How the Dead Live

by Self, Will

  This particular afternoon Russell had gone out to score. Natty wasn’t withdrawing – I could tell that. She was coked up and keen as mustard to get higher. She spent the downtime marching through the gauche rooms – white shag carps, glassand– aluminium tables, leather-and–steel chairs – and back again, smoking all the while. She was collecting an impressive ash mound for the anticipated crack session. Even I, with my tireless smoking, was disgusted by the whole concept of a drug habit that actually required that you amass cigarette ash, set up a veritable fucking store of the flaky grey filth. Yuk.

  She was wearing a slinky pair of black, sateen-finish trousers, my Natasha. And a slinky black lurex top. She still had the looks – if you fancy your meat on the lean, chemical-smoked side. Luckily, the one who came calling did. The buzzer went and down there in the lobby was . . . I went to the video entryphone with her to check out the visitor . . . Miles. How many had he dragged himself this time to visit his old paramour? He still didn’t have the wherewithal for a cab, because when she’d buzzed him up, he explained that he didn’t drive into London much, the parking was hell–and so expensrve,

  Yup, Miles, he’d moved to the sticks and married someone a little more suitable than Natty. But hell, Catherine the fucking Great would’ve been more suitable than Natty, even if you were her horse. They had two kids, non-identical twins. He showed her the smiley photos. Big mistake, Miles. Even going there was a mistake, but showing the black widow such an adorable reminder of her own maternal failures – that was deeply thick. But then you’d never exactly been on the fast track, had you, Miles? Stuck out in the boonies, labouring all day on legal-aid cases, barely making a crust. What a shmuck. And now you’d aroused her jealousy, her bad feelings, her huge dark whirlpool of self-disgust. Really, Miles, you ought to have known by now what went down when that happened. You did oughta, Miles, you did.

  They were standing in the kitchen while Natasha made him a cup of tea. It was the only cup of tea she’d made in the place in the three months she’d been dying there. (Well, you could hardly call it living.) Miles never smoked anything, which gave him definition in this hazy joint. To add to his allure, for some curious reason he seized on this moment to quote verse to Natasha. ‘September,’ he said, ‘when we loved as in a burning house . . .’

  ‘Is it going to take that long?’ she replied offhand.

  ‘What?’

  ‘For us to love? D’jew think I should set the house on fire now? We could let the calendar look after itself, huh?’ Suddenly she wasn’t kidding – and I was appalled. She pulled a disposable lighter out of the pocket of her slinky trousers and applied an inch of blue flame to the corner of a cookbook, which was in a pile on the butcher’s block. To do this she had to lean forward across Miles, so that her flat stomach momentarily nuzzled at his crotch. To give him credit, he recoiled – but not for long.

  They did it in the master bedroom, without even bothering to pull the heavy, zebra-striped counterpane off the broad flat bed. Without him even getting his trousers off. Fuck it, she wouldn’t have troubled either if it hadn’t been she who was doing the thigh-parting. I stood in the doorway of the en suite bathroom, poised between the mirrors to watch yourself crap in and the crappy act going on on the bed. Claustro and agro. I was disgusted – true enough. But more than that, I was jealous. More jealous than I’d conceived of being ever before. He was my man, my Miles. It should’ve been me he was heaving into like this. I wanted to cover his pretty face with my kisses, hold hanks of his hair, shout into his mouth, grab his firm ass. I wanted him like I’d never wanted any man before.

  And as for Natasha, the fucking slut. Always her father’s Trollope – that’s what she was. Another thick, feckless Yaws; just like a child, with an iced dick in each hand and not knowing which one to lick. If only voidness could injure such shallowness, I’d’ve scratched her fucking eyes out. To do it for kicks I could understand – but adultery out of spite, that was low. But like I say – it only took seconds. Poor old Miles, he probably wasn’t getting too much action back in Stevenage, or whichever old new town it was he crouched in. He got her trousers off, got her pants down, got on top, lanced her a few times – and it was all over. He didn’t stay for tea. He left to walk the long miles back to the station, leaving me with her.

