Jim Crace - Being Dead

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.