Waking Up Dead

by Nigel Williams

  If George had had a stroke – and he found this thought comforting because although having a stroke wasn’t ideal it was, at least, a marginal improvement on being dead – they did not seem in a hurry to do anything about it. Weren’t you supposed to try to walk a stroke sufferer round the room and get them to repeat favourite bits of poetry? No one had yet asked George to give them a chunk of Robert Browning or that limerick about the man who tried to bugger a tube train. Perhaps, even now, he was morphing seamlessly into being a vegetable. If he was, was Nat the man to bring him back into the animal kingdom?

  They came round the bedroom door in the manner of a group of gunfighters entering a room in the Old West, Nat in front, Esmeralda at his shoulder and behind her Stephen and Frigga, who had clearly grown bored with looking at their mother’s body and had decided to give her eldest son’s corpse a little face time instead. If, of course, it was his corpse. Something in him was alive – even if nobody seemed able to see it. No change there, then.

  As often in the past he found he was awaiting Nat’s diagnosis with almost light-headed eagerness. It was not unlike the moment when they had all been on holiday in Portugal in 1994 and George had asked him to look at that weird lump on his leg – or the time when he had done a spot of coughing for him behind the Earl Spencer in 2004. He had a sudden burst of confidence in his old friend. If George wasn’t dead, Nat was the man to steer him away from the route other people seemed too keen to prescribe for him – the embalming, the coffin, the—

  ‘My God…’ Nat was saying. ‘My God…’

  He said this in the kind of quiet and serious tones that George thought did not bode well.

  ‘This man,’ went on Nat, ‘is dead. I am afraid to say that I can see he’s definitely dead. Even from this distance and I’m – what? Four feet away.’

  Six feet, thought George, at least six.

  ‘I can tell you, he’s dead. Believe you me. He won’t be drinking any more Young’s Special. Ever.’

  There was another long silence.

  ‘I’d better examine him, though. We don’t want any bad feedback on my decision here. Which can happen. I am in a bit of doo-doo with the Primary Care Trust over that Asian woman who fell down a manhole. Or womanhole, I suppose, in her case. And the business with the Siamese twins. If that was what they were, although…’

  ‘We’ll leave you alone with him,’ said Stephen. ‘You need to do your job. And we need to do ours. I’ve emailed Lulu. She may not be long now. Do you need anything? Hot water?’

  Nat thought about this. George could see he was very tempted by the possibility, but he managed to control himself and, shaking his head, said, ‘That will not be necessary, I’m afraid. This man is dead. Completely dead.’

  George found himself wondering what he would have used the hot water for if George had not been dead. Maybe hot water was just what he needed to bring him round – or, at least, to get him to the point when he could start telling people that they had got this wrong. Wasn’t hot water usually used for home births as opposed to home deaths? He did not feel in the slightest dead. He felt fine.

  ‘We’ll go and stand by Mummy’s body,’ said Frigga. ‘I’ve strewn some fresh herbs on the kitchen floor!’

  ‘Why have you done that?’ said Nat.

  Frigga said something incoherent about St John’s wort and burst into tears again. Stephen ushered out Esmeralda and George’s sister, and George was left alone with the nearest thing he had to a friend in the suburb where he had lived for nearly all his life.

  Things were often slow between him and Nat. If their wives had not been friends – and Esmeralda and Veronica were tied together in ways that George would never, could never understand – he would probably not have chosen to spend quite so much time with Nat Pinker as he had done over the last thirty years. He was fond of the guy. Nat had never done anyone any harm. He had tried, and clearly failed, to be a competent GP. He had sung, off-key, in the Putney Choir for the last ten years. He had built his own bicycle. His fish smoker was something of a legend in SW15.

  He wasn’t, however, a natural conversationalist. When alone with him in the pub – at least two or three times a week – George was often hard put to find words. Oh, he found some words – ‘Fancy another pint?’; ‘The Young’s Special doesn’t seem itself tonight!’; ‘Is it my round? Really?’ – but they were never, somehow, words that conveyed the deep feelings of his heart. Perhaps because George had no deep feelings in his heart. Or, at least, not where Nat was concerned.

