How the Dead Live

by Self, Will

  — Is this strictly necessary?

  Asks Charlie, giving her version of the family contempt. But the Ronette, who’s right alongside where I’m pinioned in my low chair, feels no need to reply. She’s fortified by her mission of senselessness and her professional discourtesy. Although fundamentally unchristian, she ecstatically sways as the ambulance takes the chicane over the humpback bridge at the top of St Pancras Way and barrels down towards Somers Town. The girls fatalistically lurch, like davening frummehs accompanying the remains of some great sage of the kabbala. Their faces suggest to me that they really believe things cannot get worse. And this would touch me deeply – were I not already beyond reach.

  We arrive at the loading bay on Grafton Way primed for more industrial medicine. This new wing of University College Hospital– completed on the cusp of the bulbous decade – has a defiantly factory air about it. Whumph! go the front tyres on to the ramp. Crash! go the doors. Smash! goes the chair as they dump me down to the ground. Then dreedle-squeak-dreedle-squeak-dreedle-squeak – they wheel me into the low-ceilinged, yet cavernous, Casualty waiting area. It can’t be later than eight a.m. and the atmosphere reeks with last night’s violence. The air rings with a silent tintinnabulation of many heads clapping. It stinks of smoked cigarettes, their rotten corpses, their dead essences. Who cares about the fucking humans dying of cancer – what about the poor cigarettes being wilfully exterminated by humans? Cruelly sucked up, then ruthlessly stubbed out.

  Whumph! Banged into a wall like a bowling ball coming to rest – but there’s none. Only the two Ronnies lifting my thrashing, groaning carcass on to a trolley, then making off again. Hairy jerks. I’m conscious of the susurrations of a conversation which is being rushed alongside me:

  — This is very sudden.

  — Have you got a bed for her?

  — We’ll see, we’ll see . . . I’ve spoken to Admissions already.

  — But have you got a bed for her?

  — We’ll find one.

  — Where? Here?

  No, not here, please. Not. It’s a long, lowering, warped spine of a tunnel, which plunges beneath Grafton Way, then runs, north-south, parallel to Gower Street, connecting all the various organs of the hospital. It’s simultaneously chilly and food-odorous down here. Quite an achievement. The tunnel is green-tiled, stone-floored, strangely reminiscent of the foot tunnel beneath the Thames at Greenwich. Must be the same vintage. And like the Greenwich foot tunnel, this one feels pressurised, weighed down by the many millions of tons of water overhead. No, not water, the effluvia of disease itself. A rambunctious river of pus and gleet and ichor; a cascade of mucus and bile and gall. An impressively engineered Victorian snotqueduct. The medics here are only lock-keepers; they can check this mighty Orinoco momentarily – but never dam it.

  Dreedle-thwock-dreedle-thwock-dreedle-thwock. The trolley wheels leap and skitter over the joins in the floor. Sensible daughter is keeping pace well in her fashionable sports footwear; with each stride she glances at my face, as if hoping to find new life. Sick, junky daughter is doing less well. She shuffles and snuffles in our wake, all wiped-upon cuffs and bleary features. To be fair to darling Natasha it’s been quite a morning for her – she’s had to face it straight, for one thing. Now she’s sick with heroin withdrawal, and although I’ve never experienced it myself I know with certainty that it’s a lonely, silent hell of vulnerability. Poor Natty – it’s all about boo-hoo you, n’est-ce pas?

  We’ve stopped half-way along the tunnel at its lowest point. The trolley splashes into a brackish puddle of tears. There’s a consultation between the Ronnies, then Dr Steel emerges from a small, glassed-in office at the side of the tunnel. He’s so well pressed – it looks to me as if he’s climbed out of a trouser press where he’s spent the short night. His face is ironed into professional impassivity.

  — Hello, Mrs Elvers.

  — Dr Steel.

  — Natasha.

  —’Lo.

  He’s got the titles correct here. He’s right to address Charlotte sensibly and Natasha indifferently. If any doctor addresses Natty with a modicum of interest, she’ll hit on them for an RX. I’m looking at the globs of Blu-Tack that have been used to gum rosters and schedules to the windows of the office. When the girls were kids they played with Silly Putty-is it that recreational stuff that has evolved into this working material? I’ve stopped groaning and thrashing. The warm breezes smelling of cabbage and boiled fish play upon my slack face. On some seats at the far side of the tunnel a small Asian family – tiny bejewelled lady, tiny suited man, tinier boy in well-ironed shorts – sit in a respectable line, as if decorum were part of their cure. The little boy has a toy metal car, a toy plastic cow and a toy plastic harmonica. As I watch he carefully balances these three objects atop his flattened thighs. He tries car on top of cow on top of harmonica, then harmonica on top of cow on top of car, as if he were investigating the possibility of new Hindu cosmologies.

