How the Dead Live

by Self, Will

My daughter had already been through a battery of tests and examinations with her own doctor, but the good Lord liked to do things properly. And although she’d been pregnant once before, it’d only been managed after the most strenuous sexual callisthenics. Churchill already had a picture of a complex of problems that were hampering the Elverses’ ability to conceive. Charlotte had some endometriosis, although not enough to block her tubes. Richard’s sperm were sluggish and some of them were abnormal, but they could still do the crawl. There was no doubt that Charlotte’s tension and anxiety were affecting ovulation. Ha! Her inability to conceive had become a self-fulfilling prophecy. But there was also hostility between her refined cervical mucus and his coarse sperm.

  Churchill did more tests. He probed her with his clever hands, both he and Charlotte revelling in mutual appreciation of each other’s lack of embarrassment. This, Churchill reflected, is what gynaecology should be like – having a compliant patient, who had long since ceased to view her body as anything other than a vessel for procreation. He took blood, he took cervical mucus, he did a laparoscopy to check out her internal layout. He did a hysterosalpingography – purely because he liked impressing his patients by pronouncing the word. He did abdominal ultrasound scanning and an endrometrial biopsy. He pronounced himself satisfied and packed her off to lunch on the fifth floor of Harvey Nichols.

  Richard came to see Churchill and the doctor talked to him, man to sperm. Churchill told him how lucky he was not to have idiopathic oligospermia – and Richard couldn’t but agree. To have slow, fucked-up sperm was one thing, but to have none at all, that would look like carelessness. Churchill told Richard that even his normal, motile sperm might have undetectable chromosomal abnormalities. But he needn’t feel singled out by this, it was quite possible that his wife’s eggs were reaching their sell-by date as well. Some men, Churchill prated, are born without a vas deferens at all, or their urethra – foolish tube! – emerges on the underside of the penis. Others have retrograde ejaculation, which is pretty damn stupid; so they inseminate their own bladders, giving birth to their own pissy babies. ‘But you’ve done that,’ I mouthed at Elvers from the corner of the room, ‘you’ve done that already – and it’s I who must face the consequences. At the cat-flap, day after day, moaning for admission.’

  Another possibility was – and Churchill was buoyed up by this one, for it was an area of doubly fruitful research – that Richard’s immune system reacted to his own sperm as if it were a foreign body, as if he’d drunk some other guy’s spunk. These weren’t the good Lord’s words – they’re my own. Anyway, the important thing was to take the pith out of Richard and have plenty of the life force on tap. If he could’ve, Churchill would’ve demanded litres of the stuff from every man who walked into the room, the Lord’s lust for sperm was so great.

  Churchill told Richard to take his time; he’d go out and get a cappuccino while his patient frothed. There were any number of images on offer, carefully stored in a Chinese lacquer bookcase. Erotica of many stripes, woodblocks, etchings, dry points, even fucking oil paintings. Oh yes, Churchill certainly expected his patients to be of a refined character, the sort of men who whacked off to Degas and got a hard-on looking at a Gauguin. There were even – should Richard be of a coarser grain – actual photographs of naked women. Full frontal split-crotch shots, just in case he was forgetting what it was he was here for, and where it was all going to.

  Richard thanked Churchill and took the plastic pot. He promised he’d do his best to come with the goods. Left alone, Richard eschewed the good Lord’s cabinet of arty delights. He ignored the pornography and relied on his own procreative imagination. I watched him, a ponderous man, blurring into middle age, standing by the consulting-room window looking at the square outside. Staring at the posh, antiquated, knickerbocker-wearing kids, with their still posher, still more antiquated, Norton nannies. And visibly regretting – or so I imagined – every single lost ejaculation of his twenty-odd productive years. Every stiffened sheet and starched handkerchief, every wasted bit of tissue paper. All that wrist-acheto no avail. He jacked himself off on lost time, did Richard, and I watched him. It’s absurd, I know, but I thought I should engage with Richard a little more now, try and feel a little for him. He was, after all, still my son-in-law. Prince Stuff.

  All this hanging around the doctor’s office was hell on my smoking; I had to cut back to fewer than a hundred and thirty a day. I spent bizarre evenings watching Churchill and his lab technicians doing tests. They placed her mucus and his semen together on a slide and let the goo fight it out. They put bets on the results and drank beer out of Pyrex beakers. What a wag that Churchill was!

