Celice and Joseph were still hidden under sheets and their refrigerating blankets, but nothing could disguise the smell. Bacon, seaweed, hoof-and-horn, the sweet-death odours of burnt marmalade. Six days of grace are more than anyone can bear. The three older men moved away and lit fresh cigarettes. One of the policemen — not allowed to smoke, but used to dirty work like this — handed round a tube of mints to his three colleagues and the driver. First they rolled the canvas up and jumped on it to pump out the envelopes of trapped air. Then they disconnected and took down the two fluorescent lamps from the top strut of the tent, and dismantled the twelve lengths of the frame. It took two men to drag the canvas down to the sand jeep. One other took the tent poles. The fourth carried the lighting battery. They returned along the duckboards with the two empty, wood-effect coffins on their shoulders. Provided by the city morgue, one standard issue for a man, a shorter one for a woman. The driver followed with the lids.
Filling the coffins would have been simple if the bodies had been laid on sheets, as well as covered by them. Then the policemen could easily make hammocks with which to lift and swing the victims into their boxes. But Joseph and Celice had not been moved, except by gulls and by the murderer, since they had died. The policemen would have to pull away their coverings and roll the bodies on to lengths of folded sheet. They put on plastic gloves. They did not want to touch the dead.
Celice, when she was finally exposed, was still chest down on the ground, her left cheek pressed into the lissom grass, her legs level with her husband’s face, braced and supported on their toes and knees. Her upper body, in its black jacket and grubby white T-shirt made her seem the greater and the less-dead of the two. Below the waist she was as thin and leathery as a hermit’s water-bag. The policemen did their best — but failed — to stop themselves from looking at her nakedness and at the chipped and flaking cherry red varnish of her nails.
Her husband’s posture seemed the comic one. No clothes at all to keep him respectable. He was as modest as a beast. He’d fallen on his back. His legs were spread. His cock and testicles were livid mushrooms growing out of dough. His left wrist was twisted against the broken angle of his arm. And his hand was still wrapped round the stringy folds and sinews of her lower leg. Still devoted, then. Still in touch. But not quite innocent.
The murdered couple, in the weeks ahead, in the newspapers, even at the funeral, would have to shoulder some of the blame themselves. Their bodies were too compliant, unprotesting, over-dramatized. Their deaths — though ugly and gratuitous — seemed, even to the policemen gathered in the dunes, partly deserved. Wilful, even. Why had they wandered from the track? Why had they taken off their clothes, at such an age, in such a place, if not to draw the devils and the monsters to the dunes? These victims had been accomplices in their own misadventure. If life was an express that hurtled between termini, then it had been their choice to quit the moving train before the final station had been reached and dash themselves against the flying stillness of the earth. They’d courted death. And death had been seduced. They wanted it, and so it came, a hock of granite in its obliging hand. The four young policemen disapproved, as all the neighbours and the colleagues would. These people had been irresponsible, to let themselves be robbed so easily of their ‘good deaths’. They should have laboured on until they’d reached the floating world of pain and age. They should have persevered and competed for the just rewards of death in bed.
The four young policemen, too close now to the pungent details of mortality to concentrate on anything but horrors of the flesh, were nauseous as they prepared to lift Celice and Joseph from the dunes. They coughed and gagged. They spat into the grass. They held their breath. Anything to keep the taste out of their mouths. This wasn’t worth the pay. They’d rather be on traffic duty, even. Nevertheless they had no choice but to tuck the two sheets under the corpses, one to Joseph’s left, the other to Celice’s right. Twisting their heads to take deep lungfuls of air, two men to a body, they had to kneel down on the grass, spread their fingers against the rocky outcrops of the skull, the shoulder, the hip, the knee, and pull these two unlikely lovers apart. On to the sheets. Into their boxes, the one too large, the other far too short. Under their lids, and out of sight. Now the policemen could stand up and sip the sweet sea air.
What happened to our only prayer, May no one come to lift his hand from her? The power of a prayer is only brief at best. For a moment only, his arm was stretched as he clung on. His skin adhered. But soon his hand departed from her, slipping from the ankle bone. His fingers were unwoven through the heavy air. The space between them grew and grew. His knuckles dragged along the ground. Her lower leg was left with just the indent of his kissing fingertip. Joseph’s body rolled towards the west. His wife went east. They came off the grass and on to cotton, then into wood-effect, then on to the flat bed of the sand jeep, along the beach and through the suburbs to the icy, sliding drawers of the city morgue, the coroner’s far room, amongst the suicides. Their bodies had been swept away, at last, by wind, by time, by chance. The continents could start to drift again and there was space in heaven for the shooting stars.
If there were any justice in the world, there would be thunder, now that our only prayer has been betrayed, now that the light of time has been reunited with sound, its faster twin. Or else, at least, the baritone should sing. Lift up your voice, the conscience of the land. Protest. Give us your arias of grief. But there’s no justice in the random and habitual parishes of death. The land is conscienceless. It has no ceremony. It cannot rise to the occasion, as people must, when there’s a funeral. The best that it could do was wash its heavy waters on the shore, and stir the dimes where Joseph and Celice had died with its grey wind and let the daylight pop and crack with smaller lives than theirs.
What was their final legacy? A rectangle of faded grass and, where the bodies had decayed for their six days of grace, a crushed and formless smudge of almost white where time and night had robbed the lissom of its green.
25
6.10 a.m.
So this has been a quivering of sorts for Joseph and Celice. A day lived forwards has retrieved itself by fleeing from the future to the past. The dead are resurrected and they he in bed at backward-running dawn, with first light of a perfect summer’s day ducking and then dropping from the sky into the east, into the morning night. Ahead of them, the almost thirty years of married life, the more than twenty years before they met. The shrinking and retreating universe has left their deaths behind. They are not mortal any more.
Celice, in her wide bed, the shutters down, the silence broken by her whistling nose, is sleeping with the joyful certainty that Tuesday comes. Two days, alone, off work, with no alarm to wake her up and nothing she must do to fill her time except play music on the stereo, patrol the garden with her secateurs, walk down across the park, if it is fine, towards the shops, walk back to take some coffee and a cake at the Pavilion, toss crumbs amongst the birds, be free.
She is not restless in the least, or dreaming. Even her wheezing does not wake her up or nag her into turning on her side. She remembers in her subconscious exactly where her open book was dropped the night before and that her watch has slipped on to the floor. She will not roll on to the tasselled page-marker and crease it. She knows it’s fallen there, by her shoulder, almost hidden by the pillow. If she wanted to she could even reach out in her sleep to find at once the crumpled tissue pushed into the tucking of the bed, to blow her nose or wipe her mouth or simply grip as a comforter.