How the Dead Live

by Self, Will

  Once I’d spotted this, other mementos popped out of the murk. The cover of a paperback lying open by the mattress, picturing a neat couple in an unruly embrace. The title was Peyton Place. Butting against a pile of cardboard tubes, trying to lift them with its bulbous forks of arm, was Robbie the Robot, whining with battery-powered frustration. David picked his way through the trash like he knew this room only too well – like it was his room; one narrow foot placed surely on a shiny, new copy of The Cat in the Hat, the second planted in the saucer of an upturned frisbee. Bernie stayed standing by the door, his bullet-wound eyes wavering from David to me and back again, the grimace still splitting his toilet-brush beard. He’d had the junky daughter up here a fair few times – now he’d got her mother and elder brother. At the far side of the attic David reached a dwarfish door and pulled it open. This, I thought, must lead to some stinky kitchenette, or fouler bathroom. The boy beckoned to me to follow him and I did.

  Into 1957, into Vermont, where I’d caught him, playing in the back yard with two of his buddies.

  What’s more overpowering at first it’s difficult to say – for all senses come rushing into me with a roar, all perspectives with a screech – and the memories, the memories glissade. First, it comes to me that around this time I smoked pot, three, maybe four, times with Bob Beltane, before we made love in his station wagon, parked up by Moses Lake. Second, that this was like being high – everything musically exaggerated, the sky such a deep and aching blue, the sap from the maples in the plantation behind the yard stickily smelly, the rasp of crickets and drone of hornets a veritable string section tuning up for Fantasia. Third, that this was Now, and I could feel the very spring of the porch boards beneath my feet, the beat of the summer heat on my smooth young face, every little waft of cooler air play about beneath my light, cotton dress.

  Oh Jesus – what sweet relief! What feelings! What an inconceivably broad view, the creamy piles of cumuli dragging my eyes up, the green grass, brown earth and white clapboard houses dragging them all around. Whirling impressions of inconceivable richness and colour for someone come from mouldering Dulston, from the dead future. But then, within instants – and life is so very instantaneous, so very Now, don’t you think? – come other, deeper, more pleasing sensations too. The warm bellyache of recently received and passionately enjoined caresses, the deep thrum of dick-beats inside, the salty gushes of orgasm, his and hers, sweet and sour, acid and alkaline. The scent of the other is upon me and I know – sure as the shit I am – that I’ve only just arrived from my lover’s embrace. Waved him off from the front veranda, watched the fins of that shark-like cocksman’s car pull around the corner.

  I’ve only just now stridden through the house, revelling in the energetic languor of my long legs so recently clasped around his brown waist; the imprint of his ass cheeks is on my sweaty hands, the flavour of his poetic mouth is in mine. My vagina and pubic hair are still slick with him, for although he always has the Trojans, I insist he need not smuggle them inside this Helen. He can pull out in time, every time, so good at rhyme – without any reason – is my Bob. Yes, I’ve only just stridden through the house and my eyes are still blinded by the dark afterimage of the living room, with its scattering of David’s toys – the new frisbee, the old Robbie the Robot, the tiny transistor – and my and his father’s reading, open on opposing, uneasy chairs. Peyton Place versus Delinquency: The Juvenile Offender in America Today. Jesus H. Christ how can I stomach such shlock? How can he digest such baloney?

  I’ve left the three nine-year-olds, David, Gus and Gary from next door, for a long hour and they’ve got up to all kinds of mischief. Here they are naked save for their shorts, and smeared all over with black mud they’ve manufactured with the hosepipe. Now a surfing ofawareness and an undertow of consciousness, pulling back from the wave about to crash on to the beach. Stop this – stop this Now, stop this faithless, old geyser of rage, which is about to spew from my mouth. ‘What’re you playing?’ I call to David from the back porch. ‘The nigger game!’ he shouts back. I burst through the screen door and am on him in two strides, I knock his coonskin cap off, I grasp his blond hair, I smack his head once, twice, three times. The way British actors playing Gestapo officers smack their interrogation victims.

