a crime except, perhaps, the taking of her parents’ car by some soft, opportunist teenager who couldn’t find a taxi fare; and the theft of a radio. She hadn’t dreamed or feared a crime. She’d feared the logic of the sea. She’d dreamed their classic executioner was Fish.

Her escort crossed the gap and joined her when they reached the narrow path that left the coastal track and led into the dunes. The police had marked a route with canes and paper flags. The two women had to follow it exactly. It took them round the outside of the dunes, across the headland rocks and then, a sharp left-angle, inland, on wooden boards.

Syl had not expected so many policemen. She’d hardly ever seen as many in one place, except at riots on the television or at parades. There was a group in forage uniforms spread about amongst the dunes, searching every clump of grass, turning over every piece of drift. There were civilian attendants talking into mobile phones, and forensic investigators, wearing protective cotton overalls and gloves.

Nor had she imagined that there’d be a tent. A small marquee, in fact. Thick green canvas with the city’s logo stamped on its side. At first Syl took it to be a catering tent for the policemen, the sort she’d seen at fairs, sports events and town carnivals. It was, she quickly realized, sheltering the bodies. And protecting the ‘scene of crime’. Syl hugged her elbows tightly. She and her escort were the only living women there.

‘Where are they?’ Syl asked the policewoman, wanting confirmation.

‘They’re coming.’

‘I mean my parents!’ The answer froze her to the bone.

‘Inside,’ she said. ‘The tent. You have to wait. They’re making them presentable.’

Syl was suddenly so faint and breathless that she had to sit down on the lissom grass, her back to the tent, and look for comfort in the dunes. There was none. A police photographer was taking pictures of a torn white shirt stretched out like a flag in the branches of a thornbush. She sat as still as possible, so still that she could feel her heartbeat in her toes.

At last a man her father’s age came out of the tent, holding a purple sacados and a cardboard box. ‘Recognize this?’ he asked. No introductions or formalities. Syl shook her head at the blackening blood prints on its leather shoulder strap. ‘Or these?’ A pair of women’s shoes. Again she shook her head. ‘The phone?’ He held up a clear plastic bag with a black mobile phone inside.

She peered at it. ‘I couldn’t say,’ she said. ‘They’re all the same.’

‘Is that your parents’ number?’ He pulled the plastic tight and pointed to the line of digits written on the tag.

‘I can’t remember,’ she said. ‘That is my father’s handwriting, though. He does his fives like that.’

‘Or this?’ A rain-soaked copy of the Entomology, bloodstained.

‘They did subscribe.’

He didn’t show her the granite club they’d found, tossed in the grass and almost picked clean of the blood and human tissue by the crabs and flies, though he was tempted. He didn’t mind the public face of grief and shock. It was reassuring and appropriate. He was not one of the new school who considered mourning and weeping little better than masturbation. A daughter, in circumstances such as this, ought to be hysterical. His daughter would be, he hoped. It was her right. It was her duty. This woman, though, was far too sensible and rational. Too furtive and controlled. Too studenty and cropped. Too underdressed for such a solemn task.

‘OK, let’s have a look inside,’ he said, taking her arm. ‘Hold on to me.’

‘No thanks.’ She was used to such men, from her waitressing. She pulled her arm free, and stepped a pace away. Once he had turned his back on her, she followed him into the tent. The usual canvas smells were absent. There was no scent of cloth or waterproofing, just the odours of damp grass, with iodine, formaldehyde, and sweat. Any daylight that succeeded in penetrating the canvas was thin, green and ghostly.

It was warm inside. Out of the wind. There were four younger men already there, olive-faced and business-like. The older one who’d summoned her just said, ‘The daughter,’ then, ‘The lights.’ Two hanging fluorescent lamps stuttered into life for a few moments then shed their hard sheen on to a spread of improbably long white sheets laid out on the sloping grass inside the tent at Syl’s feet. The beds of sloping lissom grass seemed dulled now that the ghostly green had been supplanted by mechanical light.

‘It’s only the faces,’ the detective said. ‘We’ll make it very quick. Just nod. Or shake your head. We’ll do the woman first.’ He bent and turned back the top sheet and the refrigerating blanket, put there to keep the bodies cold and fresh. Celice.

