How the Dead Live

by Self, Will

  ‘Y’not in godzone yet, girl – yeh-hey?’ It’s a middle-aged black man wearing a white Stetson. He parts the curtains, thrusts his head inside – the hat so crammed down on his dusty tumbleweed of hair that it flares in his mirrored shades and says, ‘Y’not in godzone yet, girl – yeh-hey?’ Then goes. Why doesn’t my daughter register the thrust of this masculine head? Oh, I see, although it’s not cute the way she chews her cuticles. Did the black man wave a boomerang at me? Could he be an Aboriginal? He’s back. ‘Not long now, Lily, see, I’m tellin’ you. Yer djang unravellin’ now, see? Gonna curl up new time. Curl roun’ her.’ It is a boomerang and he points it at the nail-biter. ‘Mek a new rainbow . . .’ His accent is a peculiar mishmash of cheek-clicks, tongue-slaps on palate and wide open Australian vowels. What the fuck is he on about? Who the fuck let him on to the ward? Wait ‘til the Royal Ear hears about this! Christ! No fucking security in these places; any psycho who pleases could run in and molest me. Steal me, even. Snatch Mummy from her baby. Ha-ha. Aha-ha-ha-

  ‘Hhhraarrghhhresheo’ Hyayyayrhg-h’-h’h’hergh’!’

  — Sister! Sister!

  Natty’s up off her chair and out of the booth. She’ll scream for any sister but her own – like me. And one’s to hand, lurking, an older, flushed brunette. Well groomed. How the fuck can she be bothered?

  — Right. What’s the problem here?

  ‘Hhhraarrghhhresheo’ Hyayyayrhg-h’- h’h’hergh’!’

  She leans down and shines a flashlight in through my eyes, not to see if I’m inside, but merely to check the reflex action of my pupils. It’s uncannily like being a boiler and having someone lean over to check your pilot light. She straightens, stretches, adjusts the translucent spigots on the dangling bags. I become equally transparent, like a child’s educational model of the human body. Like a Biro. I can see my capillary action, the veins and arteries slurping down the sedatives, siphoning up the opiates. There’s no pain any more. No discomfort. I thought you might like to know that. I thought . . . you . . . would . . . keep . . . shtoom. Mum is the word.

  No pain, because no me. No me? No – you. The pain was about being other – I guess. The pain was about being me. The pain was about being me remembering so much trivia and you – petty pain – being a big part of it. Petty pain, my heavy-petting date at the fucking prom. Pain took time – time was painful. Could it be that . . . time . . . and pain . . . were one . . . and the same? Pain was a pebble tossed into the widening and senseless torrent of trivial innovation, which I can feel myself breathlessly breasting – or is it breastlessly breathing? – smacked in an eye by a digital watch, hit in the shoulder by a juicer. I’ll stop struggling soon and float downstream. Remember those seventies gadgets that were meant to hoard all the labour of chopping onions? Save it to spend on a leisurely, unweepy old age. A zigzag blade stuck inside a plastic cylinder, then thrust up and down with a spring-loaded plunger. The results were never as good as you hoped for. It was also a fucking pest to clean.

  I’ve been chopped up by a zigzag blade, and oblique chunks of messy old me lie about the Royal Ear. My body reclines here on a subsidised bed, yet whatever impoverished sensations pertain to it reside over there, outside the curtains. As for feelings – who needs them when there’s no one left to feel? They were useless anyway, emotions – only the dead skin of our insensitivity; which we rubbed away, each from the other, until it was all dusty down below. Who has the right attachment to vacuum up these grated calluses? Who wants it? Consciousness of what? Going where? With whom? And why, why, why, Mummy? After all these years of being assured of my own loneliness, at last I know what’s it’s like to be by myself.

  I was by myself fifteen years ago, in the flatlands of East Anglia.

  No, I am by myself, in Aldeburgh, where the sky is exactly the same washed-out grey as the candlewick spread, on the lumpy bed, at the Ship Inn in Dunwich, where I spent last night. More of a pub than a B & B; the landlord looked very much the part – mustachios, waistcoat, key fob – rushing between the stone-flagged bar and the kitchens to the rear. He was seemingly doing everything on the premises at once: tending the bar, cooking the food, serving it, showing fat guests – actually there was only me – to our lumpy beds.

