by Self, Will
Anyway, Charlotte, she activates a retro stainless-steel juicer and watches a column of bananas, prunes and whatnot turn to healthy pulp, while ruefully contemplating her younger sister. Fresh back from the back of Bourke, and newly dubbed Natasha Bloom. Yup, that Yaws never suited her, too ugly a tubercule for such a flawlessly olive skin. And Natasha isn’t simply olive now – she’s positively dark. I mean to say, it’s a wonder Immigration let her in at Heathrow, especially if they realised she was coming back to torture more victims with her sadistic pulchritude, her vicious beauty.
Yes, Natasha Bloom. Charlotte’s gone one way – Natasha the other. And while Natasha wouldn’t exactly say that she’s Jewish, she is prepared to admit to Jewish blood. ‘I have Jewish blood,’ she’ll say, as if –like the vampire she so clearly is – she keeps a vat of such in the fridge, to stop it congealing. Or, if pressed, ‘I’m half-Jewish – I get all of the guilt, but none of the community.’ Actually, Natty, there isn’t a community that’d accept you as member, even if you did choose to join it. Shit, you wouldn’t even be welcomed in at the Dulston Community Centre, and that’s saying something.
The two sisters contemplate one another, two leonine halves of one prideful being. Antipathy crackles in the air between them as Charlotte strikes down the barb that’s just been thrown. ‘No,’ she says, ‘we haven’t considered adopting.’
No indeedy. Absolument non! I mean, what’s the fucking point in acquiring quite this much pride if you’re simply going to throw it away on the first fucking epsilon semi-moron the social services are prepared to chuck your way? I mean to say, it’d be like leaving your fucking property to the state, saying, ‘Could we please pay more in the way of death duties? Pretty please?’
‘Have you?’ Oh, nice but futile try, Charlotte, for you know as well as I do that mother denatured here has no more need of adopting than a consumer has of trading a wide– for a flat-screen TV, a Ford for another Ford, or a Patek Philippe for a Longines. Yes, oh witty irony, how strange to relate that Natasha Bloom only has to rub past a man in the fucking hall to get knocked up. It’s as if her entire, lusciously lucent, dewily downy skin were a fucking flower, tilted at exactly the right angle to collect whatever spore might be floating through the air.
Following a brace of scrape ‘n’ vacs in her teens, Natasha has always used a diaphragm and the pill, and insisted on condoms, and positively slurped up spermicidal lubricant, as if her vagina were possessed of capillary action. Excepting when she’s zonked, of course – then, as we know, anything can happen.
There’s nothing more seductive for the men who fall into Natasha Bloom’s clutches than the way she puts a condom on them, muzzles their shlongs in latex. Curiously, it’s the ultimate gateway to unfettered enjoyment for these saps. As she deliciously unrolls it with coolly deft fingers, they think to themselves ‘Oooh!’ and ‘Aaah!’ – she really doesn’t want a kid, she loves me for my stiff little self. She – ‘Aaah!’ – wants the push and shove just as much as me, which is why she’s fitting this one-fingered glove so expertly.
Ach! Such shtoopidity; they don’t seem to realise that this proficiency is the very hallmark of cupidity. I was a pretty dab hand with the things myself. The point being that once those cocks are, as it were, shrink-wrapped, they’re half-way to being harmless. Given the chance, Natasha would ply condoms with extra-thick, constrictor bands at their base. Bands that would tighten, so that, as with the devices farmers use to castrate sheep, eventually the portion would wither, blacken and then drop off altogether. Ah, Natasha, even the sight of a smoked eel makes her feel a little Bobbitty.
Still, her proficiency with condoms will stand her in good stead. She’s gotta have it – she’s gonna need it.
‘Nope.’ Natasha is munching on a peanut-encrusted chocolate bar which closely resembles a turd. She doesn’t need to watch her weight, unlike Charlotte, and she has the flawless white teeth of Dorian Gray. Life can be so unfair. ‘Although Russell and I are thinking of having a kid soon.’ Yup, they’re back together, and this time it’s official. ‘Now that he’s cleaned up his act – well, I think he’d make an excellent father.’
