Being Dead Read Free Page A

was their men seemed so silent and reduced. He could sing – a phrase Celice had heard applied to a Russian balladeer and loved to use about her husband – like a sea cave, turning ocean into sound. She could not sing herself, even after a drink. But otherwise she was the greater of the two.
    She’d certainly been the greater of the two when they’d first met and measured up against each other, on this same coast, those almost thirty years ago. The sapless 1970s. They had been staying at the study house, six young biologists and oceanographers (one from each of the colleges and centres attached to the Tidal Institute of which Joseph, finally and predictably, became director). The study house was on the solid backshore, twenty kilometres from town and more than a kilometre above the dunes at Baritone Bay. They slept in sleeping-bags, the four men in the bunk room at the back, Celice and her one female colleague on mattresses on the veranda.
    Celice had not attached herself to Joseph at once. There’d been no instant passion when they met. They were too alike, and had too much in common to be passionate. He hardly spoke on that first day. He hardly moved, in fact. He’d slipped and pulled the muscles in his back on the short walk from the airport road to the study house. One of the other men had had to help him with his boned and metal-cornered suitcase, an inelegant antique and the cause of too much fuss, they all agreed. Joseph, typically, had been the only one to arrive without a rucksack.
    Celice, who wasn’t generally a fashion votary or even style-conscious, had found the suitcase irritating. It declared its owner to be a boned, inelegant antique himself. In these, her most disquieted and unhappy months, Celice could find no time for innocents like Joseph. She wanted to be courted by loud and tall and handsome men. She had the choice of three.
    While the other five students were unpacking, jockeying for the better bunks and mattresses and negotiating where to store their clothes, Joseph had stood in the doorway to the common room, stretching his back and speaking not a word except to say that he preferred to leave his ‘oddments’ where they were. Strapped and locked inside the suitcase. Celice judged him to be cold, spoiled and snobbish, and hadn’t minded in the least when, while the rest of them were trading boasts and backgrounds over coffee, he’d gone to lie down on the remaining and least favoured bunk to nurse his back.
    On the first afternoon, they all walked across the backlands and the grey fields of manac beans into the shanty village (long since demolished for the road and an estate of villas) where there was a truck bar and a store. They’d fill their rucksacks with provisions for the week and get to know each other over beers. All of them, except Joseph, that is. He remained in the bunk room when his five colleagues were preparing to go out. When they called him, he said he’d better stay behind and ‘fix things up’. And rest his back. He couldn’t trudge through fields. Not in his state. He wasn’t tall enough, he said. ‘He isn’t tall enough to piss on his own shoe,’ one of the men whispered. Their stifled, guilty laughter broke the ice.
    Celice presumed – and she was partly right – that Joseph couldn’t stand their company. He didn’t want to walk in such a frothy group or be exposed to their good humour or their cigarettes. He’d always hated cigarettes. He wasn’t interested in going to a store. Food wasn’t worthy of his attentions. He was too serious and grand for meals. She could imagine his unfinished plate, his wine-glass hardly touched. Certainly he wouldn’t be at ease in a village bar, having to drink alcohol or endure their conversation. She’d already marked him down as what she called a castaway, someone who’d lost or never knew the trick of being sociable, a single set of footprints in the sand. She didn’t care for him at all. She’d been a castaway