How the Dead Live

by Self, Will

  ‘In reincarnation – that’s what you’re talking about, isn’t it? Admit it.’

  ‘Reincarnation is far too crude a concept for looking at these things. Why – the paperwork alone would preclude such an idea. There are numerous interview committees, each necessitating the most stringently-compiled presentations, and none of this cuts against the grain of pure chance. To adventitiously pursue the possibility of being – in some sense reborn as your daughter’s child. Well, surely you can appreciate that this is the flimsiest of fantasies, the vastest of improbabilities. You’d be far better advised,’ he ran on in the face of my blank hostility, ‘to consider the animating principle of an anencephalic stillborn infant, as I believe I’ve already mentioned.’

  ‘You have – Jesus, you have. A more porous barrier – I know, I know.’

  ‘Even a lithopedion, such as I believeyou yourself conceived in . . .’ – he swivelled his chair, banged open the cabinet, flicked through the cardboard squeezebox – ‘. . . 1967, would be, ahem, a better idea.’

  ‘Why d’jew clear your throat?’ I was on him in an instant.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Why d’jew clear your throat? – You haven’t got anything there to clear.’

  ‘I hardly think – ‘

  ‘No, you don’t think. Listen, I’m not gonna sit around and sop up this mishegass for eternity, I’ve got kids to look after. And I don’t trust you one little bit, Mister “ahem”, not one little bit. I think you’re holding out on me – I think I have incomplete information.’

  ‘You can think what you like, Ms Bloom.’ He was reinforced in his free-laced straight-thinking by the arrival of a departmental Jane, who picked up the Tupperware plate of Nice biscuits and looked down at him with an expression of protective admiration. ‘You can think what you like, but until the monies owed to the Revenue are remitted, you won’t be travelling anywhere much. Saving Dulston, that is. Now, unless you have any proposals concerning a payments schedule I bid you good day, Ms Bloom, I bid you good day.’

  I swear he actually said this and, moreover (good Canteresque word, that), took the lapels of his Shavian jacket in hand at the same time, like the skilled advocate of cycling and vegetarianism that he so clearly was, had been, and would remain evermore.

  I went back to Dulston – grinding up to the Elephant and Castle in a shitty old bus, then tunnelling through the city to Bethnal Green in a fucking new tube train. Unbelievable, they’d finally got some new rolling stock on this line for the first time since I’d moved to London forty fucking years ago! I took another lumbering red dinosaur from the tube stop up Mare Street, then disappeared down Downs Park Road and into the hinterland of Dulston.

  That afternoon in late spring of 1996, even the Fats were pleased to see me. ‘Ooh, she’s tired and old, tired and old,’ they said, ‘she’s overdone it, overdone it, she’s tired and old.’

  How right they were. I figured it out, though. I’d cut back to a hundred cigarettes a day. People say it’s useless just cutting down, that you’ll simply spend the time between cigarettes willing it to pass. That it’s as bad as smoking all you can – if not worse. But then these live characters didn’t have my subtle body, nor my unsubtle incentive.

  Christmas 2001

  Yeah, I don’t have the fucking balls – that’s what I’m blubbing about. An internalised British actor, playing a Gestapo officer, has slapped me three times across my face, and I’ve confessed. I don’t have the fucking balls to do it. Although if I did, I wouldn’t choose any of those easy options. Oh no. I’d go for the heavy, mulga-wood boomerang. I’d beat myself to death with it, administer the ultimate punishment. Then I’d derisively piss on myself, humiliating my own puny conception of what the world is.

  The boomerang’s there, downstairs in the MFI shelving unit. Authenticity stashed in fakery. It’s propped up at the back of a shelf, a sinister tick this one – and not a bit ubiquitous. Hell, even the climb up there would be dangerous, given my weakness, my size, my clumsy misery. But I don’t have the balls for it – the only balls I’ve got are super ones, hugely compressed spheres of oil, which when thrown bounce around this box, batting into walls, shooting through the leaves of the yucky yucca, fetching up in the blue hollow of the Ice Princess’s throat. Super balls – the kind of pathetic little toy I was reduced to when the terrible twins ceased being able to do a number on anyone but themselves.

