How the Dead Live

by Self, Will

  I expect you’ve discovered they’re immensely proud of their statue of Anubis too? Pathetic isn’t it, the way they drag it around whichever block it is that they’re currently tenanting, as if it were a recalcitrant old pampered doggie. Still, I suppose it is.

  The living, I guess, would expect the coincidence of different eras of suiting, and the presence of Cratchit clerks playing Nintendo, to give these offices an anachronistic air . We know it’s not so. It’s always the dumb mistake of the living to imagine themselves contemporary. ‘Every period I’ve lived through has seemed like now to me,’ my second husband was fond of saying – fondness was his forte. He was no more fond of me or his daughters or his mother than he was of his dog, or his golf bag, or his penis. Fondness was inscribed on his heart when I cut it out still beating. Only kidding.

  Yaws kept prodigiously exact records of the Now during his entire lifetime, detailing every little particle of its extinction. When, after his own, I came to read them, they proved to my entire satisfaction that the over-examined life is hardly worth living; and that while ostensibly he had died of a routine cardiac infarction, he had in fact, like so many of his ilk – permanently adolescent, upper-middle-class, minor-public-school-educated Englishmen – strolled back to the Elysian pavilion, his entry in the scorebook marked ‘Retired bored’.

  ‘Oh really?’ Had Canter said it yet again? He’d definitely caught me eyeing the fucking nyujo, because he continued, ‘You hadn’t perhaps considered becoming a nyujo yourself?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ I replied – although I’d heard him only too clearly.

  ‘Liberation through hearing on the after-death plane you’re familiar with it of course?’

  ‘Of course.’ They always talk like this, don’t they, the brown suits, the deatheaucrats, effortlessly rendering the transcendent banal. ‘But I’d rather set my heart on living again.’

  ‘We’ve got all sorts of new animating principles available, you know – fresh harvests of anencephalic stillborn infants coming through all the time – ‘ He broke off to address a passing clerk: ‘Mr Davis? You wouldn’t be so kind as to bring over the Roladex with the anencephalic stillborn infants’ animating principles on it, would you?’

  ‘Truly, I have no desire to be nyujo, and I’d rather counted on being me on the next go-round, as it were.’

  ‘You appreciate that you’ll actually be more you if you accept a new animating principle, hmm? There’ll be a more . . . how can I put it? ... porous barrier between your assemblages of memories.’

  ‘I know this, yes – but I won’t be me. Me. Me.’

  ‘Quite so.’

  Yes, I kid you not – this is the kind of dreck he tried to palm me off with. Still, at least I wasn’t among the living, stumbling about the joint imagining themselves painted up with the present, when it ain’t necessarily so. Their minds are full of dead ideas, images and distorted facts. Their visual field is cluttered up with decaying buildings, rusting cars, potholed roads and an imperfectly realised sky, which darkens towards the horizon of history. They take in all ages in the one frame every time they snap the city with their Brownie brainboxes. Their very noses are clogged with dying hairs, moribund skin, stratified snot – they’re smelling the past; and feeling it too between their toes, their thighs, the pits of their arms: ssshk-shk! Peeling back the years. Whereas we, the dead, are the true inheritors of the Modern. The live lot assemble time into lazy decadences – ten-year periods of conspicuous attitudinising, which are only ever grasped in nostalgic retrospect. My second husband was a profoundly ancient man, a Neolithic stone-knapper. But we . . . we see it all; anachro-spectacles are the only ones we wear. So these interminable branch offices that I’ve revolved through, while Lithy sat in my lap and Rude Boy ranted in the vestibule, trying to piss on back numbers of the Reader’s Digest, haven’t been so strange, or so different.

  Anyway, I’m getting off the point, which Canter never has. ‘Thank you, Mr Davis,’ he said, taking receipt of the relevant buff folder. ‘You see, Ms Bloom – or rather your death guide . . . Mr . . . Jones, ye-es Jones, may have told you – we have our own calculus here, our own ways of proceeding?’

  ‘I’m only too well aware.’

