How the Dead Live (20 page)

‘Is it far to this . . . this meeting?’ I asked as we set off along Argos Road, the diminutive Mrs Seth taking five skinny steps to each of my thick strides.

‘Oh no, not at all,’ she replied, ‘it is a few streets, turns this way, turns that way. No more.’

I wanted to chat volubly with the kind Mrs Seth as we paced through the Dulston gloaming, but now that she’d been prised out of her shop setting it was hard to get going with the bejewelled woman. What kind of sally did I dare to hazard? How long have you been dead, Mrs Seth? Have you got a lithopedion of your own? How about Fats? Are there other dead Seths in Dulston? Or perhaps a less personal approach would be better, like – tell me, if you will, Mrs Seth, how exactly
do
the dead live?

It didn’t matter, for she was right, we were soon there. This, the first of many such meetings, is still the one that stays with me most clearly. It was held in the South Dulston Community Centre, a dead modernist building – flat-roofed, grey-concreted, blank-windowed – which was neither central nor communal. The Centre had a piece of waste ground on one side, where hulks of adventure-playground equipment were bound in vetch and nettles. On the other stood a derelict warehouse, whose ill-starred panes suggested perverse attempts to break out – into Dulston.

It’s my considered opinion that while the history of the twentieth century may’ve been typified by design innovations, the community centre remains, resolutely, a World War One creation. A Methodist church hall marooned in no man’s land, withstanding the bombardment of history’s howitzers. We entered via a concrete trench. It was the vacuous barn I expected – scuffed lino floors, whitewashed cinder-block walls, doors leading to equipment stores, cubbyhole offices, and toilets. In the Men’s, three full-size urinals would undoubtedly be set beside one tiny dauphin’s ear. Through a serving hatch I could see an institutional kitchen where an urn steamed, while a couple of individuals primed plastic beakers with tea and Tupperware plates with Nice biscuits, before handing them out. Overhead, five big bars of light were chained to the fire-resistant tiles. The oblong suns beat down on the assembled company, thirty-odd men and women, who stood about in uneasy groups, all of them shifting from one leg to the other, as if they were the possessors of a single, very full, bladder.

At the time I thought it was an optical effect – caused by the strip lights flickering against the night which loomed behind the blank windows. For I saw beams of even yellower light emerging from the people’s heads, from the very apex of their skulls, and bouncing off the ceiling to create strange nimbi about their ordinary heads.

I expect you’ve been to a few Personally Dead meetings yourself; still, what can I tell you about these people, these attendees? Only this, that they were the sort who show up for such meetings – ambiguous events organised in anonymous premises by shadowy parties. Pro-tem seekers after provisional truths. Sure, there was a sprinkling of lip-pluggers and neck-banglers –like the ones I’d seen at the cafe that morning – but they only leavened the general London brown bread. The middle-aged women, the old women, the very old women, and the withered crones, who, with their lumpy heads slack-wrapped in plastic headscarves, their shapeless coats and their swollen hands, were Cockney peasants. Chaucerian phenotypes. The men outnumbered the women, but they were greyer still. They carried batons they’d forgotten to relay, tightly furled newspapers or umbrellas. They were younger – on the whole – than the women, but so fucking colourless! They weren’t men – they were cut-outs of men, snipped from old knitting patterns in Woman's
Realm.
They were men from the middle rows of group photographs. Men pictured in advertisements seen from the indifferent vantage of moving escalators. Men whose cocks were merely details noted on forgotten index cards in the dusty filing cabinets of the Kinsey Institute. Statistical men. They reminded me of every shnorrer I’d ever botched a transaction with – ‘Missus – this is a fiver not a twenny’ – or crossed the street to avoid. They were the sort of nebbishes who skulked for no reason. Always disappearing around a corner ahead of you, inducing mild paranoia.