‘What! Russell!’ And enter Richard Elvers on socking big feet. Richard Elvers, grown still more corpulent despite his personal trainer. Richard who, having spent the first part of the decade humping for English pride, will now spend its middle years under the auspices of the idiotically-named Lord Churchill. Poor Richard, it would be difficult not to feel sympathetic towards him, if I weren’t so intrinsically unsympathetic, wrapped up in King Stuff as I am.
‘Look, Richard,’ she prettily mews, ‘I know you and Russell don’t exactly see eye to eye’ – on the contrary, they have, that’s the problem – ‘but he’s clean now and he’s doing well with this property-development gig. In fact, he’d like to have a word with you about an old school he and his partner are buying down in Hackney.’
I bet he would. Probably wants some notionally clean capital for this, another of his filthy deals. Still, you have to hand it to Russell, he got out at the right time. Did his own cold turkey, his own six weeks at Pullet Green – Class of ‘92: ‘A bad attitude can sometimes get you through – shit floats’ and has brought all of the twisted acumen he deployed engendering tiny dreams to this, the big nightmare of property development. Sure, Russell hasn’t exactly stayed abstinent he likes his puff and the odd glass of designer lager – but he’s off the hard stuff. When Natasha turned up at his new place in Docklands, stoned again, ready to resume their old shenanigans, Russell, to his credit, slapped her about in a new way, cleaned her up again, moved her in, togged her out. Now they’re very much the upcoming couple in town. Russell does up the apartments, Natasha furnishes their communal areas with corporate art.
‘He’s given me a budget of ten grand to sort out this other building, the one he’s just finished in St Katharine’s Dock,’ Natasha boasts to her sister, ‘and it’s gonna look really good when I’ve bought the daubs. I’m going round some galleries this afternoon – you wanna come with?’
‘You’ve got to be joking,’ her sister shoots back. ‘Anyway, Richard and I have an important appointment.’
There’re other things I like about Russell as well. I admire his dark good looks – he and Natty go well together. I like his uncompromising, East End Jewishness too. Russell’s family never moved beyond the pale, never went for the colourless indifference of the northern ‘burbs. They stuck it out down the Mile End Road, shneidering out of premises in Whitechapel, attending services with the dwindling congregation at shul, going for the occasional shmeiss at the steam baths in Hackney. They kept faith with their Cockney patter – the word of God the costermonger – and have spawned another generation of chancers like Russell, living off his wits, winging it, like a dark angel passing over the feast of commerce.
They stand in direct contrast to the likes of Lord Churchill, the leading British authority on infertility, whose clinic is the venue that afternoon for the first of a series of appointments which, over the next five years, will steadily accrue phenomenal importance for Mr and Mrs Elvers.
Lord Churchill – paternal grandfather’s moniker Jakob Rotblatt – has consulting rooms in South Kensington, within convenient hobbling distance of his own private clinic. It’s there that the majority of his patients tend to put up, while visiting London for their treatment cycles. It’s an irony which hasn’t escaped Churchill himself that most of his success stories relate to the people of the Other Book. The women whose eggs he cossets and coddles, shakes and stirs, transports hither and thither, are black-bell-tent campers, with foil beaks, fresh in from the Gulf. He has to examine them in conditions of the most stringent purdah, the afflicted parts of their bodies portioned out for him, one at a time, like pieces of chicken-fed chicken. It’s as if through such procedures he were undertaking to raise, through artificial conception, a West London army to further the jihad.
Not that Churchill’s only patients are Arabs. Even to thos
e very close to the good Lord, it’s not entirely certain whether the ‘Lord’ part of his name is a title. It could be a first name, a student sobriquet, or only the first barrel of the shotgun combination ‘Lord-Churchill’. Certainly, it’s true that the good Lord has been instrumental in assisting friends – and even a few members – of the incumbent regime towards conception. But would this be sufficient grounds for ennoblement?
