Being Dead (3 page)

Celice was in no hurry to project herself or discuss her study of the oceanic bladder fly (which lived and laid its eggs in the buoyancy sacs of inshore wrack), though no one asked. She was used to pretty girls like Festa and how they burned up all the oxygen when first encountered. She’d learned to bide her time with men. When she wanted she would be the more imposing of the two, despite her looks. Celice was tall, small-breasted, dressed like a man in shirt and jeans and mountain boots, and physically ‘squab’ (her mother’s term), which meant that though her upper body and her waist were slim, her thighs and buttocks were much heavier. She had the figure of a pigeon or a pear. She took large steps. She drank. She smoked. She stayed up late at every opportunity. Her laugh, when truly earned, was loud and disrespectful. She was a flirt.

She hadn’t been a flirt ten months before. In fact, in those calmer and forgotten days, she hadn’t any time for men at all. They never paid attention to her anyhow, never tried to make her laugh or make her kiss. They didn’t turn to stare when she walked by. She wasn’t prudish. She’d had three short-lived boyfriends in her teens, and though she’d only slept with the last she’d horsed around so much with the other two that there was little that she hadn’t learned – and liked – about their sudden passions and her own. But latterly she had become, she knew, too big and plain and clever and, at almost twenty-six, too old for marriage. She was dejected every time she saw an image of herself, in a mirror, in a photograph, in the heartless window of a shop. Men did not seem to see her any more. She turned to cats and cigarettes. Her life would be her work, she thought. She’d masturbate. She’d baby-sit. She’d wear thick glasses, read thick books, and be an aunt.

Then, out of the blue, she’d been seduced by a man she’d shared a railway carriage with, when she was visiting the National Aquarium for lectures. She’d shared his taxi, too, his restaurant table, his confidences, and then, amazingly, his hotel bed and breakfast. He’d said the district where she’d booked her boarding room was dangerous and dirty, and that it was his duty to take care of her. He had been good at taking care of her. She guessed he was experienced, probably by being married more than once and on the lookout, all the time, for border women like her. Passing an evening and a night as the centre of his attentions had been a revelation, a comic one at times because his sexual appetites included playing games. She’d been ‘Madame’, a snobbish hotel guest. He’d been ‘Room Service’, subject to her orders and demands. He’d rubbed, at her request, her backbone and the nape of her neck so skilfully that her eyes had flooded with surprise. Not tears.

The next day at NatAqua, in the break between lectures, Celice was hill of self-regard, and somewhat sore. Two men attached themselves to her and seemed to find her clever and amusing. One brought her wine and babbled on about himself, his promising career. The other gave her his address and said that she should get in touch if she were ever in his town. He touched her arm. He spread his fingers on her back to guide her through the crowd.

Maybe, she thought, the residues of last night’s games were showing in her eyes. Perhaps there was a lingering odour of his sheets and aftershave, or her pheromones were still out on the town, barking for attention. For once, she checked her face and hair in the long wall mirror outside the lecture theatre. She was both bolstered and dismayed by what she saw. Her lips were smudged and thickened from their kisses. She looked delighted with herself, and far too confident. But, still, there was a new Celice on show. She seemed approachable, available, a sport. Could she have changed overnight? Was a massage of the spine all it took for her to be transformed? Certainly, after that encounter on the train, her ambitions multiplied. She could will herself to be attractive. She could catch their eyes and make men turn. It didn’t matter how she looked. It was a matter of deportment. She no longer planned to be an aunt. She wanted taxis, restaurants and hotel rooms. She wanted room service and flooded eyes. It showed.

So, during the last ten months, Celice had evolved a mannish strategy for finding partners. She stood a touch too near to anyone she wanted, brushing his shoulders with hers when they were walking, standing so close that he could hear – and smell – her breath. She’d lay her hand on his arm or hold his elbow when they were talking. She’d rub or bite her lips to make them fleshier. She was trying to rediscover the smudged and thickened woman she had spotted in the mirror.

