Being Dead by Jim Crace Page B

of death. They might not know how strong and wonderful they are. But when every human being in the world has perished, and all our sewerage pipes and gas cookers and diesel engines have fossilized, there will still be insects. Take my word. Flourishing, evolving, specializing insects.’ Here he resurrected his best line from his student thesis. ‘There will still be sprayhoppers . . . snatching their sustenance from the pincers of the waves.’
    Even now, with no sprayhoppers to be seen, the doctor did not doubt his general accuracy. On countless other, more mildly sloping beaches of the coast there would be many active colonies. He’d seen them himself, many times in recent years, on the Mu and at Tiger Crab Edge. It made no difference that he was not there today to witness them or endow them with a consciousness. (‘They couldn’t give a damn about the scenery, these little chaps.’) It was still a disappointment, though, to find that, on this shore at least,
Pseudogryllidus pelagicus
had disappeared.
    Joseph’s disappointment was not wholly scientific, despite his long-term fondness for the creatures and their connivance in his doctorate. The fantasy that he had nurtured since he’d watched Celice in bed that morning demanded sprayhoppers. They were his Valentine. They were his single rose. They were erotica. If he were to place Celice back amongst the dunes at Baritone Bay where they had once made love, so memorably, so hauntingly, so awkwardly, then first he had to lure her to the beach. So far, achieved. Though by a painful route. But then he needed some strategy more serpentine to take her from the melancholy of the charred remains into the clutching frolic of his arms. He’d need a Venus ladder of deceit, step over step. Something that was more discreet than kissing her or bursting into that old song she had loved, the words of which he could hardly recall. He’d thought the sprayhoppers would be his collaborators once again. He’d pick some off her white T-shirt, out of her hair, blow once more into her hand, set the little creatures flying through the air, and then, perhaps (an innocent progression), drop his spaniel tongue on to her open palm. (‘Another go. Blow wet.’) Would she then allow his hand to push into her black wool coat?
    But now unfeeling nature had thrown up a beach too steep for Valentines. This Venus ladder had had its middle rung removed. Time, though, had not destroyed the light. The universe had not expanded quite so fast. Nor had it robbed the spreading breakers of their sorcery. His wife, ahead of him, calf deep, her trousers up around her knees, was burnished, thinned and immatured by sunshine bouncing off the sea, the silver flattered by the gold. A fillet of her hair fell loose across her face, picked up and dropped by a conspiring breeze. A nape of neck. The waist-enhancing sacados. The tugging whiteness of her underclothes. The bottoms of her trousers wet with sea. A woman dressed in black and white; a landscape dressed in blue. No wonder Joseph was enhanced. Had Celice looked round at what was dogging her, she’d have as usual to give its Latin name as
homo erectus
or
homo semens
. Its common name bone slave or love-gone-wild or thrall.
    ‘Let’s go. On to Baritone,’ her husband said, once they had walked the whole length of the beach and she was turning to retrace their route. He spoke as lightly as he could, blocking her. He tugged her jacket lapels.
    ‘What for?’ Celice raised an eyebrow. Her husband was too breathless and attentive. She didn’t need a cricket on her palm to read his mind.
    ‘I think the tides might run more lightly there,’ he said. ‘We have to see at least one sprayhopper now that we’ve driven out. There has to be a colony on the bay. Surely.’
    ‘We have to? Why the we? You go. Anyway, it’s rocky on the bay. You’ve less chance finding any there than here.’ Celice’s feet and back were aching. Her shoulders and her wrists were