Being Dead (20 page)

So there was Joseph on the morning of his death, flushed already by the early sun and by the prospect of an outing with Celice, looking down along the cotton and the flesh towards the hollows and the beacons of her armpits and her chest, her blemishes, her moles, the rib bones of a woman thin with age, the smell of her – bedclothes and sweat – the smell of breakfast on a tray, her body sliced up by the sun into jagged bands of shade and light. He must have wanted there and then to pass his body down the sleeve and press his lips into her shadows and her silhouettes. He’d have to wait.

Baritone Bay and its backdunes were never popular with townies. That’s why the campaign to prevent the building of Salt Pines was bound to fail. Who cared about this odd and unattractive coast? The swimming there was dangerous: cross-tides and undertows. The winds were unpredictable. Either they were bursting from the sea, wet, salt-laden, cold, uncomfortable, or they were twisting with the contours of the coast to sandblast anybody mad enough to picnic on the shore or take their sweaters off. Even walkers kept away. Why make the detour over boulders, pebbles and dunes when the earth-packed coastal path was more direct and prettier? Families and swimmers would rather drive out to the city beach the other side of town, where there were strings of scalloped coves, soft sands, lifeguards, some timber restaurants and an attendant forest of cool pines where they could park their cars, ride bikes and horses, erect their tents, and light their barbecues. And where, of course, the only sounds were of people having fun.

In recent years even the peace and quiet of Baritone – its one undisputed attraction – had been destroyed by advances at the airport. Now there were jumbos coming in and out each day across the coast, and scatty little jets. They’d opened up a private field, for businessmen and amateurs. At weekends leisure pilots made a nuisance of themselves daredevilling the ocean and the sands. The spoilt and wealthy residents of Salt Pines would need tree screens and muffler windows or nerves of steel. The guards, the gatehouse and high walls could not keep out the din of aircraft.

But before the extensions to the runways in the early nineties the only passenger planes that could get in were Stols and Trilanders, light-bodied craft that needed only two hundred metres to take off, and less to land. The coast was quieter then.

Nevertheless, the rumbling that Joseph and Celice could hear, that morning almost thirty years ago when they crept from the study house for their first tryst, must be, they thought, a plane, a low and heavy one. And one so close to them as they walked out across the shore, the sprayhoppers flying at their feet, their footprints belching air and water in their wake, that its roaring engines seemed to come out of the dunes. They tried to spot some movement in the clouds, the tell-tale, sleepless winking of the plane’s red eyes. The grey straight ruler of a wing. They turned their heads and whirled about in the shallows to fix co-ordinates of sound and find the source of that low noise.

The plane did not pass over them. It stayed and grumbled in the dunes. Its engines idled, then picked up and roared again whenever there was any wind. The nearer that Celice and Joseph got to the jutting foreland of the bay the louder it became. Of course, they realized quite soon what they were witnessing. Not an aeroplane. It was the celebrated baritone, the voice that everybody said could bring bad luck. Someone’ll die. There’ll be a month of gales and rain. There’ll be a ghost.

Celice and Joseph were bombarded by a hundred sounds. The deeper that they got into the dunes the less the roar resembled aircraft engines and the more it shaped itself like fire or hymns or thunder. Each step produced new scenes. First there was a furnace blast, and then the foghorn of a grounded ship, a sonic boom too soon for superjets, a pair of warring clouds. Finally the air drift picked up speed and steadied long enough for the sound that gave the bay its name to settle in – the humming fugue of men in churches, exercising their voices before a funeral or tuning up their instruments, choir practice from an organ loft. Celice and Joseph thought the sea was booming, that the baritone was coming off the tide, but when they climbed a dime peak to look, the sea was flat and quiet. Yet the higher they climbed the louder were the notes, and every time the wind picked up the lower was the compass of the song. This was the baritone of mourning and of saxhorns, sepulchral, pessimistic, deep. If they’d had any sense, if they had been less scientific and self-occupied, they would have run, as any small child would. They would have run upwind across the open shore and then uphill towards the safety of the study house to wrap their sleeping-bags around their ears.

But Joseph and Celice were scientists in love. They would not run away, with superstition at their heels. Their hearts were set on lesser things. They knew it would not be a grand enough response to crooning landscapes just to say, as
almost
doctors of zoology should feel obliged to say, ‘There is a natural explanation for the voices that we hear. There’s no such thing’ – that reassuring phrase again – ‘as bad luck in a natural world’. But they thought it just the same. The baritone might be a proper subject for scientific study, but it was not unnatural. They were not the types, even in their current, heightened mood, to be impressed or daunted by the portent readers and the phenomenologists who made false patterns out of chaos, who said, for instance, ‘If there’s a heavy dew tonight, there’ll be fine weather in the morning.’ Or, ‘When the sapnut trees are cropping heavily it means the coming winter will be punishing, hard winds, long storms, deep frosts.’ Or that expressions on the face of the moon presaged the fortunes of the infants born that night. A frowning moon would produce a class of melancholic kids. Or that the baritone meant death or gales or ghosts.

Our doctors of zoology or anybody who understands the mundane manners of the world, its rigid, sequenced protocols, would counter with the dulling truth that dew, sapnuts, the faces of the moon, can only show conditions that have passed. The earth is not a visionary and can’t be blamed for what’s ahead. It is retrospective, like the lovers would become, in those long years before the two of them were dead and dying in this place, before they were required to pay a heavy price for their nostalgia. It is the past that shapes the world. The future can’t be found in it. So heavy dews will indicate only that the sky has been clear and conditions favourable for the deposition of dew. A glut of sapnuts is a sign of nothing more than that the preceding spring and summer were good for
Juglans suca
trees. And so it is with singing salt dunes. They do not predict the fast-advancing misfortunes of the world. They merely say, ‘Conditions are correct for singing.’

