by Self, Will
Still, the past is another pantry. ‘Would you like breakfast in America?!’ the lithopedion warbles. I’d forgotten it – but here it is, squatting on the table, in between the sauce bottles.
Phar Lap ignores it. ‘Jeezus, Lily – what’ll y’have, girl?’
‘What d’jew recommend?’
‘I’d go for the full dead – ‘
‘Youse are going for the full dead,’ Costas interjects, ‘youse always do.’ And the cabbie lights a Benson & Hedges, blows blue smoke in my face.
‘Full dead it is, then,’ I murmur, and Phar Lap sticks up three fingers, a signal acknowledged by the barrel-chested character tending the urn, who shouts back, ‘Three full dead being exhumed!’ But I ignore this, because I’m on the verge of castigating Costas for his insensitive puffing, into the face of a woman who’s died of cancer only a few hours ago, when it hits me that the smoke doesn’t sting or irritate – it doesn’t even smell at all.
Nothing smells any more. I sniff the polluted air of the cafe with flared nostrils – but there’s no odour. None. No grease, no egg, no condemned meat – no whiff, no pong, no no-thing.
‘Phar Lap,’ I say, ‘I can’t smell.’
‘Whozzat, Lily-girl – yeh-hey?’
‘I can’t smell.’
‘No, you can’t – nor will you. Yer dead, girl. Like I say you’ve a subtle body now. It don’t make no reflection. It don’t get tired. It don’t need sustenance of any kind, no tucker, no rooting, no nothing – see. So, no smell – whyd’you need to smell, girl, see? Yeh-hey?’
‘But the breakfast – why do I need a full dead breakfast? And anyway – what do I do with the thing?’
‘You’ll see.’
‘Yeah – youse’ll see,’ Costas puts in, jabbing the air with his pill, ‘thass all youse’ll do now lady – see. Being dead is all about seeing and listening.’
And I do see – really I do. I see the full dead breakfasts approaching, rolled out by the barrel-chested Cockney man, one plate in each hand, the third balanced on his right wrist and a plastic bucket dangling from the left one. I see that all the other tables have a bucket beneath them, and that all the death guides are chomping up their full dead breakfasts; giving them a thorough mashing, then regurgitating the mush into the buckets – not always with the greatest accuracy. The newly dead all look pretty green contemplating this gross-out – and I guess I must too. ‘Ferchrissakes, Phar Lap, is this what you guys do instead of eating?’
‘Yesh,’ he says, spearing a sausage, shoving it in.
‘But why – why bother?’
‘Ritual, Lily-girl. Me – I only have breakfast when I bring someone in, but the others, hell, they’ve eternity to spend here in Dulston, so why not bloody eat – even if they can’t swallow?’
‘And smoking,’ I turn to Costas, ‘why d’jew bother with smoking?’
‘Youse smoke one time, lady?’
‘Smoke? Of course I fucking smoked – that’s why I’m dead!’
‘OK, OK – well, youse ever smoke in the dark?’
‘Occasionally.’
‘But not much – right?’
‘No, I guess not.’
‘Thass right – ‘cos youse have to see it, right? Seethe smoke. Smoking’s as much seeing as feeling, so why not smoke youse want one?’
I want a B&H more than the full dead – which anyway is exactly the same as a full English – so I take one and Costas gives me a light. The smokes plays painless chords in the accordion of my diseased lungs. ‘What’s this place called, anyway?’ I ask through my own ectoplasm.
‘No p’ticular name,’ Phar Lap replies, ‘we just call it the cafe.’ He wipes a glossy rime of egg from his matt top lip.
‘Is that because it’s the only one in Dulston?’
‘No – it’s just the one that’s bin ‘ere the longest, yeh-hey? Dulston is what you’d call a cystrict.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘A cystrict – it swells up, then it leaks, then it swells up agin. It’s a cystrict.’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘Aw – y’Il see – finished?’
‘I never began,’ I say, and stub my cig out in the egg’s yellow bull’s-eye. Full dead indeed.
‘Fine – we’re elsewhere, then.’ Our trio rises, weaves between the tables to the counter where, to my surprise, Phar Lap pays.
‘Why d’jew pay?’ I ask him as we stroll back to the car. ‘Surely you don’t need money in this place?’ He rounds on me. ‘Why not! Place has gotta run like any other. Streets gotta be cleaned, teachers paid, sewers sluiced out – it’s no bloody hotel, I’m tellin’ ya, Lily, dead people are jus’ like the livin’.’
