Being Dead

25

6.10 a.m.

So this has been a quivering of sorts for Joseph and Celice. A day lived forwards has retrieved itself by fleeing from the future to the past. The dead are resurrected and they he in bed at backward-running dawn, with first light of a perfect summer’s day ducking and then dropping from the sky into the east, into the morning night. Ahead of them, the almost thirty years of married life, the more than twenty years before they met. The shrinking and retreating universe has left their deaths behind. They are not mortal any more.

Celice, in her wide bed, the shutters down, the silence broken by her whistling nose, is sleeping with the joyful certainty that Tuesday comes. Two days, alone, off work, with no alarm to wake her up and nothing she must do to fill her time except play music on the stereo, patrol the garden with her secateurs, walk down across the park, if it is fine, towards the shops, walk back to take some coffee and a cake at the Pavilion, toss crumbs amongst the birds, be free.

She is not restless in the least, or dreaming. Even her wheezing does not wake her up or nag her into turning on her side. She remembers in her subconscious exactly where her open book was dropped the night before and that her watch has slipped on to the floor. She will not roll on to the tasselled page-marker and crease it. She knows it’s fallen there, by her shoulder, almost hidden by the pillow. If she wanted to she could even reach out in her sleep to find at once the crumpled tissue pushed into the tucking of the bed, to blow her nose or wipe her mouth or simply grip as a comforter.

The coverlet is pulled up to her chin. Her eyelids perch and shiver in the shadows of her face, pale resting moths. Her hair is spread across the pillow she once shared — and quivering will let her share again — with Syl and Joseph. If she is troubled or distressed by anything, if she is guilty or annoyed, or if her back and shoulders are painful, it does not show while she is asleep. She is too deep. She is too far away.

Joseph is the restless one, the fidgeter, in his more narrow bed in his untidy studio. He has a day of work ahead. Two meetings and a seminar. Two papers to prepare. A faculty report. Already he’s aware of where he’ll hurt that day. His knee is troublesome, even while he sleeps. His colon aches. He’s having bladder dreams. He’s almost praying for the day to come. Then he can piss the pain away and end the nightmare that has been haunting him since his last visit to the lavatory at twenty-five past four.

He is an old man in his dreams, racked with pain and naked in a pauper’s bed. His hands are stiff. His fingertips have lost their sensitivity. All he can feel, when he has found the energy to push his hands beneath the sheets to try to reach and soothe the pain, is scaly skin. He has become pie-crust. It is a bore to be so old, and so condemned. But that — great age — is what he always wanted for himself. So here’s his most sombre wish fulfilled.

His dream has moved him to the geriatric ward. The blankets and the screens. They’ve plugged him in; a monitor, a catheter, a drip. He hears the trolleys in the corridor, the purring journeys of the hearse along embedded routes to one of death’s ten thousand gates, and doctors saying, ‘Let the old man die. The world turns mouldy otherwise.’

He calls her name, Celice. He does not want to die alone. He wants the blessing of warm light and the caressing touch of family. He wants the blinds pulled up, the candles lit, the shadows falling on his bed, the mutters of his people crowding at the door. He wants to hear the sobbing of his daughter and his wife and feel their fingers wrapped around his shin. Please, let them through, he whispers to himself. Then let me doze until you hear my half-completed breath and see the sweet narcosis of no dreams.

The house itself is stretching, creaky in the rousing wash of dawn’s first grey. The sun’s forehead is peeking at the day, its face still indigo from sleep, its cloudy head uncombed and tumbling its vapour curls on to the skyline of the sea. The birds are in the gardens now, throwing out long shadows from the peaks of trees. The town’s first trams are nudging through the streets in search of love. The first alarms are sounding in a thousand homes. The water taps are opened and the gas fires lit. The smells are coffee, bread and soap. A crabbing boat is labouring along the coast, to meet the light half-way, or chase it back whence it came. And Joseph and Celice are in their rooms, spreadeagled in their beds. No matter how they toss and turn, no matter what they dream, no matter what the milky dark may whisper in their ears, its promises, its threats and its assurances, they can’t avoid the coming and receding days of grace.