  No, in the few hours of daylight I have available, I’ll climb down from the chill mattress and get myself warm with a little super-ball action. It’s a long way from pretending to be Joe DiMaggio in the sandlot to playing with my super ball here in a concrete shoebox, but I made it all the same. My toys are all in a crate under my cot, over in the far corner. This I can drag out easily enough, this I can tip over. But these plastic fragments of Chinese manufacture aren’t as fatal to those under thirty-six months as their labels would have you believe. Not that the Ice Princess cared anyway, screwed up righteously as she was, tottering into the big M of merchandising, so she could buy me an unhappy meal with a free toy, and leave me, baby Nero, fiddling at a table, while she went down to the john to burn spoons. Here they are, my own little movie spin-offs, Simbas, Buzz Lightyears, Aladdins and Barbies, all ready to play. But oops! No – I need a pee. So it’s back across the room, into the loa, drag over myoid orange-box stool, and up on to the seat. Now I know why I took to toilet-training so well this time; it was because I’d be doing it unaided soon enough.

  Ach! What a shloomph I am! Lumpy and ugly and stupid. I forgot to drink before I peed. Now I’m gonna have to wait ten minutes for the cistern to fill again, before I can dip one of my bath-toy scoops down into the bowl and get a dipper-full. The cistern – you guessed – is as kaput as every other fitment in this place. The Estate Agent – as I think I’ve had cause to remark – wasn’t too hot on doing stuffaround the house. No balls – fucked ballcock. Yeah, I’d like a drink – and I’d like to brush my teeth. There’s no paste, natch, but I’ve a tiny brush with a glittery little handle. With this I can get some of yesterday’s cake out of my milk teeth. I am, you will nowise be surprised to learn, inordinately proud of my teeth. When she tried to quieten me with sweets I’d scream and pummel her. ‘Oh Delilah! Whassamatter? Mummy’s bought you some sweeties – oh do calm down! Look, nice sweeties, you’ll like them.’

  Yeah, maybe, but they’ll rot my teeth. I’m not about to make that mistake again, so I’ll scream and kick and even bite you with the burgeoning incisors – until you back off, woman, back off and glare at me. A stand off badass mamas would be proud of down Mexico way.

  Not a lot to look at here in the bathroom. I can stand on my stool and, if I stretch right up, peek out the small window. But there’s not much out there either, only block after street after block, Plasticville E3. I had a toy like that in the 1920s, plastic buildings you arranged to build your own city. Now all that’s done on computer screens. When the Ice Princess still had women she could off load me on, or freeload off herself, I’d see older kids playing at simulating cities, with pixel parks, trees, houses, stores, factories and city halls. Putting in infrastructure with a click of a button. In the country they probably have Ploughstation by now. Yeah, now they’ve got simulated cities, simulated relationships, and even simulated sex. All courtesy of their precious world-wide–fucking-web. The reticulation of early-warning systems which have demonstrably failed to warn them of anything. They’ll never even walk to the fucking store again to buy a paper – not when they can click for it. Their legs will wither and drop off. They’ll end up as two massive thumbs sticking out ofa huge adrenalin gland. And no balls – certainly no balls.

  If I could simulate London, I’d give it a better fucking climate. I’d give it a street life of sorts. Sure, I can hear the hysterical keening of emergency vehicles up here, but I can never see any ofthe emergencies they’re heading for. The only toy humans I can make out are a few teenagers, their mental ages reduced by glue and truancy to the
point where it’s perfectly reasonable for them to be stuck to the playground furniture all day. Every day. No, I want a street life, because my predicament would never be played out like this in Madrid, or Manila, or even – conceivably – Manhattan. I want a street life, because along with it comes a well-exercised tendency for people to stick their big fucking noses right inside your business and have a damn good honk. Shit, I wouldn’t even mind being in Tel Aviv, or Jerusalem. Anywhere but London, where people are still so fucking reserved, so polite, so hidden behind gauzy indifference. Their politeness is killing me.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Before I was sacked, I’d never really appreciated how much my work got me out of the house. Sure, I had my trips down to Regent’s Park and South Ken to check up on the Elverses’ expensive procreation-purchasing programme, but it was easy to skip a few now I had more information. I didn’t kid myself that I had complete information, but c’mon – what could all of these warnings-off from Phar Lap and Canter mean? Canter clearing his throat like that and getting at me for back taxes. Well, he wasn’t gonna fool me. I’m not saying that I began totting up exactly how many reams, quartos and grams per square metre there were in the family fortune, or how I was going to spend all that paper money. But it did seem fair enough that it should devolve on to me. Me, who was responsible for launching the pen cap that unleashed a million miles of memos, jottings and reports that girdled the earth. I’d done the pens – now I’d have the paper to go with them.

  Still, I missed the daily grind, the vapid office chit-chat, the strap-hanging on the tube. Even the bumptious little pricks who were powering the economic cycle off on another steroidfuelled mountain section of the Tour de Dollar. The whole goround had kept me engaged with the world – after a fashion. As I lounged about the basement, chiding the Fats, singing along with Lithy, tolerating Rude Boy, giving HeLa the occasional cold wipe-down – ‘Ooh! That’s hot, so hot’ – I began suspecting that I might come to regret my colossal lethargy. Becausethat’s what it was –laziness. I’d always been a great, tall, heavy-minded, ageing girl, and now so more than ever.