Richard and Charlotte think so, as they watch him make allusive shapes in the air with the index finger of either hand, delineating the possible diagnoses, treatments and prognoses. Lord Churchill conducts human destiny with superb artistry, knowing that the most sure-fire salesmanship a doctor can display is to make with the hands, lay on the hands. In some alternative lifetime Churchill would’ve been a spieler in Brick Lane, piling up dinner plates, side plates, saucers and cups into a great rosette of crockery, then pounding it down: ‘Orlrighty, my loves –look at that! Never a breakage. Fine new china. Six of everything – t’you, ten quid. Only a tenner. Who’s got the gumption? Who’s got the cash!?’ But instead it’s petri dishes he’s piling up, and injections of hormones, and incubators, and the knocked-up price is in the ten-grand region.
Still, the hands are superb. When Churchill rises from behind the desk and wiggles across the consulting room’s thick, endometrial carpeting, his marvellously ugly face – like a clenched fist in a glove puppet – his barrel chest and skinny legs make him appear not unlike a highly motile sperm himself. Inspiring enormous confidence in the Elverses.
And me. Because I’ve accompanied them to South Ken. I’ve taken to hanging out with them again. I’ve begun to view spending time with the Elverses as being in the manner of an occupation. Accordingly, I’ve taken more – and increasingly protracted –leaves of absence from KBHL Corporate Communications. Until, at the point where it must’ve become clear to them that I wasn’t really working there at all, they sacked me. The bumptious little prick who I reported to reported me to another bumptious little prick. Ah capitalism! It’s gonna be a ten-thousand-year reich of a billion bumptious little pricks. Personnel had me into its drawer of the mirrored cabinet. ‘You understand, Ms Bloom,’ said Miss Ever-so-Modern, ‘that given you haven’t been with us for very long, we’re in no position to offer you much in the way of a severance payment. I hope you don’t mind me asking, but do you have a personal pension plan?’ One more mirrored building I wouldn’t have to look into, seeing nothing of myself, going nowhere.
I laughed like a loon all the way back to Dulston, Lithy gambolling beside me on the tube, singing in the street, ‘It’s good to touch the green, green grass of ho-ome!’ Not that the dead chunk of calcification knew anything about grass, or home, or touching. Still, years now of shushing, tushing and generally admonishing my never-to-be-child had started to pay off. It was mentally growing up. It was now possible to hold a conversation verging on the adult with Lithy. Lithy who, it transpired, had the sassy irreverence and anarchic acumen I’d tried to inculcate in my daughters, but without Natasha’s deep well of neediness, or Charlotte’s constricting chain of snob shops.
With Rude Boy, on the other hand, there’d been no change. He was the same as ever, impersonating the wheelchair-bound by twirling his hands at his sides while screaming ‘Um-diddyum-diddy!’, half-mooning the elderly with his muddy ass, freaking out small kiddies by manifesting himself in the margins of their vision. At least he wasn’t so clingy. I’d leave him at Argos Road when I went to work, now I left him for whole nights as well. Shit – what could happen to him anyway?
‘So, what do we do now?’ Lithy said, back-flipping from gutter to sidewalk as we neared home.
‘Well, I suppose we’ll have to visit the deatheaucracy. See if there’s an eternity benefit available, or anything of that ilk.’
The deatheaucracy were tenanting a busted car-hire operation in Acton that winter. One of those clock-card ladders was tacked up on the wall by the door of the place. When you arrived you were required to punch a card and put it in the appropriate slot. As you know, wherever the deatheaucracy pitch up there’s a waiting system of a kind, whether deli-style tickets like these, or an electronic signboard like in a post office. Three or four of the dead –looking dead ordinary – sat on functional benches, leafing through a dismemberment of week-old newspapers.
Eventually my number was up, and leaving Lithy in the waiting area I trailed behind a clerk sporting a bumfreezer, through a claustrophobic succession of rooms, each one more crowded with life-size, cardboard cut-out, stand-alone figures than the one before. These rigid men leant about the place, their cardboard supports long since torn away. They were all the same guy, a young executive in a dark, double-breasted suit, waving a bunch of keys, with a speech bubble coming out of his mouth. This said, ‘I’VE GOT HIRE POWER – HAVE YOU?’ ‘They put them in here when the business went under,’ explained Hartly, the bumfreezer clerk. ‘Frightful bore, but still, we won’t be staying for long. Have you said hello to the nyujo yet?’ I said hello to their precious fucking nyujo, which was being daubed with Copydex by one of the plain Janes.
