by Will Self
The principal difference was that whereas in the past it had been photographs of my brothers and me that had stood, either framed or mounted in plastic cubes, scattered around on the available surfaces, now the impedimenta that betrayed Mother’s affections were entirely unfamiliar to me. There were photographs of people I had never seen before. Young men who looked rather too smooth for my taste. And other, older people. A jolly couple grinning out from a particularly ornate silver frame looked like Cypriots to me. I picked up a postcard someone had sent Mother from Madeira of all places and scanning the back recognised neither the bright feminine hand, nor the scrawled male salutation and signature.
I was shocked by all of this, but kept silent. Once again I felt sure that if I pressured Mother she would tell me nothing substantial about the afterlife.
The kettle boiled. Mother filled the pot and placed it on a tray, together with cups, sugar, milk and a plate of my favourite chocolate chip cookies. She brought it over and placed it on the low table in front of where I sat. She poured me a cup of tea and offered me a cookie. The conversation lapsed for a while. I munched and Mother went into the kitchenette and opened a can of cat food. She let a couple of black kittens in from the back garden.
‘New cats, I see.’
‘Uh-huh, that’s Tillie and that’s Margaret.’ The cats lurked and smarmed themselves around the furniture. I wondered idly if they were familiars and if my mother had really always been the kind of witch my father had said she was.
I started browsing through the books. They weren’t the same as her mortal collection – I had those – but they covered the same ground: Virago Classics, a lot of Henry James and Proust in several different editions, scores of miscellaneous novels, books on gardening and cookery. By now I was quite openly looking for something, some clue. I couldn’t admit it to myself but once again Mother was managing to rile me as much dead as she ever had alive.
I went over to the phone table. There was an address book lying open which I started to flick through idly. Again there were the same kind of names, but they belonged to totally different people, presumably the ones in the photographs, the ones who sent cards. Mother had always struck up acquaintances fairly easily. It wasn’t so much that she was friendly as that she exuded a certain wholesome quality, as palpably as if a vent had been opened on her forehead and the smell of bread baking had started to churn out. In my view this wholesome quality was the worst kind of misrepresentation. If there had been such a body as the Personality Advertising Standards Commission, Mother would have been the subject of numerous complaints.
There were phone directories stacked under the table – phone directories and something else, phone-directory-shaped, that wasn’t a phone directory. I bent down and pulled it out by its spine. It was a phone directory. North London Book of the Dead, ran the title; and then underneath: A–Z. The cover was the usual yellow flimsy card and there was also the usual vaguely arty line drawing – in this instance of Kensal Green Cemetery. I started to leaf through the pages.
‘So, you’re not here five minutes and you want to use the phone,’ said Mother coming back in from the kitchenette.
‘What’s this, Mother?’ I held up the directory.
‘Oh that. Well I guess you might call it a kind of religious text.’ She giggled unnervingly.
‘Mother, don’t you think it’s about time you came clean with me about all of this?’
We sat down at the table (similar melamine finish, similar blue, flower-patterned tablecloth) with the North London Book of the Dead in between us.
‘Well, it’s like this,’ began Mother. ‘When you die you go and live in another part of London. And that’s it.’
‘Whaddya mean, that’s it?’ I could already see all sorts of difficulties with this radical new view of death, even if I was sitting inside an example of it. ‘Whaddya mean, that’s it? Who decides which part of London? How is it that no one’s ever heard of this before? How come people don’t notice all the dead people clogging up the transport system? What about paying bills? What about this phone book? You can’t tell me this lists all the people who have ever died in North London, it isn’t thick enough. And what about the dead estate agents, who do they work for? A Supreme Estate Agent? And why Crouch End? You hate Crouch End.’
‘It could have been worse, some dead people live in Wanstead.’
‘What about the people who lived in Wanstead when they were alive?’
‘They live somewhere else, like East Finchley or Grays Thurrock, anywhere.’
‘Mother, will you answer my questions, or won’t you?’
