How the Dead Live (29 page)

There’s the tinsel, the cards, and in one of the kitchenette
cupboards there’s a hunk of Christmas cake on a Tupperware saucer. It isn’t even wrapped in tin foil, because they used that up a few days ago during one of their experiments in domestic nescience. Still, I know it’s there
–
I saw it when I was last fed a little pot of heated puree, sitting up on the out-of-worktop, while the Ice Princess negligently poked a hard plastic spoon at my soft little mouth. But that’s all there is in there, save for a couple of crumpled, cellophane, sad pasta packets and three mouldy jars ofunpreserved preserves. There was a shrunkenhead apple on the edge of the serving hatch
–
but I ate that yesterday.

So, I’ll have to do some serious climbing. It’s fucking cold in here
–
as I think I’ve had cause to remark
–
and if I want to make it through another night I’ll have to eat something. I’ll have to pick my way over the lianas ofcabling, circumvent the coffee table, climb up on to the divan mountain, climb up on to the arm of the divan, crawl along the high back of the divan, gain the serving hatch. Then, leaning out on the slick melamine of the surface, while teetering over the void, some-how contrive to get the door of the cupboard open. Why is it that in this fucking hovel, where everything that ever had any utility has long since broken, there are still functioning cup-board doors?

Even if I manage this exhausting expedition there’s no guarantee I’ll be able to reach the cake. Even if I reach the cake there’s no knowing whether I’ll be able to get it down without falling. Still, if I do, at least there’s someone there to break my fall; I won’t smash my little head in on the hard floor. No, because that’s where he lay down in slow stages, the Ice Princess’s handsome consort. I watched him go
–
so I know how decorously he managed it. And it had to be, for there’s only just enough room for him to stretch out there, full length, in his own training shoes, his own sweat pants and top, all of them marked with the ubiquitous tick. He had delusions about dealing in property
–
but this is his real estate.

I suppose I should be grateful they saw fit to put me in my own little pair of Nikes, so that I could train to walk. But you know what
–
I’m not. The only thing I’m grateful for is that they left a packet of ten Benson
&
Hedges filter cigarettes on the coffee table. Without these I’d really be in shtook. Now, wouldn’t it be amusing if the delegation did turn up to find me alone here, preternaturally mature, not simply playing with a box of matches, but using them to light a cigarette as well? Har-de-fucking-har. Still, it’s good to smoke properly again, to feel the stuff ooze into my living tissues, to sense the nicotine hone my mind, to watch my puny exhalations.
To
smell again.

They used to say it stunted your growth
–
and I thought they meant smoking. But it wasn’t the smoking
–
they meant death.

Deader

‘I’m still here – where are you?’

Field Marshal von Paulus's last telegram to Hitler before surrendering at Stalingrad

Chapter Twelve

I
’d made a death for myself and was pleased to tell Phar Lap so when I ran into him in the street outside Seth’s. He was his normal self, denim-clad, boomerang-toting, roll–up-smoking, looking as if he’d blown into Dulston in a dust devil. ‘Yeh-hey, Lily-girl, whaddya ‘bout?’ he clicked.

‘Oh, this and that, this and that,’ I snapped back.

Rude Boy came running between us and tried to kick Phar Lap in the ass, screeching, ‘Nig-nog, nig-dog, walk your dog, nig-nog!’

Phar Lap made as if to grab at the tail of Rude Boy’s coonskin cap and chuckled indulgently. ‘He never gives up, that Rude Boy, hey-yeh? Ne-ver.’

‘Will he ever?’ I asked, knowing full well that Phar Lap wouldn’t give me any kind of answer at all.

‘Mebbe not, but you gotta split the swag sometime, Lily-girl.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meanin’ maybe iss time you moved on, hey? It’s always thirsty Thursday roun’ here, ain’t it?’

