How the Dead Live (32 page)

Just the same. I close my eyes tighter still – ‘ it’s an addiction like any other, Lily, it will take a few days ‘ – and will Virginia Bridge to die. O Great White Spirit, if I give up smoking will you take this woman in my stead? I
really
do this – I truly did this. I weighed up the Weights, the Passing Clouds, the Viscounts and the blessed du Mauriers. 4/- + 3/6 + 4/- + 3/6 – sums were so much kinder when they incorporated such tiny strokes. I piled them up into a huge bier of dry white twigs, threw Dr Bridge atop it – and she committed suttee in my stead. Poor Virginia. Poor, dry Virginia Bridge. Dead of cancer at forty-odd, when unlike me she hadn’t been smoking forty-odd a day for twenty-five years. Poor Virginia – you could do the arithmetic yourself – she didn’t deserve such malevolently willed extinction.

I reach for the bedside table. I’m gonna have a big slug of that Haig, before it gets too vague – but it’s too late. Gone already. She’s gone, it’s gone. I’m still here.

I looked up through the nicotine-stained windows at the roadway above, and the trim wheels of her trim car had departed. ‘She’s gone to seed,’ muttered the Fats, ‘she’s awfully seedy . . .’ I lit another B&H and remembered all the peaceable hours I’d eradicated, all the joy I’d steered to avoid, as I whiled my bitter life away on a river of resentment, lustily sculling beneath the green envy trees with their parasitic wreaths of sexy jealousy. Under the grotty bed, Lithy gave reedy voice: ‘Ah – ah – ah – ah – stay-ing al-ive!’

Who knows why Virginia Bridge found it necessary to climb in her ghostly Morris and make the long trip north from Dulburb to Dulston? (And I had no doubt that that was where she’d ended up – she was Dulburb to the very tips of her fingers. Dulburb through and through.) But she did. Again and again and again, for month after month after month – a twelvemonth in all. I bitterly regretted ever ever having called a doctor out on a house call, now that this shady practitioner kept descending on my basement. I got out of the fucking bed. I tucked Lithy in my pocket and went back to work.

That summer, Baskin had groped his penultimate fanny, shmoozed his final client, and rung down the curtain on thirty-two years of telling the world things it didn’t need to know, or would’ve found out anyway. He and Mrs Baskin retired to Rainham to breed Bedlingtons. He sold what was left of the business to a thrusting conglomerate, whose PR arm had offices near Old Street. And what was left of the business? Only a client list that included such gems as the Queen Mother Leisure Centre in Stratford – ‘You wet yourself – we’ll clean it up!’; the Mile End Road One-Stop Fitting Shop – ‘Tired of that Leaky Exhaust? So are we’; and the Leytonstone Laundromat chain – ‘Stop Watching the World Go Round – and Let Us Watch Your Wash Go Round!’ And me.

Yup – I went too. It was one of the conditions of Baskin’s sell-out, the employee hand-me–down. You might’ve thought I’d look hopelessly out of place behind the mirrored windows of KBHL Corporate Communications – not so. I couldn’t see myself in them anyway; nor could all the scented young pudendas, who tramped their knickerboxes in to play the plastic piano, see me either.

Mirrored fucking buildings – where did
they
come from? Howcould the modern city, with its vaunting ugliness, have the temerity to contemplate itself in these twenty-, thirty-, forty-storey pier-glasses? To ogle its own soullessness, while batting its vertical, textured louvres? I can recall the first time I saw such a thing – the John Hancock Center in Boston. Must’ve been the mid-seventies; the sleek rack of reflection was a preemptive strike by the future on that bulbous decade. But now London was stacking up with the things, as if the old hooker was intent on retouching her masonry maquillage in them. Every prospect became – on those infrequent sunny days – a postmodern Magritte, with fluffy white clouds oozing around giant external cornices. But inside the mirrored building was the perfect place for me to be. Me, with my tireless hatred of pretty young women and my newly recovered jealousy.

