How the Dead Live

by Self, Will

  It was the third day after my death and there I was, resurrected outside the Express Dairy. I didn’t know how I knew it was the right time, but I knew. I hadn’t wanted to go to my wake, organised by Mrs Elvers, natch, with Esther in self-pitying attendance, together with a slew of the English indifferent. Why would I wish to be present at the start of my own forgetting? No, it was the cremation I cared about. I had to make sure the coffin was of the cheapest possible manufacture, the undertakers of the sloppiest deportment, the hearse a Yawsmobile. I wanted to creep round the back, into the room where the conveyor belt disappeared the coffin. I needed to see the crematorium thieves rip my corpse out of its two-hundred-quid box. I needed to see them rip off my estate at the same time as I quit it. I’d spent years being appalled at the industry of death – I didn’t want to miss out on these gonifs doing their very worst.

  It wasn’t like that at all, though. Eleven in the morning on a gloomy Tuesday, and the gentle swoop of dull, moist tarmac empty save for the intermittent swishes of Volvos, Volkswagens and Mercedes, carrying monied matrons the long mile from the Hampstead Garden Jewburb to Golders Green for a wallet workout. Sodden leaves underfoot, and up above the square chimney of the crematorium supporting the sky with a swelling column of fleshy smoke, while sucking the greyness into its redbrick Lutyens heart. A paradoxical brightness illuminated the Jewish cemetery behind me. I laughed mirthlessly to think of all the fools who’d paid top dollar, imagining they’d end up safely ensconced here, when the prevailing wind meant they were destined for a reverse diaspora after death, back to the East End.

  Strange to relate, Natasha Yaws came alone, from the opposite direction to me. From the Hampstead Garden Suburb. Why, I couldn’t imagine. It didn’t seem a likely place for her to have scored. Scored she must have, because it was early for her, and if she didn’t exactly look perky, she was at any rate composed. I followed her on in, keeping a good fifty paces behind. I had already been well enough schooled by Phar Lap in the arts of exiguousness to know that she wouldn’t see me if I didn’t want her to. How like childhood death seemed, involving as it did such games of grandmother’s footsteps.

  Natasha hadn’t had to consider whether it was appropriate to wear black for this human barbecue – because she always did. Even so, I was faintly pleased to see that she had her best black on today. A three-quarter–length black silk skirt, flared from the knee; a black silk blouse with an exaggeratedly long, pointed collar; her good, black chenille woolly; a long black scarf; and a high-waisted, full-length black overcoat – this latter essential on an almost balmy morning in early May, to keep her junky chill wrapped up tight. It was an outfit I’d bought for her, which explained its smart co-ordination. Natasha added the mores of a beautiful woman to the messy lessons of her father. And anyway, for years now she’d been in the habit of shooting up everything she got from Marks & Spencer. She’d go in with her pal Russell, boost a load of stuff, then take it back for a fifty per cent refund. M&S had the best returns policy of any of the high-street chains. Those Jews! They understood that it was far better to roll with a problem like this. So, fifty per cent Jew, fifty per cent refunded – that was my Natty.

  As she clacked by on the worn heels of her cheap, plastic ankle-boots I saw that she had reasonably presentable black tights – or at least not running at the knee. She asked a lingering, baggy-suited man which chapel. The sepulchral underling looked at her with sarcophagus eyes. She tripped on. I followed.

  A hearse stood by the doors to the chapel. It looked bog-ordinary to me. Goody. The coffin was a plain enough deal as well. There was no toilet-seat wreath, or trumped-up tribute. Not even a loose bunch of my namesake. As we stared, four hirelings dragged the thing out and oomphed it up on to their unsteady shelves of shoulder. Who’d’ve thought the old bag had such weight in her? They shuffled a little in their square-toed, Freeman Hardy & Willis, orthopaedic-lookalike shoes. They adjusted the coffin with their ugly hands, bracing each other with thick arms held across heavy-set backs. Then plodded forward. Ah, the leaden death march!

  ‘Goin’ to the chapel and we’re gonna get mar-ried!’ the lithopedion went off in my coat pocket. I damped it down, padded forward, slid into one of the pews at the back. Natty stood two pews from the front, wavering in the narrow aisle as the undertakers undertook to dump my coffin ceremoniously on the plinth at the front, which I knew from previous visits concealed the conveyor belt.

