How the Dead Live (22 page)

How did the living react to this drop-in centre of annihilation? Why – they went crazy, natch. They were institutionalised, got religion, or left the country. They took the antics of the beyond for what they were, an eruption from a fifth, hideous dimension always suspected by them, but never witnessed. They were haunted. I very quickly saw, as I wandered the streets of Dulston, that everything I’d ever heard while living and disbelieved – about headless riders, or women in white, or screaming banshees – had been only the slightest of references to this disgusting limbo. As for the mentally ill, with their tales of alien invasion, conspiratorial control, and diabolic discorporation –
they’d been telling the absolute fucking truth.

When alive I’d fought hard to ward off the darkness at the edges of my sight; the fear of my own mind’s lintel collapsing, as I hovered on the doorstep between home and the world, claustro and agro. There’d been times when the phobias were so intense I could hardly withstand the sensation of being claustrophobic within the confines of
my own fucking head.
A little dolly-woman staring out through eyeholes cut by sadistic brain surgeons. Then I’d flee to the musty sheds of Christ, the cricket pavilions of the Lord. And how suitable it was that the English should find themselves sucking on such a meagre, rational, half-boiled sweetie of solace. My excuse was that I enjoyed the choir, or the admired the artwork, or found the atmosphere calming. But most English churches have none of these, and the raw fact of the matter is that I was
fucking afraid of the shit inside my head.
Desperately afraid it would get loose and overwhelm me. It was small satisfaction to discover I’d been right all the time. Right all along.

I didn’t see a great deal of Phar Lap after the first PD meeting. He told me, ‘I got work t’do, same as you, Lily-girl. I don’t pick up no sit-down money. I go walkabout for new prospects, y’see, yeh-hey?’ What these prospects were I didn’t discover for a long time. Phar Lap commended me to the good offices of the personally dead. ‘These babas’ll teach you all y’need t’know, girl. Keep goin’ t’ the meetings. Speak up about yer own guna – they’ll understand. There’s nothing more I can tell you fer now, hey-yeh? No-thing.’

At the meetings I blurted out that I had an insuperable urge to attend my own cremation – to watch myself burn. ‘Go,’ said the personally dead, ‘go, but don’t expect it to do anything for you in particular. Neither to resolve the past, nor to make this purgatory any more pleasant.’ Death was unable to effect any closure.

I took the tube from Highbury and Islington, and changed to the Northern Line at King’s Cross, where, if I chose to see them, astonishing ghosts of human toast haunted the escalators. I sat on an Edgware Branch train to Golders Green, watching the reflections of the wan metropolitan faces, elongated into absurdity in the window opposite. On the dark walls of the tunnel, high-voltage tendons of cable flexed below the city. As it burrowed north from the West End I could feel the building-up above my head until, at Hampstead, its great clay weight oppressed me. Still–
en route
to my own funeral and I was experiencing only
mild
claustrophobia. Fantastic when alive I wouldn’t’ve
dreamed
of travelling on the tube at all unless I were
drunk,
or sedated, or both.

Then the longest stop of all, from Hampstead to Golders Green; from the old and intelligent to the new and smart; from the villas on the hill to the chalets in the valley. Golders Green, where short-ass
nouveau riche
women of unspeakable vulgarity, their shnozzles just visible above the dash, piloted their husbands’ Mercedes with absurd legerdemain along the Golders Green Road. Treating the huge Kraut saloons as if they were ten grand’s worth of bumper car. Then oblique-parking them and pedicuring into Lindys patisserie, or Grodzinski’s bakery, or some other calorie shack, to stuff themselves plumper. And it was like this in the sixties! Only twenty years after their fucking mothers and fathers had been
slimmed down
for the ovens.

I always hated Golders Green. I’d take the kids there to see a movie at the Ionic cinema, but only if it wasn’t on anywhere else. Because I hated to be in that press of Jewry, all munching and gabbing and shmoozing their way through the ads, the support – and then the fucking feature. Ferchrissakes! It was as if they were in fucking shul! I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t hide my racial self-disgust from my mongrel kids. So, once we’d got out of the joint, I’d
swear
we’d never go there again. That if they wanted to see another movie there they’d have to get their fucking
father
to take them.

