Being Dead Read Free Page B

herself.
    Celice didn’t really trust him, either. His damaged back, she guessed, was a sham. It was an old man’s or a shirker’s malady. No one had actually seen him slip. He didn’t seem in any pain. She looked around the study house before they left on their shopping expedition. She noted anything that Joseph might try to ‘fix’ while they were away. He might clear the coffee-cups, for instance. Or sweep some of the sand out of the house. Or prepare the kerosene lamps. Or tidy the disarray of bags and boots inside the veranda where Celice and her colleague, Festa, had yet to unroll their mattresses. He might, at least, lay out their beds for them. If he did not, she would make some light remark at his expense when they returned.
    She even checked the disposition of the two ill-fitting drawers in which she’d stored her trousers, shirts and skirts, her notes and books, her purse and diary and her underclothes. The upper drawer was flush. The lower was misaligned, protruding by a centimetre on the left. She’d know if he’d been snooping. She’d snoop, of course, if she were left alone. What might she find inside his antique case? Snooping was the human thing to do.
    Celice was glad to leave the study house. Already her companions were showing off, splashing through the marshy undergrowth, more like teenagers than the finest students of their faculties. This outing would be fun. She liked the effortless company of easy-going men. It didn’t matter that the shortest and least attractive of the four had decided to stay behind. It made her feel more carefree and awakened to be one of only two women in such intensive company. Joseph would have watered down the mix.
    Festa was more demure than Celice, cherry-faced and warmly brimming, with thick, loose hair and an enraging voice, low-pitched and deferential to the men. She wore makeup, even for the walk across the fields, and did her best to overuse her spongy laugh.
    Once they had crossed the backlands to the drier fields and could walk along the tractor track, five abreast, it was only Festa who was flirted with. The talk, at first, was dull and predictable, all about the study projects they’d been set and what the prospects for employment were, once they had achieved their doctorates. Two of the men – Hanny and Victor, pampered sons of businessmen – were working on shore crustaceans and could expect to be taken on by Fishery Research, a job for life. Or failing that, they could take over from their fathers in heavy imports and construction. The third, and most attractive, was an ornithologist, ringing and recording seajacks. ‘I’m not employable,’ he said, but no matter, his family had money. Festa was a biochemist, studying the medical and nutritional uses of seaweed. The three men seemed to find that subject fascinating and full of prospects. They quizzed her on the tests she would conduct, and offered help with raking in her specimens. She told them all the local seaweed names in Latin, making, Celice noticed, two mistakes.
    Celice was in no hurry to project herself or discuss her study of the oceanic bladder fly (which lived and laid its eggs in the buoyancy sacs of inshore wrack), though no one asked. She was used to pretty girls like Festa and how they burned up all the oxygen when first encountered. She’d learned to bide her time with men. When she wanted she would be the more imposing of the two, despite her looks. Celice was tall, small-breasted, dressed like a man in shirt and jeans and mountain boots, and physically ‘squab’ (her mother’s term), which meant that though her upper body and her waist were slim, her thighs and buttocks were much heavier. She had the figure of a pigeon or a pear. She took large steps. She drank. She smoked. She stayed up late at every opportunity. Her laugh, when truly earned, was loud and disrespectful. She was a flirt.
    She hadn’t been a flirt ten months before. In fact, in those calmer and forgotten