‘I’ll just get another cup of tea, dear.’
I wrung it out of her eventually. It went something like this: when you die you move to another part of London where you resume pretty much the same kind of life you had before you died. There are lots of dead people in London and quite a few dead businesses. When you’ve been dead for a few years you’re encouraged to move to the provinces.
The dead community are self-administering and there are dead people in most of the major enterprises, organisations and institutions. There are some autonomous services for dead people, but on the whole dead services operate alongside ‘live’ ones. Most dead people have jobs, some work for live companies. Mother, for example, was working for a live publishing company.
‘OK. I think I’ve got it so far, but you still haven’t explained why it is that no one knows. Now I know I could shout it to the rooftops. I could sell my story to the tabloids.’ I was getting quite worked up by now, hunched over and absent-mindedly gobbling chocolate chip cookies with great gulps of tea. I didn’t even notice the kittens eating my shoelaces. Mother was imperturbable.
‘The funny thing is, that very few people seem to meet dead people who they know. It just goes to show you how big and anonymous the city really is. Even when people do meet dead friends and relatives they don’t seem inclined to broadcast the news.’
‘But Mother, you’ve always had an enquiring mind, you always thought you’d rot when you died. Why haven’t you got to the bottom of all this? Who’s the main man? Is it the “G” character?’
‘How should I know? I work, I go to my class, I feed the cats, I see a few friends, I travel. I’m not clever like you, if I do reflect on it at all it seems wholly appropriate. If I had spent days trying to visualise the afterlife I probably could have only come up with a pale version of the very real Crouch End I’m now living in.’
‘What class?’
Mother gestured at the phone directory. ‘The people who compile the phone book hold regular classes for people who are newly dead. They run through the blue pages at the beginning of the book and explain the best and most appropriate ways for dead people to conduct themselves.’
‘I should imagine that there are a lot of newly dead people who are pretty badly traumatised.’ I probably said this with unwarranted enthusiasm. I was still trying to look for the gaping holes in Mother’s suburban necro-utopia.
‘Oh no, not at all. Put it like this: most people who’ve had painful illnesses, or are lonely, are only too relieved to discover that instead of extinction they’re getting Winchmore Hill or Kenton. The classes only go to underline the very reality of the situation. There’s something immensely reassuring about sitting on a plastic chair in a cold church hall reading a phone book and watching a pimply youth trying to draw on a whiteboard with a squeaky magic marker.’
‘I see your point. But Mother, you were always so sparky and feisty. It’s out of character for you to be so laid back. Aren’t you curious to get the whole picture? What happens in other cities? Is it the same? If dead people move to the provinces after a while don’t these areas get clogged up and zombified? There are a million questions I’d like the answers to. You always hated groups and here you are submitting to indoctrination in a religion ostensibly run by dead employees of British Telecom. Why? For Christ’s sake, why?’
‘Yeah, it is kind of weird, isn’t it.
I think death must have mellowed me.’
We chewed the fat for a while longer. Mother asked me about my sex life and whether or not I had an overdraft. She also asked about the rest of the family and expressed the opinion that both my brothers were insane and that some gay people we knew were ‘nice boys’. All this was characteristic and reassuring. She let me take a closer look at the North London Book of the Dead. It was genuinely uninspiring, based entirely on fact with no prophecies or commandments. The introductory pages were given over to flat statements such as: ‘Your (dead) identity should hold up to most official enquiries. Dead people work in most major civil service departments ensuring that full records of dead people are kept up to date. Should you in any instance run into difficulties, call one of the Dead Citizens’ Advice Bureaux listed in the directory.’ And so on.
Somehow, reading the book calmed me down and I stopped harassing Mother with my questions. After an hour or so she said that she was going out to a party a friend of hers was throwing. Would I like to come? I said, ‘I think I can probably do better than socialising with dead people,’ and instantly regretted it. ‘Sorry, Mother.’
