Being Dead

by Jim Crace

  Celice was now despairing and infuriated. The bantering of Joseph and the drunks next door, her snuffling room-mate, fast asleep, the midnight wind wheezing through the timbers of the roof, the far-off whistling of the sands, the disappointments of the day would still not allow her any rest. She was excluded from the passion and the ardours of the night, and yet kept from the anchorage of dreams by all the laughter that was coming from the common room. She knew better than to show her face again. The joy and whispering would end and, given that her tongue and temper were unpredictable, the shouting would begin. She hoped they’d caught some bad disease, she’d say. She hoped their dicks fell off.

  ‘Keep quiet,’ she tried again. But it made no difference. They couldn’t hear. The three drunks had begun to sing. Pop songs, at first. The Ballad Kings. But no one seemed to know the words. Then parlour songs, taking it in turns to add new, vulgar, badly rhyming verses to replace the romance and the antiquated comedy. Celice had had enough of the men, and not enough. She wanted capture and escape. She wanted to be free of them and part of them.

  There was still something she could do to slow her speeding wheel and bring on sleep. She knew how to soften and placate herself. She rolled on to her back on her short mattress. She braced her legs and closed her eyes. She had only to imagine what might occur if, say, one of them came out on to the veranda, tiptoed past demure and sleeping Festa, pulled down the sleeping bag and pressed his beery mouth on to her breasts. She had only to dream she was a shanty prostitute, available to any one of them in some bright bar. How would it be to lend herself to strangers, to part her legs for them, the iron bed shaking in the backyard room as the aircraft overhead came in to land? How would it be to have these men, with banknotes in their hands, lift up her shirt to rub her spine?

  She pushed a hand into her underclothes and cupped herself. Her palm and fingertips were cold. She always had cold hands. Her mother said, ‘Cold hands, cold heart. You’ll never get a husband with hands like that. You’ll make good pastry, though.’ But now, for these brief minutes, her hand could be a stranger’s hand, one of the men’s next door, Birdie’s, perhaps. Somebody she might meet aboard a train. She couldn’t put a face to him or hear his voice. His fingers and her fingers made a parting in her hair. Her heart was hammering. She made good pastry with her fingertips.

  Then, as an accompaniment to the drumming of her heart, there was at last some proper music coming loudly from the common room. Someone, not drunk, was crooning a sugar ballad, the kind her uncle used to sing when she was small enough to be rocked to sleep. This someone had a voice as grandly sentimental as the song. It dipped and peaked as Celice herself dipped and peaked in her warm bag. It shook the bottles and the coffee-cups. It played bassoon. It ran through pipes and veins and joists. The singer didn’t try, thank goodness, to add new badly rhyming verses of his own or to undermine the words. He kept the faith:

  Stand at your window sill, tonight.

  Attend my tide,

  And mark the harbour with your light.

  I’ll not be far

  From your bedside,

  My guiding star,

  My midnight bride

  In moonbeam white

  For I’ll be steered across the bar

  To you, by candlelight.

  He ended with the familiar, mawkish, dipping chorus, sung more softly than the verse, to discourage any of the other men from joining in, perhaps. The voice was so oddly sonorous and womanly that Celice had to hold her breath to catch the words. She had to hyperventilate and grip the wadding of her sleeping-bag to stop herself from spinning in her bed. Then she was indifferent to everything.

  8

  2.20 p.m.

  Celice had become resigned to making love. Better to give way than give offence, at this late stage. Joseph’s expectations had been comically, touchingly transparent, from the moment she had woken that morning to find her hand in his, her fingers squeezed, the blinds a quarter open and the sun stretched out in slats of light across her head and pillows. She’d peered with half an eye to find her husband watching her, his mind made up, his web already spun, their day prescribed, his face unusually alight. The weather, he’d said, was far too fine to waste. They had to make the most of it. Up, up and out. He’d brought her an inducement, breakfast on a tray, his usual, clumsy courting gift. Quite a price for a dish of sliced fruit.