‘Except we can’t feel, or smell, or love – ‘
‘Or hurt! Or smell ourselves, or sweat, or any of that. There’s an upside to this, y’know,’ says Costas, who seems buoyed up by his gruelly repast, swinging himself into the front seat of the car with deathly vigour.
As we reverse into the roadway I press Phar Lap more. ‘So, if that’s where the newly dead and their guides eat breakfast, why are they serving ordinary meals?’
‘Yeh-hey. Well, the other mob come in, y’know.’
‘You mean the living?’
‘Who else.’
‘Oh, right – and you mean to say they aren’t terrified by the sight of a load of weirdos spitting pap?’
Phar Lap cants round to deliver his next line. ‘Lily – this is London, the whole bloody city is full of weirdos.’
‘So, there are living people in Dulston as well?’
‘No, I’m not sayin’ that, it’s just the place accommodates them if they turn up – like I say, it’s a cystrict.’
A cystrict. I think I’m getting the point, for, as the minicab slops along the road I begin to appreciate the character of Dulston. Sure, the clumps of houses, flats, commercial premises, warehouses, used-car lots and light-industrial units are the same as in any of the adjoining districts, but Dulston is even more characterless than other inner North East London suburbs I’ve known. The overwhelming impression the place gives is of colourlessness, an indifference towards municipal airs and graces.
Dulston is one of those districts you’re always finding yourself lost in, rather than arriving at. It’s the place you wind up in when you overshoot your destination or take the wrong turn. It’s the ‘burb as displacement activity. Without even needing to question Phar Lap I realise that Dulston must be as big or as small as its beholders. It’s a hidden pleat in the city’s rolled-up sleeve; an invisible flare flapping in its trouser leg; a vent in the back of its jacket. Presumably, if the living stray into Dulston they seenothing of its true nature. For them it’s merely a drive-by span of inattention, a glimpse of their own speeding car warped in a showroom window – before they find themselves traversing Hackney Marsh, or gawping at the Stamford Hill frummers, or heading into town. Dulston: you wouldn’t know you were there at all – unless you were dead.
It’s no revelation to me either when Costas angles the minicab into a road lined with late Victorian houses not dissimilar to the one I lived in in Kentish Town. No bolt from the blue when we halt outside one midway along. Costas and Phar Lap are out on the sidewalk by the time I’ve disencumbered myself. Peculiar, to move with the gait I used to have yet feel none of the discomfort of swollen feet, or riding underwear, or fatty ballast. The lithopedion comes too, chanting, ‘This is the sound of the suburbs!’ as I start for the stairs up to the front door. I’m gonna have to address this problem – but for now there’s the new apartment to consider. ‘Am I on the first floor?’
Phar Lap isencumbered with his wooden paraphernalia; bits of wood clack against the railings he’s walking beside. What a kid. He calls me back. ‘No, Lily-girl, you gotta go down, y’know. Basement, for now – mebbe go up a floor in time.’
So, down we go into the tawdry little area with its bins that look like rubbish. Phar Lap has a bunch of keys chained to the hip of his skinny jeans. H
e deals one out and unlocks the heavy door, with its architrave of London grunk, its lint-trailing draft-includer, its four whirl-of-distortion glass panes. He shoves it open into a vestibule which is dank to the point of musty saturation. I follow his flat ass; Costas comes behind with the sad Samsonite. The lithopedion warbles, ‘Another suitcase in another hall / Where are you going to?’ And we tour my new quarters.
The deformed corridor staggers along the left-hand side of the basement, and the first door off to the right limps into a mouldering bedroom. The bed’s a shapeless pagoda of three double mattresses. There’s a naked dressing table with a tip-tilting oval mirror; a freestanding thirties wardrobe, like a mahogany plinth; and three sash windows which aren’t admitting much at all. There’d be dust motes in here if it wasn’t so damp. The poor mites in the soggy old mattresses must be swimming for their fucking lives.
The next watery closet along is a sitting room. This comes complete with a Danish ancient armchair (x 2), some crappy lamps set on insignificant occasional tables, and a period gas fire piled with a miniature, flame-snagging ossuary. Somewhere Sweep could commit fucking suttee. Oh, and a bad-news bookcase with a Good News Bible in it, together with eight mildewed copies of the Reader’s Digest. Perched on top of this is a tiny, old, black-and–white telly – like a bird box. But there’s more –less more. With the lithopedion batting past my ankles, the party gains the end of the corridor and the fetid horrors of the kitchenette and bathroom. Shitty units clutter both pigeonholes. In New York – given the overall decrepitude of the basement – these would be rustling with roaches. But I know what’ll be in these without needing to look: six laid-off wads which were once copies of the Daily Worker, seven mismatched Tupperware cups and saucers, five belly-up wood-lice. That’s it.
