How the Dead Live (30 page)

In the daytime, every toy dog Charlotte passed trotting along the sidewalk was a furry foetus. The Elverses gave up on the spreadsheet analysis and abandoned systematic fornication. They now had nearing a thousand Waste of Paper outlets and there was no sign of the expansion slowing down. Sure, there’d been something of a glitch during the end of eighties, but now, like some rocket rounding the moon of recession and utilising the inertia, the Elverses’ enterprise accelerated into the boom. In the nineties the economic cycle began freewheeling on what people wanted. It was no longer a question of establishing people’s needs and providing for them, it was a matter of encouraging them to want any old tat – then supplying it. That’s what the Elverses did so well – supply any old tat.

Never before in the history of the world had so many pictures been framed, presents wrapped, knick-knacks boxed, books covered, prints masked, stamps hinged, photos cornered and shelves lined. And with the daily grind of encrypting information now computerised, never had stationery been such a decorative, luxurious item. The populace no longer so much as sent each other a note – but by Christ they had notelets. Weren’t they tortured, as I’d always been, by the tyranny of this much blank paper? Or was it, as I suspected, that the enormous Waste of Paper was itself the cosmic complement to their unformed, unbecome and untold stories?

Not that the Elverses didn’t diversify – they were no fools. Like Esther Bloom they bought art galleries, properties and business publishing companies. They moved from being merely frivolously wealthy – to being seriously rich. Richard Elvers, who’d left school at sixteen to sell collarless white shirts on a stall at Camden Lock, and Charlotte, who’d bought one of them – neither of them even knew that the country’s constitution was yet to be written; so they’d no shame when it came to entertaining legislators, lordlings, and stars of the musical theatre.

Yes, I felt some sympathy for Charlotte – and that alone should’ve alerted me. Where was my stupid colourlessness of indifference when I needed it most?
Les Miserables
had been running for nearly ten years – didn’t I comprehend the true nature of my own? As I crouched by the poor, professionally dumb waiters, while they ministered to the ministerial chums, the millionaire thriller-writers and the televison executives who made up the Elverses’ little coterie, I grew angry. Angry at the gaucheness of this, a newly-fabricated dining cubicle that made a crass mezzanine in the once airy apartment. Angry at the chatter that emanated from these privileged mouths. Had anyone heard that the FDA was warning women with breast implants against flying, lest they explode? Given half a chance I’d give them a fucking breast implant they wouldn’t forget. I wished I was an unquiet spirit. A Bernie who didn’t know I was dead.

And wasn’t it the case that it was useless airlifting food to the former Soviet Union? (At this time none of them could yet contemplate the word ‘Russia’.) And had anyone yet been to Nowhere, the new, Australian aboriginal, themed restaurant? It was
tres tres amusant.
For night after night I gnashed my own teeth in my daughter’s Nash apartment. The Cold War was over and these jerks had won. Everyone was a liberal now. ‘I’m basically a liberal,’ they’d say to each other, as if this freed them up to affect the jacket of a fascist, or the trousers of an anarchist. Apparently the only people who didn’t get it were satanic covens of fat, black, poor trade-unionists, riddled with Aids in the Gambia.

Yes, good, old-fashioned, righteous anger. Bottled bile. Canned gall. Draught choler – this being England. Richard and Charlotte were encouraged by their short, swarthy, successful, Semitic friends to contemplate a shopping trip to Phoenix, Arizona, where they might be able to purchase, from a stud of an orphanage, a tall, blond, Aryan child. A child who would come with a form book of its very ownsome, out of Mormon by Swede. Richard and Charlotte were advised by sterile friends who had a ‘liberal’ conscience to fly to Manila, or Managua, or Mauritius, where, for hardly any gelt at all, they’d be able to shop freely for a mulatto. Browse, as it were, in the birthing bazaar. Richard and Charlotte were adjured by charitable couples of unimpeachable rigour – the kind who fully appreciate that charity begins as far away from home as you can possibly get – to take a camper van of medical supplies to Romania, or Somalia, or Rangoon, where – with considerable effort and bribing of UN officials – they’d be able to secure a little leper, or a burgeoning haemophiliac, or a cute encephalitic. ‘Isn’t his swollen brow
so
cute.’