  Then nothing. Or, as Phar Lap would phrase it, ‘no-thing’. Meaning a great desert of negativity, an ultimate tundra, a vanishing-point veldt. No readings, no music, no flowers, no weeping, no no-thing. The undertakers stood, ranged across the front of the chapel, displaying to the ungregation their four elephant asses. After a while one of them came back to where Natty stood and said something in her ear; she murmured in return. The lift attendant of death strode forward across the lobby and without bothering to conceal his action hit the concealed button. The conveyor belt jolted, took up the sad slack, and propelled it offstage left. Exeunt.

  Natasha came past me fast. All I saw were her pin-prick pupils, her paper-pale skin, her ineffable cheekbones, and she was gone. What did she see? No-thing. I waited ‘til the undertakers had passed, rubbing their hands, getting out their packs of Benson & Hedges, then walked forward, up the aisle and round the back of the belt, to where I found the expected door.

  They say it helps people to see the bodies of those they’ve loved one final time before disposal. Helps to confirm beyond any doubt that the dead are dead. Deanimated. Gone. Perhaps it would’ve helped if I’d seen the rip-off I’d anticipated. My corpse helped out of its pine jacket and speedily dispatched; the cheapo coffin shoved straight back in the hearse and returned to the showroom, like a used car with a number of careless owners. As we all know, there’s nothing more comforting than being confirmed in one’s long-held prejudices. I was out of luck. Backstage two men in the khaki overalls affected by Englishmen on the calmer shores of manual labour checked the seals, the paperwork, the dials on the big chundering oven; then, without even adjusting its position on the conveyor belt, opened the doors, hit another button, and off it went. It, you note. Not I – it.

  Had I expected anyone else to be at the bonfire? To wave sparklers of feeling about, let off fireworks of emotion? No, not particularly. Although I was surprised at Mr and Mrs Elvers’s non-attendance. I supposed they must have had an important meeting – they were that kind of people. Meetings for them were sumptuary affairs. Such that, were either of them to be asked at around teatime if they wanted a slice of cake, they’d reply, ‘No thanks, I had an important meeting at lunchtime.’ Both of them were growing fat on important meetings; and as time went by, and the Waste of Paper chain grew and grew, a crumpled streamer of premises wreathing the office world, they grew fatter still.

  No, it was left to Natty to mourn in the now sunny morning. Under the plane trees with their dancing leaves, amid the cherry and apple blossom, looking imposingly beautiful, ridiculously Russian. She dallied outside a small exterior office, which, like everything else there, was solidly built with dark Dachau brick. As the undertakers were stubbing out their cigarettes and swinging into their hearse, one of them paused, a crease neatly slicing his ham’s brow. Was he thinking of consoling Natty, or hitting on her? Or both – she was that kind of a girl. He thought better of it and shuddered.

  And Natty, did she cry? Cry she didn’t – and this did rile me. She’d cried at fucking Yaws’s funeral. Admittedly she was only ten then – but still, her own fucking mother. Her Mumu. The fount of her own incomparable narcissism, her wayward charm, her rampant needs. How come she didn’t shed at least one, meagre, drip of grief? Couldn’t she wring out her emotional wet blanket of a character just that little bit more? I mean, I know she was sad all right, sad for her own fucking self. Miserable as hell. Desolate beyond belief. Or was she too like Yaws? Another fucking Yaws, with a fresco of his face painted on the wet plaster inside of her own. So it seemed.


  After half an hour they brought her an urn. Well, not exactly an urn, more of a giant, bronze-coloured, plastic Nescafé jar, complete with screw top. She cradled this bulky thing in her skinny, shot-to-shit arms, her shabby gloves grasping the lid of her dead mummy of a baby. Then she turned and walked away, back up Hoop Lane, still dry-eyed.

  Now I concede, the smack must’ve stunned her along with the shock of it all. And having to do it on her own little lonesome had to’ve put a spanner in her Fabergé works. But even so – not to cry at all. Well, this did cut through my colourless, odourless, insensate stupidity of indifference. I tried rage on for size, like a hat, and it nearly fitted. I pronounced an anathema on my junky daughter. I lit a ciggie and, inhaling, remembered the words of a more famous puffer than I. Camus, dead at forty-seven in an auto wreck. ‘If a man does not cry at his mother’s funeral, the world will chop his head off.’ Quite so, Bert, quite so. And as for a daughter well, I shuddered to think. I shuddered to think.

