Free Being Dead by Jim Crace Page A

One of them would never have to become accustomed to the absence of the other, or need to fix themselves on someone new. No one would have to change their ways.
    This was not death as it was advertised: a fine translation to a better place; a journey through the calm of afterlife into the realms of instinct and desire. The persons had not gone elsewhere, to blink and wake, to sleep and salivate in some place distinctly other than this world, in No-reality. They were, instead, insensible as stones, imprisoned by the viewless wind. This was the world as it had always been, plus something less which once was doctors of zoology.
    By Wednesday noon, a gloomy day, their bodies were as stiff as wood. A full day dead. They had discoloured, too. The skin was piebald. Pallid on the upper parts. Livid on the undersides. What blood remained had gravitated downwards to suffuse their lower vessels with all its darker wastes. Celice, her nose still pressed against the grass, was purple-faced. Her downward-flexing knees and upper thighs were black as grapes. Her buttocks were as colourless as lard.
    Joseph, dead on his back, was white-faced and purple-shouldered. His lips, though, were drawn and blue, his gums had shrunk, so that his teeth appeared to have grown a centimetre overnight. His nose had sunk into his face. His tongue was also blue – the child in him had sucked its pen. Already he was losing form, though not enough, just yet, to make him animal or alien. Had anybody stumbled through the dunes and half glimpsed the bodies there, they might still have thought the couple were only sleeping, as lovers do, and hurry on, not wanting to look back on such a private place.
    The light of day had thinned the rain, though there was almost uninterrupted drizzle until the afternoon. The storm had shifted sand during the night and banked it up against the bodies on one side. Already they were sinking in. Celice’s discarded shoes and Joseph’s remaining clothes were soaked and almost buried. The wind had lifted his shirt and carried it along the dune gully and into the stretched branches of a sea thorn. It was their flag.
    By four the rain had stopped, although the sky stayed overcast and dull. Again the crabs and rodents went to work, while there was light, flippantly browsing Joseph and Celice, frisking them for moisture and for food, delving in their pits and caverns for their treats, and paying them as scant regard as cows might pay a turnip head.
    So far no one had even missed Joseph and Celice. They were not expected back at work till Thursday. Their daughter, Syl, would not phone until the weekend, if she remembered. The neighbours were used to silence from the doctors’ house. So their bodies were still secret, as were their deaths. No one was sorry yet. No one had said, ‘It’s such bad luck.’ They’d perished without ceremony. There’d been no one to rub their skin with oils or bathe and dress the bodies as they stiffened. They would have benefited from the soft and herby caresses of an undertaker’s sponge, the cotton wool soaked in alcohol to close the open pores. No one had plugged their leaking rectums with a wad of lint, or taped their eyelids shut, or tugged against their lower jaws to close their mouths. No one had cleaned their teeth or combed their hair. The murderer, that good mortician, though, had carried out one duty well. He had removed their watches and their jewellery. There was a chance, depending on the wind and sand, that even their bones might not be found or ever subjected to the standard rituals and farewells, the lamentations, the funeral, the head-stones and obituaries. Then they’d not be listed with the dead, reduced by memory and legacies. They’d just be ‘missing’, unaccounted for, absent without leave. His hand could hold her leg for good.

10
    Joseph rose early on the first morning of the study week, even though he’d only slept since three. He could easily manage on four or five hours of