How the Dead Live (21 page)

Some were visited by deities appropriate to their denominations.A Wicklow man gossiped in thick brogue about Mary-next–door’s open-heart surgery. A quavering member of the Brethren bore witness that, before the deluge, he was required nightly to cut Methuselah’s prodigiously large corns. The dead horny skin of nine centuries. But others were pretty confused. Why was this intense old Portuguese man tormented by Osiris? Why was that foolish frummer shaking his locks over the manifestation of the Rainbow Serpent? And what did any of it have to do with me? The Secretary had impressed upon us the importance of ‘listening for the similarities rather than the differences’, and there were those who spoke of more physical apparitions – personifications of hiccuping, blinking, burping, farting and yawning – which sounded suspiciously like the Fats. Still, my attention wandered. Lithy had found a couple of its own, and the three grey foetuses ran in and out of the shadowy corners of the room, chanting in their reedy voices, ‘We are fa-mi-ly / I got all my sisters an’ me!’ until the Secretary told them to shut up and behave.

Behave like what, exactly? I mocked to myself. How
should
a reanimated, minuscule, petrified cadaver behave? How should any of us behave? I mean to say – ‘can’t do’ could no longer be made to do. And what if you
simply don’t like
kreplach?

After an hour or so, the Secretary shushed up a slight, nervy woman who was complaining about Mithras – he lived in her icebox, conducting improbable, pyromantic rituals – and informed us that the last ten minutes would now be available for ‘the newly dead’ to share. ‘This is to embarrass you flatliners into admitting your own extinction,’ he crowed. ‘After all, if you aren’t defunct – what’re you doing here? Even if you can’t face saying anything, you can grunt or rattle, or do whatever it is you did when you gasped your last.’ As he pronounced these cruel words, a rictus tore in his papery face. All the dead eyes swivelled to fix me, all the bony fingers wiggled as if to clutch me.

Seeing Phar Lap Jones and Costas come in by the swing doors opposite – the very ordinary swing doors – and feeling a sense of relief, I decided to brazen it out. ‘I’m Lily,’ I said, ‘and personally, I think I’m dead.’ That was it. That was all I said. It seemed that was all that was required – some admission that I was dead. Cut off from everything. A tumour of a woman excised from the world. Phar Lap’s Stetson brim dipped with the weight of his cool approval. His mirrored shades tilted and the two tiny sections of floor reflected in them sank down. Costas filled his ample chest with unnecessary air and the hairs flared in the V of his shirt. My fellow members mumbled their approval.

Then it was over, we all stood, held the shape of each other’s hands and muttered the prayer: ‘Gog grant me the stupidity to deny there’s anything I cannot change, the temerity to neglect the things I can, and the ignorance to be incapable of distinguishing between the two.’ Phar Lap and Costas moved forward to join in this balderdash.

As soon as it was over I went up to them. ‘What the hell was that about?’ I asked Phar Lap. ‘It made no sense at all. It certainly didn’t teach me anything about Dulston, or death, or how to cope with it.’

‘Yeh-hey, well, I s’pose it might seem total fuckin’ gammin-but thass the way of it girl, yeh-hey? Thass the way of it – ‘

‘Yes, Lily-lady, that
is
the way of it,’ Costas added. ‘Youse should listen to my friend here, he’s youse death guide. Youse can’t get back in my cab and leave Dulston – this lot here know the only routes out. Listen to him! Now, I have peoples here I must talk with.’ He sidled off, and Phar Lap indicated with twitches of his snaky hips that I should follow him into one of the cubbyhole offices.

Here, he got behind a desk, squatted on a swivel chair, pressed the back of his Stetson against a cork board – so that the front poked up, releasing a puff of black curls – and regarded me with wry detachment. ‘Yairs, nothing here fer you, Lily-girl. Thass true enough. All this gammin, see – it’s ‘cos yer dead but won’t accept it, yeh-hey? It’s gonna get worse – b’lieve me. It’ll get worse than the lithopedion, yehhey? Worse than the Fats – and it’s all in yer head, girl. None of it’s real. None of it at all– you, this, me, whatever. You get me, girl? Don’t you remember how you felt back there in the hospital, when we walked out of the ward, quit the place? It was like a mirage, hey-yeh? Like hot wind movin’ across bush, all shimmery, yeh-hey? That was
you,
girl – b’lieve me. It’s you who’re no-thing. Recognise it an’ all this . . . this guna will evaporate, y’see that? Doncha Lily? Doncha?’

