How the Dead Live

by Self, Will

  But I was tired – fucking exhausted. As the police moved in, blows were exchanged and they lost control – marvellous expression. They lost control, fists tried to fly but crashed into skulls and cheekbones. Fleet feet fled through flesh. I snuck away – leaving my young lover to the shlemozzle. But not before seeing more striking slow motions – heads going like the clappers, the impacts were so percussive. I saw one beefeater thug smack a Buddy Holly lookalike the way British actors playing Gestapo officers smacked their interrogation victims. Back and forth and back again. I never ever wanted to be that close to violence again. I’d never intended it, my life wasn’t meant to be like that. I’d understood that I was to be excluded from this section of the twentieth century, that I hadn’t been selected. I saw it as my role to skulk in history’s wings, observing the actors once they’d been bandaged, or otherwise made beautiful.

  Even the noise of a riot soon fades if you tuck your head down and ignore it. While bottles, bricks and splintered placards punctured the drizzly sky, I made my way to Berkeley Square and sat down on a bench. Here, then, there were elms not yet diseased – I think. I sat and lost myself in the damp leaves pressed into the pavement, the old people fizzling out. Come in cigarette number 34, your time is up. I’d never felt, it occurred to me, more depleted. Or, to be correct, more indolent. The very effort needed to register my own fatigue was . . . too much. Seeing made me yawn. I was only forty-six, but I couldn’t conceive of how I’d make it through the remaining years – they’d have to spool them in front of my eyes. Pathé life reels.

  Eyes which are now jammed open in the enclosing darkness. I wake from reveries of the late sixties to this nighttime paralysis. Waking takes long enough for me to realise that these memories – undoctored and unedited – are a crude gloss on the badly painted present. More precisely – that the tank of tiredness is itself now empty; and I feel fatigued by this fact alone. I’d thought that at least I could always depend on this numbing languor, this painful drowsiness. That it would be the layette of my lifetime; and that sleep – for so long dispensed in famine rations – would now, at long last, be in plentiful supply.

  Not so. The devil is looking at me with malevolent red eyes shaped like twos. They blink with electronic implacability. Coiled around the bedroom the plumbing gurgles like a gassy gut. The pain comes galloping towards me, ravening white horses which chomp though everything in their path. Hurricane pain. Pain that leaves me clinging to the driftwood of my own consciousness; battered into not being me. Maybe now I die? I allow myself to be lifted up by this anguish like an oscillating mote. Higher and higher I rise in the fusty darkness, while below me the duvet’s pattern dissolves into the grid of Manhattan, as a clarinet intimately moans: ‘Ooooowaaaawa-waa-wa-waa-waaa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-waaaa . . .’ then a string section cranks up the pace: ‘Diddleumdumdumdiddle-umdumdumdiddleumdumdum!’ until the clarinet gets eloquent on behalf of its own misery: ‘Wawawawaaaawawawawaaawawawawawawawaaaaaaaaaaa . . .’ and not to be outdone, the strings crank it up some more: ‘Diddleumdumdumdiddleumdumdumdiddleumdumdum!’

  ‘Wawawa-waaaa!’ Christ alive – it’s fucking Rhapsody in Blue. Christ penetrated by the Lord. Christ jacking off the Holy Ghost – how I hate this tune. Three in one. It’s a tune-not a rhapsody. A tin-pan–crash-bang bit of Yid slickery, played out in the trash-choked alleys around Times Square and Broadway.

  The city of my majority swims towards me out of the dusty deathly darkness of this suburban room an ocean away. At first I’m relieved to have this effortless ascendancy; rising in a smooth parabola from the coxcomb of Liberty into the clouds over the toe of Manhattan, so that the leggy length of the island rears below me, each neon street switched on by my own awareness. ‘Diddleumdumdumdiddleumdumdumdiddleumdumdum!’ A set of a certain unreal age, with no distinction between the fabricated and the constructed, between interior and exterior. Amusical New York peopled by eternally young songsters clad in sky-blue Runyon shmutter. See them dance down the block, swing around the corner, leap into the subway, while Top Cat trades gags with Officer Dibble and the Jetsons head home in their flivvers to White Plains.

