Syl wasn’t sure herself. ‘Have you got any bread to spare?’ she asked.
Back at the house, a half-loaf richer, Syl placated Geo somewhat with a cheerful if mocking slap across his buttocks, then pulled a chair up to the phone. She tried her parents’ mobile again. The number, as before, was unobtainable. She called her father’s secretary. No reply, except the answerphone. The Institute was closed. Then she began to call the hospitals. The switchboards were not staffed on Saturdays. She was required to ‘Key the number of the patient’s ward’, or ‘Try again on Monday’, or ‘Dial four sevens for Inquiries’ and join the queue of other callers and the crackling, patience-testing music of Osvaldo Bosse.
It was tempting to get rid of Geo straight away. Already he was getting on her nerves. He was a whiner and a liability. She did not like the way he’d held her arm once he’d sniffed her out in Mother’s bed that morning. Nor his attempts to lift the coverlet and join her there. Then, once she had scrumped the half-loaf, he evidently thought she was obliged to get him breakfast. ‘I’ve given up waitressing,’ she’d said, and let him sulk. But now she guessed she’d better change her tune, at least till evening. If, as seemed likely, she couldn’t get through to the hospitals by phone, then a driver and his car would be essential for the day.
Then she’d dump him. (‘You’ll have to find yourself another girl. Your lovemaking is poisonous. Geo’s such a very stupid name. Don’t phone.’)
He was no longer in the kitchen when Syl went to make her peace. She found him in the garden studio, sitting in her father’s chair with coffee, an apple and an old newspaper. He’d rather die than have to toast himself some bread. He, surely, was the guest, the giver of free lifts, who should be fussed by her.
‘Sorry, Ferryman,’ she said.
‘OK.’
‘I’m worried, see?’ She put her arms around his shoulders. ‘Shall we go?’
‘Go where?’
‘Go to the hospitals, I guess. And then go to the dungeons where the ghouls and corpses are. Frequent the graveyards and the tombs. Hang out at funerals.’ She did her best to cheer him up. She put her hand inside his shirt.
‘OK,’ he said, as flatly as he could.
But first Syl went upstairs to shower and then to make her mother’s bed. She had to clear away the breakfast-cup and plate, and remove her parents’ ghostly residues. She took the rain-soaked rug and coverlet from her mother’s bedroom and hung them in the airing room. Her father’s ledger was already dry and stiff. She was reluctant to look inside. This was his private space, and no child wants to read about a father’s secret world. Nevertheless, she held up the pages to the window light and let them hang open until she found the last completed page. The paper had expanded and the ink had lost its pigment, first to the rain, now to the heat. The ledger smelt of museums and the inside of briefcases. But still his final, corrugated sentence was clear enough. Such joyful, optimistic words, she thought. And reassuring. He’d written, ‘Tuesday. Far too fine for work.’ And then, ‘(In search of sprayhoppers!)’.
So Syl, with Geo too attentive and long-suffering at her side, embarked upon the oddest town tour that Saturday, driving in the wake of Fish through rain-dejected streets, with only one windscreen wiper functioning on his car, from clinic to hospital, the private and the public wings, hoping to find Joseph and Celice tucked up in bed with grapes and magazines. They ran up stairs, rode bed-wide lifts, and queued for clerks to hunt her parents’ names on screens and registers. They visited the wards of unclaimed, injured patients who might be Joseph or Celice, pulling back the curtains to see the damage that a car, a knife, a heart-attack or an overdose can do. All strangers.
Finally, they visited the central police station. Syl did her best to alarm the duty officer with how reliable and punctual her parents usually were. ‘They’re the ones who always let you down,’ he said. He took descriptions of her parents and noted the registration number of their car. He searched his VDU, but no reports were listed.
‘They’ll show up,’ he promised. And then, an agile contradiction, ‘Check they haven’t turned up at the city morgue.’
17
Birdie volunteered to run down to the beach to check that Festa, Joseph and Celice were indeed safe and to let them know about the fire and what was lost inside the study house; their clothes and bags, their notes and books, the promise of their doctorates. Birdie could hardly refuse the task: he was the fittest of the three and, actually, the only one with any shoes. He’d used the heels to knock the glass out of the bunk-room windows for their escape.
Hanny and Victor would have to make their unheroic ways barefoot across the manac fields towards the shanty village. A second visit, less triumphant than the first, in search of borrowed clothes and shoes, and a telephone to call the Institute, the airport and the fire brigade. If this wind picked up, so might the embers of the study house. Then they’d have a forest or a scrub fire to account for, and even houses in the village might be lost. A trembling thought.
Their comrade Birdie was a scarecrow, leaping down the steps, two at a time, through the stands of flute bushes, until he reached the farm lane and the ponds. He wore only a white T-shirt, fly-fronted pyjama bottoms from which his penis pecked and nodded like a finger puppet as he ran, black ankle boots, no socks. He smelt of smoke and sweat. His hair was matted. He’d never felt before so cinematic and so wholly ludicrous. He knew where on the coast he would find his three colleagues. He had himself helped Festa rake in the seaweed for her medical and nutritional studies one afternoon. She’d recompensed him with her kisses just the night before, although, despite his best endeavours, she was not yet quite ready to allow his tongue to penetrate her lips or his hand to dip into her clothes. And he had twice spotted Joseph and Celice in the shallows further up the coast, towards the jutting foreshore of the bay.
The route was simple and mostly downhilclass="underline" the pines, the marshes and the dunes, the coastal track, the wide expanses of the beach, the splashing run along the shore towards the figures in the tide, the distant, bending plume of ash. He hadn’t felt so fit for months, despite the ankle-rubbing boots and the remains of a smoke-laden headache. He was pumped up by all the thrilling chemicals of shock. The effort brought it home to him. Death had been near; he had been fortunate. He’d never been so fast or spirited, so oddly close to nausea and joy. How glorious he would appear to Festa as he called to her, half naked and half Hollywood, an envoy bearing messages and running from the fire towards the sea.
18
It would have been a busy week for death even without Syl’s parents. One hundred and twenty-seven new bodies had been registered at the city morgue before the clerk went off for lunch. And Fish would send a further seventeen in the afternoon when the clerk came back to work, puffed up as usual at that time on a Saturday by barbiturates. He’d already reached the fourth level of disinhibition and euphoria by swallowing two Eden pills with his lunch-time beer. Now he was chewing Go gum to take away the smell of onions, cigarettes and alcohol. Cadavers and lunch do not mix well, he had been told a hundred times by the duty doctor. A morgue worker should be as sweet-breathed as a dentist or a prostitute. A belching clerk should not deal with the deceased and their bereaved. Whispered sympathies to widows and to widowers — and to daughters who had lost both parents in a single day — could not come laden with the stench of food and nicotine and still appear sincere.