  ‘This isn’t’ – then he really did take off his wire-rimmed spectacles, and run his hand through his sparse, sandy hair, giving me time to appreciate, once again, that instead of being determined by the magisterially pompous English gentile who I’d thought was going to decide it, my fate was in the waxy paws of a ratty little Jew – ‘any longer a matter of how you conducted yourself on your last “go-round”, as you put it.’

  ‘Mr Canter, sir’ – such honorifics came naturally when I was addressing someone who hadn’t taken a shit since 1953 – I’m only too well aware of the implications of karma.’

  ‘On the before-death plane perhaps – but after death? You died, in 1988, owing over two thousand pounds to the Inland Revenue. Monies which had, subsequently, to be disbursed by your estate –’

  ‘Is this strictly relevant?’

  ‘Oh yes, accounts are accounts – and we are – ‘

  Accountants. Save for his peculiar colleagues, Mr Canter is well-nigh indistinguishable from Mr Weintraub, who, when I saw him for the last time – the cancer scooping out my left boob as if it were a fucking avocado – assured me he’d take care of the relevant returns . . . sitting in his aggressively Artexed office, off the North Circular by Brent Cross, playing with a Bic Cristal and annotating the accounts I myself had laboriously put together.

  ‘– concerned here with totting up all the relevant columns. We’ll be doing this for most of the next year, so don’t be alarmed if your neighbours – you live in Dulburb?’

  ‘Dulston,’ I grunted.

  ‘Dulston, quite so, a lovely area, very much village London. Anyway, if you should hear that certain enquiries are being made about you, rest assured that it’s only us. And now,’ he screwed his doughy butt into the swivel chair as if he were intent on sodomy, ‘there’s the matter of sex.’

  ‘Sex?’

  ‘Indeed, you will not, I hope, find yourself too discomfited by a resumption in sexual feelings, hmm? Merely psychic to begin with, but very real for all that.’ He paused for effect and a zombie brought in tea and Nice biscuits.

  Mr Canter and I sat either side of them for the remainder of the interview. After I’d left, another zombie returned to take them away. Funny how we dead never eat – yet still, some of us love to serve food.

  Well, that was one of the last encounters with Canter, as I say. And earlier this evening, in Piccadilly now, I was beset by a liquefying inundation of orgasms – of dicks stirring me up. When I was abandoned in the wastes of late middle age, my flesh folding, then frowning into sour slackness, I wanted my sex cut out – and so it was; in death, at least. Who cut the cookie with the cookie cutter? But ever since Miles and Natasha got down to it in the gauche apartment on Regent’s Park Road, I’ve been tormented by lust and jealousy. Who’d ever have thought they’d be welcome again in this old house, behind this envious green door? Ethereal fingers prinking my pussy. My first husband, jolly Dave Kaplan, he used to say that his beard was like ‘wearing a pussy on my face – I’ve only got to stroke my chin and I feel real comfy’. It’s Dave I thought of in Piccadilly. Or rather, it was the incongruous liver spot, adrift in his sparse hairline, that I pictured. It was always this scrap of yellow-brown I focused on as I willed myself towards another orgasm of crushing non-spontaneity.

  Years after the marriage was over – the late sixties to be vaguely precise – when we’d occasionally meet in Manhattan for lunch – those good, wholesome divorcees’ lunches, the only ones people who’ve been sexually involved can have and still enjoy their food – he divulged that while I was looking at his liver spot and imagining myself ecstatic, he was concentrating hard on the mole on my chin, while willing himself to detumesce. ‘Touche pas!’ I laughed, and raised my glass of Zinfandel. ‘Yes,’ he continued,
‘I’ve spent possibly years of my life entirely absorbed in the pimples, blemishes and other imperfections of beautiful women.’ And as if called to stimulate himself by this revelation, he meditatively stroked his pussy.

  Spontaneous or not, I did use to orgasm with Kaplan. I did clutch his arched neck, groan, say things – I did that crap. I loved sex – or rather, like so many women of my era, I loved the idea of sex. Sex garbed in romantic weeds, sex with strong self-assured men rather than puling boychicks. Set against imaginings like these the real thing was never that great, natch; the dildo would have to be dressed. I knew even then, from talking to the boychicks themselves (and was there ever a century like the twentieth for chewing things over; ‘Time as a Cud’ – discuss), that their chief sexual hang-up was the reverse of mine – a hang-down, if you like. For all these guys sex was too sexy. That’s why Dave confined himself to the mole.