  —Hmm.

  Steel is reading notes handed to him by Charlotte. Must be Deirdre’s report of the night’s jam session.

  — I’m afraid this is it.

  — It?

  — The cancer appears to have metastasised into the meningeal fluid.

  — Meningeal?

  — Her brain – your mother’s brain. The fluid is in a column inside the spine; once cancer is present in this fluid, it will rapidly move throughout the brain.

  — It’s – it’s like she isn’t there any more. Like she isn’t sentient.

  — Well, who knows . . . but our priority is to keep your mother as comfortable as possible.

  — Until she dies.

  — Yes, until she dies.

  I like this finality, this spade-calling. I like it well. Of course, like so many others, I had hopes of attaining the gift of perpetual old age; still, finality I like as well. But Natty doesn’t – she’d like some histrionics. She feels everyone present would benefit from an improvisation of her love.

  — You’re fucking giving up!

  — Natty!

  — Shut up, Charlie. You – you’re fucking giving up.

  — What’re you talking about?

  — You aren’t even trying to help my mother – to cure my mother. You’ve given up. I thought you lot signed some fucking oath, that meant you had to try. What about a fucking transplant? They do them now – liver transplants. I read about it in the paper, why don’t you do one – or aren’t you a good enough doctor? Good enough with your fucking hands.

  Disregarding the fact that Steel, of course, is not a surgeon, I still think this last shot of Natty’s is a good one. I mean to say, there’s the competence of the doctor and the sexual amour propre of the man, both nicely insinuated. If I were Steel I’d be chastened – but then I’m not, and he isn’t.

  — Listen, Natasha, your mother isn’t the only person who’s dying. Not in the world, not in this hospital – not even in this corridor. Yes, they can do liver transplants. They do them in California. If you can lay your hands on the thirty thousand pounds necessary to pay, and can organise air-ambulance transportation for your mother from here to Los Angeles, then you might – just might – have a chance of saving her life. But not her brain.

  — Jesus! Wha’kinduvafuckin’monster’reyou? Oh – h’h’–hoh! Those ambulance fuckers smashed her all about, an’ now you’re gonna put her on a fucking drip in this fucking tunnel and leave her to die. National-fucking–death-service – that’s what you are.

  — The ambulance crew did their level best to get your mother here as quickly and as smoothly as possible. We will do our best to care for her now she’s here. If, Natasha, you cannot control yourself, I will have to ask you to leave. If you then won’t leave, I’ll have you removed. Now, Mrs Elvers, we have a bed for your mother in the Royal Ear Hospital. It’s not available yet, but she shouldn’t have to wait here for too long.

  Steely Steel. Now that’s telling Natty. I don’t imagine many men still capable of m
aintaining an erection would’ve dared to tick her off that severely, but then Natty’s junky allure is totally lost on him. He looks upon her – quite rightly – as another of the diseased. And she self-pityingly leaks, dabs black cuff to bruised eye, shuffles off to one side, into the shadows of a temporary oblivion.

  Chapter Six

  We’re rolling again. Dreedle-thwock-dreedle-thwock-dreedle-thwock-crash! That was a corner. The Rons have long gone, and in their place there’s an authentic porter; a neanderthal shvartzer, whose brows beetle all over the place as we squeak forward. Charlotte marches in step with him, looking down at me now as if I were a vast dog turd which has to be removed. The Royal Ear . . . mmm. How suitable, when it’s my hearing that looks like being the last thing to go. My ears . . . mmm. So curiously hand-moulded –like all the rest of the human clay. My ears – the last part of me that will feel the claw of cancer.

  The trolley has assistance – or are they assistants? Anyway, along either side, like oars thrust through the gunwales of a galley, are many many legs. Fat legs, thin legs, hairy legs, smooth legs, waxen legs, dusky legs. They have nothing in common with one another save for being dead. Dead legs. Dead legs streaked with the miasma of gangrene, or swollen with purulence, or shattered by impact. They’re severed and stuck along the trolley’s sides, so they may bend and push, walking with me to eternity.

