Waking Up Dead

by Nigel Williams

  George seemed to be in pretty constant oppositional motion in relation to every other system on the planet, not least the system that had been, until recently, his body. That is to say he was, at the moment, simultaneously downstairs in the living room and upstairs, dead, on his bed; the only way to make sense of these two events, as far as he could see, was to invoke dear old Einstein, who seemed to be telling him that they weren’t necessarily simultaneous.

  This might explain, George decided, why he seemed sometimes to be moving at different speeds. It could explain why certain events (like the doorbell) seemed to occur before or after the moment when he experienced them and why now, although it had not yet occurred, he knew, with horrible clarity, that a very large number of people were lumbering up Hornbeam Crescent with cake, wine, flowers and all sorts of other things to gladden the heart of the birthday girl, now lying on the kitchen floor in a pool of her own blood.

  Chapter Eight

  Jessica Pearmain’s wake and birthday party were simultaneous events. They were also viewed by people attending both functions who were, without doubt, in motion relative to both simultaneous events, events which were, George suspected, living witness to the fact that space-time was curved and that there was a sinister and possibly dangerous relationship between mass, velocity and energy.

  Cousin Bob, for example, weighed seventeen stone and eleven pounds. He ran head first at George’s corpse, while simultaneously drinking a triple brandy and a glass of champagne. The mass that he lost by attempting to rugby-tackle his dead cousin might, under the laws of classical mechanics, be thought to have disappeared from the closed system, which was at this point 22 Hornbeam Crescent, but, viewed from another system, the mass – or its equivalent energy – reappeared dramatically in a simultaneous event in the living room.

  Frigga was sick all over the sofa.

  Peregrine Belhatchett, who had started the rot by insisting on serving champagne cocktails to everyone, was, from the very earliest moments of the birthday party (as opposed to the wake), the observer whose frame of reference was not only not fixed (he was staggering after half an hour and flat on his back after forty-five minutes) but a man whose velocity moved to match the speed with which light waves conveyed his antics to other observers in the simultaneous event, though in motion and therefore not seen as such, that could be thought of as Jessica’s wake. So it was that he seemed, in the view of many people present – well, in George’s, anyway – to be watching himself travel back in time towards the lavatory while at the same time emerging from it, wiping his mouth with a Kleenex and muttering, ‘Christ! I honked like a goose!’

  The Prune seemed to be weeping in a corner with Frigga. This might have been because Frigga had made some terrible, and this time specific, confession to her about her part in George’s death. Or, possibly, that she was about to make it. Or even, thought George, that she was trying to work up the courage to do so. Either way he still did not seem to have yet had the chance of working out exactly how and why Frigga might have been involved in his death.

  Somehow or other somebody had moved Jessica Pearmain’s body. Only slightly – they hadn’t carried it out, shoulder high, into the back garden and tried to set light to it – but they had moved it. There were moments when George was quite sure it had moved of its own accord. That his mother had come back to life, not in the quiet, unassuming manner he had chosen but in the style of the waking dead. That Mrs Pearmain was now a zombie. That she was hobbling round the kitchen, her face dripping with blood, her skull wide open to the June day, introducing people to each other.

  ‘This,’ she was saying, with a fixed smile and that relentlessly cheerful, polite way she had, ‘is Deirdre. She is a piano teacher. Like I was.’ Wasn’t Deirdre dead, though? Hadn’t she got breast cancer and died years ago? George was pretty sure she had, but why should that keep her away from Jessica’s birthday party? All bets were off.

  Someone had produced Frigga’s goulash. Or should that be ‘ghoulash’? Esmeralda, of course, had put herself in charge of it and tried to make it look a bit more eatable. She had, unbelievably, succeeded. George, who was fond of this particular dish – when Esmeralda cooked it – found himself following its progress round the room as Esmeralda, shy, as always, going about the business of putting her food in front of the public, wove this way and that through the press of people, looking around, in a hunted manner, for someone to take it off her hands.

