by Self, Will
Anyway, Sydenberg – here he is: tall, stooping, grey, bespectacled. His suit – unlike my body – is double-breasted. He carries an ugly, modern, vinyl attaché case, which he places by the side of the bed before methodically retracting himself down to my level. Bedside manner – what an expression. All the doctors who’ve ever come to my bedside have looked, suitably enough, utterly uncomfortable. I mean, what could it be like for them to be completely at ease – to put you completely at ease? They’d have to put their cases down, then pull their pants off and get into bed with you. Now that would be a bedside manner.
‘So, you came home, Lily?’
‘As you can see, Dr Sydenberg, as you can see.’
‘How’s the pain?’
‘It hurts.’
‘And the nausea?’
‘Sickening.’
‘I see.’
He does see, he sees through thick bifocals which prise his oyster eyes open with enlargement. I wish he had a better bedside manner, though. I wish he’d get into bed with me – I want someone, anyone, to hold on to. I’ll try another tack. ‘I’m frightened.’
‘Of dying?’ Good man. Direct – I like that.
‘Of dying, of what they’ll do to me after I die.’
‘You told me that this didn’t concern you, that you’d told Natasha and Charlotte to have your body cremated and drop your ashes in a skip, or a bin, or anywhere.’
‘I’m worried they won’t – Charlotte’s too sentimental, and Natty’s too stoned.’
‘Well, given your convinced materialism this would hardly matter – would it?’
‘I don’t want to be embalmed.’
‘That’s an American thing – we don’t do that here. Remember, the vast majority of English people are cremated; I think it’s something like seventy per cent.’
‘I know – it’s a great country to burn a corpse in. They won’t even have to take my pacemaker out – ‘cause I don’t have one. D’jew think you can still feel it when they burn you?’
‘Lily.’
‘I’m serious. What if I’m wrong? What if you can feel everything, what if you can feel it when they crush your bones in the cremulator?’
‘Cremulator?’
‘It’s like a spin drier full of steel balls – they use it for bone-crushing, for making human bonemeal, so that the relatives aren’t freaked out by spare ribs or odd vertebrae when they collect the urn and sift through the leftovers.’
‘No, no, come now, this isn’t right – I think you must be suffering from taphephobia.’
‘What the hell’s that?’
‘An irrational fear of being buried alive.’
‘Unlike people who live on the San Andreas fault.’
‘Quite so.’
Wow, taphephobia. And I’d thought death was the great phobia-eradicator; now I discover that I’m to be irrationally fearful – even as I die. ‘How about decamping to Palermo?’
‘What?’
I can see that this conversation is beginning to discomfit him. Good – I can’t keep it up much longer. ‘Palermo – or Paris, anywhere where they have catacombs, where I can be strung up on a wire wearing my best M&S dress, my sensible flat shoes, my raincoat.’
‘That’s not altogether practical, is it?’
No, it isn’t, and I don’t want to hang around – I don’t want to be a drag. Nor do I want to be planted out in Wanstead at the municipal necropolis. I’ve had enough difficulties with paying for living space as it is; the idea of mortgaging a grave plot is unspeakable. I’ve read too much about it, I know what goes on. I even know that there are giant American corporations in the process of taking over the British cemetery industry. These saps – they think they’re going to heaven; but even if they are – which I very much doubt – their earthly remains are being transformed into a very worldly profit for fat, unscrupulous investors. Fools.
I’d like to convey some of this intelligence to Sydenberg, who’s been proving such a good listener, but by the time I realise my eyeshave been shut for a while, and then manage to open them, he’s gone next door for a case conference.
— I’m afraid there’s very little to be done.
— We understand. Do you think there’s any point in calling round the hospices?
— Not really, we can manage the pain just as effectively here. You’ve arranged for twenty-four–hour cover?
— Yes, so it’ll be here then?
— As long as there isn’t any major change, as long as it’s possible to give her her medication.
— And you think it will?
