How the Dead Live

by Self, Will

  ‘Yairs.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yeh, thass right, Lily-girl. You ain’t got no physical body no more now, kiddo, jus’ this like subtle one, yeh-hey? This subtle one. It can’t reflect light. It can’t feel pain or pleasure. It don’t sleep or smell. It don’t need tucker. It don’t need grog. It don’t need this one.’ He makes a schoolboy’s obscene gesture with an eye and a hook of fingers. ‘It don’t need no-thing.’

  I think for a moment before coming back at him. ‘But no pain, right?’

  ‘Thass it, girl – no pain. Not for now, leastways.’

  So, all have won – and all shall have prizes. My prize being the smashed crab, its pincers dislocated and laid alongside the white and brown mush of its flesh. No pain. It looks like an excellent deal to me. It feels like a great deal of numbness, like a whole body-shot of super-Novocaine, and an epidural for all eternity. I love it.

  The cab pivots through ninety degrees under the bland graticule of the Euston Tower and glides on to the Euston Road, where we’re confronted by the unwelcoming Wellcome Institute. How many fucking times have I laboured along here on the way to work. A fat, old, bourgeois bag lady, weighted down by a Barnes & Noble book bag full of second-hand culture and wicked, carbohydrate snacks. The gritty city air gusting up my dress, blowing shrapnel in my eyes. My dentures clenched with the artificiality of my own efforts.

  Dentures? Dreaming of teeth. Dreaming of teeth again. I have my own teeth back – that much I can feel. My own filled, bridged and promiscuously uneven choppers. Dunce-prize cuspids – hardly worth dying for. They should never have taken them out in the first place, but hell, they used to do that before they put fluoride in the water. They’d rip your fangs out without so much as a by-your–leave. Parents used to give their halitosis-haloed kids fucking dentures for their twenty-first birthday. The keys to the door leading away from pyorrhea. Jews especially – as if we were anticipating an evil demand for rotten enamel to build another foul shower-surround. So, then I had no teeth and a big appetite. Now I have teeth and no requirement for them. Quelle blague.

  ‘What y’thinkin’ ‘bout, girl?’ Phar Lap swivels to show me his yellow eyeballs, his yellow teeth. Aboriginals – unlike African blacks – are entirely matt, there’s nothing oleaginous about their skin at all. No sallowness either. Just matt black. They’re definitely the ethnic minority the eighties have been crying out for.

  ‘You.’

  ‘What ‘bout me, hey?’

  ‘What’re you for?’

  ‘Like I say, Lily. Like I tell you back in that place – I’m yer death “guide, girl.’

  ‘So – guide me. Where the hell are we going?’

  ‘Do you know where you’re going to?/ Do you like the things that life is show-ing yoooooo? / Do you know!’ This is from the lithopedion, who perches on the very edge of the back seat, actually managing to swing its calcified little legs. I shall have to have a serious word with it about this behaviour when we arrive.

  ‘Like I say, girl– we’re goin’ to Dulston; it’s a ‘burb like any other, yeh-hey?’

  ‘And where is Dulston?’ The minicab has nosed on to Pentonville Road. ‘I mean, we appear to be heading in the direction of Dalston.’

  ‘Yairs, well. It’s right alongside of it, y’know. It’s like a skinny district, yeh? One minute yer on the Kingsland Road, the next yer turnin’ into Dalston Lane. If yer not quick you can miss Dulston.’

  ‘So, it’s between Islington to the west and Dalston to the east?’

  ‘Thass right.’

  ‘And what’s to the south?’

  ‘Dalston again.’

  ‘And the north?’

  ‘Stoke Newington.’

  ‘That doesn’t make any sense. There isn’t anything between these parts of London. Not unless Dulston is a made-up estate agents’ kind of place.’

  ‘Could be that. Could be y’don’t know London quite as well as you think.’

  ‘I’m sorry – and how fucking well d’jew know it, then?’

  Phar Lap waits a while before answering. Long enough for us to turn into Barnsbury Road and pass the Metropolitan Cab Office. Long enough for me to conclude that this isn’t the way I’d go to Dalston if I were driving. I’d head north and go over the Archway – detouring via Jack Harmsworth’s comfy, musty flat, at the top of the priests’ house off Hornsey Lane. He’d still be sleeping off last night’s gin when I tiptoed in. I’d have to prise the bottle from his blue hands. Still, I know he’d be glad to see me and we could have a cup of coffee together. Or I’d head south from here, cut through Covent Garden and pass by Emma’s chichi flat off Bow Street. I’ve never been by her place this early – I bet she sleeps clutching one of those teddies she collects, like a diminutive furry lover.