  This won’t do. This is a recollection within a memory – and this won’t do. The sky over Aldeburgh is the same washed-out grey as the shuck-shuck plastic curtains, and like them it’s being shucked off to reveal Steel and Bowen and the sister and the edible girly. The giant medics are set against an inconceivably lofty, cavernous universe of a hospital ward. A rough terrain of fire-resistant tiles floats in the middle distance like flat earths. The staff foregather and bear down on me. Hard. Better get away from here – get back.

  She began to take exercise far too late, embarking on tiny cycling tours to music festivals, or flower shows, or doing the rounds of churches – there were so many spires in her uninspiring adopted home. Three kids, one episiotomy, two continents, many phobias, lots of depressions. Old fat lady’s underwear. It was all a curse upon cycling, which she’d taken up for what reason? Believe it or not, even in the bulbous seventies there were still bulbous, middle-aged women such as she, who thought that the principle of cycling meant something. They cycled and they ate in health-food restaurants like Cranks or Ceres, their cussedness aimed at appeasing the Earth Goddess herself. They almost fucking overdosed on grated carrot; while sipping fucking prune juice. They invented being environmentally-conscious, with their vegetable-buying co-operatives which gave them an excuse to put gumboots on in town.

  Poor Lily. Poor, infinitely pathetic, fat, old, blowsy Lily; a jolie laide, who should’ve been laid out years before. It was sad to witness her, in her final fifteen years, assiduously picking up litter – tin cans, wrapping paper, cigarette packets, whatever – and secreting it about her person. Tucking it inside her coat pockets, or even her handbag, then carrying it back with her, one corny footstep after another, until she reached whichever place it was she was currently calling home and lodged it with more of its own kind. No wonder she always called her kids’ attention to bag ladies – she was one, albeit of a bourgeois stripe. But unlike her, at least the litter got to be with its own, then more of its own, then more. Each stage of the litter’s journey involved rooming with more rubbish; until the final journey, down the Thames, in the big steel barge, to Trashy Yar.

  In Aldeburgh, having propped up her Raleigh Tourer, Lily stands by the Moot Hall observing an eyebrowless man who’s pottering in his front garden, fussing at some ferns with secateurs. Peculiar, she thinks, how the absence of the one usually unnoticed feature renders this man so sinister, so maimed, so odd. Funny also – and here she shifts from one corny foot to the other, feeling newly-acquired blisters, pedal-pushed into painfulness – that I bother to observe this. I should never have spent all of this time observing people they mean nothing to me. How many more of these stakeouts have I left to endure? Five a day? Ten when taking little cycling trips? How many more years before I fulfil my own prophecy and the crabs crawl out of the dark sea and begin to clip away at my ferny flesh with their secateur claws? Ten, maybe – in which case I’ll die in 1984. Or perhaps fifteen? Who knows. No woman may know the hour of her death, nor stare at the sun. Not in Aldeburgh. Not during this June, which is unseasonably grey and blowy. There may be rain this afternoon. She’s glad she brought woollen underwear. Big woolly pants.

  Lily goes round the corner to the little box office for the Festival, which is opposite an equally dinky cinema. On the way she deposits a bit of trash in a bin – a sweet-wrapper she’s been carrying for at least two days. Paper ballast – no wonder she’s so unstable. She likes Aldeburgh and its environs, does Lily. It’s the England she came here for, a country of gabled houses, genteel old ladies, secateurs, gently undulating countryside, a good social-security and health service. It’s Holland – the England she came here for. Lily buys herself a ticket for the concert that afternoon. Peter Pears singing Schumann’s Liederkre
is, accompanied by Murray Perahia on the piano. She’s inordinately pleased to have secured a ticket; this has to be one of the most popular events of this year’s Festival. ‘I’ll buy a packed lunch,’ she thinks, ‘then cycle up towards Snape along the lanes. Find somewhere quiet and picnic. Settle down with my book.’

  She’s reading a book about a Suffolk village. It’s a painstaking piece of social history, lovingly worked up by the author from hundreds of stilted interviews with senescent peasants. She likes to think of herself as in some way partaking of this panoply of rootedness, this weighty garb of staying put, but knows it isn’t so. She shops in the Co-op, wondering if she’d be more at home hobbling after a chicken in a shtetl; and wonders as well about her girls – the younger is on a trendy kids’ camping holiday, the elder off skiing. She tests how tight are the ties that bind her to them. They’re slack. They’re nearly grown. Her job is over. She could in all reasonableness make good now all those screeched threats to ‘hand in my motherhood badge’.

