Being Dead by Jim Crace Read Free Book Online Page A

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