Read Being Dead for Free Online

half filled with juice, a strip of painkillers, a hairbrush, notebook, cheese knife and three pens. All useful things. Except the magazine. It landed on the scarp slope of the neighbouring dune.
    He had to roll the woman on to her front to search her jacket. She was tall and heavy, uncooperative, and damp. But there was little in her pockets, except a crumpled tissue, a button, laced with broken threads, which must have loosened from the sleeve, and a mobile phone, no use to him, he had no one to phone. He wiped Celice’s blood off his shirt and arms and threw the tissue and his piece of granite into the longer grass. He spat away the smell of her. Finally, he helped himself to Joseph’s discarded sweater, not only to hide the bloodstains on his shirt but also because, despite the tall heat of the afternoon, he was shivering.
    He did not check to see if they were dead. His job was finished. He pushed both biscuits into his mouth, packed his booty into a bag made out of stolen trouser legs – the sacados was far too womanly – and set off with their car keys for their car. He didn’t pause to look at Joseph or Celice. He was embarrassed by their age and nakedness. Perhaps he’d not have punished them so much if they’d been clothed. They’d brought this bad luck on themselves.

6
    The bodies were discovered straight away. A beetle first.
Claudatus maximi.
A male. Then the raiding parties arrived, drawn by the summons of fresh wounds and the smell of urine: swag flies and crabs, which normally would have to make do with rat dung and the carcasses of fish for their carrion. Then a gull. No one, except the newspapers, could say that ‘There was only Death amongst the dunes, that summer’s afternoon.’
    This single beetle had no appetite for blood. He was not a scavenger. His preference – his speciality – was for the roots of lissom grass, the only vegetation on the dunes, apart from the sea thorn and the sapless tinder trees, that could make a good green living out of sand. He had been feeding in an exposed tangle of roots when Celice fell back. Her sudden shadow might have been a hawk. But
Claudatus maximi
was fortunate. The woman’s body only up-ended him and pressed him into the grass. Unlike humans, beetles have armour plating on their backs. They’re not soft fruit. They are designed to withstand blows.
    The beetle flipped off his back and hurried towards the sunlight still visible beyond the warm and wool-roofed cavern, which had enclosed him so suddenly. His legs caught in the folds of Celice’s black jacket. Wool was harder work than sand or grass. It snagged on him, a heavy web. But he persevered against the cloth and against the unexpected darkness. Dune beetles choose to feed in light. Celice was an eclipse for him.
Claudatus
did not appreciate the woman’s company. He fled her weight and shadow, despite the ancient dangers of the open air, the skin-eyed hawks, the gull, the squadron ants, the parasites, the playful boys with jam-jars. He didn’t carry with him any of that burden which makes the human animal so cumbersome, the certainty that death was fast approaching and could arrive at any time, with its plunging snout, blindly to break the surface of the pool. Mondazy’s Fish again. It’s only those who glimpse the awful, endless corridor of death, too gross to contemplate, that need to lose themselves in love or art. His species had no poets. He was not fearful of Mondazy’s Fish. He had not spent, like us, his lifetime concocting systems to deny mortality. Nor had he passed his days in melancholic fear of death, the hollow and the avalanche. Nor was he burdened with the compensating marvels of human, mortal life. He had no schemes, no memories, no guilt or aspirations, no appetite for love, and no delusions. The woman had destroyed his light. He wanted to escape her, and to feed. That was his long-term plan, and his hereafter.
    The waiting gull, a greater intellect, was too nervous of the