by Self, Will
As this gauzy crew pulled stacks of plastic chairs away from the walls and arranged them in a loose oval, I noticed other features of the meeting. Cards were taped on the walls with peculiar exhortations written on them: ‘LIVE AND LET DIE’; ‘DON’T THINK, DON’T THINK, DON’T THINK’; ‘IT’S HARD GOING’; ‘FOR ALL ETERNITY’. The lettering was as inelegant as the sentiments – someone had misused a Magic Marker with a shaky hand. The cards were bad enough, but by the serving hatch leaned two placards which were far worse. These read as follows:
The Twelve Steps of Personally Dead
1. We realised we were dead and that our lives were over.
2. We came to disbelieve everything.
3. We made a decision to painstakingly remember our former lives.
4. We made a searching and fearful inventory of our nervous tics and mannerisms.
5. We shared this inventory with our death guides, and subjected ourselves to their ridicule.
6. We became entirely ready to abandon ourselves.
7. We waited for nothingness.
8. We made a list of all those we hated.
9. We remembered them.
10. We continued to make a daily inventory and when we noticed disturbing personality traits we embraced them.
11. We sought through meditation to improve our unconsciousness and isolation.
12. Having spiritually annulled ourselves as a result of working these steps, we carried this message to the newly dead.
and:
The Twelve Traditions of Personally Dead
1. Our common annihilation comes first – individual dissolution depends on dead unity.
2. For our group purpose there is no ultimate authority; our leaders are usually petty bureaucrats.
3. The only requirement for membership is death.
4. Each group is autonomous – after all, frankly, who gives a damn?
5. Each group has but one primary purpose – to carry the message to the newly dead.
6. A PD group ought never endorse, or lend the PD name to, any living facility or enterprise, lestwe scare them to death.
7. Every PD group is fully self-supporting, incapable of receiving outside contributions.
8. Personally Dead is non-professional, although our death guides – who belong mostly to traditional peoples may be appeased with cowrie shells, bullroarers, penis sheaths and whatever other tat appeals to them.
9. PD is over-organised, consisting largely of a purposeless and inefficient bureaucracy.
10. PD has so many opinions, that they should – all things being equal – cancel one another out.
11. Our public-relations policy is based on deception. We must always maintain the illusion of being alive at the level of press, radio and films.
12. Individuality is the basis of all our traditions, ever reminding us to place personalities before principles.
Now, at this stage in death, thinking of my former life had become a delicious irrelevance. Why worry about my junky baby when I couldn’t change her shitty diaper? Why fulminate against Mr and Mrs Elvers when it wouldn’t make them even remotely uncomfortable? And so I slackened all the daily ranklings with which I’d strung my catty cradle. The two Daves I’d been indentured to – well, fuck ‘em. Could I make them better and more considerate lovers, fathers, friends? I think not. My shyster father – my sadistic mother? All the slaps in the face and kicks in the shins that had been dealt me over sixty-five years? Gone – or at least not relevant. It seemed that even my leading persecutors had had only cameo roles; and now they had no more significance than the protesting brooches on Jane Bowen’s lapels.
It should’ve dawned on me how awful it was that in my life gall had been all– but it didn’t. I suppose it should’ve sunk in how unbelievable my new-found coolness was – but I simply took it on trust; death, I figured, must’ve mellowed me.
As for the trappings of the Personally Dead meeting – the bowdlerised twelve steps and twelve traditions, the pie-chart slices of humanity wedged alongside me – why didn’t they jerk me into comprehension? Why didn’t it even occur to me that there was only one person who could’ve arranged these particular elements of my own experience, and cobbled them together into this dreary scene? I dunno. But at the time I’d forgotten all the weary weepfests of Families Anonymous I’d attended – along with other fucked-up mums and fucked-over spouses – to try and get a handle on Natasha’s limitless capacity for destroying herself and others.
Jesus Christ, I sit here with you, leafing through yet another fucking Woman’s Realm and I still don’t know. And even now I’ve had more than enough time to give the question all due consideration, I don’t think I’ll ever know. Not on this go-round.
