How the Dead Live

by Self, Will

  It’s not easy being good, so the goodies eventually retreated to the kitchen, where they propped their comfortable rumps against the range and the worktop, while they deliberated on what to do about Natty – who so clearly was out of control. (Although, in truth, she had always been; it was just that now, given Mumu’s demise, they’d decided to take responsibility for it. Big booboo.)

  ‘I’ve already taken two days off from the office,’ said Richard, his face pinker than ever, his sandy hair ruffled with emotion. ‘I mean,’ he hurried on, ‘not that that means anything.’

  But he needn’t have worried about upsetting his wife; Charlotte had had quite enough of her mother’s implosive death, and didn’t like the fall-in either. ‘Darling, I know what you’re thinking, but Esther won’t stay for long, she’ll want to get back to New York as soon as possible – but Natasha we’ll have to deal with. I think we should ask her to stay here, she’s got to kick the drugs. I spoke to Dr Steel about her and he had a word with a colleague. They’ll have a bed for her on the psychiatric ward at the Royal Free if we can hold on to her for a day or so.’

  ‘D’you think that’s wise? D’you think she’ll do it?’

  ‘It’s worth a try – we have to try. I’ve called Miles as well and he’s coming over – perhaps he can persuade her?’

  Two hours went by, and forty-odd butts accumulated before Esther and Natasha went to lie down in adjoining bedrooms. The heroin had leached through Natasha’s system – and the cocaine was long gone. But it didn’t matter any more which end of the narcotic seesaw she was perched upon – she still lurched in short arcs of hysteria. Natasha was broke, of course, or she wouldn’t have dreamed of staying in this centrally-located country house hotel, with its plump, square flunkeys. True, Russell might well have scored for her, or given her tick if he was holding, but lately he’d been making odder demands upon her. Demands so peculiar that Natasha couldn’t get stoned enough to fulfil them without feeling very bad. She knew that she ought to get away from her sister’s, that soon she’d be immobilised, that the seesaw was rocking to rest.

  She lay down on the Elverses’ brass one-and-a-half-size bed. She squirmed under the quilt and immediately was concussed by unconsciousness. Smack – such a good word that; such an apt example of psychic onomatopoeia. Natasha Yaws, smack-head. So true, so just.

  When Natasha awoke, seven hours later, in the early evening, Esther had already gone. Esther, a fleet old bird, winging her way back to the US of A. Ageless Esther Bloom, her stem of a body propped up in a padded first-class vase, on a British Airways flight out of Heathrow (‘the best bit of Britain so far as I’m concerned – yooknowhatlmean?’). Esther, watered by passing hostesses and leafing through the current number of Fortune, was already putting the last few days behind her. She’d take time out to process her little sister’s death when she’d dealt with her broker, her accountant, her tenants, her friends, the committee at the Met, her pet dogs, her tame faggots, and all the rest of the Manhattan menagerie which kept her from brooding. Kept her alive, in the present, not sunk in the hopeless past like her sad Lil, not endlessly reliving it and chewing it over, as if there were any way to change it. What could that provoke? Only a trip and a tumble, down the basement steps and into the jumble of memory. Their parents – their fucking parents. Ach! Such pretentiousness! Such stupid foolery! Denying their race, their religion, their debts, their lies – and for what? Doodly-squat. And Lily, sprinting through life bearing the eternal flame of internalised race hatred. Carrying it all the way to this grey, wet little island, where she ended up the widow of some dumb Englishman. Now she was dead herself, poisoned by her own incompatibilities.

  Lily had always joined in with this idiocy – but not Esther. Esther went to shul, gave money to B’nai B’rith, visited Israel, wailed at the wall, screamed at Yad Veshem. Esther didn’t simply resign herself to being Jewish – she accepted it. Lily had nearly always tried to hide it from the world. ‘If no one knows,’ she told Esther one time when they were still young enough to speak seriously with each other, ‘I won’t have to react when some swine makes an anti-Semitic remark.’ Esther had roared with laughter. ‘If anyone makes an anti-Semitic remark around me I’ll smack him – or her – in the keister!’ And now Lily was dead of all that ulcerating self-hatred, those phobias, those useless husbands, these nudnik kids – and Esther? Esther was going to live for ever – so she lit another Kool and stayed that way.