  Christmas 2001

  I shudder now. It’s cold in here. For some reason the Estate Agent opened the window in the kitchenette before it all happened. Before he lay down in slow stages. I stand in here hungry, cold, and not a little weepy, looking up at the underside of the leaves of the hideous spider plant. How can you tell that a property’s empty? Because the spider plants have taken it over, colonised it with their sharp fronds. A very domesticated day of the triffid. Perhaps the spider plant will take over this property, now vacant save for little me? Proving that this was no symbiosis on their part – squatting in the corner looking fucking ugly, in return for three drops of Baby Bio and a few shaky dribbles of tepid tap water – but a rampant, parasitic war. Spider plants against all the rest.

  Naturally it was the Ice Princess who did the watering, tending this appropriately ugly garnish with one of her characteristically absurd attempts at housewifery. In a while I’ll crawl up and take a look at her – but not now. Now it’s sufficient for me to stand here, under the spider plant, in the corner. If I turn round I can observe the ganglia of cabling sprouting from the back of the television, which once yoked it to the amplifier, the CD player, the tape deck, the record deck and the speakers. All the technically musical appurtenances of this most unmusical of households. This gravely quiet household. It’s amazing they managed to hang on to these black-box recorders for as long as they did, but they’re gone now– and so are their sounds. The least the Ice Princess and her swain could’ve done would’ve been to put the television on.

  But then I was forgetting – there’s no electricity.

  Chapter Ten

  I’ve always managed to have a certain cold objectivity about my daughters, perhaps because of losing the loved son so early. And in the years following my own death I excelled myself. But then the perspectives afforded by my pulverised condition – the view from the Nescafé jar – supplemented my own Dulston prospect. Everyone who touched, or even beheld, that plastic pot of me, took a little bit away with them – a sarcastic smear of ash.

  Natasha Yaws strode with purpose up Hoop Lane on that balmy morning in early May 1988. She’d descended a scant hour before from a house on Central Square. An oblong-fronted, mock-Regency affair of fake solidity but credible rectitude, where she’d spend the latter hours of darkness sitting, half-naked, on the edge of a man’s marital bed. She’d fallen in with the man at Russell’s in Kentish Town, where he’d been scoring cocaine. His wife and kids were away, and the nameless, never-to-be-named man had taken Natasha home with him in the first, cocaine flush of certainty that he’d be able to fuck her. Natasha had been confident he wouldn’t be able to – and she’d been right. She needed to be north in the morning – so why not grab two kinds of lift?

  He’d lain in the marital bed casually rubbing the mush at his central juncture, while Phil Collins cried melodramatically from concealed speakers, feeling him coming in the air at night . . . O Lord!

  Natasha had sat on the edge of the big Slumberdown, half-naked to give the married man the necessary visual fodder, while she snarfed up the remains of his cocaine. She interspersed dirigible lines with chases of smack off of a generous foil hanky torn from a family-size roll, which she’d found in the immaculately white, family-size kitchen below. She’d only needed to strip off her funereal woolly and funereal blouse and funereal M&S black bra to give the man what he wanted. Ach! Such loveliness. Such high breasts, such long pink nipples, such a smooth back. Such a pity he was too far gone to see the raw pink pits in the crooks of her arms. Such a shame he wasn’t able to insist – once Rémy Martin and cocaine had done their work – on her removing the black skirt and the black tights, so that he might see the truly awesome mess she’d made of her nether regions with her sharp nails. Picking and slashing at her own long thighs, as she vented her hatred on half of herself. But he didn’t.

  Now, Nescafé urn in her arms, Natasha banged the brass knocker on the big white door and waited for the married man to come running. Which he did, jerked awake from spunk-sodden sopor with a sudden awareness of all that had transpired. Could it be wife and kids prematurely returned? He pulled on trousers, shirt, kicked drug trash under the bed, limp-staggered down to the front door. But no – it was the tart without a heart. ‘G’gaa wh’ what?’ he gagged on the fresh, spring air. He was confused; the last time he’d seen her she’d been half-dressed, now she was over – and holding a bizarre jar. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘My mother,’ she tartly replied. ‘I need a cab for her – and me. I’m going to Regent’s Park. Give me the money, call the cab. Don’t worry – I’ll wait on the bench over there.’ She pointed with a black-sheathed finger.