The kitchenette has a gas stove and a fucking meat safe. Still, I shan’t be cooking in it – so what the hell does that matter. No cooking – no reheating a saucepan of coffee even. And no ablutions in the bathroom, where a pre-shrunk shrink – Shtikelberg perhaps? – might sit alongside the dugout enamel couch on a cork-topped stool of unspeakable shoddiness. The very heads of the rivets that pinion the mirror to the seeping wall are rimmed with shit. The splashback is grouted with effluent. And throughout the entire apartment the walls are covered with bilious lozenges, or garish parallelograms, or clashing cones. Wallpapers of sixties vintage, which were designed by English hicks imagining a psychedelic experience, when succumbing to the effects upon their inner vision of two pints of fucking Strongbow. There’s unfit carpeting too, the kind that looks like underlay. If I could squidge it with each footstep – I would.
It’s unspeakably awful. I slump down on one of the chairs in the sitting room and my gaze wavers from Phar Lap to Costas to the lithopedion. This is the spring season in hell. Sitting room is right, I guess. Yaws used to call the ratty reclining space of the house on Crooked Usage the ‘drawing room’. The pretentious shmuck. Still, ‘living room’ is so non-U, and totally out of the question now. ‘Ferchrissakes Phar Lap this joint is terrible. If I weren’t dead already this’d kill me off once and for all – you can’t expect me to stay here!’
‘Everyone’s gotta start somewhere, Lily-girl, yeh-hey.’ He’s unfazed. ‘An’ anyways – what choice you got? You don’t know bugger-all about Dulston. You need this unit – which is mine t’give, yeh-hey? You need me big-time. You need the meetings as well.’
‘Meetings?’
‘Yairs – meetings. Induction kinduva thing. They’re held all the time, all over Dulston. You gotta go, Lily – else you won’t know nothing about death, won’t get to yabber with the rest, won’t be able to function, yeh-hey?’
‘Mores than thats,’ Costas puts in, lowering his broad bottom into the other Danish ancient chair and sparking up another B&H, ‘iss frightening, y’see. There’s scary stuff you need to prepare y’self for.’
‘Scary stuff?’
‘Sure.’
‘Scary stuff in a suburb called Dulston? A suburb full of dull cafes, tedious streets, boring buildings, and this – this crappy flat?’
‘Yeah, even in this crappy flat.’
On cue, there’s the most peculiar sound of murmuring and cackling from the bedroom. It’s faint but clearly audible. Colourless voices intoning, ‘Fat and old, fat and old, fat and old, fat and old . . .’
‘What the hell’s that?’ I snap.
‘Fat and old, fat and old, fat and old, fat and old,’ the murmuring continues. Phar Lap and Costas have sly little smiles perched on their foreign faces.
‘Well – aren’t you gonna tell me?’
‘Fat and old, fat and old, fat and old, fat and old – ‘
‘Looks like you got the Fats, girl,’ my death guide finally answers. ‘Lotta people – specially women – do. Better go see ‘em – they’re like the lithopedion here.’ He gestures at the lithopedion, who sits on the gas fire’s brick surround, swinging its grey legs, singing, ‘I’m just a poor boy / I get no sympathy / Caught in a landslide / No escape from reality . . .’ in bizarre counterpoint to the ‘Fat and old, fat and old, fat and old, fat and old’ coming from next door.
I rise up and strike out for the door; Phar Lap and Costas follow me. In the bedroom there’s a terrible sight. It’s not scary – it’s terrifying, yet oddly pathetic as well. There’s a doppelgänger of myself, naked and shining, beneath the window. Another is trying to wedge itself under the bed, a third sits on the plush-covered mini-banquette in front of the dressing table. They’re disgustingly obese versions of me, all wobble and jounce, huge dewlaps of belly dangling to their knees. They’ve no eyes, hair or nipples, and they’ve the slack mouths I saw last on my own corpse. They’re the Pillsbury Dough girls of total dissolution. The one under the window has a hank of intestines wound round her forearms; which the one on the banquette is paying out, pulling off loop after loop of goo and feeding it through to the one under the bed. I can’t see what this one’s doing, but I can distinctly hear the ‘shuk-shuk’ of garden shears. They’ve got a beat going – these obese versions of me; and the ‘Fat and old, fat and old, fat and old, fat and old’ is a work song of sorts.
