by Self, Will
Every interface between the worlds of the living and the dead was just this prosaic. Utilities – well! They were as hard to organise now as ever, despite there always being a dead person working in the relevant office. Getting everyday stuff together was a real hassle now I was so very subtle. The boundaries between life and death were as provisional, confused and indeterminate as those of Dulston itself. The living, foolishly, comfort themselves with the notion that in death at least things become clear-cut, as if death were a definable barrier, a wall or a line. But I was finding out that death was far trickier, and as hard to locate as the exact edge of your own visual field. I now understood why spiritualists’ communications with the hereafter are invariably so ludicrously trite. If anyone had been bothered to tap my table, without hesitating I’d have asked for a nice cup of tea.
Baskin, a bearded-Lothario emeritus, hired me because I boldly announced that I’d take twenty per cent less than any flibbertigibbet who was prepared to flirt with him. In truth it was Mrs Baskin – a marcelled monstrosity who came in to do the accounts from time to time – who took me on. Wasn’t it always the way. So, not much in the way of shekels from Baskin PR.
It took me ages to get the basement tricked out to my satisfaction. There was no sense in getting workmen to do the painting and decorating. At the Personally Dead meetings they were good enough to tell me that dead artisans were incredibly unreliable. Anyway, I was free from arthritis, from bronchitis and from gingivitis – free from anything that could have stopped me doing the work myself. I bought black slacks and a man’s white shirt from the flea market at the end of Sparta Terrace. I tied the shirt-tails under my jugs and crawled on top of the furniture to slop and roll the paint about. The Fats crowded round me and giggled at my efforts. ‘Look at her great white belly! He-he, it sags like a sack when she stretches . . . He-he, she’s a fat old thing. Fat and old, fat and old . . .’
So it went on. It should’ve driven me right round the bend in a few long days – but it didn’t. Now I had no need for sleep, I really missed repose. Shit, if I’d known the afterlife was going to be a relentless 24 × 7, I’d’ve had thousands more lie-ins, heaps more hot-water bottles, gallons more fucking hot chocolate. All that fucking dieting – yet here I was, pear-shaped for eternity and beset by the blind bogeywomen of my own vanity. Sure, I did have Lithy. I’d stuck with the name Lithy for my lithopedion, because I couldn’t figure out any alternative. Gus Junior didn’t seem – how can I say – wise. Besides, the past was the last thing on my mind, there was so much to do, so many bloody errands. Lithy was a troublesome, precocious little thing, but despite its nimble pins and familiarity with seventies pop songs, it really didn’t have much idea of the world; so, I took it upon myself to educate my never-born cadaver of a child.
I dressed Lithy in Barbie and Ken’s little hand-me-downs and took it to work with me at Baskin PR. It knew enough to slump and be silent when told. ‘What an unusual dolly,’ said Mrs Baskin, while Gloria, the blowsy secretary, admitted she found it ‘creepy’. Nevertheless, from the vantage point of my desk, propped up against the old plastic Cheops of a computer, Lithy was able to get an angle on the origami paper economy of the late eighties.
I confess, I used the same baby talk with Lithy that Natasha and I had shared, peppering every proposition with ‘noo-noo’s, ‘goo-goo’s and other gummy nonce words. Lithy became my itty-bitty plaything and in time I even began to enjoy its performances, as it danced through the basement singing, ‘We had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun.’ I couldn’t see any resemblance to me or Gus in its crinkly nearly-face, or its beady jet eyes. I don’t think there’s anything much in the world of the living that does resemble a lithopedion, saving perhaps that horse’s ass Spielberg’s alien. And that – natch – has big, blue eyes. The big, blue, bootiful eyes that can only be worked up from the dreams of yet another Jew boy who yearns to date blonde shiksas. ‘The Extraterrestrial as Shiksa – Discuss’ would be a likely subject for the kind of term paper I’d set for the lithopedion itself.
