by Lucy Ellmann
One bony lady, bedecked in a fancy bodice, garter belt and lace, kept bringing a frying pan down on her husband’s bare skull, not once but a MILLION times — as if marital spats last an eternity and the afterlife were a SOCIABLE kind of place. As if death were not spent UNIMAGINABLY alone. The trumpet tooted, the drum echoed with a tat, violins were sawed, guitars rhythmically strummed. What the hell IS music anyway? Dot wondered. It seems to lead you towards the Underworld.
Dot was frightened by her present position in the scheme of things. She didn’t WANT to be dead. She was tired of playing at being ROCKS. The only kind of existence that had any meaning for Dot was being ALIVE in the REAL WORLD. In her despair, she dropped to the ground and bemoaned her time on earth, and the day and the hour and the place and the seed and the womb that gave her life. L’umana spezie e ’l luogo e ’l tempo e ’l seme.
Through her tears she noticed a ghostly presence materialising before her. It turned out to be that of a flat-chested perky-nosed blonde who looked familiar but, being one amongst so many (so MANY) flat-chested perky-nosed blondes that Dot had known, Dot at first couldn’t place her. ‘Who are you?’ she asked.
‘My blood is English,’ rasped the wraith (hoarse from shooting her mouth off all her life). ‘I was bred in Notting Hill. I sang of interior decoration. I was on TV!’
‘Belinda Lurcher!?’ Dot exclaimed. ‘But you’re … a fountain of DIY advice! You can’t be … dead.’
‘Well, I’m not here on holiday,’ growled Belinda.
‘I’m so sorry. But it’s lovely to meet you. I’m a great fan of your design ideas!’
Despite her deathly demeanour, Belinda could not help beaming a little. ‘I have plans for this place too, you know. Yes, I intend to Lurchify Lucifer. I’ll show you what I mean. Come, I’ll be your guide.’
Few souls would feel confident about being taken through Hell by Belinda Lurcher — except Dot! She had always been happy to blindly lurch wherever Belinda Lurcher led, ledge by dark ledge. And Belinda had a CAR, which she drove from the BACK SEAT whilst painting her toenails. As she drove, she pointed out many design features of the Underworld. They’ve got some pretty funky stuff down there!
She dragged Dot into a cave full of BUN MOSS BALLS. Caves in the Underworld are called ‘pouches’, she explained. They had been mostly derelict when Belinda arrived, used only for escaping from sand storms. Now it was hard to find one that Belinda had not stripped and sprayed with silver glitter paint: the Underworld was in fact the IDEAL PLACE for Belinda Lurcher.
‘I am one of these,’ she said to Dot, holding up a bun moss ball.
Death Stinks
People are UNDERHAND in the Underworld. Underaged, underdeveloped underlings all, understated in their undershirts and UNDERSTANDING VERY LITTLE.
There are ADULTERERS in the Underworld, who want no one to be happy. Well-meaning adulterers who tortured women and their own FRIENDS when alive and still pine for adultery in death.
There are BEAUTICIANS in the Underworld, without their MAKE-UP kits (they really suffer).
There are IRONIES in the Underworld. For instance, you try your whole life to get AWAY from your family and then they all turn up in Hell. DOCTORS gather there too, feeling unwell.
But Dante was WRONG. It’s not just a place for MISCREANTS. There are people in the Underworld who simply lacked PATIENCE, or listened to too much Radio Four. People who fell for the bunkum of RELIGION, people who killed spiders, spiders who killed PEOPLE, goops who mocked Mozart. Mozart himself! The many vets who benefited from their clients’ excessive DOG-LOVE. Cold, undermining sales assistants, sadistic nurses, and their VICTIMS. People who let their children play on railway tracks. People who loved the PHONE. People who WHISTLED (no need for this). People who worked for Disney in any capacity. Actors, farmers, nerds, fakes, sportsmen, cheapskates, world leaders, snobs, model-train addicts, clingy types, tragic tots, evil grannies, Scottish BAP bakers (no need for these). People who specialised in OPERATIC LAUGHTER. Guys who believed in GAIA. Guys who TALKED about their belief in GAIA. Bereavement counsellors, asbestos cowboys, punsters, Martial Arts boors, popes, millionaires, billionaires, the manufacturers of ARTIFICIAL FLAVOURS, people who cook nut loaves, orchestras, conductors, and orchestral music COMPOSERS (no need for this), postmen who hide the mail, patriots, spies, computer buffs, clowns, bullfighters, architects, columnists, chiropractors, Procurators Fiscal, Stipendiary Magistrates, royals, rude people, gym teachers. People who let their CHICKENS play on railway tracks. And men who hoick big gobs of phlegm up their throats as they’re walking along the street and spit it so far that there’s a noticeable PAUSE before you hear the plop.
