How the Dead Live (12 page)

Radio 4 has become the World Service as I skip over the surface of consciousness then dip beneath it. I’ve slept like this for the last ten years – with the radio pancaked beneath my ear. The wholesome, middle-class, middle-aged, well-spoken announcers substitute for all the wholesome, middle-class, middle-aged, well-spoken lovers I’ve never had. They murmur consolingly to me of war and famine and insurrection. Then they murmur consolingly to me of horsey victories, tennis tourneys and cricket scores. They are the world’s grounds-men, gently dragging an enormous groundsheet of dull comprehension over the darkening playing field.

Chapter Five

T
he semi on Crooked Usage was absolutely that – half a house, with its own disordered demi-monde. Half cluttered with the Yaws family pieces, which had been kicked down the generations – heavy sideboards, heavier bookcases, solid and ugly chairs. And the other half decked out with the half of nothing much salvaged from my first marriage, crated and freighted to this damp isle. There was nothing beautiful in the house, or loved, or remotely modern – save for little Natty.

A red-brick garage was tucked up beside it in its privet bed. The house was never clean or tidy, but even if I managed – along with Mrs Jenks, my dirt-rearranger – to get it into some semblance of order, there was always the garage to serve as a museum of chaos. That garage – no object that entered it evere-emerged. It was a memorial to going nowhere. The family car camped out in the driveway. That the garage was built to match the house – red brick, slate mansard, metal mullions -belittled the latter rather than exalting the former. As for the interior, a cenotaph of steamer trunks was piled up in the middle of the floor, and a tea-chest columbarium ranged along the back wall. In the far corners, old bags of Yaws’s golf clubs lowered in the gloom, like outsize dental instruments, once used for messy operations on mossy mouths. Crooked usage indeed. A family grouping of decaying bicycles – mummy, daddy, baby-with–stabilisers – leant against one another, festooned in cobwebs, roughened with rust. Those were the main props in this Garage of Usher, but there were also sodden newspapers aplenty, books ditto, bulging cardboard boxes prolapsed with mildewed old clothing, toys; all kinds of trash no one had troubled to sort through, bothered to discard. Over all of this there hung the distinctive – almost sacred – odour of Three-in–One oil.

The girls played in there when they were small. Or rather, Charlotte – true to character – attempted to impose the order that so eluded her mother. It was Bob-a-Job week times fifty-two for that little miss – while her sister smashed old panes of glass or imprisoned pigeons the cats had maimed. The garage was beyond Yaws’s ken. As I’ve said, he sauntered through his life as if it were an unusually large cathedral close, and although he could drive, his expression as he pushed down the accelerator, and the Bedford – or the Austin, or whichever crap car it was we currently suffered –lurched backwards out of the drive, was one of clerical distaste. He was the only man I’ve ever known who drove a car as if it were an unseemly act; as if he were committing adultery by betraying his own, huge feet.

Mindjew, this wasn’t an act of betrayal that would’ve truly bothered him. (‘Bothered’ – another great Yaws word, used as noun, as verb and even – Oh! corny hallelujah! – as an exclamation.) Yaws was tight-fisted with his things, his piddling private income and his pathetic mementos of the Yaws family. When tipping girls (whether servants or his own children – both were liabilities to this neo-Victorian), he’d often be unable to let go of his end of a ten-shilling note. If they snatched, father, daughter and bill were divided.

Tight with things but free with his body. He stalked the unlovely environs of Crooked Usage in his yellow flannel underwear, one thick sock in his hand, plainting, ‘Bother! Lily, have you seen my other sock?’ Which I’d hear, natch, as ‘have you seen my other cock?’. ‘Think back to which frumpy cunt you last saw it in!’ I’d snap – and he’d look bemused, or else rise to ire: ‘Now look here, Lily!’ Jesus, he was an asshole. Christ, he had a skinny Shylock for a heart, enfolded in his fat form. He was that emotionally tight-fisted a man – with his smile which was like a ‘Keep Out’ sign.

If the late sixties proved anything to me it was that not all phobias are irrational. There was I – who’d spent the first half of the decade prostrate beneath the bed covers, as if they’d shelter me and my babies from the fallout – striding out into chilly arena of Grosvenor Square in order to hurl my hoarse barbs at the American Embassy.
So
dumb to be protesting when I was always happier to be alone in bed, reading recipes and cracking up with Jacob’s Cream Crackers. But I knew I wasn’t a little girl running down a mud road with a napalm cloak flaring from my shoulders; and I knew I wasn’t a Viet Cong suspect, dying in a short-sleeved, tartan-patterned shirt, from one of General Loan’s bullets. Strangely, the very intimacy of these extinctions – now brought to us near instantaneously – made them quite inapplicable to my sad sack. I was safe while all the baddies were off on a peasant shoot in Indo-China. Safe enough for idealism to blossom anew in the neglected, North London borders of my mind. Safe enough to lust after Gus.