  He perched at an odd angle in the wicker chair at her bedside while she sat up in bed to eat her breakfast fruit and sip her glass of tea.

  ‘I think we should drive to the coast,’ he said. ‘Today’s the perfect opportunity. I’ve phoned in sick.’ Not quite the truth. ‘It’s almost thirty years, you know. If you can’t do it now, then never.’ The implication was supposed to be a visit to the study house, to lay her ghost at last. The bay, the dunes were not mentioned yet. But when he said, ‘We’ll make a day of it,’ and volunteered to prepare a picnic lunch, Celice suspected that her husband meant to lay more than a ghost. He meant to reinflate their past, if only she’d agree. A quivering.

  He sat and watched Celice while she dressed. Her husband could be as guileless and transparent as a sheet of glass, and twice as grubby. She did her best not to seem too negative. She even, just to please him, just in case, put on the summer jacket and the T-shirt he had said suited her. He liked the drama of the black on white. He said the same about the printed page. Yet she was pleased.

  But by the time they reached the bay, at his insistence, she was too hot – who wasn’t hot that day? – and still too disconsolate after their visit to the wreckage of the study house to have much appetite for sex. The hour they had spent on the shore below the dunes, hunting but not finding sprayhoppers, had hardly been as nostalgic or romantic as he’d hoped. No kissing with the tide around their knees. No sopping clothes or mouths. No urgency. No blowing wet into her palm. She needed first to eat her picnic lunch and rest before she’d even let him touch her. Then she might relent. Although she doubted it. Times change.

  She suggested – half teasing him and half hoping that her choice of an open picnic spot might help to thwart his lovemaking until they were back home, behind locked doors – that they sit on rocks, looking out across the sea at Baritone Bay, watching seajacks and skimmers while they, the humans and the birds, ate lunch. Then they could go hunting in the running tide for sprayhoppers again, the most elusive of insects nowadays, it would seem. That ought to be their entertainment for the day. That ought to be enough.

  ‘I’d forgotten how strange it was out here,’ she said, climbing up, despite the rheumatism in her shoulders and her wrists, on to a shelf of heated rocks with sweeping views both out to sea and along the coast. She lifted the straps of her sacados over her head, wincing at the stiffness and discomfort, and took out the foil-wrapped sandwiches and the fruit, the cheese, the flask, the knife. ‘Let’s eat.’

  Joseph shook his head. ‘It’s windy there.’

  ‘There’s hardly any wind.’

  ‘Come on, not there. I’ll find a place.’

  He should have said, I’ll find the place because, as Celice knew full well, only fifty paces or so into the dunes behind them, rock free and with no ocean views, was the grassy spot where, all those years before, they’d first had sex. That time she’d been the schemer and he uncertain and reluctant. This time, so far, her tables had been turned. She wasn’t sure whether Joseph’s torturing desire to put the clocks back to the seventies and to repeat that first encounter, was flattering or manipulative or merely thoughtless. Was this romantic or annoying? She’d allow him the benefit of the doubt, if she must. She’d not be sorry if the moment passed.

  ‘I’ll wait here. You find it first,’ she said.

  ‘Find what?’

  ‘You know exactly what. Out of the wind. Go on. You get your way. I’ll wait.’

  Celice removed her shoes, shook out the sand and placed them, upside down, next to the sacados. She ate her sandwiches while she waited for her husband to return. She
liked to be alone when she was eating. She’d always preferred her meals to be more contemplative than social; her lunch-breaks at the university, at the comer table with her back against the room, her rest-day breakfasts out on their deck when Joseph was at work, the suppers taken up to bed. These once had been an opportunity, as well, to smoke without her husband’s purse-faced disapproval, though Celice had not had a cigarette now for seventeen weeks. Her breakfast cough, the smell, the propaganda, and unrelenting memories of Festa, had finally warned her off tobacco, though she’d only been a dilettante smoker anyway, one pack of Dortmundas a week at most. Those days when she’d enjoyed a cigarette, a drink and conversation, with her elbows on a table late at night, were long gone. She hardly recognized the girl she’d been. So much of her had disappeared. The blackness of her hair. The hollow underchin. Her muscle tone. Her libido. An appetite for trains and hotel rooms. Dunes shift. She could only half regret the way she’d been, how carelessly available she must have seemed when she’d met Joseph at the end of that strange year of sex and fire.