Take it from me, Dulston was as good an arena within which to exercise the greyhounds of my contempt as any living suburb of London. Who’d’ve imagined it – but the late English middle class were exactly the same pompous pricks they’d been when alive. Still piling up infinitesimal gradations of accent, demeanour and education into staggeringly baroque edifices of class. There were U and non-U dead to the nth degree. The old dead and the newly dead, the dead who were the salt of the earth and the dead who were the corrupted soil. With grim inevitability it turned out that you could take it with you – your death grant was index-fucking-linked. Not only that, but despite their much-vaunted disregard for vulgar notoriety, the English dead doted on their famously deceased, being at great pains to report that they had met so-and–so, preferably while both parties were still alive.
Most of the famously dead people had long since moved on from Dulston – another thing that made me think it was merely a quarantine, a clearing house for the newly dead to reside in until our dispersal to more comfortable berths. In the meantime, all and sundry made it their business to tell me that of course they had known Countess Teresa Lubinska. How she’d always been very free with her stab wounds, and how she’d come directly to Dulston on the tube after the stabbing-only realising she was dead when the officious ticket-collector at King’s Cross troubled her for her ticket and it struck her that she was changing trains for no apparent reason. What horse shit. Typical of the English dead that the only Holocaust martyrs they’d recognise were fucking Polish aristocrats, killed in fucking London. Just typical.
And they socialised – boy, did they socialise. They held parties where the liquor was sluiced round their mouths and puked in the geraniums, and the canapés parted from their wooden prongs only to be spat into buckets. Yup – drinks parties, the English dead were so fucking happening. They chewed quiche a lot – because it was easy to do so.
It was a long, hot summer for those of us who had to work, and frankly it wasn’t my idea of fun to spend evenings standing about on terraces, chewing quiche, munching salad and then regurgitating into plastic buckets. True, not all the buckets were plastic, there was a vogue among the trendier dead for galvanised steel. These looked better, were easier to hit, but rang pretty loudly. Mrs Seth was always quick to defend the buckets, the chewing and the spitting. ‘You have to let people do what they want, Mrs Bloom,’ she told me, ‘and what these dead people want to do is behave like the living-you can appreciate that.’
What I did appreciate was that Seth’s Grocery and General Provisions did damn well out of the bucket business, the wine sales, and the bloody cheese trade too. They did almost as well out of flogging aluminium foil to Bernie, the unquiet spirit of a junky who lived in the attic of number 27. I never got used to the way these dead stupenagels got tipsy at their terminally dull drinks parties. I guess it followed from acting as if they were drinking – such is the power of ritual; but still it was foul to witness a lot of dead middle-aged people talking crap, singing old show tunes, and even making passes at each other.
So far as I could see, the only thing that distinguished these gatherings from those of the living – besides the sick buckets was the fantastic number of smokers. In my experience all the dead smoke. Even those who hadn’t smoked when alive took it up once they moved to Dulston. There was a real payback for smoking when you were dead. With a lung full of acridity there were a few, brief instants when you almost felt embodied. Then you’d exhale and revert to being no more substantial than the individual portions of cloud floating in front of your death mask. But these moments were worth paying for, worth working for.
Mostly prices in Dulston were low – after all, who’d want to live there? But cigs were as dear as anywhere else – and I got through pack after pack. I don’t know what it’s been like for you, but I found that the whole process of smoking acquired a certain dash once I was dead. The crinkle-slip–crunch of the cellophane as it came
away from the cardboard, the very boxiness of the pack itself, its hard edges defining my hand. Then the rough silkiness of the inner foiled lining, and finally the cancer sticks themselves, so deliciously harmless. To smoke when one was so clearly fat and old – what high bravado blown in the face of the living, as they waited to exhale their last!
And it kept off the Fats. They couldn’t stand cigarette smoke. It must’ve been something to do with their eyelessness. Whereas I could only see, they could only smell and complain, like the health-consciously correct, overweight adolescents they were. ‘Ooh!’ they’d chorus, as I greeted another dawn with my hundredth-odd smoke of the twenty-four. ‘Ooh – must she? Should she? Why does she? Can’t she stop? Doesn’t she know it’s bad for her?’ And I’d shoo them off with another blast of menacing wraiths. The sight of their wobbling butts disappearing out of the bedroom, fast, would’ve got me giggling; but now I realised – occupying as I did a wholly absurd world – that I hadn’t been giggling at the absurdity of the world before I died, only wearily sniggering at my own.
