How the Dead Live

by Self, Will

  But how soon? Two days now and all I’ve had to eat is the Christmas cake and all I’ve been able to get to drink is scoops of water from the toilet bowl in the bathroom. Several times I’ve inched along beside the banisters, avoiding looking at the Ice Princess, and gained the door to the bathroom. Here I’ve managed, only just, to climb up, scoop and drink, then sit down and pee, then flush. This death is child’s play.

  To think I was jealous ofthe Ice Princess and her consort-jealous of this pitiable pair, she up here, he down there. But they had their moments, cackling in minicabs as we slewed across town to score, steal or mooch, the African drivers navigating the ancient city by reference to their internal maps of Lagos, Dar es Salaam, or Addis Ababa. Cackling as the drivers slammed on their brakes and slide guitar slid from the speakers on the back shelf; cackling as they pictured tall, slim, tirelessly elegant Masai, puffing on filter-tips and staring out over the riven valleys of Marlboro Country.

  But then I had every right to feel jealous of him – he wasn’t anything to do with me. And her – well I knew her as intimately as anyone could know another. Knew her inside and out, claustra and agro. As begetter and begotten. Yes, I’ve edged past the Ice Princess’s bier, this chilly slab of padding, disgorged from the fast-flowing glacier of her life into a terminal moraine of duvet and pillow. Edged past – now I must edge towards. Last night was cold – tonight will be colder. No one will come in this, the dead interstice between the years. Despite the muted bang and wail ofthe people who live in the flat above, cranking up for another evening session on the karaoke machine they got for Christmas. For they’re as inaccessible to me as if this maisonette were an orbiting space station, with its communications failed, its computers down, its life-support systems a misnomer.

  ‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do / I’m half crazy, all for the love of you . . .’ She sang it to me – I sang it to her. Now, as I crawl over the carpet, struggle up on to the bed, pull a lappet of duvet from her, curl it around myself, I lisp the ditty in my own inimitable way: ‘Daithee, Daithee, githee y’antha doo / N’yam na’ athy, orcalovuv oo . . . ‘ A shame to cry so – to void the toilet water. I could cry enough to flood this room, and send a wave crashing down the stairs, smashing into the door, busting the chains at top and bottom. Cry enough to flood the whole of Coborn House, so that its inhabitants have to assemble in the playground and run a caucus race so as to dry themselves off Everybody has won and all must have prizes. Karaoke machines for the kiddy-winkies, karaoke machines for the leering adults. Then they can all sing something very very simple. I could never quite believe how popular popular music is.

  From where I lie I can see very little and the Ice Princess is merely another bit of cheap furniture lying beside me. This place abounds with such meagre sticks. I can see orange beams from the streetlamps without, cut up by the louvres and ranged across the room. I can see a thin rime of ice forming on the windows. I want to sink into dreams of quiet, brown rooms, with slants of sunshine and poignant, boring atmospheres. Instead, I recall a trip the two of them took me on at the cold start of this year.

  They were wrecked – natch. Stoned as crows. Flapping down through the Isle of Dogs, past the Celesteville of Canary Wharf to Victory Gardens. Then through the foot tunnel to Greenwich, then through the smoggy streets to the Millennium Dome. All the way they took turns to push my chair ahead of them. First one, then the other, giving it an almighty shove, then running a few paces to catch the handles of the caroming cart. Laughing like loons, imagining that this barely controlled sensation was fun for me. ‘Oh my, my, my De-li-lah!’ he sang – she’d thought it amusing to incorporate her feared mother’s name into her fearful daughter’s. Why were we going there? Because they were high – yes. Because they thought the Dome would prove to be a hit, a trip for happy-go-lucky, hippy-dippy souls such as themselves. Oh and the Estate Agent had pulled off some successful scam, or deal, so he had money for a change.

  They did enjoy themselves – scampering from the Money Zone to the Play Zone to the Discovery Zone, all the time utterly zoned out. And what did I think of this huge, crushed boob, with its panoply of corporate playthings, its coursing multitudes of middle-class proles? Well, when they’d proposed the trip that morning, at our walk-up apartment in Coborn House, on the Coborn Street Estate, on Coborn Street, Mile End, I wanted to say to them, ‘Let’s not and say we did.’ But that wasn’t possible. My vocabulary has stretched a bit now – I could ask for the essentials if they were available – but then, all I could burble was ‘Mumu’ to her and ‘Ruh’ to him. Yes, Coborn House, with its three storeys of external walkways and staircases, so like a shoddy version of the Rhinelander Gardens on West 11th Street.