  Miles and Natasha sat and wept apart in the second spare bedroom of the Elverses’ apartment. Despite the late hour, Molly, the Filipino peon, was vacuuming up after Esther, trying to eradicate her smoke-cured, ageless air. JAP jerky. Through the wall came the distinctive noises of someone throttling a robot.

  The two cried apart – because they couldn’t do anything much together any more. Not with Natty like this, skinny, scabby, sweaty; her black hair stuck down on one side of her pillow-creased face and flying away from the other; her nails bitten to the quick – the only thing that prevented her from picking at the sores on her legs. What a turn-off! Or so Miles, hypocritically, thought. For, in truth, he’d made love to her for the first time when she was precisely like this – and done it many times since. He’d pressed his soap-smelling, nicely compact, firmly muscled body against this scabrous streak, and hoped that at each contact point his own vitality would flow into her. He pushed himself up and moved over her with his electric mouth, pulsing between the abrasions, jolting to the side of wounds, conducting into her cunt.

  Natasha would lie almost inert during these Frankensteinian sessions, only shocked a little by her own tardy orgasm. For what was Miles for, anyway – save this: to make love to her, to admire her, to bail her out of jail, or the clutches of other men, or the sludge of gutters. It was his métier, his expertise. He’d been trained up to it from birth. No, with Miles Natasha would allow herself to be made love to, like the exquisite mechanism she might’ve been, had it not been for this dynamo of self-indulgence which was her animating principle. And for a big-cocked, hard-assed, cranked-up, solid fuck? For that she went to Russell. Russell who, with his pimp-size prick and his own implausible good looks – hawkish face, olive skin, chestnut locks – was in every way a match for Natty. Russell with his endless patter, his casual anarchism, his plangently sexy amorality, his violence, his madness, his not-being-nice-Milesness.

  So, Miles cried for himself and Natasha cried for herself, and eventually Miles broached the subject of his quest into the bedroom. ‘Natty, Charlie and Richard and I – ‘

  ‘What?’ Quick off the mark there – such consensus was, in and of itself, deeply suspicious.

  ‘We wondered if you might consider going in for a detox now . . . now Mumu’s gone?’ Good way of putting it, that, for Natasha is far too selfish to think of doing anything for herself. She’s entirely centred in what others might do for her. But Miles is too thick to leave it there – he pressed on regardless of her dangerous glare. ‘Charlie’s spoken to the Royal Free, they’ll give you a bed – your own room, even. It’ll be a good detox – not too fast. Nothing heavy . . .’

  He tailed off because she’d uncoiled her feline length from the bed, avoided his entreating arm and was bending down, groping for her black plastic ankle-boots, her little black bag full of crumpled foil and wads of tissue paper.

  ‘Natty – what’re you doing?’ Dolt – wasn’t it obvious?

  ‘Getting the fuck out of here . . . this-this clinic.’

  ‘Natty . . . Natty . . .’ Natty what? Dread? He was such a twerp. ‘You’re in no fit – ‘ He didn’t have to go on, for she was performing the end of his sentence by doubling up and retching. Her forehead was braced against the carpet, her fingers scrabbling and clutching at the pile, as if she’d been taken with the plague in the very act of fitting the fucking thing. ‘Oh Natty – Natty my love.’

  She allowed him to help her back into the soft, soiled bed. Allowed him to smooth the henna-tipped bangs away from her knotted forehead
and wipe the sticky slick from her sharp chin. She moaned, ‘I can’t, Miles, I can’t I jus’ can’t . . . specially without Mumu . . . ach-oh– eurgh I can’t. I’ve got to have something – anything – I’ve gottoo, dammit, gottoo!’ Natasha Yaws yowled and yelled.

  Miles proved himself at the very moment when he was physically resisting her to be entirely conducive, completely deserving of what Fate would deal him out. ‘Natty, if you’ll stay here at Charlie and Richard’s you can have this – and these.’ Yup, he had some drugs. One hand came up out of the pocket of his uniform black jacket, in it a little brown jug of methadone. Crazy drug – crazy boy. A heroin-substitute, named Dolophine for the Fuhrer when it was synthesised by the Germans during the war. So, Miles medicated the emaciated Jewish junky with special Nazi drugs. Swiss ones too, for in his other hand appeared a littler vessel of Valium. Resourceful Miles had bought one from his mother, Isis, and the other from the junky who lived upstairs from him. He hated doing it. Not.

  Natasha snatched them both, hunched to protect her supply, unscrewed caps, washed down pill with potion, dropped the bottles clinking back over the side of the bed, then subsided on to the pillows.