Gus, who strode athletically off the plane, and came to us from London Airport wearing the American student uniform of the time – blue jeans, college sweatshirt, sneakers and duffel coat. Within ten years this gear had been fully adopted as an off-the-peg, pre-unwashed, counter-cultural, dressing-up costume, but then it was preppily pressed. Decadences are just that. I remember the crowds at Grosvenor Square only too well, the young men with parted hair and heavy-framed spectacles, the young women in thrifty knitwear, some even sporting
twinsets.
My girls now ask me what the sixties were like – and the answer’s simple enough: the fifties. Yup, just like the fifties; the great mass of youth merely aped the styles and modes of their elders who’d advanced half a generation further into the future fray. Naturally, the fifties themselves were not unlike the late forties, which in turn were umbilically linked to before the war. And to me England was a retard society anyway, empty of fridges, devoid of drive-ins. If I squinted at the Aldermaston crowds of plump-faced CND demonstrators only a little, they became hollow-cheeked Jarrow marchers.

Anyway, Gus was the son of one the Eight Couples Who once Mattered, and – far more pertinently – one of Dave Junior’s friends, the mud-streaked skinny-dippers who’d been playing the nigger game on the day my love died. Gus, who’d mysteriously fallen through all the bafflers of influence and gratings of exemption designed to prevent good middle-class boys from going down the Vietnam pan. Gus, who’d actually been
drafted;
and who then took to his heels, hiking his way out along the Long Trail into Canada, where he waited for a money order to arrive from his parents before jetting on to Europe.

There was no room in the house – so Gus moved into the garage. He bivouacked in among the discarded luggage of the previous two decades. In order to dodge the VC he had to hunker down in the dark jungle of my peripatetic life. I’d never been anywhere for long – he was not to be long in the leavings of it. Nights we’d watch the nine o’clock news together, our asses rammed to the back of the vomit-coloured, oatmeal-textured divan. Yaws took a similar line on Vietnam to the one he’d taken on the Cuban missile crisis: this too would pass, leaving the Warden intact, a crumpet
en route
to his lips. Yaws didn’t suspect anything sexual between me and the kid. It wasn’t so much that he’d rationally dismissed the idea, rather, it couldn’t even register on his smutty radar. Gross. I can’t have slept with Gus more than four times – five at most. All that stuff about teaching young men the ways of love is so much horse shit. All you have to do is feed ‘em into the groove and they’ll do the hammering. Every time we did it I was amazed that he wasn’t discommoded by my sour smells and puckering cellulite. But I guess there was plenty of vagina, heaps of bosom.

It was last time in my life that sex held any quality of conviction for me. In the cooling pretzel of tatty linen, still aromatic with Yaws, we’d thrash about. He did it hobbled by his jeans. I did it hobbled by Librium. It was a big period of mental freedom for me. I hauled myself up in the morning and cooked the kiddy-winkies breakfast in my nightie. Then I drove them to school in my nightie. Then I came back to Crooked Usage, took my nightie off, and climbed back into bed. I felt like I was on the night shift. Haig was the blended Scotch people drank in those days. It was advertised with the catch-line ‘Don’t be vague’, when that’s exactly what it did to you. To me.

On that particular cold March afternoon, shlepping from Marble Arch with all the other bleeding hearts and closed minds, I was tired. I was always fucking tired. Natasha’d kicked seven kinds of hell out of the insides of me; I still smoked forty a day; I was often vague – and there was the Librium. It didn’t lay you out like sodium amytal, but it still made me pretty laid back. Laid back on a cushion of Librium, my young lover by my side, I railed by the railings at the boob-helmeted policemen. Over the grey haunch of the American Embassy the tessellated greenery of Hyde Park tossed with wind and drizzle. The coppers linked arms and forced the beatniks and beatific old Quaker women back from the entrance. Lots of the duffel-coat–wearers – and Gus, to my shame – began to chant, ‘Ho! Ho! Ho-Chi–Minh!’ Absurd what did they think an ageing, intellectual, highly ascetic, Vietnamese Communist Party cadre would have to do with these truants from the bourgeoisie?

That’s all gone now, social revolution as an aspect of the gap year. It’s all there was to left-wing radicalism in the West after the war anyway; doctoring the social fringes was as much a fashion statement as cutting your hair, or growing it, or shaving it off. I fell for these cheap nostrums as did many others. Protest marches were my weight-watching; and I used to see plenty of other women, nearing middle age, verging on being pear-shaped, who smiled ruefully at me as they toted their placards.