  We’d gone a couple more blocks and I couldn’t see Phar Lap Jones ahead of me, when ‘Oimissus!’ – there he was, sitting, back against the wall, beside one of the alleyways that leads into the Albany. With the brim of his white Stetson pulled down low, he wasn’t much more than black jeans, bullroarer and outsize punishment boomerangs. He looked just like any of the other alien sophomores who’ve enrolled for this year’s London Summer School of the Didgeridoo. ‘Oi!’ He’d managed to mooch a meat pie from somewhere along the way. Strange, this being Kebabistan, rather than Fish-and-Chiplington. He chews up these hassocks of mince and onion after he’s skin-popped them with brown sauce. It’s a newly-coined Strine tradition of his. Meat-pie dreaming – I guess. But he never swallows it, none of us does, do we.

  Anyway, as I say, there he was in the alleyway and I felt this aching desire to get in there with him, to cram myself inside that gully of old bricks. I was half-convinced that for the first time in eleven years I’d get some abrasion, some rasp-between Phar Lap and the wall, that is. I may even have begun insinuating myself, because he said, ‘Juda! Lily, not in there, girl, that’s bad, you can’t go in there.’

  ‘Where? The Albany?’

  ‘No, that fuckin’ buju, girl!’ He made as if to pull me along with him and I followed in his wake, the two of us breasting the summertime crowds, who had now, like brown rats, sensed the explosion five blocks away by mood transmission. It made them all look as ugly as they are for a change. ‘You feel that, didya?’ he said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘No more of yer stupid colourlessness of indifference, hey-yeh?’

  ‘No, I really wanted to get in that alleyway – ‘

  ‘With me, yuwai, an’ you been thinkin’ ‘bout rootin’ long time now, yeh-hey?’

  ‘Ye-es.’

  ‘You’ve bin dead too long, girl, dead too long. Those dead souls on Old Compton Street, they passed clean through and you never broke step. I saw that.’

  ‘So you – you do think rebirth would be a good idea . . . in my case?’

  He stopped again, this time right next to a woman who was squinting into the air, arm outstretched, as if hailing a cab driven by Zeus across the fiery evening sky. Phar Lap was so close to her that he damped himself down a little and so did I. We whittled our presences away. That’s what we dead do, isn’t it? Shave ourselves out of the designer-stubbled faces of the living. Rude Boy came and sat on the kerb by us. Lithy, amazingly, leant against Rude Boy’s knee. ‘Is it that you wanna get shot of these fellers, yeh-hey?’

  ‘No! I mean – maybe. I don’t know. But if J am reborn I’ve children to talk to among the living – even if I leave these two behind.’

  ‘Yeh-hey! You don’t wanna be alone ever, d’you Lily?’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘I never am. Listen, don’ go crawlin’ into no cracks, not now. You hold back on those wantin’ feelings you’re gettin’, yeh? You do bad shit now and you’re done for girl, see? It’ll come back at you like this here kayan – see?’ He waved his big, black boomerang to bludgeon home his point. ‘Now snap it up – Mr Canter is waitin’ for you.’

  He lifted his arm up in front of the vacant eyes of the living woman and grabbed the cab. That’s how I ended up here with you. Stuck here in the waiting room, anticipating my final encounter with the deatheaucracy – for the time being.

  Christmas 2001

  Yeah, but there was more, hindsight multiplying me like opposing mirrors set either side of a restaurant booth. Because as we boarded the cab I remembered. This rush across this West End, ignoring the bombing in Old Compton Street, forcing Rude Boy to keep the pace: we were in a hurry – I was in a hurry. Now, that’s one thing you never do when you’re dead. There’s no rush when you’re dead. You may have scrambled up the dark stairs to confront it, nose to the musty carpet, anticipating its horror for everyone of those fifteen steps, expecting it every inch of the half-landing. But there’s no rushing once you’ve seen him, her and it. No rushing once you’re there. Only pottering around. Pottering around for eternity.

  Dying

  ‘It’s been quite a morning.’