  Miles looked on, pretending to be aghast. He muttered while he stroked her hair. ‘That’s twenty mils.’ He knew the jargon – well he would, wouldn’t he? Nice boy, in his last year of law studies, although he’d be righteously fucked if the powers that be were to find out about this. ‘It should hold you for twenty-four hours – and now you’ll sleep. I’ll get you more, Natty, but only if you’ll stay here, see the people at the Royal Free on Friday. Please?’ He didn’t have to go on with this ordinary pleading, because Natasha was sleeping, or pretending to sleep, or ignoring him, or all three.

  Near to sleep, Natasha Yaws was delivered from the awful death of her beloved Mumu. She escaped the Furies of her own addiction, avenging, implacable, disputatious. She lay quiet, as the drugs percolated her raddled young body, turning filthy blood to distilled water, distressed flesh to waxy purity. She waited for the tearful irritation – which made her feel like smacking nice Miles in his pretty face – to turn to the tearful impersonation of love. And in these moments of halfsleep, with the narcotic undertow pulling her out, Natasha became the person she would’ve liked to be, her beauty as yet unmarred, thin and young. Sexy, yes, but not the Charybdis of venality she’d fast become, sucking men down into her, wrapping her long legs around their waists as many times as there are carnal sins to commit. Simply sexy. And free – not free like a loosed horse, or a runaway train, but capable of sustained and voluntary action.

  Capable of the concentration, application and creativity required to paint the vast and splendidly-achieved frescos that processed behind her eyelids as she sank into sleep. Frescos on the ceiling – it was always these that Natasha dreamed of painting, because all her ambitions were approached from a recumbent posture. Yet, what frescos! What a teeming new mythology! What boldness of composition! Sureness of line! Brightness of colour! Such a shame they always faded as she metabolised, until, on cracking her crusty eyes, Natasha was confronted yet again with the painfully uncertain, cramped line drawings of her very real life. The old realism.

  Dusk fell and Natasha wheezed on the pillow. Miles moved a high-backed armchair to the window. As the sun set over the arboreal park, and the gibbons in the zoo – now denied human subjects – impersonated each other, he took from his case a book which nearly filled it. He resumed reading where he’d left off early that morning, about the law of tort.

  The cremains of Lily Bloom sat in a bronze plastic, outsize Nescafe jar, in a fitted cupboard, in an alcove, in the Elverses’ front room. Lily had always wanted to live between here and Oxford Street. It’s the only part of London that has anything approaching a grid system, a tiny gauze patch of American antisepsis set in the infective core of the Great Wen. Mindjew, the ironic recursion of the past few days wouldn’t have been lost on her. Her cadaver carted north to Kentish Town, filed in a giant desk drawer at the undertakers’ for two days, then carted further north, then burnt, and now the residuum carried unsteadily back here, to within carping distance of the Royal Ear. Yes, Lily Bloom appreciated an irony – arguably she moved to England mainly in order to experience its green, unpleasant irony at first hand. To play out her overdramatised internal conflicts in a theatre where she could be assured that the audience were laughing at her heartily. Behind their hands.

  Given that the Elverses’ Cumberland Terrace apartment is on a twenty-five-year, Crown lease, it’s not quite as dear as you might expect. But still, this is 1988, and London’s funicular property prices are at the peak of one of their ten-year wind-ups. A hundred per cent has been put on the value of every bothy in the burg. So, given the settlement of that troublesome tax bill which – along with Minxie – gnawed her in her last days; and given the settlement of death duties; and given her mortgage on the flat in Bartholomew Road; and given the fact that she could never, ever save, Lily could just about afford the cupboard her cremains are to tenant for the next five years. In death there are smaller premises, littler ironies.

  Through in the master bedroom the Elverses were having sex. This was no joyful affirmation that they were alive while the greyish Nescafé next door was dead, nor was it a defiant assertion of marital fidelity in the faithless faces of the pair in the second spare bedroom. No, this was having sex, owning sex in the same way that the Elverses possessed two hundred Waste of Paper outlets, three homes (London, Norfolk and the Algarve), four cars (his Mercedes, her Volvo, their Range Rover and the little Seat down south), fifteen notable canvases (Jasper Johns, Lichtensteins, even a Warhol – their fresh-bought modernism was conservatively American), twentyodd minor prints, and lots and lots and lots of chattels. The Elverses had more than one mug tree – that said it all.