  And the Dome with its cheesy evocations of a technologically advanced future that we know will never arrive, what did that remind me of, dear Mumu, dearest Ruh, as you shoved me hither and thither? Why, of another time and another place, where 6,700,000 cubic yards ofcontamination was removed so that the world oftomorrow could be built. It reminded me of a 700–foot-high tapered pillar, symbolising the finite, and a 200–foot steel globe, symbolising the infinite. It reminded me of the Helicline, the ramp that connected them, and of the giant NCR cash register that counted the visitors in. It reminded me of the giant powder box that served as a pavilion for ladies’ cosmetics, and the humungous radio tube that did the same for RCA. It reminded me that Lewis Mumford said in 1939 that the World’s Fair represented ‘a completely tedious and unconvincing belief in the triumph of modern industry’.

  Oh, the future – it’s always so fucking dated. For you, for me, for all of us. If only there were some way out of it.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I went in search of Phar Lap to discuss this not so welcome homecoming. I didn’t go into town that often – but I went. I’d been to the Courtauld fairly frequently since I’d died. The situation of the galleries – in those days tucked up several flights in back of Gower Street – was obscure enough to make me feel secure. The rooms were poorly lit considering the trove they contained, and visitors wafted over the sound floorboards. I favoured the Wigmore Hall for concerts, but mourned for the days when it smelt of Dettol. I avoided the grand galleries and booming venues, I skirted the wide esplanades. The London I traversed was a Dickensian city of snaking alleys and sunless courtyards, where the corroded bricks oozed pigeon droppings, and indecorous ledges were blanketed by sootfalls. What was the point of going to Self-ridges, they didn’t sell Benson & Hedges.

  But even I, going on my wraith’s progress, began to notice wedges of modernity, hammered into the creaking joints of the city, like plastic hips into arthritic old women. Flashy boutiques and garish eateries were opening up by the score. Down pissy passageways, brushed-aluminium frontages gleamed through the murk, where stray catwalk models picked their way between turds, en route to rest their heads on pillowy ciabatta and slurp frothy cappuccino. Of course, those of us who’d been here all along had seen it all before. The coffee bars and the themed restaurants, the drugs and the deshabille, the tourists and the travail, the pansies and the punters.

  It transpired there were no fewer than thirteen branches of Nowhere, the Centralian themed restaurant. Three in the Square Mile, five in the West End, five more in the ‘burbs – but none of them in the phone book. It was easy to comprehend the success of Phar Lap’s venture; the Nowhere concept evinced all of the foibles that passed for convictions among the city-dwellers: a willingness to embrace Ocker chauvinism, combined with a desire to lie down with the Aboriginal, and then complicated by the difficulty of actually finding the place. Nowheres weren’t listed in the phone book, nor did Phar Lap and his partners permit entries in restaurant guides or listings magazines, or on tourist maps. To find Nowhere you either had to know someone who’d been, or had to go walkabout through the outback of London. This in the jaded eyes of its beholders – made Nowhere an authentic transplant of traditional folkways into the urban context. You could only eat at Nowhere if yo
u’d secret knowledge, or were prepared to seek it out.

  There were also different kinds of Nowhere. The decor of the most basic outlets evoked the dried-out riverbed of the Todd, in Alice Springs, on a hot summer afternoon. Black shade edging pitiless glare. Vast mounds of empty cans and broken bottles. Extreme drunkenness. Very little to eat. As you ascended the hierarchy of Nowhere, so you moved figuratively speaking – further out into the Centralian desert. The waiters discarded more and more K-Mart clothing and were to be encountered daubed with ochre, taking down orders on tjuringa-shaped pads, their hacked-about genitals concealed in leathery pouches. And these were the white staff – college kids from Perth, Melbourne and Brisbane – hired by Phar Lap because they were so much more reliable than the natives, and at least their accents were authentic.

  In the most prestigious branches of Nowhere, which took up whole floors of mirrored office blocks in the City, there was nothing save for featureless expanses of cracked salt pan, ringed with spinifex. The walls were artfully painted with a continuous trompe-l’oeil mural depicting the hot air on the desert horizon; with perhaps the merest of dark smears to indicate, in the far far distance, a low escarpment, or was it the bar? Occasionally a goanna or a marsupial rat would be released from the far recesses of the establishment and would scamper through the dust, startling the clientele, who’d writhe in the dirt with delight.

