Jim Crace - Being Dead

His arm was in the air. She had her back to him. Her legs were stretched out on the sloping grass so that her body was thrown slightly forward. Her husband sat between her legs, almost like a boy, a teenage son, encircled by the gateway of her knees. Her body pressed against his back. Her chin was resting on his head. Their arms were pleached like turnip roots. She was talking in a wealthy, educated voice, hesitating, searching for the proper words. ‘It’s not as if. ’ she said. And then her scalp hung open like a fish’s mouth. The white roots at her crown were stoplight red.

By the time he registered their nakedness, the stone had hit her head three times. His granite strokes demolished her. Celice fell back almost at once. The granite struck her four more times. Her nose. Her cheek. Her mouth. Her throat. Seven piston blows in scarcely more than seven seconds. Purposeful, indeed.

Her husband didn’t stand a chance. He felt the recoil first, her chin was banged against his head. Then he heard her splitting skull, its vacuum punctured. Just for an instant, he mistook the first wound gasping through its gashes at the salty air like the red gills of a fish, for Celice’s voice, a startled shush of pain as if she had been stung by ants or by a wasp. Then — too late — he saw the pounding arm and heard the grunts of someone other than his wife. He hardly had the time to turn and check. Or stand. Or make some small sounds of his own.

For a man in his fifties Joseph was not as agile as he ought to have been. He didn’t exercise. He had defaulted on himself. His body’s pinions, coils and springs had lost their elasticity. His impulses were slow. His reflexes were numbed. He was half crouching, his body already twisted away from the attack, and preparing to flee rather than to throw himself between the granite and his wife, when the man’s heavy shoe struck his underchin and knocked his head back. He received the rock, first, on the forehead, and then more wildly and less logically across the chest and upper abdomen as if the granite worker could not bring himself to break a stranger’s spectacles. Too much respect.

Another instant, shorter than a blink — the two men looked each other in the eye.

Joseph brought his hands up to his chest to shield himself against the granite. His knuckles split. Bare bone and blood. Then he tumbled on his back, too winded and too shocked to help himself. Unlike his wife — who, though still bucking from the blows, could feel no pain — he was loudly conscious. There was the taste of vomit in his throat; an orchestra was tuning up between his ears. His gut was punctured by a broken rib. He understood the danger he was in. He must have known that there was worse to come. He did his best to scream, but fear and the constrictions in his throat only made him sound as if he were a very constipated man.

The granite wielder had not meant to take their lives. It hadn’t mattered to him either way. He would have simply helped himself to their possessions and gone away, if Joseph hadn’t tried to scream. He didn’t like the noise that Joseph made. It was disturbing. He stamped on Joseph’s shoulder twice to shut him up. He struck him with the rock on the right side of his skull. Unable to resist the obvious, he kicked the soft and naked testicles.

Now the couple were doing what he wanted, keeping still and silent. He needed peace and quiet to search their clothes, their bodies and Celice’s bag, the leather sacados she’d bought ten years before at a conference in Ankara, though he was breathless and his hands were shaking like a pensioner’s. He felt a little nauseous himself, and close to tears. He’d strained his wrist. It hurt to push his hands into their pockets and lift their bodies. His heart was beating far too fast. But this diversion from the coastal track had been well worth his while. His haul: two watches and a bracelet, car keys, three rings, enough money for a week in a cheap hotel, trousers, socks and shoes, a nice silk scarf. And from the woman’s sacados, which he emptied on the grass, a peach, two biscuits, some sunscreen, a quarter cheese in foil, apples, a copy of the Entomology , an envelope of toilet tissue, a plastic flask half filled with juice, a strip of painkillers, a hairbrush, notebook, cheese knife and three pens. All useful things. Except the magazine. It landed on the scarp slope of the neighbouring dune.

He had to roll the woman on to her front to search her jacket. She was tall and heavy, uncooperative, and damp. But there was little in her pockets, except a crumpled tissue, a button, laced with broken threads, which must have loosened from the sleeve, and a mobile phone, no use to him, he had no one to phone. He wiped Celice’s blood off his shirt and arms and threw the tissue and his piece of granite into the longer grass. He spat away the smell of her. Finally, he helped himself to Joseph’s discarded sweater, not only to hide the bloodstains on his shirt but also because, despite the tall heat of the afternoon, he was shivering.

He did not check to see if they were dead. His job was finished. He pushed both biscuits into his mouth, packed his booty into a bag made out of stolen trouser legs — the sacados was far too womanly — and set off with their car keys for their car. He didn’t pause to look at Joseph or Celice. He was embarrassed by their age and nakedness. Perhaps he’d not have punished them so much if they’d been clothed. They’d brought this bad luck on themselves.

The bodies were discovered straight away. A beetle first. Claudatus maximi. A male. Then the raiding parties arrived, drawn by the summons of fresh wounds and the smell of urine: swag flies and crabs, which normally would have to make do with rat dung and the carcasses of fish for their carrion. Then a gull. No one, except the newspapers, could say that ‘There was only Death amongst the dunes, that summer’s afternoon.’

This single beetle had no appetite for blood. He was not a scavenger. His preference — his speciality — was for the roots of lissom grass, the only vegetation on the dunes, apart from the sea thorn and the sapless tinder trees, that could make a good green living out of sand. He had been feeding in an exposed tangle of roots when Celice fell back. Her sudden shadow might have been a hawk. But Claudatus maximi was fortunate. The woman’s body only up-ended him and pressed him into the grass. Unlike humans, beetles have armour plating on their backs. They’re not soft fruit. They are designed to withstand blows.

The beetle flipped off his back and hurried towards the sunlight still visible beyond the warm and wool-roofed cavern, which had enclosed him so suddenly. His legs caught in the folds of Celice’s black jacket. Wool was harder work than sand or grass. It snagged on him, a heavy web. But he persevered against the cloth and against the unexpected darkness. Dune beetles choose to feed in light. Celice was an eclipse for him. Claudatus did not appreciate the woman’s company. He fled her weight and shadow, despite the ancient dangers of the open air, the skin-eyed hawks, the gull, the squadron ants, the parasites, the playful boys with jam-jars. He didn’t carry with him any of that burden which makes the human animal so cumbersome, the certainty that death was fast approaching and could arrive at any time, with its plunging snout, blindly to break the surface of the pool. Mondazy’s Fish again. It’s only those who glimpse the awful, endless corridor of death, too gross to contemplate, that need to lose themselves in love or art. His species had no poets. He was not fearful of Mondazy’s Fish. He had not spent, like us, his lifetime concocting systems to deny mortality. Nor had he passed his days in melancholic fear of death, the hollow and the avalanche. Nor was he burdened with the compensating marvels of human, mortal life. He had no schemes, no memories, no guilt or aspirations, no appetite for love, and no delusions. The woman had destroyed his light. He wanted to escape her, and to feed. That was his long-term plan, and his hereafter.