  They are – I realise this joyfully – the leftover limbs of amputees. This hospital is famous for its amputations – the first ones ever conducted using ether. I read it in a helpful historical handbook before I was past caring. These must be the ghostly legs themselves; left to hop for ever along the striplit cloisters of this mundane monastery.

  The Royal Ear Hospital – it has a ring to it. I can imagine one periwigged courtier saying to another, ‘I have the Royal Ear.’ And the other replying, ‘But I understand it’s in the hospital.’ Where do they keep the Royal Ear, I wonder? I think of it as very large – as big as a dinner tray – and very red, angrily red. They probably keep it in an incubator in the subbasement of the hospital, where it’s tended by a succession of pasty-faced flunkeys, who rub saline solutions containing royal jelly into its swollen lobes. De temps en temps a minister will arrive from the Palace to impart matters of state to the Ear. He’ll sit on a folding chair and mutter into the fleshy toilet bowl. Naturally, the Ear will be unable to respond, so in due course the Minister will repair to the Royal Mouth Hospital, where he’ll learn the royal edict.

  They’re removing the imperial dentures from my royal mouth. O well-formed acrylic, fare ye well! You never required additional grip or adhesive. I bathed you in Steradent so you never rotted or stank. I handled you with the utmost gentility so you never chipped or broke. You cleaved unto me and I cleaved unto you – we were as one, snugly snogging each other for a quarter of a century. You two plates and I – we were the true and loving trinity.

  — Blood pressure forty over seventy.

  — Have you brought a bag for her?

  — Sister, could you find me a seven-gauge one of these?

  — Would you take five cc and take it to Bloods?

  — I’ll need saline, sucrose and diamorphine.

  Ssshk-ssshk-ssshk-shk,

  They’ve shucked the nylon curtains and screened me from the incurious eyes of my fellow mothers. We all know what’s in store for us, so why bother to act in this coy fashion? Still, what can you expect from a medical staff who have the bodies of humans and the heads of pussy cats? It’s true that their paws are surprisingly deft when it comes to putting in catheters, arranging feed lines and filling in charts. But I can’t help suspecting that their chimerical nature has contributed to their failure to treat me properly. To save at least one of my nine lives.

  Perhaps I should’ve examined my own breasts a little more thoroughly. Possibly I should’ve attended screenings more regularly. But you know what? I couldn’t fucking find one of my teats amid all that tawny chest fur –let alone six. By the time they gave me a CAT scan it was already too late. The radiation only singed my fur and burned me. Oh! How vile it is – the feel of exposed feline skin. It made me puke. I lost the wild exquisite pain of being hungry. Not even Whiskas appealed to me. They gave me tamoxifen. Then more tamoxifen. Then more. My fur fell out in clumps – I went right off . . . everything. Now they’ve got me here, in the cattery, morbidly pregnant. Full of the kitties of death. And here’s kind Dr Bowen annotating a clipboard with a Bic Cristal as she stands at the foot of my basket.

  There are moggies in here with deadlier enteritises than mine. Moggies who’ve been out on the tiles. Moggies who now lie emaciated, blind, forsaken. Mewling pitifully. Herpes was a trailer for Aids – that much we now understand. ‘Coming Soon to a Body Athwart Yours!’ was how the titles read, spelt out in precise, warty eruptions. Of course, you had to get right down on the relevant genitals to see it – not something I was in a position to do. The appetite for oral sex is, in my experience, entirely vitiated by an inability to touch your own toes. Even when seated. Oral sex – yummy. That’s what it made me to Yaws – yummy. Couldn’t keep his eyes off my mouth. He’d never been blown before me, they didn’t do that kind of thing in Barchester. If you were lucky the Dean of Chapter’s wife would let you touch her stays, or jack off into her under-petticoat. Wow! Those were the days.

  I only mention it because I’ve still the hunger for sex – still, with Death licking me out, nuzzling me with its bony head. And while I concede that it’s peculiar, I have an awful kind of jealousy towards the Aids patients in here. They had more sex and more unsuitable sex. I had more cigarettes and more liquor.

