by Self, Will
I managed a cigarette every four minutes, fifteen an hour, three hundred and sixty each day. In two months of that summer I spent all of the money I’d saved working for Baskin. The front room became a worthless Fort Knox with its stacks of empty, gold, cardboard boxes. ‘She’s gone to seed, gone to seed,’ muttered the Fats, ‘she’s awfully seedy – she’s let herself go, let herself go.’ I ignored them. I listened to my little radio. ‘When a lovely thing dies, smoke gets – ‘ Lithy crooned and I tried to lash out. As required, I’d send Lithy or the Fats – they did everything together, entwined by flab – down to Seth’s to get another carton, but I had no intention of sallying forth. To Baskin I explained that I had chronic bronchitis, a reasonable explanation for my absence, given my advanced years and my heavy, dutiful smoking.
In bed and without the need to plump my pillows – what could be finer? In bed, blowing blue ploots of smoke into the rank atmosphere (no lungs, so no moisture, no colour change). I considered smoking experiments. Might I be able to build a Rube Goldberg contraption with which to feed myself ciggies? Acomplicated and implausible arrangement of wheels, cogs, pulleys and conveyor belts, rigged up to the engine of a dismembered Hoover, all with the aim of supplying me with ready-lit, correctly aligned pills. I’d resemble an early animated short – Steamboat Lily – and add at least twenty minutes to my daily smoking time. I meditated on having my own teeth again, on how they did wonders for inhalation and exhalation. Smoking with falsies had always been absolutely that. The loss of the cigs and the loss of my teeth. Always together.
In late July they released Demjanjuk – the car worker who claimed he’d never been involved with the assembly line of death at Treblinka. I felt myoId anger stir, but wouldn’t let it get the better of me. My counterpane world was absolutely that; I lay, a shloomp in a humped muddle of duvet, gazing up at the letterbox view of the outside afforded me. The tops of the bedroom windows framed three portions of the sidewalk. This grey view of slabs was striped by the railings, so that as legs went by, they flickered like zoetropes, or stop-action photographs. Cars seldom parked up outside the house. The dead – for reasons never altogether understood by me – didn’t bother too much with driving. Dulston was like the past in this regard; if you could get it together to drive, there was always somewhere to park. Like Crooked Usage in the sixties.
As I lay smoking, on the morning when the Today programme announced Ivan the Terrible’s acquittal, two neat wheels squeaked, crunched and grounded against the kerb. I could see a foot or so of the immaculately dusted, half-timbered bodywork; then one trim, court-shod, tan-hosed foot; then its accomplice. They clicked past the railings, then out of sight. I heard them clicking down the steps. There was a pause, followed by – a sharp rap on the knocker. Most peculiar – the dead never knocked, the door was always open. There was no point in locking it; I’d long since learned that if the shades wanted to get in they’d simply manifest themselves in the dank corridor.
‘Answer that, will you?’ I snapped at the Fats, and the three of them blindly bumped out of the room, squashing together in the doorway.
‘I’ve come to see Mrs Yaws.’ The clipped syllables evaded big teeth. ‘Is she at home?’
‘She’s let herself go,’ gabbled the Fats, ‘she’s fat and old. Fat and old.’
‘Could you tell her Dr Bridge is here?’ The classy dullard was unfazed by watching my personified weight. ‘No – don’t worry, I’ll tell her myself. In here, is it?’ And in she came, Virginia Bridge no less, the whole dry, tweedy, twinsetted, headscarved, equine length of the woman. Her pale blue eyes blinked and watered in the pale blue clouds of smoke from my umpteenth B&H of the morning. ‘Really, Lily,’ said Virginia, crossing to the bedside, setting down her Gladstone, removing her tan suede gloves, ‘really.’
And I was back there with her – really. Back at Crooked Usage. Back in that anachronistic period of the early sixties when there was nightly television news and coal was still delivered. Coal in dusty blue-black sacking; coal, as dense as the smog it generated. The sixties, a decade of thick, yellow smog and swinging sputum. On the crappy copy of a Hepplewhite bedside table sit several flat packs of du Maurier filters. Beside these is a Daphne du Maurier novel, its paper cover bent to buggery. There’s a cut-glass ashtray full of butts – one of which is still smouldering – and I’m lighting up another with my smogodynamically-shaped Ronson.