So the zombies took their places in the oval of chairs. Deadening silence was achieved. Thirty-odd cigarettes and cheap panatellas were sparked. The smoke-streams flowed through their searching headlights. It was a community Nuremberg. A fishy little fellow in a blue shirt and a grey V-neck flipped the proceedings off. He called upon three members to read the screeds printed on some laminated cards. The first of these – entitled ‘Why Are We Dead? – spoke of how dying was an uncomfortable and fearful experience for us all; how disturbing it was to realise that style was personality, and that our sense of self was nothing but mannerisms and negative emotions. The second reading explained how the members of PD thronged together on a regular basis to remind each other that they were dead, and to inculcate the newly dead into the ways of the afterlife. The third reading proposed a solution to this malady, but by then I wasn’t concentrating. The readings went on and on. If I’d been in the least bit tired I could’ve fallen asleep, but no dice. God knows my interest in life had flagged all too frequently, but clearly, being bored was now going to be even duller.
My gaze, like a fat fly, droned about the large room, alighting on a flyer for intermediate aerobics classes, a fire extinguisher, some stacked gym mats. As the other dead smoked and I fidgeted with nothing, it did occur to me that this queer Kaddish had some justice. That it was suitably hellish for me – who had always prided myself on not being a joiner – to end up like this, in a terminally banal club, whiling away the aeons under strip lighting.
I was winched back up to earth by the personally dead, who all thanked the last trumpeter in unison. The human tiddler who was, I gathered, dubbed ‘the Secretary’ – then introduced Robin Cook, who, he informed us, had come along this evening to share his experience of death with us. Cook, a smouldering twig of a man, as spindly as the cigarette he kept permanently tucked between his thin lips, rasped his words. His eyes were hidden by the yanked-down peak of his tweed cap. He was all sharp knees, sharp elbows and sharper Fitzrovian tones. Cook had, he told us, been agreeably surprised, given that he had no religious belief whatsoever, to discover that there was an afterlife. Of sorts. He’d been a thriller-writer while alive, and as he’d always published pseudonymously, there was no problem with his continuing his career after death. Indeed, the books he’d written since moving to Dulston sold marginally better than the ones he’d published before. Even if they weren’t too well received by the critics.
Yes, it was difficult to get used to not feeling, touching, eating or sleeping, but the relief from the pain and the indignity of terminal illness had always stayed with him. Cook was grateful for death – considering what a crock of shit his life had become. True, there were awful psychic manifestations caused by the dissolution of his mind – but hell, he’d always had a dark imagination anyway. There was nothing more horrible than he could’ve conceived himself. He found the cynicism of the PD programme a balm for disincorporation. ‘What do the steps mean?’ he croaked. ‘I’ve no fucking idea. Do I work them in any sense? I haven’t a fucking clue. It seems to me – and I’ve only my own experience to go on – that this whole set-up is a bit of joke. Who’s the joke on? I don’t know – and what’s more, my loves, I don’t think I ever will.’ He spoke – as you can see – to my condition.
After Cook had finished, the Secretary announced that he was ‘throwing the meeting open for general sharing’. They called it ‘sharing’ – how ridiculous, how risible an expression. Only corpses could’ve failed to corpse when uttering such jargon. Anyway, what this meant in practice was a lot of halting, garbled complaint. One after another, introducing themselves ‘I’m so-and-so and I’m personally dead’, the members of PD gave vent to their smoke and their complaints. The bizarre thing was that while what they described was pantomimically over-the-top, the manner in which they expressed it was leaden. It was like the visitation of the Fats; the terrors faded out suddenly, like piano notes stifled by a foot-pedal. I guess it should’ve hit me then that I really was dead, and more so, that all life’s piquancy had been solely a function of the fear of death. But it bloody well didn’t.
The PD members spoke of the gods of the Hindu pantheon – elephant-headed Ganesh, monkey-bodied Hanuman, skull-garlanded Kali, quadri-armed Vishnu – smashing through the thin walls of their Dulston bedsits, rehearsing their ancient grievances, then re-enacting their epochal battles. A whirl of avatars in the toilet bowl. They moaned about Christ emerging from the Golgotha of their fan-assisted oven, to deliver a quavering sermon from the mount on their secular kitchen floor. In the Babylonian suburb they inhabited, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse exercised their mounts by cantering across the municipal park. Death, War and Hunger hitched them to the swings in the kids’ playground; while Civil Strife shared out ham sandwiches and tea by the boating lake.
