How the Dead Live

by Self, Will

  Deirdre bundles up the soiled nightie and the soiled bottom sheet. Someone’s put a plastic sheet on the mattress underneath it. How sensible. It must be the same procedure for home deaths as it is for births. The chair she’s put me in is a little Regency fake which I recently had covered. Looked at this way, my decline has been sickeningly abrupt – there are library books unreturned, a tax return inadequately filed, letters unwritten, even appointments I’ve yet to cancel. Who knows, I might make a sudden recovery, Minxie might gather herself together and quit her temporary home, leaving me free to attend a flower show on Saturday with Susie Plender. O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

  ‘I’m sorry, Lily?’

  ‘Nothing, Deirdre, nothing at all.’

  I don’t mind Deirdre; more than that – I’m grateful to her. Dying should be done with strangers – it’s not so bad for them, mopping up the sweat and puke. After all, it’s not as if the cancerous burglar has broken into their corporeal house, laid a tumour turd on their cellular carpet. So, I guess it’s a hell of a lot easier for them to clean it up. It must be the same with undertakers. They must be the jolliest guys around, going into work every day and knowing they’ll face tragedies not their own, such a relief. And English undertakers must be the jolliest of all, given their unrivalled propensity for schaden-freude: Ho-ho–ho! You’re lying down on the ground covered in blood, what a silly pratfall. They don’t need to be venal and money-grubbing the way Americans are, because they actually enjoy the work – they’d pay to do it. And anyway Deirdre holds me well, touches me firmly. She’s a nurse – I’m a child. This will be the only way the English handle me now, until they chuck my corpse in a cheap pine coffin with no bogus ceremony at all and I disappear up the pillar of chimney that supports the grey sky over Hoop Lane. I do so like Golders Green Crematorium – did you know that children under five are burnt for free? So very humane.

  She dries me off, dresses me up, tucks me back in, smooths the duvet, smooths my hair. I wonder if all nurses played with dolls a lot when they were little girls?

  ‘Do you think you could manage a snack now?’

  To my near infinite amazement I discover that I might be able to choke something down. ‘In the cupboard over the stove you’ll find some Ryvita – would you spread a couple with a little of the cream cheese in the fridge? And perhaps some fruit if there’s any?’ She shuffles off over the carpet I’ve never liked, into the kitchenette which has always been too small. I suppose I could’ve stayed at the house on Crooked Usage – the kitchen there was fine. But what would I’ve done in it? Cook gigantic meals I was incapable of eating without ballooning still more than I had? The entire fucking house was defaced with the evidence of my bouts with the bulge. On every wall there were pencilled lists of my daily weigh-ins: ‘April 5th –186 lb. April 6th –184 lb. April 7th –183 lb. April 10th – 189 lb. SHIT! SHIT! SHIT!’ I must’ve gone away for the weekend – to a fucking bakery.

  The seventies were my fattest decade. Overall I think the seventies were distinctly bulbous. People looked chunky, typefaces were rounded, writing implements penile. I liked to think I was maintaining an aesthetic unity, as my weight shot up to two hundred pounds and I became a Mrs Pepperpot of a woman. Sheer bravado – I hated it. I hated my fat. I’d sit sobbing on the side of my bed – things never change – and grab folds of myself up in order to present them individually with my derision. The effortlessly skinny girls would gather whispering on the landing – was it safe to approach the obese old dragon? Emphatically not. I loathed and resented the sylphs I shared the house with. I hated their nascent curves and their burgeoning sexuality – and probably showed it too much. Said too much about quite how shitty it can be to lie with a man. Said it to Natty – in baby talk, naturally. Pas devant les enga-fengas.

  Up and down went the scales, the dial flickering over weeks and months. I reckon that between ‘73 and ‘79 I must have lost and regained, lost and regained getting on for seven hundred pounds – three whole obese mes Me-me-me. Then I stabilised as a fat old pear-shaped woman. Not obese, simply fat and old. It seemed that I’d acquired the naturally pear-shaped body of the middle-class, late-middle–aged English-woman. My adoptive country’s lard had taken me for its own. How nice. No wonder Hedley didn’t fancy me. Natasha caught me sobbing on a transatlantic call: ‘I was like a seal,’ I moaned, ‘like a seal.’ I was referring to my agility in bed, but he took it to be a reference to my size and replied, ‘It’s not that, Lily – it’s not that you’re fat, believe me – ‘ I hung up and saw black bangs dangling over the banisters. ‘Whyd’jew say that, Mumu? Whyd’jew say you were a seal?’

  Here comes Deirdre with the inapposite slimmer’s snack. I don’t need fucking Ryvita – I need food substantial enough to give me back my life, my vigour, my health. I need to eat an entirely new Lily Bloom, so that she can be me. Deirdre’s put it all together quite well, and she’s found the grapes in the front room too, but I should’ve told her where the trays were, tucked beside the cooker, because the crackers are sliding around on that blue plate like pucks on an ice rink. Even when the plate’s propped on my withered boobs I can’t seem to keep the things still enough to grasp them. Deirdre’s set herself down in the blue chair and is ostentatiously pretending to read her notes from the nighttime. Oh Christ! If only now were the bite time, but I know it isn’t, even before the carious corner of one of the crackers stabs into my gum, underneath my bottom plate, and inflicts a wound nasty enough to bleed. Blood on the snacks.