I passed him the lighter I was using that week, which was clear, blue, plastic and eminently disposable. Lighters filled and emptied, came and went. I remained the same. They were alive – I was not. He lit his dag-tail, I my B&H. We both stood puffing, our smoke simulating the misty exhalations we should’ve had on this, a chilly December morning. Moved on? What could Phar Lap mean? Not, I hoped, a tedious intracity trek down to Dulburb, Dulston’s corresponding cystrict in South London. I’d been to Dulburb a few times – and it was exactly that. It was where the more comfortable dead liked to rest, in substantial semis, behind shaven privet hedges, in back of broad sidewalks, beside quiet roads, the tarmac surfaces of which were so bluey-brown they seemed like infinitely slowmoving, turbid waters.

No, not Dulburb, at once illimitable and confined, like all the parts of London the dead inhabited. Not Dulburb, where every mile or so the houses pared away from a brief stretch of dual carriageway and you found the same mouldering parade of identical shops – the butcher, the baker, the greengrocer, the ironmonger – as you’d encountered a mile back. Not Dulburb, where the roundel of the tube station at Dulburb North was followed by the roundel at Dulburb Common and then, eventually, the roundel at Dulburb South. Dulburb which its gentrifying incomers jokingly referred to as ‘Dahlb’ – sounded a little too much like ‘dull burg’ for my taste. Anyway, I’d had enough of the Dulburbs of this world when alive – ferchrissakes I’d raised two kids in Hendon!

But if not Dulburb there could be worse destinations. The deatheaucracy – which I knew was as powerful as it was nebulous – might have in mind a move to the provinces. And what would lie in store for me there? No jobs available in the vicinity for a fat old woman, and no bus service to take me anywhere else. My life would become a series of Women’s Institute cake-bakes, neighbourly cups of tea-spit, walks through fields of crops committing pesticide. It hardly bore thinking about.

‘Don’ see you at the meetings much, Lily,’ Phar Lap said after some smoking, changing his tack. ‘Wossamatter, doncha think they’ve anything to teach you?’

‘Since you ask – no. As far as I can see it’s simply an excuse for a lot of saddies to get together and moan about being dead. If the intention is to make the condition any more bearable it’s a waste of time. If the aim is to alleviate it – then it’s about as effective as getting tuberculosis-sufferers together in a room and having them cough over each other. I’ve got a death thank you very much. I’ve got my job, I don’t need much money to die on. I’ve only the rent on that grotty little flat to pay, my ciggies, and a few cents for lighting – why should I spend my time listening to a lot of mumbo-jumbo?’

‘You remember what I said before, girl?’

‘What, exactly – you’ve said so much and it’s meant so little.’

‘About it all being gammin, rubbish, lies.’

‘What? What you say to me – that I don’t doubt.’

‘Yaka! No! Don’t be a fool, girl– yer no buju. Act yer age-think!’ I hadn’t seen the man so exercised before; his mirrored sunglasses shimmered as he jerked his head about, his angular arms sliced the chilly air. He even snatched up one of his precious fucking boomerangs and waved it in my face, as if this could possibly intimidate me. ‘The meetings, girl, this place, the Fats, Lithy, Rude Boy – all of it.
Don’t you geddit?’

I stared at him, and pictured two little mes staring back out of his lenses. I wondered if I was still keel-nosed and log-faced, and my complexion remained sallow. Or were the lines on my face incised a little less deeply? The grooves not so groovy? The bags under my eyes not quite as capacious? Had death, perhaps, mellowed me?

Anyway, what the hell kind of a psychologist could possibly be observing me from behind these two-way looking-glasses? I tried to think about what he was saying, but it didn’t mean nix to me. On the other hand, everything I’d experienced of the afterlife these last few years made perfect sense. Especially the way I was able to go on working for year after year at Baskin’s, Lithy propped on my desk, with no one making more than a perfunctory connection with me – this was so true to life.

When alive I’d always been stunned at how, if you were raddled, ringed and accented, once you got into an English office environment you became an ageless, stateless single. You might be asked about your holiday, or your new shoes, or even – on certain, vital occasions like the outbreak of war what your ‘views’ were, but anything that defined you as more than another plastic-piano player was irrelevant. Husbands, kids, homes, beliefs – these were beyond the ken of anyone at the office. I came, I wrote press releases on integrated shelving systems, I went again. I remembered thinking when I had to hobble from Kentish Town to Chandler PR, bunion-shod, arthritis-gloved and latterly cancer-clad, that this kind of life was a living death. Now it was a deathly life. The awful symmetry was appealing – and entirely believable.