In the confused realm of the personally dead, houris bathed in the small sinks left behind in the corners of spare bedrooms where dead builders had undertaken spurious conversion work. These eternally pure courtesans, capable of conceiving at the will of the faithful, drank sherbert, and laughed lustily long into the night. Even the gods of the pre-Buddhist religion of Tibet could get flat-shares in Dulston. So, psycho-physical chromatism came to Corinth Way, Sparta Terrace, Syracuse Park and Athens Road. Blue gods the size of car dealerships loomed over the car dealerships; red gods the size of buses dodged among the buses; and green gods – temporarily entombed in the raised, grass-covered embankments of the Dulston Reservoir – surged forth when the personally dead approached. The florists sold demoniacal flesh-eating plants at a pound a stem. Very dear.
Some were visited by deities appropriate to their denominations.A Wicklow man gossiped in thick brogue about Mary-next–door’s open-heart surgery. A quavering member of the Brethren bore witness that, before the deluge, he was required nightly to cut Methuselah’s prodigiously large corns. The dead horny skin of nine centuries. But others were pretty confused. Why was this intense old Portuguese man tormented by Osiris? Why was that foolish frummer shaking his locks over the manifestation of the Rainbow Serpent? And what did any of it have to do with me? The Secretary had impressed upon us the importance of ‘listening for the similarities rather than the differences’, and there were those who spoke of more physical apparitions – personifications of hiccuping, blinking, burping, farting and yawning – which sounded suspiciously like the Fats. Still, my attention wandered. Lithy had found a couple of its own, and the three grey foetuses ran in and out of the shadowy corners of the room, chanting in their reedy voices, ‘We are fa-mi-ly / I got all my sisters an’ me!’ until the Secretary told them to shut up and behave.
Behave like what, exactly? I mocked to myself. How should a reanimated, minuscule, petrified cadaver behave? How should any of us behave? I mean to say – ‘can’t do’ could no longer be made to do. And what if you simply don’t like kreplach?
After an hour or so, the Secretary shushed up a slight, nervy woman who was complaining about Mithras – he lived in her icebox, conducting improbable, pyromantic rituals – and informed us that the last ten minutes would now be available for ‘the newly dead’ to share. ‘This is to embarrass you flatliners into admitting your own extinction,’ he crowed. ‘After all, if you aren’t defunct – what’re you doing here? Even if you can’t face saying anything, you can grunt or rattle, or do whatever it is you did when you gasped your last.’ As he pronounced these cruel words, a rictus tore in his papery face. All the dead eyes swivelled to fix me, all the bony fingers wiggled as if to clutch me.
Seeing Phar Lap Jones and Costas come in by the swing doors opposite – the very ordinary swing doors – and feeling a sense of relief, I decided to brazen it out. ‘I’m Lily,’ I said, ‘and personally, I think I’m dead.’ That was it. That was all I said. It seemed that was all that was required – some admission that I was dead. Cut off from everything. A tumour of a woman excised from the world. Phar Lap’s Stetson brim dipped with the weight of his cool approval. His mirrored shades tilted and the two tiny sections of floor reflected in them sank down. Costas filled his ample chest with unnecessary air and the hairs flared in the V of his shirt. My fellow members mumbled their approval.
Then it was over, we all stood, held the shape of each other’s hands and muttered the prayer: ‘Gog grant me the stupidity to deny there’s anything I cannot change, the temerity to neglect the things I can, and the ignorance to be incapable of distinguishing between the two.’ Phar Lap and Costas moved forward to join in this balderdash.
As soon as it was over I went up to them. ‘What the hell was that about?’ I asked Phar Lap. ‘It made no sense at all. It certainly didn’t teach me anything about Dulston, or death, or how to cope with it.’
‘Yeh-hey, well, I s’pose it might seem total fuckin’ gammin-but thass the way of it girl, yeh-hey? Thass the way of it – ‘
‘Yes, Lily-lady, that is the way of it,’ Costas added. ‘Youse should listen to my friend here, he’s youse death guide. Youse can’t get back in my cab and leave Dulston – this lot here know the only routes out. Listen to him! Now, I have peoples here I must talk with.’ He sidled off, and Phar Lap indicated with twitches of his snaky hips that I should follow him into one of the cubbyhole offices.
