‘Don’t move my father’s hand,’ she said.
Syl could not arrange the funeral at once, and flee the coast, as she would have liked. The bodies, according to the detective, would have to stay inside the tent until the Monday. Forensics had to do their work and the police preferred to keep the corpses where they were until they’d checked each grain of sand, each blade of grass for clues. Then the magistrate would need to come to issue a certificate of removal. It all took time. And magistrates are not at work on Sundays. So Syl, instead, asked Geo to drop her at the Mission Church at the harbour in the town centre. No need to wait for her, she said. She didn’t know how long she’d be. She’d make her own way home. A slim excuse for getting rid of him. Her parents had been married at this church and Celice had always said that it would be a happy final resting-place. Syl needed time alone. She would light a candle, sit in semi-darkness and concentrate on what their deaths might mean.
The Mission Church was busy with a service when she arrived, so she sat outside on the commemorative benches made from the timbers of wrecked ships and carved with the names of lost seamen and waited for the worshippers to leave. The world went on. It orbited through space. There were the usual markers of the day. A sinking sky. The sound of motor-cars. The muted Sunday clatter of the port. And, finally, the sound of people singing hymns, their voices raised against the universe, as thin as water and as nourishing.
It wasn’t difficult for Syl, with that accompaniment, to recall the image of her parents, side by side and murdered on a bed of grass, her ankle in his hand. She tried to let the hymning voices pick up the bodies from the dunes and take them to the kingdom of their verses, amongst the heavens and eternities, into the everlasting peace. But it was obvious that these were voices and these were verses that had not got the muscle to displace a single leaf, let alone pass sinners into paradise. Her father’s songs, for all their mawkish sentiment, were far more powerful. Love songs transcend, transport, because there’s such a thing as love. But hymns and prayers have feeble tunes because there are no gods.
By the time the worshippers were coming out, Syl had lost her need for solitude and candles. She walked away, a member of the parting congregation, euphoric and dismayed at once, and only praying that her life would have as much love as her parents’ had.
Syl had not asked herself the greater question yet. She was too young to need the death-defying trick of living in a godless and expanding universe, its gravity dispersing by the second, its spaces stretching and unspannable, its matter darkening. Life is. It goes. It does not count. That was the hurtling truth that comes to rattle everyone as they grow up, grow old. Syl need not worry for a while.
But she had at least an answer to the lesser question. How should the dying spend their time when life’s short portion shrinks with every waking day? She’d walked to see mortality that Sunday afternoon and found her parents irredeemable. Her gene suppliers had dosed shop. Their daughter was the next in line. She could not duck out of the queue. So she should not waste her time in this black universe. The world’s small, breathing denizens, its quaking congregations and its stargazers, were fools to sacrifice the flaring briefness of their lives in hopes of paradise or fears of hell. No one transcends. There is no future and no past. There is no remedy for death — or birth — except to hug the spaces in between. Live loud. Live wide. Live tall.
She could not ape her parents’ life. She would not merely turn her back against the coffin-hurtling streets and focus only on the minutes in the room, the light that makes an oval of the square, the half-filled diary open at the week, the music on the stereo, the kettle heating on the stove, the photos poked between the mirror and its frame, the dancing page, the other person breathing in a chair, still life. She would, instead, embrace the warmer fevers of the world. Their deaths were her beginning.
These have been unusual days, she thought, as she walked back towards the empty house, her house, through first the wide catalpa-lined avenues of the centre then the gaunt, less pungent streets of the inner suburbs. I am bereaved and liberated at one stroke (a dozen blows). There isn’t anything beyond me now. There isn’t anything I cannot think about, or say.
She would make plans. Bright days ahead.
21
7.05 a.m.
Joseph was out of bed early on the morning of his death. He was always up before Celice. He took his breakfast out to the greying, sapwood deck behind the house, and found just sufficient space for his chair in that trapezium of light where the first sun of the day, if there were any, stretched across the boards. This was where his own father, twenty years before and sitting in the same sunlight, had been killed by a stroke, and where, a thousand times when she was small, his daughter had climbed on to her father’s lap, her bony bottom on his bony knee, to beg for breakfast from his tray, and a song. Syl loved to listen to him saying things in song, in his mad, comic bass, that he could never say in life. Those were the only times he made her laugh.
The condemned man did not eat much. He was the supper not the breakfast sort. He had vanilla coffee on that day, some mango and a cheese brioche, too stale to finish. He’d arranged the food — together with a peeling-knife, his Cardica pills, his daily ledger and a pen — on a featherwood tray as neatly as an airline meal, as if he needed to remind himself of his sparing moderation and his discernment, his high blood pressure hardly helped by all the coffee that he drank, his growing singleness. He exercised his finger joints, battled with his morning cough, waited for his head to clear. He was, as usual, tired.
But not even Joseph could fail to be diverted by the sun. The radio had promised fine weather for a change. He’d make the most of it. Many people in the town on that day would make the most of it. They would invent aching backs and flu, sudden funerals to attend or urgent business somewhere away from their desks and yards so that they could reward themselves with a dry day or two off work. The parks and public lawns could be their offices. The restaurants would be packed out.
We know exactly what Joseph did. He phoned the Institute at 7.25 a.m. and left a message for his secretary on their answerphone. He had some fieldwork to complete, he said, and would not come into his office until early Thursday morning. She could telephone him on the mobile if she needed to, but only ‘urgent things’. This was his final contact with the world at large, the last time that his voice was heard. He’d started off the day by telling lies. He felt both nervous and excited. He wrote a one-line, optimistic entry in his ledger and, warming in the sun, imagined how he and his wife might pass the day.
Once he had dressed, showered and succumbed to a second coffee, Joseph took a glass of tea and a dish of sliced fruit to Celice in her bed. A tender treat? An uncomplicated invitation to the pleasures of the sun? No, he hoped to give her more than breakfast. His breathing was already thin and papery with desire for her. A little lie, a little sun, some mango and a pill, an overdose of caffeine, an unexpected holiday is all it takes to make a man feel amorous.
Their rooms were separate and had been for more than twenty years, since Syl was born in fact and had demanded a share of her mother’s pillow every night. Even when Syl was a teenager Joseph had not returned to Celice’s bed for sleep. He said it was because he did not like the smell of her tobacco, but did not want to spoil the pleasure that she took in a breakfast cigarette. He hadn’t gone back to the room four months before when she had given up her smoking, though. Privately, they both acknowledged that they had become too shy and selfish to accommodate the patterns of each other’s sleep, or tolerate a squeaking bed, or share the coverlet.