— It’s impossible to say; if there’s any radical acceleration, rather than . . . a slow fade, well, I’m afraid you’ll have to call UCH.
— She doesn’t want to die in the hospital.
— Frankly, Charlotte, it’s that she doesn’t want to die; your mother’s a relatively young woman to be dying. I think all this talk about remains and burials is a diversionary tactic. Has she discussed the future with you at all?
— A little. She slides in and out; sometimes she appears reconciled, but mostly she’s very very angry.
— Well, this is to be expected.
— I’d hoped she might be a bit more philosophic.
Philosophic – ha! That’s one of Yaws’s catch-words ‘ philosophic’. He was very phucking philosophic. Philosophic about everything but philosophy – that he couldn’t manage. Yaws was an ecclesiastical historian. He wrote his thesis on Trollope and the nineteenth-century clergy as depicted in his novels. I’m not saying it was a second-rate subject, but it was notable how many second-rate minds were engaged by it. I used to have to make tea for them, entertain greying perpetual students on perpetual, grey English afternoons: ‘Tell me, Mrs Yaws, which would be your favourite Barchester novel?’ Any that was in a small enough format for me to shove it right up your ass you dumb motherfucker. I wish I’d been less polite to these people, who didn’t matter at all, and more polite to the ones who did.
So, I’m to die here, am I? Here in my dingy little flat. I’d better do an inventory of my dying space, my ideal tomb, my gentrified sarcophagus. This latter meaning – as I know only too well– ‘flesh-eater’. Hear that, Minxie? You’re not the only flesh-eater around here. And the cancer, like the faithful dog it is, gives me a maul with its deathly awl. I’d almost forgotten what a wild, exquisite pain there is to being hungry – until you reminded me. So, tatty furniture, mismatched pots, boxes of postcards – why the fuck did I buy them? Memo for Another Lifetime: never buy more postcards than you’re going to send, no matter how attractive the pictures are. Bibelots; books; racks of shabby tent clothes; cupboard bottoms carpeted with pasty shoes; baskets and shoeboxes crammed with damned knitting and odd bits of sewing that’ve gone to hell; drawers full of sad underwear and sadder letters. Letters – why keep letters? Do I want to read letters now? Do I fuck. In the kitchenette cupboards there are jars of congealed preserves; in the bathroom cabinets there are half-used cans of talcum powder and suspect unguents – bring them to me! Bring me my chattels! I want to die with a pot of blackcurrant conserve in one hand and a straw place mat in the other. I want to expire with all the records of my tortured heart, the minutes of my faithless meetings and the proceedings of my dishonourable societies to hand. Don’t I just. Aren’t I keen.
As is Dierdre, who’s arrived and processes across the bedroom to where I lie, news of Ivan Boesky burbling in my ear. ‘How are you feeling, Lily?’ she enquires.
‘Downsized,’ I reply. ‘They’re selling off bits of me, leaving only the profitable core.’ I want to say more, but I can’t, because there’s a new sensation to contend with, making me more fearful than the terror, sicker than the nausea. It’s the mother of all sensations for this mother – who’s always had to run and hide when things got too much to bear. I’m paralysed. I can’t move, I can’t blink my eyes. There’s a fat bastard sitting on my chest crushing the life out of me and it isn’t me any more. Deirdre gets a fork of
hand behind my neck and lifts me up far enough to drop the pills into my mouth, then tips my head back so that water can be poured to sluice them down my throat. Pain relief has now become an engineering work rather than a medical operation.
‘There you are,’ she’s got me back down on my pallet, ‘I’ll mop your face and neck with a flannel – you’ll feel more comfortable.’
When I was a functioning mother I had this routine down pat, the index finger tightly cowled with hanky; the child’s mouth imprisoned on my hard hand, the tiny gummy lips attacked with the adamant prong. If I’d only known this technique was going to be applied to me again, I’d never have been so brutal.
— I just thought I’d drop by, see how she is.
— She’s as well as can be expected, Natasha. She’s sleeping now.