Christ I was jealous! I was jealous of the Filipino shoe fetishist when she went to jail for corruption – at least she’d stayed married. I was jealous of Hillary-fucking-Clinton even when it looked as if she’d stay hitched too. I was jealous of the Israelis and the Palestinians, locked into the war congress with Slick Willie playing pander. Jealous of Arafat with his vaginal mouth, Rabin with his penile nose – jealous of what they did together. I was jealous of the kid in Pittsburgh who had seven major organs replaced during fifteen hours of surgery – she’d had more men inside her than I ever would. I was jealous of the Bobbitt woman who sliced off her husband’s cock – to have
and
to hold. I was jealous when Fellini died – now there’d never be a bed for me in his dreamhouse of feminine archetypes. I was jealous of all the girls caught in the LA quake – they felt the earth fucking move all right. I was jealous of the Palestinian women when that crazed Yid shot their menfolk in the mosque – at least they could wail and rant and scream and
feel
their loss. I was jealous when Fred West, the home-improvement serial killer, was arraigned for his crimes. Imagine that – jealous of those poor young women, lured to their vile deaths. Could jealousy take me any lower? Yes. I was jealous when the massacres began in Kigali, simply because I hated to be excluded. But I
toasn’t
jealous when Marcel Bich died; then I was merely beset by the old, stale envy. But I
was
jealous when the Channel Tunnel opened. Jealous of it as it was penetrated by train after train, each with its spermatozoa-load of men, eating
croques m’sieurs,
swigging beers, reading
Le Monde.
I was jealous of Winnie Mandela. I was jealous of OJ’s wife. I was so jealous – I so wanted
not to be me.
I wanted to be loved. I wanted to be held. I wanted to slur sibilant Mama-loshen with someone to whom I’d always be – their baby.

‘Be my, be my baby!’ Lithy sang in the pocket of my sack dress, as I wended my way between the girlish crowds streaming from the subways around Old Street. They’d’ve looked at me oddly – had they bothered to look at all. At work I considered offering the young men, with their brightly coloured braces and their dull imaginations, a crack at my withered sex. The subsonic hum of the air conditioning, the ultrasonic whine of the computers and the droning of the workaday chatter – all of it, amazingly, gingered them up. Most of them would, I knew, fuck
anything.
They’d insinuate their thin white joints into the photocopier or the fax machine if they thought it would feel good. But what’d be the point? I’d only feel the worst jealousy of all, the jealousy of my former, busty, lusty self.

In the late summer of ‘94 I was standing in the bloody basement of 27 Argos Road, by the open window of the bedroom, when I heard the familiar invocation of the Yale in an altogether too familiar voice. I craned up to see unfamiliar, expensive-looking, brown leather ankle-boots; unfamiliar, well-washed dungarees; and – thumb hooked in pocket, four fingers drumming on a flat thigh – a hand, the garden of which I once travelled round and round, like a teddy bear. Attached to it was an arm I used to take one step up, then a second, and an under-there which I’d tickle and tickle, until its owner’s face scrunched up with giggles.

The key sailed down and she stooped to pick it up. Her hair was cut short – mannishly short. It didn’t suit her. But her arms were tanned, almost muscled, with clean white sleeves rolled up on them – and that did suit her. ‘She’s fit and well, fit and well . . .’ babbled the Fats, who’d joined me by the window and who huddled by my hips like loveless handles. ‘But not for long!’ I snapped back at them. Up above, Natasha turned and casually scanned the street, then her new clothes disappeared back into her old life.

Christmas 2001

I’m a chubby little thing
–
that I am. A regular piglet. The Ice Princess
–
to give her her due
–
was inclined to feed me on sterile pots of puree, gluten-free, protein-balanced, vitamin-enhanced. I suppose this careful feeding was by way of compensating for her own, increasingly erratic diet. Still, the Estate Agent made a mockery ofthis, because whenever the three of us were out together, and she’d disappeared behind one of those heavy, tomb-like doors, incised with the hieroglyphs ofsociety’s disadvantaged
–
the old, the wheel chaired, women with small kids
–
he’d buy me a bag of chips. Chips as thin as toothpicks, frazzled into spikiness in the grease bins of Burgerland, or McDonald’s or KFC. Chips as sharply unpleasant in my tiny soft mouth as dental instruments
–
for, once again, I’m soft in the tooth department. Or alternatively, fat, blubbery, near-disintegrating chips, as white as Ouruobouros, questing towards my pink lips from within greasy flaps of grey paper.