  Hedley. He’s still alive somewhere. He sent me a chess set only last year, even though he knows I don’t play. But then he does have a chess shop in the Village – and his house was always cheap. Dead cheap. He doesn’t own a car to this day doesn’t need one. He walks from the brownstone his gonif papa left him in the fifties, trolling down Broadway in a seersucker suit and a straw panama, all the way to the Village – where he sells his chess sets and his checker boards. Not exactly demanding work. It leaves him plenty of time to concentrate on the only problems he’ll admit into his life chess ones. Hedley, the last man who ever touched me intimately – saving Dr Steel, but then he’s barely human. More of an animated scalpel.

  Hedley. Together we would lie in the flat in Brooklyn I borrowed from Esther – ‘Darling it’s rent-controlled – so I can’t be assed to rent it!’ – naked on the bed, like two parentheses indicating the presence of passionate language, of sex. Of course, he’d never leave his wife. His invalided wife. I mean to say, he’d leave her – in order to come to me; but he’d always go back again. Back to put her on the machine (she is-was? – a diabetic), or take her off the machine, or give her a shot. I asked him once if, given that he had a mountain of cash in the bank, he couldn’t arrange for her to have a kidney transplant. He looked the most flustered I’d ever seen him, more abandoned by his reason than when he orgasmed. He said something about tissue types, rejection, unavailability, unsuitability – but I didn’t believe him. Like I say, the house was cheap; and more than that I think he actually wanted her to be housebound, wanted her there whenever he eventually came home. What a psycho. Good riddance.

  Eight o’clock, and outside small birds are going ‘cheep’. I can hear cars grinding into motion and the relentless stutter of lorries on Kentish Town Road. Hard to believe, as I lie here listening to the Today programme, that six weeks ago I would’ve been leaving with them. The Italians call this kind of cancer ‘the whirlwind’, because it blows down on the person and winnows them right out, like a husk. It’s blown away all my precious routines, my rounds of errands, my staggered sociability, my little trips – all gone. And with them the people.

  No need to see Susie Plender any more – although she’s called, naturally. No need to see Emma Gould either and hear about her latest man-trapping escapades. She’s not a fifty year– old woman – she’s a tethered goat. No need to see Jack Harmsworth, my alcoholic bibliophile friend – although him I could bear the most. Like Natty, I guess – addictive personali
ties are peculiarly restful to the dying, because like us they operate within tiny windows of temporal opportunity. And no need to call Mr Weintraub. No, actually I must call Weintraub, or get Charlotte to. I must sort out this tax business before – before – well, let’s just say it has to be dealt with. No need to see Tim, my boss, although the sweetie did come and visit me in the hospital last week. He was terribly uneasy and his wife, Lola, a squint-eyed Spaniard, kept looking around the ward as if she could see something we couldn’t. Something terrifying.

  Nope, no need for any of them. Hedley’s history. Yaws is dead. Kaplan – well, Kaplan, there lies a tale. Anyway, I don’t expect to be hearing from him, oh no. It’ll be Natty and Charlotte and Steel and Deirdre from now on in. Not that Deirdre’s here for the duration; I can hear her next door passing the careful baton as I muse.

  ‘Here’s my time sheet, Mrs Elvers. Your mother had a very quiet night.’

  ‘Did she?’ You note there’s no move to informality from my stuck-up daughter.

  ‘Well, I say quiet, but in truth I have to say she’s . . . she’s . . .’

  ‘Fading fast?’

  ‘I – I wouldn’t want . . . it’s . . .’

  ‘Please, Mrs Murphy, please – don’t be afraid to express an opinion.’

  ‘She does appear to be in a rapid decline. It happens quite often – when a . . . terminal patient comes home.’

  ‘I see. Is your colleague here yet?’

  ‘No –’

  ‘Errrr!’ Yes she is, and hesitating for admittance – but no:

  ‘Hiya.’ It’s Natasha, come for her get-up, I daresay – well, I did tell her to – and:

  ‘Errr.’ A bit less insistent, that – it’ll be the Murphy-substitute, another certain woman of a certain age in the slick, professional housecoat of death. Their Father’s house has many mansions, and they’re intent on dusting the vestibules.

  From the main room of the flat come scraps of conversations, leftovers of sentences which float through. Then there’s yet another burp from the intercom, and Molly, the Elverses’ maid, arrives to clean. Jesus! It must be like the stateroom scene from the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera in there. I wonder if I’d find them funny any more. I wonder if there’s a last particle of amusement left inside this rotting body. Perhaps if I vibrated at the right frequency the worms would quit me, like a stream of rats running out of Hamelin. In truth, I never thought them that funny. I always equated Groucho Marx with Hitler – saw him as Hitler, with his bogus, greasepaint moustache and his rapid-fire delivery of deranging demagoguery. Like Hitler and like my father, with his big hands, his scarred face, his Indian-head money clip, his wiseacre’s patter. ‘A child of five would understand this. Send somebody to fetch a child of five.’ So that he can perform unnatural experiments on it, flay its skin off for a nightlight’s shade. Yeah, nothing cosy about Groucho, giving the lie to Hitler’s own Semitism – surely only a Jew could hate Jews with such intensity, wish to rip out the kike sleeved within the Jew? I married Dave Kaplan, I understood later, because of his own – soon to be manifested – Jewish anti-Semitism. ‘Y’know Kaplan isn’t my real name,’ he used to say to people, ‘I changed it in order to appear Jewish – my real name’s Carter.’ And this from a man with such a melting-pot of features – it was irresistible.

  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. Char
lotte 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!’