The coverlet is pulled up to her chin. Her eyelids perch and shiver in the shadows of her face, pale resting moths. Her hair is spread across the pillow she once shared — and quivering will let her share again — with Syl and Joseph. If she is troubled or distressed by anything, if she is guilty or annoyed, or if her back and shoulders are painful, it does not show while she is asleep. She is too deep. She is too far away.
Joseph is the restless one, the fidgeter, in his more narrow bed in his untidy studio. He has a day of work ahead. Two meetings and a seminar. Two papers to prepare. A faculty report. Already he’s aware of where he’ll hurt that day. His knee is troublesome, even while he sleeps. His colon aches. He’s having bladder dreams. He’s almost praying for the day to come. Then he can piss the pain away and end the nightmare that has been haunting him since his last visit to the lavatory at twenty-five past four.
He is an old man in his dreams, racked with pain and naked in a pauper’s bed. His hands are stiff. His fingertips have lost their sensitivity. All he can feel, when he has found the energy to push his hands beneath the sheets to try to reach and soothe the pain, is scaly skin. He has become pie-crust. It is a bore to be so old, and so condemned. But that — great age — is what he always wanted for himself. So here’s his most sombre wish fulfilled.
His dream has moved him to the geriatric ward. The blankets and the screens. They’ve plugged him in; a monitor, a catheter, a drip. He hears the trolleys in the corridor, the purring journeys of the hearse along embedded routes to one of death’s ten thousand gates, and doctors saying, ‘Let the old man die. The world turns mouldy otherwise.’
He calls her name, Celice. He does not want to die alone. He wants the blessing of warm light and the caressing touch of family. He wants the blinds pulled up, the candles lit, the shadows falling on his bed, the mutters of his people crowding at the door. He wants to hear the sobbing of his daughter and his wife and feel their fingers wrapped around his shin. Please, let them through, he whispers to himself. Then let me doze until you hear my half-completed breath and see the sweet narcosis of no dreams.
The house itself is stretching, creaky in the rousing wash of dawn’s first grey. The sun’s forehead is peeking at the day, its face still indigo from sleep, its cloudy head uncombed and tumbling its vapour curls on to the skyline of the sea. The birds are in the gardens now, throwing out long shadows from the peaks of trees. The town’s first trams are nudging through the streets in search of love. The first alarms are sounding in a thousand homes. The water taps are opened and the gas fires lit. The smells are coffee, bread and soap. A crabbing boat is labouring along the coast, to meet the light half-way, or chase it back whence it came. And Joseph and Celice are in their rooms, spreadeagled in their beds. No matter how they toss and turn, no matter what they dream, no matter what the milky dark may whisper in their ears, its promises, its threats and its assurances, they can’t avoid the coming and receding days of grace.
26
There was a tiger sky in the early hours of the morning — an orange wash of sun in mist behind a camouflage of black-grey, drifting stripes. The clouds were shredded by the wind. Later there would be rain, a middling tide and average temperatures. A dull and uninspiring day, except for a short storm in the afternoon when the sky would fill with lightning sprites and the sea would briefly turn to slate.
No one could tell that police had been at work, or what dramas had occurred the week before. Overnight, the weather and the sea had removed the spoors of the sand jeep, the duckboards and the policemen’s boots. There was no evidence of humankind. The bay had been abandoned to itself, in its last months before Salt Pines.
It is, of course, a pity that the police dogs ever caught the scent of human carrion and led their poking masters to the dunes to clear away the corpses for ‘proper burial’, so that the dead could be less splendid in a grave. The dunes could have disposed of Joseph and Celice themselves. They didn’t need help. The earth is practised in the craft of burial. It gathers round. It embraces and adopts the dead. Joseph and Celice would have turned to landscape, given time. Their bodies would have been just something extra dead in a landscape already sculpted out of death. They would become nothing special. Gulls die. And so do flies and crabs. So do the seals. Even stars must decompose, disrupt and blister on the sky. Everything was born to go. The universe has learned to cope with death.
So, had it not been for the dogs, the residues of Joseph and Celice’s lives would have been tossed and tumbled in the dunes to nourish and renew themselves in different forms. They might have found a brief eternity below the sand, together at first, still touching, but soon they’d have to separate, to weave and drift into the unremarking sea, or sink into the clods and pebbles of the earth. A slower journey than a hearse. Slower than a glacier.
Instead, they left only a white and yellow patch of lissom grass (or angel bed, pintongue, sand hair, repose) where they had loved and died, framed by a tent-made rectangle of lesser green. The bodies had blocked out the light and flattened and indented the soft ground underneath. For almost six days the grass had had to live by root alone, scavenging for nutrients and minerals with its thin threads while its foliage was bleaching in the dark. Celice and Joseph’s long and heavy shapes had robbed the grass of its free energy and left a vegetable ghost. It was as if someone had thrown down a ship’s tarpaulin or dragged up a skein of seaweed into the dunes for use as fertilizer on the fields and then collected it, days later, to leave their soft denials in the grass. Each blade was tendril soft, as colourless and feeble as a day-old shoot, as lank and listless as cut straw. Some leaves were bent and scarred and some were tom. Others had been pressed into the sandy earth, to seem ingrowing, keen to burrow back. The worms and grubs that hated light had come up to the surface for a change to crawl and slide in these rare caverns, leaving their half-tunnels and their casts as decorations on the ground. The smell was like red wine; earthy, rich and fermenting.
But once the tent and bodies were removed, and once the unsustaining night had passed, the wounded lissom grass perked up. Hope springs eternal in the natural world. Its leaves and blades sprang straight again. They dragged their bodies from the gluey sand to face the morning. They latched their protein-eyes on daylight. They photosynthesized. The grass’s stored supplies of water and carbon dioxide conspired with the thin light of that misty, cloudy day to make its carbohydrates and put back into the world its by-product of oxygen. At last its bludgeoned chloroplasts could go about their work, capturing the energy of sunlight. They were the master craftsmen of the grass, the conjurors of chlorophyll. Gradually, as dawn was thickening, as day grew fat to slumber through the heavy afternoon, the pigments of the vegetable scar, its corpse stretched out across the grass, returned. By dusk the rectangle of time-paled lissom grass had gone. By dusk, next day, the ghost was sappy at its tips, and only yellow lower down where the leaves were closest to their stems. After that the lissom darkened, day after day. Spring green, then apple green. And bottle green. Envy green, and green as grass.
By final light on the ninth day since the murder all traces of any life and love that had been spilt had disappeared. The natural world had flooded back. The brightness of the universe returned. If there was any blood left in the soil from Joseph and Celice’s short stay in the dunes then it could only help to fortify the living murmur of the grass.