Being Dead

7

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!

It was soon after one o’clock, and Celice was still not sleeping, when Joseph — she’d forgotten Joseph — came back to the study house without colliding with the doors or furniture. The first thing that she heard of him was his small voice. Where had he been, the three men asked, more sober now, and more subdued. And why the torch? And why — some boyish comments here — the muddy knees?

They jeered, of course, when Joseph said he’d only been walking along the coastal track into the dunes to watch the stars and see what nightlife he could find.

‘Nightlife? Oh, yes?’ said Hanny. ‘Was that nightlife in skirts? Nightlife with harry arses?’

‘Furry foxes.’ Joseph’s voice was careful and defensive; the brainy boy unused to body jokes. ‘And there were rock owls and moths and some fine sea bats. This big.’ He spread his hands.

‘Big tits,’ remarked the ornithologist. ‘Come on! You’ve not been prancing on the beach. You’ve found yourself a little farm girl. ’

‘Some short-sighted little farm lass. ’ Hanny squinted into the corners of the room, contorting his face and pursing his lips, acting the half-blind village nincompoop that Joseph might attract.

‘Sea bats. This big, as a matter of fact,’ insisted Joseph, unembarrassed by their drunkenness and delighted, even, by his own eccentricity. ‘I’m not tall enough for girls.’

‘What kind of person — as a matter of fact — goes bat-hunting.?’

‘A zoologist,’ suggested Joseph. And then, more playfully, ‘You’ve seen some fauna of your own, no doubt.’

‘Oh, yes. Wild beasts. We’ve been riding wild beasts.!’

‘Well, that was foolish,’ Joseph said. ‘You took a risk. The light’s all wrong.’ And then, no warning, he began to sing, hardly lifting his voice as if his comic riddle and its innuendoes should not be heard beyond their yellow ball of lamplight. This was not intended for Celice’s ears.

It isn’t safe to ride the beast

When the light is in the east.

All riders of the beast will die

Unless the moon has crossed the sky.

Be still while beast light’s in beast east,

Bestow beast man with your best beast,

For, once beast star bestrides beast sky,

Beast moon bestirs and beast will die.

Who dies? The beast? The sky? The moon?

The light? The man?

We’ll all know soon.

Now they wouldn’t let him go to bed. ‘Again,’ they said. ‘And sing it fast, sing it fast, sing it fast.’ The little man was more amusing than they had expected. He could be the drunkest of them all, by far, even if he’d only drunk with bats and moths. They insisted that he take a bottle of ‘their’ beer and sit with them at the common-room table, staring at the ducking flame in the lamp. They wanted more of his exquisite nonsense.

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.