How the Dead Live

by Self, Will

  Christmas 2001

  Even when adults make the greatest possible effort they can’t imitate the handwriting of small children – or our drawings either. They can’t fake the wonky strokes, botched loops and exaggerated serifs, nor the curiously prosaic orthography. It would be neat if adults, when imitating children’s handwriting, ended up with something that looked like children’s imitation of adult handwriting – but they don’t. There is no mirroring here – only a vast strangeness.

  When I was last a little girl, sitting in a hot cotton dress, under the hot, cotton-boll sun, I’d imitate adult handwriting with a bridge pencil in a green, narrow feint book. That’s what I remember – the stationery, the writing implements. The feelings are all gone. I’d loop the narrow loop clear along one line, then smear to the line below and loop all the way back again. My idea of adulthood was one of such loopy continuity. A crazy kabbala of curlicues. On that last goround I had all kinds ofideas about young children. When my own were small I thought them all little Wittgensteins, biding their quiet times scrawling in blue and brown notebooks, until they were ready to publish their philosophical investigations; garbling gobbledegook until they felt the need to translate it. This was, of course, entirely down to the influence of mother-hood and that overwhelming sense we all have of giving birth to a unique personality, a timeless individual. Adults who’re children giving birth to children who’re adults. Then, as they grew, and the hated lineaments oftheir forebears began to test the limits of my own forbearance, I concluded that I’d been wrong all along, and that babies were merely stupidity in waiting. Doubly dumb.

  Now I’m a child who’d like to imitate an adult’s writing. I’d like to be a little Scott marooned in this walk-up antarctic apartment. But these chilly mummies, lying at the bottom of their terminal moraines – they never had much time for writing. They were too busy failing life’s examination. I stalk the main room, wending my way from the horrible spider plant, around the entertainment stack, around the coffee table, past the stairs, into the defile between the shelving unit and the door to the kitchenette, but nowhere can I see so much as a half-chalk, or crushed crayon. And believe me, I’m well adapted for searching – ground-hugging as I am; I’m perfectly contrived for looking under furniture, or squeezing behind it. I once put considerable effort into designing ideal writing implements – now I can’t even find a real one.

  In the course of the first few stunned hours I spent alone here, I espied the handle-less mug on top of the shelf, inside the serving hatch, which makes this lower floor one no-so-roomy tomb. A present from Bangor – banged up here. Had it been an ironic gesture to buy this incurious curio, this souvenir ofnothing? I couldn’t give a flying fuck – but what I could see, from down here below (and now I see everything from below, everything soaring up and away from me; that’s what you get for a lifetime of looking down on people another, shorter lifetime of looking up at things), was that it held a stook of pens and pencils. It took me quite a while to get up on the divan, longer still to achieve, precariously, the back of it. I fell a number of times, bounced, rolled to rest among the highly flammable cushions. When at last I managed to knock the mug from the shelf, the implements nearly impaled me as they rained down, although none of them had a point – so the exercise was pointless.

  There was one, blue, Berol Rollerball, but it lacked its pillbox cap. The ink had long since evaporated, leaving only a trace in the ball itself. This I discovered when I began pretending to be an adult and tested it on the corner oflast week’s Cable Guide. This pretence was, of course, too good for a child. Kids don’t test pens – not little kids. They just pitch on in and draw a wonky house or a turd-bodied man. But I tested it – and the pen donated a few, short blueish grooves in the shiny paper, then gave out for ever.

  Anyway – what would I have written? This adult imitating a child imitating an adult. There’s nothing much to say except that I’m cold and I’m hungry and I’m lonely and I’m frightened. And what’s so fucking novel about that?

  Chapter Eleven

  Phar Lap introduced me to HeLa, which was really the only wall-covering adequate for a Dulston basement like mine. HeLa wasn’t a paint, or a wallpaper, or plaster, or even anything in the synthetic line, oh no. HeLa was the product of abnormal karyology. A vigorous cell line which had originated from the cervical tumour of one Henrietta Lacks, who died in Baltimore in 1951. That was a good year for innovations of a polymorphous nature – what with Disney releasing Alice in Wonderland. HeLa was immortal and grown in suspension cultures. The living used it for virus research – and it almost always produced tumours when injected into animals.