‘No offence taken, son,’ she smiled. This was completely uncharacteristic and her failure to get violently angry filled me with dismay. She let me out of the flat just as a small wan moon was lifting off over the shoulder of Ally Pally. I set off towards Stroud Green Road buzzing with weird thoughts and apprehensions.
That night I thrashed around in bed like a porpoise. My duvet became saturated with sweat. I felt as if I were enfolded in the damp palm of a giant … Mother! I awoke with a start, the alarm clock blinked 3.22 a.m., redly. I sat on the edge of my bed cradling my dripping brow. It came to me why I should be having such a nightmare. I wanted to betray Mother. It wasn’t out of any desire to change once and for all the metaphysical status quo, or because I wanted to open people’s eyes to the reality of their lives, or even in order to try and blow a whistle on the Supreme Being. It was a far more selfish thing – wounded pride. Mother could have kept in touch, she let me go through all that grief while she, she was pottering around the shops in Crouch End. She could have fixed up some sort of gig with a séance or a medium, or even just written a letter or phoned. I would have understood. Well she wasn’t going to push my buttons from beyond the grave. I was determined to blow the whistle on the whole set-up.
But the next day came and, standing on a tube platform contemplating the rim of a crushed styrofoam cup as if it contained some further revelation, I began to waver. I sat at my desk all morning in a daze, not that that matters. Then, at lunch time, I went and sat in a café in a daze.
When I got back to my desk after lunch the phone rang. It was Mother.
‘I just called to see how you are.’
‘I’m fine, Mother.’
‘I called while you were out and spoke to some girl. Did she give you the message?’
‘No, Mother.’
‘I told her specifically to give you the message, to write it down. What’s the matter with the people in your office?’
‘Nothing, Mother. She probably forgot.’
Mother sighed. For her, neglected phone messages had always represented the very acme of Babylonian decadence. ‘So what are you doing?’
‘Working, Mother.’
‘You’re a little sulky today. What’s the matter, didn’t you sleep?’
‘No, I didn’t. I found yesterday all a bit much.’
‘You’ll adjust, kid. Come over tonight and meet Christos, he’s a friend of mine – a Greek Cypriot – he runs a wholesale fruit business, but he writes in his spare time. You’ll like him.’
‘Yeah, I think I saw his photo at your place yesterday. Is he dead, Mother?’
‘Of course he’s dead. Be here by 8.00. I’m cooking. And bring some of your shirts, you can iron them here.’ She hung up on me.
Ray, who works at the desk opposite, was looking at me strangely when I put down the receiver.
‘Are you OK?’ he said. ‘It sounded like you were saying “Mother” on the phone just now.’
I felt tongue-tied and incoherent. How could I explain this away? ‘No … no, ah … I wasn’t saying “Mother”, it was “Mudder”, a guy called Mudder, he’s an old friend of mine.’
Ray didn’t look convinced. We’d worked with each other for quite a while and he knew most of what went on with me, but what could I say? I couldn’t tell him who it really was. I’d never live down the ignominy of having a mother who phoned me at the office.
Ward 9
‘Ha ha ha, ha-ha … Hoo, h’, hoo, far, far and away, a mermaid sings in the silky sunlight.’ An idiot cooed to himself on the park bench that stood at the crest of the hill. Below him the greensward stretched down to the running track. In the middle distance the hospital squatted among the houses, a living ziggurat, thrusting out of a crumbling plain.
The idiot’s hair had been chopped into a ragged tonsure. He wore a blue hooded anorak and bell-bottomed corduroy trousers, and rocked as he sang. As I passed by I looked into his face; it was a face like the bench he sat on, a sad, forlorn piece of municipal furniture – although the morning sun shone bright, this face was steadily being drizzled on.
This particular idiot lay outside my jurisdiction. He was, as it were, un-gazetted. I knew that by ignoring the opportunity to indulge in the sickly bellyburn of self-piteous caring, I was facing up to an occupational challenge. If I was to have any success in my new job I would need to keep myself emotionally inviolate, walled off. For, this morning, I was to begin an indefinite appointment as art therapist, attached to Ward 9. My destination was the squat fifteen-storey building that rose up ahead of me, out of the tangled confluence of Camden Town.