  Come the winter, Churchill had us back in his consulting room and laid out the possibilities. He was no nearer to comprehending how the Elverses had managed to conceive once, but were now unable to, than when he’d started the hundred-guinea-per-hour meter. There were myriad possible factors, but none of them alone was sufficient. ‘I don’t recommend such a course lightly,’ he said weightily, ‘but if you’re intent on trying, and you feel you have the complete information necessary to give informed consent, you might try in vitro fertilisation.’

  Oh, they wanted to try – why wouldn’t they? After all, they were now as rich as fucking Croesus, and given their grossly stultified imaginations, and their gross houses stuffed with chattels, they had little precious else to spend the money on.

  Churchill described the treatment cycle. The drugs he’d use to suppress Charlotte’s pituitary system and the temporary menopause they’d induce. The drugs he’d then employ to stimulate her ovaries and ruff up her follicles. The ultrasounds and blood tests they’d be doing all along to check everything was going OK. Then he got to the hard part. Even if she could cope with the mood swings, the abdominal bloating, the rashes and the muscle-aches, there was still no guarantee that any given treatment cycle would be worth completing. Did they still want to go through with it? You bet your ass they did.

  Then came the hard-drug education. Churchill and his storky assistants showed Charlotte how to sniff Zoladex on the first day of her period. It made her feel high just knowing she was finally under way, even if in the wake of her sniffing sessions came these crippling mood swings, waves of hormonal weltschmerz. After day fourteen of Charlotte’s cycle, when they’d checked to see that her ovaries were well and truly dormant, they taught Richard how to shoot his wife up with human menopausal gonadotrophin. He had to get a grip on a fucking big hypo for this job, and shoot the shit clear inside Charlotte’s muscles. To begin with it made him feel quite nauseous – but not as sick as her.

  Allthis time they had to visit Churchill’s clinic for blood tests and scans. The treatment cycles played hell with their business cycle. Near the end of each one, Richard had to provide another semen sample, which was assessed, then washed yup, that’s what they called it – in preparation for fertilisation. Finally came the harvesting of Charlotte. The furrowed field of her laid out for Churchill’s combined probes and needles. One last big hit of human chorionic gonadotrophin before bed. Goodnight Ovalteenies. At the crack of dawn, the eggs were sucked from the mature follicles in her uterus, and bunged into a nice fattening nutriment with Richard’s squeaky-clean sperm. Then the whole primordial stock was chucked in an incubator to see if it would make soup.

  Sometimes the embryologist found a normally developing embryo when she peered through her microscope twenty-four hours later – sometimes she found two. On other occasions there would be four – or none. There were decisions to be made – which to plant, which to discard, which to bung in the deep freeze to make Charlottes and Richards in the far distant future. The good Lord regarded this egg-selection business as his forte. Like a housewifely deity he would scrutinise the ontogeny through his microscope, then squeeze each egg with an eye-beam, deciding which of them were ripe, which ones made the cut.

  Back in Cumberland Terrace, in the titanic flat, I watched Richard shoot up his wife with more human chori
onic gonadotrophin, the two of them bent in grunting, painful, bloody consummation. Then the transfer. Back down to South Ken, up on the couch, in with yet another needle. There was an uncharitable première when she got to scrutinise Churchill’s choice on a monitor – weren’t they cute. Then, sedated, Charlotte was finally impregnated. What a fucking lottery! Only twenty per cent of the fertilised eggs had a chance of making it once they finally got back up Charlotte’s cervix. One in five! Bad odds at the humility racetrack. Still, I’ve gotta hand it to her – to them – for persistence. For, as cycle succeeded cycle, and the seasons ran into one another like the watery colours on a child’s painting, they kept right on.

  More than this, I was actually proud of Charlotte and Richard. They were fighters, they were sticking at it, they wouldn’t give in. They were so charmless together; unlike Natasha they had no internal voices to wheedle them, saying, ‘C’mon – give up. You know you’ll never have a child. Give it up. Adopt while there’s still the remotest possibility. Don’t chuck away all your Waste of Paper . . .’