  Worry he might, at home in the mid-morning, his motherly neighbours perambulating around the square, greedy for indiscretion. ‘B-b-but . . . I thought . . . What?’

  ‘Don’t think – act,’ said Natasha. ‘Give me the money.’ He groped in his pocket and found a tenner. She swivelled on her synthetic heel, clacked across the road to the bench and sat down on it. He called the cab and as he dialled reflected, quite rightly, on his lucky escape.

  At the sumptuous Cumberland Terrace apartment an odd trio awaited Natasha: the two mortally tubby Elverses, and the eelishly thin, immortal Esther. They talked small while anticipating large events. They sat at a big, round, pine table, with big, round, china teacups in their hands. This was domesticity with a generous shot of growth hormone. They weren’t to be disappointed.

  The day before there had been a characteristic Natasha-Charlotte row, about the cremation. Esther had wanted to attend and Charlie didn’t see why she shouldn’t. Should-shouldn’t, shouldn’t-should had, in due course, given way to did-didn’t and the whole dull grind of inter-sibling abrasion. ‘If she goes, I don’t!’ Natasha plainted. ‘Mumu couldn’t stand her – and nor can I. Mumu would’ve hated her being there – and so would I. If she goes, I don’t – and you know what Mumu would think of that!’

  Charlie had sobbed on her husband’s upholstered shoulder, beat her plump fists on the arm of a candy-striped divan, reversed the procedure. She decided she couldn’t go without Esther. That she’d better sit it out and endure developments.

  Now, the entryphone burped and Charlotte went to spy on her sister courtesy of the CCTV system. How bad might she be looking? But of course, she was beautiful in her black pillbox hat – toque of the devil. The trio braced themselves as Natasha made her way up the wide, carpeted treads of the staircase. Richard Elvers said to his wife and her aunt, ‘Let’s humour her on this occasion, she’s been through a lot – we’ve all been through a lot as well.’ But there was nothing funny about Natasha and no point in humouring her.

  ‘Where the fuck were you – you bitch!’ Natasha spat at her sister from the door, ignoring her brother-in–law, blanking her aunt, and putting her jarred mother down on the thickly carpeted floor.

  ‘B-but you . . . You – ‘ such stuttering is all Natasha can elicit today.

  ‘I what? What?!’

&nb
sp; ‘You, you said you’d go alone. That you’d only go alone. I was only doing wh – ‘

  ‘What! What were you doing – sitting here! With that . . . that . . . bitch!’

  And you might’ve thought that Natasha had really gone too far now, if it wasn’t that this elegant, Nash apartment had – for the purposes of this shtick – become another waiting room on a timeless Ellis Island of crowded, over-emotional Jewry. Esther – far from swooning, or screaming, or otherwise manifesting Anglo-Saxon attitudes – sank quite disgracefully to the boards of her niece’s histrionic play. She trilled, ‘Oy! My faygeleh! My little Natty! Oy – come here darling, darling! Don’t cry so. Your mother dead – and you so sad, so sad.’ She sprightly rose, advanced towards Natasha and the two skinny Jews embraced, while the two tubby Gentiles looked on. What’s bred in the bony – and all that jazz. As if all this wasn’t bad enough – they smoked, Natty and Esther. They smoked big-time. Charlotte and Richard had given up. They were the kind of people who’d given up everything at least twice. Although when they’d taken it up again – in order to give it up once more – was difficult to ascertain. They’d given up smoking, drinking, eating and – the unkind might say – thinking. But they had to tolerate the junky and the aunty smoking two packs of Kools and drinking their tea, while goading each other into more emotionality than could rightly be contained even in this vast apartment, with its aircraft-hangar ceilings, its cliff-top cornicing, its massy mouldings, and its outsize eighties furniture arrayed in pastel riot. Esther and Natasha smoked and sobbed while the long, lipstick-stained butts piled up in the ashtray, building a burnt pagoda. Mumu’s cremains were tidied away.