Here, he got behind a desk, squatted on a swivel chair, pressed the back of his Stetson against a cork board – so that the front poked up, releasing a puff of black curls – and regarded me with wry detachment. ‘Yairs, nothing here fer you, Lily-girl. Thass true enough. All this gammin, see – it’s ‘cos yer dead but won’t accept it, yeh-hey? It’s gonna get worse – b’lieve me. It’ll get worse than the lithopedion, yehhey? Worse than the Fats – and it’s all in yer head, girl. None of it’s real. None of it at all– you, this, me, whatever. You get me, girl? Don’t you remember how you felt back there in the hospital, when we walked out of the ward, quit the place? It was like a mirage, hey-yeh? Like hot wind movin’ across bush, all shimmery, yeh-hey? That was you, girl – b’lieve me. It’s you who’re no-thing. Recognise it an’ all this . . . this guna will evaporate, y’see that? Doncha Lily? Doncha?’
But I didn’t see it at all. I saw Phar Lap’s amazing apple cheeks, his ebony eyelids, all the Epstein planes of his handsome head. And behind him I saw the cork board, with its thumb-tacked schedules, notes and newspaper clippings. I saw rain spatter against the black window pane, and tiny dusty dervishes whirl across the floor. I saw piles of undone folders on the dun desk, I saw the personally dead all smoking away in the hall, and I saw Phar Lap prise open a can of Log Cabin, his fingers forklift a pinch of tobacco and grind it into rollability. I saw the pennant of paper appear on his lower lip. I saw him contrive another cigarette and light it with a Redhead match. I saw it, and while it may have been wacky, disconcerting, troubling – I didn’t disbelieve it for a second.
Christmas 2001
I didn’t give it any less credence than the colossal rampart of MDF that rears up above me now, tier upon tier of crappy possessions, like the steps of a Toltec pyramid. All the valueless things the Ice Princess and the Estate Agent stole, then couldn’t fence or pawn. Grown-ups forget quite how huge their material transgressions are – so preoccupied are they by tiny, psychic misdemeanours. I simply couldn’t understand what Phar Lap Jones was d
riving at– I couldn’t hear him. No more than I can reach the mobile phone that I know is up there, way beyond my reach. And anyway, even if I could, it’s a dead chunk of circuitry now – an immobile, an uncommunicator It’s as incapable of receiving anything as I was of understanding Phar Lap’s clicking and palate-slapping. At the time I thought he was trying to drive me crazy – but hell, I managed that all by myself.
Chapter Nine
I settled into Dulston well enough. I hummed, ‘Little boxes, little boxes, and they all look just the same / And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same / There’s a red one, and a blue one, and a green one, and a yel-low one / And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same,’ as I sluiced the depression out of my basement. I got a job. Not in Dulston, but down the road in Hackney. Phar Lap had explained it made no odds if I worked for a living company or a dead one. And believe me it certainly didn’t seem any different. I’d only six weeks earlier left off working at the public-relations business where I’d toiled when alive, yet here I was at another PR company, on the other side of town, typing up still more releases on fresh kitchenware, country club launches, innovatory thermal socks – whatever new effluvia were next to join the ever widening torrent of increasingly trivial innovation. Or so it seemed to me.
Just as when I was alive hardly anyone at Chandler Communications had bothered to ask me who, what, where, or why I was – so nobody at Baskin’s Public Relations gave a rat’s ass either. Each day I stomped to work down Argos Road, turning into Corinth Way with its coursing traffic, taking the short cut along the gentrified Sparta Terrace – who says the dead can’t be upwardly mobile? – and traversing Syracuse Park, before catching the bus that ran down Athens Road. Usually in the fusty warmth of the upper deck, where pensioners and kids squeezed together, cutting out the middle-aged, I forgot about my own death, neglected Death in general, ignored metaphysics, and instead read crappy women’s magazines. Eventually, after much diesel grunting, I’d look up from my Woman’s Realm to find that the bus was trundling down Dalston Lane, or Queensbridge Road, or already turning into Mare Street. Back – laughable as it may seem – in what’s called the land of the living.