  At London Zoo, which I strolled through on trips to Cumberland Terrace, they had a sloth bear. It was a curious beast, definitely ursine, but with a pointed snout and hooky feet. They’d put it in an open enclosure, in front of the artificial rock formation. Way back in the sixties when I took the kids there, this was occupied by brown bears. Anyway, this sloth bear just couldn’t get used to captivity. Couldn’t get used to having that much pizza – it was within yards of the concession – dangled in its snout. It rocked like an autistic, or a Stoke Newington frummer davening on a mobile Jew phone. From side to side, from one pair of hooky feet to the other. Over and over. I felt a good deal of weary sympathy for the sloth bear; for two pins I’d’ve put it out of its fucking misery. But then, as Phar Lap would gnomically utter, voidness cannot injure voidness. What a jerk. Or, as Lithy would whine, ‘Too much of nothing can make a man ill at ease.’ The passage of the years was at least improving my calcified cadaver’s lyrical taste.

  But mostly I kept to the debatable ‘burb of Dulston. ‘And another child cries in the ghet-to / In the ghet-to!’ Lithy covered the other King Stuff. Ghetto, natch, derives from the Italian for suburb – borghetto. Not a well-known fact, that, but one known to me. I’d like to be able to tell you that I found it out reading through the nights, laying up my store of useless erudition, but it’d be a lie. Truth to tell, an Italian guy at the Dulston cafe vouchsafed it to me one morning, when we were idly comparing pathographies over a full dead breakfast. Yup, it was that bad, I’d taken to chewing egg slop like all the rest. Perhaps this was the ultimate acceptance of death, the ability to pass the egg test of mortality itself? I dunno. But it wasn’t so much a case of snatching an all-day breakfast – it was more a matter of all-breakfast days. I might not have been able to taste or feel, but I could at least hear the crunch of my prize cuspids on that mineralised scenery laughably known as fried bread. I ordered it up by the square metre. Like fucking carpet underlay – or a waste of paper.

  I’d given up on the meetings altogether. It was blindingly clear that the personally dead had nothing to teach me. It was little more than an anti-social club, and I am – as I think I’ve had cause to remark – not a joiner. Also, I couldn’t fail to notice, when I did from time to time drop in at the Community Centre, or St John’S, that there were hardly any of the same people there, none of the members I remembered from my first few years in Dulston. What had happened to them? Gone to Dulburb? The provinces? Or had they taken up short-term contracts in the Gulf? Or maybe, like me, they’d simply dropped out of the loop altogether, decided they had better things to do with the unlimited time available.

  It dawns on me at last, too late, that they weren’t bullshitting after all. That they did have better leverage than I supposed. They were getting out big-time – getting out for good. Not simply dropping out to squat on the allotments behind Dulston Junction, like a few of the dead did. Growing vegetables they could never eat, while trying to ‘connect’ with the hop-head eco-warriors. This lot had taken up residence on platforms set among the branches of an ancient oak which leant over the railway tracks. They were gonna save it. What did they imagine would happen if it was hacked down? I mean, it’s not as if it was the bloody Tree of Life. Amazing that these kids – allegedly so in tune with fucking nature didn’t even realise they were consorting with dead drabs. But then I suppose affecting a Palaeolithic line in clothing can scramble up anyone’s feel for the stuff of life. Egg test indeed. Don’t be vague – be vegan.

  No, the personally dead weren’t bullshitting. There was something – or no-thing – to their programme after all. There are no facesI recognise here in this ghastly waiting room, which Hartly has long since forgotten me in. We pitched up a while back (a long fucking while back), after Phar Lap, Rude Boy, Lithy and I took a black cab from Piccadilly. Suspicious, this, in itself – taking a black cab. The only cabs I’d ridden in for the past eleven years belonged to Costas and his pals who ran the Samsara Minicab Company. Sloppy old jalopies, driven with clutch-for-brake, by hairy dead men. But on this occasion Phar Lap gazumped the woman who had her arm up as if she were hailing Zeus himself. He wrenched the door open, and we all piled in. Not that the woman argued about it or anything wouldjew? If you found yourself standing in Piccadilly, hailing a cab, and when it stopped a fat old blonde, a skinny Aboriginal and a naked nine-year-old boy beat you to the punch.

  ‘Where to, guv?’ said the self-employed Nazi in the front compartment, and Phar Lap replied, ‘Palmers Green.’

