Being Dead (21 page)

She wrapped herself around him afterwards. They were too deep to spot the distant, inland plume of smoke, or hear the calls of ‘Joseph! Celice! Festa!’ from the sprinting ornithologist. The dunes blocked out the world. They cuddled on the bed of lissom grass. They were the oddest pair, in their flat, hollow suntrap, hidden from the sea, with no idea of what the bay might have in store for them.

Syl was exhausted, naturally. It had been a day of walking. First along the coast and back. Then up from the Mission Church to the family house, a longer distance than she’d remembered from her childhood, but curative.

The town looked and smelt its best at dusk. The grime and wear became invisible. Man-made illuminations showed only the good parts of the streets. The coloured bar lights had come on, in all their ripening shades from green to red, no blues, like strings of mangoes. The pavement stalls, their wares side-lit by lanterns from the town’s pre-electric past, were already trading Sunday treats: nut sticks, cocoa dips, candied fruit, doughnuts. The brochette salesmen raked the charcoal in their braziers. Each pulse of flame was their street cry. But, most of all, the dusk’s illumination came from the headlamps of cars in swinging, lighthouse beams. The corridors of quizzing light retracted and stretched out to sweep the legs and faces of the people on the street. The sleeping Sunday town was resurrected in the evening. It was a time for families and lovers.

Syl would have gone into a bar or bought herself a cheese and pork brochette. She hadn’t eaten anything that day. She’d had to leave for Baritone Bay before the ferryman had had a chance to bring the coffee and the cake he’d promised her for breakfast. And she was cold. Still just a shirt. No coat or jumper. A warm indoors, some food, a beer, some company were what she needed. Even the fall-short, underreaching comforts of a brazier would do. Or a speedy taxi ride back home. But she had not brought any money from the house, and hadn’t had the nerve to borrow any from Geo. She’d have to starve. She’d have to walk. And she’d have to shiver all the way. A lively and romantic prospect, actually. It matched the way she felt about herself – an orphaned, independent woman, with empty pockets, empty stomach, cold and young, and passing through the bright and filling streets without a friend.

It wasn’t long before Syl had left the Sunday carnival of crowds and lights. She crossed the river by the cycle bridge and followed the main boulevard out of the centre towards the hilltop houses where the artists, the academics and her parents lived. First there were the civic buildings, the pinkstone barracks and the regimental offices, the hotels of the Bankside district, the Geometric Gardens to hurry past. But then the streets were livelier again and Syl could peer down cul-de-sacs and into wayward tenements where students, conscripts, single men were dodging motorbikes and hesitating outside brothels, narrow bars and curtained doors, pretending to belong.

It was completely dark when Syl approached the railings of Deliverance Park. She had either to undertake the long walk round to reach the stretch of unmetalled side roads and the family house, or break a rule her parents had imposed since she was young and risk the night-time trespass and the trees. ‘There isn’t anything beyond me now,’ she’d told herself, that afternoon, outside the Mission Church. ‘There isn’t anything I cannot do or say.’ So she climbed the railings, dropped down on to the sodden plant beds and sprinted off into the dark, sprinted off as she had always wanted to, euphoric and untouchable. She let out great whoops of liberation and defeat as she progressed, as she was bound to, across safe lawns on to a pine-shielded path, blacker and more feverish than night, owl-eyed and loveless. Heading for the house that had to let her in.

The front door stuck even worse than usual. The opening was snagged by letters, cards, condolences, all hand-delivered during the day. Word had already got around. The murder was made public. Syl took them to the kitchen, put on the cooking-duty cardigan, which was left hanging, as ever, on the larder hook, and started hunting for her supper. There was – Sod’s law – no food at home, except the breakfast cake, still lying on its plate and dried out by its hours of neglect. Nor was there any alcohol. Syl searched the kitchen cupboards again and her father’s room, but all she found were a set of spirit glasses and the lees of some gleewater in a square bottle, half hidden on a high shelf, out of harm’s way. Not worth the reach. The cake would have to do. She broke it into four dry pieces and started on the mail. Cards first, from neighbours mostly who hardly knew her parents. Photographs of clouds and aquatints of flowers with ornate fine lines from poets and the scriptures, being brave at the expense of death. ‘Life is the Desert,’ Syl was told in gold and silver italics. ‘Death is the Rendezvous of Friends.’ Or ‘Death’s a shadow, always at our heels.’ Or, It’s ‘our second home. The feast is spread upon its table. The Host is waiting at its door.’ Or ‘Death’s the veil which those who live call Life: They sleep and it is lifted.’ Or (from the sepulchre in Milan where Claudio Busi, the architect, is buried) ‘Death is nothing at all. I have slipped away into another room. All is well.’ Except, thought Syl, that there’s no slipping back.