The bedside table has three drawers. There’s one for medicaments: sodium amytal capsules; a pot of attractive yellowand-green Librium; the proprietaries – Venos useless cough syrup, dumb Disprin, asinine Anadin; and tampons – because, of course, I’ve got my period. Blood at one end – sputum at the other. It’s enough to make you retch. Drawer number two has a bottle of Haig laid end-on in it, couched with Kleenex. Virginia has adjured me time and again not to drink liquor on top of the barbs, but what care I?
Drawer number three is full of snack food, purloined over the past few days from the cold kitchen. There’s half a pack of fucking Huntley and Palmer’s Toytime biscuits. They’re square, slick things, with icing pictures of trains and teddies on them. When I crunch them with my rotting fangs, they turn my mouth painful and gritty. I do this frequently. I also munch on Crawford’s Ginger Ruffles and squidge on Nestlé fruit drops, nor am I averse to the occasional excruciating worrying that’s required to dispatch a tablet of Callard & Bowser’s butterscotch. Yup – I sneak down to the cold kitchen and I steal the kiddies’ cookies and sweeties. Then I come back up here and get snacked out.
Virginia’s got me upright, the buttons of my nightie undone, and is sounding me with her smooth, Atrixo-creamed hands, while speaking to me with her dry English accent. ‘Lily, really, I mean to say, you can’t expect me to go on treating you for chronic bronchitis if you aren’t prepared to give up smoking. I mean, it’s not as if you don’t know the facts . . .’
The facts are that every month or so Yaws goes away to play golf, with his peer group of permanently prepubescent, ex-minor-public-schoolboy pals. In provincial towns she liaises with him in prim guesthouses. They’re so respectable that their adultery is never suspected. At night, on brushedcotton sheets, they chafe together. He ejaculates dust into her sandy vagina. I tolerate this in the mad way you do when you’re not sure you require the pipe that is his forever being knocked out on your mantel, the dottle gagging in your throttle. Not true. I was riven with jealousy, hacked out with the adze of it – a dugout canoe of yearning. I wanted to be the one who stood, with an ice lolly in each hand, not sure which one to lick. Not Yaws. Not Virginia, who, pausing from her soundless, insensate sounding, peers around the room at the blubbery golems, the lithopedion, Rude Boy, the sarcoma wall-covering . . . has she come to the basement flat in order to speculate as well as employ her speculum?
About what Yaws and I didn’t do together? Or Kaplan? Or Bob Beltane? Or King Stuff? Is she imagining all this as a possible version of her own afterlife? I can believe that. She had a crippled husband. Paralysed from the waist down. Lucky for Virginia it wasn’t from the waist up. Anyway, I lie here and black-and–white documentary clips of that era showing baboons with masks lashed on to their muzzles, forcing them to smoke – spool behind my eyes. Give it up. I couldn’t – I’d rather die again. Cigarettes are the best friends I’ve ever had. More reliable than liquor, comforting – but not fattening. I’d sooner die a thousand deaths. Roll me over in the clover. Roll me over and let me expire again.
The fucking cow – fucking with my bull. The whole fucking herd of them, being serviced by a husband with a dripping, yard-long pizzle. Jealousy courses through me – a green circulatory system. All the wives I ever betrayed, all the wives who ever betrayed me. I see them congregating in a field and cunting up to form a gay rondo of congress that excludes me utterly. I stand in a fucking cowpat, a sad little thing, while they whoop and low and grind and groan. Little boxes, little boxes . . . and they all look just the same / And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky . . . and they al
l look –
Just the same. I close my eyes tighter still – ‘ it’s an addiction like any other, Lily, it will take a few days ‘ – and will Virginia Bridge to die. O Great White Spirit, if I give up smoking will you take this woman in my stead? I really do this – I truly did this. I weighed up the Weights, the Passing Clouds, the Viscounts and the blessed du Mauriers. 4/- + 3/6 + 4/- + 3/6 – sums were so much kinder when they incorporated such tiny strokes. I piled them up into a huge bier of dry white twigs, threw Dr Bridge atop it – and she committed suttee in my stead. Poor Virginia. Poor, dry Virginia Bridge. Dead of cancer at forty-odd, when unlike me she hadn’t been smoking forty-odd a day for twenty-five years. Poor Virginia – you could do the arithmetic yourself – she didn’t deserve such malevolently willed extinction.
