How the Dead Live (7 page)

‘What time is it?’

‘It’s nearly five, Mumu.’

‘You must be feeling sick, precious – tell Charlotte to bring my drugs in.’ That gets her trotting off coltishly – my little junky pony.

‘Aren’t you feeling well, Mum? Are you in pain?’

Oh yes – it pains me to see your round face. It pains me to see that I’ve squeezed out a further dollop of Yaws’s white, adipose body. Never allow yourself to be swayed by a man with a surname that can be read backwards. ‘I want my pills.’

‘Dr Bowen thought you wouldn’t need any more until this evening.’

‘Well . . .’ It’s becoming a real effort to say things; I have to punch a hole in the wobbling membrane of nausea that envelops me, simply in order to ejaculate them. ‘I don’t believe Dr Bowen is
that
sympathetic. I mean – it isn’t
her fucking pain!’

‘I’ll get them.’

More muttering behind the doors, then they swing open again. Why am I insistently reminded of cowboys being thrown out of saloons in old westerns? It’s the movies, kid – enjoy. Natty was right about the cardigan. ‘Ms Bloom?’ She’s revolting – arguably more cadaverous than me; a ministering angel – of death. ‘I’m Deirdre Murphy.’ I’m an authority on arrogant contempt – perhaps the world’s fore-most. ‘I’ll be looking after you for the night.’ She has a rapid yet limpid voice – no Irish accent.

‘You’re a bit early, aren’t you?’

‘Normally the night nurse will come on at eight in the evening and stay ‘til eight the following morning, but the agency thought it would be a good idea if I came earlier this evening so that you wouldn’t have to deal with two new carers in the one day.’

‘How considerate of them.’ To consider their own profits.

‘Yes, well, we are here to help.’ Indeed you are, you’re helping me to let go of life already – with cardigans like that loose on the surface of the world, it’s no longer a safe place for anyone with any sartorial taste. ‘Your daughter said you wanted some pain relief?’ She’s got the bag.

‘Yes, where they took the stitches out – it’s very raw.’

She disappears into the bathroom and I can hear her stacking the packets and pots of pills. She reappears with the Oramorph.

I wave her away. ‘No, no, I need a pill – that stuff doesn’t work.’

‘You’ve already had twenty milligrams of diamorphine today, Ms Bloom – any more will make you awfully constipated.’

‘Awfully?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘There’s nothing awful about my constipation, madam. I cherish it. I hated having to crap – and now it’s over.’

‘I – I was going to ask you if you’ll be needing a portable commode?’

Only to stuff your head down. ‘No, no – that won’t be necessary, just gimme the pill.’ And she does, worn down by my irony. I put it in my mouth and when she turns away palm it. If life has been a prison – what better time to break the rules than when you’re dying? I wish I’d had more sex – and more unsuitable sex. Now one of my descendants will have to have it on my behalf – a groaning legacy. ‘And Deirdre.’

‘Yes, Ms Bloom?’

‘Call me Lily, please, and would you send Natasha through now?’ All this coming and going – so little discussion of the Great Masters.

‘Yes, Mumu?’

‘There you go, honey.’ I display the brown pill in my palm.

‘What?’

‘Here’s some heroin for you, darling, better you should take a pill than make your arms more of a pin cushion than they are already. What’s this . . .’ I squint at the pill, which is slick with saliva, ‘. . . ten milligrams, is that enough to hold you?’

‘Not quite – but why’re you doing this, Mumu?’

‘Not quite, huh? Go in the bathroom and get me the pot.’ She complies and I shake her out two more. ‘Enough now?’

‘Yuh.’ She dry-swallows them. ‘But why, Mumu?’

‘Listen, I’ve been to those crappy meetings ‘cause of your drug problem, I’ve sobbed in doctors’ waiting rooms and casualty wards, and you’re still taking this shit – though Christ knows what it does for you, it does nothing for me. So, if you want to hang out here with me I don’t want you always on the lookout for cash to steal, or drugs, and I don’t want that junky pal of yours coming round here either what’s he called?’

‘Russell.’

‘Yeah,
Russell.
Him I could really do without seeing. So, if it’s all the same to you I’d as soon I was your pusher for the time being – suit you, madam?’