A few of the suits were hanging around the place. Two sizes sat with their jackets off, trading baseball cards from their waistcoat pockets. Another, in a blue blazer, fired Buck Rogers’s rocket pistol X2-31 at a hippy in a Mao jacket who sported a Zapata moustache. ‘Zap-zap-zap,’ the toy went. Other deatheaucrats were playing mah-jong or Diplomacy, Scrabble or Monopoly, or working their way through all 43,252,003,274,489,856,856,000 possible combinations of Rubik’s cube. They ignored us as we passed. They concentrated on their dead crazes and their ceaseless smoking. Like Phar Lap, the deatheaucrats rolled their own. It gave them another excuse for a good fidget and pocketful of paraphernalia.
Hartly showed me into Canter’s partitioned office.
‘Ah, Ms Bloom.’ Canter looked up from his paperwork, put down his Papermate, adjusted the collar of his Jaeger jacket. ‘You may leave us, Hartly – do something useful, like taking Anubis for a walk on Turnham Green.’
‘As you wish,’ said Hartly, with ill grace. It was never possible for me to ascertain where authority lay with the deatheaucrats. While Canter nominally took control of my case, on occasions I’d heard him answer in the same surly fashion to Hartly, Glanville, or even Davis. The whole organisation has too many Indians and no discernible chiefs at all, wouldn’tjew say?
‘Ms Bloom,’ Canter pressed on, ‘apparently you’ve given up your job?’
‘News travels fast.’
‘Oh, well-nigh instantaneously.’
‘I’m getting too old for it.’
‘You’re no older than you were the day you died. Have you, perhaps, been having some . . . mmm, how can I put it?’
‘Feelings?’
‘Precisely so.’ He shuffled a couple of file cards. ‘Jealousy in the early sixties, anger in the late fifties, pride going back to the Second War and so forth?’
‘Ye-es, those would be the ones.’ The deatheaucrats always know everything, yet understand so little. ‘But they don’t altogether – ‘
‘Impinge? Well they wouldn’t, would they? Given your subtle body. It’s more in the manner of seeing feelings, isn’t it? Looking in on them from outside, revisiting the sights.’
Loathsome man. I was more than glad I hadn’t got the job with them. A plain Jane came in with the obligatory Nice biscuits and the rancid tea. She looked at me with ill-concealed pique and eased herself out again.
‘Going to the meetings, are you?’ Canter pressed on, peering at me through a rimless pince-nez he’d poked up on to his shnozzle.
‘Now and then.’
‘Not according to our records. Listen, Ms Bloom, may I be candid?’
‘What’s the sense in being anything else?’
‘You’re still preoccupied with the affairs of the living. This observation of your daughters, this entering into their lives. Mr Jones should encourage you to desist. There’s nothing to be gained now. You’d be far better
off considering a move to Dulburb, or even further afield. I understand that your elder daughter, Mrs . . .?’ Another search for facts – when were these assholes going to get computerised.
‘Elvers.’
‘Yes, Elvers. She’s about to undertake fertility treatment, if I’m not mistaken.’
‘Could be.’
‘I wouldn’t make the mistake of spending too much time with her during this, if I were you. There could be complications.’
‘Oh.’ I got up to leave; I’d had enough of the interview. I pulled my gloves on – it seemed the appropriate action. ‘I’m not really interested in your advice on the matter, Mister Canter, I only came here to enquire whether there might be some cigarette money available now that I’ve quit my job?’
‘Only the most nugatory amount. I think the current grant stands at around a hundred and fifty pounds per calendar month.’
‘That will be sufficient. I won’t bother you any further.’
‘Good day, Ms Bloom, see the cashier on your way out. And do try and think about what I’ve been saying.’
But I didn’t – why would I? I went back to Cumberland Terrace, I took up my station at the Elverses’. I went with Charlotte and Richard to their consultations with Churchill.