  With a thrill of sadness he realized she was searching for him. He had always been good at the social side of things. ‘Tell them there is goulash,’ is what she would have been saying to him, had he been alive, and George would have bellowed, in his party voice, ‘Goulash, everybody!’

  But wait! It was what she was saying. To herself, in a small voice, ‘Tell them there’s goulash.’ Oh, darling Esmeralda. If I had any tears I would cry them. I hear you. Even if you don’t hear me.

  Death is nothing at all.

  I have only slipped away into the next room.

  I am I and you are you …

  Call me by my old familiar name …

  Why should I be out of mind

  Because I am out of sight?

  Like it says in the ludicrous poem that the canon of St Paul’s came up with after Edward VII, one of the most useless monarchs in English history, had croaked.

  George, as he, literally, floated between the guests, listened for any fragments of gossip that might help him get some kind of grip on the question of what might have been his murder. It was Lulu Belhatchett, surprisingly, who had asked the question that set him thinking seriously about the question of motive, and about something that might possibly connect his own death with that of his mother.

  She’d come out with it quite early in the proceedings. Almost certainly before Hobday and his team had managed to bring things under control. ‘This is a murder investigation,’ he had said to Marilyn Munson, who had come all the way from Penrith. This did not stop her offering him a piece of birthday cake or sobbing violently, as she said, ‘Jessica loved sponge.’

  So there was some old-fashioned causality about the proceedings. One thing, to his relief, sometimes led to another. Almost immediately after the Marilyn Munson incident, George saw an elderly relative he had always known as the Incontinent Market Gardener ask Hobday if the police were baffled, and Hobday, irritated by the question not only because of what it was in itself but because of Marilyn’s earlier attempt to confide in him, replied, ‘We are not baffled. We have not had time to be baffled. What we are trying to do is clear this place and continue with our investigation.’

  George then definitely saw Hobday turn on the crowd of elderly, often drunk, well-wishers and heard him say, ‘This is a crime scene, ladies and gentlemen! Not a birthday party! Mrs Pearmain is not receiving guests today! She is unable to lunch! She is dead! Do you hear me? Dead!’

  He then definitely saw Uncle Arthur, though not his mistress, turn to the inspector and ask if he could go and pay his respects to his dead sister. ‘It should have been me! I am a hundred and one! She was only ninety-nine, for God’s sake!’ He saw, too, the detective’s instant respect and appreciation for the officer class (Uncle Arthur had been a district officer in the Punjab in 1939) as he told him that, although this was not the kind of thing he would usually allow, he was sure that what Arthur had done in the Battle of Britain (he seemed to have the mistaken idea he had been in the RAF) justified a relaxation of the rules in this instance.

  George was also 100 per cent certain that, after Uncle Arthur had gone in to see Jessica, quite a queue formed at the doorway to the kitchen as guests jostled their way in to have a look at the birthday girl. And not just her. Once word got around that George’s remains were upstairs in the bedroom, he rapidly became part of the list of attractions, as far as the guests were concerned. ‘Old people,’ as Stephen said, ‘are interested in anything to do with death. It’s on their radar. They sort of get it, I find.’ At times, George’s bedroom resembl
ed one of those rooms in country houses that have been opened to the public (‘Why don’t they charge entrance?’ he was heard to mutter to the 0.00 people capable of hearing him.). After that had started there didn’t seem to George anything like a clear sequence of events. Perhaps, he thought, this was because of another of the scientific laws that had made the twentieth century so tricky for dim persons like him to navigate. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.

  George was uncertain about what Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle was – other than that it had been discovered by someone called Heisenberg, whoever he might have been. He could not be positive, but George suspected it told you that even physicists, who ought to know about these things, did not really have a clue what the fuck was going on in the world of science. Every time you peered at a subatomic particle it responded by behaving like a bird that has just spotted an ornithologist and dived for the undergrowth. To wriggle out of this spectacular attempt to do themselves out of a job, the physicists tried to tell you that this uncertainty only happened at the subatomic level – the very area they were supposed to know about – but its general drift could not be avoided. We never, ever, really have a fucking clue about what is going on in the world around us.