  Neither of them was anywhere near the Flixborough explosion, or the Red Lion Square riot either – another of Lily’s concert venues. There are so many ways to die – burnt to a sludge by overreacting chemicals or bludgeoned by a law-ordering stick – can it matter which one will claim you? Raisins – with the bountiful Mediterranean lovely on the box – 5p. An orange – 3p. Crispbread – 23p. Six segments of cream cheese – 18p. A tin of Top Deck lager and lime – 10p. Total = 59p. Good going. There might be enough cash left for a minicab on from Snape to Saxmundham, forestalling the late-afternoon effort to insert underwear where it shouldn’t be. Shove it up Lily, as she pushes herself in the direction of the train station. Heading home to Crooked Usage. Total =59p.

  ‘Was there anything else?’ It’s a near-eyebrowless girl at the cash register. Can it be a locally inbred characteristic? Plucking hell. Gross, of course, both the register and her.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Was there anything else, or is that all you’ll be having?’ She realises that the girl wouldn’t have spoken at such length were it not for Lily’s American accent.

  She must assume I’m a tourist. Christ! That chocolate looks good. One a day. One chunk of nougat and toffee and chocolate. Mmm. I mustn’t. This trip means slender, means healthy, means sexy. Means a prelude to all the alfresco lovemaking I haven’t done since a class ring gashed my ass and blood flowed under the bleachers. ‘And a Mars bar.’ Ferchrissakes – I’ve already eaten it with my eyes.

  Outside she finds her cycle and stashes the picnic in the panniers, carefully tucking each item in amongst her squished socks and nightie and cagoule. It’s still cloudy, but there’s no sign of rain. She looks to see if the eyebrowless man is still there, if he’s now observing her, and noting her sportily efficient packing. But he’s gone and in his place is a pear-shaped woman in her sixties with her ivory hair in a chemical fix. ‘Chuck a match at her,’ Lily sardonically, internally observes, ‘and she’d be a mini-Flixborough.’

  Yup, not a lot to Aldeburgh, save for a few substantial houses on a low eminence. Yet even this rise is enough to wind Lily as she pedals her way up. Foot 1: corn-awareness first, then bunion-awareness, then a third, sharper wave of blistering unease – it can only get worse, because here comes Foot 2: and the same again. In between each downward spiral of effort there are other, inveterate sensations – rasp of lungs, pain in rib cage, stricture of underwear, stab in belly. Such is the go-round of discomfort as her fat legs revolve that Lily is entirely absorbed in it, adding her own mantra of self-hatred to each stab in the direction of self-improvement. ‘Uneasy and faulty, ignorant and bumbling, neither generous nor giving . . .’ Absorbed to a point where she cannot notice giant hands peeling away the greyness overhead. Absorbed to a point where she cannot hear the voices of the future sonic-booming over the flatlands. It’s been quite a morning.

  — Mrs Elvers?

  — Yes.

  — We’re going to move your mother to a small room at the far end of the ward. There’ll be more privacy there.

  — Thank you. Sister?

  — Yes?

  — I know . . . I know you can’t – don’t –like to say, but–

  — It’s not long now.

  — Not long now.

  To lunch. Lily stops to consult her map. Not that she knows how to read it that well– all she wants to do is confirm the distance as superable. Map-reading was a Yaws thing. He used to read maps while crapping in the lavatory at Crooked Usage. A lavatory that was never locked – because it never had a lock. Not that this was evidence of progressiveness on either of their parts – simply more don’t-do-it-yourself inertia. Never locked – so that from time to time the women of the house would walk in on the old bull and find him, peering at tiny countryside, while sitting over his own dung.

  The lane is a tedious straight line, mercifully flat, which runs alongside a coniferous plantation. Should she crawl in there and try and cuddle down among the spiky trees? It hardly appeals. To the left of the road there is at first a golf course – which reminds her of Yaws’s recent demise – and then fields full of either flowering potatoes or crap ping cattle. Nowhere in this worked-over landscape to rest and read about the dignity of labour. How ironic. The Mars bar gibes at her hip as she pedals. The little log of chocolate feels absurdly bulky. ‘Must be my conscience.’ Lily has promised herself not to eat chocolate until the evening – and then only one item. She has five days away on this cycling trip and she wants to get home, climb on the scales and see firm evidence of the ounces and pounds jettisoned along the Suffolk lanes.