I reach for the bedside table. I’m gonna have a big slug of that Haig, before it gets too vague – but it’s too late. Gone already. She’s gone, it’s gone. I’m still here.
I looked up through the nicotine-stained windows at the roadway above, and the trim wheels of her trim car had departed. ‘She’s gone to seed,’ muttered the Fats, ‘she’s awfully seedy . . .’ I lit another B&H and remembered all the peaceable hours I’d eradicated, all the joy I’d steered to avoid, as I whiled my bitter life away on a river of resentment, lustily sculling beneath the green envy trees with their parasitic wreaths of sexy jealousy. Under the grotty bed, Lithy gave reedy voice: ‘Ah – ah – ah – ah – stay-ing al-ive!’
Who knows why Virginia Bridge found it necessary to climb in her ghostly Morris and make the long trip north from Dulburb to Dulston? (And I had no doubt that that was where she’d ended up – she was Dulburb to the very tips of her fingers. Dulburb through and through.) But she did. Again and again and again, for month after month after month – a twelvemonth in all. I bitterly regretted ever ever having called a doctor out on a house call, now that this shady practitioner kept descending on my basement. I got out of the fucking bed. I tucked Lithy in my pocket and went back to work.
That summer, Baskin had groped his penultimate fanny, shmoozed his final client, and rung down the curtain on thirty-two years of telling the world things it didn’t need to know, or would’ve found out anyway. He and Mrs Baskin retired to Rainham to breed Bedlingtons. He sold what was left of the business to a thrusting conglomerate, whose PR arm had offices near Old Street. And what was left of the business? Only a client list that included such gems as the Queen Mother Leisure Centre in Stratford – ‘You wet yourself – we’ll clean it up!’; the Mile End Road One-Stop Fitting Shop – ‘Tired of that Leaky Exhaust? So are we’; and the Leytonstone Laundromat chain – ‘Stop Watching the World Go Round – and Let Us Watch Your Wash Go Round!’ And me.
Yup – I went too. It was one of the conditions of Baskin’s sell-out, the employee hand-me–down. You might’ve thought I’d look hopelessly out of place behind the mirrored windows of KBHL Corporate Communications – not so. I couldn’t see myself in them anyway; nor could all the scented young pudendas, who tramped their knickerboxes in to play the plastic piano, see me either.
Mirrored fucking buildings – where did they come from? Howcould the modern city, with its vaunting ugliness, have the temerity to contemplate itself in these twenty-, thirty-, forty-storey pier-glasses? To ogle its own soullessness, while batting its vertical, textured louvres? I can recall the first time I saw such a thing – the John Hancock Center in Boston. Must’ve been the mid-seventies; the sleek rack of reflection was a preemptive strike by the future on that bulbous decade. But now London was stacking up with the things, as if the old hooker was intent on retouching her masonry maquillage in them. Every prospect became – on those infrequent sunny days – a postmodern Magritte, with fluffy white clouds oozing around giant external cornices. But inside the mirrored building was the perfect place for me to be. Me, with my tireless hatred of pretty young women and my newly recovered jealousy.
Christ I was jealous! I was jealous of the Filipino shoe fetishist when she went to jail for corruption – at least she’d stayed married. I was jealous of Hillary-fucking-Clinton even when it looked as if she’d stay hitched too. I was jealous of the Israelis and the Palestinians, locked into the war congress with Slick Willie playing pander. Jealous of Arafat with his vaginal mouth, Rabin with his penile nose – jealous of what they did together. I was jealous of the kid in Pittsburgh who had seven major organs replaced during fifteen hours of surgery – she’d had more men inside her than I ever would. I was jealous of the Bobbitt woman who sliced off her husband’s cock – to have and to hold. I was jealous when Fellini died – now there’d never be a bed for me in his dreamhouse of feminine archetypes. I was jealous of all the girls caught in the LA quake – they felt the earth fucking move all right. I was jealous of the Palestinian women when that crazed Yid shot their menfolk in the mosque – at least they could wail and rant and scream and feel their loss. I was jealous when Fred West, the home-improvement serial killer, was arraigned for his crimes. Imagine that – jealous of those poor young women, lured to their vile deaths. Could jealousy take me any lower? Yes. I was jealous when the massacres began in Kigali, simply because I hated to be excluded. But I toasn’t jealous when Marcel Bich died; then I was merely beset by the old, stale envy. But I was jealous when the Channel Tunnel opened. Jealous of it as it was penetrated by train after train, each with its spermatozoa-load of men, eating croques m’sieurs, swigging beers, reading Le Monde. I was jealous of Winnie Mandela. I was jealous of OJ’s wife. I was so jealous – I so wanted not to be me. I wanted to be loved. I wanted to be held. I wanted to slur sibilant Mama-loshen with someone to whom I’d always be – their baby.