  He’s only said it by mistake – this much I know. The red fog of anger is only the gas blowing off the forbidden planet where my own, selfishly sated lust resides. But it’s too late, for the other little boys’ faces are racist caricatures of minstrel shock, and my David is running out of the back yard, across the front yard, into the roadway. I reach the side of the house at the precise moment the fender hits him. The car can’t be doing more than thirty – this is a sleepy, residential area, we all sleep with our fellow residents – but these gas-guzzlers are huge and the impact is enough to hurl him into space, my son the puppet. ‘Mayall your children be acrobats.’ Now I comprehend the Jewish curse. His astral body rotates a full one and a half times before crumpling to the asphalt, then I see that he isn’t mine any more, he doesn’t have a face – only a mush. I recall the line I always used when he rode me too hard – ‘Go and play in the traffic’ – and every instance whips me. Keening and tearing at your bosom turns out to be a reflex action. ‘Jeeezus! Jeeezus! Jeeezus!’ I run towards the scrap of dead boy in the roadway, and the driver is out of the car, keening too. ‘Jeeezus! Jeeezus! Jeeezus!’ Jew and Gentile stand over the dead child’s broken body. Was there ever an era when so many faithless people cried out so loudly for the Messiah?

  ‘. . . You’ll feel so lonely you could die.’ The tinny ululation loops me in, and in a single swivel I turn from young and thin and keening with grief to fat and old and boiling with anger. The blue sky falls away, the dirty walls rise up, and there at the door stands Bernie ushering me back into death, the permanent Then.

  He grunted once as I squeezed past him to gain the stairway. Already, below me, I could hear Rude Boy’s clattered descent, the rattling crash of the basement door to number 27.

  ‘Aren’t you ever going to clear this shit-hole up?’ I enquired of mine host.

  He didn’t have an eyelid to bat. ‘Yeah – well. Yeah. Busy at the moment, yeah?’

  Oh yeah, busy all right, busy handing out paper packets of indulgence, busy listening for the wailing wall. Busy doing nothing, this Junky, the eighth fucking dwarf. If only I could’ve found a way to scare him off – but he’d already seen every horror show on offer. That much was clear.

  Christmas 2001

  High-heeled sneakers – verily, that’s what they are. They’re exactly like the basketball boots kids wore in the fifties rubber-soled, black or white canvas uppers, thick white laces, cross-threaded all the way up to the ankle – but they’ve got high heels. Fancy that. Imagine such an asinine article of footwear being sung into being by a nigger minstrel. They didn’t get to lie down by the waters of Babylon, nor did they rock in the bosom of Abraham, the chariot never swung low enough for them to catch a ride home, but they did get to wear high-heeled sneakers. If God exists, clearly he is a fashion-conscious queen, so much attention has he lavished on the accessories of this world, so little on its substance.

  Not that I’m wearing high-heeled sneakers. The Ice Princess and her consort may have been ludicrous, but they never wasted hard currency on such soft tat. Not for me. Nope – I got a pair of fake Nikes, off a stall on the Mile End Road. Gutter shmutter for a guttersnipe. ‘Nah – they’re not snide, mate!’ exclaimed the shabby man groaning beside the board of shoes. ‘Why’re they only two fucking quid then?’ replied the Estate Agent, cradling the little trainers in his swollen hands. ‘Take it or leave it, mate,’ said the shabby man – and the Estate Agent took it, because by then taking it was all he could do. Gone were his looks, gone was the fire in his belly, and his chutzpah was useless – there was no one left to charm save the Ice Princess, and she’d long since been inoculated. ‘T’a-ra,’ said the shabby man. ‘T’a-ra,’ said the Estate Agent. Tan-ta-fucking-ra,
a futile fanfare for the common man.

  Which English class do I truly prefer now I’ve had the opportunity to be the dunce in both of them? (1 exclude the aristocracy on principle – and because they’re all fucking Krauts anyway.) The middle, with their ludicrous sense of wounded responsibility for a phantom imperial limb? Have you ever noticed how it’s they who apologise if you knock against them in the street or on public transport? ‘Sorry!’ they involuntarily bleat. ‘Sorry!’ Sorry for taking your land and the fruits of your labour, sorry for taking your men and killing them in our wars, and an especial apology for making you play fucking cricket. So very sorry for that, old black/brown/ yellow chap (delete as required). At least they’ve ceased referring to themselves as ‘one’, that peculiarly arithmetical form of the royal ‘we’. What can you make of people who talk about themselves so persistently in the third person? Only that they were doomed to be sucked into the estuary and have their vowels flattened by the tide of commonality.