I bounced down the hill, the decrease in altitude matched pace for pace by the mounting density of the air. The freshness of the atmosphere on Parliament Hill gave way to the contaminated cotton wool of ground-floor, summer London. Already, at 8.45 a.m., the roads around Gospel Oak were solidly coagulated with metal while shirtsleeved drivers sat and blatted out fumes.
As I picked my way through the streets the hospital appeared and then disappeared. Its very vastness made its sight seem problematic. In one street the horizon would flukily exclude it in such a convincing way that it might never have existed, but when I rounded the corner there was its flank rearing up – the grey-blue haunch of some massive whale – turning away from me, sending up a terrace of concrete flats with a lazy flip of its giant tail.
I walked and walked and the hospital never seemed to get any closer. Its sloping sides were banded with mighty balconies, jutting concrete shelves the size of aircraft carrier flight decks. The front of the building was hidden behind a series of zigzagging walkways and ramps that rose in crisscross patterns from the lower ground to the third floor. At the hospital’s feet and cuddled in the crook of its great wings-for-arms, were tumbles of auxiliary buildings: nurses’ flatlets; parking fortlets; generator units two storeys high, housed in giant, venetian-blind-slatted boxes; and ghostly incinerators, their concrete walls and chimneys blackened with some awful stain.
I rounded the end of the street and found myself, quite suddenly, at the bottom of a ramp that led straight up to the main entrance. The two previous times I had been to the hospital it was a working wasps’ nest in full diurnal swing. But now, their photoelectric cells disconnected, the main doors to the hospital were wedged open with orange milk crates. I picked my way through the long, low foyer, past the shop, at this hour still clad in its roll-over steel door, and in between miscellaneous islands of freestanding chairs, bolted together in multiples of two, seemingly at random. They were thinly upholstered in the same blue fabric as the floor covering. The room was lit by flickering strips of overhead neon, so that the whole effect was ghostly; the overwhelming impression was that this was a place of transit, an air terminal for the dying. It was impossible to differentiate the ill from the dossers who had leaked in from the streets and piled th
eir old-clothes forms into the plastic chairs. All were reduced and diminished by the hospital’s sterile bulk into untidy parasites. The occasional nurse, doctor or auxiliary walked by briskly. They were uniformed and correct, clearly members of some other, genetically distinct, grouping.
In the glassed-in corridor that led to the lifts there was an exhibition of paintings – not by the patients, but by some pale disciple of a forgotten landscape school. The etiolated blues and greens chosen to take the place of hills and plains were flattened to sheens behind glass, which reflected the dead architectural centre of the hospital: an atrium where a scree of cobblestones supported uncomfortable concrete tubs, which in turn sprouted spindly, spastic trees.
I shared the lift to the ninth floor with a silent young man in green, laced at hip and throat. His sandy, indented temples with their gently pulsing veins aroused in me an attack of itchy squeamishness – I had to touch what repelled me. I scratched the palms of my hands and longed to take off my shoes and scratch the soles of my feet. The itch spread over my body like a hive and still I couldn’t take my eyes off that pulsing tube of blood, so close to both surface and bone.
At the ninth floor the sandy man straightened up, sighed, and disappeared off down a corridor with an entirely human shrug.
I’d been on to the ward before, albeit briefly, when Dr Busner had shown me round after the interview. What had struck me then and what struck me again now was the difference in smell between Ward 9 and the rest of the hospital. Elsewhere the air was a flat filtered brew; superficially odourless and machined, but latent with a remembered compound of dynasties of tea bags – squeezed between thumb and plastic spoon – merging into extended families of bleaching, disinfecting froths and great vanished tribes of plastic bags. But in Ward 9 the air had a real quality, it clamped itself over your face like a pad of cotton wool, soaked through with the sweet chloroform of utter sadness.