The letters were all handwritten, from her parents’ colleagues and the secretaries at the Institute and the university.
For Syl, For Sil, With love to Sylvia, For Celice and Joseph’s daughter
(‘Sorry, but we do not know your name’),
To Cyl
. All of them seemed fonder now of their two doctors of zoology than they had ever been in life. ‘Your parents were admired by all of us,’ they wrote. ‘They were devoted. Anyone could tell. They will be missed. It’s such a blessing, in a way, that they should have died in each other’s arms.’ And ‘They are irreplaceable.’

It was as if Syl’s parents’ lives, which had seemed hidden and pale, illuminated by so few surface lights, at best a silhouette, only needed death’s bright torch to bring the passion and the colour out. Its beam had caught and fixed them now. Their histories were certain. No more to come. No more to add. Their dates were written down indelibly. Nothing could be changed or mended, except by the sentiment and myth of those who were not dead. That’s the only Judgement Day there is. The benefits of hindsight. The dead themselves are robbed of retrospect. They’re not required to make sense of their deaths.

Syl dropped the letters and the cards in the waste-bin. She’d not reply. Life was too short. They’d understand. She gleaned the few cake crumbs off the table top with a wet finger. She stared out of the kitchen window at the dark and empty deck. She turned the taps on and off to check that the world was functioning. She was tired and hungry still and bored with home. It was not yet ten o’clock, but she would have to go to bed. What else was there to do?

She started in her mother’s bed. She liked its space and the heavy coverlet. But it was unnerving to sink into the hollows of the mattress where the springs had been weakened by Celice and rest her head on pillows impacted by her mother’s thousand nights and one. So she moved into her own room for the first time since that Friday night with Geo, and only for the second time in two years. These hollows were her own. It was like the simple legend on the condolence card, ‘I have slipped away into another room. All is well.’ Indeed. All would be well. She’d stay until the funeral, that day of chores and crowds, of false handshakes and noise. Then her parents could be dead in silence. And she could sell the house. She’d take the money and herself abroad, to all the places that she’d underlined in atlases when she was young, to Goa, Sydney, Rio, Rome, Berlin.

She was soon fast asleep. But not for long. Before eleven, she was woken by the same sound that she’d been half expecting on the previous night in this bed, the brakes and engine of her parents’ car, their headlights flaring on her bedroom walls, their hurried steps up to the front door, the key, the tumbling of the locks, the cold reunions. All there that night. Except there was no tumbling of the locks. Someone had left the headlights of a car on full beam, shining at the front of the house. Someone was tapping on the door with the metal of a key. Syl pulled two slices of the window screen apart and looked down at the porch. It was the ferryman.

She went back to her bed and listened to him calling for her through the letterbox. A pretty sound, she thought. Syl, Syl. Syl, Syl. The sort of sound you’d make if you were stroking a cat. But she was never tempted to go down. She didn’t want to be his cat. She’d slept with him three times already and she had more than paid her fare. She waited for his tapping to become less tentative, and then a hammering. His anger shook the house, but she was all the more unreachable. He would be certain she was there, inside and listening. He had, she knew, a right to be annoyed. She half expected pebbles at her window, a note wrapped round a stone; or to see his looming, rueful face pressed up against the window-glass. But he gave up quite quickly and drove away.

