by Self, Will
I stared at him, and pictured two little mes staring back out of his lenses. I wondered if I was still keel-nosed and log-faced, and my complexion remained sallow. Or were the lines on my face incised a little less deeply? The grooves not so groovy? The bags under my eyes not quite as capacious? Had death, perhaps, mellowed me?
Anyway, what the hell kind of a psychologist could possibly be observing me from behind these two-way looking-glasses? I tried to think about what he was saying, but it didn’t mean nix to me. On the other hand, everything I’d experienced of the afterlife these last few years made perfect sense. Especially the way I was able to go on working for year after year at Baskin’s, Lithy propped on my desk, with no one making more than a perfunctory connection with me – this was so true to life.
When alive I’d always been stunned at how, if you were raddled, ringed and accented, once you got into an English office environment you became an ageless, stateless single. You might be asked about your holiday, or your new shoes, or even – on certain, vital occasions like the outbreak of war what your ‘views’ were, but anything that defined you as more than another plastic-piano player was irrelevant. Husbands, kids, homes, beliefs – these were beyond the ken of anyone at the office. I came, I wrote press releases on integrated shelving systems, I went again. I remembered thinking when I had to hobble from Kentish Town to Chandler PR, bunion-shod, arthritis-gloved and latterly cancer-clad, that this kind of life was a living death. Now it was a deathly life. The awful symmetry was appealing – and entirely believable.
‘I am thinking, Phar Lap – truly I am. But I don’t “geddit”, as you so succinctly put it.’
‘Yeh-hey, Lily-girl, no way t’ ‘tach you to the hooks and eyes of grace if you don’t.’
‘I guess not.’
‘Still, if you change yer mind you’ll know where t’find me.’
‘Where’s that, then?’ I never had any idea how to locate the man; he’d told me he was going walkabout for ever – and I took him at his word.
‘No-where.’ Phar Lap said and snickered, palate-slapped, cheek-sucked – did all the things that reminded me what an alien he was.
‘Don’t be funny, or I’ll begin thinking I had your fucking number from the get-go.’
‘Hey-yeh – I’m serious, girl. Doncha pay no attention to what goes on in this city?’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meanin’ iss nearly 1992, girl – the recession’s over, yeh-hey?’
‘So – how does that effect you?’
‘When the London mob gotta little more dough in their pockets they wanna spend it – thass how the whole fuckin’ show gets back on track.’
‘So?’ Christ, I hated joining in debate with Phar Lap. The marriage of aboriginal enunciation to the quintessentially Australian, meaningless interrogative made for the most irritating exchanges.
‘So, they want their kuyu y’see – their meat. An’ I’m the feller to give it them, yeh-hey? Smokes?’ He poked the little round tin of Log Cabin in my direction and for a change I accepted it. I’d seen Phar Lap grate the coarse tobacco in his coarser hand, then deftly marry it to the tiny ensign of paper that flew from his bottom lip, enough times to do it by rote. In death I was becoming unusually deft. He matched me with a Redhead. We puffed. If I could’ve tasted it I bet the smoke would’ve been woody.
‘How, exactly,’ I asked, spitting out the shreds of tobacco that caught on my lip with little ‘paf’s, ‘are you going to give the Londoners their kuyu?’
‘Nowhere,’ he snickered again. ‘Iss a restaurant, see –like a roadhouse, yeh-hey?’
‘You are opening a restaurant?’ I thought of eating at Overtons in the sixties with Yaws; the bill – as I recall it was six pounds for two. Well wined, natch, but being Yaws, near tipless. When I moved to London in 1958 there were two kinds of restaurant in the whole city, bad and worse. Now a dead Australian Aboriginal was about to open one.
‘Yeah – Nowhere. Thass what it’s called, yeh-hey? Kinduva themed joint, y’see. Themed Centralian, yeh-hey? I’ve got some traditional fellers to cook bush tucker for me – damper, ‘roo, goanna an’ such. Customers’ll come an’ sit out on a sandy floor round a fire, yeh-hey? Keep it fuckin’ hot in there. Big video screen on the roof showin’ pictures of the sky over my country, hey-yeh?’
‘And you believe this will be successful?’
‘Bound t’be. Can’t fail – this kardibar mob’ll eat any old guna, an’ the stuff at Nowhere is gonna be good, yeh-hey?’