  Yes, I felt proud of them, but then I daresay this pride had a good deal to do with the fact that during those years I was proud of almost everything. Proud of Russian plutonium-smugglers – hot dogs that they were. Proud of their president sleeping through Ireland. Proud of the Jackal– finally brought to bay. Proud of the ridiculous Englishwoman who shlepped around the world in eleven years. They say that when she reached John O’Groats she was X-rayed and found to have the pelvis of a seventy-year-old woman. Tell me about it, sister – perhaps it was mine? Proud of the cultists suiciding in Switzerland. Proud of Dean Rusk – un-be–fucking-lievably. Proud of Rose Kennedy – welcome on board. Proud of those Russkis again – inefficiently demolishing Grozny with artillery rounds and small-arms fire. Proud of Fred Perry – thanks for the titty-patches, feller. Proud of the Taliban – crazy headgear guys. Proud of the Turks – once you’ve denied the reality of one holocaust it’s so much easier to precipitate another. Proud of Michael Jackson, that whited-up shvartzer sticking it to the Yids. Proud of Timothy McVeigh – what a guy! Fascism American-style. Proud of the French – hey, they need all the pride they can get, to add to their European Economic Community pride mountain. Way to go, guys starting up with those nuclear tests again, just what the world needs in 1995. And while you’re at it – why the fuck didjew pardon Dreyfus? Surely some humility gaffe there. Proud of the British yomping into Sarajevo – you’re only a couple of years late, fellers, with your army commanded by Yaws. Proud of OJ – well, someone has to get away with it. Proud of Farakhan and his million men – give or take 600,000. Proud of Yigal Amir, who acted alone on God’s orders and had no regrets. Yet. Proud of the dumb Princess Sloane, left home all alone, while her hubby the tiny horseman went a-rogering. Tally hoI Proud of the University of Texas researchers, who isolated the gene that causes breast cancer. Thanks guys. Proud of the Tamil Tigers – you’re grrrreat! Proud of the First Lady with her legal bill primus inter pares. Proud of the Paddys bombing Docklands – a mere two dead and so much uggerly real estate demolished. Cool. Proud of the optical fibre that can transmit a trillion bits of information – twelve million phone calls at once, well just fancy that. Now we can all know what she said that he said that she said – to the power of fucking four hundred. Proud of the cloned sheep and George Burns – although it was hard to tell the difference. But mostly proud of the Unabomber arrested way out in Montana. Him I could’ve curled up with and done a little sly whittling. Doncha think?

  Oh yes, with so much pride sloshing inside, I could afford to splash out a little. Hell, I even had some pride left over for Natty and Russ, that golden couple. Pride for them as they ducked and dived in the ponds of plutocracy, dipping their bills here, there and fucking everywhere. One month they’d be in an apartment in Mayfair – the next a penthouse in Paddington. They put on and removed their habitations the way other people did clothes. With their lunatic swaggering driving down Aldgate in a Golf cabriolet, the City putting on a ticker-tape parade of unpaid bills – they parodied the comfortable wealth of the Elverses. While, with their latexwrapped, spermicidal, easeful couplings, they mocked the Elverses’ urge to conceive.

  No, not strictly accurate, that, for, as I trailed across town– sometimes on foot, often in buses, occasionally by tube reeling in the lifelines of my girls, I became aware that Russell’s occasional reefers were weaving themselves into a full sisal jacket. That his odd half of lager was becoming an odd bottle of Famous Grouse, or Stolychnaya. Then he did odd things. They fought, the two of them, the two ruddy ducks. They pecked at each other and complained, circling the pond in the gathering twilight of narcosis, not noticing that all the other birds had flown, that the hoary mantle was encroaching from the shoreline. That winter, with its chilly austerity, was coming.

  Yes, it was really the Elverses who parodied Russ and Natty, what with their sniffing and shooting up drugs and their washing of the milky-white lode. It wasn’t to be long before such playground mockery – and why, oh why, do one’s children never grow up? – got to Russ and Natty, and they recommenced sniffing and shooting and washing up the milky-white lode.

  I could see the future – and it wasn’t gonna work. The way they watched so many soap operas lying on their sofa. Listening to the synthesised arrhythmia of the signature tune, as if it would introduce a little more drama into their operatic lives. The way her voice impaled the octaves on its sharp spike. And the distorted leviathan’s moan of his lust – calling out to her from the deep. When he took her by force – which he did increasingly during the spring of ‘96 – it was distressing to realise that it was he who imagined himself the vulnerable one. The little girl.