  From George’s recent experience, this Heisenberg guy had been on to something.

  It was hard enough when you were alive. When you were dead, atomically, subatomically and sub-subatomically defunct down to the bare quark, things were as deliberately confusing as the Paris Périphérique or the one-way system round Bolsover Street. There was a moment when George could have sworn he smelt goulash, but that was before Esmeralda even started cooking it. There was a moment when Frigga flung her arms round the Prune and kissed her, after which Lulu told her daughter by the Man of Whom No One Ever Spoke not to be stupid. There was definitely a moment when Stephen asked his phone what time it was in New York and his phone said, ‘You do not need to know that! You are in Kuala Lumpur!’ There was a moment when George was sure Esmeralda asked him directly if he thought she had made too much goulash and he said – as he would have done in life – that of course she hadn’t, but that could not have happened yet though it seemed as if it had.

  But all these events afterwards seemed to crystallize around the moment of Lulu’s Fateful Question, the question that had first made George think that, yes, there was some substance to all this innuendo and uncertainty and, yes, he had been murdered and maybe his mother, too.

  ‘What,’ Lulu said, ‘are we doing about Jessica’s will?’

  He had forgotten about his mother’s will. He had also forgotten that she had a net worth of around twelve million pounds. How had he managed to forget that?

  After George’s father had died in 1982, Jessica had become closely involved in the stock market. George Pearmain Senior, like George Junior, was not very interested in money. He always said he thought it made him a much better bank manager. ‘The trouble with banks, these days,’ he used to say, ‘is that they’re too interested in money!’ Even as a child, George Junior had enjoyed this paradox. He was, indeed, the only one of his family who laughed at the old man’s jokes, which perhaps accounted for the close bond between the two of them.

  His father spent most of his evenings working on his translation of The Iliad into Welsh (‘The move from a dead language to one that may not have long to live is fascinating!’) or indulging in his other hobby, setting the poetry of Mallarmé to music. At the dinner table, all through George’s childhood, he used to burst into his twelve-tone version of ‘Brise Marine’ for counter-tenor and brass band. The poem was, in George’s view, pretty tough, even when not given the squeaky-gate treatment, but, unlike the other two, he loved his father for this and all his other eccentricities. He had ended up, of course, becoming him. Like him, he had gone into the bank, after a brief period of infantile leftism in his twenties, and also like George Senior, he had what the Irish call ‘a sword upstairs’, his pile of unpublished poetry. It said as much about the love between the two men as anything else.

  George Senior had been cautious about money but, after he had been burned to a cinder at Putney Vale Crematorium and his wife had granted him the ungrudging respect she had withheld for most of their forty-eight-year marriage, she had got jiggy with the dosh. She had sold the big house up on Putney Heath and bought a small flat down near Putney Bridge. Helped by a small Jewish man called Norman, she used George Senior’s savings, with the profit she had made out of the house sale, to play the markets. She invested in BP just before they bought Amoco and sold her shares well before they started blowing up refineries in Texas and deep-sea rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. She bought shares in Apple very, very early in the game and, though she did not like to talk about her business affairs, George thought she had hung on to them. She got into the dotcom boom just before it went crazy and got out of it before it collapsed.

  She travelled everywhere by bus and ate only one cheese sandwich a day. She was still wearing the dress she had worn at George Senior’s funeral. She never drank alcohol. She might, George thought, be worth more than twelve. It had been twelve last time he looked.

  Her will was a document as legendary and elusive as the Protocols of Zion. ‘Wills’ would have been a more accurate word as, to George’s certain knowledge, there had been at least five. There had almost certainly been others along the way. It was Jessica’s hobby. George had discovered the first by accident at the back of one of her kitchen drawers. There hadn’t been any bequests. The Mullins woman, who, according to Esmeralda, had spent the whole of the 1980s ‘licking her lips at the prospect of all that cash’ was not even mentioned. He, Stephen and Frigga got the lot, shared equally between them. There was even a note to the effect that she had always loved all of her children equally.