Again she was in Rio and she slept. The phone, which rang ten minutes after midnight, was not her parents getting through. She could not even dream they were alive. It was, of course, Geo again. The phone bell even had his plaintive ring. It wasn’t hard to guess how he had passed the hour since he’d driven off. Either he was calling from the corner of a bar, enraged by drink and his unrewarded hankerings. Sex is the wasp trapped in the jar. Or he had gone back to his home – she’d never even asked him where he lived, but still with his parents, she was sure – and was sitting, sober and resentful, in their dark hallway, ready to beg and to berate when she picked up the phone: ‘I thought I might come round,’ and then, ‘You thankless bitch.’ She let it ring. And so did he. At last, she had to go downstairs to disconnect his call. She left the handset dangling. She’d be engaged all night.

Syl didn’t try to sleep again. She’d had enough. She walked about the house, her mother’s night-coat wrapped around her shoulders, and turned on every light, upstairs and down. Perhaps the lights would help her face the truth of her bereavement, and her guilt. She’d often daydreamed they were dead. And now they were. She still found satisfaction in their deaths – they represented Goa and Berlin. She was to blame. For wanting it. For having too little love for them. For being less than they had hoped. For being thankless, lazy, hard.

She went again into her mother’s room, pulled back the sheets and stared at the bed, looking for the trigger of some tears. She opened all the cupboards and the drawers, spread a hand across her mother’s underclothes, inspected the unopened packet of cigarettes she found buried underneath, picked up her combs and necklaces, sniffed the cordite smell of hair on her brush, stared at the wedding photograph. But she felt nothing. Everything was too familiar. She opened Calvino’s
Antonyms
. Her mother read the oddest things. And then the book that Syl herself had bought her father,
The Goatherd’s Ancient Wisdom
. The book mark was a funeral card. A name she didn’t recognize. The Academic Mentor at the university. ‘Rejoice, for he has woken from his troubled dream,’ it said. Another idiotic card. She dropped it, like she’d dropped the others, in the bin.

Her father’s room was half the size, and cluttered. Again she pulled back the covers on the bed. A pair of patterned socks. And, pushed between the mattress and the footboard, there was a glossy magazine of photographs, called
Provo
– the grinning natural world in two-page spreads. Syl bent to look beneath the bed. His shoes. Some scientific journals. A coffee-cup. A tray of rocks. His binoculars. She ran her hand along the spines in his bookcase.

Finally she went downstairs into the kitchen, the most anonymous of rooms. Still nothing in the fridge to eat and drink. She’d have to go next door again, when it was morning, to beg some bread and cheese from her neighbour. For now the little drop of gleewater in its square bottle on the high shelf was worth the reaching after all. She was her father’s height and shorter than Celice. She had to climb on to a chair. She blew the dust off the bottle’s epaulettes, removed the stopper and drank the quarter measure without coming down off the chair. Too sugary. But energizing. There was a small round glass jar with a gold screw top hidden behind the spirit glasses at the back of the shelf, no bigger than a tangerine. Its contents looked like tiny yellow stones or shells. She took it down and held it to the ceiling light. Small rodent bones, perhaps. Misshapen pearls. Something from her mother’s lab. Something they’d picked up on the beach, and kept, and hidden.

Syl unscrewed the cap and tipped the contents on her palm. They hardly weighed a gramme and felt as moist and soft as orange pips. They were all teeth, some as tiny and enamelled as a grain of rice, others larger, and contoured, spongy and pitted at their dentine caps but jagged and with the stringy residues of blood pulp on their roots. Milk teeth or ‘fairy dice’. The sweet incisors, canines, molars of a girl.

She counted them, pushing them across her palm with one finger. Nineteen. One short of a set. That must be the one, Syl thought, that she had lost at school when she was about eleven. She had been worrying it all day with her tongue and thumb and it had almost fallen out while she was in the music class. Her teacher had insisted that she spit it in the lavatory and swill the blood away with water from the toilet tap. That one tooth had not been saved. But her mother and her father had preserved the rest, this first sign of their daughter’s growing old.

Syl dropped her teeth back in the jar. Then, clutching it, she got down off the kitchen chair and went into the garden studio to curl up on the couch. Monday was approaching fast with its disjunctive ways. Monday rips the family apart. It sends its members off to work. It puts them on the bus and train and plane. She folded one hand round the jar of teeth and wrapped the other one around an ankle, spread her fingers on her lower leg, held herself in place with just her fingertips, dug bitten nails into her skin. She closed her eyes against the dawn to find out what it felt like to be loved and dead.