But when the gut gang see me they break off, huddle together, fall silent. Phar Lap and Costas nod their heads significantly. ‘Fair dinkum,’ says my death guide, ‘they’re Fats all right.’
The Fats whisper sour nothings to each other which sound like tummy rumbles: ‘What’d he say? Who’s he? There she is – ‘
‘And what, exactly,’ I assume a sang-froid worthy of the Aboriginal himself, ‘are the Fats?’
‘Yairs . . . well . . . Y’did a fair bit of dieting while you were alive – yeh-hey?’
‘Urn . . . yes . . . I did.’ Did I hell– I dieted for suety Olde Englande. I obsessed about my weight so much that I probably put more on, simply by thinking it into existence. Kerrist! Those endless doodled figures on the wallpaper, those thick supplements and insipid juices, those minutely calibrated snacks – trimming the edge of a lettuce leaf in an attempt to negate another calorie. Those fucking Weight Watchers meetings. Did I diet? My whole existence during the seventies and eighties was defined by the continual struggle not to eat, not to stuff the hated world in my face.
‘See these Fats here, Lily, yeh-hey, they’re your fat. The fat you shed during all that dieting’ – a black mattock digs in the direction of the skein-holder – ‘and the fat you put back on again.’ And he gestures at the one who’s taking up the slack.
‘What about the one under the bed?’
‘She’s the fat you lost for ever – the stuff you dag-tailed.’
‘Oh, so I did actually manage to lose some . . . overall.’ Why should this give me any satisfaction now? Yet it does.
Phar Lap doesn’t answer. He’s extracting bits of paper, booklets and envelopes from a small straw bag he has slung over his shoulder. ‘Listen, Lily, I got you a few bucks here in me dillybag, sit-down money, see? And I’ve got you a map of Dulston and a list of meetings. C
ome in the other room.’
‘But what about these . . .’ I can’t address them so casually, the fat fiends with their Edgar Allan Poe faces.
‘The Fats? They won’t trouble you any more than the lithopedion here. They’re part of you, Lily-girl, see? No more terrifying than yer own mind, yeh-hey?’
So I follow him into the other room, and the Fats carryon muttering and unravelling the loops of gut. Phar Lap counts out exactly seventeen pounds and thirty-six pence. Both the notes and the coins are old, distressed.
Then Costas weighs in, ‘Youse gotta pay me now, Lily – gimme youse plates.’
‘Plates?’
‘Yeah – youse falsies.’
‘But – but I don’t have them any more.’
‘Look in the case,’ Phar Lap advises – and I do. There they are, wrapped up like they used to be on the rare occasions when I took them out. Wrapped up in new fat old lady’s pants, looking more fleshly now than prosthetic. I feel an affection for them – these prised-apart jaws – they were more a part of me than what I’ve become. Still– Charon is Charon, I guess, even if he only drives you across London, so I go next door and hand them over.
‘There’s a store up at the corner there, Lily, yeh-hey?’ says Phar Lap. ‘You can get cleanin’ stuff, give the place a goin’over, hey-yeh?’
‘And what’re you going to do now?’
‘Work – I got work t’do jus’ like Costas. We all gotta work, Lily. Maybe I’ll see you at the meeting tonight? Maybe not.’
‘And if I don’t go to the meeting?’
‘You stay at home with the Fats, then, and – ‘
‘Me and you and a dog named Boo, loving and a-living off the land!’
‘ – the lithopedion here.’
He was right – I’d rather go to any kind of a meeting than sit around with the tiny calcified cadaver, the reanimated reminder of my sexual fecklessness. Let alone those Fats.
Chapter Eight
Well, what can I say, that’s how it was for me. Not so different to anyone else’s death, I guess. We’ve all got our own fucking sob stories in here – that’s for sure. Still, you might’ve thought that with the Fats kind of gibbering in the next room, and the lithopedion belting out its seventies ditties as it dragged at my feet, I wouldn’t have had any difficulty at all appreciating I was extinct. Not so. I can remember that first afternoon in the basement flat at 27 Argos Road as clearly as I can recall anything that happened to me before – or has transpired since.