  We, the dead, had nothing to fear from this material, and it made a fine wall-covering: flexible, durable, and softly murmuring the words of the dying woman herself – ‘I’m cold, so cold . . . so very cold’ when it was hot, and ‘I’m burning up . . . I’m bur-ning . . . Oh, I’m so hot!’ when it was cold. I suppose the living would find this grotesque in the extreme, but then they can walk away from such horrors; until, that is, they tread on the rake of their own short-term view, and it smacks them in the face.

  There was a factory behind Dulston Junction which churned this stuff out, and Seth’s sold it in four-litre cans. Very popular it was too.

  In August, Dan Quayle was adopted as Bush’s vice-presidential running mate. This made me think of the little birds served up by Bunny Yaws, and all the weird dinner parties of the living, with their smells, burps, grunts and slurps. In November they decided the Turin shroud was a hoax, and at least five Dulston trainspotter types – personally known to me – claimed responsibility. They wished. Fuck it these characters also said they were behind the Stealth Bomber, the mobile phone, satellite television and several other technical innovations – none of them beneficial.

  In December there was an earthquake in Armenia. Many thousands dead – many more thousands mangled and starving. But this meant little to us; after all, they were unlikely to pitch up in Dulston, unless they had family here. The same month saw the Clapham rail crash and the Lockerbie bomb. A few of these people did come to us – burnt, crushed, bemused, and bearing a certain enviable cachet for having been so randomly and rapidly annihilated.

  In March of 1989, middle-class liberals in the cystrict were transfixed by news of the Tibetan riots. Tout le monde had street plans of Lhasa pinned to their cork boards so they could discuss the finer points of the action, while serving up rosti, masticating it forty times, spitting it out. The Hillsborough disaster claimed little attention in Dulston – after all it was an away match in every sense. Indeed, I’m ashamed to say that many dead I knew laughed uproariously when Kenny Dalglish, the manager of Liverpool Football Club, made his famously understated appeal: ‘I think everyone knows there have been a few problems. Please try to stay calm. We are trying to help you.’ But then even the most crushing events can acquire an unwarranted irony – when you’re dead.

  Ah me! Dulston days. The Tiananmen Square disturbances in June of ‘89 affected us not at all – but the same month, Freddy Ayer moved to Dulston. He pitched up in an elegant, ground-floor apartment, two blocks away from me, on Athens Square. Fucking academics, they always wind up with cushy berths. Ayer I’d met a couple of times when living – Yaws and he had been distant colleagues. I went to a kvass and goat-cheese party given for him by his death guide – an impressively furry shaman. I was always trying to wring some truths out of these reindeer-piss drinkers and shrunken-head merchants, but no dice. Everyone else’s death guides were just as uselessly enigmatic as my own. They all muttered about ‘go-rounds’, the ‘Clear Light’ and the ‘hooks and eyes of grace’, as if this jargon was self-evident.

  Of course, Freddy always thought all metaphysics was mumbo-jumbo, and death hadn’t thawed his notoriously glacial logic. He even suggested to me that it might be the case that all of my sense data since expiring – Lithy, Dulston, Phar Lap, the Fats – were no more than fragments of my disintegrating consciousnes
s. To give him his due, Freddy included his own manifestation, along with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, within the elastic confines of this set.

  When I pointed out that this left him with little more than a phantom existence of his own, Freddy giggled indulgently. He liked death because he could smoke again, and put his hands up young women’s skirts with total impunity. I figured that only such a relentless rationalist could gain any succour from these, the nervous tics of the afterlife. Still, it was fun to run into him from time to time, dapper, distinguished, wholly disengaged.

  Not so Ronnie Laing, who died in August of that year. His was a most unquiet spirit. Clad in tennis togs, swishing his racket, he wandered the streets of Dulston looking to kindle fights with everyone, but the dead – as we know – aren’t combustible. So he exercised his volleys of rage on the living, smashing into schizophrenia mere drivers-through, who’d never had a moment’s mental ill health in their lives. In death, I suppose, he did at least have the satisfaction of confirming his own prejudices. Or theories.