  And what of the lovelorn commonality I’ve spent the last year or two with? ‘Orlright luu,’ they say, or occasionally, ‘Orlright luv?’ they query. ‘Ta-ra luu,’ they say on parting, and, ‘ ‘Allo luu,, on arrival. There’s so much luv in their world – so little caring. Luv is to love as diesel is to petrol– a heavier, more viscous, less incendiary form of affection. Not that they’re averse to petrol – these superannuated Cockneys, these fag-end easterners. They’re pretty adept with the petrol-soaked rags. They’re partial to posting them through the letterboxes of the black/brown/yellow (delete as applicable) who’ve cropped up on their estates. (And isn’t that so fucking English – difficult to imagine an American blue-blood inviting you to his project in the Hamptons.) Oh yes, the middle class say ‘Sorry!’ and shoo them away, straight into the luving arms of these diamond geezers, these pearly queens.

  I fell on him orlrighty. Fell on him as I lunged for the Christmas cake. The irony is that the Estate Agent could be well-spoken – when he chose to be. But somewhere along the hideous line he travelled, the wind changed and blew the glottals far back into his throat, where they stopped, for ever. I fell on him and he was cold and stiff and unyielding. So much better than when he was alive – for then he was hot and warped and endlessly pliable. I can tell you there was a curiously pink froth at his blue lips. I can tell you about his rictus and his rigor and the feel of his dead flesh beneath my windy feet, my chubby body – but I could never describe how fantastic that icing tasted. How scrumptious it was to devour gobs of suety cake, and how little I minded having to search for currants and raisins in his matted chest hair.

  That was hours ago. Mid-afternoon I guess. Since then I’ve knocked about the apartment a little – but then nowadays I knock about everywhere. For the last two nights I slept downstairs on the divan with the cushions humped round me for warmth – but it was still cold. Tonight it’s going to freeze, and little people like me feel the cold, don’t we? And there’s no one here to do hot potatoes on my chubby hands, or blow warm breath on my absence of a neck. The stairs here have treads but no backs, and as you ascend, the room below retreats in stripes ofshoddiness, framed by worn carpet. Dead ahead, as I crawl up the second flight, there’s a walk-in closet.

  I’ve considered making every effort to get inside, by dragging stuff over so I can climb on top of it and reach the handles. But the only thing high enough is a table that the television up here occupies – and that television, portable though it is, is not portable by me. Even ifI could contrive this platform, I know the closet doors open outwards. The jerk of the catch freeing would be enough to propel me backwards down the stairs. Even if I could get inside, there’s little hanging there to cover myself with. How could a woman who made so many trips to Marks & Spencer come away with so little in the way of clothing? Oh, I know, I know orlrighty.

  My bed isa barred cage-on-legs. It’s squeezed in the corner at this end of the room, behind the television, between the two windows and the two cold radiators set below them. Even when the radiators were hot it was fucking draughty, and I usually ended up at the other end ofthe room, on their bed, in between the Ice Princess and the Estate Agent, balancing – in my own mind– the benefit of their two kilowatts apiece against the likelihood that one, or other, or both of them might roll over in their smack stupor and crush the tiny life out of me.

  She’s there, lying twisted at the hips, but her shoulders are flat against the single squashed pillow. She’s there, wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt, one arm flung out across the pillow next to her, the other curled against her upper thigh, as if mortality has surprised her in the act of drumming her fingers with boredom, or irritation. She’s there, the duvet – which is my only hope – mounded over her central parts. She’s there, her dark hair lying in a fan around her face, and her dull eyes wide open in astonishment. Doubtless she’s surprised at what’s happened to her. But I know I wasn’t.

  Chapter Thirteen

  For the next eighteen months I existed on that back porch, screened in by the red fog of anger. Sure, I did my goround, 24 × 7, 7 × fucking 52, but I was a whiter shade of my former pale shadow. ‘We skipped a light fandango!’ sang Lithy, as it did just that. The little ones asked to wee-wee, the walls moaned, the Fats jiggled, and Rude Boy gave me a knowing eye. I went to Baskin’s, I came back again. I went to Seth’s, I returned. I watched TV, listened to my little radio and stayed angry. Very angry. For if ever I let the anger drop, let the geyser subside, Rude Boy would beckon to me, lead me outside, call up for the key and take me back up to that attic full of grief, guilt and loneliness. Heartbreak Hotel indeed.

  I existed in anger – and rage awoke me. I’d always had a temper and usually temporised, so this was quite like life. The anger seeped into every part of my no longer subtle body, like Three-in-One lubricating a rusty engine. My fat, old belly gurgled with annoyance, my saggy limbs shook with irritation’ my tired old sex grew gummy with pique, my internal organs played arpeggios of indignation. Even the parts of me that, when I was alive, were dead – my hair, my teeth, my toenails – ached with dissatisfaction. Have you ever seen a dissatisfied toenail? I think not.

