Free Being Dead by Jim Crace Page B

rest a night. He was used to making up the loss during the day, often napping with a newspaper on weekend afternoons or, at the Institute, snacking on sleep while other students were at lunch, in bars. He was not comfortable in bars.
    He meant to catch the rising tide on a gently sloping beach. He had to hurry. High water was at eight. He hardly washed – just his face with cold tap water and dish soap at the kitchen sink. He pulled on – for luck – his fieldwork T-shirt with Dolbear’s formula (for estimating air temperature by the frequency of insect stridulations) emblazoned on the chest and back.He cleaned his teeth with his forefinger, drank cold coffee from one of last night’s cups, and went noiselessly outside in semi-darkness. He was as furtive as a burglar, and with good reason.
    Joseph had only to cut across the flagstones to the gate in the study-house yard, ten metres at the most, to find the steps and path down to the coastal track and make his escape without disturbing any of the sleepers with his footsteps. But he was tempted by a longer route, to walk through the unattended ferals of what once had been a fine maritime garden and circle the house from the rear. He wondered what the women looked like, sleeping.
    Festa did not interest him. She was a trinket. Just the woman to divert the dull and photogenic men who would share his bunk room for the week – if, that is, they could control their first-night appetites for drink and village life. But the taller one – Cecile? Celice? Cerice? a French name anyway – was not their sort. They’d find her odd. And she would find them tedious, he hoped. But, surely, she’d be Joseph’s natural ally. She was a stray, like him. Strays pack with other strays.
    Joseph had never been a flirt. Not once. ‘I’m far too short to flirt.’ So he was surprised how much this woman had enthralled him in those few minutes when they’d met the day before. He admired the way she dressed, the boots, the jeans, the dissident hair. He liked her face, her unmasked skin, her unplucked brows, her gallery of battlemongering frowns and winces, which seemed to hold a private dialogue with him. He’d leaned against the doorway to the common room, making too much fuss about his hardly injured back, so that he would have the excuse to stand and watch her while she put her clothes and books away, while she stretched to hang her coat or bent to close a drawer. Her heavy, shapely thighs were centimetres from his waist. She wasn’t beautiful. She was provoking, though. She was, he knew instinctively, his only chance.
    Joseph should have introduced himself at once. She seemed ready to be spoken to. She had challenged him several times to contribute some small remark, just by looking at him steadily – if such a shifting face as hers could be described as steady – when he must have seemed rudely silent. But he would not, and could not, compete with such unfettered, garrulous companions. He knew his weaknesses: his looks, his social skills, his impatience. He knew his strengths as well. He’d bide his time. He’d take her by surprise.
    His was the grandest vanity. He thought she’d be attracted to him more if he stayed out of sight. She’d find his faked indifference a magnet and a challenge. So he didn’t speak to her on that first afternoon. He lay down on his bunk and napped. He didn’t go with them on their shopping expedition to the village or – an easy sacrifice – to the bar. He was not there when the women came back to the study house that night. He’d forced himself, despite the cold and dark, to walk down to the shore, dead at that hour, and then, on his return, to invent moths, foxes, owls and sea bats to justify his curious excursion. And now he wouldn’t be there when his five colleagues got up in the morning. So he would make a mystery of himself, and she would need to solve him.
    Festa and Celice were not sleeping when Joseph, carrying a wet-pad for his