‘And where, exactly, is Nowhere?’ Why, why, why did I let him draw me into his absurdities? Phar Lap’s conversation was like Yiddish, always querying to solicit another question.
‘Oh – y’know,’ he shouldered his boomerang, adjusted his shades, pulled down the brim of his Stetson, showed me his boot heels, ‘it’s around the place. Ask anyone – they’ll tell you. B’lieve me, Lily-girl– yer gonna wanna know, yeh-hey? Come by for this one,’ he tilted his thin hand to his plump lips, simulating taking a drink, ‘it’ll be my shout.’
With that he was gone, striding off down Argos Road, rollup tilted up, hat brim bent down, his dusty figure blowing past the front of Seth’s. Nowhere. Honestly, was there any limit to the man’s impossibility? And to think I’d once imagined I could learn something from him, that he could guide me somewhere. Nowhere indeed.
But I ignored him on this occasion – and what kind of a klutz did that make me? Fumbling with metaphysics, cackhandedly assembling tiny cosmologies in the greyness of my short everyday. Mumu in a mumu. A sad sack in a sad sack. It should’ve begun to come together in my mind by then surely? Or at least when I discovered that Natasha had split with Miles in the wake of losing the baby. Especially when I found out she’d contacted an old friend, and decided to head out to Australia for a year’s travelling.
The old friend was teaching in Sydney – which was why she’d remained a friend of Natasha’s at all. Natasha had a way with friends; far from cultivating them, she rubbed her salty tears into the wounds she’d inflicted, rendering them incapable of sympathy towards her for the next thirty years. But this one had been out of the loop since they were in art school together.
Polly Passmore was her name. I remember her as a plump, comely lass, with a healthy, sensual appetite for hairy thighs against her smooth ones. She laughed, drank too much white wine, cosseted the children in her care when she ended up teaching. Her life was like the brightly coloured collages she liked to make – full of disparate shapes and textures, harmonised by her own good nature. At school she’d been burdened by her own good looks, pushed into a popularity she found wearisome. But when she got to St Martin’s she found Natasha. What a boon, for set beside Natasha’s sinister beauty, Polly became a fat, plain young woman. She was able to take up the second fiddle she’d always longed to play.
Polly didn’t get enough of Natasha. She presided in a teadoling, tissue-passing capacity over Natasha’s first few spirals down into dissolution. She provided a shoulder for the young men to cry on impotently, the young men whose imperfectly fired hearts Natasha had smashed on the kitchen floor of their shared flat. She scraped Natty off the same floor a couple of times, after early, poignant, never-do-it-again heroin overdoses. She attended court with Natty when her pal was had up for shoplifting. Again. She blocked in the blank areas of pictures Natty had hurriedly sketched out, so that they could be presented for tutorial assessments.
But Polly cleared out before things got truly heavy. Perhaps she’d had as much of Natasha as she needed. She knew now, at any rate, that she could never be as beautiful – nor as damned. Polly left London still thinking that one of her friend’s wings was broken, not comprehending that it had been amputated. She went to Glasgow, she went to the Isle of Mull. She spent time in California and in Banff. She taught art quite artlessly and had many many unsuitable liaisons with men who treated her quite unforgivably. She grew into the fat, plain woman her friend had licensed her to be; and while swilling sweet wine bec
ame appropriately bitter. How else could Polly Passmore have been dumb enough to keep in touch? Stupid enough to offer Natasha a home once the life had been sucked out of her?
Natasha snorted the last of her heroin off a metal soap dish, in a toilet cubicle, in the transit lounge at Abu Dhabi. When the plane touched down in Sydney all the passengers applauded, while giving Ocker cheers and piercing squeals of glee. Our little sophisticate clutched her sweaty head between her scrawny upper arms and vomited into one of the bags provided. A classic antipodean already – chundering the dreamtime into a nightmare.
