Being Dead Read Free

flesh, and then we are all meat.
    Joseph’s grasp on Celice’s leg had weakened as he’d died. But still his hand was touching her, the grainy pastels of her skin, one fingertip among her baby ankle hairs. Their bodies had expired, but anyone could tell – just look at them – that Joseph and Celice were still devoted. For while his hand was touching her, curved round her shin, the couple seemed to have achieved that peace the world denies, a period of grace, defying even murder. Anyone who found them there, so wickedly disfigured, would nevertheless be bound to see that something of their love had survived the death of cells. The corpses were surrendered to the weather and the earth, but here were still a man and wife, quietly resting; flesh on flesh; dead, but not departed yet.
    It was as if they had been struck by lightning but the thunder, separated from its faster twin, had yet to come with its complaints to shake and terminate the bodies lying in the grass. Time was divided into light and sound. There was a sanctuary for Joseph and Celice between the lightning and the thunderclap. Such were their six days in the dunes, stretched out, these two unlucky lovers on the coast.
    This is our only prayer: May no one come to lift his hand from her leg. Let thunder never find its voice. Hold sound and light, those battling twins, apart. There is a meadow that separates death’s chilly gate and the tumbling nothingness beyond, in which our Joseph and Celice are lying, cushioned by the sunlight and the grass, and held in place by nothing firmer than his fingertip.

4
    Celice was Joseph’s senior by eighteen months. A good deal taller than him, too. Once or twice a year when they were obliged to entertain at home, it was Celice who had to reach up for the spirit glasses and the candle set on the cupboard shelf, or, in the spring, cut back the topmost branches on the fessandra bushes that screened them from their neighbours. On tiptoes, she could unscrew and change lightbulbs. She could reach high corner cobwebs with a dusting stick and spin grey candyfloss.
    ‘I’m not tall enough,’ was her husband’s once-amusing excuse for being idle while she was not. Close the windows, Joseph, she might say. Tidy up those books, for goodness sake. Write to your brother in New York. ‘I’m not tall enough.’
    Celice’s reach was greater than her husband’s in all but one respect. In their younger, more outgoing days, when he had had a drink or two and she had shamed him into singing, then he could be astounding. He had the voice of someone twice his size. His tone, so hesitant and quiet in conversation, so inefficient in the lecture room, was magisterial in song. Alcohol and lyrics made him eloquent and confident in ways that talk, with all its set responses, never could.
    Joseph’s eloquence, it must be said, was out of date, untrained. All the songs he knew he’d learned from his parents. These were dance tunes, sentimental standards, love ballads, patter songs, the sort of music we all resort to after midnight, when the lights have failed. Gas-lamp melodies. Moonlit songs. Joseph would be the only one in any company to remember all the words. He might have hardly opened his mouth in conversation all evening, but he’d still be singing when everyone else, having faked a verse or two, had fallen silent. Then he’d raise his voice and perform his unembarrassed solo, plunging (if the music would allow) through the registers so he could finish with the last line of a chorus on a comic bass. He loved to reach and hold the gravest notes.
    This was his party trick.
    It was a trick that, for Celice, more than compensated for his lack of sociability or size. Joseph’s singing undermined the other men. It left them ill-at-ease, dismayed and dull. Their wives would lift their chins, part their lips, loll their tongues, made wishful by the music. They’d watch Celice’s little doctor of zoology with dawning understanding of why it