How the Dead Live (9 page)

Dear Dave – he styled himself ‘the Fatalistic Funnyman’, or even ‘the Ya-Ya Yid’. I suppose his defiance was beefed up all the more by my appearance – at that time willowy and very blonde. It was quite a thing in the forties, in the States, this marriage between a Jew and an apparent Gentile. When people caught on that I
was
Jewish as well it was already too late, we’d moved on, doubtless leaving an unpleasant taint behind us. Moved on. The late forties and early fifties were a succession of hole-in-the-wall appointments for Kaplan, whose communist sympathies made it impossible for him to teach politics with any candour. So he drifted into admin, which is how we ended up in Vermont, in 1955, in time for Dave Junior to rendezvous with that fender.

It destroyed the driver’s life – hitting my child. Destroyed it. He went crazy – or rather, he had a breakdown, and in those days, in that place, if it was severe enough they’d put you in an insulin coma and hook your temples up to the mains. I felt sorry for him even when I was caught in that vile ballet of shock – the five steps to where Dave and his pals were playing. Sorry because I was always guilty, ever in the wrong myself. I was on him in two strides, grasped his blond hair, smacked his head once, twice, three times. Then he was out in front of me, his narrow little ass covered in mud, out of the back yard, across the front yard, and then WHACK! A twisted scrap of flesh on the asphalt. The impact was so strong it split the child’s head in two. In two. His face was hanging off like a crumpled bit of cloth – and there was blood and grey stuff. Kaplan and I lasted a year after that. I don’t think he ever styled himself ‘the Fatalistic Funnyman’ ever again. Not after I’d taken all of my guilt out on him and remoulded whatever love we’d ever had for each other; fired it in a kiln of white-hot anger and smashed the fucking ugly memento.

‘Mumu?’ Here she is, looking scrubbed in jeans, sneakers, sweatshirt, black hair back in a ponytail. Looking very
American
today.

‘Natty.’ I’m alarmed by my croak, it sounds like ‘N’nerr’.

‘Mumu!’ She swoops down on me, crying. I suppose the junk is out of her system and a little of the real world is seeping in. She plants kisses on my moulting skull. ‘Mumu, Esther’s arrived.’

Esther, eh, now there’s a turn-up. ‘Where is she?’

‘At the Ritz, I think.’ Natch, although it could be the Royal Garden, or the Savoy, or Brown’s. ‘She called – she wants to come straight over.’

‘I don ‘wanner here.’

‘What?’

‘I donwannesther here.’ Only my older sister’s arrival could galvanise me in this fashion.

‘What do you mean?’ Her scrubbed appearance is being sullied by the seepage of sweat along her hairline.

‘We’ll meet her elsewhere – anywhere else we can.’ This morning I not only have to punch a hole through the nausea, I have to punch through indifference as well. It’s clear to me-transmitted on a special frequency employed by the British Broadcorpsing Corpsoration – that I no longer matter. Sure, I’m the pretext for an intense endgame, a dramatic enough finale, but then? I’ll be forgotten in months – years at the outside. Of that much I’m certain. Oh, I don’t doubt that the girls will remember me after a fashion, but there’ll be no gathering of people where my name will animate the conversation, no spirited chat that in turn will reanimate me. No, I
know
not. The Lily Bloom who commanded attention has quit already – except for this one final fling, this defiance of Esther. ‘I don’t want her coming here – she’s such a fucking snob.’

‘Oh Mumu – does it matter now?’

‘Now more than ever.’

‘Ms Bloom?’ It’s the new muck-shoveller and she’s black – natch.

‘Hi.’

‘I’m Doreen Matthews, I’ll be handling the day shift, I wanted to introduce myself.’

‘Pleased to meet you.’ She’s dazzling, this one, a coffee Nefertiti with sugar-almond eyes. I could look at her all day; women simply
are
more beautiful than men – just as Jews are smarter than the goyim.

‘How’re you feeling, Ms Bloom?’

Punctilious, this one – I can tell, I’ve had my tilly punked more than most. ‘Lily, please. I feel better, since you ask.’

‘Then will you be needing these?’ She’s got the entire assortment with her – pain relief, anxiety relief, nausea suppressant. They should come in a dear little choccy box, with a book of words attached. Natty is looking avid, as if she might swoop down on Doreen’s palm and snaffle the drugs up like the raptor she is.

‘Yes, yes, I think it would be a good idea . . . you never know.’