‘I am
thinking, Phar Lap – truly I am. But I don’t “geddit”, as you so succinctly put it.’

‘Yeh-hey, Lily-girl, no way t’ ‘tach you to the hooks and eyes of grace if you don’t.’

‘I guess not.’

‘Still, if you change yer mind you’ll know where t’find me.’

‘Where’s that, then?’ I never had any idea how to locate the man; he’d told me he was going walkabout for ever – and I took him at his word.

‘No-where.’ Phar Lap said and snickered, palate-slapped, cheek-sucked – did all the things that reminded me what an alien he was.

‘Don’t be funny, or I’ll begin thinking I had your fucking number from the get-go.’

‘Hey-yeh – I’m serious, girl. Doncha pay no attention to what goes on in this city?’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meanin’ iss nearly 1992, girl – the recession’s over, yeh-hey?’

‘So – how does that effect you?’

‘When the London mob gotta little more dough in their pockets they wanna spend it – thass how the whole fuckin’ show gets back on track.’

‘So?’ Christ, I hated joining in debate with Phar Lap. The marriage of aboriginal enunciation to the quintessentially Australian, meaningless interrogative made for the most irritating exchanges.

‘So, they want their kuyu y’see – their meat. An’ I’m the feller to give it them, yeh-hey? Smokes?’ He poked the little round tin of Log Cabin in my direction and for a change I accepted it. I’d seen Phar Lap grate the coarse tobacco in his coarser hand, then deftly marry it to the tiny ensign of paper that flew from his bottom lip, enough times to do it by rote. In death I was becoming unusually deft. He matched me with a Redhead. We puffed. If I could’ve tasted it I bet the smoke would’ve been woody.

‘How, exactly,’ I asked, spitting out the shreds of tobacco that caught on my lip with little ‘paf’s, ‘are you going to give the Londoners their kuyu?’

‘Nowhere,’ he snickered again. ‘Iss a restaurant, see –like a roadhouse, yeh-hey?’

‘You
are opening a restaurant?’ I thought of eating at Overtons in the sixties with Yaws; the bill – as I recall it was six pounds for two. Well wined, natch, but being Yaws, near tipless. When I moved to London in 1958 there were two kinds of restaurant in the whole city, bad and worse. Now a dead Australian Aboriginal was about to open one.

‘Yeah – Nowhere. Thass what it’s called, yeh-hey? Kinduva themed joint, y’see. Themed Centralian, yeh-hey? I’ve got some traditional fellers to cook bush tucker for me – damper, ‘roo, goanna an’ such. Customers’ll come an’ sit out on a sandy floor round a fire, yeh-hey? Keep it fuckin’ hot in there. Big video screen on the roof showin’ pictures of the sky over my country, hey-yeh?’

‘And you believe this will be successful?’

‘Bound t’be. Can’t fail – this kardibar mob’ll eat any old guna, an’ the stuff at Nowhere is gonna be good, yeh-hey?’

‘And where, exactly,
is
Nowhere?’ Why, why, why did I let him draw me into his absurdities? Phar Lap’s conversation was like Yiddish, always querying to solicit another question.

‘Oh – y’know,’ he shouldered his boomerang, adjusted his shades, pulled down the brim of his Stetson, showed me his boot heels, ‘it’s around the place. Ask anyone – they’ll tell you. B’lieve me, Lily-girl– yer gonna wanna know, yeh-hey? Come by for this one,’ he tilted his thin hand to his plump lips, simulating taking a drink, ‘it’ll be my shout.’

With that he was gone, striding off down Argos Road, rollup tilted up, hat brim bent down, his dusty figure blowing past the front of Seth’s. Nowhere. Honestly, was there any limit to the man’s impossibility? And to think I’d once imagined I could learn something from him, that he could guide me somewhere. Nowhere indeed.