Charlotte had coped with so much for so long. With her father’s face, with my death, with her sister’s addiction, with fucking to order. But this . . . this . . . global injustice. With this she could not cope. A woman called her a month after the event and asked if she’d like to attend a group, where women whose babies had died in utero got together to show the Polaroids of their tiny lifeless progeny. The ones the medical staff had thoughtfully taken. It wasn’t Charlie’s style to snack on such meagre leavings, crumbs of maternity on the expensive empty plate of her life. So she shrugged it off, declined the invitation. She’d rather suffer the trauma. She saw her dead son in nightmares of savage reality. Each night he came slithering, the poor mite, up the facade of Cumberland Terrace. He tapped, the lost soul, against the pane of the large sash window. Charlotte rose from the marital slough, padded through the soft pile to confront the hard truth. ‘What is it, my love? What do you want, you poor thing?’ His tiny maw opened and closed in the orange light of the streetlamps. She heaved up the sash with a whoosh and leant in close. ‘I need to go wee-wee,’ he said. ‘I need to go wee-wee.’ For shame on the little bugger, shlepping all the way over from Dulston, simply to lay this heavy trip on his poor mother. Jesus – even I felt some sympathy for the woman, for a change.
In the daytime, every toy dog Charlotte passed trotting along the sidewalk was a furry foetus. The Elverses gave up on the spreadsheet analysis and abandoned systematic fornication. They now had nearing a thousand Waste of Paper outlets and there was no sign of the expansion slowing down. Sure, there’d been something of a glitch during the end of eighties, but now, like some rocket rounding the moon of recession and utilising the inertia, the Elverses’ enterprise accelerated into the boom. In the nineties the economic cycle began freewheeling on what people wanted. It was no longer a question of establishing people’s needs and providing for them, it was a matter of encouraging them to want any old tat – then supplying it. That’s what the Elverses did so well – supply any old tat.
Never before in the history of the world had so many pictures been framed, presents wrapped, knick-knacks boxed, books covered, prints masked, stamps hinged, photos cornered and shelves lined. And with the daily grind of encrypting information now computerised, never had stationery been such a decorative, luxurious item. The populace no longer so much as sent each other a note – but by Christ they had notelets. Weren’t they tortured, as I’d always been, by the tyranny of this much blank paper? Or was it, as I suspected, that the enormous Waste of Paper was itself the cosmic complement to their unformed, unbecome and untold stories?
Not that the Elverses didn’t diversify – they were no fools. Like Esther Bloom they bought art galleries, properties and business publishing companies. They moved from being merely frivolously wealthy – to being seriously rich. Richard Elvers, who’d left school at sixteen to sell collarless white shirts on a stall at Camden Lock, and Charlotte, who’d bought one of them – neither of them even knew that the country’s constitution was yet to be written; so they’d no shame when it came to entertaining legislators, lordlings, and stars of the musical theatre.
Yes, I felt some sympathy for Charlotte – and that alone should’ve alerted me. Where was my stupid colourlessness of indifference when I needed it most? Les Miserables had been running for nearly ten years – didn’t I comprehend the true nature of my own? As I crouched by the poor, professionally dumb waiters, while they ministered to the ministerial chums, the millionaire thriller-writers and the televison executives who made up the Elverses’ little coterie, I grew angry. Angry at the gaucheness of this, a newly-fabricated dining cubicle that made a crass mezzanine in the once airy apartment. Angry at the chatter that emanated from these privileged mouths. Had anyone heard that the FDA was warning women with breast implants against flying, lest they explode? Given half a chance I’d give them a fucking breast implant they wouldn’t forget. I wished I was an unquiet spirit. A Bernie who didn’t know I was dead.
And wasn’t it the case that it was useless airlifting food to the former Soviet Union? (At this time none of them could yet contemplate the word ‘Russia’.) And had anyone yet been to Nowhere, the new, Australian aboriginal, themed restaurant? It was tres tres amusant. For night after night I gnashed my own teeth in my daughter’s Nash apartment. The Cold War was over and these jerks had won. Everyone was a liberal now. ‘I’m basically a liberal,’ they’d say to each other, as if this freed them up to affect the jacket of a fascist, or the trousers of an anarchist. Apparently the only people who didn’t get it were satanic covens of fat, black, poor trade-unionists, riddled with Aids in the Gambia.
