Again she was in Rio and she slept. The phone, which rang ten minutes after midnight, was not her parents getting through. She could not even dream they were alive. It was, of course, Geo again. The phone bell even had his plaintive ring. It wasn’t hard to guess how he had passed the hour since he’d driven off. Either he was calling from the corner of a bar, enraged by drink and his unrewarded hankerings. Sex is the wasp trapped in the jar. Or he had gone back to his home — she’d never even asked him where he lived, but still with his parents, she was sure — and was sitting, sober and resentful, in their dark hallway, ready to beg and to berate when she picked up the phone: ‘I thought I might come round,’ and then, ‘You thankless bitch.’ She let it ring. And so did he. At last, she had to go downstairs to disconnect his call. She left the handset dangling. She’d be engaged all night.
Syl didn’t try to sleep again. She’d had enough. She walked about the house, her mother’s night-coat wrapped around her shoulders, and turned on every light, upstairs and down. Perhaps the lights would help her face the truth of her bereavement, and her guilt. She’d often daydreamed they were dead. And now they were. She still found satisfaction in their deaths — they represented Goa and Berlin. She was to blame. For wanting it. For having too little love for them. For being less than they had hoped. For being thankless, lazy, hard.
She went again into her mother’s room, pulled back the sheets and stared at the bed, looking for the trigger of some tears. She opened all the cupboards and the drawers, spread a hand across her mother’s underclothes, inspected the unopened packet of cigarettes she found buried underneath, picked up her combs and necklaces, sniffed the cordite smell of hair on her brush, stared at the wedding photograph. But she felt nothing. Everything was too familiar. She opened Calvino’s Antonyms. Her mother read the oddest things. And then the book that Syl herself had bought her father, The Goatherd’s Ancient Wisdom. The book mark was a funeral card. A name she didn’t recognize. The Academic Mentor at the university. ‘Rejoice, for he has woken from his troubled dream,’ it said. Another idiotic card. She dropped it, like she’d dropped the others, in the bin.
Her father’s room was half the size, and cluttered. Again she pulled back the covers on the bed. A pair of patterned socks. And, pushed between the mattress and the footboard, there was a glossy magazine of photographs, called Provo — the grinning natural world in two-page spreads. Syl bent to look beneath the bed. His shoes. Some scientific journals. A coffee-cup. A tray of rocks. His binoculars. She ran her hand along the spines in his bookcase.
Finally she went downstairs into the kitchen, the most anonymous of rooms. Still nothing in the fridge to eat and drink. She’d have to go next door again, when it was morning, to beg some bread and cheese from her neighbour. For now the little drop of gleewater in its square bottle on the high shelf was worth the reaching after all. She was her father’s height and shorter than Celice. She had to climb on to a chair. She blew the dust off the bottle’s epaulettes, removed the stopper and drank the quarter measure without coming down off the chair. Too sugary. But energizing. There was a small round glass jar with a gold screw top hidden behind the spirit glasses at the back of the shelf, no bigger than a tangerine. Its contents looked like tiny yellow stones or shells. She took it down and held it to the ceiling light. Small rodent bones, perhaps. Misshapen pearls. Something from her mother’s lab. Something they’d picked up on the beach, and kept, and hidden.
Syl unscrewed the cap and tipped the contents on her palm. They hardly weighed a gramme and felt as moist and soft as orange pips. They were all teeth, some as tiny and enamelled as a grain of rice, others larger, and contoured, spongy and pitted at their dentine caps but jagged and with the stringy residues of blood pulp on their roots. Milk teeth or ‘fairy dice’. The sweet incisors, canines, molars of a girl.
She counted them, pushing them across her palm with one finger. Nineteen. One short of a set. That must be the one, Syl thought, that she had lost at school when she was about eleven. She had been worrying it all day with her tongue and thumb and it had almost fallen out while she was in the music class. Her teacher had insisted that she spit it in the lavatory and swill the blood away with water from the toilet tap. That one tooth had not been saved. But her mother and her father had preserved the rest, this first sign of their daughter’s growing old.
Syl dropped her teeth back in the jar. Then, clutching it, she got down off the kitchen chair and went into the garden studio to curl up on the couch. Monday was approaching fast with its disjunctive ways. Monday rips the family apart. It sends its members off to work. It puts them on the bus and train and plane. She folded one hand round the jar of teeth and wrapped the other one around an ankle, spread her fingers on her lower leg, held herself in place with just her fingertips, dug bitten nails into her skin. She closed her eyes against the dawn to find out what it felt like to be loved and dead.
24
The brothers who ran the Salt Pines Company were happy to loan their sand jeep to the police. Although they hadn’t yet started building a single house, their marketing campaign was due to open in ten days’ time. Their brochures, already printed, had renamed the area Lullaby Coast, suggesting safety, retirement and the soothing presence of the sea. The murder of two respectable doctors of zoology on the fringes of the development could well suggest the opposite, that this was not a happy coast. It could suggest conspiracy as well. The doctors had publicly opposed the building scheme. Their names were on petitions. So the brothers would do what they could to remove the bodies from the dunes as speedily as possible and then persuade the police captain that a quiet, low-profile hunt for ‘the responsibles’ might well produce the best results for everyone.
Their driver took the vehicle along the coastal track then down the small stone jetty below the car park into the shallows of a receding tide where the sand was firmest and not too steeply banked. He would have liked to have accelerated and sent out loops of water from his tyres. Surf-driving. But this, he had been warned, would be the first, informal part of a funeral and he should drive the jeep as if it were a hearse. There were two empty coffins in the body of the jeep. So he kept the needle hovering at 10 k.p.h. and made the most of going through the waves as deeply as he dared, until he reached the first rocks of the bay and had to turn inland towards the dunes.
Two policemen showed him where to back and park. There were another two laying wooden duckboards along the sandy gully of the access dime, dull conscripts with unruly uniforms and minds. Three more men, in suits, and all with cigarettes, were standing like good golfing friends on the grass below the tent. The police detective. The magistrate. One of the brothers from Salt Pines. It looked as if they were expecting someone to come from the tent with a tray of drinks. Their conversation stopped when the thick green canvas had been loosened from its pegs and pulled off its shaking metal frame to show the sun-deprived rectangle of grass beneath. The tent had been up only since the Sunday morning. A day, that’s all. But already photosynthesis had stalled. The lissom green had slightly paled, like the skin below a sticking plaster.