  We only had Larry Olivier for a few matinées before he transferred to the provinces. But you can bet every star-fucker in the whole miserable joint did their splendid best to try and rub up against his commanding nothingness. I stayed out of the crush bar. I’d other things to worry about. Work every fucking day – only the subtlety of my body made the slog tolerable. Two disruptive kids now, one a petrified club singer, the other an all too bumptious delinquent. Yup – that Rude Boy. He pitched up and acted out. He arrived barefoot and buck-naked from Heathrow, hula-hooped down the steps and came screeching into the basement, coonskin cap wagging, ass wiggling, all blacked up for the nigger game. Sure, I tried to placate him with glasses of milk, peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches, Captain America comics and Hostess Twinkies, but he wouldn’t wear them any more than he would clothes, or manners. Rude Boy put the mockers on any kind of social life I might’ve got going in my freshly HeLadecorated apartment. He was totally unmanageable.

  When the Marchioness sank in September of ‘89, Rude Boy had been around for nearly a year. Mostly I could get him to stay home with the Fats, who could cow him a little, with his own mother’s future bulk. But when the poor drenched kids were driven into Dulston by their death guides, there was Rude Boy to make their extinction thoroughly miserable, screaming, ‘Got a little muddy, did you – you fucking disco dancers! Not making so many waves now, are you!’ And natch – Lithy had to chime in with ‘All I need is the air that I breathe, and to love you!’ Not that Lithy was a sick or resentful creature itself, you understand; it was just that sibling thing, that badly mixed blood cocktail.

  I wanted the hell out of Dulston, where the new arrivals were mostly damp and déclassé. In August I wanted to be in NY, where Irving Berlin died, or in Paris where Simenon died, hobbling to Ennuyeuseville with his tailored trousers down round his ankles. He claimed to have had sex with ten thousand women, and I’d’ve liked to see him confronted by the stadiumful of drabs. Shit, I could’ve even handled Hollywood, where Bette Davis was headed when she died that fall. I’d always admired her – or rather her screen persona. But then if death taught you anything, it was that a screen persona was as good as any other. A cigarette held just so, a devilish smile, an inscrutable gaze. We lived through our mannerisms – and died through a lack of them.

  At a PD meeting I struck up an acquaintance with Clive, a man of my own agelessness. Clive was an investment banker, who hadn’t taken retirement until five years after he died. Like most of his ilk he remained stuffed with down payments. Through the winter of ‘89-’90 Clive and I began to go about together, taking long zigzagging walks which allowed us to escape the confused borders of the cystrict. Clive had a wry sense of humour and tolerated the Fats, Lithy, Rude Boy and all the rest of my death baggage, which tagged remorselessly along. ‘Ah!’ he’d exclaim as Rude Boy launched another assault. ‘The young Rosicrucian.’

  Clive’s own baggage was exactly that – baggage. For reasons I never discovered, he inhabited an austere, onebedroom apartment in a five-storey block on the Thebes Estate that was full of luggage – suitcases, holdalls, tool bags, attache cases and steamer trunks. This luggage moved around morning, noon and night, like the plastic counters of a 3-D puzzle. We’d be sitting, chatting, in one of the irregular spaces left between mounds of Gladstones and piles of kitbags, when one of the valises would ease out of its confinement, as if propelled from behind. Clive would grunt, ‘I think . . . ahem . . . Lily, we’d better vacate this area.’ So we would. He never explained what was doing it – and I never asked. Clive’s sparse hair and lustrous, gold-rimmed bifocals were in keeping with this rectitude. These qualities, which in a living Englishman would’ve been bloody irritating, I found curiously seductive in dear, dead Clive.

  During those days I often awoke in the small hours of the morning, having been visited by incubi as I slept. Comforting phantoms of unspeakably sweet, erotic loveliness, who hugged me to their ecstatic nothingness, clasped me to my own subtle bosom, breathing into my toothy mouth their gummy nullity. In the corner of the bedroom the Fats murmured, ‘Plump and ageing, plump and ageing, plump and ageing . . .’ while beneath the bed Lithy boogied and belted out, ‘I feel lo-o-ove / I feel love!’ and in the corridor Rude Boy romped, rending the air with his ranting.