So, pills mouthed then palmed, water dribbled, nurse exited and drugs passed on to lurking junky daughter. Charlotte understands immediately about Esther and goes to phone her – we’ll meet at Kenwood, in the Old Coach House. There’s considerable consternation about dragging my bag of bones out to the Heath, but then – as I observe to all and sundry – it’s· not going to kill me. The cancer’s going to kill me – but not before I’m a lot thinner, I hope.

‘Are you absolutely sure about this, Mother?’ Charlie is in another suit today, fresh from meeting with Wiggins Teape or Reed International. An A-line skirt is not her, her ass is too big, legs too chubby. But it’s cut exceedingly well; once you’re up above a 14 the best you can hope for is a clever cut – colour must be inconspicuous.

‘You know what she’s like, Charlie, I’m amazed she’s here at all.’

‘She’s genuinely upset, very tearful on the phone.’

‘Great.’ She’s going to live for ever, Esther, she’s never had a day’s illness in her life. She’s seventy years old, she smokes like a house on fire and she drinks as if she were trying to extinguish it. She spends more money than the Colombian government and earns more than the Medellin cartel. She’s a fucking nightmare – my sister.

Leaving the apartment proves difficult, a protracted, staggered departure, which sees me arrayed successively in day clothes, an overcoat, a rug, while supported by daughters and paid servitors. I feel Lear-like – and wouldn’t be that astonished if Natty were to begin addressing me as ‘Nuncle’. Charlie’s got the Mercedes today, Elvers must’ve walked in to the head offices of Waste of Paper. He’s the kind of man who likes to say, ‘Yes, I walk
everyhere,’
as if he’d recently spent a summer crossing the Antarctic with Rheinhold Messner, not twenty minutes strolling through Regent’s Park from his Nash terrace apartment to his Terry Farrell office. What a creep.

We purr up Kentish Town Road and on up Highgate Road to Gospel Oak. There’s apple blossom and cherry blossom and light industrial units and gentrified nineteenth-century terraces and lots of cars. There’s London. I read in a magazine – not
Woman’s Realm
– that the human brain recognises composites rather than elements; which is why – I guess – I know this is London and not New York, or Chicago or Rome, because it doesn’t matter to me any more. I’ve shut down all the outlets and there are tacky signs up on the insides of my eyes: ‘CLOSING-DOWN SALE – ALL MEMORIES MUST GO!’

Memories of my dad and his card files of smutty gags; his Indian-head, mother-of-pearl money clip; his lack of funds for it to clip. In the Depression he took jobs doing
anything.
Esther told me once that he was a pimp for a while, and I can believe it. Although he wasn’t an overtly sexual man, there was a greasy feel to him, a greasy
Jewish
feel. I would imagine that he had a large pimp’s penis. But the job I remember best was the one he took closing down department stores. He was good at this – firing the staff, arranging for the stock to be discounted, selling the premises. He functioned better during the Depression than he did either before or after. Very much a twentieth-century man – my father. A boom-and–bust jockey. An economic cyclist.

We tip up on to the steep slope of Highgate West Hill and drive between wealthy villas. Then along the Grove at the top, past Yehudi Menuhin’s imposing house. I hate Menuhin. I sent Natty to audition at his school when she was eight. She was a not untalented little pianist – but I knew not good enough. But that isn’t why I hate him – I hate him because he never crossed a road alone until he was twenty-five, or so they say. Just fancy! The ultimate effete, artistic Jew – and this is meant to be impressive? This racial cosseting. Yuk. He’ll live for ever – of that I’ve no doubt. Live for ever in a gilded cage of sound, a eat’s cradle of golden harp strings. Double mint choc chip yuk. Thirty-two flavours of Baskin-Robbins’s best nausea.

I know it’s got to my liver, this cancer. I can feel it as we tilt down and turn into Hampstead Lane. I can feel the fucking thing swollen inside, each lurch of the car pressing on it so that, like a filthy sponge, it oozes poisons. The body’s oil refinery is itself polluted. The crazed enzymes have taken over the asylum – oh, for a sane axeman. Two fucking lumpectomies that fraudulent pal of Steel’s did on me. He scooped out my boobs like a counterman in Baskin-Robbins . . . Maybe I
want
ice cream, that’s why I keep thinking of it. ‘Natty.’

‘Mumu?’ She’s in the back with me again. She has darker skin than me – but finer-grained, to go with her long narrow nose, delicately flared cheekbones, violet eyes. Little bitch. When she was a child she went red in the sun, but if she’d let it get to her now she’d turn a pleasing olive. But she’d rather be sallow, clearly. Under her preppy clothing are track marks, sores, infections, all abraded by her serrated nails. I wonder how Miles can stand to touch her.