Ooh – it made me mad! Then I’d get home to Dulston, to find Rude Boy resplendent .in his coonskin cap watching footage of the LA riots, his muddy feet up on the arm of the chair. ‘Get those niggers!’ he’d scream with approval. ‘Ream those boogies!’ Cowering at the back window were Charlie and Natty’s slunks – ‘We want to wee-wee’ – and hoedowning on the kitchen lino was Lithy – ‘Oh the concrete and the clay / Beneath my feet begin to crumble!’ And in the bedroom the Fats, naked as the day they were shed, gained, or lost, spun their hanks of flab and muttered, ‘Ooh she’s mad, yes she is. Ooh she’s in a rage. Fat and old, fat and old – and in a rage. Fat and old.’ Then there was HeLa as well, whispering along the walls. Why the hell didn’t these kids
listen
when I told them not to track dirt into the house? Here was I, suffering all the weight of these, the family’s dead progeny, while junky dearest took another instalment of her gap life and Charlotte contemplated fucking
buying
out.

Rude Boy never spoke to me, he only shouted at me. But one evening he took myoid hand in his young one, in such a way as to suggest that we might be holding on to each other, and he led me. Led me out of the flat. Led me up the steps to the front door. Rude Boy shouted up to Bernie’s window, ‘Chuck down the key, you miserable fucking smack-head!’ And the Yale sailed down.

As we mounted the stairs, turning awkward corners by grimed-up windows, passing the shabby doors to the flats on the first and second floors, I saw a change in him. If you ignored your children’s moods when they were alive, imagine how pervasive this becomes when they’re dead. Rude Boy was simply that to me now – a rude boy, a troublesome presence to be blanked, especially when he frigged in the face of some stodgy Dulston lady, whose only terrors in the afterlife consisted in being unable to serve the vicar his tea. ‘Less tea, Vicar?’ But as I followed his ass up the stairs, his mudspattered ass, his vulnerable ass, his nine-year-old ass, he ceased being Rude Boy and became Dave Junior once more.

At the top Bernie was waiting, anorak zipped up, grimacing teeth in beard. He made as if to ruffle David’s blond hair. No, he did, he did ruffle it. He was, I remembered, alive after a fashion. Which is by way of noting that he thought he was. I followed David in. Bernie’s attic was as Mrs Seth had said. Up here under the sloping eaves of the old house, Bernie had camped for decades, a filthy urban Bedouin who’d lost the urge to wander. Piled everywhere, like a never-to-be-begun game of pick-up sticks, were hundreds of cardboard tubes and boxes that had held the tin foil he’d bought at Seth’s. Mixed up with them were frozen dollops of discarded clothing; milk bottles half-full of ancient, crusted, brown piss; heaps of mildewed magazines and newspapers. In the dead centre of the attic, under a spillage of light from a filthy skylight, sat a bare, single mattress, a vile stain in the middle of its ticking. Alongside it was the electric heater that had done for Bernie, both bars radiant in the gloom.

As if they were the remains of an offering that had been sacrificed at this domestic altar, dangling on the fireguard, plopped on the bare boards and splashed on the walls were melted and ashy bits of Bernie and his late anorak. From somewhere within one of the drifts of trash hiding the skirting boards came a choked, tearful voice singing, ‘. . . it’s down at the end of lonely street – that’s Heartbreak Hotel . . .’ For a few seconds I thought Lithy must’ve climbed up here with us, but it wasn’t the right decade. Then I realised it was Elvis, and that the sound came from the paltry speaker of a fifties transistor, muffled by an unspeakable item of Bernie’s underwear.

Once I’d spotted this, other mementos popped out of the murk. The cover of a paperback lying open by the mattress, picturing a neat couple in an unruly embrace. The title was
Peyton Place.
Butting against a pile of cardboard tubes, trying to lift them with its bulbous forks of arm, was Robbie the Robot, whining with battery-powered frustration. David picked his way through the trash like he knew this room only too well – like it was
his
room; one narrow foot placed surely on a shiny, new copy of
The Cat in the Hat,
the second planted in the saucer of an upturned frisbee. Bernie stayed standing by the door, his bullet-wound eyes wavering from David to me and back again, the grimace still splitting his toilet-brush beard. He’d had the junky daughter up here a fair few times – now he’d got her mother and elder brother. At the far side of the attic David reached a dwarfish door and pulled it open. This, I thought, must lead to some stinky kitchenette, or fouler bathroom. The boy beckoned to me to follow him and I did.