And so it was that morning for Joseph and Celice. Conditions were correct for singing, that is all. The sand was still a little moist from sea spray, dust free and already warmed above 16° centigrade by the sun and by the heat retained from the previous day’s fine weather. The surface sand grains on the dune slopes were well rounded, as required, and coated with a layer of silica – otherwise this would have been known as Tone Deaf Bay, not Baritone, producing a cacophony of frequencies and not the coherent and acoustic wave of singing. There was, as well, the optimum direction and velocity of wind. And there had been a catalyst, someone, some fleeting thing, a gull, a fox, a slipping dune, to start the salt sand moving and allow the famous baritone to croon. The singing only signified the scientific present and its past.

But Joseph and Celice were becoming less scientific by the minute. They were becoming more disposed to take the baritone not as a sign of bad luck but as a blessing. They would not say the earth had moved for them, but they could claim that the landscape had broken out in song and was arousing them, and was embracing them.

They had, in fact, not even touched each other so far that morning. He’d seen her almost naked through the veranda windows and had been terrified. She’d pulled her nightshirt high above her head. There were three sudden triangles of hair, her armpits and her crotch, and then the dropping of her head hair, springing back in place as the shirt’s tight neckband cleared her forehead. She’d turned away before he had a chance to see her breasts. He’d caught an instant only of her narrow waist, her perfect eighteenth-century back, the age of flesh and dimples. She’d bent to pick the clothes out of a drawer. Then her body disappeared again, beneath a modest working shirt, and she became the wader on one leg pulling on a pair of pants, her socks, blue jeans, black jumper, walking boots. She’d turned and waved at him. He’d never been so shocked or fearful. He was a small boy at the blind summit of a roller-coaster ride, poised at the limits of control, his stomach in his mouth, and no retreat.

He had not dared to take her hand as they’d walked down to Baritone Bay. One fingertip, one uninvited touch, and she would disappear, he thought. And she had not attempted to touch him either. Touch is too obvious. She walked ahead. She let her body swing. She let him watch. She knew she was the centre of his universe. She wanted, if she could, to leave this small man giddy. He’d have a heart-attack. The earth would swallow him. He’d have a fit and bite his tongue in half. He would be speechless when she’d done with him.

Celice only touched him when they’d topped the outer dune to listen to the ululating orchestra of sand. She knew she’d have to overcome his nervousness and inexperience. She had to take command. She stood behind him and let the tumbling sand beneath their feet topple them together. She put both hands on his hips as if to steady herself. Quite innocent. Quite sisterly. But then she pressed her chin and mouth against his head and smelt the musty mushroom of his scalp. The sudden pressure seemed to clear his lungs of oxygen. He gasped and buckled under her, a man with just one bone. She had to hold him round the waist to stop him falling. Her fingers dug into his clothes, first at the side and then around his abdomen. She pulled up his shirt,
and found the space between his belt and navel. Room enough for her slim wrist.

He winced, and shook. He doubled up. ‘Cold hands,’ he said.

‘Good pastry,’ she replied.

Joseph was indeed sent giddy. He pressed his back into Celice’s chest. He turned his face towards her. An awkward angle. His mouth was lifted, open, pink. He was a greedy little bird. She fed him fat worms with her tongue. She had to duck her knees and tip her head to find his mouth with hers.

The lissom grass was irresistible, the perfect blanket, velvety and sensuous. Celice and Joseph fell on their knees and pulled each other’s trousers down. She stretched her toes beyond his toes when they made love. She liked her Joseph all the more for being small. She liked to be the wrapper, not the wrapped. And he was clearly more than happy to be eclipsed by her, to have his light shut out by her descending shapes, to have his breathing blocked, his ears absorbed into her mouth, to earn the wet and grateful puppy kiss across his fingertips when finally he dared to touch between her legs.

No one could say their love was cautious. Love on that day was bold. Joseph was not as reckless as she’d hoped he’d be. But she enjoyed his shaking passion and the way – once he had found his voice – he glorified the parts of her he liked, the wonder of her springy hair, the girlish, modest chest, the way her skin was coloured in its contours, summit white but darker in its crevices, at her throat, her armpits, under her breasts, her torso, the inside of her thighs. She showed him where to linger and what to leave alone. He even rubbed her back and neck, and kissed, as she requested, every vertebra. But still he was no maestro of the spine. Nor was he in control of her. It can’t have helped that he was trembling with desire and that his senses of timing, balance and direction had deserted him. Or that he was attempting to make love to her still shackled by his underclothes and jeans. She should have guessed how green he’d be, how inexperienced, how lacking in technique. He was not the Casanova of her dreams. It was, though, thrilling to imagine what he might achieve when he became her lover, night on night, when he had learned to direct his energies more accurately. This first time, though, she’d do her best for him. She’d sacrifice herself.

It didn’t matter, so he said, that after all her scheming and attention, his climax when it arrived was not a mighty one and hers was oddly short and shadowy, approaching and departing in one move. A shiver and a shudder; they were done. But were they satisfied? Entirely so. Not Eros manifest, perhaps. Not sent sublime by orgasms into the whirlpool of amnesia that poets claim – although it isn’t true – is like the absolute forgetfulness of death. But happy to their fingertips. And pacified. And sparkling. And more in love – it’s all that counts when all is said and done – than they had been before the sex.

There must have been a moment when the baritone stopped singing. The salt dunes did not make acoustic waves all morning. Conditions changed. The wind came round and dropped. The perfect angle was reduced. The sand dried out. The lovers did not care or even notice, though. They were not listening to the reverberations of the land, but to their own.