  That was not really true. It was much more that conversations with Nat proceeded like one of those complicated forms you were obliged to fill in when booking tickets on the internet. Just as you were about to proceed to the next level you discovered you had left out some mandatory detail and were obliged to go back to the beginning. And, like the man in Kafka’s story, you never quite got the details right so you were always in transit, groping for but never reaching the consummation of conversational exchange.

  There was, of course, now no onus on George to keep up his end of the conversation. He was dead. He was, clearly, not supposed to sparkle. He imagined, indeed, the whole business would take place in total silence but, to George’s surprise, Nat was far more chatty than usual. Perhaps dead bodies coaxed hitherto untapped reserves of dialogue to make the long journey from the Pinker brain to the Pinker voice box. Or perhaps – George had the uncomfortable feeling he was about to find out a great many things about himself he might have been better off not knowing – he never let the poor bastard get a word in edgeways. Not when he was alive anyway.

  ‘Well, George, my boy, this is a pretty kettle of fish!’ said Nat, as he began to apply his fingers to George’s ribcage. ‘I must say, I thought you had a few more years in you yet! We were all looking forward to you finally bringing out that volume of poetry. There were a few more publishers to try, I gather. I mean – not many but, you know, a few!’

  He put his thumb and forefinger up to George’s eyelids and, with the practised assurance of someone who did this for a living, closed his wife’s friend’s husband’s eyes for what he clearly imagined was the last time.

  It didn’t seem to stop George watching him do it. He’d read somewhere – in H. G. Wells, perhaps, the supreme information scavenger of all time – that there is a pineal eye somewhere deep in the brain through which we may perceive visions. It did not feel as if it was this eye that was observing Dr Nat go about his final examination of George Pearmain, B. A. Oxon. In so far as George had a point of view, it still seemed to be coming from the area of his bonce. Perhaps this would change. He was not looking forward to the fairly prolonged spell in a pine box that was – if this was not an unfortunate way of putting it – de rigueur for the newly dead.

  Best not to go down that route. What was the thing you were supposed to do with death? Accept it. You didn’t have much fucking choice, thought George, grimly, but panicking wouldn’t help. He did not, for the moment anyway, seem to have any means of letting people know that he was still on the scene; although this, he had to admit, was not a new experience for him as far as 22 Hornbeam Crescent was concerned. He would just have to grit his teeth, get on with it and accentuate the positive.

  It was not easy to feel positive about Nat’s build-up to awarding him his death certificate. The man gave him the medical equivalent of a quick polish – not even bothering (to George’s relief) to lift his pyjama bottoms and see if anything ghastly had happened to his cock. Then he took out a pad from his big black bag and started scribbling.

  ‘It was your heart, old boy,’ he said. ‘It just gave up on you, mate. It sort of said, “George, I don’t want this any more. I don’t want to live in a world run by Islamic terrorists.”’

  Not for the first time, George felt a sneaky urge to disagree with him but was unable to begin the complicated process of questioning what Nat clearly thought were shared assumptions.

  ‘Romanians,’ he went on, as he continued to prod at Ge
orge’s chest, ‘swarming all over the place. Interest rates at rock bottom. England despised all over the world. Black newsreaders. I give up, mate. And so, obviously, have you. I see your point, Georgy. You’ve had a massive heart attack, old boy.’

  This speech, thought George, was both politically and medically questionable. Was that all it took? A quick feel of his sternum, a rapid flick of the eyelids and off to the golf course? How did Nat know he’d had a heart attack? It had obviously stopped working – but why?

  Nat seemed to think he was done. He stepped back from the bed and gave something that was halfway between a salute and a wave. ‘Goodbye, George!’ he said, in a suitably solemn fashion. He turned on his heel and headed for the door. When he got to it he peered out on to the landing to make sure no one was listening. Then, after closing it completely, he turned back into the room.