  But there I stayed. There I stayed until only weeks before my rendezvous with Phar Lap in Soho, the one I told you about at the beginning of this empty tale. Typical of the fucking deatheaucracy to keep us hanging about like this – but then it’s lucky for me you’ve proved such a good listener.

  Yup, I stayed. In fact – I had no choice. I was wedded to her by my lust, for whenever she turned a trick I had to be there. She turned a fair few in the months before she realised she was pregnant. I learned to experience the most exquisite torments of desire while she checked her watch over the juddering shoulder of unknown john number eighty-two. ‘I’ve got to be there!’ as Lithy so charmingly put it. I suffered the most intense agonies of insatiable sexual hunger, while she gagged on her seventieth cocktail sausage of the week.

  How did she get into it, seriously tricking? Well, she wasn’t one of those poor girls who have to get a card put up in a phone box, not our Natty. She didn’t breach the sex descriptions act so blatantly. Those cards, with their pictures of pneumatic, unsullied, bounteous flesh, all strapped up in a waste of red elastic and white satin. Those cards, which read: ‘Jasmine, 36-26-34. Eighteen-Year-Old. New on the Scene. Own Flat. No Hurry. Come and Relax. Stay for a While’; when what they should scream is: ‘JANINE, TWENTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD EMOTIONALLY SUBNORMAL CRACK ADDICT, GONORRHEA, BRUISES, NON-SPECIFIC URETHRITIS, HIV. I’LL JACK YOU OFF FAST FOR TWENTY QUID – I NEED A HIT SOMETHING FIERCE.’ No, none of that for our Natty, she was a bit upmarket.

  Russell knew all about it, natch, how couldn’t he? It was he who introduced her to slimy Zimon in the first place. Yeah, Zimon, what a character; the type who thinks a z will turn him into Zorro, and his ‘escort agency’ into a convent in fucking Baja California. Zimon’s big in the escort business, and his girls are the best when it comes to escorting drunken middle managers the seven feet from the doors of their hotel rooms to the middle of their beds. Yeah, Russell knew – not that they ever spoke of it. They were like every pimp-whore set-up the world over, his hook of inadequacy in her eye of disgrace, dragging each other down. Way on down.

  They sank lower and lower. By the time the pregnancy was close to completion the Estate Agent had burnt down every business connection he’d ever had. There were men with writing on their trousers who wanted him dead. Literally. To give him some credit, credit where credit is jew. He did stop her putting out for money in the last trimester. I mean to say, how many perverts were out there who could fancy a methadone-swigging drab with a foetus visibly kicking in her stretched brown belly? Plenty. Yup, she was on the ‘done. Twenty mils a day, picked up at the chemist and drunk there, standing beside shaven-headed kiddies, whose mums were shopping for nit combs. He nearly had to fucking wall her up in order to keep her off the other shit. But by then it was getting much easier to confine her – given that their residences had become so confined.

  Down and down, from penthouse, to house, to apartment, to squat. They headed east, beating against the trade winds of affluence which blew in the opposite direction. Two skinny weather vanes, orienting themselves by an afflatus of extinction. They’ve come to rest now in Mile End, on a grotty little estate, along with all the other insecurity claimants. Still, what care I? There’s a brave new world out there and I want to be part of it again. Hell, they’ve even managed to put an airstrip in the Gaza Strip – well ain’t that something! They’ve finally impeached Slick Willie – although why they didn’t get chopper Bobbitt in ages ago is beyond me. Bambi Blair has become Bomber Blair, doing his level best to convert his cub scout’s woggle into a swinging, militaristic shlong, by wasting high explosive on the Balkans. At least Yehudi Menhuin didn’t live for ever, and even if it wasn’t a ca
r that carried him off, there’s still only one destination in the final taxi.

  Which leaves us, here, with the Woman’s Realms, and all the other faceless waiters. I don’t suppose you fancy popping in to see the departmental nyujo with me? You know about nyujos, do you? I guess it’s the way the deatheaucracy get out of the go-round, as Phar Lap calls it. This department’s nyujo is usually being encrusted, by some dusty clerk or fusty scrivener, with Copydex, Tipp-Ex, or any other gummy stuff they can lay their hands on. But this being a dentist’s, they’re probably turning it into Mr Potato-Head with fucking amalgam. No, not a trip to the nyujo? I can’t say I blame you. It’s been a bloody long sojourn here in this waiting room, hasn’t it? We’ve seen a great mess of the dead come up the stairs, and go through that door to where the fucking drill keeps on whining. Whining like an infant machine; and as our Ford so perspicaciously said, ‘Machinery is the modern Messiah.’