— It’s – it’s Deirdre, isn’t it?
— That’s right.
— D’jew think it’s gonna be soon?
— That’s not the sort of thing I’d like to say.
— But what d’jew think?
— [Sigh] I’ve seen people in your mother’s condition linger for weeks and months or go in seconds and hours. Death, Natasha, doesn’t abide by our schedules.
— I’m going to the loo.
Natasha’s normally husky voice has gone up half an octave and the vibrato is quite intense. I can smell the fearful sick sweat come off of her as she canters through my bedroom – why doesn’t somebody give the junky pony a rub-down? I can hear the Vent-Axia stirring up the lint in there and the taps running and the loo flushing and she seems to be out in seconds and rummaging in the bedside-table drawers.
— Are you looking for something?
— Just a letter – a bill; I left here.
— There’s some papers on the table by the front window.
— Oh, oh – are there?
Busted. Deirdre’s quite a smooth operator – despite the cardy. She’s got little Natty’S number. I daresay Deirdre hasn’t a great deal of time for spoilt middle-class brats like mine. She’s certainly not about to let Natasha walk off with my medication. Damn – I should’ve given her a supply while I still could. Now it’ll be Chez Russell– I wonder how many miles she’s managed to put between herself and Miles? I don’t even hear her go – my own daughter; but then I didn’t feel myself deanimate – and this is my own body.
I remember this lack of sensation; it’s happened enough times to me in this bedroom, usually in a ginny mist, a forest of juniper. Lying here, desperate to get to sleep, the World Service revolving in my ear. So desperate to sleep, thoughts buzzing in my skull, pinging off the inside of my eyelids. Eyelids which at first cannot be opened and then can’t be shut; which are rolled up like recalcitrant blinds. Then it occurs to me – my body has fallen asleep while my mind is still awake, hence the paralysis. It’s a reversible jacket of a mind, mine is; ever ready to play an ironic trick and confound me. It’s petrifying – this paralysis. Ha-ha. I thought you became petrified because you were terrified – but now I realise that the reverse can also be the case.
Why aren’t I more frightened than I am, lying here, while the plummy radio accents describe rotten events? Unable to move, to escape. Claustrophobia and agoraphobia – all these years I’d thought they were to do with external spaces, but now I understand that both fears are – in Lichtenberg’s dumb jargon – ‘projections’. That it’s the body itself that is either too vast for the tiny mind that wanders over it, or too small to contain the myriad perceptions that pile up in its memory like dishes in a sink. Christ – I’m waxing philosophic and I’m waning into a reverie of Penn Station . . .
. . . which I trot through on clicking heels, from the tracks up the iron stairs, clack-clack-clack, and into the General Waiting Room, click-click-click. I move from one huge vaulted space to another, the distinction between them being that the body of the station is an exposed skeleton of cast-iron ribs, vaunting pelvises and soaring, arched spines, whereas the waiting room is fleshy with coffered plasterwork. You might think that Penn Station – or indeed any station – would be the last place I’d want to hang out, given that it has so much of the outside inside of it. Not so. I prefer to think of it as being solely an internal construction, a huge den tucked securely in a corner of the city. It helps with the claustro, eases the agro, that there’s a stench of train exhaust and the breakfast breaths of ten thousand thousand. It helps the station towards classical immortality that the facade was modelled on the Caracalla Baths. Not that this morning I pause under its heavy pediment – I’ve more important things on my mind.
Today is the launch of the new Rose’s Rocket – and I’m on the sharp end of a revolution in writing materials. Yup, it may be the closing stages for the war in the Pacific (VJ Day is only weeks away), but the only projectiles bothering me are Rockets with a cap ‘R’ – and the only flaks present will be wearing snap-brim hats. It’s the press day for the Rose’s Rocket, the first continuous-inkflow pen to hit the US market ever. Oh sure – the idea’s been around for ages, patented as far back as 1888, but hell, what’s inventing something when you can copy it? The laps created an entire manufacturing economy off the back of copying things after the war, but they copied the copying from the likes of Rose. Bob was well ahead of the game.