  So, the Elverses, as plumped-up as their 100% pure eiderdown, forty-tog, emperor-size duvet, disported themselves on their daddy-and-mummy-bear bed, desperate to become a daddy and a mummy. They possessed the sexual act in the way that they might wish to have a baby bear securely, cherishing it, nurturing it, raising it up, giving it everything it might conceivably need in the way of porridgy caresses. Charlotte – as, I daresay, has been remarked – was a fine figure of a woman, broad-beamed, pink from nape to base, big-breasted, saucer-nippled, blonde-maned and square-shouldered. And Richard was big enough to fold all this motherly potential in his own heavily-freckled bulk, his own white and ginger enormity.

  Richard Elvers, curiously enough, even had the same Yaws mouth as Charlotte, the same red turbine of a kisser. Observing them sucking saliva in and out of each other made it difficult not to fear for any progeny, who might well have this characteristic reinforced by heredity. It was only early evening and here they were possessing sex. But then Charlotte had researched thoroughly and discovered that there could never be enough sex when it came to manufacturing more Elverses. That Richard’s vas deferens –like a wrinkled, brown udder-would fill up with more little Elverses the more it was milked.

  Moreover, that morning Charlotte had gone for her weekly reflexology session. Her feet were palped by an old Kiwi hippy in Harley Street, so that her endocrine system was, it was to be hoped, in as much harmony as the flower pensioner’s stock portfolio. Not to mention the herbs Charlotte regularly grazed on, and the flower decoctions she regularly slurped up, and the essential oils she regularly sniffed, and the needles that regularly riddled her – all in the service of regular ovulation. No wonder they went about the business of this regular sex meeting with a specific agenda. Specific because it fell within the three days that Charlotte knew – by dint of keeping a very regular cycling diary, taking her temperature frequently, and watching her cervical mucus like a peculiar hawk – were most likely for ovulation. And specific because their movements were co-ordinated so as to discharge the maximum number of elvers, from his Sargasso into her internal waterways.

  It didn’t matter if Charlotte went on top – which she mostly di
d – it was still essential that she stay still once they had come. And come they must. Orgasms had to be achieved like the sales targets throughout the two hundred card houses of their paper imperium. Orgasms must also be as simultaneous as possible, and consummated not with a second try – fatal that, over-stirring the generative broth – or a clammy cuddle, but with Charlotte pancake-flat on the mattress, with her feet higher than her head. Every possible natural force was brought to bear on this natural process – even gravity itself.

  Richard did his best too. Not that there was much he could do. His was not a frame that took tight, hip-hugging briefs anyway. He was to boxer shorts and pleated cords as to a baggy manor born. He cut his commitments back to the bare minimum, slackening his grip on the business so there was plenty of time in hand for regular sex. Regular sex and, unfortunately, regular snacks. Not that either Elvers thought of their biscuit-barrel blow-outs as regular. No – they were highly irregular, unscheduled, unpremeditated – but they happened often. Even if only a fraction of the space in the fridges, cupboards and freezers in their three homes was filled, there was still enough delicatessen pigswill to fatten several porkers. The Elverses, for such plump presences, had an immaterial way of absorbing nutriment. Their big hands blurred from plate to mouth. They didn’t know what they were doing themselves. Otten, they only realised they’d had yet another cookie-monstering when they rolled over in the fluffy bed and felt the shingle of crumbs grate beneath their stranded bodies. You could only feel sorry for them – or not sorry at all.

  Natasha was kept in a chemical straitjacket for the next few days. It was murder on the Elverses’ furnishings and on their nerves, already frayed by death. Natasha couldn’t figure out why it was she felt so crappy, despite the little brown jugs that Miles brought by. But then she didn’t know that the cunning, legalistic fellow was watering each draught down more and more. Natasha dragged one of the portable Trinitrons into the spare room and got it into bed with her. She yanked a phone in as well, and ran up the bill calling her one remaining friend, who lived in Australia – natch. She burnt holes in the carpet, the duvet and the sheets with her ceaseless smoking. She raided Richard’s drinks cabinet and downed cherry brandy, advocaat, and Chartreuse – then puked on the pricey Persian kilims. She wouldn’t bathe. She prevented Molly from cleaning the apartment by engaging her in endless disquisitions on domestic exploitation. She’d tolerate Miles’s presence at night, but only if he sat in the chair by the window. She would’ve had him pacing up and down the Outer Circle if she could’ve.