‘Be my, be my baby!’ Lithy sang in the pocket of my sack dress, as I wended my way between the girlish crowds streaming from the subways around Old Street. They’d’ve looked at me oddly – had they bothered to look at all. At work I considered offering the young men, with their brightly coloured braces and their dull imaginations, a crack at my withered sex. The subsonic hum of the air conditioning, the ultrasonic whine of the computers and the droning of the workaday chatter – all of it, amazingly, gingered them up. Most of them would, I knew, fuck anything. They’d insinuate their thin white joints into the photocopier or the fax machine if they thought it would feel good. But what’d be the point? I’d only feel the worst jealousy of all, the jealousy of my former, busty, lusty self.
In the late summer of ‘94 I was standing in the bloody basement of 27 Argos Road, by the open window of the bedroom, when I heard the familiar invocation of the Yale in an altogether too familiar voice. I craned up to see unfamiliar, expensive-looking, brown leather ankle-boots; unfamiliar, well-washed dungarees; and – thumb hooked in pocket, four fingers drumming on a flat thigh – a hand, the garden of which I once travelled round and round, like a teddy bear. Attached to it was an arm I used to take one step up, then a second, and an under-there which I’d tickle and tickle, until its owner’s face scrunched up with giggles.
The key sailed down and she stooped to pick it up. Her hair was cut short – mannishly short. It didn’t suit her. But her arms were tanned, almost muscled, with clean white sleeves rolled up on them – and that did suit her. ‘She’s fit and well, fit and well . . .’ babbled the Fats, who’d joined me by the window and who huddled by my hips like loveless handles. ‘But not for long!’ I snapped back at them. Up above, Natasha turned and casually scanned the street, then her new clothes disappeared back into her old life.
Christmas 2001
I’m a chubby little thing – that I am. A regular piglet. The Ice Princess– to give her her due – was inclined to feed me on sterile pots of puree, gluten-free, protein-balanced, vitamin-enhanced. I suppose this careful feeding was by way of compensating for her own, increasingly erratic diet. Still, the Estate Agent made a mockery ofthis, because whenever the three of us were out together, and she’d disappeared behind one of those heavy, tomb-like doors, incised with the hieroglyphs ofsociety’s dis
advantaged – the old, the wheel chaired, women with small kids – he’d buy me a bag of chips. Chips as thin as toothpicks, frazzled into spikiness in the grease bins of Burgerland, or McDonald’s or KFC. Chips as sharply unpleasant in my tiny soft mouth as dental instruments – for, once again, I’m soft in the tooth department. Or alternatively, fat, blubbery, near-disintegrating chips, as white as Ouruobouros, questing towards my pink lips from within greasy flaps of grey paper.
Chips, chips and more chips. Chips clutched and chomped in shopping precincts, on street corners, or beside the twisted railings in shat-upon parks. Chips drenched in ascorbic acid, or bleeding Heinz. Chips hung on to by me for their warmth alone. My precious chips, always being solicited by kids with hooded sweatshirts – ‘Gizzacbipi’ – their button noses silverriveted to their gunmetal faces. In the bilious gloaming of the inner city they resemble a closed order of the shabby, the infantilised. Chips – always Prêt à Shit for me. Then the Estate Agent or the Ice Princess would lie me on a bench or a folddown plastic scoop, or even on the cold earth itself, in order to wrestle with tights and trousers, to extract the wad of absor-bency from between my rash thighs. Then the Wet Ones insinuated between my folds, then the slathered cream. All my life, underwear has tormented me – soon it’ll be over.