  It was Natasha who clued me in to all this – told me who had what. Natasha, whose attendances at my radiotherapy sessions were an amusing sideshow. In among the prematurely bald boys and scoop-breasted women, Natty was at once exotic and right at home. She knew the medical ghetto well enough – she’d trailed her own trailer to James Pringle House for treatment; and in the casualty wards and drug-dependency units she’d watched the skinny junkies getting far far skinnier. Can her pallor be the result of radiation? thought all who saw her slumped against me, the two of us purring feline kitty talk to each other.

  ‘Will it be the dykey one today, Mumu?’

  ‘I shouldn’t be at all surprised. Mindjew, I always feel better when it’s the lesbian radiographer, Natty.’

  ‘Why’s that, Mumu?’

  ‘Well, it strikes me that she may be that much better at handling boobs – given that she enjoys it.’

  ‘S’pose so.’

  She’d come with me, in amid the clanking equipment, which was meant to smoke out the smoking-related disease. It banged and whined – we both cowered. At the time there was no sensation, although I always thought I could smell the cells singe. I daresay anything nuclear looks the same – power stations, weapons systems, whatever. All these inhuman forces, these isotopes of Vishnu, being flung out by lesbians in tightly buttoned nylon coats, snapping heavy switches at Bakelite consoles. Singeing us to no avail.

  Then we’d head back out into Grafton Way, turn the corner into Tottenham Court Road. It was OK to feel like death with my youngest, who, after all, had been suiciding for ten years already. We’d drag our heels around Heal’s, then go for coffee, then back to the flat. She’d slide off to score. I wouldn’t remark on it. It was a deal between us: don’t mention death – I won’t mention smack. Even-steven. I grew hollow-cheeked, my eyes bruised, my hair thinned, my breast burned. Natasha paced me in my race to the grave.

  It wasn’t always thus – so I was genuinely glad of her company. She may’ve been untrustworthy, unreliable, selfish, sluttish and even – and to say this of one’s own, one must really have chewed the cud of irony until it’s bitter as wormwood – pretentious. But then that was far better than boring, which is what all the other women in my life – all the other ‘friends’ – had been for years. All the Susies and Emmas rationalising their loneliness, their very raw lack of the manly tu
mour that surgical lawyers had so efficiently excised, by an appeal to sociology, or demography, or even – laughably fucking biology! Nope, better my junky own.

  They meant nothing to me – she did. Mrs Elvers has gone now – but Natty remains. And they’ve taken my false teeth out of my fake face – I must look like death warmed over. A nurse enters the shucked-in space pushing a bag on a stand. She uncorks the catheter stopper on the back of my hand and plugs me into the drip. I feel more affinity to it than to her. She’s tiny – all her work is up above her. So she ups and stretches, and the wide elastic belt cinches her tiny waist tighter. Her pinafore is fine-striped, she’s blonde, her calves heart-shaped, her elbows dimpled. Natty – that crow – stares at her with avidity, as if she would eat the girly nursling. Oh yes, they say you are what you eat, my daughter – but then you hardly eat at all.

  Shucked in here, in this nylon shoebox, and shucked in here behind grating lids. Shucked-in eye, walled-up eye. I am obscured by my own tatty beliefs – entertaining any company with very much banked fires. Eyes that rock to rest at the bottom of either socket, or lunge at a glance. Outside in the mid-morning Mrs Elvers will be calling her husband Richard on a mobile telephone which looks like a black plastic tibia. Inside thirty-odd of his outlets, thirty bored sales assistants are wrapping up some wrapping paper, then ringing up the sale. It’s not too early to leave after all.

  But I can still summon up the past – even now. Even now as the cancer, this inky antagonist, corners my very sentience and readies its suckered tentacles. Let’s face it, anything that has suckers sucks. Yeah, I can summon up the past. Howdy-doody past! Yo Main Street USA! I gwyne to talk with yo’ hairball. I gwyne to drop yo’ on de floor an’ see how yo’ roll. Nope. The past is too dense, too digested to act as an organ of prophecy. If I attempt to feel it, its falseness is overwhelming. It’s not of me – I was of it. I glibly made a profound mistake. I thought I was getting wisdom – it was getting me. They were staying away in droves, and I’ll be droving away in stays, cinched by the knowledge that the cap of a Biro is all I leave behind me. A flimsy plastic nose cone crewed by twenty thousand metres of potential expression; a long line of sense, as yet unformed, unbecome. The registrar will probably pull one off to warrant I’m dead.