There is a special rung of Hell for SCIENTISTS, who act in darkness. They play. Lord it over everybody as if they KNOW SOMETHING, even get PAID for it. Then out comes an ATOM BOMB (thanks) or a rabbit with pig’s ears. They FUCK WITH THE PLANET. Napalm, uranium, plutonium, strontium — they can’t get enough of the stuff. Dead scientists have to mingle with their VICTIMS in the afterlife, but generally they just sulk, unable to bear the fact they no longer have any power to FUCK WITH THE PLANET.
Retribution aside (though it IS tempting), the Underworld welcomes all. No real differentiations are made. Each dead soul is awarded the same futility. And all agree: DEATH STINKS. Dot, who had vestiges of religious training, had hoped there WAS no afterlife, for fear of being castigated there for having committed suicide, but it turned out that no death was deemed unworthy in THIS Underworld. It wasn’t squeamish — it eagerly gobbled them all.
Belinda took her to a hellish subterranean CAR BOOT SALE in an underground car-park, an EVIL car boot sale full of STOLEN stuff snatched from the real world by poltergeists; enormous blue and yellow teddy bears and useless electric typewriters and pirated video tapes and not a bargain to be had. A silent resentful crowd moved through the winding aisles like shit shifting in a colon.
Dot found a TEA COSY! She didn’t know what to do with it, since there WAS no tea in the afterlife and she had nowhere to put anything either. Belinda suggested Dot turn it into a RETRO tea cosy by stitching on a lot of black-and-white squares. Dot still didn’t know what to do with it.
Belinda got all excited about a crate of CANDLES. How she had missed CANDLES. ‘There is nothing like a candle in a corner to create atmosphere,’ she informed Dot.
After placing lit candles behind tumbleweed in dozens of distant pouches (yes, we have Belinda Lurcher to thank for HELL-FIRE), they drove to an underground CAFÉ where you could get the only comestibles on offer in the Underworld: muddy brown Lethe water and flat square white mints (some with a cream filling). The place was packed with FASHION MODELS, who were stuffing their mouths and Gucci bags with mints. The models we see don’t just LOOK dead, some really ARE dead. They leave the Underworld only to do their stint on the CATWALK, then return below, weighed down with designer clothing.
But they didn’t die of ANOREXIA as everyone supposes. They died of BRONZING TREATMENTS, VITALITY DETOXES, MOTHERS-TO-BE SERENITY FACIALS, COLONIC IRRIGATION, BIKINI WAXES and RADIANCE. That ain’t no colonic irrigation, honey, that ain’t no BIKINI WAX. That’s having the SHIT sucked out of you and the PUSSY ripped off you! And a mother-to-be serenity facial just means you get MUD slapped on your face because you got KNOCKED UP.
They died of EUPHEMISM. It would kill an OX.
Death is Debatable!
There’s a Museum to Death in the Underworld. Glass cases, full of malignant tumours and poison rings and bullets that hit their targets, line the walls, interspersed with decorative displays of ancient weaponry. Belinda showed Dot how to press the buttons to hear people’s last words or death rattles. Dot was particularly taken with a wall of suicide notes.
There were also goofy tableaux of famous people dying, acted out by the famous people themselves! Isadora Duncan could be seen getting her neck snapped every weekday, on the hour. Zorro was forever strangling himself, Faulkner fell off his horse again and again (he played
it for laughs), and Arnold Bennett died repetitively of HICCUPS. It was VAUDEVILLE in there!
Belinda was bored by celebs other than herself, and hurt that no one had ever asked her to act out HER death (she’d been caught by the tide while hunting for shells to stick between panes of Perspex, which make attractive wall decorations, and she couldn’t see why that wasn’t AT LEAST as interesting as Arnold Bennett’s hiccups). She hurried Dot past Edward Gibbon with his exploding hydrocele so Dot never found out exactly what an exploding hydrocele IS. Tycho Brahe’s bladder burst right in front of them but they just carried on, past Pliny breathing his last of Vesuvius’ fumes, and Dostoevsky, who was trying to shift a bookcase to get at his pen, despite being specifically told not to by his doctors (played by shadowy holograms in the background). Belinda only slowed down to jeer at Coleridge.