  Those early times with Joseph had been difficult. Not loving him. Monogamy of love was something she was suited to. But physical monogamy was hard. How often she’d been tempted to reach out through the bars. These days, though, she was indifferent most of the time to making love with anyone. She would not welcome the attentions of backbone pianists or room service. Her greatest fantasy was a night of unbroken sleep. The massages she cherished now were for her rheumatism and for migraines. They should placate her, not provoke. She wasn’t in her twenties any more; the easy pleasures of the flesh were much reduced by wear, tear and repetition. Her shoulders hurt. Her body was more tender than it used to be, and less productive. Besides, her Joseph was a conquest she’d already made and didn’t need to make again. At least, not frequently. She didn’t have to worry about losing him to someone else. She was, he always said at times like this, ‘the only one’. He was her what? Her fifth, sixth lover, and her last.

  Was it exactly six or was it more? She spread the fingers of one hand and counted them. Her blessed rosary. The boy when she was seventeen. That’s one. Her little finger. She held him snugly in her other hand. She couldn’t even recall his name. He had black hair, the use of his father’s car and absolutely no idea how girls were made or how to park. Then there was Mr Room Service, the maestro of the spine. Followed by her year of pickups, none of whom had made love to her more than twice. She blushed even to think how she’d behaved, the risks she’d taken for so little in return. A young professor from the city college whose wife, he claimed, had left him (but only for the afternoon). She’d drawn blood on his neck. A waiter, who’d come back to her rooms one evening after he had served – and undercharged – her on the terrace of the Floridel. He’d been a very handsome man but not especially bright or passionate. And then – her thumb – the student she had startled in the empty study room one day. How reckless and courageous she had been. He hadn’t wanted to make love to her. Someone will interrupt, he said. But she’d insisted. She’d only had to nudge his trouser front and he was hers. She was in charge of him for at least two minutes. That was one minute more than her command of number six, her little finger once again, a German tourist who was drunk (though beautiful). The last – he lived across the hall, the slipper man – had survived with her a month. He loved the cinema. Five times a week. But not the bed.

  That’s seven, not counting Joseph. Joseph did not count. For when Celice recalled her adventures, Joseph was not on the list. Husbands are not adventures. Nor are they pickups to be enjoyed and then discarded. They are the custom of the house. They are the formula.

  The truth is that mature Celice would rather have her cigarettes returned and, yes, some undemanded tenderness in the shape of books, opera CDs and house plants, than her old appetites. Lust had abandoned her; she had despaired of it – and there were times when irritation was the only passion that she felt. She was provoked not by her husband’s melting voice these days – although occasionally he tried to win her back with an old song – nor by his hand across her neck, but by his radio, the clutter that he left in every comer of the house, his acid hypochondria, his toiletries, his unselfconscious repetition of the facts.

  Perhaps that’s why, although the day-long prospect of making love again to Joseph in the dunes had not much stimulated her so far, the five minutes that she’d spent, while he was absent, resuscitating her seven other men had already aroused her so much more. She closed both fists and unbent, erected, one finger at a time, rehearsing once again their kisses and their liberties. How giddy it had been to give herself to virtual strangers, to snatch some passion in the afternoon, to lie out naked on a hotel bed with Room Service attending to her spine and with, of course, a pack of Dortmundas open on the table top. Deep satisfaction was at hand when she was young. She only had to lift an arm and reach. The lips, the finger and the cigarette. How giddy it would be again – a little late in life, too late for him, alas – to be desired, just once, by someone other than her husband. There was, had been, a man. She did not want to put a name and face to him, her concert-going colleague at the university, so recently removed. But that had been her harmless fantasy for years. He could have been her number eight.