  Thousands have priority over us. I guess they’ve got clout that you and I are lacking, an angle on the deatheaucracy. That, or – and it’s a revolting thought – they know how to suck up to them. Sucking, that reminds me – did I ever tell you about the ballpoint pen I designed back in the forties? I did? Well, you know how it is, you tell a long story and you tend to forget the beginning. Bit like life, I suppose. I’m grateful to you, though, you’re such a good listener, clearly the type who picks things up. But while I do think I may have recognised some of the others who’ve revolved through this room, you – sister? brother? – remain totally indistinct.

  Who? Well, I think I maybe saw Yaws – or someone who looked like Yaws – come and sit for a time. He was carrying a bag of golf clubs, smoking a fucking pipe. If it wasn’t Yaws it might as well have been. He was always a banality in an unwrapped commonplace so far as I was concerned. What do I wanna be? I’ll tell you – anything that has the requirement to increase its body weight with extreme rapidity in the first few hours after entering the world. Anything at all. Personally, I don’t care if I draw the fucking squid straw, as long as I’m a squid that gets to eat. I could kill for krill. Let’s face it – not everything that has suckers sucks.

  ‘Ms Bloom?’ There’s Canter . . . and yes . . . yes . . . it looks like it’s gonna be me at last. ‘Would you come through now please, he’s ready to see you.’

  Well, so long pal, I hope it isn’t too much longer for you either. I don’t know if there’s anyone else here who’s simpatico, but you could always work your way through a few more thousand Woman's Realms. I find the banana-flapjack recipes a help. Sure, they don’t deal with the wild exquisite pain, but they give it a point.

  Well, whaddya know – it is a dentist’s after all. And there’s the dentist himself, another fucking ratty little Jew taking a part in my destiny. I wonder what this one’s called? No, don’t tell me.

  ‘Blomberg, I’m Mr Blomberg – and you must be Ms Bloom. Please take a seat in the chair. Let me take a look in there. Mmm . . . my, you have been doing a little snacking, haven’t you? Still, I suppose you had a long wait. Would you mind rinsing for me? Thank you so much. Now look, I’m not going to mislead you about this, Ms Bloom – may I call you Lily? Lily, then. Well, this is going to be painful – very painful. And I expect it’ll be messy and embarrassing as well. I’d like to be able to offer you an anaesthetic, but you know how it is, our resources aren’t what they used to be. All I can say is, I’ve done a lot of this before and I’m strong and quick. Is it absolutely necessary? Oh, absolutely – strictly, even. I mean there is the occasional sport or freak, but in the normal run of things it’s unheard of for a human baby to be born with its own full set of teeth.’

  Christmas 2001

  I don’t know if you’ve experienced being born – but I’ll tell you what it was like for me anyway. It was fucking painful, disgustingly messy and truly embarrassing. Thoroughly un-savoury – not at all to my taste. Slobbering out of the Ice Princess’s much-visited fanny, while she shitted and pissed and screamed and kvetched. Epidural be damned, they should’ve given her a fucking Caesarean and euthanasia at the same fucking time!

  The clasp of firm professional hands, the enfoldment of a clean blanket, these were partial compensations. But then they had to go and clamp me on her fucking tit. Ach! The smell – you wouldn’t believe it! But then smelling isn’t your forte either, is it now. Still, in the days and weeks that followed, smell was an interesting rediscovery – if not an altogether welcome one. Far more to my liking were the colours. So bright! So varied. If I’d had the opportunity I never would’ve called anything ‘grey’ again on this go-round. Oh no, it would’ve been canescent, griseous, dove-grey, pearl-grey, cinereous, fuliginous, or écru. I revelled in those colours, and they were silent too. They didn’t scream the way I did. Scream and whine, bellow and trumpet, whinny and gulp – do every fucking thing I could to persuade those bastards to give me drugs!