At the PD meetings the ‘old-timers’, those who’d been dead for upwards of five years, counselled against getting involved in relationships during your first year of death. This was absurd, for if there was one thing the dead did even more than the living it was form relationships. Or rather – they moved in. A couple of dead oldsters would shack up with a dead middle-aged person in order to save on rent and keep up appearances. The dead middle-aged would take in the young dead for the same reason. It wasn’t uncommon to see two middle-aged dead people walking along swinging a dead nonagenarian between them. In Dulston a second childhood really meant something. You might’ve thought the family units formed by these convenient liaisons would reek of oddity – not so. These shared households only brought home to me that blood had always been the most arbitrary basis upon which to order your emotional life.
What the dead discussed most was the past and the future. This explained their defiant lack of interest in Dulston, its environs and organisation. Dulston – which Phar Lap called a ‘cystrict’ – was as uncommonly like the adjacent districts as its residents were like theirs. Despite being deceptively thin – no more than a sliver of brick, masonry, concrete and tar Dulston never felt the bustle of the living city that surrounded it. At night, after we dead were all safely tucked up inside, watching our own horror shows, we’d hear the living zipping through on the stunted stretches of arterial road that traversed our neighbourhood. If they did chance to stop, what did they find? Nothing much. A gas-station forecourt drugged with its own fumes, an all-night zoo store where the keeper cowered behind bars, a hooker selling her sad snatch on the corner of a council estate.
Drivers did pull over occasionally, by night and in the day. They bought petrol, groceries and forlorn fucks, for the most part never knowing what macabre exchanges they’d transacted. The live johns were numb to the dead hookers’ insubstantiality. But the dead also refused to lie down under it. We rebelled and manifested ourselves as we actually were. The poor, sluttish women, dead from poverty and drugs, too many pregnancies and too much Valium, would appear in broad daylight at Dulston Junction, with their aborted foetuses floating around their lowering brows, bloody umbilici festooning their nylon housecoats. The suicides would gape their double mouths in the faces of lost travelling salesmen, or flash their crimson bracelets, or display the impacted sludge of their lower bodies, as snail-like they dragged themselves around the block. The murdered would exhibit their slicedup, shot-through and bludgeoned bodies. The diseased would parade their chancres. The heart-attack victims would convulse and fall, convulse and fall, convulse and fall– an endless ring-a-ring-a-corpses. We all fall down.
How did the living react to this drop-in centre of annihilation? Why – they went crazy, natch. They were institutionalised, got religion, or left the country. They took the antics of the beyond for what they were, an eruption from a fifth, hideous dimension always suspected by them, but never witnessed. They were haunted. I very quickly saw, as I wandered the streets of Dulston, that everything I’d ever heard while living and disbelieved – about headless riders, or women in white, or screaming banshees – had been only the slightest of references to this disgusting limbo. As for the mentally ill, with their tales of alien invasion, conspiratorial control, and diabolic discorporation – they’d been telling the absolute fucking truth.
When alive I’d fought hard to ward off the darkness at the edges of my sight; the fear of my own mind’s lintel collapsing, as I hovered on the doorstep between home and the world, claustro and agro. There’d been times when the phobias were so intense I could hardly withstand the sensation of being claustrophobic within the confines of my own fucking head. A little dolly-woman staring out through eyeholes cut by sadistic brain surgeons. Then I’d flee to the musty sheds of Christ, the cricket pavilions of the Lord. And how suitable it was that the English should find themselves sucking on such a meagre, rational, half-boiled sweetie of solace. My excuse was that I enjoyed the choir, or the admired the artwork, or found the atmosphere calming. But most English churches have none of these, and the raw fact of the matter is that I was fucking afraid of the shit inside my head. Desperately afraid it would get loose and overwhelm me. It was small satisfaction to discover I’d been right all the time. Right all along.