But I was tired – fucking exhausted. As the police moved in, blows were exchanged and they lost control – marvellous expression. They lost control, fists tried to fly but crashed into skulls and cheekbones. Fleet feet fled through flesh. I snuck away – leaving my young lover to the shlemozzle. But not before seeing more striking slow motions – heads going like the clappers, the impacts were so percussive. I saw one beefeater thug smack a Buddy Holly lookalike the way British actors playing Gestapo officers smacked their interrogation victims. Back and forth and back again. I never ever wanted to be that close to violence again. I’d never intended it, my life wasn’t meant to be like that. I’d understood that I was to be excluded from this section of the twentieth century, that I hadn’t been selected. I saw it as my role to skulk in history’s wings, observing the actors once they’d been bandaged, or otherwise made beautiful.

Even the noise of a riot soon fades if you tuck your head down and ignore it. While bottles, bricks and splintered placards punctured the drizzly sky, I made my way to Berkeley Square and sat down on a bench. Here, then, there were elms not yet diseased – I think. I sat and lost myself in the damp leaves pressed into the pavement, the old people fizzling out. Come in cigarette number 34, your time is up. I’d never felt, it occurred to me, more depleted. Or, to be correct, more indolent. The very effort needed to register my own fatigue was . . . too much. Seeing made me yawn. I was only forty-six, but I couldn’t conceive of how I’d make it through the remaining years – they’d have to spool them in front of my eyes. Pathé life reels.

Eyes which are now jammed open in the enclosing darkness. I wake from reveries of the late sixties to this nighttime paralysis. Waking takes long enough for me to realise that these memories – undoctored and unedited – are a crude gloss on the badly painted present. More precisely – that the tank of tiredness is itself now empty; and I feel fatigued by this fact alone. I’d thought that at least I could always depend on this numbing languor, this painful drowsiness. That it would be the layette of my lifetime; and that sleep – for so long dispensed in famine rations – would now, at long last, be in plentiful supply.

Not so. The devil is looking at me with malevolent red eyes shaped like twos. They blink with electronic implacability. Coiled around the bedroom the plumbing gurgles like a gassy gut. The pain comes galloping towards me, ravening white horses which chomp though everything in their path. Hurricane pain. Pain that leaves me clinging to the driftwood of my own consciousness; battered into not being me. Maybe now I die? I allow myself to be lifted up by this anguish like an oscillating mote. Higher and higher I rise in the fusty darkness, while below me the duvet’s pattern dissolves into the grid of Manhattan, as a clarinet intimately moans: ‘Ooooowaaaawa-waa-wa-waa-waaa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-waaaa . . .’ then a string section cranks up the pace: ‘Diddleumdumdumdiddle-umdumdumdiddleumdumdum!’ until the clarinet gets eloquent on behalf of its own misery: ‘Wawawawaaaawawawawaaawawawawawawawaaaaaaaaaaa . . .’ and not to be outdone, the strings crank it up some more: ‘Diddleumdumdumdiddleumdumdumdiddleumdumdum!’

‘Wawawa-waaaa!’ Christ alive – it’s fucking
Rhapsody in Blue.
Christ penetrated by the Lord. Christ jacking off the Holy Ghost – how I hate this tune. Three in one. It’s a tune-not a rhapsody. A tin-pan–crash-bang bit of Yid slickery, played out in the trash-choked alleys around Times Square and Broadway.

The city of my majority swims towards me out of the dusty deathly darkness of this suburban room an ocean away. At first I’m relieved to have this effortless ascendancy; rising in a smooth parabola from the coxcomb of Liberty into the clouds over the toe of Manhattan, so that the leggy length of the island rears below me, each neon street switched on by my own awareness. ‘Diddleumdumdumdiddleumdumdumdiddleumdumdum!’ A set of a certain unreal age, with no distinction between the fabricated and the constructed, between interior and exterior. Amusical New York peopled by eternally young songsters clad in sky-blue Runyon shmutter. See them dance down the block, swing around the corner, leap into the subway, while Top Cat trades gags with Officer Dibble and the Jetsons head home in their flivvers to White Plains.

As if the streets were sore throats gargling the violence of their own dissolution, it’s a
memento mori
city in which a flayed cop rides a flayed horse, half of their skulls and half of their skeletons exposed. And these picked-clean knights are predisposed to shepherd a funeral which emerges from Harlem to march across 121
^st
Street and downtown. A black funeral – what repulsive fun. How much black silk and black crêpe, how much bombazine has been draped over these black bodies? The tubas and cornets are pooting out the hated moans of Jew urbanity. This black has decided to belong to the Jewish Death Club – which is happy to accept him as a member. This Jew has declined to attend meetings of the Black Club – but she’s being forced into the procession for all that. Please don’t let Death touch me with its black hands; please don’t let Hitler kiss me with his greasepaint moustache.