I’d hold out for a month or two, or even three. Then on a dull winter evening we’d be driving back from shopping in town, grinding up the Finchley Road in whichever clunker it was the Yaws family had that year, when the thought of getting home to Daddy with his goyish air of pernicious, pipe-and-slipper anaemia would become
too much
for me. I’d find myself stopping outside Bloom’s, ushering the girls in, waiting in the homey-smelling takeout area, while the old shlepper in the stained white coat made up our order of salt-beef sandwiches and latkes. Even the food at Bloom’s – where, let’s face it, the bland were feeding the bland – tasted exotic in this city of carbohydrate. Then we’d go sit in the jalopy and gobble it up. I’d tell Natty and Charlie how fucking brilliant our people were. How we’d produced all the great thinkers of this century
and
the last. How even Bloom’s was full of wayward Einsteins, Freuds and Marxs, waiting table for food money while they finished their PhDs. And how when our dander was up we could hold off an entire army of Yaws and his Latin-conjugating ilk for months at a time, until we committed fucking
suicide
rather than surrender.

It was utterly unchanged – Golders Green. The same Becks stood becking in the station forecourt, about whatever nonsense was in their heads. I turned away from them, and under a London sky with superb vertical hold – a static greyish band below a whitish static band – walked north along the Finchley Road past the uncomfortable semis, squatting behind their prickly, privet barriers, to Hoop Lane.

It was the third day after my death and there I was, resurrected outside the Express Dairy. I didn’t know how I knew it was the right time, but I knew. I hadn’t wanted to go to my wake, organised by Mrs Elvers, natch, with Esther in self-pitying attendance, together with a slew of the English indifferent. Why would I wish to be present at the start of my own forgetting? No, it was the cremation I cared about. I had to make sure the coffin was of the cheapest possible manufacture, the undertakers of the sloppiest deportment, the hearse a Yawsmobile. I wanted to creep round the back, into the room where the conveyor belt disappeared the coffin. I needed to see the crematorium thieves rip my corpse out of its two-hundred-quid box. I needed to see them rip off my estate at the same time as I quit it. I’d spent years being appalled at the industry of death – I didn’t want to miss out on these gonifs doing their very worst.

It wasn’t like that at all, though. Eleven in the morning on a gloomy Tuesday, and the gentle swoop of dull, moist tarmac empty save for the intermittent swishes of Volvos, Volkswagens and Mercedes, carrying monied matrons the long mile from the Hampstead Garden Jewburb to Golders Green for a wallet workout. Sodden leaves underfoot, and up above the square chimney of the crematorium supporting the sky with a swelling column of fleshy smoke, while sucking the greyness into its redbrick Lutyens heart. A paradoxical brightness illuminated the Jewish cemetery behind me. I laughed mirthlessly to think of all the fools who’d paid top dollar, imagining they’d end up safely ensconced here, when the prevailing wind meant they were destined for a reverse diaspora after death, back to the East End.

Strange to relate, Natasha Yaws came alone, from the opposite direction to me. From the Hampstead Garden Suburb. Why, I couldn’t imagine. It didn’t seem a likely place for her to have scored. Scored she must have, because it was early for her, and if she didn’t exactly look perky, she was at any rate composed. I followed her on in, keeping a good fifty paces behind. I had already been well enough schooled by Phar Lap in the arts of exiguousness to know that she wouldn’t see me if I didn’t want her to. How like childhood death seemed, involving as it did such games of grandmother’s footsteps.

Natasha hadn’t had to consider whether it was appropriate to wear black for this human barbecue – because she always did. Even so, I was faintly pleased to see that she had her best black on today. A three-quarter–length black silk skirt, flared from the knee; a black silk blouse with an exaggeratedly long, pointed collar; her good, black chenille woolly; a long black scarf; and a high-waisted, full-length black overcoat – this latter essential on an almost balmy morning in early May, to keep her junky chill wrapped up tight. It was an outfit I’d bought for her, which explained its smart co-ordination. Natasha added the mores of a beautiful woman to the messy lessons of her father. And anyway, for years now she’d been in the habit of shooting up
everything
she got from Marks & Spencer. She’d go in with her pal Russell, boost a load of stuff, then take it back for a fifty per cent refund. M&S had the best returns policy of any of the high-street chains. Those Jews! They understood that it was far better to roll with a problem like this. So, fifty per cent Jew, fifty per cent refunded – that was my Natty.

As she clacked by on the worn heels of her cheap, plastic ankle-boots I saw that she had reasonably presentable black tights – or at least not running at the knee. She asked a lingering, baggy-suited man which chapel. The sepulchral underling looked at her with sarcophagus eyes. She tripped on. I followed.