‘I wonder how Miles can stand to touch you.’

‘What?!’

‘I want an ice cream; no – an ice lolly.’

‘OK – they’ll have them at Kenwood.’ She heard me, but hey – let’s not make waves.

If I were dying when I should’ve, say in the late sixties, when I thought my head would explode with howling misery, when every time their father opened his fat mouth I thought I’d have to kill him, then – then I would’ve written the girls affectionate letters, telling them of my sadness, and how much I loved them, and how sorry I was to be leaving them. Too late. They’re here, they’re grown-up, they’re crap; and so we’ll bicker towards oblivion.

I must’ve dozed a little, or zoned out, because when when I’m conscious of myself again I find we’re hobbling down the hill towards Kenwood House, a fuzzy blob of off-white Palladian which wobbles amazingly for something so heavy. The girls have me under either arm and I’m saying to them, ‘You must remember how much easier dying is for a pessimist like me than it would be for someone who’d expected anything from life, who’d counted on anything.’

‘Yes Mum.’

‘I mean to say – I’ve always been hunkered down on the starting line, waiting for the pistol shot so I could race to the next bad thing.’

‘You wanted it badderly,’ says infantile Natty, in baby talk.

‘Oh, I did, I did.’ I clutch her hand tighter under my armpit, and I guess she thinks this affectionate, but it isn’t.

Kenwood. I’ve always known I was going to end up here. When I first came to London it was my favourite park. I’d come here alone and sit and read a book, or strike up conversations with old women, or down-and-outs. In the States I was never gregarious in this fashion, never. It was all that English dissimulation that forced my cards, made me play my crappy little hand: ‘Oh, how interesting –
do
tell me more.’ And they would, by Christ they would. That precious fucking reserve, it transpired, was only the thinnest of hoary mantles, beneath which was a positive torrent of chilly drivel. No, there’s nobody like the English for inconsequential chat and I hope they all fucking choke to death on it. ‘How’s the
wea-theurgh!’

In the sixties this place was primmer, more proper. The prams looked positively nineteenth-century – great black things, pushed about by pudding-faced nannies and mums, all belted up in coats and hats and even
gloves.
Now it’s spring, and track-suited, androgynous parent-substitutes are shoving McLaren buggies loaded up with hothouse weeds. There are faggots flexing their muscles on the shaven grass. Yaws would come here every weekend before Sunday lunch and force the girls to accompany him. Yaws had played lacrosse when he was at the varsity.
I kid you not.
And he thought it would be nice for the girls to learn to play it with him. Nice for whom? Not me. I’d stay back in Hendon, overcooking Sunday lunch in the prescribed way. Granted – I’d take the task on, but what were we going to do otherwise? Yaws himself, notoriously, could survive for days on a heel of bread smeared with Frank Cooper’s Oxford marmalade. Cunt. To think I washed his underwear. Double cunt. Double choc chip cunt.

The only thing that remains unchanged in this ersatz landscape are the little brown men. They’re
exactly
the same, in their trilbies and brogues, spiking litter, checking notices to see that they’re officious, driving dinky vans full of dead leaves. The suits themselves may be nylon now – they certainly look cheap – but the men are as fawn as ever. Fawn-coloured – and they look like fauns too. Camden Council must have an Affirmative Faun Action Programme. I’ve never seen a truly brown little brown man, though, never. The brown men are important – they minister to the memorial benches. I always fancied a memorial bench: ‘In Loving Memory of Lily Bloom 1922–1988, Who Loved to Take Our Products on This Bench. Hoffmann La Roche’. But when I looked into it two years ago (I did this when I discovered the lump, did it even before I called Sydenberg, the GP), I discovered that the Heath was bench-saturated, that if you wanted to evoke even the tiniest bit of recall here in the future, you’d have to have your name put on a marker along with a lot of others. Doubtless, as with the benches, relatives scatter ashes around these markers. A delicious irony – those of us Jews who escaped the Holocaust, none the less interred in mass graves with our kikey kind. How unkind.

Inside the tea place it’s dark, despite the whitewash on the walls. This is the old stable block of the house, and even now or maybe
especially
now – with its stalls full of horse-faced Englishwomen slurping down Earl Grey, it feels like one. The only non-horsey face in the place is a version of my father’s. A smaller, painted version of his face – like Dad’s funerary mask. A Jewish face. A New York Jewish face. An Upper East Side New York Jewish face. A UESNYJF. Esther, my sister.