How the Dead Live (28 page)

So, who fathered Natasha’s child? Perhaps nobody – since neither Miles nor Russell could exactly be pegged as remotely paternal. Was it, then, a destructive feat of parthenogenesis on the part of my daughter Kali, frigging herself with one hand, tossing off the donor with a second, readying the instrumentation of insertion with a third, leaving one free for petty gestures of supplication? No matter – she was knocked up. Miles tended to her as she puked and moaned and kvetched in all her specialness. And while he was out dogging at the lawyers’ offices in High Holborn where he now worked, Natasha, the bitch, headed off to Dulston – which to her was simply another nondescript part of a city she was incapable of describing – and spent his gelt on Bernie’s gear. She’d been introduced to Bernie by another girly flake who’d failed to take recovery seriously; a young woman who, like my Natasha, attended the meetings of recovering addicts in a spirit of social enquiry, taking notes on the counterfoils of stolen chequebooks.

What a perfect cover for using heroin this pregnancy was or so Natasha thought, caught up in her own cunning awfulness. You can fool some of yourself all of the time.

I’d watch her from my front window. Or rather, watch her ankles, trim – for such a tall, disorderly woman – in her trademark ankle-boots. I’d watch her bump ballooning above me. Then I’d hear her throw her voice up to Bernie, and see the Yale thrown down. The Fats saw her as well, and burbled to themselves, ‘So lovely, so lovely. Young and blooming, young and blooming,’ while Lithy dug into its trove of popular song for a serenade – ‘It’s all too beautiful! It’s all too beautiful!’ I’m not saying she did it all the time, but once every fortnight I’d see Natasha on the front steps, waiting to cop from the other side. And once a fortnight I’d troll over to Cumberland Terrace to see how Mrs Elvers was getting on with her swelling.

Saddam invaded Kuwait and my girls indulged their own cravings. In their second trimester, the towelled heads unravelled on Temple Mount. On the cusp of their third, Maggie-Maggie-Maggie – that cross-dresser – was finally out; and a film opened at the Dulston Odeon, in which a woman is pleasantly haunted by her dead lover. It played to packed houses for months. How we laughed at this light comedy of extinction. Then, at the close of the year, as big, steel, Arab phalli flopped on Tel Aviv and the shmendricks all scattered for cover – they lost them. Both of them, Natasha
and
Charlotte, lost their babies – within a week of each other.

Peculiar, this, given that they had so little to do with one another, bar the occasional anti-social call, when Charlie decided there was an item of pregnancy pret-a-porter she could do without, and gift her skittish sister. Peculiar that their bell-shaped bodies should resonate like this, especially considering that their pregnancies had been ministered to so differently: Charlotte regularly sitting, leafing through glossies at the London Clinic, propped up by a duchess to one side and an arms dealer’s paramour to the other; while Natty occasionally crawled into the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, to rub the midwives up the wrong way with her invincible hauteur.

Strange that both foetuses died the same way – poisoned by their own backed-up piss, their puny bladders blocked by congenital knots. Not that Natasha didn’t blame herself, didn’t fear she was sunk because of the tin-foil flag of inconvenience she’d been cruising under. For if one thing’s for sure, in the realm of the emotions all contingent events are causally felt. I smoke heroin, then my baby dies, therefore my addiction killed my baby. Too true, missy. Too bloody true.

They both found out the same way as well. Lying on the padded couch with the ultrasound technicians making with plastic pucks, ironing their big bellies with little echoes. There was a cheerful, running commentary to begin with, and then . . . silence . . . looks of anguished confusion rippled both operatives’ brows. Both pregnant women had been having a hard time with nausea and then, magically, ceased feeling sick a couple of days before. Both mothers had been getting an internal kicking – and this too had stopped. ‘Um . . . err . . . there’s a problem here . . .’ The operatives both struggled for the words with which to describe this intractable situation.
In utero
death can do this to the most consummate rhetorician it’s so
previous.

On the padded couches both ex-mothers, weighed down by the awful dead things inside of them, stretched out anguished hands to clutch at their menfolk. Hysteria welled up in all four of them. Richard vented his bad feelings on the doctor, when he eventually arrived to tell the Elverses their baby was dead. Miles didn’t intervene. Both women were prescribed
plenty
of Valium. Charlotte stayed in the London Clinic and that very night they dripped the drugs into her that contracted the womb, which squeezed the corpse, and evacuated it into a cardboard kidney dish. Natasha went home to Kentish Town wearing a self-pitying sackcloth woven entirely from blue, tenmilligram sedative pills. Two days later she presented herself, back at the Garrett, smacked out to the gills, and they sucked the dead fish out of her too.