Into 1957, into Vermont, where I’d caught him, playing in the back yard with two of his buddies.

What’s more overpowering at first it’s difficult to say – for all senses come rushing into me with a roar, all perspectives with a screech – and the memories, the memories
glissade.
First, it comes to me that around this time I smoked pot, three, maybe four, times with Bob Beltane, before we made love in his station wagon, parked up by Moses Lake. Second, that this was like being high – everything musically exaggerated, the sky such a deep and aching blue, the sap from the maples in the plantation behind the yard stickily smelly, the rasp of crickets and drone of hornets a veritable string section tuning up for
Fantasia.
Third, that this was Now, and I could
feel
the very spring of the porch boards beneath my feet, the beat of the summer heat on my smooth
young
face, every little waft of cooler air
play about
beneath my light, cotton dress.

Oh Jesus – what sweet
relief!
What
feelings!
What an inconceivably broad view, the creamy piles of cumuli dragging my eyes up, the green grass, brown earth and white clapboard houses dragging them all around. Whirling impressions of inconceivable richness and colour for someone come from mouldering Dulston, from the dead future. But then, within instants – and life is so very instantaneous, so very Now, don’t you think? – come other, deeper, more pleasing sensations too. The warm bellyache of recently received and passionately enjoined caresses, the deep thrum of dick-beats inside, the salty gushes of orgasm, his and hers, sweet and sour, acid and alkaline. The scent of the other is upon me and I know – sure as the shit I am – that I’ve only just arrived from my lover’s embrace. Waved him off from the front veranda, watched the fins of that shark-like cocksman’s car pull around the corner.

I’ve only just now stridden through the house, revelling in the energetic languor of my long legs so recently clasped around his brown waist; the imprint of his ass cheeks is on my sweaty hands, the flavour of his poetic mouth is in mine. My vagina and pubic hair are still slick with him, for although he always has the Trojans, I insist he need not smuggle them inside this Helen. He can pull out in time, every time, so good at rhyme – without any reason – is my Bob. Yes, I’ve only just stridden through the house and my eyes are still blinded by the dark afterimage of the living room, with its scattering of David’s toys – the new frisbee, the old Robbie the Robot, the tiny transistor – and my and his father’s reading, open on opposing, uneasy chairs.
Peyton Place
versus
Delinquency: The Juvenile Offender in America Today.
Jesus H. Christ how can I stomach such shlock? How can he digest such baloney?

I’ve left the three nine-year-olds, David, Gus and Gary from next door, for a long hour and they’ve got up to all kinds of mischief. Here they are naked save for their shorts, and smeared all over with black mud they’ve manufactured with the hosepipe.
Now a surfing ofawareness and an undertow of consciousness, pulling back from the wave about to crash on to the beach. Stop this
–
stop this Now, stop this faithless, old geyser of rage, which is about to spew from my mouth.
‘What’re you playing?’ I call to David from the back porch. ‘The nigger game!’ he shouts back. I burst through the screen door and am on him in two strides, I knock his coonskin cap off, I grasp his blond hair, I smack his head once, twice, three times. The way British actors playing Gestapo officers smack their interrogation victims.

He’s only said it by mistake – this much I know. The red fog of anger is only the gas blowing off the forbidden planet where my own, selfishly sated lust resides. But it’s too late, for the other little boys’ faces are racist caricatures of minstrel shock, and my David is running out of the back yard, across the front yard, into the roadway. I reach the side of the house at the precise moment the fender hits him. The car can’t be doing more than thirty – this is a sleepy, residential area, we all sleep with our fellow residents – but these gas-guzzlers are huge and the impact is enough to hurl him into space, my son the puppet. ‘Mayall your children be acrobats.’ Now I comprehend the Jewish curse. His astral body rotates a full one and a half times before crumpling to the asphalt, then I see that he isn’t mine any more, he doesn’t have a face – only a mush. I recall the line I always used when he rode me too hard – ‘Go and play in the traffic’ – and every instance whips me. Keening and tearing at your bosom turns out to be a reflex action. ‘Jeeezus! Jeeezus! Jeeezus!’ I run towards the scrap of dead boy in the roadway, and the driver is out of the car, keening too. ‘Jeeezus! Jeeezus! Jeeezus!’ Jew and Gentile stand over the dead child’s broken body. Was there ever an era when so many faithless people cried out so loudly for the Messiah?