But I didn’t see it at all. I saw Phar Lap’s amazing apple cheeks, his ebony eyelids, all the Epstein planes of his handsome head. And behind him I saw the cork board, with its thumb-tacked schedules, notes and newspaper clippings. I saw rain spatter against the black window pane, and tiny dusty dervishes whirl across the floor. I saw piles of undone folders on the dun desk, I saw the personally dead all smoking away in the hall, and I saw Phar Lap prise open a can of Log Cabin, his fingers forklift a pinch of tobacco and grind it into rollability. I saw the pennant of paper appear on his lower lip. I saw him contrive another cigarette and light it with a Redhead match. I saw it, and while it may have been wacky, disconcerting, troubling – I didn’t disbelieve it for a second.

Christmas 2001

I didn’t give it any less credence than the colossal rampart of MDF that rears up above me now, tier upon tier of crappy possessions, like the steps of a Toltec pyramid. All the valueless things the Ice Princess and the Estate Agent stole, then couldn’t fence or pawn. Grown-ups forget quite how huge their material transgressions are
–
so preoccupied are they by tiny, psychic misdemeanours. I simply couldn’t understand what Phar Lap Jones was driving at– I couldn’t hear him.
No
more than I can reach the mobile phone that I know is up there, way beyond my reach. And anyway, even if I could, it’s a dead chunk of circuitry now
–
an immobile, an uncommunicator It’s as incapable of receiving anything as I was of understanding Phar Lap’s clicking and palate-slapping. At the time I thought he was trying to drive me crazy
–
but hell, I managed that all by myself.

Chapter Nine

I
settled into Dulston well enough. I hummed, ‘Little boxes, little boxes, and they all look just the same / And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same / There’s a red one, and a blue one, and a green one, and a yel-low one / And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same,’ as I sluiced the depression out of my basement. I got a job. Not in Dulston, but down the road in Hackney. Phar Lap had explained it made no odds if I worked for a living company or a dead one. And believe me it certainly didn’t
seem
any different. I’d only six weeks earlier left off working at the public-relations business where I’d toiled when alive, yet here I was at another PR company, on the other side of town, typing up still more releases on fresh kitchenware, country club launches, innovatory thermal socks – whatever new effluvia were next to join the ever widening torrent of increasingly trivial innovation. Or so
it seemed to me.

Just as when I was alive hardly anyone at Chandler Communications had bothered to ask me who, what, where, or why I was – so nobody at Baskin’s Public Relations gave a rat’s ass either. Each day I stomped to work down Argos Road, turning into Corinth Way with its coursing traffic, taking the short cut along the gentrified Sparta Terrace – who says the dead can’t be upwardly mobile? – and traversing Syracuse Park, before catching the bus that ran down Athens Road. Usually in the fusty warmth of the upper deck, where pensioners and kids squeezed together, cutting out the middle-aged, I forgot about my own death, neglected Death in general, ignored metaphysics, and instead read crappy women’s magazines. Eventually, after much diesel grunting, I’d look up from my
Woman’s Realm
to find that the bus was trundling down Dalston Lane, or Queensbridge Road, or already turning into Mare Street. Back – laughable as it may seem – in what’s called the land of the living.

Every interface between the worlds of the living and the dead was just this prosaic. Utilities – well! They were as hard to organise now as ever, despite there always being a dead person working in the relevant office. Getting everyday stuff together was a real hassle now I was so very subtle. The boundaries between life and death were as provisional, confused and indeterminate as those of Dulston itself. The living, foolishly, comfort themselves with the notion that in death at least things become
clear-cut,
as if death were a definable barrier, a wall or a line. But I was finding out that death was far trickier, and as hard to locate as the exact edge of your own visual field. I now understood why spiritualists’ communications with the hereafter are invariably so ludicrously trite. If anyone had been bothered to tap my table, without hesitating I’d have asked for a nice cup of tea.

Baskin, a bearded-Lothario emeritus, hired me because I boldly announced that I’d take twenty per cent less than any flibbertigibbet who was prepared to flirt with him. In truth it was Mrs Baskin – a marcelled monstrosity who came in to do the accounts from time to time – who took me on. Wasn’t it always the way. So, not much in the way of shekels from Baskin PR.

It took me ages to get the basement tricked out to my satisfaction. There was no sense in getting workmen to do the painting and decorating. At the Personally Dead meetings they were good enough to tell me that dead artisans were incredibly unreliable. Anyway, I was free from arthritis, from bronchitis and from gingivitis – free from anything that could have stopped me doing the work myself. I bought black slacks and a man’s white shirt from the flea market at the end of Sparta Terrace. I tied the shirt-tails under my jugs and crawled on top of the furniture to slop and roll the paint about. The Fats crowded round me and giggled at my efforts. ‘Look at her great white belly! He-he, it sags like a sack when she stretches . . . He-he, she’s a fat old thing. Fat and old, fat and old . . .’