In Buenos Aires, to be precise, buying supplies of raw wool for his business. Rose was a Chicago businessman who’d made a wartime fortune out of stuffing things with wool: flying jackets, helmets, sleeping bags – you open it, he’d stuff it. In the Windy City they called him King Stuff. Anyway, Rose saw some of the original Biro pens on sale in a department store and, cottoning on instantly to their potential, bought them and brought them home intent on copying. Poor old Laszlo Biro; he sold his North American rights to Ever-sharp, but never bothered with a patent – the way was clear for both of them to be stuffed by the King.
Rose was an old college buddy of Kaplan’s. Kaplan was away at the war. That’s what we used to say: ‘He’s away at the war.’ It made flame-throwing Japs sound like a ball game and I liked it that way. I was a selfish, headstrong, oversexed girl of twenty-one when Kaplan was drafted; we’d been married a year. He was, as yet, without his pussy. A square-jawed, wiry man of medium height with brown, wavy hair, who could always raise a laugh with his ‘I changed my name to Kaplan’ routine, because he was so all-American as to have an indeterminate feel about him. He appeared no more Jewish than he did German, or Italian, or Irish, or anything else. Jolly Dave Kaplan, the genetic blender.
We had a cold-water apartment in the run-down wreck that was the Rhinelander Gardens on West 11th Street. Not that there were that many hot-water apartments in Manhattan in those days – the war was on and so was the housing shortage. I had a job selling war bonds for a while, but then so did everyone else. I was crap at selling war bonds – Kaplan had infected me with his cafe communism, and his Jewish anti Semitism. Canter – that was the guy who ran the war-bonds outfit. Ratty little man – a British emigrant. I couldn’t stand him. ‘Your heart isn’t in this,’ he’d say pompously, sanctimoniously – as if I were personally responsible for Pearl-fucking-Harbor, and fucking over Mrs Miniver.
I did other war work for a while, putting radios into Flying Fortresses, which was kind of fun. I thought I looked good in an overall when I cinched it tight, but I had to go way out into the Jersey boondocks to get to the factory, and, well . . . I had a real yen for Manhattan at the time. Didn’t make any difference whether I was a V–8 or a V-girl – I still had to be sucking on that big lozenge of masonry.
So, anyway, I’m coming out of Penn Station, because I like to detour there on my way to Rose’s offices, which are in the mid–40s (I can’t remember where exactly – could you?), and I’m cock-a–hoop because we’re launching the first continuous-inkflow pen in the entire US of A. We’ve beaten Eversharp’s Capillary Action to the stores by five clear weeks, and the Rocket’s smooth, futuristic design sold it in as much as its revolutionary ink-delivery system. And who’s
responsible for this design? Why, me of course. Little ol’ missy. I’d taken design classes as part of the art syllabus at Columbia, although I’d never intended becoming a professional. I didn’t want to do anything much at all when I was young. I saw myself as a Zelda Fitzgerald type, married to a successful writer or artist, running a salon, drinking too many highballs, crashing my Hispano-Suiza into the Mediterranean – whatever. I was a fantasist; the only part of it I could realistically manage was the drinking. The only things I had going for me were a big, blowsy body, a dirty imagination and a talent for back talk.
Rose sent me a wire because we didn’t have a phone. Like I say, I can’t recall exactly where his offices were, but from his window you could see the Times Tower. As for what the suite looked like – well, it was full of stuff, natch. Rose was – to my considerable chagrin – a big guy, a blond as myself. ‘I changed my name to Rose so people would think I was Jewish,’ he told me; ‘it’s the only way to get on in business.’ We laughed about this; then he showed me the designs he had for the pen, and asked if I thought I could help. He didn’t want to use any established product designers, this had to be done in total secrecy, I was his pinch hitter. ‘Like the atom bomb,’ he said, ‘this pen is going to revolutionise the world – you’ll see.’