But I ignored him on this occasion – and what kind of a klutz did that make me? Fumbling with metaphysics, cackhandedly assembling tiny cosmologies in the greyness of my short everyday. Mumu in a mumu. A sad sack in a sad sack. It should’ve begun to come together in my mind by then surely? Or at least when I discovered that Natasha had split with Miles in the wake of losing the baby. Especially when I found out she’d contacted an old friend, and decided to head out to Australia for a year’s travelling.

The old friend was teaching in Sydney – which was why she’d remained a friend of Natasha’s at all. Natasha had a way with friends; far from cultivating them, she rubbed her salty tears into the wounds she’d inflicted, rendering them incapable of sympathy towards her for the next thirty years. But this one had been out of the loop since they were in art school together.

Polly Passmore was her name. I remember her as a plump, comely lass, with a healthy, sensual appetite for hairy thighs against her smooth ones. She laughed, drank too much white wine, cosseted the children in her care when she ended up teaching. Her life was like the brightly coloured collages she liked to make – full of disparate shapes and textures, harmonised by her own good nature. At school she’d been burdened by her own good looks, pushed into a popularity she found wearisome. But when she got to St Martin’s she found Natasha. What a boon, for set beside Natasha’s sinister beauty, Polly became a fat, plain young woman. She was able to take up the second fiddle she’d always longed to play.

Polly didn’t get enough of Natasha. She presided in a teadoling, tissue-passing capacity over Natasha’s first few spirals down into dissolution. She provided a shoulder for the young men to cry on impotently, the young men whose imperfectly fired hearts Natasha had smashed on the kitchen floor of their shared flat. She scraped Natty off the same floor a couple of times, after early, poignant, never-do-it-again heroin overdoses. She attended court with Natty when her pal was had up for shoplifting. Again. She blocked in the blank areas of pictures Natty had hurriedly sketched out, so that they could be presented for tutorial assessments.

But Polly cleared out before things got truly heavy. Perhaps she’d had as much of Natasha as she needed. She knew now, at any rate, that she could never be as beautiful – nor as damned. Polly left London still thinking that one of her friend’s wings was broken, not comprehending that it had been amputated. She went to Glasgow, she went to the Isle of Mull. She spent time in California and in Banff. She taught art quite artlessly and had many many unsuitable liaisons with men who treated her quite unforgivably. She grew into the fat, plain woman her friend had licensed her to be; and while swilling sweet wine became appropriately bitter. How else could Polly Passmore have been dumb enough to keep in touch? Stupid enough to offer Natasha a home once the life had been sucked out of her?

Natasha snorted the last of her heroin off a metal soap dish, in a toilet cubicle, in the transit lounge at Abu Dhabi. When the plane touched down in Sydney all the passengers applauded, while giving Ocker cheers and piercing squeals of glee. Our little sophisticate clutched her sweaty head between her scrawny upper arms and vomited into one of the bags provided. A classic antipodean already – chundering the dreamtime into a nightmare.

Charlotte had coped with so much for so long. With her father’s face, with my death, with her sister’s addiction, with fucking to order. But this . . . this . . .
global
injustice. With this she could not cope. A woman called her a month after the event and asked if she’d like to attend a group, where women whose babies had died
in utero
got together to show the Polaroids of their tiny lifeless progeny. The ones the medical staff had thoughtfully taken. It wasn’t Charlie’s style to snack on such meagre leavings, crumbs of maternity on the expensive empty plate of her life. So she shrugged it off, declined the invitation. She’d rather suffer the trauma. She saw her dead son in nightmares of savage reality. Each night he came slithering, the poor mite, up the facade of Cumberland Terrace. He tapped, the lost soul, against the pane of the large sash window. Charlotte rose from the marital slough, padded through the soft pile to confront the hard truth. ‘What is it, my love? What do you want, you poor thing?’ His tiny maw opened and closed in the orange light of the streetlamps. She heaved up the sash with a whoosh and leant in close. ‘I need to go wee-wee,’ he said. ‘I need to go wee-wee.’ For shame on the little bugger, shlepping all the way over from Dulston, simply to lay this heavy trip on his poor mother. Jesus – even I felt some sympathy for the woman, for a change.