  I almost wished the Ice Princess and the Estate Agent had been worse parents than they manifestly already were. That they would tip one of their little brown bottles into my plastic one. The doctors said they’d detoxed me before she took me home from the hospital – but what do those quacks fucking know. I was clucking, man. I needed a hit. I mean to say, if babyhood is all about rampant need to begin with, to be a baby junky is to experience overpowering fucking need. It’s like being the whole world, waiting for something – anything – consumable, to keep you distracted from the silence of space.

  There wasn’t even a chance of getting it out of her, either. The Ice Princess didn’t take to titty feeding. Well, she needed her metabolism for her ownsome – and her nipples for everyone else. Everyone who had a hundred quid that is. So, it was lumpy, barely dissolved formula for this kiddo. Usually it was the Estate Agent who got it together to feed me. But he’d give it to me boiling, tepid, or plain cold. It’s a wonder I made it to toddlerhood at all. It’s been a craven new world for me, that’s for sure. I can’t, in all honesty, recommend it. Sure, there are video screens by gas pumps now, so they can sell you something else while you’re actually in the process of paying to denude the non-renewable resources, but what’s so special about that?

  I can’t say I was surprised when it happened. I may not have been in a position to talk to them these last eighteen months, but I’ve listened. It was the same thing last Christmas – some asshole put a load of strong smack on the market and a fair few of their shooting buddies took a hot shot. They very nearly kissed off then, which, all things considered, would’ve been better for me. If only they’d kept on with the foil fucking hankies, kept on smoking the shit. Very hard to overdose that way. All in all, the demise of the Ice Princess and her consort rather tends to confirm me in my good opinion of smoking. Wouldjew like a B&H? No, I suppose you’re a little young.

  They were all cock-a-hoop when he brought the stuff back this year. They hadn’t had any money for days. The trousers were out for Russell, he couldn’t have got tick from the fucking Rothschilds – even if they’d discovered he was a long-lost son. Then she managed to haul herself up and go blow someone. Well done, Natasha! That’s my girl! What a snappy little sucker you were. So, she hobbles back with the gelt, and he goes off to score while she makes me the first pot of slop I’ve had in fucking days.

  They both fixed up in the kitchenette while I was watching Teletubbies. No, I didn’t disdain the entertainments available any more than you would. Then she managed to make it upstairs to their bed, as he lay down in slow stages. Kinduv touching, that, huh? Them heading off like that together, like Romeo and fucking Juliet, except older, more despairing, and devoid of any love for each other. Me, I barely stirred. Truly, I expected it to happen.

  I also expected Miles to walk all those miles down to Mile End – it’s so difficult to get a bus in this, the dead interstice between the years. Yeah, I knew he’d show. He kept in touch with her, always suspecting that I was his, despite the myriad other candidates in the frame. I mean, Russell wasn’t ever a serious proposition for my
paternity, I just don’t look Jewish enough. Dear little snub nose and all. Retroussé – that’s what I’d call it.

  Yeah, that’s why I’ve managed such bravado since you cropped up again. Well, now he’s been and he’s gone again, and I’m still fucking here. If only those swine upstairs weren’t belting it out with the karaoke I might’ve heard him before it was too late. As it was, I was up in the bathroom drinking fucking toilet water when I heard the letterbox clack back. I got downstairs as fast as I could, but evidently he’d knocked many times, peered in, seen nothing, and decided to go. That’s it – I’m done for. It’s only – like everything else – a matter of time.

  And to be frank, I haven’t been enjoying your company too much either. I haven’t a fucking clue who your father was, but when you came scampering off their bed three days ago I knew full well who your mother was. I guess you can’t be entirely blamed; after all, her taste in music was never exactly developed. But even so, those ditties you warble, those snatches of idiotic pop songs, they set my teeth on edge. I wish you were the good listener I found when we waited together back at the Palmers Green dentist’s office, in the waiting room between the lives. Still, what can you expect from a lithopedion – calcified little fossil baby that you are?

  Nothing much. No-thing. Except this: forget me. Not.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Half Title

  Title