Both slunks came to join me at the flat in Dulston. Natch. They lay alongside the nodding Cerberus on the back shelf of Costas’s cab, like bloody, discarded rear-view-mirror dingledangles. He scooped them into a Sainsbury’s bag – It’s Clean, It’s Fresh – and dumped them at my door. All through that winter, while young Iraqi conscripts were being entombed by British and American aerial gravediggers, and into the spring, when once again, Famine drew the Sudanese as stick-figure parodies of human figuration, Charlotte and Natasha’s startwrong kids haunted the basement flat at number 27.

I couldn’t get them to stay inside. Once admitted they slimed right through and out the cat-flap in the back door. They flotched around the tiny concrete area out back, beneath the miniature clothes-line pylon. They sat, side by side, on the three dank steps that led up to the sunless strip of garden. Two little red cousins with unformed faces hugging each other. Dead babes in the concrete jungle. We all did our best – Lithy, the Fats, Rude Boy and I – to coax them in. It was to no avail. Only in the middle of the night, when the Fats gyred in the front bedroom, and Rude Boy roamed the corridor spitting imprecations, and Lithy sang, ‘I’m gonna wait ‘til the midnight hour . . .’ did the poor mites climb up on to the sill and slither against the window, their tiny maws opening and closing. If I opened the bottom sash and bent down close, I could just about make out what it was they wanted. ‘We need to go wee-wee,’ they said. ‘We need to go wee-wee.’ And of course they did. For eternity.

Clive departed. The dead never broke off relationships, as such – we simply drifted away from one another, each suspended in our own wispy cloak of cigarette smoke. You’re never alone with a Strand. There was no rancour, no weeping, no sense of loss. He couldn’t really take the horror show in the basement – and who could blame him? He’d rather squat in his apartment full of baggage, while the lost principles of his office lifetime pushed the valises, rucksacks and steamer trunks this way and that.

Anyway, the Balkans were revolting, while in Milwaukee they’d discovered an apartment not unlike Clive’s, but stacked with dismembered corpses. How much more disgusting were the flights of fancy of the living than those of us mere shades. Miles Davis was dead. Miles with his impeccable sartorial taste, his sweet shofar, his infinite cool. Miles whose jizzy horn had limned in the fins of the fifties. Miles, who did battle with Dizzy on the hot afternoon at the party, when the poet said, ‘September, when we loved as in a burning house.’ So sexy, that quoting poetry. It’d never failed to turn me on. Not that I’d ever needed much turning on, my heels were ready-rounded. Miles was dead. I should’ve suspected that something was afoot.

I’d been dead for three years. In the sixties we’d all been shocked by the Living Theatre, but I’d grown accustomed to a dying one. I was barely fazed any more by the antics of the Dulston shades, the way my nostalgia for the beautiful babies I’d once had had been transfigured into a menagerie of ugly abortions. The PD meetings, the lazy manifestations of Phar Lap Jones – how could I’ve been expected to realise that this was the peaceful side of the afterlife? Because while the dead hoovered up useless cocaine and tried to rub up against one another, the living were going on and on. Life bobbed like a cork caught in an ever widening torrent of trivial innovation. The century gurgled towards the artificial plughole. And if in those three years I began to accept that I was dead, in the ones that followed, it was made transparently clear to me that I was even . . . deader.

Christmas 2001

Soon I’m going to have to attempt some serious climbing. I can’t expect to hug the ground indefinitely, a deserted rug rat. I try to comfort myself by imagining this is a test, a probationary period; and that if I do well the delegation will eventually arrive to announce that I am, indeed, the living goddess. This shoebox maisonette occupies the corner of the building, two flights up. There’s another, empty box, between the front door and the piss chute which serves all the apartments as an external staircase. Even now, in the dead interstice between the years, I can hear children running up and down the stairs, along the landings, the soles of their trainers slapping the concrete. But they seldom venture along here to the corner. Even if they do get as far as the neighbouring flat it’s only to rattle the letterbox with a stick, or bang it on the steel shutters the Council have bolted across the windows. Anyway
–
kids never listen. We never really listen.