  What am I thinking of? Neither of these routes to Dalstonor Dulston – is anything like direct. Anyway, I haven’t even driven the last couple of years. I gave the old runabout to Natasha, who, predictably, ran it into the ground. Also, I never call unexpectedly on these people. Not at this hour – not ever. It isn’t, as the prissy English would say, the done thing.

  ‘I know London well enough. Y’know, Lily, I’m a traditional feller, yeh-hey? I still sing the songs. So, when I came here for the bicentennial, yeh?’

  ‘The Australian bicentennial?’

  ‘Yairs. Mebbe. Anyway, when I came here for the bicentennial – on account of someone needing to point out what wholesale fuckin’ gammin it was – I planted my kayan right down on the carpet, in the terminal building at Heathrow, gave me bullroarer a swing, an’ dropped dead, hey? Dropped fuckin’ dead. Heart attack.’

  ‘So that was when?’

  ‘January, thereabouts.’

  ‘January? You’ve only been in London since January?’

  ‘Thass right.’

  ‘And you presume to tell me the way around town?’

  ‘Like I say, Lily, I’m a bit of a traditional feller. So I had to find out what the city songs were, y’know – ‘

  ‘So how can you tell me you’re lo-one-ly, and say for you that the sun don’t shine? / Let me take you by the hand and lead you through the streets of London . . .’ the lithopedion croons, but we pay it no mind.

  ‘Had to go walkabout the place. Find out what makes it tick, yeh-hey?’

  ‘Are you dead?’ I lean forward and ask the Cypriot cabbie. I was going to tell him where to turn off the Liverpool Road, but I suspect my directions are of little use to him either.

  ‘Me – four years,’ the man replies, smiting his breast with a closed fist, as if proud of an achievement. ‘And the name’s Costas – if youse don’t mind.’

  ‘You must . . . You must . . .’ – I can’t believe I’m saying anything quite this trite, but still it trickles out – ‘. . . miss them a lot?’ In among the empty-eyed halo-heads on the dash are snapshots of curly-haired kiddies smiling out of lace, taffeta and other ruffs.

  ‘Not rrrreally,’ he rolls out a devilish r, ‘I see more of them now I’m dead than I did when I was alive.’

  ‘And . . . and they can see you?’

  ‘No-no – I’m not about to do this to them – they’re little childrens. I wouldn’t want to scare them none. Now – theirs mothers, that’s not same thing.’

  I want to pursue this subject a little more but Costas has to execute a tricky manoeuvre which I myself know only too well: the slide down the side of the station, the whip round Highbury Corner and on to St Paul’s Road. By the time we’re halted again at the junction of Essex Road I haven’t exactly lost interest, but I’ve collapsed into a state which – faute de mieux – I can only call a colourless stupidity of indifference. I’ve always thought London was this, anyway – a colourless stupidity of indifference. Even in this lemon dawn of late spring, with the sunlight turning everything Janus-faced with darkness and light, there’s still no relief. The city is an encrustation upon a scab, cigarette ash flicked on to cigar ash. Terrace upon terrace of knock-kneed, terminall
y warped Victorian townhouses, with shitty council blocks sticking them apart. The shopping parades aren’t festive enough to warrant the moniker, they’re parodies of commerce, every third window boarded up and plastered with flyposters for pop and politics. Very occasionally a triangle, or a quadrangle, or a trapezoid of closed-off space insinuates itself between the brick bluffs, the dirty turf marked out for the lost game of life, with no-goal posts in its pissy corners.

  Five a.m., and the city is rolling over in its clay riverbed and feeling the gravel of sweaty repose. Five a.m., and the human collectivity is rubbing the gunge of urbanity from its filmy eyes, farting the gas of lack-of-utility, and yawning asthmatically as it struggles to inhale another day. Planeloads of sleepy dust are touching down at Heathrow. Terminal morning. Is it my imagination, or is this road even more saggy and daggy than usual? True, it’s a journey I’ve only ever done for workaday purposes, or to undertake merciless errands. Going to squats to pick up my junky daughter, prise her loose from the carpets of ‘friends’. Or to discharge her from dying in hospitals, when she’s anaesthetised herself against the intolerable pain of her bourgeois affluence.

