Jim Crace: Being Dead

Celice presumed — and she was partly right — that Joseph couldn’t stand their company. He didn’t want to walk in such a frothy group or be exposed to their good humour or their cigarettes. He’d always hated cigarettes. He wasn’t interested in going to a store. Food wasn’t worthy of his attentions. He was too serious and grand for meals. She could imagine his unfinished plate, his wine-glass hardly touched. Certainly he wouldn’t be at ease in a village bar, having to drink alcohol or endure their conversation. She’d already marked him down as what she called a castaway, someone who’d lost or never knew the trick of being sociable, a single set of footprints in the sand. She didn’t care for him at all. She’d been a castaway herself.

Celice didn’t really trust him, either. His damaged back, she guessed, was a sham. It was an old man’s or a shirker’s malady. No one had actually seen him slip. He didn’t seem in any pain. She looked around the study house before they left on their shopping expedition. She noted anything that Joseph might try to ‘fix’ while they were away. He might clear the coffee-cups, for instance. Or sweep some of the sand out of the house. Or prepare the kerosene lamps. Or tidy the disarray of bags and boots inside the veranda where Celice and her colleague, Festa, had yet to unroll their mattresses. He might, at least, lay out their beds for them. If he did not, she would make some light remark at his expense when they returned.

She even checked the disposition of the two ill-fitting drawers in which she’d stored her trousers, shirts and skirts, her notes and books, her purse and diary and her underclothes. The upper drawer was flush. The lower was misaligned, protruding by a centimetre on the left. She’d know if he’d been snooping. She’d snoop, of course, if she were left alone. What might she find inside his antique case? Snooping was the human thing to do.

Celice was glad to leave the study house. Already her companions were showing off, splashing through the marshy undergrowth, more like teenagers than the finest students of their faculties. This outing would be fun. She liked the effortless company of easy-going men. It didn’t matter that the shortest and least attractive of the four had decided to stay behind. It made her feel more carefree and awakened to be one of only two women in such intensive company. Joseph would have watered down the mix.

Festa was more demure than Celice, cherry-faced and warmly brimming, with thick, loose hair and an enraging voice, low-pitched and deferential to the men. She wore makeup, even for the walk across the fields, and did her best to overuse her spongy laugh.

Once they had crossed the backlands to the drier fields and could walk along the tractor track, five abreast, it was only Festa who was flirted with. The talk, at first, was dull and predictable, all about the study projects they’d been set and what the prospects for employment were, once they had achieved their doctorates. Two of the men — Hanny and Victor, pampered sons of businessmen — were working on shore crustaceans and could expect to be taken on by Fishery Research, a job for life. Or failing that, they could take over from their fathers in heavy imports and construction. The third, and most attractive, was an ornithologist, ringing and recording seajacks. ‘I’m not employable,’ he said, but no matter, his family had money. Festa was a biochemist, studying the medical and nutritional uses of seaweed. The three men seemed to find that subject fascinating and full of prospects. They quizzed her on the tests she would conduct, and offered help with raking in her specimens. She told them all the local seaweed names in Latin, making, Celice noticed, two mistakes.

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.