‘He just died ALL WRONG. He should have had the guts to jump romantically off a cliff or something in his heyday! Instead he clung on, taking drugs, borrowing money from friends, pissing off Wordsworth and suffering constantly from CONSTIPATION.’
Dot glanced at Coleridge who, though theatrically frozen in the act of picking up a bottle of laudanum, BLUSHED. Dot felt sorry for him.
‘Perhaps he …’ she began, but then hesitated, since she knew nothing whatsoever about Coleridge.
Coleridge himself came to the rescue. ‘You were going to say, no doubt, that I accomplished more than many who were lucky enough to be endowed with looser bowels?’
‘Uh, yes,’ said Dot hesitantly. Coleridge winked at her and she was THRILLED, but Belinda impatiently pulled her into the next room where Attila the Hun was dealing with a bloody nose and Edward II had a red-hot poker up his ass. Dot detected a change of tone.
‘Yes, we’re nearing the prize-winners now,’ said Belinda.
‘Prize-winners?’
‘Yeah, the prize for the most horrendous death,’ said Belinda. ‘It all gets decided in the Debating Chamber. I’ll take you.’
Dot was tiring of Belinda and reluctantly followed her perky little ass out of the museum and up the street to another building of more functional design. They could already hear boos and cheers coming from the Debating Chamber. Inside, standing on a podium, a blood-drenched fellow was summing up the deaths under review.
‘… cancer of the, uh, bladder, vulva, tongue and throat, always good contenders —’
‘Hey, what about septic kidneys and an enlarged prostate? Come ON,’ cried a disgruntled guy who was writhing around in the middle of the main aisle. ‘What’s wrong with THAT, I’d like to know.’
‘That’s nothing compared to being flayed alive,’ mumbled a very red man behind Dot. He seemed to be oozing stuff on to the floor. Dot edged away.
‘Things often descend into chaos,’ Belinda explained, as if Dot didn’t KNOW that by now.
On and on it went. There were many deaths to be considered. There were people in the room who’d been overwhelmed by wallpaper, vending machines and inflatable ELEPHANTS, people who’d been stabbed by raw spaghetti or Parmesan, and a dairymaid who’d been bowled over by a runaway cheese. Another girl had been kept waiting too long inside an airless stag-night CAKE. Various people had been killed by members of their own family for choosing the wrong TV show, not eating their porridge, or drumming non-stop. But you were GUARANTEED applause if you’d been stabbed in the eye by a violin bow, clawed to death by a peacock or pushed off a building by a SHEEP.
Belinda was bored by them all and gestured to Dot to follow her out. They went through a door at the back of the hall.
‘Can anyone join in?’ asked Dot shyly, wondering if HER death would get any sympathy.
‘Sure. Except the cryonic guys, the ones waiting to be thawed when science advances enough. Because they’re only half-dead and they act so superior.’
She pointed out a small square pool in a dark alcove. The green water glowed wonderfully and Dot ran up and dipped her fingers in. It felt warm, and tasted salty.
‘Is this a spa or something? A healing bath?’ she asked, hoping she would be allowed to swim.
‘It’s all the tears that have been shed over death,’ said Belinda.
‘How deep is it?’
‘Bottomless!’ said Belinda brightly.
This was too much for Dot. She’d HAD it. She was FED UP with the Underworld. Call this an Underworld? No heaven, no hell, no purgatory, no NUTTIN?
‘GET ME OUTTA HERE!’ Dot yelped, and fell, weeping, into the pool. The water felt warm but awfully STICKY and Dot had trouble getting out.
‘Don’t tell me you want to be reincarnated or something?’ asked Belinda gloomily, as she gave Dot a hand.
This was the first Dot had HEARD about reincarnation and it sounded good to her! Whether she went back as Zorro or Marie Antoinette, she didn’t mind, as long as she could be in the real world again.
Belinda felt cross. Why did her assistants want to be reincarnated all the time? She had really been hoping Dot would stay put and help with the makeover she was planning for Hell. There were so many BOULDERS that needed to be painted silver. And other exciting tasks. Belinda couldn’t do it ALL…
Dot wanted to LIVE. But what does life matter, Belinda pointed out, if there’s life after death? Why go back to all that PAIN and SORROW and the aggravation of being GOOD? Maybe none of it matters a jot. Or a dot.