  Even so, I know the Balls Pond Road – who doesn’t? And this isn’t it. This is some further division of the polarised city-with its poor to the east, its rich to the west. The terraces are more warped – totally cockeyed, with their front steps collapsing, their roof tiles flaking like hard scalp. The little council estates seem even littler, their red-bricked walkways but pillbox slits from which the inhabitants might indifferently regard – should they even be able to – the colourless stupidity of the city all around. And the shops – is it my imagination, or are they more run-down than ever, offering fewer goods, with hardly any cards taped in their filmy windows, offering utterly useless services?

  Phar Lap Jones sits with sharp knees against the dashboard, sharp shoulders against the seat, the crown of his white Stetson floating along the black crown of the road. He turns from time to time, adjusts his sunglasses, peers at me with world-weary amity. Costas drives with surprising verve for a man who’s been dead since the early eighties, swerving the car this way and that, grabbing at the shift and banging his corpulence forward on to the pedals, then back on to the knobbly seat. The bundle of votive knick-knacks dangling from the rear-view mirror jangles. ‘How can he drive,’ I interrogate Phar Lap, ‘when he’s immaterial– or isn’t his body as subtle as mine?’

  ‘Yeh-hey. Well, yer gettin’ curious, girl – an’ y’know, more’ll be revealed. You didn’t learn life in one day – death won’t be any different.’

  Not only is Costas driving with considerable ferocity, but there are other vehicles doing just the same – making a getaway into the Islington panhandle. Apart from the occasional doodling milk-float, or heavy lorry stomping through, these dawn racers have the roads to themselves. From what I can see they’re all driven by Costas’s brethren, and they all have nodding Cerberuses on their back shelves, and they all carry recently expired passengers. Fords full of infarctions, Toyota-loads of tachycardia, Vauxhalls freighted with valvulitis. I guess they aren’t playing chicken with one another – because they’ve nothing to be afraid of. A Datsun of such raddled antiquity that its bodywork is entirely oxidised orange cuts in front of us by inches as we slow for a light. But Costas, instead of beeping or berating, merely laughs, ‘There’s Spiro – he’s frisky this morning!’ Then pulls alongside. The Datsun also has bead covers on its seats and another Greek at the wheel. In the back sits a whey-faced man who clutches the driver’s headrest. He’s agonised, on shpilkes.

  ‘You see that, girl?’ says Phar Lap. ‘Another one of the newly dead.’

  ‘I gathered that, but where’re they going?’

  ‘Hey-yeh, girl– y’know there’s only one destination in the final taxi – ‘

  ‘Dulston?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And . . . and this is it?’

  We’ve zoomed off the Balls Pond Road, zoomed down a one-way street, turned in front of an old Victorian pub which looks like a waterworks and is called The Waterworks – and are now standing at a junction by a gas station. Its oilstained forecourt is like a dirty diagram of the world. And my death guide replies, ‘This is it.’ He lifts one of a pair of big, black boomerangs, which he has tucked between his seat and the door, and deftly slices the air. ‘There’s the cafe. All the drivers gonna stop, yeh-hey? Gotta get some tucker in – s’been a long long night for us, hey-yeh?’

  The cafe is underneath one of the arches of a suburban branch line. It’s a Nissen-hut–shaped enclosure full– I assume – of steam and smell. But all I can see from the outside are whited-out windows, with star shapes of card taped on to them – menu items, presumably. Costas slews the car to a halt on an apron of tarmac, alongside twenty or so similar vehicles – rusting Fords, Vauxhalls, Toyotas and Mitsubishis. All of them have wonky aerials stuck on their trunks, earthed by scraps of old plastic bag. Across the bellying brickwork, which weeps mortar and bird shit, snakes the graffito ‘GEORGE DAVIS WAS GUILTY – AND NOW HE’S DEAD’. We clamber out and my calcified foetus comes with, hanging on to my foot. I’m not sure which aggravates me more – the lithopedion or my own bare-assed nudity. ‘Jesus, Phar Lap,’ I say, ‘I can’t go in there like this!’