  Writhing in the dirt was a big part of the Nowhere shtick. Diners might arrive in a London midwinter, draped with cashmere, wrapped around with wool, suited and booted. But a few, short minutes in the dehumidified, forty-fourdegree heat of Nowhere would see them stripping off their silk ties, letting them fall to the ground like limp snakes, unbuttoning their collars, unzipping their dresses, peeling off their tights, dropping their socks and feeling the grit between their soft toes.

  The food was almost inedible: half-burnt chunks of kangaroo, witchetty grubs, damper – a kind of mushy campfire bread – and, if you were very lucky, a few handfuls of bitter herbs. But that wasn’t the point. Overhead, the high-resolution screens drummed down on the dyspeptic diners a view of a sky so vast and encompassing that it entirely diminished the meagre earth. Cloud formations like continents wheeled by. The gibbous moon rose, its craters and mountains more sharply credible than Europe. The London without wasn’t merely masked – it was annihilated by the experience of Nowhere. And there was the booze. Plenty of liquor. Phar Lap quipped to me, ‘We put this stuff in the grog, yeh-hey? Kinduv makes this mob like blackfellers, hey-yeh? Takes out an enzyme – whatever. Makes it so they can’t handle it.’

  I didn’t believe this for a second. What there was at Nowhere was blistering dry heat and a pushy, personable kid by your side, for every second of your stay, mimicking the raising of a glass or a bottle, and interrogating you. ‘This one?’ he’d say. ‘You want this one?’ Then he’d bring cold bottles of good Australian white wine, or beers colder still, and slap the vessels, filmed with condensation, straight into your sweaty palm. No wonder people drank and drank, stripped off their clothes, and howled, and beat sticks together when – as was often the case at Nowhere – there was an inauthentic display of a bowdlerised initiation ceremony, put on by ex-anthropology students from the Australian National University. They drank, and during unhappy hour – when Phar Lap’s staff released swarms of fresh flies into the joint – the drinks were half-price, so they drank twice as much. Yes, there was nothing in London quite like a trip to Nowhere. No-thing.

  Not, you understand, that I ever saw the place in full swing. I arrived at the flagship branch of Nowhere, which was sited at the southern end of Blackfriars Bridge, in a prime piece of repulsive eighties rococo called Sea Containers House, during one of my lack of lunch hours. Nowhere never opened at lunch – although during the late nineties Phar Lap started up a hugely successful chain of themed Centralian sandwich shops, called Anywhere.

  It was early August 1994. There’d been a car-bombing at the Israeli Embassy in London a week or so before, and the week before that a bomb in Buenos Aires had done for a hundred of my coreligionists. It was business as usual for us Jews, holocaust and diaspora, hand in oven glove. While in upstate New York they were limbering up to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of fucking Woodstock. Ach! If the seventies were bulbous, and the eighties sharp, the nineties were nothing but bogus.

  From the mock gilt and garbled marble of the lobby, Schindler’s lift took me up five storeys and disgorged me into a grim slot of space. The overhead video screens were showing naught but themselves. At the far side of a hundred feet of cracked white mud, a panel of desert horizon had been rolled back to reveal a patch of the Thames’s north bank and a slice of Unilever House. A beefy blond boy in overalls was sweeping up a pile of dead flies and the occasional crushed lizard. Truly, I thought, we are as flies to wanton boys. A fat girl whistled as she vacuumed the spinifex, breaking off as I approached to gesture towards a pile of old clothes, which, as I tramped over to it, resolved itself first into a hat on top of a pile of old clothes, and latterly into Phar Lap Jones.

  ‘Bin ‘spectin’ you, Lily-girl, yeh-hey.’ He was toying with his big boomerangs and smoking his dag-tail cigarette. At his feet, on the floor of the mock desert, the ends of many many similar failed to reach any conclusion.

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘Yuwai – y’got wulu, girl?’ He indicated that he needed a light – and I provided him with one. He took a long pull of the scrawny cigarette, the smoke leaked from his plump lips in thin pleats, staggered in a draught, then dispersed. ‘Yairs Natasha – back, yeh-hey?’

  ‘You know about that?’

  ‘Know ‘bout that. Know ‘bout yer feelings – bin havin’ them, yeh-hey?’

  ‘I’ve been fucking angry – if that’s what you mean – ‘

  ‘And jealous. Deadly jealous, hey-yeh?’

  ‘And jealous,’ I acknowledged.