  Oh goody, thought I, Palmers Green, another jerking odyssey out to London’s periphery. Another search for a run-down insurance office, or the colourless premises of a failed colour consultancy. Another visit to the deatheaucracy. Phar Lap and I settled down on the bench seat, Lithy and Rude Boy took the rumbles.

  We U-turned away from the kerb. The Nazi shouted, as if throwing his grating voice at the back row of the Nuremberg stadium, ‘Watch where yer fucking going, you wanker!’ The intercom hissed at us, ‘Traffic’s diabolical up the other way-bin a bombing – orlright if I take the Embankment?’

  ‘Yer the expert,’ Phar Lap replied. How could he be so stupid? Even I, who hadn’t ridden in a black cab since before they had intercoms, knew this was giving the shnorrer an open fucking season to rook us. Embankment indeed. Still, it wasn’t me who was paying, so I sat back and tried to enjoy the ride.

  Yup. Between May of ‘96 and Christmas ‘97, when I found out that Mr and Mrs Elvers had well and truly done the dirty on me, I was Dulston’s own sloth bear. I took languor to new troughs. Without straying too far from Argos Road, I entered an Olympic pentathlon in ennui and won every event. Running with boredom, hurdling over inertia, staying the put, throwing the indolence, shooting the tired breeze – I excelled in all fields of uncompetitive endeavour.

  I was like the Inca sacrificial mummy they discovered that year, thro
wn up by a glacier in the Andes; perfect in every regard except for being frozen to death with my head bashed in. My little radio told me all the news that was fit for Estuarine accents to relate – and I’d thought the rotten plummy ones were bad! But I couldn’t’ve cared less about peace in Chechnya – I’d outlast it. And even though I’d thought Timmy Leary a fraud when I’d met him in the late fifties (one of Kaplan’s pals), I wouldn’t’ve bothered to tick him off if I’d met him now, walking the beach at Santa Dullica. Land-mine bans were not my concern, bombs in Manchester and Atlanta left me cold. The tiny horseman coughed up fifteen fucking million for his coughing-up wifey. So what. Truth itself was relaunched as a downmarket tabloid – but hell, we’d seen that one coming. In Belgium they found a basement full of horrors. Tell me about it. Not. In Jerusalem they had an almighty brawl over the tunnel under Temple Rock. The Yids wanted it – the yocks wanted it. And all this for a tunnel? Try riding on the fucking tube, you shmucks. In the States a sixty-six-year-old had himself bumped off by a computer. Doh! Like – aren’t we all being bored to death by the bloody things; no need to make a special effort. There was a fucking auction for Holocaust victims in Vienna. Kinduv like holding a sponsored pie-eating contest for Somalia wouldn’tjew say? They re-elected the Prick in Chief from Arkansas – now that’s boreocracy for you. OJ paid out. Yawn. The dumpy Duchess won a million-dollar deal with Weight Watchers, and, I concede, I was mildly taken with the idea of what her Fats were gonna be like. The Human Fertilisation and Embryo Authority let a woman called Blood inseminate herself with her dead husband’s jism. That’s what I call tardigrade ejaculation. In LA some bozos tried to catch a comet tail and fell flat on their own overdoses. In France a poor everythingplegic wrote a novel with his eyelid. And they say the novel is dead. Another fucking Berg – this time the Gins kicked the bongos and beat the retreat. Just down the road from Dulston, the off-the-peg mob cheered in a pop-eyed Bambi of a premier, as if it were some kinduva fucking revolution, when all it really meant was another excuse for a Waste of Paper. Acomputer beat the Jew Kasparov at his own game. Au revoir, clever clogs. The Swiss found four fucking billion of our money in their vaults. It was no good to me, but really, which hole did you lose that lot in, you Emmenthal-heads? The cancer-stick–makers had to cough up $370 million for Medicare. I wearily guffawed – too little, too late – and lit a B&H. Number seventy-six for the day. I was cutting down, remember. In Cambodia Pol finally got potted. In Florida a pansy nobody killed a pansy somebody ‘cause he didn’t like the cut of his pants. Or so I surmised. In Paris, the tiny horseman’s clothes-horse bought the farm with weary predictability, galloping round the Peripherique late at night with her Arab rider. All London went meshugga. Even I hauled myself out of bed and shlepped down to Kensington Palace to get a look at this massacre of the blooms. Even I couldn’t be altogether indifferent to this unbelievable waste of cut flowers. I mean to say, they might as well have passed the cheques straight over to New Covent Garden, and cut out the dead fucking middle woman. Who at that moment was probably having intercrural sex with Georges Simenon in fucking Ennuyeuseville. She should care.