What’re they in training for anyway? Everyone of them shod in complex vehicles of rubber, leatherette, suede, GoreTex, and even, I daresay, Sympatex. I wonder if anyone else has noticed the sinister convergence of training shoes and cars? Both cars and shoes are now designed so as to appear as if they’re plunging down and forward. They’re ass-up, their squared-off butts anticipating the tragic congress ofa rear-end shunt. And the cars are getting smaller, more garishly painted, their plastic bumpers, wing mirrors and functionless spoilers just like the useless ridges and corrugations of training shoes. Training shoes which are, natch, getting larger. Soon people will find themselves inadvertently parking their shoes and putting on their cars. I wish. Even police cars are fashion statements. Calling all queers
–
there’s an all points style bulletin. Graphic law and garish order.

Sympatex
–
rich, isn’t it. But it exists, I know it does. I saw it advertised on the tube, in the days before the Ice Princess had degenerated so much she could no longer head up west to Marks
&
Spencer, and make use of their generous returns policy. I guess Sympatex must be an artificial material that adapts itself to the shape ofthe wearer’s body. If only it could adapt itself to the wearer’s intentions, but then they’d have to call it Unsympatex, certainly so far as my fellow residents here in Coborn House are concerned.

What’re they in training for, a lifetime of being unfit? I used to think it absurd enough to share a country with people who wore baseball caps
–
back to front, natch
–
when they’d never played the game in their lives; but during the few, short months of this latest go-round it’s struck me that I’ve been living with millions of worshippers of the wind goddess. Everywhere you look, NIKE is emblazoned on sweat pants and tops, jackets and hats, shoes and even socks. Often there’s only the ubiquitous tick that’s the shmutter vendor’s logo.
So
droll, that; when to me, who’s lived through times when people didn’t feel the need to put on sports gear before lighting a cigarette, the tick looks like nothing so much as the symbol on an old packet of Newport
–
but turned upside down. The logo
–
the logos. The world’s been turned upside down. The daughters are the mothers
–
their former nurturers are now their neglected babies. Mummy, why’s your skin so rough and hard? Because I’m a fucking corpse.

Yes, they walk the shitty streets of this fucking hole, Mile End, East London. They walk these shitty streets, sucking on their cigarettes, marked off with the ubiquitous tick, and exhibiting all the florid symptoms of schizophrenia. I used to see them, hanging about the precincts of Coborn House, right up until the last few days, when the Ice Princess couldn’t even get it together to get up at all. She used to think I was complaining because she was removing me from the rusty swings, the groaning seesaw, the wonky roundabout
–
when really I was protesting that she’d taken me there at all. Close by us the wind-worshippers stared into the air, while addressing the voices piped into their inner ears. Like modular, electronic talismans, their mobile phones performed the
magical feat of convincing them that they had a relationship with these disembodied individuals.

Why do I
sneer? I
could use a phone myself right now, but the land-line is cut off and the chunks of plastic the Ice Princess and the Estate Agent used to wield are simply that now: chunks of plastic. If a delegation did arrive it wouldn’t be to find the living goddess, it would be to dun the Ice Princess, or drub her consort. I
suppose the
GP
or the social worker might’ue been anticipated, if this wasn’t the dead interstice between the years. Instead they’re tucked up in their own warm homes, gobbling fat fowls, advocating another thimble ofadvocaat, doing their level best to forget the human wreckage they sort through during their working lives. ‘Did you have a good Christmas and New Year?’ their colleagues will enquire of them when they get back to the surgery in the early part of January. ‘Gh yes,’ they’ll reply,
‘
I
remembered I was middle-class. And you?’

Even at 32
Coborn House the season of joy has been, if not exactly celebrated, at least alluded to. The hideous spider plant down here has been indecorously draped with a twist of tinsel. I
know she dangled some shiny balls from the fronds of the yucky yucca upstairs. On top of the TV there are at least three cards, only one of which is from the world’s most unsuccessful lawyer. Who’re the other two from? Fuck knows. I
wouldn’t be at all surprised if both are from members of the ‘crew’ the Ice Princess and her consort associated with. ‘Crew’, marvellous euphemism this, as if that raggedy gang were in fact a bronzed cockpit full of Ivy Leaguers, plunging through the surf off of Cape Cod. But the only America’s Cup this ‘crew’ have ever been associated with is a crushed Coke can, punctured with a bent pin, and fumigated with crack smoke.