Syl had to shake herself awake. But when she fell asleep again, ten minutes later, she was pestered by the same recurring dreams, the flying car, the petrol flames, the naked couple blanketed by windscreen glass and bricks and sea. The more she slept the more her parents’ public nakedness would play its comic, unforgiving part.
But it was telephones that really troubled her. In these nightmares the telephone was just beyond their reach, on the rear seat of the car or at the bottom of her mother’s bag. Or else the telephone was in their hands but not responding to their stabbing fingers. Nothing they could do would stop the ringing or put them through. Or else the telephone was melting in the heat, or sinking, twenty metres down.
In other dreams, it was Syl’s own phone that sounded. It seemed to wake her up but was not ringing when she reached for it. As soon as she dropped back to sleep it rang again. Or it was ringing in the hall outside the bedroom Syl had had when she was small. If only she could get to it in time, if only she were tall and brave enough to reach the phone she’d hear her parents talking from their mobile begging for her help. ‘Say where you are,’ she said. But all she heard was, ‘Try again. Please try again.’ Her parents’ pulses failed. Their batteries expired, and they were disconnected from her calls.
The waking dream, sidelit by dawn: her father phoned his daughter in the final moments of his life. Had she been drinking, he wanted to know. What was she doing with her life? What books? What plans? When could they hope to see her in the flesh? He could not say exactly where he was.
13
By Friday dawn the rain was back, not Wednesday’s undramatic, blood-releasing drizzle but lashing downpours. Its moisture was so ambient and insinuating that it found its way into the tightest wallets of the town and made the banknotes damp. This rain was bruising, bouncing, saline. It crusted all the cars with rust. It silvered Joseph and Celice.
In fact, Rusty City used to be the tourist nickname for the town in their student days. Or Wetropolis. Summer heat, trapped by the surrounding rim of dead volcanoes, sucked up the sea — still does, though no one comes to see it any more — and spread it thinly through the streets. Even in the winter there were fogs and frets, lasting until dusk, lasting sometimes weeks on end. There was, and is, a metre and a half of rain each year. Up to Celice’s chin and up to Joseph’s eyes. And constant windborne spray. ‘The windscreen wipers must persist with their condolences across the weeping windows of our cars even when there is no rain,’ Mondazy wrote (the Academic Mentor’s perfect epitaph), in the years when the town and coast were wild enough to attract visitors. Tourists could buy postcards of traffic in the rain, with his words printed underneath.
Sometimes, as now, there were tidal floods. But in those days there were no concrete breaks and barriers to keep the water back. The floods would chase along the lower town with street deliveries of wrack, eelgrass and crabs. We have fins, the citizens would boast. Our girls have seaweed ribbons in their hair, and gills.
Even death (according to the town’s resurrected folklore — Mondazy’s work again) was watery. ‘We call it Fish,’ he wrote in his final memoir, published more than thirty years ago. ‘It swims, we say, a silent, unforgiving predator that comes at night out of the sea and speeds into the shallow, less resistant moisture of the streets. Fish comes and takes your father and your mother from their bed. All that you’ll hear, as souls depart and make their spirals of displacement in the clammy air, is the shivering of fins.’ Sometimes, his superstitious readers and adherents used to say, Mondazy’s Fish would show itself only as silvering across the corpse, or by its smell. Death was hardly visible. Yet it was already in the room. And it would leave its wake of scales and mucilage across the sheets.
Fish, for a while, used to take the blame for every death in town. It swam, to the accompaniment of rain on roofs, through bedrooms and through wards where cancer, heart-attacks, old age and strokes had outwitted the nurses and their drugs. It called on people who had drowned in their pyjamas, amongst the reefs and corals of their furniture. Ten times a day it heard the parting rattle in the rusty throats of asthmatics, or hurried to attend a child struck by a car in the sudden blindness of a pavement-hugging cloud, or stayed to witness doctors write, ‘Pneumonia’, as cause of death for some damp pensioner whose lungs were water-bags when everybody knew the cause of death was Fish.
Fish couldn’t boast of many sailors drowned at sea. In those days Rusty City was a tourist, not a fishing, town. (It’s neither now.) Only visitors chose to dine on seafood so there wasn’t much call for fishermen or fish ‘chauffeurs’. But they were bound to lose some people to the waves each year. There was always some outsider who wanted to run along the front at high tide in a storm to take a photograph of pouncing seas. Or see if he could race down the now-demolished jetty, touch the flagpole at the end, and return to his companions before the next wave came. Two months before Celice and Joseph’s study week a couple tried to save their dog when curling water swept it from the town beach. The woman went into the water, fully dressed, reaching for the dog’s lead. When Fish found her, up the coast a few hours later, the sea had stripped her of her clothes. She was a nearly naked body wearing only shoes, her fingers wrapped around the dog’s red collar, and neither of them quite dead yet. Fish had to flap and wriggle over frothing rocks to brush their lids with its dispatching fins.
Wise people in Wetropolis, who did not want to die until they were old and ready for it, stretched nets across the headboards of their beds, or wore a fishhook on a chain around their throats. Even today, long since Mondazy resurrected Fish, there are still a few surviving men and women in the town who won’t eat fish at all or let a fish inside the house, not even in a tin to feed their cats. They remember what happened at the Pisces restaurant, down at the port, in 1968. Nine diners at a wedding feast and a waiter died. Fish came and poisoned them. It was a massacre. The bride did not survive to join her husband on the honeymoon.
These same wise people in Wetropolis might find in Joseph and Celice, on their fourth day of putrefaction in the dunes, much evidence of Fish. Their deaths seemed watery, as if they had been swept by curling breakers off the beach and dumped. They had both dissolved and stiffened. They were becoming partly semi-fluid mass and partly salted drift; sea things. They even smelt marine, as corrupt and spermy as rotting bladderwrack or fish manure.
There was, of course, their silvering, as further evidence that Fish had been. It was its watermark. In that dawn light and that hard rain and at a passing distance, the corpses would have looked like shiny human earrings made by fairy silversmiths and dropped by giants, two shards of fallen ice, two metal leaves, two scaly sculptures beaten out of tin and verdigris’d with mildew and with mould.
Even if the light were blocked, there would still appear to be a jewelling to their bodies, where life’s soft pink and death’s smudged grey conspired to find the silver in between. And there’d still be a tracery of lucent white where snails and slugs had made enamel patterns on the flesh with their saliva trails. These would be the patterns, surely, that Mondazy had described, the wake of scales and mucilage where gasping Fish had wriggled on its fins across the dunes to touch their skin.