Often she’d find a man she hardly knew looking intently at her face or running his eyes over her body. She would have blushed and turned away, ten months before, presuming that he disapproved of her, was finding her ungainly, unattractive, oddly shaped and clothed. Someone had written ‘so-so’ across her forehead in the college yearbook. Other women graduates had scored a ‘Top of Year’ or ‘Man’s Best Friend’ or, simply, ‘Ace’. She knew her eyelids were a little heavy and her eyebrows rather too defined. Her skin was oily, which sometimes gave her face a lively shine but mostly was a curse, as it accounted for the blemished chin where teenage acne had left its purpled stain. Her springy hair was getting duller by the month. She’d even had to snap out a few white strands. But now, a little desperate and aided by what her railway-carriage lover had described as her ‘dizzy’ face, she could return their stares. Celice was reasonably contented with her so-so looks at last.

Mostly the men she focused on, it must be said, were nonplussed and embarrassed by her unorthodox approaches. They thought she was bizarre and fooling no one but herself. Who was she kidding with an arse like that? Why was she breathing in their faces? Was she deranged? Some of the younger lecturers avoided her. Occasionally, though, she was successful. A few times, recently, she’d taken someone home with her only for the night or afternoon. And, once, just for the forty minutes between waving goodbye to her father at the station and meeting with her professor for a tutorial, she’d satisfied a startled student she half knew in an empty study room. That was the spirit of the age in 1973. Love was disposable.

She had become, she was not ashamed to admit, eager for sex. Why not? she asked herself. You can’t make mayhem when you’re dead, you can’t make mayhem – she was wrong – when you’re white-haired. The study week at Baritone Bay was the perfect opportunity for a hurtling adventure of some kind. She would, with any luck, make love with one of these three men, probably the self-effacing ornithologist, or Birdie as she had already nicknamed him, if not all three. She laughed out loud. Just to think of it. The possibilities.

This trio of prospective suitors were not, she knew, deserving candidates. She liked surprising men. These three were callow, clubbish and predictable, and less than subtle, like most scientists. But the very fact of being in a house with them, of sleeping just a room away, was stimulating and a challenge. She wasn’t hunting for a boyfriend or a husband – her confidence was not that high – but for encounters. Conquests and encounters. She expected only to be desired and in control for a day or two, not loved.

Even if she did succeed in enticing one of these brash, dull colleagues into her sleeping-bag, she would not imagine that, once the study break was over, she had made a friend for life. One thing was certain, she’d discovered: men are embarrassed by the unexpected women they have slept with. Casual partners don’t make casual friends. They wouldn’t write. They wouldn’t call. They’d cross the street to save their blushes. Festa was the sort they’d marry, not Celice. She was wifely, motherly, petite. Yet, as soon as Hanny, Victor and Birdie discovered that the taller, plainer, odder one was open to their advances, she reckoned, they’d lose their fascination with dim Festa and concentrate on her. One of them would, at least. All she had to do, that afternoon when they were in the bar, was catch an eye or touch a hand or take the opportunity to wrap an arm around a blushing waist. She could imagine the ornithologist tiptoeing along the veranda in the middle of the night to slip into her bed. They’d push their clothes down to the bottom of the sleeping-bag with their jostling naked feet. There was the prospect of a lively week ahead.

When she and Festa returned to the study house, alone, late in the afternoon, already dark, Celice was in a less expansive mood. The men had not turned out to be the attentive company she had imagined, despite her best efforts. As soon as they had left the fields and walked into the village, all three had fallen silent, self-conscious at the way they must appear to the country wives and labourers who watched them going past from their front gates and barns. Their cash seemed heavy in their pockets. Their student clothes and rucksacks felt snobbish and indulgent. Their skin was too well shaved. They kept their voices low, in case their accents gave offence.

Victor was the first to start compensating for his class and education by behaving like a conscript or a rowdy poor boy from the provinces or a farmer’s son instead of someone from a family that bullied fortunes out of villages like this. Buy, bulldoze and build. He called out greetings to passers-by in an accent he’d not had before. Hanny and Birdie followed suit. They swore. They stamped their feet. They kicked at anything that lay in their paths – a stone, horse dung, a boulder snail – like bored and reckless country boys. They wouldn’t go into the store with Festa and Celice. What farmer’s son would shop for eggs and bread? The women could do that, they said, while the men reserved a table and some chairs in the bar. ‘We’ll test some beers.’ Tough talk.