A hearse stood by the doors to the chapel. It looked bog-ordinary to me. Goody. The coffin was a plain enough deal as well. There was no toilet-seat wreath, or trumped-up tribute. Not even a loose bunch of my namesake. As we stared, four hirelings dragged the thing out and oomphed it up on to their unsteady shelves of shoulder. Who’d’ve thought the old bag had such weight in her? They shuffled a little in their square-toed, Freeman Hardy & Willis, orthopaedic-lookalike shoes. They adjusted the coffin with their ugly hands, bracing each other with thick arms held across heavy-set backs. Then plodded forward. Ah, the leaden death march!

‘Goin’ to the chapel and we’re gonna get mar-ried!’ the lithopedion went off in my coat pocket. I damped it down, padded forward, slid into one of the pews at the back. Natty stood two pews from the front, wavering in the narrow aisle as the undertakers undertook to dump my coffin ceremoniously on the plinth at the front, which I knew from previous visits concealed the conveyor belt.

Then nothing. Or, as Phar Lap would phrase it, ‘no-thing’. Meaning a great desert of negativity, an ultimate tundra, a vanishing-point veldt. No readings, no music, no flowers, no weeping, no no-thing. The undertakers stood, ranged across the front of the chapel, displaying to the ungregation their four elephant asses. After a while one of them came back to where Natty stood and said something in her ear; she murmured in return. The lift attendant of death strode forward across the lobby and without bothering to conceal his action hit the concealed button. The conveyor belt jolted, took up the sad slack, and propelled it offstage left.
Exeunt.

Natasha came past me fast. All I saw were her pin-prick pupils, her paper-pale skin, her ineffable cheekbones, and she was gone. What did she see? No-thing. I waited ‘til the undertakers had passed, rubbing their hands, getting out their packs of Benson & Hedges, then walked forward, up the aisle and round the back of the belt, to where I found the expected door.

They say it helps people to see the bodies of those they’ve loved one final time before disposal. Helps to confirm beyond any doubt that the dead are dead. Deanimated. Gone. Perhaps it would’ve helped if I’d seen the rip-off I’d anticipated. My corpse helped out of its pine jacket and speedily dispatched; the cheapo coffin shoved straight back in the hearse and returned to the showroom, like a used car with a number of careless owners. As we all know, there’s nothing more comforting than being confirmed in one’s long-held prejudices. I was out of luck. Backstage two men in the khaki overalls affected by Englishmen on the calmer shores of manual labour checked the seals, the paperwork, the dials on the big chundering oven; then, without even adjusting its position on the conveyor belt, opened the doors, hit another button, and off it went. It, you note. Not I – it.

Had I expected anyone else to be at the bonfire? To wave sparklers of feeling about, let off fireworks of emotion? No, not particularly. Although I was surprised at Mr and Mrs Elvers’s non-attendance. I supposed they must have had an important meeting – they were that kind of people. Meetings for them were sumptuary affairs. Such that, were either of them to be asked at around teatime if they wanted a slice of cake, they’d reply, ‘No thanks, I had an important meeting at lunchtime.’ Both of them were growing fat on important meetings; and as time went by, and the Waste of Paper chain grew and grew, a crumpled streamer of premises wreathing the office world, they grew fatter still.

No, it was left to Natty to mourn in the now sunny morning. Under the plane trees with their dancing leaves, amid the cherry and apple blossom, looking imposingly beautiful, ridiculously Russian. She dallied outside a small exterior office, which, like everything else there, was solidly built with dark Dachau brick. As the undertakers were stubbing out their cigarettes and swinging into their hearse, one of them paused, a crease neatly slicing his ham’s brow. Was he thinking of consoling Natty, or hitting on her? Or both – she was that kind of a girl. He thought better of it and shuddered.

And Natty, did she cry? Cry she didn’t – and this did rile me. She’d cried at fucking Yaws’s funeral. Admittedly she was only ten then – but still, her own fucking mother. Her Mumu. The fount of her own incomparable narcissism, her wayward charm, her rampant needs. How come she didn’t shed at least one, meagre, drip of grief? Couldn’t she wring out her emotional wet blanket of a character just that little bit more? I mean, I
know
she was sad all right, sad for her own fucking self. Miserable as hell. Desolate beyond belief. Or was she too like Yaws? Another fucking Yaws, with a fresco of his face painted on the wet plaster
inside
of her own. So it seemed.