  When Joseph came back to her rock, a little breathless and disappointed to report he couldn’t find or recognize ‘their spot’, Celice no longer cared.

  ‘It’s obvious,’ he was explaining. ‘It’s almost thirty years since we were here. And dunes migrate . . .’ He really was an irritating man.

  ‘Let’s just find anywhere,’ she said, to Joseph’s evident surprise. And his alarm, perhaps. She pulled her bag on to her shoulders and, carrying her shoes, walked off between two dunes with Joseph following, his heartbeat almost audible. She sensed his gluey eyes, as if she were a model on a catwalk, naked, clothed, a flick and shuss of skin and fabric. She was relieved to find she could willingly indulge his desires after all and even match them with some feelings of her own. A great relief. She hadn’t felt so much like making love for years. She had recovered her old self through memory, receding. A quivering of lovers from the past. The drumming rosary of fingertips.

  These are the instruments of sex outdoors. You need good weather, somewhere dry to stretch out far from dogs and wasps, and no sense of the ridiculous. Celice wanted privacy, a place beyond the eyes of passers-by, though it was not likely they’d be spied or interrupted. Hardly anyone came out on to the bay, these days, now that the Baritone coast had been ‘released’, they said, for building. She was looking for a mattress of the lissom grass, which still flourished thickly on the leeward-sloping sand. She found one within a minute, not quite flat, pillowed at one end, a bit too sandy, but it would do. She was in a hurry, but still self-conscious in a way she hadn’t been in her mad months. Prehistory. She didn’t want to take off all her clothes, not in the hard sunlight, not in her fifty-sixth year. She pulled off her trousers and her underpants and folded them on top of her shoes. Still slim, waist up, and neatly dressed. The naked pigeon thighs. The balcony of fat around her navel. The strong and veiny legs. But she did want Joseph naked. She watched while he threw off his clothes. His penis was engorged but not erect, though she could tell from his dropped lip and his short breaths how earnest and absorbed he had become.

  She faced him, put one hand across his shoulder and ran her other hand, her first five lovers, down his chest and abdomen. His retracted testicles were creased like walnuts, damp and warm to touch. She almost said he ought to lose some weight and do some exercise. But she had the sense to hold her tongue. These were fragile moments, soon betrayed. Too soon betrayed, in fact. For she had hardly touched him when he ejaculated. Fulsomely. The sudden shock of her cold hands, perhaps. Bad pastry. There was the usual groan of men his age, the disappointment and the pleasure in one go. So much for well-laid plans.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Celice said. And, indeed, it didn’t matter. It was comical, this failure to contain himsel
f for once, this clownish tragic curtain call, this pantomime called sex. Her husband was a man who lived in fear of folly, denying his exquisite gift for folly all the time. She found that so endearing. You couldn’t call it manly, not with him. But it was lovable.

  She made him sit between her legs, so that they both faced sideways to the sun. She made him eat his lunch. ‘You’ll need the strength.’ There was no rush. They had all afternoon to try again. She leaned her body on to his and wrapped an arm across his chest. If she wanted tenderness to precede the passion, then now she had her way. Joseph was not capable of both at once. So few men are. Passion is the work of seconds. You only have to make a god of what you most desire. But the gentler pleasures are built up over decades. She rubbed her knuckles down his spine.

  ‘I wonder if the bay will sing again,’ she said. ‘Remember?’

  They waited, while Joseph ate some of his sandwich grumpily. He hardly dared speak. They listened for the baritone and waited for the flesh to recompose itself. She would have liked a cigarette. A pre-coital smoke. Instead, she kissed his scalp, his neck, his ears. She pushed her nose and lips into her husband’s thinning hair. She stroked his chest and brushed away the fallen sandwich crumbs. She reached between his legs and tugged his pubic hair.

  ‘Listen,’ Joseph said. He thought he’d heard some shifting sand, a humming voice, a body on the move, a discord in the wind. With any luck it was the dunes.

  ‘It’s not as if . . .’ Celice began to say.

  9