Being Dead by Jim Crace Read Free Book Online

the cemeteries. We’ll take you to the forest or the beach. You only have to turn a log or rock to see at once more violence and more death than you’ll discover in a hundred years of, well, life at this university, despite the instincts of the hard-pressed teaching staff when dissertations aren’t handed in on time. Enjoy yourselves.’ She’d close her book with a bang, at this, her practised, closing joke. ‘I don’t believe that any student’s perished at my hands. Yet.’
    Not true, Celice.

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