The women, it seemed, would be left to entertain themselves as well, when they finally arrived at the bar with their rucksacks full of local manac beans, green milk, farm cheese and eggs, rice, pilchards, cucumbers, tins of imported meat, bottled water, bottled beer. They could pay for their own drinks and sit by themselves, out of the way, because the three men had taken the three spare stools at the high table and were buying shots of gleewater for the truck-girls there, whose usual customers, the produce drivers coming to the town and the few surviving ‘fish chauffeurs’ with that day’s catch, would not arrive till evening. Whatever seduction tricks Celice had tried in the past ten months were timid compared to those of these young, stalwart girls. They were all fingernails and heels. They smelt of lavender and peppermint and aftershave. Their stockings squeaked. Their lips were pepper red.

The three men had decided to stay at the bar, try all the local brews, pick local brains, eat beans with sour bread and yoghurt like country folk, Birdie explained, meaning that their two embarrassing companions should not expect to be escorted back to the study house just yet, if at all. This might prove to be a long and drunken night, too long and drunken for Festa and Celice who should feel free to go right now, if they were bored, if they were nervous of the dark.

Joseph wasn’t there when the women got back to the study house. There was no light, nor had any of the lamps been primed with kerosene. The coffee-cups were still unwashed, the mattresses were not unrolled, and the draught-spread sand on the common-room floor had only deepened in their absence.

No one had tampered with the drawers either, as far as Celice could tell. That was a disappointment in a way. Another rebuff in an afternoon of rebuffs. Even Joseph, the least of the four, might have had the grace and curiosity to show some interest in her comfort and her diary and her underwear.

3.10 p.m.

Celice could not have seen the granite plunging through the air on his ferocious arm. The man had crept up from behind. He must have known as soon as he’d caught sight of them from the coastal path, drawn by the cartoon sunflash of Joseph’s spectacles, what sort they were, what treatment they deserved from him.

Here were people to be robbed. They might have cash and jewellery, and good wristwatches, binoculars, perhaps, a camera, some lunch, some cigarettes. Anything of theirs would be better than anything of his, that was certain. Even the laces from their shoes. He’d help himself to everything, and wouldn’t be opposed; they could not defend themselves. They were like rabbits, too weak and mesmerized to run or hide, too soft to fight, too rooted to the spot. He wouldn’t try to threaten them. He’d be tongue-tied. They’d possess more words than him. He wouldn’t even use his fists. The flesh-on-flesh of fists was far too intimate. But robbing them would be the simplest thing, if he were armed.

The man searched the scrubland near the track for something hard and heavy. A broken branch might do. A length of driftwood. A strip of fencing. There was a piece of displaced builder’s granite in the undergrowth. Pink, grey and white, an untender joint of veal, with gristle silica. It fitted in his hand. The perfect friend. He tested its power and rehearsed what he could do with it, swinging his arm, with the granite weighted in his palm, chopping at the unresisting substance of the wind, and cursing at his spectral enemies, the rich, the old, the educated and the loved, the fed, the wordy and the well-laced, whom his shadow boxing made as thin and helpless as the air.

He took deep, energizing breaths, like a weight-lifter, to inflate himself: squat, thrust and strike. He punched the air – a prize-fighter, a champion already, the hero of an unmade film – and smacked the granite down on his thigh to feel how dangerous and bold it made him. The first blood to be drawn would be his own. He was the vanquisher and the comrade of pain. Even so, despite the self-inflicted bruises, it would not be easy to be truly enraged by the man and woman until he was closer. Then, prompted by some detail of their clothes or faces, he would find the fury to engage with them, to embrace them with his energy. He could be (he’d done this twice before) as unembarrassed and as open with his violence as, say, a fox or rook would be. A lion. They took such careless pleasure in their savagery. So would he.

By the time he had left the track and set off to stalk and rob them, the couple had dropped out of sight amongst the dunes. He could no longer see the man’s grey head or spot the woman’s flapping scarf. But he had noted roughly where they’d disappeared and all his hunting senses were provoked. He’d not have trouble finding them, he thought. He ran along the shore at first, looking for an easy way into the dunes.