I didn’t see a great deal of Phar Lap after the first PD meeting. He told me, ‘I got work t’do, same as you, Lily-girl. I don’t pick up no sit-down money. I go walkabout for new prospects, y’see, yeh-hey?’ What these prospects were I didn’t discover for a long time. Phar Lap commended me to the good offices of the personally dead. ‘These babas’ll teach you all y’need t’know, girl. Keep goin’ t’ the meetings. Speak up about yer own guna – they’ll understand. There’s nothing more I can tell you fer now, hey-yeh? No-thing.’
At the meetings I blurted out that I had an insuperable urge to attend my own cremation – to watch myself burn. ‘Go,’ said the personally dead, ‘go, but don’t expect it to do anything for you in particular. Neither to resolve the past, nor to make this purgatory any more pleasant.’ Death was unable to effect any closure.
I took the tube from Highbury and Islington, and changed to the Northern Line at King’s Cross, where, if I chose to see them, astonishing ghosts of human toast haunted the escalators. I sat on an Edgware Branch train to Golders Green, watching the reflections of the wan metropolitan faces, elongated into absurdity in the window opposite. On the dark walls of the tunnel, high-voltage tendons of cable flexed below the city. As it burrowed north from the West End I could feel the building-up above my head until, at Hampstead, its great clay weight oppressed me. Still– en route to my own funeral and I was experiencing only mild claustrophobia. Fantastic when alive I wouldn’t’ve dreamed of travelling on the tube at all unless I were drunk, or sedated, or both.
Then the longest stop of all, from Hampstead to Golders Green; from the old and intelligent to the new and smart; from the villas on the hill to the chalets in the valley. Golders Green, where short-ass nouveau riche women of unspeakable vulgarity, their shnozzles just visible above the dash, piloted their husbands’ Mercedes with absurd legerdemain along the Golders Green Road. Treating the huge Kraut saloons as if they were ten grand’s worth of bumper car. Then oblique-parking them and pedicuring into Lindys patisserie, or Grodzinski’s bakery, or some other calorie shack, to stuff themselves plumper. And it was like this in the sixties! Only twenty years after their fucking mothers and fathers had been slimmed down for the ovens.
I always hated Golders Green. I’d take the kids there to see a movie at the Ionic cinema, but only if it wasn’t on anywhere else. Because I hated to be in that press of Jewry, all munching and gabbing and shmoozing their way through the ads, the support – and then the fucking feature. Ferchrissakes! It was as if they were in fucking shul! I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t hide my racial self-disgust from my mongrel kids. So, once we’d got out of the joint, I’d swear we�
�d never go there again. That if they wanted to see another movie there they’d have to get their fucking father to take them.
I’d hold out for a month or two, or even three. Then on a dull winter evening we’d be driving back from shopping in town, grinding up the Finchley Road in whichever clunker it was the Yaws family had that year, when the thought of getting home to Daddy with his goyish air of pernicious, pipe-and-slipper anaemia would become too much for me. I’d find myself stopping outside Bloom’s, ushering the girls in, waiting in the homey-smelling takeout area, while the old shlepper in the stained white coat made up our order of salt-beef sandwiches and latkes. Even the food at Bloom’s – where, let’s face it, the bland were feeding the bland – tasted exotic in this city of carbohydrate. Then we’d go sit in the jalopy and gobble it up. I’d tell Natty and Charlie how fucking brilliant our people were. How we’d produced all the great thinkers of this century and the last. How even Bloom’s was full of wayward Einsteins, Freuds and Marxs, waiting table for food money while they finished their PhDs. And how when our dander was up we could hold off an entire army of Yaws and his Latin-conjugating ilk for months at a time, until we committed fucking suicide rather than surrender.
It was utterly unchanged – Golders Green. The same Becks stood becking in the station forecourt, about whatever nonsense was in their heads. I turned away from them, and under a London sky with superb vertical hold – a static greyish band below a whitish static band – walked north along the Finchley Road past the uncomfortable semis, squatting behind their prickly, privet barriers, to Hoop Lane.