As this gauzy crew pulled stacks of plastic chairs away from the walls and arranged them in a loose oval, I noticed other features of the meeting. Cards were taped on the walls with peculiar exhortations written on them: ‘LIVE AND LET DIE’; ‘DON’T THINK, DON’T THINK, DON’T THINK’; ‘IT’S HARD GOING’; ‘FOR ALL ETERNITY’. The lettering was as inelegant as the sentiments – someone had misused a Magic Marker with a shaky hand. The cards were bad enough, but by the serving hatch leaned two placards which were far worse. These read as follows:

The Twelve Steps of Personally Dead

1. We realised we were dead and that our lives were over.

2. We came to disbelieve everything.

3. We made a decision to painstakingly remember our former lives.

4. We made a searching and fearful inventory of our nervous tics and mannerisms.

5. We shared this inventory with our death guides, and subjected ourselves to their ridicule.

6. We became entirely ready to abandon ourselves.

7. We waited for nothingness.

8. We made a list of all those we hated.

9. We remembered them.

10. We continued to make a daily inventory and when we noticed disturbing personality traits we embraced them.

11. We sought through meditation to improve our unconsciousness and isolation.

12. Having spiritually annulled ourselves as a result of working these steps, we carried this message to the newly dead.

and:

The Twelve Traditions of Personally Dead

1. Our common annihilation comes first – individual dissolution depends on dead unity.

2. For our group purpose there is no ultimate authority; our leaders are usually petty bureaucrats.

3. The only requirement for membership is death.

4. Each group is autonomous – after all, frankly, who gives a damn?

5. Each group has but one primary purpose – to carry the message to the newly dead.

6. A PD group ought never endorse, or lend the PD name to, any living facility or enterprise, lestwe scare them to death.

7. Every PD group is fully self-supporting, incapable of receiving outside contributions.

8. Personally Dead is non-professional, although our death guides – who belong mostly to traditional peoples may be appeased with cowrie shells, bullroarers, penis sheaths and whatever other tat appeals to them.

9. PD is over-organised, consisting largely of a purposeless and inefficient bureaucracy.

10. PD has so many opinions, that they should – all things being equal – cancel one another out.

11. Our public-relations policy is based on deception. We must always maintain the illusion of being alive at the level of press, radio and films.

12. Individuality is the basis of all our traditions, ever reminding us to place personalities before principles.

Now, at this stage in death, thinking of my former life had become a delicious irrelevance. Why worry about my junky baby when I couldn’t change her shitty diaper? Why fulminate against Mr and Mrs Elvers when it wouldn’t make them even remotely uncomfortable? And so I slackened all the daily ranklings with which I’d strung my catty cradle. The two Daves I’d been indentured to – well, fuck ‘em. Could I make them better and more considerate lovers, fathers, friends? I think not. My shyster father – my sadistic mother? All the slaps in the face and kicks in the shins that had been dealt me over sixty-five years? Gone – or at least
not relevant.
It seemed that even my leading persecutors had had only cameo roles; and now they had no more significance than the protesting brooches on Jane Bowen’s lapels.

It should’ve dawned on me how awful it was that in my life gall had been all– but it didn’t. I suppose it should’ve sunk in how unbelievable my new-found coolness was – but I simply took it on trust; death, I figured, must’ve mellowed me.

As for the trappings of the Personally Dead meeting – the bowdlerised twelve steps and twelve traditions, the pie-chart slices of humanity wedged alongside me – why didn’t they jerk me into comprehension? Why didn’t it even occur to me that there was only one person who could’ve arranged these particular elements of
my own experience,
and cobbled them together into this dreary scene? I dunno. But at the time I’d forgotten all the weary weepfests of Families Anonymous I’d attended – along with other fucked-up mums and fucked-over spouses – to try and get a handle on Natasha’s limitless capacity for destroying herself and others.

Jesus Christ, I sit here with you, leafing through yet another fucking
Woman’s Realm
and I still don’t know. And even now I’ve had more than enough time to give the question
all due consideration,
I don’t think I’ll ever know. Not on this go-round.

So the zombies took their places in the oval of chairs. Deadening silence was achieved. Thirty-odd cigarettes and cheap panatellas were sparked. The smoke-streams flowed through their searching headlights. It was a community Nuremberg. A fishy little fellow in a blue shirt and a grey V-neck flipped the proceedings off. He called upon three members to read the screeds printed on some laminated cards. The first of these – entitled ‘Why Are We Dead? – spoke of how dying was an uncomfortable and fearful experience for us all; how disturbing it was to realise that style
was
personality, and that our sense of self was nothing but mannerisms and negative emotions. The second reading explained how the members of PD thronged together on a regular basis to remind each other that they were dead, and to inculcate the newly dead into the ways of the afterlife. The third reading proposed a solution to this malady, but by then I wasn’t concentrating. The readings went on and on. If I’d been in the least bit tired I could’ve fallen asleep, but no dice. God knows my interest in life had flagged all too frequently, but clearly, being bored was now going to be even duller.