So it went on. It should’ve driven me right round the bend in a few long days – but it didn’t. Now I had no need for sleep, I really missed repose. Shit, if I’d known the afterlife was going to be a relentless 24 × 7, I’d’ve had thousands more lie-ins, heaps more hot-water bottles, gallons more fucking
hot chocolate.
All that fucking dieting – yet here I was, pear-shaped for eternity and beset by the blind bogeywomen of my own vanity. Sure, I did have Lithy. I’d stuck with the name Lithy for my lithopedion, because I couldn’t figure out any alternative. Gus Junior didn’t seem – how can I say – wise. Besides, the past was the last thing on my mind, there was so much to do, so many bloody errands. Lithy was a troublesome, precocious little thing, but despite its nimble pins and familiarity with seventies pop songs, it really didn’t have much idea of the world; so, I took it upon myself to educate my never-born cadaver of a child.

I dressed Lithy in Barbie and Ken’s little hand-me-downs and took it to work with me at Baskin PR. It knew enough to slump and be silent when told. ‘What an unusual dolly,’ said Mrs Baskin, while Gloria, the blowsy secretary, admitted she found it ‘creepy’. Nevertheless, from the vantage point of my desk, propped up against the old plastic Cheops of a computer, Lithy was able to get an angle on the origami paper economy of the late eighties.

I confess, I used the same baby talk with Lithy that Natasha and I had shared, peppering every proposition with ‘noo-noo’s, ‘goo-goo’s and other gummy nonce words. Lithy became my itty-bitty plaything and in time I even began to enjoy its performances, as it danced through the basement singing, ‘We had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun.’ I couldn’t see any resemblance to me or Gus in its crinkly nearly-face, or its beady jet eyes. I don’t think there’s anything much in the world of the living that
does
resemble a lithopedion, saving perhaps that horse’s ass Spielberg’s alien. And that – natch – has big, blue eyes. The big, blue, bootiful eyes that can only be worked up from the dreams of yet another Jew boy who yearns to date blonde shiksas. ‘The Extraterrestrial as Shiksa – Discuss’ would be a likely subject for the kind of term paper I’d set for the lithopedion itself.

Take it from me, Dulston was as good an arena within which to exercise the greyhounds of my contempt as any living suburb of London. Who’d’ve imagined it – but the late English middle class were exactly the same pompous pricks they’d been when alive. Still piling up infinitesimal gradations of accent, demeanour and education into staggeringly baroque edifices of class. There were U and non-U dead to the nth degree. The old dead and the newly dead, the dead who were the salt of the earth and the dead who were the corrupted soil. With grim inevitability it turned out that you
could
take it with you – your death grant was index-fucking-linked. Not only that, but despite their much-vaunted disregard for vulgar notoriety, the English dead doted on their famously deceased, being at great pains to report that they had met so-and–so, preferably while both parties were still alive.

Most of the famously dead people had long since moved on from Dulston – another thing that made me think it was merely a quarantine, a clearing house for the newly dead to reside in until our dispersal to more comfortable berths. In the meantime, all and sundry made it their business to tell me that
of course
they had known Countess Teresa Lubinska. How she’d always been
very free
with her stab wounds, and how she’d come directly to Dulston
on the tube
after the stabbing-only realising she was
dead
when the officious ticket-collector at King’s Cross troubled her for her ticket and it struck her that she was changing trains
for no apparent reason.
What horse shit. Typical of the English dead that the only Holocaust martyrs they’d recognise were fucking Polish aristocrats, killed in fucking London. Just typical.

And they socialised – boy, did they socialise. They held parties where the liquor was sluiced round their mouths and puked in the geraniums, and the canapés parted from their wooden prongs only to be spat into buckets. Yup – drinks parties, the English dead were so fucking
happening.
They chewed quiche a lot – because it was easy to do so.

It was a long, hot summer for those of us who had to work, and frankly it wasn’t my idea of fun to spend evenings standing about on terraces, chewing quiche, munching salad and then regurgitating into plastic buckets. True, not all the buckets were plastic, there was a vogue among the trendier dead for galvanised steel. These looked better, were easier to hit, but rang pretty loudly. Mrs Seth was always quick to defend the buckets, the chewing and the spitting. ‘You have to let people do what they want, Mrs Bloom,’ she told me, ‘and what these dead people want to do is behave like the living-you can appreciate that.’