  I was disgusted by the escape of Pablo Escobar – I’d have liked to eviscerate him myself. The Serbian death camps revolted me – if I could’ve got to that fat fuck Milošević, I would’ve strung him up by his own quiff. In Nazi old Germany thugs burnt the hostels of the laughably-named Gastarbeiter; it would’ve pleased me mightily to stand these shaven-headed monstrosities to a drink of their own Molotov cocktails. That dimwit Polack in the Vatican had the temerity to admit that Galileo was right – as if the sun shone out of his own fucking heliocentric ass. The dishonourable, spunkdrunk governor from Arkansas planted his fickle shaft in the Oval Office before I could get to him – I thought I’d drown in my own gall. Those peaceful Hindus razed the Ayodha mosque until it was like unto a dungheap – what high, old Babylonian fun; eight hundred dispatched to the subcontinental twin town of Dultson – I wished I were Kali herself, so I might garrotte the lot of them. The Somalis shot each other’s starveling bones to pieces with the West’s charitable Death Aid – didn’t anyone have the wherewithal to bang their woolly heads together? In Britain the bog-trotters went abombing again – I’d’ve delighted in stuffing their blarneyholes with Semtex. Bombs in Manhattan, bombs in Bombay, barking-mad cultists in Texas – they all had their moment in the megaton sun of my ire. And another clever, famous, Jewish wiseacre fought another million-dollar suit against the shiksa he’d discarded in favour of her adopted child.

  Oy-oy-oy gevalt!

  In June of ‘93 twelve Bosnian boys were killed when the Serbian fascists shelled a football pitch in Sarajevo. Now this was excessive – one would’ve been enough; then at least they’d still’ve had a full team. It occurred to me that all violent deaths were like this – the elimination of substitutes. Mass warfare is the biggest confirmation that there’s a mass at all. The twentieth century in a lethal nutcracker. Thousands march down Whitehall ever
y day, yet no one thinks to throw a can of paint over the bombastic statue of Field Marshal Haig, a man who presided over the deaths of a third of a million men, during six, short months in the mud fields of Flanders. Europe’s own Hiroshima.

  When I came to Britain in the late fifties people still mused wonderingly over the way the First War had touched everyone. How there wasn’t a town, a village, a hamlet, a school, a business or a club that hadn’t lost its complement of men. On Remembrance Day, special reverence would be accorded to the sad old things who came tottering along Whitehall, beribboned with bravery, willing yet again to place themselves in the shadow of Haig’s stone horse. Parliamentarians to this day rise up on their hind legs and bleat and baa about the way these khaki ants sacrificed their lives for the preservation of free speech, of liberty. Freedom to do what exactly? Freedom in what precisely? Freedom to be part of the nest? Freedom to die of cancer? We’ve been given the great and glorious choice to do multiple-choice questionnaires. Mr Khan’s quality-of-life questionnaire for terminal patients.

  Cancer and warfare. There are memorials in every town and village and hamlet to those who’ve shrivelled in the battle against the sarcoma; and of course, both forms of annihilation hammer home the same point – that those who survive do so arbitrarily. ‘It could’ve been me!’ scream the ones left behind-and only demented moralists dare to contemplate that it should’ve been them.

  The anger subsided, leaving me deader than ever. Even if I could’ve been resurrected now, what place would there’ve been for me in the world? In the five short years since my demise, new models of car had come on the market, different makes of mobile phone; the people cut their hair in innovative styles. Beside these nineties folk – who were themselves unsurpassedly decadent – I would’ve appeared a walking continuity error. Lily Van-fucking-Winkle. I couldn’t get myself connected. I lay in bed and I smoked. I smoked B&H. I smoked lots of them. I had twenty-four hours every day in which to smoke – and no lungs to damage. I was merely a subtle set of bellows, a temporary confinement for the genie that eddied about me in the cold, front room of the basement. Where the tissue culture on the wall muttered to itself, and the eyeless golems of my own indulgence squatted, and the calcified cadaver of my own lust did its shimmy, and the angry child I’d slaughtered raved. And, lest we forget, outside the back window my dead grandchildren shuffled from one vestigial foot to the other. They always say it’s so much more satisfying being a grandparent – but compared to what, exactly?