  The last words of Samuel Beckett’s father

  Chapter One

  April 1988

  They say you are what you eat and now that I’m dying I know this is the solid truth. Actually, it’s not only a solid truth – it’s a gelid one as well. It’s also a sloppy, tacky, congealed reality. It’s a pink blubbery blancmange of an evidence and a stringy gruel of proof. It’s a gristly confirmation which swells like a filament of meat caught between teeth. Not, you understand, that I’ve had my own teeth for years now, it’s just that recently I’ve found myself dreaming of teeth, of what it’s like to have your own teeth. Dreaming of having teeth again. Anyway – you are what you eat: in my case, this hospital slurry, which seems to’ve been put together – insofar as it’s cooked at all – for the express purpose of sliding through us near-cadavers as fast as possible.

  ‘No need to give them anything but swill,’ I can hear a pushy lack-of-nutritionist proclaim (funny how the profession attracts quite so many anorexics) at this meeting or that case conference; ‘they’re eating up half the budget of the NHS already – can that be right?’ No, maybe not, but I’ve paid my fucking taxes, or at least I hope that ridiculous little man Weintraub has by now.

  The other thing about this slick cuisine is, natch, that it doesn’t repeat on you. Or rather, neither its odour nor its substance is likely to rise up in the faces of those poor overworked nurses. Good thing. We seldom get cheese — never smoked fish. Eggs are boiled to shit. Hard ovals of desiccated shit. No pickles. No rich sauces. No onions and emphatically no garlic. Not that I really liked such food when I was well, it’s just that now, now that I’m dying, I realise that this capacity certain foodstuffs exhibit of reappearing in your mouth, spontaneously, hours after they’ve been consumed, is very much a sign of life. Life in its very repetitiousness. Life going on. I could murder for a shmaltz – now that I know I’m definitely going to die. After my teeth were taken out, in the mid-sixties – ‘63, ‘64, weird not to remember – I thought that I’d become immortal. I’d always assumed that I’d die with my teeth because they were so fucking painful. Anything that painful – I unreasoned – even if it didn’t kill you itself, would surely be the end of you when it went. You’d die of bliss. But now, teeth or not, I’m dying.

  I’m absolutely certain that I’m going to die because half and hour ago nice Mr Khan, the clinical psychologist attached to the ward, came and told me I was. Some wiseass once said that the miracle of lifewas that we all might die at any minute – but that we live as if we were immortal. I wish I could get this wiseass by his scrawny throat and throttle his life right out of him. Did he have any idea what it’s like when you know the hour of your own death? And when it’s announced to you thus: ‘Erm – ah. I understand, Ms Bloom, that Dr Steel spoke to you this morning?’

  ‘Yes, he did.’ I put my crappy women’s mag to one side, I show my dentures to the nervous Mr Khan. I’m being a good little cancer-ridden old lady. S
o easy to be like this when you don’t have any legs. Legs make men think about pussy – even old pussy; and no one has legs in bed – not unless you’re in there with them.

  ‘Did he have a word about palliative care?’

  ‘About giving me palliative care? Yes he did, thank you.’ I’m still giving Mr Khan the glad eye but it’s beginning to dim slightly, because let’s face it, affirmative action or not, it’s very difficult to see what the point of puffed-up Mr Khan really is. Sure, he’s perfected that clever little Uriah Heep act which makes him appear ever so ‘umble to his clients and employers, but my teeth aren’t simply long – they’re fucking eternal! And I know this covers up a typical subcontinental mummy’s boy, a puling bully who lords it over the womenfolk when he gets home from a hard day talking crap to the dying.

  ‘I’m sorry there isn’t anything more that we can do for you . . . I can . . . do for you. Are you a religious person, Ms Bloom?’

  ‘No, no I'm sorry.’

  ‘You’re sorry?’ He’s a fat thing, he hasn’t got a hungry cancer chomping up his breasts, breasts which jiggle most unpleasantly inside his pressed, near see-through, synthetic shirt. Why do they always wear translucent shirts, these people who have everything to hide?

  ‘Sorry that you’re labouring under the delusion you’ve helped me at all. Done anything for me whatsoever.’ And I pick up my abandoned Woman's Realm, get back to reading recipes I’ll never make, ever, for sure now. Picking apart knitting patterns in my mind.