Syl had only an instant’s view. It was her mother, much reduced, but unmistakable. Her face was cheek down, turned sideways, resting on the pillow of the grass. Her mouth was swollen and her skull collapsed. Her best front teeth were grinning, cracked from root to tip. Her skin was indigo. The hair was dappled with dead blood.

‘Just nod or shake your head,’ he said again.

‘It’s her.’

‘And now the man, if you’re ready?’ He knelt on the grass further down the array of sheets, looking at Syl, waiting for her to compose herself, hoping for some high response.

She was composed. She felt relieved, in fact. The pressure was reduced. Nothing could be worse than this, so there was nothing more to fear. ‘I want to see it all,’ she said. ‘Not just the face. Take all the sheets away.’ He did so at once, pulling the sheets and refrigerating blankets up towards himself and gathering them against his chest. She nodded twice. Then shook her head in disbelief. The doctors of zoology. The lost and secret couple, Joseph and Celice, on their sixth day of grace. At last, the mystery. At last, the solace of the world’s worst thing.

A trained mortician or pathologist, used to the pus and debris of exploded tissue, the ruptured membranes leaking lymph, the killing fields of murdered cells, might find a thousand signs of disassembly and decay on Joseph and Celice’s cadavers. Their eyeballs were already liquefying and their faces were enlarged. Their skin was blistered on the undersides. Their innards were so bloated from the by-products of decomposition — methane and ethium — that their nostrils, ears and open wounds had been made frothy by exuding gas.

But at the distance that their daughter viewed them from, in that exaggerated light, they seemed less troubled than they had even that morning when they’d been found in natural light. Except for the typical glaucous bruises above the small intestine, their livid colours had calmed down, more blue than purple, more grey than green. They had even tanned and darkened a little in the sun. And the hours of rigor mortis had long passed. Their arms and legs no longer stuck out like mannequins. Joseph’s one wild sign, death’s unkind erection, had reduced. Their bodies were unstiffened and fell into the hollows of the grass, like sleepers fall into the cushions of a bed, relaxed and rounded, fitting in.

The crabs had gone. Celice and Joseph were not fresh enough for them. And though the swag flies had deposited more eggs in the couple’s open cavities, most of the flies had now departed, kept away first by the covering of wind-borne sand that was embalming Joseph and Celice and then by the busy presence of the police. The forensic officers had hoovered out the maggots, ‘making them presentable’, before the daughter came.

Syl was too touched by the gentle nakedness and disposition of her parents to stop herself from sobbing. Sobbing on the edges of the sea as she had so many times before when Joseph and Celice were too far out to reach. The policewoman who had been standing outside was summoned. A job at last. She put her coat round Syl’s shoulders and laid her arm too heavily across her back.

The body sheets had been pulled across again without Syl noticing, but she had got a snapshot printed in her mind. She’d not remember all the wounds, the gull damage, the black dry blood. It was her father’s hand wrapped round her mother’s leg that haunted and delighted her. It looked as if the leg and arm were keeping them earthbound.

‘They didn’t drown?’

‘That’s right, they didn’t drown,’ the detective said. ‘Somebody with a rock.’

‘A murderer?’

A nod.

‘Who, then?’

The policeman shrugged. He meant, Maybe we’ll never know.

‘You’ve no idea?’ insisted Syl. ‘Do say!’

‘Mondazy’s Fish,’ he said — the old phrase, meaning Fate. The usual crap.

‘Show me their faces one last time. I’ll be OK.’

Her parents seemed oddly young and flourishing, in this second, edited glimpse of them, through half-shut eyes. Their skin was stretched. Her father’s forehead was unlined. Her mother’s underchin was firm. But there was something else that made them young, Syl realized. The very manner of their deaths. For violent death is usually the province of the young. Slow wasting is the property of age. And there was none of that. They were, indeed, quite handsome in their fast dilapidation; despite the damage and the wounds, they had not surrendered any of their nature or their character. They’d not depersonalized. They were uplifting in their way, and oddly calm. Here was a suicide of sorts, because her parents had escaped those last, geriatric shudders — convulsions was too strong a word — which dog a person from the womb. Yet this was also something happier than suicide. No evidence of anger, sorrow or despair. No farewell note. No self-inflicted wounds. No legacy of spite. No last regrets. They had departed from their world while there was still good health to keep them sweet and their old age to look forward to with hope. Syl had to allow them this at least: her parents had surprised her this one time. Not just their murder. Nor their nakedness. But that they had the power, on their deaths, to flush her heart — too late — with love. It was the light touch of his finger on her leg.

