Being Dead by Jim Crace Page A

fences to secure the beach, and lines of erosion bags arranged in chevrons to protect against shoreface recession. It seemed, as well, from the way the tides were running, that the disposition of the offshore spits and shoals, bars and channels had been redesigned. Friction and accretion, flooding, overwash and deposition had made fresh patterns. The ocean has a thousand crafts.
    Fifty metres offshore there was a new, elongated ridge of sand, which broke the waves and robbed the plunging breakers – their crest curls wrapped round tubes of air, like brandy snaps – of their dramatic energy. They reached the beach, emasculated and at a lesser angle.
    At the far end, where Joseph had once sent phlegmy – and seductive – crickets flying, the shore had lost its shallow gradient to thirty years of spilling and collapsing seas. The waves had pushed the sand higher up the beach and dumped a steep and arching shelf of pebbles and shells.
    ‘They’ll not like that,’ said Joseph.
    This could be disappointing. They almost ran along the whole length of the beach, from west to east, looking at the hem of breaking waves, hunting for sprayhoppers in the tide’s spumy residues, turning the piles of coal shells with their shoes to disturb any living fugitives. But nothing jumped for them, even though they’d timed their visit perfectly. The tide was high and running in. They should be ankle deep in crickets.
    ‘Not even one,’ said Celice.
    ‘One’s not enough. One never lasts.’
    Joseph was not entirely surprised. As soon as he had seen the steepened disposition of the shore he knew conditions would be wrong for
Pseudogryllidus pelagicus
. He’d predicted as much in his long-forgotten doctoral thesis (grandiloquently titled
Patience and Blind Chance: A Natural History of the Sprayhopper
). They were so specialized and so discriminating that they would be unable to adapt quickly enough to the fickle disposition of the waves. Blind chance had brought bad luck. ‘Too steep for them,’ he said. ‘They need a good flat beach with running tides. That’s life.’
    That’s life, indeed. But it had always been his private fancy that crickets, hoppers and beetles would withstand anything that life could toss at them. They were the grand survivors of the natural world. They were the nimblest of all insects. They were better-equipped than almost any other creature to endure extreme conditions. One had only to keep up with reports in the
Entomology
to know that there were furnace beetles, impervious to glowing coals. There were polar crickets, which lived in permafrost, and blind cavehoppers, which flourished on the limescaled rims of underground pools and listened for their tiny prey through four ears mounted on their knees. There were bugs that feasted on the hot and sticky gas tars at the back of cookers, or navigated sewerage pipes, or chewed electric cables.
    There was even a specialist cicada in South America (
Entomology
, vol. CXXI / 27) that fed and bred in diesel engines. It lived on emulsified fuel. Its common name? The grease monkey. It had first been identified in the 1970s in Ecuador. It was wingless, with short legs, designed for clinging, not for mobility. But it had travelled north and south, two thousand miles in less than twenty years, by diesel lorry and diesel train. Mechanical migration. It was now common in Mexico City and Brazil. Single specimens had turned up in engine blocks in Dallas scrapyards. Nature’s stories are the best, Joseph often said. ‘Except when you are telling them,’ his wife replied.
    ‘Whatever philosophical claims we might make for ourselves, human kind is only marginal. We hardly count in the natural orders of zoology. We’ll not be missed,’ Joseph, in a rare display of scientific passion, had told a student at the Institute when she had been too dismissive of the earth’s smaller beings. ‘They might not have a sense of self, like us. Or memory. Or hope. Or consciences. Or fear