What I did appreciate was that Seth’s Grocery and General Provisions did damn well out of the bucket business, the wine sales, and the bloody cheese trade too. They did almost as well out of flogging aluminium foil to Bernie, the unquiet spirit of a junky who lived in the attic of number 27. I never got used to the way these dead stupenagels got tipsy at their terminally dull drinks parties. I guess it followed from
acting
as if they were drinking – such is the power of ritual; but still it was foul to witness a lot of dead middle-aged people talking crap, singing old show tunes, and even making
passes
at each other.

So far as I could see, the only thing that distinguished these gatherings from those of the living – besides the sick buckets was the fantastic number of smokers. In my experience
all
the dead smoke. Even those who hadn’t smoked when alive took it up once they moved to Dulston. There was a real payback for smoking when you were dead. With a lung full of acridity there were a few, brief instants when you almost felt embodied. Then you’d exhale and revert to being no more substantial than the individual portions of cloud floating in front of your death mask. But these moments were worth paying for, worth
working
for.

Mostly prices in Dulston were low – after all, who’d
want
to live there? But cigs were as dear as anywhere else – and I got through pack after pack. I don’t know what it’s been like for you, but I found that the whole process of smoking acquired a certain dash once I was dead. The crinkle-slip–crunch of the cellophane as it came away from the cardboard, the very boxiness of the pack itself, its hard edges
defining
my hand. Then the rough silkiness of the inner foiled lining, and finally the cancer sticks themselves, so
deliciously harmless.
To smoke when one was so clearly fat and old – what high bravado blown in the face of the living, as they waited to exhale their last!

And
it kept off the Fats. They couldn’t stand cigarette smoke. It must’ve been something to do with their eyelessness. Whereas I could only see, they could only smell and complain, like the health-consciously correct, overweight adolescents they were. ‘Ooh!’ they’d chorus, as I greeted another dawn with my hundredth-odd smoke of the twenty-four. ‘Ooh – must she? Should she? Why does she? Can’t she stop? Doesn’t she know it’s bad for her?’ And I’d shoo them off with another blast of menacing wraiths. The sight of their wobbling butts disappearing out of the bedroom, fast, would’ve got me giggling; but now I realised – occupying as I did a wholly absurd world – that I hadn’t been giggling at the absurdity of the world before I died, only wearily sniggering at my own.

At the PD meetings the ‘old-timers’, those who’d been dead for upwards of five years, counselled against getting involved in relationships during your first year of death. This was absurd, for if there was one thing the dead did even more than the living it was form relationships. Or rather – they moved in. A couple of dead oldsters would shack up with a dead middle-aged person in order to save on rent and keep up appearances. The dead middle-aged would take in the young dead for the same reason. It wasn’t uncommon to see two middle-aged dead people walking along swinging a dead nonagenarian between them. In Dulston a second childhood really meant something. You might’ve thought the family units formed by these convenient liaisons would reek of oddity – not so. These shared households only brought home to me that blood had always been the most arbitrary basis upon which to order your emotional life.

What the dead discussed most was the past and the future. This explained their defiant lack of interest in Dulston, its environs and organisation. Dulston – which Phar Lap called a ‘cystrict’ – was as uncommonly like the adjacent districts as its residents were like theirs. Despite being deceptively thin – no more than a sliver of brick, masonry, concrete and tar Dulston never felt the bustle of the living city that surrounded it. At night, after we dead were all safely tucked up inside, watching our own horror shows, we’d hear the living zipping through on the stunted stretches of arterial road that traversed our neighbourhood. If they did chance to stop, what did they find? Nothing much. A gas-station forecourt drugged with its own fumes, an all-night zoo store where the keeper cowered behind bars, a hooker selling her sad snatch on the corner of a council estate.

Drivers did pull over occasionally, by night and in the day. They bought petrol, groceries and forlorn fucks, for the most part never knowing what macabre exchanges they’d transacted. The live johns were numb to the dead hookers’ insubstantiality. But the dead also refused to lie down under it. We rebelled and manifested ourselves as we actually were. The poor, sluttish women, dead from poverty and drugs, too many pregnancies and too much Valium, would appear in broad daylight at Dulston Junction, with their aborted foetuses floating around their lowering brows, bloody umbilici festooning their nylon housecoats. The suicides would gape their double mouths in the faces of lost travelling salesmen, or flash their crimson bracelets, or display the impacted sludge of their lower bodies, as snail-like they dragged themselves around the block. The murdered would exhibit their slicedup, shot-through and bludgeoned bodies. The diseased would parade their chancres. The heart-attack victims would convulse and fall, convulse and fall, convulse and fall– an endless ring-a-ring-a-corpses. We all fall down.