  Costas waddles round to where we stand. He’s even fatter than I am – and no one’s ever counselled him against the optical effects of horizontal-striped shirts. He’s so hairy he has noselocks. He’s one of those ugly people who used to make me feel happy to be alive. He unpops the trunk and there amidst oily clutter is a sad piece of individual Samsonite, identical to the case Charlie must’ve packed for me to go to the Royal Ear – but this one is brand-new. I open it. Inside are big, soft, old woman’s panties, ditto vest, ditto tented dress (‘Not the wigwam, Mumu!’ Natty silkily whines in my inner ear), ditto pasty shoes for minced feet swollen by half a century of standing still. All of the pathetic kit for this – my biggest adventure – is brand-new. All of it – and that makes it all still sadder. I pull the dress off its midget hanger, decant the shoes from their box, rip underwear and tights from cellophane. I dress without chagrin under the dark eyes of the dead men.

  Costas leads the way into the Turkish baths of a cafe. Gushes of steam from an urn toiling on the Formica counter are doing mighty but insubstantial battle with the kraken tentacles of smoke from the fifty-odd fuming fags stuck in fifty-odd fuming faces. The tables are packed tight, twenty playing-card shapes laid out for a game of impatience. At each sits a trio as mismatched as Phar Lap, Costas and I. The newly dead are easy to spot – we all look simultaneously bemused and relieved. Relieved from the pain – whether it’s the hammer blow of violent extinction, or the quick-quick–slow scuttling crab, or the lightning lobe strike – and bemused by the outrageous dullness of the afterlife itself. The Charon-substitutes are Greek Cypriots to a man. They’re all paunch and trouser wrinkle, they make burning points with their cigarettes and chatter loudly. They sit back in their chairs, or forward, or ride them back to front, the way car jockeys habitually do when out of the saddle.

  I whisper to Phar Lap, ‘Why’re all the final taxi drivers Greek Cypriots?’

  ‘Yeh-hey. Well – s’matter of opportunity, y’know. Big community of these fellers all round Dulston – in Dalston, Homerton, Hoxton, Clapton, Hackney, too – they know the territory, see? So they get the pick-ups. Still, it changes – used t’be all the drivers were proper Cockney cabbies, but last ten years gone death’s bin kinda deregulated. Yeh-hey?’

  I trail after him to where there’s a vacant table. Our trio black face, brown face, sallow face – sit down with the red, brown and yellow sauce bottles. Yup, I can cope with the hacks, but the assembled death guides are much harder to come to terms with. These guys are all fucking weirdos. There are Amerindians with lip plugs the size of their own breakfast plates; saffron-robed Buddhist monks; Samoyed shamans in trimmed, reindeer-hide robes; Korean Taoists in shiny, black origami hats
; Wolof witch doctors wearing ebony masks; Dayak cargo cultists sporting wickerwork beanies; and several ringers for Baron Samedi, all togged up in voodoo suits. ‘What community do they belong to?’ I say. ‘What unites these guys? Nothing save for worshipping the fucking fairies in lieu of the mighty dollar.’

  ‘Yeh-hey,’ Phar Lap predictably tics. ‘Fair dinkum, Lily m’girl. All us mob here – we’re mostly what’re called traditional peoples, yeh-hey? Seems like you Westerners can’t get no grasp on the death stuff, on the ungud, on no-thing. ‘Less you have one of us to guide you. See – seems like when you b’lieve in nothing you gotta have guides who b’lieve in the never-never, see?’

  ‘Erm . . . I suppose so.’

  ‘No you don’t. Yer jus’ sayin’ it, Lily-girl. But anyway this ain’t no settin’ face to face with the Clear Light. Plenny of time for that. Now – let’s eat. What’ll y’have?’ He points a big black boomerang at the star-shaped bits of cardboard Sellotaped to the window. These announce the awful permutations of egg (poached, fried, scrambled to fuck), sausage, bacon, beans, black pudding, white pudding, fruit pudding, slice, two slices, beans and tomatoes. One is headed ‘Full English’, another ‘Full Irish’ and a third ‘Full Dead’.

  When I first came to London in the late fifties the very words ‘full English’ gave me heartburn. Just saying them left a sticky film on the roof of my mouth. Mindjew, in those days with rationing still within gut feeling – the cafe breakfast was more commonly ‘tea and two slices’. Two slices of thin white bread, lifeless flour slunks smeared with marge. Slices of no kind of life at all. Truth to tell, the English really loved rationing. It was the only thing that prevented them from swelling up and fucking exploding – given the lashings of carbohydrate they were wont to eat. Unnaturally, in time I too became inured – even accustomed – to the messy business of coating the walls of my stomach with a thick layer of grease. Like a cross-Channel swimmer I’d dive into the choppy, inland sea of my neuroses, fully, greedily, daubed.