  But I hadn’t slept, I was wide awake in the colourless indifference of death. Comfy Clive and I were having shady sex. Strange, isn’t it, how among the dead all sex is intercrural – a matter of penises placed in the crevices of the body, but never the vagina. Clive would put his stubby dick beneath my armpit, in the join of my thighs, between my breasts, or even lever apart two dewlaps of belly to interpose what might be him. It was as if, in attempting these contortions – which enabled us to see the afflicted portions – we believed we might achieve the least little bit of friction, of touch. But there was nothing, nothing nuzzling nothing.

  Clive squired me to dinner parties where the most elaborate meals were prepared by hosts and hostesses anxious for our approval. Such casseroles, brown, vinous and creamy. Such cuts of meat – pink and juicy! Oh, the colourful collations of the freshest vegetables, dew-selected from the finest greengrocers in the capital. And for what? For no-thing. They didn’t even smell. We guests played with our portions – for this was all we could do. One mounding his mashed potato into a semblance of a Rodin; another arranging her glazed carrots and broccoli florets so as to imply the garden at Giverny; and a third experimenting with lumps of meat, transplanting them into chewy torsos with gristly limbs and bitten-off heads. Grimly anticipating the coming decade’s conceptual excesses.

  That was Dulston dinner parties for you – wasteful, costly patty cake. If we were deluded enough, gripped by whatever tittle-tattle was doing the rounds, like the San Francisco earthquake – nothing that exciting could ever happen in London – or the death of Samuel Beckett – oh happy day or the last exit of Greta Garbo – alone at last, she wishes! then perhaps we’d make the effort to bite it to bits, chew it to shreds, ruminate it to slop, then shpritz it into an ever so echt pail. In March of 1990, Clive and I attended a dinner party for the late Jane Grigson where all her finest recipes were served up, barely played with and then speedily discarded. How we all tried to laugh, but that evening sick humour was lost on us, who were forever bulimic.

  Clive – God knows how – even knew racier characters. Dead yuppies who dwelled in the fashionably minimalist, rubber-floored, down-lit warehouse conversions in back of Sparta Road. These types served up newly dead cuisine. Tiny cuts of meat – the flensings of fidgeters; itty-bitty parings of root vegetables – thrown carelessly on to huge white plates, like the haymaking of elves.And over everything they drizzled jus, as if these stripes of edible semen could compensate for their own infertility, their own inability to eat; while at the same time proving that this – and they – were absolutely, totally, really, the dernier cri.

  We sat by abstract picture windows, on poufs among gays, while dea
d people dressed entirely in black – it really doesn’t suit us, does it? – chattered on remorselessly about the invasion of Kuwait, or the extinction of Leonard Bernstein, or the cultural relevance of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. After dinner, mirrors would be produced, coffee tables cleared, and fish-shaped lines of cocaine laid out on the slick surfaces. Meticulous exercises in the preparation of antinutrition. Astonishing – for even the dead have to pay for their drugs. And they weren’t cheap. Astonishing, because after the assembled company had stared at these tiny drifts of numbing snow for five, ten, or twenty minutes, whoever was the provider fetched the vacuum cleaner and hoovered them up with the big, plastic, mechanical nostril. Gone – just like that! Gone, in a dinky expensive vortex. Look what God just did to us! No-thing – as Phar Lap would’ve said.

  So, Clive and I didn’t rub along. We went to PD meetings together, where, one evening, we listened inattentively – chins rammed against hands tilting faces; have you ever noticed quite how many ruined Rodins there are in London? – while a young woman, with eyes sunken for her age, recounted her day. ‘Well, there was a knock on the flat door and I answered it. I mean to say, what’s the point in not answering, d’you know what I mean – they’ll only get in anyway. So, I answered it and this bloke says he’s one of the executive Furies of the Lord of Death. They always talk like that, don’t they, all pompous like. Then, without so much as a by-your-leave he chops off my head, removes my heart, extracts my intestines, licks up my brain, cuts my flesh and gnaws my bones. ‘Course, I’m incapable of dying, and even though my body’s all hacked to pieces, it revives – then the fucking bastard does it all over again. Every time as painful as the last. Every time. Well, at the end of the day, I suppose that’s the executive of the Lord of Death for you. Well, I just wanted to open my mouth . . .’ And the other members rustled, examined their nails, each other’s nails, the floor.