Oh, it suits her all right. I can see that. I thought heroin made people who took it comatose zombies. In my own case it would be all but impossible to tell the difference, but Natasha is peculiarly charged by the drug – and even by the mere anticipation of its effects. She shifts from being vulnerable and skittish and withdrawn to being strong and steady and extrovert. She’s told me before that it makes her feel ‘complete’ and ‘confident’, and I can see what she means. When she’s off heroin she’s a fucking nightmare – when she’s on it she’s a peach. It’s not what a mother should feel about her daughter, but I do, I do, I do. She’s positively cantering around the room now, hanging my clothes in the closet, ordering my bedside table – books neatly stacked, little radio to the fore. ‘Do you want me to crash here, then? Stay in the flat?’ She stays at Russell’s flat, I know. It’s right around the corner from here, over a bookie’s on the main road. Natasha stays there so she can have her fix in the morning – her ‘get-up’, she calls it.

‘No, that won’t be necessary – there isn’t any room anyway. Besides, I thought you were staying with Miles at the moment?’ Miles is the boyfriend – there would have to be a boyfriend. Natasha couldn’t live without a boyfriend.

‘Oh yeah – but . . . well y’know.’

‘What, what do I know?’

‘He’s so
dull.’
Oh yes, my daughter the thrill-seeker. Perhaps if I hadn’t brought her up to thrive on high drama she wouldn’t approach her life in this stagy fashion. My mistake. I would say
mea culpa,
but in the commercial premises I currently lease there’s a discreet sign by the cash register that reads: NO LIABILITY IS ACCEPTED FOR ANYTHING WHATSOEVER. FOREVER.

‘Well, are you staying with him?’

She is. This is confirmed by another burp of hesitation from the intercom – Miles has arrived. Miles by name, miles by nature – for he walks, rides and drives many many of them in pursuit of the lovely Natasha. I feel like drawing nice Miles to one side and warning him that this will always be his fate. That he will spend a lifetime trailing after this no-cash cow, as it grazes on other men and more drugs; and that if he’s fool enough to impregnate her it will be worse still. He’ll find himself shouting through letterboxes to check that his kid is still alive, that its mother hasn’t dropped dead from an overdose, leaving it to bang around by itself, in a squat full of rusty nails angled so as to inject tetanus. Poor Miles.

In he comes, looking dutiful – as if he were my son. He opens the double doors like a flunkey or an ambassador, parting them in front of his face, then deftly marrying them again behind his ass. ‘Mumu?’ He partakes of the family lingua franca, the gooey argot. ‘How’re you feeling?’

‘All the better for being home, Miles.’ I manage to look at him with feigned betterness concealing my real bitterness. He’s a severely attractive young man, straight black hair, burnished features – he’s far more handsome than anyone I’ve ever been with. Not that I could’ve summoned up a smidgen of lust for him, even before Minxie came along. No, my lust grew old along with me. In my thirties I only found thirty-year– old men attractive; in my forties, forty-year–olds; and in my fifties, men who were, quite frankly, moribund. Now my lust has died alongside them – and so I’m dying. How I used to hate putting on the convict’s costume of feminine allure, so that all the arrows pointed towards my sex – yet how I miss it now. It transpires that my life may well have been for lust.

‘I was going to take Natasha to a film – if that’s all right with you?’

‘Perfectly fine, although I shan’t be accompanying you.’

‘Would you like me to bring the telly in here?’

‘No, don’t worry, I’ve got my little radio. I like the BBC voices. I like the news bulletins. I bet they’ll have them even in the grave.’ His shapely mouth becomes amorphous with concern, but he doesn’t blink. Bit of a catastrophile, our Miles comes of being raised by a drunk old hippy. He’s told me that he spent much of his childhood prising her insensate fingers from bottles of Merrydown cider, and checking to see Isis (that’s her name – I kid you not) hadn’t wet herself. Yup, he’s right at home with the incapacitated, is Miles, which is presumably why he finds Natty so bloody irresistible.

‘If there’s anything I can do, Mumu – anything at all.’

What service does he imagine he can perform for me? Does he really
want
to give me an enema, a blanket bath, an injection? Or is his heart set on something even more sinisterly invasive? Is he looking at me in the way Dr Steeldoes, seeing the patient as merely the container of the disease? Steel, a pathologist
manqué
if ever there was one, clearly cannot wait to unzip me and have a look at my malignant goodies. Good luck to him – I’ll be elsewhere. ‘No, Miles – you head off. And Miles.’

‘Yes, Mumu.’

‘Natty’s had thirty milligrams of my diamorphine, so don’t let her anywhere near that creep Russell, OK?’

‘OK Mumu.’ He withdraws, his idol face determinedly void of consternation at this bizarre role I’ve adopted.

