It was Celice, with better eyesight than her husband, who spotted the arrowed way-marker, tacked to a pine trunk, which showed the forward route of their disrupted path. But she and Joseph were nervous and reluctant to cross the open ground. They felt like trespassers. The clearance was intimidating, like some contested border from their youth. A DMZ, scorched clear to keep defectors in or out. A no man’s land, to hold the easts and wests, the norths and souths apart. The Germanys and the Koreas. The Vietnams. It looked as if there ought to be guard turrets, land mines, Alsatian dogs and barbed tripwire. There were, in fact, two planes above the trees; one high, circling airliner and, at five hundred metres, a single-engined trainer, snooping directly overhead and looking as if it might release at any time a bomb, a canister of gas, a parachutist. Even if Joseph and Celice were not spotted by the plane, snipers would pick them off if they were mad enough to walk out from the undergrowth. Only animals were safe. Wood crows and pickerlings hopped across the naked soil. Rats ran along the flooded lorry ruts to feed on roots and bulbs. Two hispid buzzards — lovers of the open motorway — sat waiting in the pine tops for the carnage that would come. Celice did not regard the clearance as a metaphor, a thick and earthy line between their futures and their pasts. She merely was depressed by what they’d found and would have turned around and gone back home if she had had the choice. If her husband hadn’t been so keen to reach the coast, she would have died in bed.
Joseph and Celice began their trespasses. The wind and sun had dried and baked the surface of the soil above soft, ankle-deep mud, but that top layer was as thin and friable as pie crust, too thin to support two heavy mammals. They left deep footsteps in the soil, and the soil made its mark, too, on their shoes and on the bottoms of their trousers. ‘Now what else?’ remarked Celice, meaning that there could be worse ahead. They might spend the afternoon wading through the mud of endless building sites. Their outing — post study house — had not begun well.
But once they’d reached the continuing path and had made their way through the remaining forest pines, salt marshes and lagoons (perfect for the planned golf-course: golf balls float best in brackish water) and had cleaned their shoes by climbing in the loose sand of the first dune ridge, all evidence of Salt Pines disappeared. From the summit of the dunes the wounds and scars were masked by trees. Even the clank of trucks and dumpers was absorbed. The training plane had gone elsewhere. Here was their first view of the coast; the wine-deep, sad, narcotic sea.
They slid down the sand scree to the coastal plain, which sloped towards the scrubshore. Beyond were the dunefields of Baritone Bay. The plain was hardly touched, as yet, by progress or ‘landscaping’. There would be a resort village there in time, they knew. A marina, too, and a granite esplanade with shorefront restaurants and cycle tracks. But these would not be started until, phase one, the houses were complete and there were influential residents to overcome the reservations of the more sentimental town governors. Someone had built a small stone jetty, with a boat winch at the top. It ran from the coastal track, across the shore, to the low-water mark. That was something new since their last visit together. And, where once there had been natural barriers of shore grass and a prairie of low vegetation, there were now sand fences to secure the beach, and lines of erosion bags arranged in chevrons to protect against shoreface recession. It seemed, as well, from the way the tides were running, that the disposition of the offshore spits and shoals, bars and channels had been redesigned. Friction and accretion, flooding, overwash and deposition had made fresh patterns. The ocean has a thousand crafts.
Fifty metres offshore there was a new, elongated ridge of sand, which broke the waves and robbed the plunging breakers — their crest curls wrapped round tubes of air, like brandy snaps — of their dramatic energy. They reached the beach, emasculated and at a lesser angle.
At the far end, where Joseph had once sent phlegmy — and seductive — crickets flying, the shore had lost its shallow gradient to thirty years of spilling and collapsing seas. The waves had pushed the sand higher up the beach and dumped a steep and arching shelf of pebbles and shells.
‘They’ll not like that,’ said Joseph.
This could be disappointing. They almost ran along the whole length of the beach, from west to east, looking at the hem of breaking waves, hunting for sprayhoppers in the tide’s spumy residues, turning the piles of coal shells with their shoes to disturb any living fugitives. But nothing jumped for them, even though they’d timed their visit perfectly. The tide was high and running in. They should be ankle deep in crickets.
‘Not even one,’ said Celice.
‘One’s not enough. One never lasts.’
Joseph was not entirely surprised. As soon as he had seen the steepened disposition of the shore he knew conditions would be wrong for Pseudogryllidus pelagicus. He’d predicted as much in his long-forgotten doctoral thesis (grandiloquently titled Patience and Blind Chance: A Natural History of the Sprayhopper). They were so specialized and so discriminating that they would be unable to adapt quickly enough to the fickle disposition of the waves. Blind chance had brought bad luck. ‘Too steep for them,’ he said. ‘They need a good flat beach with running tides. That’s life.’
That’s life, indeed. But it had always been his private fancy that crickets, hoppers and beetles would withstand anything that life could toss at them. They were the grand survivors of the natural world. They were the nimblest of all insects. They were better-equipped than almost any other creature to endure extreme conditions. One had only to keep up with reports in the Entomology to know that there were furnace beetles, impervious to glowing coals. There were polar crickets, which lived in permafrost, and blind cavehoppers, which flourished on the limescaled rims of underground pools and listened for their tiny prey through four ears mounted on their knees. There were bugs that feasted on the hot and sticky gas tars at the back of cookers, or navigated sewerage pipes, or chewed electric cables.
There was even a specialist cicada in South America (Entomology, vol. CXXI / 27) that fed and bred in diesel engines. It lived on emulsified fuel. Its common name? The grease monkey. It had first been identified in the 1970s in Ecuador. It was wingless, with short legs, designed for clinging, not for mobility. But it had travelled north and south, two thousand miles in less than twenty years, by diesel lorry and diesel train. Mechanical migration. It was now common in Mexico City and Brazil. Single specimens had turned up in engine blocks in Dallas scrapyards. Nature’s stories are the best, Joseph often said. ‘Except when you are telling them,’ his wife replied.
‘Whatever philosophical claims we might make for ourselves, human kind is only marginal. We hardly count in the natural orders of zoology. We’ll not be missed,’ Joseph, in a rare display of scientific passion, had told a student at the Institute when she had been too dismissive of the earth’s smaller beings. ‘They might not have a sense of self, like us. Or memory. Or hope. Or consciences. Or fear of death. They might not know how strong and wonderful they are. But when every human being in the world has perished, and all our sewerage pipes and gas cookers and diesel engines have fossilized, there will still be insects. Take my word. Flourishing, evolving, specializing insects.’ Here he resurrected his best line from his student thesis. ‘There will still be sprayhoppers. snatching their sustenance from the pincers of the waves.’