The Thing About the Underworld
The thing about the Underworld is that you have to fill out so many FORMS. And they’re full of impossible questions, like your National Insurance number, your NHS number, your father’s date of birth, your mother’s mother’s mother’s country of origin. Not many in the middle of their death throes think to bring all this information with them — but they sure WISH they had.
You fill out all the forms as best you can and hand them in to belligerent BUREAUCRATS who hand them right back, asking MORE questions. It is a silly and childish GAME they play with you, it’s INTOLERABLE. As if you never existed if you can’t remember your Vehicle Registration Number! They don’t actually CARE who you are or what your Vehicle Registration Number is, they are just trying to delay your rightful progress towards REINCARNATION, for the HELL of it! The thing is, if you can’t prove you were BORN, you might have to start over as a microscopic SPIDER or a PLANT. That’s how they run things in that old Underworld.
The bureaucrats were not only iffy about Dot’s inability to remember NUMBERS. They require from murderers a list of their VICTIMS, just to keep records up to date. Dot was embarrassed to find that she couldn’t remember a single old-lady name!
Belinda took pity on her. ‘If you’re really determined to be reincarnated, you have to go back as a ghost. It’s not so bad. But the sooner you go the better, before your family shreds all your credit cards and throws out your scrap book. People are always rushing to tidy up after a death.’
N.B. This is why ghosts are seen wafting around their old homes: they’re looking for their FUCKING BIRTH CERTIFICATE, the original not a photocopy. It’s surprising that seances aren’t jammed with spirits asking, ‘What the hell did you do with my HANDBAG/BRIEFCASE/WALLET/DRIVER’S LICENCE/EXAM RESULTS?’
After climbing into her GHOST outfit (kind of like a DIVING suit and rather clammy), Dot set off in another plane. A LOT of turbulence on this flight: the winds are all in the wrong direction when you’re coming BACK from the Underworld (it’s supposed to be a one-way trip).
It can be really problematic EMOTIONALLY for suicides to return to the real world, the world they just REJECTED or that rejected THEM. But nobody cares about that in the UNDERWORLD, nobody gives a DAMN about you in the Underworld. Dot clutched her forms and hoped for the best.
On landing she was able to verify by the dullness of her surroundings that she was indeed in Jaywick. Grey day, flat horizon, mud colours. She was struck by how EARTHBOUND everything seemed, how STUCK. We’re held so tightly to the earth. She’d forgotten what it was like to be imprisoned inside a body that needed to breathe air and p
ump blood around and digest and excrete and walk and rest. She had never noticed how glued DOWN we are by the demands of gravity: trees, houses, animals, water, even refrigerators, all PINNED to their allotted spots. We only scuttle HORIZONTALLY, if at all. Even birds don’t escape very far.
John was in bed with Julie when Dot wafted in. Julie was blindfolded and tied to the bedposts and John was carefully positioning a pillow under her ass. But Dot was quite calm; she just wanted her PIN number and some names of old ladies. She slunk ethereally around the house looking for John’s address book, and gave a miniature orange plant Julie had bought such a chill (accidentally), all the miniature oranges dropped off. Dot searched for the address book under furniture, in amongst papers, on shelves, in drawers and cupboards. If John and Julie heard weird noises, what did that matter to DOT? But when she went bumping past the humping pair to look under the bed she must have made too much of a commotion, since Julie exclaimed through her GAG, ‘Wha’ the fu’s tha’?’ Somehow, John SENSED that it was Dot and cried out bewilderedly, ‘Dot?!’ Julie started squirming around in muted horror. Dot gave her suspender belt an eerie TWEAK but there was no time for further frivolities.
Dot eventually found the address book in the kitchen drawer (which was shockingly messy). The old ladies were easily identified because John had drawn a red line through their names, indicating death. He’d drawn the same sort of line through DOT’s name and her address in Edinburgh. But, just by chance, long ago, he’d written down her PIN number, Vehicle Registration Number, credit card number and expiry date, the code for telephone banking and OTHER JUNK. What a haul! John had redeemed himself! Dot felt a real glimmer of warmth towards him, and to show her appreciation, as well as to scare them again, she put the address book in the TOASTER and gave it a light browning.