  dreedle-thwock-dreedle-thwock-dreedle-thwock

  Oh the fucking effort of it all– why can’t effort be effortless? The effort of it, and the still worse effort of not thinking about chocolate. Lovely runny, brown, amorous chocolate. Chocolate penetrating your belly with its warm, tingling sweetness. ‘I can smell it,’ she thinks, her nostrils flaring for air, ‘I can smell the Mars bar.’ At the very least she should wait until she’s smeared cream cheese on Ryvita, picked the peel off her orange, slurped her shandy, but Lily isn’t sure she’s able. How can such pathetic little instances of self-control ever amount to anything? Would it even make it into the local paper? MIDDLE-AGED WOMAN ON CYCLING TOUR DENIES HERSELF MARS BAR FOR FOUR HOURS. No. Not even in East Anglia, in the bulbous seventies, is there such little news.

  She finds the traffic scary as it ploughs a windy tunnel past her labouring flanks. With a little extra energy this ride would go that much faster. It’s nearly one already. She left Dunwich at eight-thirty; surely the intervening hours must have chomped away some of her hips? She wishes. She yearns. Most middle-aged women, it occurs to her, must consider taking up cycling once they’ve reached the menopause – for obvious reasons. Why are there always dead leaves in the roadway regardless of the season? When things die they should rot. Can I make it to Snape at all? Why bother? To see some pansy sing Nazi love songs? I think not. Still the forestry plantation to one side, the fields full of cow poo to the other. Oh fuck it! I must stop! I must have chocolate!

  And so she does – the nudnik. Belly-kvetched into being stationary. As she brakes, slows, and her Daks-sneakered undercarriage comes down to absorb the impact, another motorised peasant-wagon peals past. Shaken, she miscalculates, barks shin on pedal and doesn’t so much collapse as retract into herself – an uncomfortable huddle of steel, rubber, nylon, wool and fat. Tears before snack time. Lily hauls the bike with its stupidly bulky panniers off the road and into a gateway leading to the coniferous wood. She claws her comestibles out and, cradling them like nutritious babies in her woolly arms, she clumsily negotiates the five-barred gate. She can feel a trickle of blood lazily snaking beneath her slacks, down her shin, into her sock. Something to pick at later.

  By a tree upon which a sibilantly bloodthirsty notice ‘ TRESSPASSERS WILL BE SHOT’ – has been nailed, she makes camp, dumping her mishmash, claiming her steak. And when she eases herself down to the damp groun
d of twig and leaf mould, she smells the moribundity of the wood rather than its life force. And she cries, ‘Do I belong here?’ Questioning the pine-stale air. And the answer comes back not in an echo – but in a sodden silence: no, not here. Not anywhere. She fumbles the Mars bar out from her pocket and tears the wrapping off within the compass of the same movement, so that she can bring it directly to her misshapen mouth. Mmm . . . salty. Her upper plate sucks apart from her gum as she works the chewy goo around, feeling the loving trickle down her loveless and unloved throat. ‘I might as well die here,’ she ruminates, vilely aware of the fact that nothing can ever change, ‘and now.’

  Her wish is granted. A curtain of black rain is drawn through the darkling wood. The stuttering burr of a tractor in a far-off field is suddenly stilled, as are all the lowings, tweetings and bucolic burblings. Chill invests everything from within. It’s a total eclipse of reality itself, because a well-formed arm a hundred feet long tears through the curtain of rain and shucks it to one side. Four giants loom there, three hundred feet high. A giant in blue, a giant in white, a giant in red. And a scrawny giant in black.

  ‘Push!’ That’s how they adjured you. ‘Push!’ And they’re doing it now. Doing it again. Pushing me up the corridor. Pushing me in here. Pushing in syringes. Being generally pushy. I wonder if this time I’ll shit and give birth simultaneously? With Natasha it was a welter of shit and blood and fluid. Then they stitched me up like a fucking turkey. So embarrassing – they made me feel so embarrassed. Actually, both times I gave birth here, there was this oh-so-English attitude of prurience combined with prudery, then horribly diluted until it was a thin gruel of disapproval. It was as bad in the States in the late forties when I had Dave Junior. I can only hope it’s finally changed now; that if fucking feminism has won us anything at all, it’s a right to our dignity in labour and our joy in birth. No matter how difficult it is. How shitty.