Syl held the woman’s arm, to steady her for the descent. The clerk kept well away until they reached the basement. Then he took charge of the gurney again, and helped to lift and slide the casket into the brothers’ hired van. They slipped him money, for his help. ‘Good luck,’ he said, and muttered, ‘Give her a decent send-off.’ The woman and her sons were almost smiling when they drove away. Everybody was relieved to have the body in the house the night before the burial, lying in its own bed in its own home, amongst its things.
‘What should we do?’ asked Syl.
The clerk, standing at the elevator gate, just shrugged. He’d like to have her warm and naked on a slab, his scissors slicing through her polymura coat. ‘We’ve looked,’ he said. ‘There’s nowhere else. Go to the police. Check up at all the hospitals.’
‘We’ve done all that.’
He closed the gate and pointed through the concertina’d bars up the ramp to the street. ‘That way.’ And then — you could never know your luck with a woman like her — he added, ‘Do call again!’
By the time that Syl was half-way up the ramp the clerk had already found the little bag of Eden pills. He popped a couple underneath his tongue. They were as easily absorbed as sugar. So once he’d reached the morgue to log out the woman’s body from his register, the new pills had begun to have their topping up effect. Nothing mattered any more. His little pills could conquer all the stench and tedium of death. They shrank the afternoon.
‘She’ll not be long,’ he said to Geo. The idiot was still sitting on the waiting bench, as chained and patient as a dog. You’d see more vigour in the fridge, the morgue clerk thought, and spent a mean and happy half-hour before the couple finally found each other and departed from his life if not his fantasies.
That night, Syl conquered death by sleeping with her driver once again. It had been a wearing day. She could not spend the evening alone. She’d rather tolerate his proprietorial love-making for a second time, his too-long fingernails, his inexperience, his lack of enterprise. It was a necessary sacrifice, and soon dispatched.
This time — an awful and pre-emptive sin — they took her mother’s bed. Dry sheets. More space. But as she prepared to let her ferryman help himself to her, the phone rang in the hall. Her chest went tight. She had to gasp for breath — what had become of her disdain for family? — and run out on to the landing. She could only stutter nonsense when she picked up the receiver, trembling and naked in the moonlit house. Good news or bad? Please let there be a parent on the phone. It was the police, of course. They’d found the car, downtown, abandoned in a bank car park. A thief had taken out the radio-cassette, but otherwise no damage. No sign of any accident or forced entry. No keys. There was a receipt for parking on the dashboard, timed and dated Tuesday noon, for the open ground next to the visitors’ centre beyond the airport road out at Baritone Bay. ‘Is there any reason you can think of why your parents would go there?’
19
Noon
It was not the easy and pleasant walk that he had promised her. There was a level, waymarked track down to the coast, but Joseph and Celice had to clamber through the man-made hillocks on the margins of the widened airport road and skirt the recent piles of building aggregate to reach the high backshores where once the study house had been. Instead of beaten scrub, the soil was loose and gravelly. The rubble-loving undergrowth tore at their trouser legs. Somewhere, below these engineering dunes, Celice had first seen Joseph, almost thirty years before. He’d slipped and pulled the muscles in his back. The other men — it didn’t seem like yesterday — had had to help him with his antique, boned suitcase. Consumed by fire. The well-worn path that the six students had followed then had disappeared over time, of course. There was no longer any need for it. No study house, no path.
Celice was breathless, not only from the effort of the climbs on such a sun-wrecked day but also with apprehension. The blackened wreckage of her past was far too close — six hundred metres from the air-conditioned comforts of their car. She’d never found the time or felt the impulse to return before. Not cowardice, just caution. Why take the risk? Why resurrect bad memories? It isn’t true that murderers are drawn back to the scene of crime before the blood has dried. They only dare go back when age has toughened them.
Celice was not a fool. She knew her thirty-year timidity had not been rational. Yet the fire had singed and carbonized her past. She was in no doubt of that. She could hardly bear even to recollect her first meeting with her husband, his singing voice, the sprayhoppers, their first love-making, because an image of the smoking study house would soon impose itself. With Festa’s blackened face, her toasted hair. And Festa’s melted voice.
Celice hadn’t witnessed a single flame of the actual fire, of course. She’d been. elsewhere. Impossibly alive and joyful. By the time that she and Joseph had finished with each other at Baritone Bay, the fire had used up all the wood and was only ruminating smoke. The almost naked ornithologist, running in black boots and his nightwear along the coastal track, had found them — caught them — consummated, arm in arm, coming from the dunes. ‘Thank God,’ he’d said, and almost hugged them with relief. ‘Where’s Festa?’
Celice could still recall her easy shrug. She hadn’t cared where Festa was. But some days, now and ever since, that’s all she thought about. Where Festa was. Her thirty years of being dead. The life in parallel to hers that Celice’s colleague never led. The uncompleted doctorate. The unbegun career. The unique progress never made in the medical and nutritional uses of seaweed. The man not found, the children she’d not have, the house, the undemanding life. The middle years of that enraging voice and spongy laugh. The thinning of the thick, loose hair. The fattening. The chance encounters with Celice, once in a while, on the street or at the annual conference on seaweed studies, ‘It’s Festa, isn’t it?. How’s life with you? I haven’t seen you since. ’ All murdered by a coffee pan or by a toppling cigarette.
It was a flinty task for Celice even to imagine herself back at the study house, as she’d last seen it, standing, trembling, with another calming cigarette and facing down across the black and silvered ruin towards a smoke-smudged sea. Her lungs, already stressed by their uphill running from the coast, had been raw with wood ash. She’d yelled out Festa’s name, both at the house and at the countryside around, until her voice had failed. But no one answered her — and no one ever would. Her colleague and room-mate was buried underneath the smouldering tent of timbers. It was too hot to peer more closely and look for signs of skull and bones or rake the ash for Festa’s confirmation ring, her watch, her silver bracelet and her teeth.
Joseph had come forward to put his arm around her waist. But she had waved him back. It was his fault, this fire, this death, as well as hers. Love was to blame, and passion. Passion such as theirs, brief as it was, was strong enough to shake the balance of the natural world, and test its synchronicity. Where there is sex, then there is death. They are the dark co-ordinates of one straight line. Grief is death eroticized. And sex is only shuffling off this mortal coil before its time to plummet to the post-coital afterlife. Celice’s haste to rush out of the house and take command of her new love so early in the morning was bound to set the flame. That is a scientific view.