Yes, Miles. Trying to look sharp and hip and funky in his all-black denim costume, his three earrings, his teased hair. Miles, who like so many of the kids of bohemians is in fact desperate to conform. Miles, who would’ve made the perfect partner for Charlotte. Charlotte, who now bustles in efficiently with what appears to be – actually
is
– a checklist. ‘Mum, I’ve filled in Deirdre on the kitchen, the heating and the cats. Richard has arranged for Molly to come by for an hour each morning and give the place a once-over. Natty says she’ll check on you later, and I’ll be back late tomorrow morning – I have an early meeting.’

‘OK.’

This downbeat reply doesn’t please her, and her fat lips give a Yaws moue, as if disappointed in the world that has been organised. ‘Are you OK, Mum?’

‘Charlotte,’ I lever myself up on the pillows so that I may get more uncomfortable, ‘I’m not going to go gently.’

‘I hadn’t thought so.’

‘I’m scared.’

‘So am I.’ She comes over and kisses me on the forehead. I cry a little and when she’s comforted me a little I forget that she’s there and even who she is. When I remember – she’s gone; and so, apparently, are the black-denim twins.

With the girls and their swains departed, I’m free to meditate on the way time will drag to the fore their presently obscure resemblances. With Charlotte, as I say, so far there’s nothing but Yaws, and with Natasha there’s still nothing of him. But I know this isn’t true, know it from my own experience. As I’ve grown older, increasingly the disliked and heavy face of my Aunt Rhea has stared back at me from the glass. This face has been hidden from me for all these years and comes upon me now in mockery – or so it seems. I wonder who’ll rise up to mock my two? Neither will know until they reach the age I was when I raised them. Then the memories of their own bodies will inform them who they genuinely are. What if they turned out to be Aunt Rheas as well? That would be worth waiting for – the three fat Rheas sitting stitching malicious tapestries together. I think not.

I guess I kept the delusion of being my own woman too long, blowing hot and cold so that eventually I was annealed by my neuroses. If I was my own woman, why was it that these impersonal anxieties and mass phobias could jerk me around so, like a dope on a rope? Let alone lust. Or even:
let alone lust!
Lust was a positive high-tension cable, plugged into my core, activating a near-epileptic seizure of conviction that this was the one thing I
had
to do in life.

Deirdre comes tiptoeing through to check on me. ‘Would you like a snack, Ms – Lily?’ Sounds like ‘Mizz Lily’ and for a moment I’m back in the thirties being waited on by a negro-which is what they were then. What’s she gonna offer me, corn pone? Jell-O?

‘Thank you, Deirdre, I’m not hungry.’

And she withdraws through the double, ceiling-high doors, which are really the only original feature left in this heavily converted apartment. And isn’t the same true of me? All that was once me has been dispersed through the flux of a thousand thousand experiences. The ‘I’ has been partitioned off, remodelled, resurfaced and re-insulated, so that it cannot even remember what the original dados or mouldings were like. They say ninety per cent of house dust is dead human skin – and that’s me. Dust on a windowsill, in a converted apartment, in a foreign city.

I suppose I should’ve written a memoir before it was too late, but unlike fucking Lady Asquith I never kept a diary. The towns and cities and areas I’ve lived in, on two continents, over sixty-five years, merge into a composite Unpleasantville. The people I’ve known are resolved into types, appearing to me now as a play set of plastic figurines: ‘Typical People of the Eastern Seaboard of the USA and London England from the Twentieth Century – .030 Scale’. Only lust can grab me in its bra-cinching hook eyes, drag me down through the undertow of nausea, into a past which could be mine.

1955. Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis are duelling through the door. It’s a jizzed jazz scherzo, so jizzy that globs of jizzum must be shooting out of their horns. I’m leaning against a General Electric fridge of such purring, juddering, aerodynamic aspect that were I to unsuck the rubber-flanged door and climb inside, settle myself comfortably in amongst the bowls of chopped liver, the packets of frankfurters, the crinkly heads of lettuce, it might well lift off for the Forbidden Planet. Yup, Dizzy and Miles are going at it next door, and I’m leaning in here talking with a man who isn’t my husband. He’s a tall, stooped man – quite unlike Dave Kaplan – and he’s wearing a suit, which Kaplan would never do. We’re talking around Norman Podhertz and the
New Republic,
or the poetry of William Carlos Williams, or the pickling of Einstein’s brain, but we’re talking
about
lust. Sex. Screwing. He’s saying, ‘I want to screw you, but I don’t want to break up my marriage.’ And I’m saying, ‘Let’s just make love – and damn the consequences.’ I communicate this by staring straight into his remarkably deep, black eyes. He expresses his demurral by peering at a point just above my left shoulder, a vantage allowing him to see his wife’s arms, which are waving about animatedly in the next room. It’s 1955 – and I’m armed with my own teeth.