Jim Crace - Being Dead

Not true, Celice.

Celice was stretched out on the veranda when she first heard Joseph singing. Too long and big-boned for the camping mattress, she had hardly slept. She’d always been a poor sleeper. She’d spent the small hours of her adolescence pinned awake in a dormant house, with nothing for her lullaby but dyspeptic plumbing, clocks and the incessant industry of mattress springs. Fear of dreams, her mother said. But it was simpler than that. The faster a wheel is spuming, the longer it will take to come to rest. Celice, the speediest of wheels, was too quick-witted, eager, swift to give and take offence, too mercurial, impulsive, brisk and fretful for easy sleep. She was too occupied by life that first night of her study week to let it go.

Festa, though, an idle wheel, had fallen asleep at once, untroubled. She was wearing earplugs and the hood of her sleeping-bag against the noise and cold. Her heavy breathing was infuriating. So was the rattling wind. So were the men. All four of them. All men.

The drinkers had been late back from the bar, as they’d predicted. It was well past midnight and the world was already tumbling east on its home run when they finally found the heavy, ornamented gate to the unlit study house. They were malt-and-hop buffoons, stumbling against the outside steps and fly-doors and, once they’d got inside, crashing against furniture and each other. The more they crashed the more they laughed, the clumsier they were. The tallest one, Hanny, spilt kerosene and dropped matches before he managed to produce, first, a blue fire on the floorboards, then a clownish tap-dance to stamp out the flames, and, eventually, some lamplight.

The coarse beer from the village bar, served from living barrels (microbes, yeast mould, malt weevils, flies) had left them drunker and more bilious than usual. Their sense of balance was destroyed. Their stomachs were so light and volatile they’d floated up, like helium balloons, into their throats, and would rise further, given half an opportunity, a squeeze, a cough, or — God forbid — a yawn. It seemed a reckless effort just to bend, or sit, or even tilt their heads. They dared not go to bed, though it was late. It was too dangerous to sleep. The bunks would sink and spin like fairground rides. They’d never keep their evenings down. They’d flood their pillows and their sleeping-bags. There was no choice. They could not sober up before they went to bed so they’d have to fight off sleep with first some coffee and then the bottled beer that Celice and Festa had brought back from the village. The sweeter, gaseous bottled beer would steady them and keep them conscious till the morning. So they thought.

Celice could smell the brewing coffee and hear the fizz of malt gas as they untopped their bottles and flicked the caps across the room. She was tempted to get up and join them. If she could not sleep, she could at least have some of the beer she’d partly paid for. She liked to have her elbows on a table late at night, even if the company was as infuriating as these three men. She could beg a cigarette, at least. Perhaps she could persuade them to explain their lack of manners in the bar; rich boys had no excuse. What stories had they heard? How was their meal? What mischief had they got up to once she and Festa had been sent away? What had they made of those appalling girls?

She wriggled out of the sleeping-bag, pulled on some socks and her long sweater and, lit by moonlight, felt her way along the veranda to the door into the common room. She was not embarrassed to show her legs or uncombed hair, or smell of bed. This was their second chance.

The men had been whispering and laughing like dormitory boys. The squeak of the door hinge silenced them at once. Their three faces, hard lit by the table lamp and turned awkwardly towards Celice, were fearful and unsmiling. Expecting ghosts, perhaps. Or Matron. Their eyes were hard. Birdie and Hanny put their hands up to their mouths when Celice’s face broke into the lamplight and she was recognized. Victor laughed, and said, ‘What’s wrong?’

‘What’s wrong with you?’ she replied. She was ready either for a row or for some amusement. What were they grinning at?

Celice had met such grins before. Here was the same mixture of blushes and bravado that her younger cousins had displayed when they’d been smoking their father’s cigarettes or looking through blue magazines. (‘Pink magazines’ was Celice’s more accurate description.) She sniffed for cannabis. No sign of it, though there was something acrid in the air, other than tobacco and the kerosene. There was nothing on the table top she shouldn’t see, just beer bottles, coffee-cups and elbows. The men did not seem to be hiding anything. Except themselves. All three had drawn back from the light.

‘Come on, what’s going on?’ she said, and as she spoke she placed the smell, the lavender, the peppermint, the aftershave, the odours of those bright-clothed girls on their high stools and their high heels, back at the bar. Beyond it all there was the faintest yeasty and metallic scent of sex.

‘I see,’ she said. There was good reason for their blushing silence, the grins and their retreat into the shadows. These very adolescent graduates had guilty consciences. They’d been ‘poking turnip through the hedge’, what rich boys do to village girls and goats. They’d paid to go back with the truck tarts to their shanties on the airport road. Their thwarty eyes, their hands on mouths, the smell revealed as much. Celice had not expected that, when she had left them at the bar. She had expected them to boast and flirt and drink, but not to buy. That was too bestial, too devious. She pulled her sweater down to hide herself. It was too soon for them to care about her anyway, her hair, her legs, the smell of bed. These men had spent themselves on prostitutes.

Celice had been naive, she knew. She should have guessed exactly what the ‘boys’ were planning for themselves once they were unobserved. Why else would they have crowded round the bar’s high table and been so short with Festa and Celice? Why would the men attempt to sleep with clever maiden graduates or even flirt with them, when they could purchase girls like those tough teenagers, and nothing to negotiate except the price? No wasted time discussing doctoral theses. No massaging of spines. No kissing, even. And no boundaries. Money is the whoremonger, to quote Cornelius. Cash fornicates with any open purse.

Celice had seen enough French films. She could imagine the drab and low-lit rooms, the drab and low-lit girls, their skirts hitched up, the meretricious underwear, the unmade beds, and how these three would have been too drunk and overawed and pitiless to take their pleasures slowly. Perhaps they were the sort who’d never learn to take their time. Celice had had a narrow squeak. She might have ended up with one in her bed, and nothing to show for it. She stepped back out of the lamplight. Her legs were cold. ‘Keep quiet,’ she said, and closed the door on them. ‘We want to sleep.’

‘Keep quiet!’ she said again, perfecting the phrase, as she returned to her mattress. She bit her lower lip and dug her nails into her palms, resisting the temptation to kick her shoes across the floor, or tread on Festa’s outstretched hand, or scream. She’d sleep. She’d dream. She’d eat and work alone. She would not waste herself on any of these men. There’d be a week of silences. She’d hold them in contempt. She was too big and free for them. Too tough and odd. Too ugly-beautiful. ‘Shut up,’ she called out from the veranda. One of the men — smug Victor, she suspected — was trying not to laugh aloud, and failing. ‘Shut up. Shut. Up. We’re sleeping here.’ She had not felt so cruelly liberated for a year. Less preferred than prostitutes, indeed!