Being Dead Read online

  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.

  5

  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.

  Here were people to be robbed. They might have cash and jewellery, and good wristwatches, binoculars, perhaps, a camera, some lunch, some cigarettes. Anything of theirs would be better than anything of his, that was certain. Even the laces from their shoes. He’d help himself to everything, and wouldn’t be opposed; they could not defend themselves. They were like rabbits, too weak and mesmerized to run or hide, too soft to fight, too rooted to the spot. He wouldn’t try to threaten them. He’d be tongue-tied. They’d possess more words than him. He wouldn’t even use his fists. The flesh-on-flesh of fists was far too intimate. But robbing them would be the simplest thing, if he were armed.

  The man searched the scrubland near the track for something hard and heavy. A broken branch might do. A length of driftwood. A strip of fencing. There was a piece of displaced builder’s granite in the undergrowth. Pink, grey and white, an untender joint of veal, with gristle silica. It fitted in his hand. The perfect friend. He tested its power and rehearsed what he could do with it, swinging his arm, with the granite weighted in his palm, chopping at the unresisting substance of the wind, and cursing at his spectral enemies, the rich, the old, the educated and the loved, the fed, the wordy and the well-laced, whom his shadow boxing made as thin and helpless as the air.

  He took deep, energizing breaths, like a weight-lifter, to inflate himself: squat, thrust and strike. He punched the air – a prize-fighter, a champion already, the hero of an unmade film – and smacked the granite down on his thigh to feel how dangerous and bold it made him. The first blood to be drawn would be his own. He was the vanquisher and the comrade of pain. Even so, despite the self-inflicted bruises, it would not be easy to be truly enraged by the man and woman until he was closer. Then, prompted by some detail of their clothes or faces, he would find the fury to engage with them, to embrace them with his energy. He could be (he’d done this twice before) as unembarrassed and as open with his violence as, say, a fox or rook would be. A lion. They took such careless pleasure in their savagery. So would he.

  By the time he had left the track and set off to stalk and rob them, the couple had dropped out of sight amongst the dunes. He could no longer see the man’s grey head or spot the woman’s flapping scarf. But he had noted roughly where they’d disappeared and all his hunting senses were provoked. He’d not have trouble finding them, he thought. He ran along the shore at first, looking for an easy way into the dunes.

  Baritone Bay was not a bay in any geographic sense. Besides its honorary name, it had only the sand and salt dunes of a bay. The sea had not scooped out a wide-mouthed recess in the coast, an arc of beach, two headlands standing sentinel. Instead, the grey-black coast protruded here into the sea, like a delta. Here was an oddity, well worth a visit for students of earth sciences if unattractive for the rest of us, a tidejutter almost an hour’s walk from end to end, twenty minutes deep and protected from the haulage of the sea by a horseshoe of submerged rocks a hundred metres from the shore, which broke the power of the waves and left the dunes impervious to everything but the stormiest weather. The coast at Baritone Bay, naïvely unaware that water was more powerful than earth, had scooped out a wide-mouthed recess in the sea.

  The bay, of course, was subject – famously – to the wind. There was a constant drift of air that ran along the coast, west–east, so that the dunes were sculpted and aligned like resting seals. Most days the dunes would hum as the wind hugged scarp and dip across the bay. Sometimes there’d be a timpani of scratching lissom stems or the rattle of a sea thorn or a lisping a cappella from the waves. But nothing sang. No crooning baritone, so ecstatically described by guidebooks as ‘the operatic coast’. It took clear weather, temperatures near but above 16° centigrade, moist but contracting sand, a consistent and exact westerly, and the catalyst of something moving for the dunes to sing their single aria. There was clear weather that afternoon, fine and sunny, with a hugging offshore breeze, but the temperatures were rising still and the wind was misdirected by ten degrees at least. Nothing – not even an operatic sense of drama – could make the bay perform.

  The man had reached the outer sea curve of the shore. He was not singing either. He was as quiet and careful as a stalking cat. He was a noble beast. This part was the most enjoyable, the chase and the surprise. He wasn’t nervous for himself. He was in charge. Robbing them would be as easy, to use the childhood phrase, as shitting on a rug. He’d startle them. Even if they saw him coming, what could they do except presume that someone with a piece of granite in his hand would only bring misfortune? If they cried out for help, there’d be no help. No one would come to rescue them. There’d be no miracles. This was both the quiet part of the week and the quiet part of the coast. No builders yet. The dunes of Baritone Bay were – as he was now discovering – a long diversion from the track, hard going, and worth the detour only to those who relished aching legs, and sand and chaff inside their shoes. Walkers took a firmer and a safer route. Someone could die out on the dunes and not be found except by gulls.

  It took him almost half an hour to find the couple at their picnic spot, cushioned by the lissom grass.
As soon as he had climbed up off the shore into the slopes, he’d lost his way amongst the dunes. One dune, close up, was like any other. The wind had made them so. Their scarp and dips were matching, shape for shape. Twice he came between two dunes to find himself back on the shore again. He almost threw his granite rock into the waves and let the couple keep their cash and sandwiches. The weather had become too hot for him. His trousers had been soaked with spray by running waves. His shoes were wet. His thigh, which he’d struck so theatrically with the block of granite, was bruised and stiffening. Less than an hour’s walk away – if he left now – there was a car park below the visitors’ centre, which might provide easier profit. He could smash some windows and help himself to the coats, bags and radios inside. But then he heard a wind-snatched voice, the woman’s, followed by a laugh, the woman’s again. He had only to walk towards the sound to find their tracks, and the slippages in the dunes where the couple had displaced the sand with their fine feet. He was so happy he was humming to himself. A humming cat.

  He discovered Joseph and Celice in a shallow dell, protected from the wind, which now was blowing off the coast more forcefully. They were sitting where the lissom grass was at its greenest and its thickest on the landward-facing slopes, up-wind from him. Two lovers on the lawn.

  He crouched behind them, hidden by a ridge, but only watched them for a moment, to check that they were unprepared and vulnerable, that his rock was sitting firmly in his palm, and that he had the strength and will, the inspiration, even, to see this drama through. This was no paltry thing. A thief needs inspiration like any other artisan; he needs some grand and swelling muse, some driving shudder of disgust and ambition to help him bring the granite down. He has to find the fury that links all living creatures, the wildlife in himself, which could destroy in order to create. Where was the pleasure, otherwise?

  The muse obliged the man. He took his four long, descending strides towards their backs. He dared not wait. This wouldn’t take a moment, anyway, if he was purposeful.

  At first, it wasn’t obvious that Celice was naked below the waist and that Joseph had discarded all his clothes. It was too fast to notice anything, except the crown and white roots of the woman’s hennaed hair. The target for his blows. The detail that he’d chosen to inflate his anger: her white roots.

  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.

  6

  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 o
nly 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.