Chips, chips and more chips. Chips clutched and chomped in shopping precincts, on street corners, or beside the twisted railings in shat-upon parks. Chips drenched in ascorbic acid, or bleeding Heinz. Chips hung on to by me for their warmth alone. My precious chips, always being solicited by kids with hooded sweatshirts
–
‘Gizzacbipi’
–
their button noses silverriveted to their gunmetal faces. In the bilious gloaming of the inner city they resemble a closed order of the shabby, the infantilised. Chips
–
always Prêt à Shit for me. Then the Estate Agent or the Ice Princess would lie me on a bench or a folddown plastic scoop, or even on the cold earth itself, in order to wrestle with tights and trousers, to extract the wad of absor-bency from between my rash thighs. Then the Wet Ones insinuated between my folds, then the slathered cream. All my life, underwear has tormented me
–
soon it’ll be over.

But how soon? Two days now and all I’ve had to eat is the Christmas cake and all I’ve been able to get to drink is scoops of water from the toilet bowl in the bathroom. Several times I’ve inched along beside the banisters, avoiding looking at the Ice Princess, and gained the door to the bathroom. Here I’ve managed, only just, to climb up, scoop and drink, then sit down and pee, then flush. This death is child’s play.

To think I was jealous ofthe Ice Princess and her consort-jealous of this pitiable pair, she up here, he down there. But they had their moments, cackling in minicabs as we slewed across town to score, steal or mooch, the African drivers navigating the ancient city by reference to their internal maps of Lagos, Dar es Salaam, or Addis Ababa. Cackling as the drivers slammed on their brakes and slide guitar slid from the speakers on the back shelf; cackling as they pictured tall, slim, tirelessly elegant Masai, puffing on filter-tips and staring out over the riven valleys of Marlboro Country.

But then I had every right to feel jealous of him
–
he wasn’t anything to do with me. And her
–
well I knew her as intimately as anyone could know another. Knew her inside and out, claustra and agro. As begetter and begotten. Yes, I’ve edged past the Ice Princess’s bier, this chilly slab of padding, disgorged from the fast-flowing glacier of her life into a terminal moraine of duvet and pillow. Edged past
–
now I must edge towards. Last night was cold
–
tonight will be colder.
No
one will come in this, the dead interstice between the years. Despite the muted bang and wail ofthe people who live in the flat above, cranking up for another evening session on the karaoke machine they got for Christmas. For they’re as inaccessible to me as if this maisonette were an orbiting space station, with its communications failed, its computers down, its life-support systems a misnomer.

‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do /
I’m half crazy, all for the love of you
. . .’
She sang it to me
–
I sang it to her. Now, as I crawl over the carpet, struggle up on to the bed, pull a lappet of duvet from her, curl it around myself, I lisp the ditty in my own inimitable way: ‘Daithee, Daithee, githee y’antha doo
/
N’yam na’ athy, orcalovuv oo
. . . ‘
A shame to cry so
–
to void the toilet water. I could cry enough to flood this room, and send a wave crashing down the stairs, smashing into the door, busting the chains at top and bottom. Cry enough to flood the whole of Coborn House, so that its inhabitants have to assemble in the playground and run a caucus race so as to dry themselves off Everybody has won and all must have prizes. Karaoke machines for the kiddy-winkies, karaoke machines for the leering adults. Then they can all sing something very very simple. I could never quite believe how popular popular music is.

From where I lie I can see very little and the Ice Princess is merely another bit of cheap furniture lying beside me. This place abounds with such meagre sticks. I can see orange beams from the streetlamps without, cut up by the louvres and ranged across the room. I can see a thin rime of ice forming on the windows. I want to sink into dreams of quiet, brown rooms, with slants of sunshine and poignant, boring atmospheres. Instead, I recall a trip the two of them took me on at the cold start of this year.

They were wrecked
–
natch. Stoned as crows. Flapping down through the Isle of Dogs, past the Celesteville of Canary Wharf to Victory Gardens. Then through the foot tunnel to Greenwich, then through the smoggy streets to the Millennium Dome. All the way they took turns to push my chair ahead of them. First one, then the other, giving it an almighty shove, then running a few paces to catch the handles of the caroming cart. Laughing like loons, imagining that this barely controlled sensation was fun for me. ‘Oh my, my, my De-li-lah!’ he sang
–
she’d thought it amusing to incorporate her feared mother’s name into her fearful daughter’s. Why were we going there? Because they were high
–
yes. Because they thought the Dome would prove to be a hit, a trip for happy-go-lucky, hippy-dippy souls such as themselves. Oh and the Estate Agent had pulled off some successful scam, or deal, so he had money for a change.