  That had changed when Stephen married Lulu Belhatchett. At first it looked as if Jessica had, at last, found her ideal daughter-in-law. Esmeralda had never come into that category, although after about fifteen years Mrs Pearmain Senior had learned to approach her elder son’s wife with a kind of wary respect. Nothing goes as sour as passion, though, and the early love affair between her and Lulu had turned very rapidly into something very grim indeed.

  In the first few years of Stephen’s marriage almost every other word in Jessica’s vocabulary was either ‘Lulu’ or ‘Belhatchett’. She was, of course, a great fan of Come Sit On My Knee and, especially when friends or neighbours were in the vicinity, lost no opportunity of rushing to the radio or, later, television every time the familiar music sounded. Yet there were signs even then of the beginnings of conflict. They had always used that particularly elaborate form of politeness that, for George, was always proof that women disliked each other.

  Little by little Lulu began to make mistakes. Well, not exactly mistakes. Lulu did not make mistakes. She just went ahead and did whatever she felt like doing and if people didn’t like it they could go and fuck themselves. When she turned up late to Jessica’s eighty-ninth, it was, George thought, a deliberate move made for no other reason than to see how the other woman would shape up to a hostile action. The real issue between them was, of course, Stephen.

  Lulu seemed to have the kind of effect on Stephen that Svengali had on Trilby. She did not actually say, in a spooky, foreign voice, ‘Now, Stephen, you will go and buy a blazer! A blue blazer – with silver buttons on the cuffs!’ Or ‘When I count to three, Stephen, you will book a holiday in the Maldives.’ And Stephen did not rise as in a trance and, credit card in hand, sleepwalk his way out into the world to carry out these commands. But she might as well have done so.

  That Stephen was an enthusiastic accomplice in the total obliteration of the person he had been before he met her was, as far as Jessica was concerned, no excuse. She wanted her son back. She didn’t want the thumb-sucking Stephen, the one who had been unable to pronounce the word ‘milk’ until he was twelve; she didn’t want the holier-than-thou, solemn, round-faced little boy, who had announced to his family in the early 1950s t
hat he was going to dedicate his life to Christ. She wanted someone she vaguely recognized. ‘If I had wanted a puppet who wears braces, I would have asked for one!’ she told George. The braces were, of course, Lulu’s idea.

  What really hurt was Stephen’s schedule. He had never really had a schedule before he met Lulu but he sure enough had one afterwards and she was the principal thing on it. He made a brief attempt to hang on to some of his personality and even retained some of the bluff charm that had served him so well in the media but, essentially, she swallowed him whole. His schedule did not seem to allow him any human contact, apart from with Lulu – although, as Esmeralda pointed out, it was questionable whether ‘human’ was the right word in this context.

  ‘Stevie!’ Lulu would call, a name that no one in his family had ever called him. ‘Stevie!’ Stephen would stand to attention, eyes glazed, thumbs to the seams of his trousers, and wait as obediently for orders as if she had planted an electrode in his brain. Which was, according to Esmeralda, a distinct possibility.

  That wasn’t, as Jessica had told George many, many times, the half of it.

  Stephen had been married before, to a teacher. She was black, as he made a point of telling everyone before they met her, perhaps to stop them running out of the room when they did so. She wasn’t jet black. She was the colour of very strong regular coffee. She had hair that ran between woolly and straight. She had been born in Holetown, Barbados, and had ended up in south-west London. Her name was Geraldine. George had always liked her. His mother had tolerated her.

  Geraldine, in Stephen’s horribly revealing phrase, was ‘only a primary-school teacher’. He would never have referred to Lulu as ‘only a newsreader’ but, then, he did work in the media.