Yes, good, old-fashioned, righteous anger. Bottled bile. Canned gall. Draught choler – this being England. Richard and Charlotte were encouraged by their short, swarthy, successful, Semitic friends to contemplate a shopping trip to Phoenix, Arizona, where they might be able to purchase, from a stud of an orphanage, a tall, blond, Aryan child. A child who would come with a form book of its very ownsome, out of Mormon by Swede. Richard and Charlotte were advised by sterile friends who had a ‘liberal’ conscience to fly to Manila, or Managua, or Mauritius, where, for hardly any gelt at all, they’d be able to shop freely for a mulatto. Browse, as it were, in the birthing bazaar. Richard and Charlotte were adjured by charitable couples of unimpeachable rigour – the kind who fully appreciate that charity begins as far away from home as you can possibly get – to take a camper van of medical supplies to Romania, or Somalia, or Rangoon, where – with considerable effort and bribing of UN officials – they’d be able to secure a little leper, or a burgeoning haemophiliac, or a cute encephalitic. ‘Isn’t his swollen brow so cute.’
Ooh – it made me mad! Then I’d get home to Dulston, to find Rude Boy resplendent .in his coonskin cap watching footage of the LA riots, his muddy feet up on the arm of the chair. ‘Get those niggers!’ he’d scream with approval. ‘Ream those boogies!’ Cowering at the back window were Charlie and Natty’s slunks – ‘We want to wee-wee’ – and hoedowning on the kitchen lino was Lithy – ‘Oh the concrete and the clay / Beneath my feet begin to crumble!’ And in the bedroom the Fats, naked as the day they were shed, gained, or lost, spun their hanks of flab and muttered, ‘Ooh she’s mad, yes she is. Ooh she’s in a rage. Fat and old, fat and old – and in a rage. Fat and old.’ Then there was HeLa as well, whispering along the walls. Why the hell didn’t these kids listen when I told them not to track dirt into the house? Here was I, suffering all the weight of these, the family’s dead progeny, while junky dearest took another instalment of her gap life and Charlotte contemplated fucking buying out.
Rude Boy never spoke to me, he only shouted at me. But one evening he took myoid hand in his young one, in such a way as to suggest that we might be holding on to each other, and he led me. Led me out of the flat. Led me up the steps to the front door. Rude Boy shouted up to Bernie’s window, ‘Chuck down the key, you miserable fucking smack-head!’ And the Yale sailed down.
As we mounted the stairs, turning awkward corners by grimed-up windows, passing the shabby doors to the flats on the first and second floors, I saw a change in him. If you ignored your children’s moods when they were alive, imagine how pervasive this becomes when they’re dead. Rude Boy was simply that to me now – a rude boy, a troublesome presence to be blanked, especially when he frigged in the face of some stodgy Dulston lady, whose only terrors in the afterlife consisted in bei
ng unable to serve the vicar his tea. ‘Less tea, Vicar?’ But as I followed his ass up the stairs, his mudspattered ass, his vulnerable ass, his nine-year-old ass, he ceased being Rude Boy and became Dave Junior once more.
At the top Bernie was waiting, anorak zipped up, grimacing teeth in beard. He made as if to ruffle David’s blond hair. No, he did, he did ruffle it. He was, I remembered, alive after a fashion. Which is by way of noting that he thought he was. I followed David in. Bernie’s attic was as Mrs Seth had said. Up here under the sloping eaves of the old house, Bernie had camped for decades, a filthy urban Bedouin who’d lost the urge to wander. Piled everywhere, like a never-to-be-begun game of pick-up sticks, were hundreds of cardboard tubes and boxes that had held the tin foil he’d bought at Seth’s. Mixed up with them were frozen dollops of discarded clothing; milk bottles half-full of ancient, crusted, brown piss; heaps of mildewed magazines and newspapers. In the dead centre of the attic, under a spillage of light from a filthy skylight, sat a bare, single mattress, a vile stain in the middle of its ticking. Alongside it was the electric heater that had done for Bernie, both bars radiant in the gloom.
As if they were the remains of an offering that had been sacrificed at this domestic altar, dangling on the fireguard, plopped on the bare boards and splashed on the walls were melted and ashy bits of Bernie and his late anorak. From somewhere within one of the drifts of trash hiding the skirting boards came a choked, tearful voice singing, ‘. . . it’s down at the end of lonely street – that’s Heartbreak Hotel . . .’ For a few seconds I thought Lithy must’ve climbed up here with us, but it wasn’t the right decade. Then I realised it was Elvis, and that the sound came from the paltry speaker of a fifties transistor, muffled by an unspeakable item of Bernie’s underwear.