  As if the streets were sore throats gargling the violence of their own dissolution, it’s a memento mori city in which a flayed cop rides a flayed horse, half of their skulls and half of their skeletons exposed. And these picked-clean knights are predisposed to shepherd a funeral which emerges from Harlem to march across 121st Street and downtown. A black funeral – what repulsive fun. How much black silk and black crêpe, how much bombazine has been draped over these black bodies? The tubas and cornets are pooting out the hated moans of Jew urbanity. This black has decided to belong to the Jewish Death Club – which is happy to accept him as a member. This Jew has declined to attend meetings of the Black Club – but she’s being forced into the procession for all that. Please don’t let Death touch me with its black hands; please don’t let Hitler kiss me with his greasepaint moustache.

  ‘Ooooowaaaa-wa-waa-wa-waa-waaa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-waaaa . . .’ I managed to squeeze that one out, project it above the murmurous, murderous news of Kurt Waldheim’s reha-bilitation.

  — Ms Bloom?

  I try to reply, to ask her to move me, feed me, drug me, comfort me, but all that emerges is more blueish rhapsodising. ‘Wawawawaaaawawawawaaawawawawawawawaaaaaaaaaaa . . .’

  — Ms Bloom, are you all right? Is there something I can get for you?

  And now the beat is doubled up: ‘Diddleumdumdumdiddleumdumdumdiddleumdumdum!’ Deirdre has opened the double doors to the living room, letting in a big wedge of yellow light. She returns to my bedside.

  — Ms Bloom, can you hear what I’m saying to you?

  ‘Diddleumdumdumdiddleumdumdumdiddleumdumdum!’ Oh yes, and I can also see the greasy blackheads like Braille on your yellow vellum.

  — Ms Bloom, could you blink, or close your eyes if you can understand what I’m saying?

  No. No – that’s beyond me. It’s happened. I’ve been buried alive in the flesh-eating box of my own body. My eyelids, intermittently and unpredictably, sweep wet streaks across my view –like demented windshield-wipers. Time doubles up in their wake. ‘Diddleumdumdumdiddleumdumdumdiddleumdumdum!’ And my voice is compelled. ‘Wawawawaaaawawawawaaawawawawawawawaaaaaaaaaaa . . .’ This definitely gets things going. Deirdre recoils as if I’ve spat in her face. I have spat in her face – she’s wiping the spittle from her drippy nose. I can hear my clarion cry echo around the room, my hearing must have a delay now, a sound-lock. But in place of Gershwin’s bombastic klezmer, it’s become a hideous life-rattle, a gurgling, gasping, aspirated screech: ‘Hhhraarrghhh-resheo’ Hyayyayrhg-h’- h’h’hergh’!’ This is a terrorist alert in the language centre itself; vowels and consonants evacuating at top speed from the Tower of Song. Christ! You would’ve thought such a bestial noise would get windows banging open all over Kentish Town.

  — What’s the matter?!

  Sweat damp in her knickers and wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt, Natty appears in the yellow wedge.

  — Your mother is declining very rapidly, Ms Bloom –

  — Mum! Mumu! Can you hear me?

  — I’m afraid she’s no longer lucid –

  ‘Wawawawaaaawawawawaaawawawawawawawaaaaaaaaaaa . . .

  — What’s that dreadful noise she’s making?

  From the terror in my youngest’s porcelain eyes I can assess the mess I must be. If I try hard I can re-establish contact with this steadily departing vessel of cellular mush. I can feel its dismasted no-progress –limbs flapping like collapsed sails, as it no-heads round into the afflatus of extinction.

  — I’m afraid the cancer must have entered her brain –

  — Her brain?

  ‘Wawawawaaaawawawawaaawawawawawawawaaaaaaaaaaa . . .’

  — That’s awful, she . . . she doesn’t sound –

  Human. I don’t sound human. I sound like a fucking animal. A gurgling cow. My brain’s been vaccinated – with cancer.

  — Please –
Natasha, It isn’t her, these noises are involuntary. It’s breakthrough pain.

  Oh, it’s a breakthrough allrighty. Brand-new pain for a brand-new era – coming soon to a nerve ending near you.

  — What can we do?

  — I’ll have to phone the hospital, see if they’ll admit her.

  — Admit her, why?

  — I haven’t been able to give her medication for eight hours now – it’s likely she’s in a lot of pain. I can’t tell. She’ll have to–

  Make sure you know quite how far things have got by my skilled employment of the voluntary involuntary action; in this instance an arm swung wide in the shadows, swiped in a spastic butterfly stroke, then whipped back again. Whack-whack-smack! I catch Deirdre in the lower belly, Natty on the thigh, paperbacks and the little radio fly from the bedside table.