  ‘I’ve never told anyone this,’ he said, ‘not even Veronica. And she gets pretty much everything out of me. In time. As you know. I’ve never told you this, George, but I’m telling you now. When it’s, er, safe to do so, as it were.’ He cleared his throat. ‘A few years back … I can’t remember quite when. Ten? Can’t remember. Anyway. A good few years. I think the summer we all went to Sicily. My God! Sicily! What a dump! Anyway, Esmeralda and I … I don’t quite know how to put this but … I imagine you have a pretty good idea of what I’m trying to say…’

  George would not, he felt, even if he had not just been pronounced dead.

  ‘But … I won’t go into detail. You were a great bloke, George. A great bloke. You could be very funny, George. Very amusing. That time you put that bucket on your head in Nîmes. My God. I nearly died laughing. But you could be … which was why Esmeralda and I … you know … I mean there were times, George, when I could cheerfully have murdered you. And I think Esmeralda felt the same. Anyway. I had to get that off my chest. I think it’s cleared things up. So … thanks. Thanks for everything. Especially that piece of advice you gave me in Dieppe in 1993. My God. Saved my life. Such wisdom. Such wisdom. Look…’nuff said. Cheerio … I’m … you know…’

  For a moment George thought that Nat might be about to lower the general tone by bursting into tears, but he did not. He closed the door reverently, and tiptoed away down the stairs. Why were people always closing the door on dead bodies? They had done it, George remembered, when his father had finally conked out in that sad little side-room in the hospital. Was it that people were worried some passing stranger might blunder in and see the unmentionable? Or was it some primitive fear that the body was going to rise up from the bed and do a zombie? In George’s case, he reflected, that seemed a distinct possibility.

  Esmeralda and Nat, eh? What exactly had they got up to? As a confession, thought George, Nat’s speech needed work. It lacked detail. It needed a little more than ‘… why Esmeralda and I, you know…’ From what George could remember of that holiday in Sicily there was hardly any time for sexual intercourse – even between people who were supposed to be staying in the same room. That time they went shopping in La Malfatta di Stagione or whatever the place was called? She might just have had time to give him a gobble in the hire car when they were going up the mountain road and George and Veronica had got lost. But …

  And while we were at it, what was the invaluable piece of advice George was supposed to have given Nat in Dieppe in 1993? To give up medicine, perhaps? Not to say, ‘Shall we have the other half?’ after they had consumed two pints each? George couldn’t remember ever having gone anywhere near Dieppe. The whole of the nineties had been a bit of a blur, even while he was living through them, and now he was dead they were more or less totally impenetrable. Perhaps because there were things he really didn’t care to remember.

  Had she, somehow, found out about Julie Biskiborne? Had she discovered that letter? It wasn’t a great letter – Ms Biskiborne was no great shakes as a prose stylist – but, at the time it had meant a great deal to George. Which was why he had hidden it under the water tank in the attic. There had been a difficult two or three days last year when Esmeralda had decided to clear ‘all that rubbish in the loft so as we can move somewhere smaller’. George had refused to help and, after three days of humping, pulling and desperate screams from the murky corners where roof met wall, she had given up.

  She had not said anything but he would not have put it past her to have recovered the letter, read it, photocopied it and put it back exactly where she had found it to use against him at a later date. George thought he knew most of her moves in the marital boxing ring but, even after forty years, she was still capable of surprising him.

  He supposed he was going to have to get used to seeing a lot of the details of his life made public. The dead have absolutely no defence against snoopers. They cannot even sue for libel. A full-length biography was not very likely. Unless, by some freak chance, someone stumbled across his poems, published them and George became a sort of middle-aged male English equivalent of Emily Dickinson, the most he was going to get was a few lines in the local paper.

  If there was a local paper. George had a feeling they did not exist any more. Maybe someone would blog. Or maybe they wouldn’t.

  Nevertheless, in the small circle of people who made up George’s public – Esmeralda, Barry, Maurice, Barry’s wife Ginny, Maurice’s wife Jojo, Nat and Veronica, Stephen, Frigga and (God help us) Lulu – it was going to be open season on his life. God! Maybe they were going to find the suspender belt! He had the distinct, though unjustifiable, feeling that he was breaking out in a sweat.

