Viewed from closer up, there were colours and motifs on Joseph and Celice that Fish could never leave. A dazzling filigree of pine-brown surface veins, which gave an arborescent pattern to the skin. The blossoming of blisters, their flaring red corollas and yellow ovaries like rock roses. And in the warmer, gaping caverns — sub-rib, sub-flesh, sub-skull — the garish blues and reds and greens of their disrupted, bloated frames. They were too rotten now and far too rank to hold much allure for gulls or crabs. They’d been passed down, through classes, orders, species, to the last in line, the lumpen multitude, the grubs, the loopers and the millipedes, the button lice, the tubal worms and flets, the bon viveur or nectar bugs, which had either too many legs or none.
The swag-fly maggots had started to emerge on this fourth day from their pod larvae, generated by the putrid heat in Joseph and Celice’s innards. Long dead — but still producing energy! The maggots gorged and tumbled in the carrion, as balls of rain as big as them and fifty times as heavy came down like meteorites to pound and shake their caverns and their dells. Death fattens us to dine on us. The maggots are the minstrels at his feast.
Joseph, like most zoologists, had been a faculty snob and hated botany. He thought the ‘plant men’ lived a lesser fife. He was the huntsman to their gatherers. Their only weapons were the plastic bag and trowel. But he was closer now to botany than he had ever been. His greater, living predators had gone, but the longer blades of lissom grass, gasping for the light, were bending over him like nurses. His body was a vegetable, skin and pulp and fibre. His bones were wood. Soon, if no one came to help, the maggots would dismantle him. Then his body could only be gathered up by trowels and put in plastic bags.
It would be comforting, of course, to believe that humans are more durable than other animals, to think that by some miracle (of natural science obviously) his hand and her lower leg remained unspoiled, enfolding and enclosed, that his one fingertip was still amongst her baby hairs, that her ankle skin was firm and pastel-grained, and that her toenails were still berry red and manicured. But death does not discriminate. All flesh is flesh. And Joseph and Celice were sullied everywhere. His fingernails were split and loosening. His hand was angular and void, a starched and empty glove. Her lower leg was little more than rind.
But the rain, the wind, the shooting stars, the maggots and the shame had not succeeded yet in blowing them away or bringing to an end their days of grace. There’d been no thunderclap so far. His hand was touching her. The flesh on flesh. The fingertip across the tendon strings. He still held on. She still was held.
‘We know that Fish will poison all of us one day,’ Mondazy wrote, in his death year. ‘We wait for it to push its nose into the corners of our house, our room. Too weak to move, we’ll watch it browse the mildewed woodwork and graze amongst the timber lichens, which grow as black as barnacles along the window-frames beside our beds, until it turns to cast its sideways eye on us. Our town is mouldering. We are eroded by the wind and salt and rain. We live in fear of water and of death.’
14
It was Fire not Fish that put an end to Festa. Some water might have saved her life.
Early, on her fifth day of research, the study house was hardly visible. A damp sea mist had dug more deeply into the land than usual. It had crossed the high, absorbent peaks of the inner dunes, depositing its slightly brackish dew into the sweet-water ponds and puffing its grey breath against the veranda’s clammy glass.
Inside, at seven in the morning, the hopeful doctors were all sleeping, even Celice. Their thesis tutor had visited the evening before for dinner and had expressed his broad approval of their field researches, if not their cooking. That night, when he had gone back to the Institute, they celebrated with four bottles of Van Paña and a drunken game of charades. They’d had to mime the names of animals. Joseph guessed the sprayhopper as soon as Celice puffed across her palm at him, like someone blowing kisses. The others seemed to take it as the natural order of the universe that Joseph and Celice would become attached, though they neither touched nor paid excessive attention to each other. Odd sticks to odd; that was the formula. The three men flirted only with Festa. In fact, at two in the morning, when everyone else had gone to bed and sleep, Festa and the ornithologist were still in the common room, kissing noisily.
It must have been one of those two, Joseph thought, who’d placed the kerosene lamp underneath the table and turned the flame down to its lowest setting for a more romantic light, perhaps, then left it burning through the night. He wasn’t even sure if he’d imagined it. When he’d got up at seven thirty the common room was almost bright with natural light. The feeble kerosene flame would not have been especially noticeable. It might, in fact, have been already dead. He’d only half noticed it before rushing out to circumnavigate the house and stand on the open ground outside the veranda waiting for Celice. Joseph wasn’t sure if there was any smell from charring wood. He should, he knew, have checked the lamp and turned it out if it was on, or moved it somewhere safe away from wood before he left the study house. ‘Maybe, even if I’d definitely seen a flame I’d not have turned it out,’ he admitted to Celice, years later, to comfort her. He was not the sort to interfere. He was preoccupied. Thank heavens that he didn’t say, ‘I’m far too short to play with fire.’
Celice had not seen anything, no fight, no lamp. She’d only seen Sprayhopper Man, waiting outside for her as she’d asked (‘instructed’ was the truer word, he’d say), half consumed by mist and half obscured by ochred glass.
The night before, Joseph had admitted — drink talks — that he’d spied on her through the veranda windows. Such an arousing liberty, Celice had thought, and one that she was impatient to repeat. ‘Come for me in the morning,’ she had said, when they had gone back to their beds. Indeed, he’d come for her, come into her, come with her a dozen times that night, in dreams. He’d sung for her. He’d played piano on the bone-keys of her spine. He’d held her in his palm and breathed on her and she had flexed and sprung her endless legs for him and tumbled in the air.
So when she saw him standing in the garden, beyond the glass, Celice was hungry to be loved. She did not try to hide herself, nor did she try to show herself. She just pulled down the sleeping-bag and stood up, naked on the mattress, as if she didn’t know that she had purposefully placed him there to watch her tug her nightshirt by its shoulders high above her head. For a few seconds, she was blinded by material and Joseph was enlightened on how her body looked. The pear. The pigeon. And the truth of it. The wisp and tuft of body hair. Her shoulders and her modest breasts. Her squabby hips. Her virtues and her blemishes. When her head and hair sprang out again into the light she half expected to find Joseph with his nose pressed to the glass. But — and this was touching and oddly arousing too — he had stayed exactly where he was, a soft-edged figure in the mist. She dressed for him. A shirt, no brassière. Some underclothes. Jumper, trousers, socks and walking boots. She put her fingers through her hair, a mermaid’s comb, and waved at him. For Celice this was the high point of their love.
How long had Festa been awake and watching her? (She’d never have the chance to ask.) But while Celice was sitting on her mattress tying her shoelaces, her room-mate suddenly sat up in her sleeping-bag, bleary-eyed and pastry-faced, and begged for one of Celice’s cigarettes. ‘I’m feeling awful,’ she said, and gave her irritating laugh. ‘My mouth’s a bird’s cage.’
‘I’m not surprised.’ Celice lit two cigarettes and handed one to Festa. ‘Go back to sleep,’ she said. ‘I’m going down to the bay with Joseph.’