  — go on a drip.

  Drip-drip. In fairness to Natty she’s exactly the same as everyone else. It’s only that unlike the others she can’t prevent the naked self-interest from showing. Especially not now, not near naked, in frayed M&S bikini briefs, sweat on her thighs, sweat on her neck and sporting a sweaty tiara. It’s a sweat T-shirt competition – the sweat plastering Che Guevara’s noble brow between Natty’s once proud tits. So, she stayed here last night. Evidently Russell wasn’t available; absent, I daresay, at some junkies’ soiree – pass the Vicar, tea-head. Miles would’ve been small comfort – and miles away if he’s any sense. So, best for her to hang out here in the hope of a few crumbs of pleasurable relief. You would’ve imagined that this – the live burial, the uncoupling of mind from body – would plunge me into final despair. Not so. Can you hear me? Not so. All those injunctions to let go; to accept and let go; to walk into the garden and see spring invest the saplings and let-fucking–go when there was no need. I can kick and punch and scream as much as I like, I can hold on for dear life if I want, because it makes no odds. Dear Life is rearing up above me, rearing over me as my fingers scrabble on mortality’s cliff edge; and Dear Life’s boot is coming down on the back of my hand. Hard.

  Life has left me in a plastic-curtained cubicle. Life has left me in the family way. I’m fully gravid with Death; Death is engaged now – his bony head nuzzling my cervix. Perhaps that’s why I’m so detached, and able to witness impassively my spasmodic movements, my stuck-pig cries. My sick and sickened daughter.

  Deirdre hits the overhead light and banishes one kind of darkness. Natasha sinks down on the chair and stares at the animal who used to be her mother. I can’t focus on her – I can’t focus on anything. I have no more control over my eyes than I do over the rest of my body. Perhaps that’s why I’m achieving such glorious indifference? After all, it’s foolish to take any responsibility for involuntary actions, to weep for sneezes, cry for hiccups, mourn for yawns.

  — I think the best course would be admission. Is it possible to send an ambulance? 256 Bartholomew Road, ground-floor flat. The name on the bell is Bloom.

  Efficient Deirdre comes back to deal with dreck girl:

  — Now, Ms Bloom – Natasha – I know you’re not feeling well yourself –

  — Can you help?

  What a chancer. Deirdre glares at her with a what-kind-of-an-inhumanly-selfish-bitch-are-you expression. Natasha isn’t chastened.

  — Look. I know what you’re thinking, but Mum –

  — Was giving you some of her diamorphine? I’m well aware of that, Natasha, but as a registered nurse I’d be risking my career as well as breaking the law. Now, if you can forget your own sickness for a moment and remember your mother, perhaps it would be a good idea if you called Mrs Elvers? And put some clothes on!

  This last is mine; sensible Deirdre wouldn’t say such a thing – even to the junky daughter of a moribund patient. She must also sense that Natty is well capable of striking out. Like me, she has a hair-trigger temper; an element within her which incandesces. Not that you’d know it to look at her now, gathering herself up, limping off to the spare bedroom, her wasted buttocks looking, from the rear, like the kneecaps of a starving child. And that sweat.

  Mrs Elvers – now she’s doing the mothering I think it behoves me to address her formally – arrives in good time. Why wouldn’t she? She’ll’ve been dozing lightly in their big, white bed. Their bed so big she need hardly sleep with Mr Elvers, merely in his general vicinity. There’s a lot of padding in the Elverses’ world. They sleep swaddled in linen and duck down, while propped against goose down. Charlotte’s skeleton is sheathed within her own foam rubberiness; and when she arises – moving with the spirited jiggle of the plump-yet-fit – it’s to encase it in more softness, before carting it downstairs and buckling it into the foam rubberiness of the Mercedes.

  It takes Charlotte five minutes from Regent’s Park to Kentish Town. She brings the dawn with, and comes in through the double doors to my bedroom with a grey corona behind her. Funny how the light is frightening to me – the dark was better. Her rumpled sister meets her by my bed and they embrace, anxiety cancelling out enmity.

  — Oh, Charlie, it’s terrible.

  Natty gasps in her older sister’s hair, then they awkwardly decouple. Charlie leans down to look at me, and I have the bizarre sensation that I’m an aquarium; that my convex elder is peering in through my toughened glass eyes, to admire my lazy eels of thought.

