Being Dead Read Online Free PDF Page B

back. Her chin was resting on his head. Their arms were pleached like turnip roots. She was talking in a wealthy, educated voice, hesitating, searching for the proper words. ‘It’s not as if . . .’ she said. And then her scalp hung open like a fish’s mouth. The white roots at her crown were stoplight red.
    By the time he registered their nakedness, the stone had hit her head three times. His granite strokes demolished her. Celice fell back almost at once. The granite struck her four more times. Her nose. Her cheek. Her mouth. Her throat. Seven piston blows in scarcely more than seven seconds. Purposeful, indeed.
    Her husband didn’t stand a chance. He felt the recoil first, her chin was banged against his head. Then he heard her splitting skull, its vacuum punctured. Just for an instant, he mistook the first wound gasping through its gashes at the salty air like the red gills of a fish, for Celice’s voice, a startled shush of pain as if she had been stung by ants or by a wasp. Then – too late – he saw the pounding arm and heard the grunts of someone other than his wife. He hardly had the time to turn and check. Or stand. Or make some small sounds of his own.
    For a man in his fifties Joseph was not as agile as he ought to have been. He didn’t exercise. He had defaulted on himself. His body’s pinions, coils and springs had lost their elasticity. His impulses were slow. His reflexes were numbed. He was half crouching, his body already twisted away from the attack, and preparing to flee rather than to throw himself between the granite and his wife, when the man’s heavy shoe struck his underchin and knocked his head back. He received the rock, first, on the forehead, and then more wildly and less logically across the chest and upper abdomen as if the granite worker could not bring himself to break a stranger’s spectacles. Too much respect.
    Another instant, shorter than a blink – the two men looked each other in the eye.
    Joseph brought his hands up to his chest to shield himself against the granite. His knuckles split. Bare bone and blood. Then he tumbled on his back, too winded and too shocked to help himself. Unlike his wife – who, though still bucking from the blows, could feel no pain – he was loudly conscious. There was the taste of vomit in his throat; an orchestra was tuning up between his ears. His gut was punctured by a broken rib. He understood the danger he was in. He must have known that there was worse to come. He did his best to scream, but fear and the constrictions in his throat only made him sound as if he were a very constipated man.
    The granite wielder had not meant to take their lives. It hadn’t mattered to him either way. He would have simply helped himself to their possessions and gone away, if Joseph hadn’t tried to scream. He didn’t like the noise that Joseph made. It was disturbing. He stamped on Joseph’s shoulder twice to shut him up. He struck him with the rock on the right side of his skull. Unable to resist the obvious, he kicked the soft and naked testicles.
    Now the couple were doing what he wanted, keeping still and silent. He needed peace and quiet to search their clothes, their bodies and Celice’s bag, the leather sacados she’d bought ten years before at a conference in Ankara, though he was breathless and his hands were shaking like a pensioner’s. He felt a little nauseous himself, and close to tears. He’d strained his wrist. It hurt to push his hands into their pockets and lift their bodies. His heart was beating far too fast. But this diversion from the coastal track had been well worth his while. His haul: two watches and a bracelet, car keys, three rings, enough money for a week in a cheap hotel, trousers, socks and shoes, a nice silk scarf. And from the woman’s sacados, which he emptied on the grass, a peach, two biscuits, some sunscreen, a quarter cheese in foil, apples, a copy of the
Entomology
, an envelope of toilet tissue, a plastic flask