‘Don’t move my father’s hand,’ she said.

Syl could not arrange the funeral at once, and flee the coast, as she would have liked. The bodies, according to the detective, would have to stay inside the tent until the Monday. Forensics had to do their work and the police preferred to keep the corpses where they were until they’d checked each grain of sand, each blade of grass for clues. Then the magistrate would need to come to issue a certificate of removal. It all took time. And magistrates are not at work on Sundays. So Syl, instead, asked Geo to drop her at the Mission Church at the harbour in the town centre. No need to wait for her, she said. She didn’t know how long she’d be. She’d make her own way home. A slim excuse for getting rid of him. Her parents had been married at this church and Celice had always said that it would be a happy final resting-place. Syl needed time alone. She would light a candle, sit in semi-darkness and concentrate on what their deaths might mean.

The Mission Church was busy with a service when she arrived, so she sat outside on the commemorative benches made from the timbers of wrecked ships and carved with the names of lost seamen and waited for the worshippers to leave. The world went on. It orbited through space. There were the usual markers of the day. A sinking sky. The sound of motor-cars. The muted Sunday clatter of the port. And, finally, the sound of people singing hymns, their voices raised against the universe, as thin as water and as nourishing.

It wasn’t difficult for Syl, with that accompaniment, to recall the image of her parents, side by side and murdered on a bed of grass, her ankle in his hand. She tried to let the hymning voices pick up the bodies from the dunes and take them to the kingdom of their verses, amongst the heavens and eternities, into the everlasting peace. But it was obvious that these were voices and these were verses that had not got the muscle to displace a single leaf, let alone pass sinners into paradise. Her father’s songs, for all their mawkish sentiment, were far more powerful. Love songs transcend, transport, because there’s such a thing as love. But hymns and prayers have feeble tunes because there are no gods.

By the time the worshippers were coming out, Syl had lost her need for solitude and candles. She walked away, a member of the parting congregation, euphoric and dismayed at once, and only praying that her life would have as much love as her parents’ had.

Syl had not asked herself the greater question yet. She was too young to need the death-defying trick of living in a godless and expanding universe, its gravity dispersing by the second, its spaces stretching and unspannable, its matter darkening. Life is. It goes. It does not count. That was the hurtling truth that comes to rattle everyone as they grow up, grow old. Syl need not worry for a while.

But she had at least an answer to the lesser question. How should the dying spend their time when life’s short portion shrinks with every waking day? She’d walked to see mortality that Sunday afternoon and found her parents irredeemable. Her gene suppliers had dosed shop. Their daughter was the next in line. She could not duck out of the queue. So she should not waste her time in this black universe. The world’s small, breathing denizens, its quaking congregations and its stargazers, were fools to sacrifice the flaring briefness of their lives in hopes of paradise or fears of hell. No one transcends. There is no future and no past. There is no remedy for death — or birth — except to hug the spaces in between. Live loud. Live wide. Live tall.

She could not ape her parents’ life. She would not merely turn her back against the coffin-hurtling streets and focus only on the minutes in the room, the light that makes an oval of the square, the half-filled diary open at the week, the music on the stereo, the kettle heating on the stove, the photos poked between the mirror and its frame, the dancing page, the other person breathing in a chair, still life. She would, instead, embrace the warmer fevers of the world. Their deaths were her beginning.

These have been unusual days, she thought, as she walked back towards the empty house, her house, through first the wide catalpa-lined avenues of the centre then the gaunt, less pungent streets of the inner suburbs. I am bereaved and liberated at one stroke (a dozen blows). There isn’t anything beyond me now. There isn’t anything I cannot think about, or say.

She would make plans. Bright days ahead.