  After one purloined session, watching them tussle in a rented house in Notting Hill, I walked back into town along the side of Hyde Park. When alive I had, natch, belonephobia – a morbid anxiety of being pierced by needles, or any sharp thing. To walk like this, past a mile or more of iron railings, would’ve been impossible. Inconceivable. Even if I could’ve, I’d’ve listed, an old ship overloaded with fat anxieties. Death, I supposed, had given me at least this queer stability.

  The kids chased in and out of the beech avenues. Lithy and Rude Boy, death’s kittens – ever sportive. We gained Park Lane and struggled across the three lanes heading north. We climbed the barriers on either side of the verge, then dodged the three lanes of traffic heading south. We tagged across Grosvenor Square and, as a small squall blew in, I looked back over my shoulder to see the tessellated greenery of Hyde Park, tossed with wind and drizzle, a verdant coping for the grey haunch of the American Embassy.

  Even the noise of a city raving drunk on its own commerce fades if you tuck your head down and ignore it. While twomillimetre– thick hulls cut through the spray, I made my way to Berkeley Square and hunkered down on a bench. Here, then, there were never elms, simply great old plane trees, in a plain new place. I sat and lost myself in the damp leaves pressed into the pavement, a kiddy collage of anti-nature. Come in cigarette number 134, your time is up. I’d never felt, it occurred to me, more depleted by death. Or, to be correct, more indolent. The very effort needed to register my own fatigue was . . . too much. Seeing made me yawn.

  Yawning summoned up Phar Lap, who came, picking his way between the sheltering tourists, from the Piccadilly side of the square. Phar Lap, looking unusually dapper in a brandnew Dryzabone, the waxed-cloth cape of the big coat giving him the gravitas of a black knight, or a city conquistador.

  ‘Feelin’ tired, are you, Lily-girl, yeh-hey?’

  ‘Mmph – yup.’

  ‘Feelin’ all wrung out, yuwai?’ He joined me on the bench, took the bullroarer and his boomerangs out from the coat folds, set them on the ground. We must’ve been visible because a passer-by looked at us with mild interest. The old woman, the Australian black – another pair of misfits in the ill-fitting city.

  ‘My feet would be killing me if I weren’t dead.’

  ‘Ha! Issatso
. Listen – you bin seein’ Mr Canter, hey-yeh?’

  ‘Oh, I went to see him a while back about a grant now I’ve stopped working.’

  ‘And yer still hangin’ roun’ yer girls, yeh-hey?’

  ‘If you can call it that – being unseen and not heard.’

  ‘I can see I’m gonna have to remind you all the fuckin’ time, girl. All the fuckin’ time. Don’t hang ‘round the buju, Lily-girl, specially not yer daughters’.’ He got the makings of his shrivelled cigarettes out and put one together. The rain didn’t bother him. ‘Wulu?’ he clicked, and I gave him a light. ‘Listen, go see Canter again. They’re down off the Walworth Road this month, old office block called Providence House. Go talk to him – he wants to see you, yeh-hey?’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Taxes – you owe taxes, hey-yeh?’

  ‘Taxes? Whaddya mean? I’m not on any Revenue computer

  – I’m dead.’

  ‘Yaka! Not now – before, taxes from before. You gotta settle up if you want to go back.’

  ‘You’re kidding, surely.’

  ‘Listen, Lily-girl,’ he stood to leave, ‘there are some certainties, yeh-hey?’ And was gone.

  I went back to see Canter again. Admired their precious fucking nyujo, patted their bloody Anubis. I joshed the clerks playing with their clackers, or bouncing through the old offices on their orange Spacehoppers, rubber horns clenched between their decadently suited thighs. I listened to Canter, I watched him tot it up on an old Burroughs adding machine, crank the handle, pronounce the sum proffered to him on the paper tongue. ‘Two thousand, three hundred and thirty-four pounds and twenty-three pence exactly. That’s what’s owing, Ms Bloom. You will have to settle via us before there can be any possibility of your regaining the before-death plane. You do appreciate this, I trust.’

  ‘No, I don’t fucking appreciate it – and I don’t trust you.’

  ‘One thing you may certainly trust is my advice in respect of the time you’ve been spending at the Churchill Clinic. You really should desist, Ms Bloom, now your, ahem, feelings are resuming – there are no simple mechanisms involved in this pro –’