My gaze, like a fat fly, droned about the large room, alighting on a flyer for intermediate aerobics classes, a fire extinguisher, some stacked gym mats. As the other dead smoked and I fidgeted with nothing, it did occur to me that this queer Kaddish had some justice. That it was suitably hellish for me – who had always prided myself on not being a joiner – to end up like this, in a terminally banal club, whiling away the aeons under strip lighting.

I was winched back up to earth by the personally dead, who all thanked the last trumpeter in unison. The human tiddler who was, I gathered, dubbed ‘the Secretary’ – then introduced Robin Cook, who, he informed us, had come along this evening to share his experience of death with us. Cook, a smouldering twig of a man, as spindly as the cigarette he kept permanently tucked between his thin lips, rasped his words. His eyes were hidden by the yanked-down peak of his tweed cap. He was all sharp knees, sharp elbows and sharper Fitzrovian tones. Cook had, he told us, been agreeably surprised, given that he had no religious belief whatsoever, to discover that there was an afterlife. Of sorts. He’d been a thriller-writer while alive, and as he’d always published pseudonymously, there was no problem with his continuing his career after death. Indeed, the books he’d written since moving to Dulston sold marginally better than the ones he’d published before. Even if they weren’t too well received by the critics.

Yes, it was difficult to get used to not feeling, touching, eating or sleeping, but the relief from the pain and the indignity of terminal illness had always stayed with him. Cook was grateful for death – considering what a crock of shit his life had become. True, there were awful psychic manifestations caused by the dissolution of his mind – but hell, he’d always had a dark imagination anyway. There was nothing more horrible than he could’ve conceived himself. He found the cynicism of the PD programme a balm for disincorporation. ‘What do the steps mean?’ he croaked. ‘I’ve no fucking idea. Do I work them in any sense? I haven’t a fucking clue. It seems to me – and I’ve only my own experience to go on – that this whole set-up is a bit of joke. Who’s the joke on? I don’t know – and what’s more, my loves, I don’t think I ever will.’ He spoke – as you can see – to my condition.

After Cook had finished, the Secretary announced that he was ‘throwing the meeting open for general sharing’. They called it ‘sharing’ – how ridiculous, how risible an expression. Only corpses could’ve failed to corpse when uttering such jargon. Anyway, what this meant in practice was a lot of halting, garbled complaint. One after another, introducing themselves ‘I’m so-and-so and I’m personally dead’, the members of PD gave vent to their smoke and their complaints. The bizarre thing was that while what they described was pantomimically over-the-top, the manner in which they expressed it was leaden. It was like the visitation of the Fats; the terrors faded out suddenly, like piano notes stifled by a foot-pedal. I guess it should’ve hit me then that I really was dead, and more so, that all life’s piquancy had been solely a function of the fear of death. But it bloody well didn’t.

The PD members spoke of the gods of the Hindu pantheon – elephant-headed Ganesh, monkey-bodied Hanuman, skull-garlanded Kali, quadri-armed Vishnu – smashing through the thin walls of their Dulston bedsits, rehearsing their ancient grievances, then re-enacting their epochal battles. A whirl of avatars in the toilet bowl. They moaned about Christ emerging from the Golgotha of their fan-assisted oven, to deliver a quavering sermon from the mount on their secular kitchen floor. In the Babylonian suburb they inhabited, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse exercised their mounts by cantering across the municipal park. Death, War and Hunger hitched them to the swings in the kids’ playground; while Civil Strife shared out ham sandwiches and tea by the boating lake.

In the confused realm of the personally dead, houris bathed in the small sinks left behind in the corners of spare bedrooms where dead builders had undertaken spurious conversion work. These eternally pure courtesans, capable of conceiving at the will of the faithful, drank sherbert, and laughed lustily long into the night. Even the gods of the pre-Buddhist religion of Tibet could get flat-shares in Dulston. So, psycho-physical chromatism came to Corinth Way, Sparta Terrace, Syracuse Park and Athens Road. Blue gods the size of car dealerships loomed over the car dealerships; red gods the size of buses dodged among the buses; and green gods – temporarily entombed in the raised, grass-covered embankments of the Dulston Reservoir – surged forth when the personally dead approached. The florists sold demoniacal flesh-eating plants at a pound a stem. Very dear.