  It was curious. He could have sworn that, although he was clearly not drawing breath and his heart was no longer beating, he still did have physical sensation. He had read somewhere that people who had lost a leg or an arm sometimes had the illusion they could waggle their toes or develop an itch on their palms. Maybe he was suffering from a similar form of hallucination; he had lost the use of heart, brain and nervous system but was, somehow, still under the illusion they were working away on his behalf. Was he, perhaps, like one of those cartoon mice who, when pushed off a cliff, still seem to stand, pedalling furiously, on the empty air? At any second would his system crash and the light inside George Pearmain be switched off for ever?

  Something was worrying him. It wasn’t what Nat had said about Esmeralda in Sicily (which sounded like the title of a novel she might read) and it wasn’t the advice he had or hadn’t given his friend in Dieppe in 1993. What was it?

  As he tried to remember, he had the distinct sensation that he was moving his left leg off the bed. So vivid was this delusion that he could have sworn he felt the White Company sheets brush against his thigh. With it came a sudden and quite pleasurable awareness of the day outside. He could see his garden. He could see the silver birch tree. He could see the clematis against the fence. The big lawn and the rough ground beyond it. The parakeets were screeching their way from tree to tree on the borders of George’s ridiculously large garden. It was sunny. Everything out there was blue and gold and deep green.

  Had he decided to move his leg off the bed? Or had it been done for him? Was he, perhaps, in the control of some Higher Power? In fact, he realized, as soon as his left foot hit the floor he became involved with the decision to move the other after it. The right leg. It wasn’t easy. It felt (no, ‘felt’ was the wrong word) … It reminded him of how it felt when you ungummed your eyelids after sleep. It was like pulling the leg out of a bath of treacle so that, for a moment, George had the idea that he was dripping on to Esmeralda’s carefully polished floor.

  Curiouser and curiouser.

  When George set himself the task of getting his arms to follow his legs, things did not proceed according to the same pattern. For a moment it seemed as if his legs and feet were out there on their own, in the middle of the floor, ready for duty, like a pair of unclaimed prosthetic limbs abandoned in a hospital ward. He was, somehow or other, going to have to move the middle section, head, arms and groin, and bolt them on to the as yet unclaimed app
endages parked in the centre of the bedroom.

  He concentrated on his upper body – which he had never done enough when alive – and found, to his surprise, that it seemed to be floating, free of the flesh that was still lying on the bed. His shoulders, too, were drifting upwards, aimlessly at first, then settling, as lightly as a butterfly, above his chest. His midriff came next, tearing itself away from the thing on the bed and weaving through the air like some aerodynamic puppy until it locked itself in place alongside head, eyes, ears, nose and mouth, all twanging their way back home with the decisiveness of a snapped garter belt.

  And now other pieces of phantom George were docking, like spacecraft returning to the mother ship in deep, deep space, so that, soon, a new kind of body had been reassembled next to the old one. He did not, as yet, seem to have any control over it. It looked, somehow, wrong. Did he have two left feet? Was his right hand screwed on backwards? Was that hole in his neck his belly button? He had the idea that if he managed to smuggle the thinking bit of himself – the only bit that seemed to have survived – into this ramshackle assortment of body parts, it would all begin to make sense. It would have a human shape even if it wasn’t quite him. Maybe he’d be able to make it move. Maybe he’d be able to make it walk. Perhaps, eventually, he could persuade it to communicate. The idea excited him and, with a supreme effort, he concentrated on trying to steer the thing that was still George Pearmain up into the air and away from the bed.

  It was as he was doing this, and it seemed to take an age, that he realized what was worrying him. He couldn’t have said why he thought this (had he overheard someone downstairs whisper it?) but he felt he knew that Nat had, as usual, got it completely wrong and that there was something not right about his death. The word that echoed in his head – and it was his head now, as he seemed to have parted company from the dead ex-bank manager who was still stretched out beneath his unmortgaged ceiling – was, to his surprise, ‘murder’. Mur-der. Mur-der. Mur-der. It banged around his newly reoccupied skull, like the noise of a battering ram against the walls of a castle, like the noise of water pipes booming in some old, abandoned house. Mur-der. Mur-der. Mur-der.