  — Her eyes are open, but she doesn’t seem conscious. Mum? Mu-urn?

  I’m in here, dear, dressed in a fleshy winding sheet – but still alive. I’m in here, dear, still conscious but suffering no fear. I have no volition any more, you see, there’s nothing I want, nothing I desire. The world is cold, grey Ryvita – and I’m, as ever, on a diet.

  Deirdre comes through and pronounces with equestrian authority:

  — The ambulance has arrived, Mrs Elvers.

  Then all hell breaks loose. Two big men and one man-sized woman are in the room. They’re all wearing green nylon coveralls and stomping on the carpets so hard I can see plumes of dust explode from beneath rubber soles. They talk in very loud, workaday voices.

  — In here, is she love?

  — This is Ms Bloom, yes.

  — Double doors no problem –

  He looks at me as he says this. Looks at me where I lie twitching and spluttering. Looks at me with no more empathy than he would regard an awkward piece of furniture.

  — but the vestibule is tricky, both doors open into it. We can’t get the stretcher through there. Have to be the chair. Ron! Ron! Get the chair out of the van, woodjew?

  No attempt at volume control at all. He might be in a warehouse. My daughters are frozen in mid-flinch. They clearly expect their dying mother to be handled like a piece of gold leaf, blown upon and gently applied to the hospital. The other two manual workers are shifting the furniture about, shoving the sofabed, the Danish modern armchair and the recliner into a cramped ménage. Deirdre is off to one side, feeding her pasta knitting into her working-woman’s holdall. Both our shifts are over. If my body has a mind of its own, then whose mind is this one? For I’m convulsing again and the blue rhapsody of dissolution streams from my mouth. Wawawawaaaawawawawaaawawawawawawawaaaaaaaaaaa . . .’

  They all turn to goggle at the lowing, thrashing bovine in their midst. Then they all redouble their efforts: must remove this farmyard detritus from this domestic context. Get it in the van. Drive it to the abattoir. But Natty is transfixed by her own particular agony. Christ she looks ill in this cold dawn light. I can see the gross pores pitting the edge of her fine jaw. I can apprehend the agony of her jarred pelvis. I feel no compassion,

  The chair is in the front room. It’s highly utilitarian – a kitchen stacking chair with extra foam-rubber padding and many straps. The two ages of woman: in the morning you toss your food about in a high chair; in the evening you’re trussed up and carted off in a low chair. Ron and his mate bring the thing in. They smell of diesel exhaust, bacon sandwiches, sugared tea, smokes. They clomp and stomp, their hands are square. The woman – who’s a bumpie
r version of her colleagues – has finished clearing the path to the door; so, without any ado, they yank off the duvet, yank me upright, get a wispy shawl around me, lift me off the bed, slam me in the chair, strap me in, lift me fore and aft, lug me out.

  In quick succession, as we go, I see the following: the Yaws family silver in its box – atop a mouldering Yaws family Bible – alongside a dust brush for LPs – alongside some carpet alongside some skirting board – underneath a wall– on which hangs a dark oily daub I bought in a flea market – up above a plug socket – over which dangles a crystal, which flashes facets of this space where I have lived into my dulling eyes. This is how you leave your home to die – with a bang and a ‘Wawawawaaaawawawawaaawawawawawawawaaaaaaaaaaa . . .’

  In the ambulance things are getting uglier. There’s an opaque, green-tinted gloom-roof in this vehicle which would turn blood to sap. The green light makes everyone appear deathly. How comforting. Charlie looks so like Yaws, it might actually be Yaws – or his corpse, dug up and propped in this vehicle –lurching through London. Her and her sister’s faces are paralysed with nauseous shock. They can’t put their eyes on me. I must be quite a sight. I can read the disgust, though, when they glance at me, then peer to see if it’s really true: that the lights are all on, and the Old Dear is finally absent.

  But I’m not. I’m hiding under the bed in the spare room of my mind, waiting for the men in the death’s-head uniforms. So foolish to have bothered to avoid the Holocaust, when it was waiting for me all the time –

  — Can’t he drive a little more gently?

  — We’ve got to get there, haven’t we?

  — Why – are you gonna save her life?

  Good. Nice sarcasm, Natty. Nice crappiness. Puts these hirelings in their place – ‘Awoo’wooo’wooo’wooooo-a’wooo’ – until they put on their siren.