  ‘The best is yet t’come, girl, yeh-heh? All yer feelings come down now, yeh-hey? Nearly yer last chance, hey-yeh? Make up yer mind, girl, get off yer go-round or shit yerself back into life, yeh – your decision.’ Once again Phar Lap was putting the onus on to me, poor little fat old me; me, who’d endured so many twenty-four–hour Dulston days. My death, it occurred to me, was falling into the same pattern as my life, apathetic sojourns followed by spasms of inertia. He asked me if I wanted to get off this ‘go-round’, as he termed it. But as to what that was, or how to do it, he was as vague as ever.

  Anyway, I couldn’t bear too much of this twaddle, especially not there, not in a downtime themed restaurant, talking to a dead Aboriginal. I surprised myself by caring about Natasha. ‘Natasha’s back, Phar Lap, and she looks well.’

  ‘She looks damn fine. Damn fine buju. But not for long, yeh-hey? Not for long. Y’see yer wonderin’, Lily-girl, yeh-hey? Wonderin’ how it all adds up, yeh-hey? How it kinduv fits together, hmm? Wonderin’ why a traditional man like me has anything t’do with you girl, hey-yeh?’

  ‘Yes. I think it has something to do with Natasha – to do with what happened to Natasha – ‘

  ‘Down under?’

  ‘Yes, down under.’

  ‘Yuwai! Down fuckin’ under, girl. Juda! What happened-you want me t’tell you what happened, yeh-hey?’

  ‘You know, then?’

  ‘Oh I know, Lily-girl. I know – I was fuckin’ there.’

  So he told me. It took the rest of the hour. I was late back to Old Street. Phar Lap told me in his own, inimitable way, but for your convenience I’ll omit the cheek-clicks and palateslaps, I’ll translate the blackfeller terms and the Strine slang. After all – everything should be for your convenience in this, the most inconvenient of times. A waiting time in a waiting room.

  But Phar Lap wasn’t at Potts Point, where Natasha pitched up to stay with Polly Passmore. He wasn’t present while she puked her way through hot days – so bizarre, the chill of withdrawal in this balmy clime; nor when at night the two young women would haul the mattress up on to t
he roof, and hunker down beside the swimming pool there, staring over at the entrance to the Sebold Townhouse Hotel. Watching the Caucasian big businessmen tramp inside with tiny Asian hookers dangling off their arms – like charmless bracelets.

  Natasha stayed with Polly at Potts Point for six months, for her a triumph of mateship. She kept off the smack as well, more or less. She did score a couple more times at the Cross, and in so doing made less of herself. King’s Cross, Sydney. How absurd – like Paris, Texas. Every facet of Natasha’s London life was reflected back at her out of the hard diamond of the southern sky. She learned that you scored at Alice’s Restaurant in King’s Cross. Scored from surfer junkies. Ever seen a junky with a surfer’s toned body, and who has no need to roll up a sleevein order to find a vein, because he’s wearing a fucking singlet? Totally bizarre. Natasha saw them and scored off of them, like I say, two, maybe three, times. But worse than that, one time she turned a trick to get the money. In London, Russell had taken to getting Natasha to do perverse things sexually. Fuck with him while men watched, so as to entertain dealers he wanted to get on the right wrong side of, or voyeurs he wished to be seen with. He’d also tied her up and slapped her around. All to get junk when they were coked up – or coke when they were junked up. Seesaw, Marjorie door, Natasha will have a sick master.

  But this was different. Natasha strolled in among the milling tourist folk, beneath the low neon advertising strip shows, gripped by the need to get high. To let go of herself. To forget all. It wasn’t the money per se – she had some. Miles sent her monthly chunks, the proceeds from selling the flat. But that was only enough to live healthily. That was her healthy stake. If she was going to get smack, she thought, she’d have to do something grubby for it, teach herself a lesson. What a mistake. Teach yourself a lesson and you become an autodidact. She thought it would be easy enough. She’d seen the street girls pick men up off the strip, walk round two corners with them, lie down in the bougainvillaea-planted border of a little park for all of two minutes of bumping. The men’s white asses rising up from the hardy perennials like cloven moons. And everywhere she walked in the red-light district she was propositioned. ‘G’day, g’day, g’day,’ the men said to her. Which really meant – observing her long brown limbs, her blue-black hair, her still high-riding breasts – ‘Good lay, good lay, good lay . . .’ The Australian men, loudly dressed and clamorous, like gallah birds.