How the Dead Live (10 page)

‘Lily!’ She’s on her sharp heels pointing her beak at me, and her claws are out.

‘Esther.’ My piece of dead veal collides with her facial. Esther doesn’t have a face any more – only a facial. Not that she’s had nips and tucks – she knows better than to do that, because she’s going to live for ever. If she has a facelift now, in thirty or forty years’ time she’ll be looking like Methuselah.

‘How
are
you?’ Incredible, only the tactless can live for ever – that much is obvious. ‘Let me
look
at you.’ Why would you wanna do that, dumb ass? Well, let her –looking is all you’ll get.

I slump there in my cancer cloak while the world goes on dancing about me. They give me a little pot of Cornish ice cream, which sits in front of me on the table uneaten. I mean to say – it’s hardly likely to repeat on me, now is it? And anyway – I
asked
for a lolly. I regard Esther critically; it’s interesting looking at a version of yourself that has achieved immortality, courtesy of Saks Fifth Avenue, Tiffany, Bergdorf Goodman and all the other temples of dressage – which is what these English horses could do with, even my little ponies. Americans always look so clean and scrubbed and presentable – is it any wonder I ended up a slut living in this dungheap? Is it any surprise I lost my teeth grazing on this rotten dump?

Esther has brought presents for the girls. Yup, Tiffany thought so. A brooch for Charlie, which she’ll treasure along with the rest of her hoard, and a little gold watch for Natty, which she’ll pawn the first time she claps eyes on some dangling balls that aren’t attached to a man. They chat away as if I wasn’t here. Esther tells them about her hotel, her art gallery, her other shops, her properties, this business, that business. Natty’s lovely head is heavy with heroin now – that much is obvious – but Charlie keeps on nodding and interjecting and chatting with her mummified aunt. Her made-up aunt.

I had hoped that seeing Esther would provoke some flood of recall. I wanted – God knows why – to immerse myself in childhood again. I wanted to summon up sarsparilla and kewpie dolls, baseball cards, jitterbugging, kreplach, jitneys, the surrey with the fucking fringe on top. I wanted us to mull over the proportions of all the houses and apartments we grew up in and the foibles of all the friends we’d had. I wanted to reach back to a time when Esther and I loved each other more than anything else in the world, when the only thing in the world we feared were our poor, sad, frightened parents. I wanted to turn the leaves of the high-school yearbook with Esther (Class of ‘35 – ‘A flair for business is an ornament for the whole world’) back to a happier time. But now I set eyes on her, all I can think of is ‘The Relic’ by Donne, and how, despite the fact that her expensive watch is shackled on to her skeletal wrist, she’s going to live – while I’m definitely going to die.

One thing to be grateful for is that there’s no waitress service here. Esther always abuses servants with her familiarity – ‘Hi! What’s
your
name, then? Mark, eh? I bet you’ve made one here . . .’ – effortlessly engendering their contempt. And mine. Although it’s not hard to feel contempt for surly English service. England – where the waiters respond to any orders that transgress the menu as if it were carved in stone and they were terrifying and incomprehensible heresies. ‘Hold the mayonnaise?! You mean to say the world is round?! God is dead?! Good and evil are conterminous?!’ There’s one thing I can do for Esther, though, one bequest her lumpy, liverish, cancerous, moribund sister can give her, and that’s to not talk about anything of consequence whatsoever. Don’t talk about dying. Don’t rupture her great reservoir of denial and watch her sang-froid escape into the hell of the present. Heat up, bubble, boil, evaporate –leaving this little old Jewish lady just as terrified as this big dying one. Oh no, save her. Together with her savings.

I can’t be damned to listen to people’s chatter any more. Everything they say bears upon a future that doesn’t include me. I don’t even notice if it’s Esther who leaves, or us. The fact that I’ll never see her again is obscurely satisfying – and I prevented her from visiting my shitty little apartment, propping her narrow JAP ass on my dusty cushions. She’s the sort of woman who wants the earth girdled with a sanitary strip-for the duration of her stay, which, as I believe I’ve mentioned, will be for ever.

We’re in the car again and heading down the hill from Highgate. Charlie is a very good driver, much less impetuous than I used to be, far steadier. She knows how to pilot this big Kraut box, this steel egg-carton containing a diseased yolk. Pain has been cracking on the edge of me for hours now. I’m drenched with sticky pain, and Natty’s lying – cool and dry-on an ottoman of
my
heroin.

Miles is waiting outside when we get back, resting his beauty on a wall. I wonder how many he’s travelled to get here this time? He’s a law student, he studies hard – what’s he doing with this skittish trash? They unload me and hustle me inside, to where Molly and Doreen have made enormous inroads on the entropy. Seat covers have been cleaned! Shelves dusted! This is real housework going on. I like to think I could’ve been a good housewife – I should’ve adored to keep house for a man I admired. I’d’ve ironed Trotsky’s shirts like a dervish, then made love to him like a seal. But the men I was with were always feeble suppliants, wanting sex the way little boys want sweets. Pathetic. No wonder I’d discover myself day after day cursing and moaning and even screaming as I wiped up their shit, cooked for them, ordered their little play-dens. I’m glad that’s over. I’m glad house-cleaning is over. Goodbye Jif, fare thee well Flash,
au revoir
Harpic – I’m sure we’ll meet again some su-unny da-ay.

They’ve cleaned the flat up because they’re going to sell it. Charlotte’s going to sell it. I wish my will wasn’t in order, I’d’ve liked to gift little Miss Yaws at least a duplex of litigation, if not Bleak House itself.

Competent black hands are all over me now – and d’jew know what? I don’t care. I can feel each black handprint as she pushes and plumps me like a pillow, but there’s no Pavlovian revulsion, no sick decoction of petty-minded bigotry. I used to torment Yaws: ‘You’re the fucking black man’s burden!’ I’d scream at him. ‘Look in the fucking dictionary, you creep! Read it – “a contagious disease of Negroes characterised by raspberry-like tubercules on the skin” – that’s you, pardner, that’s you!’ Usually, at around this stage I’d begin hitting him, and wouldn’t stop until one of the kids intervened. Do I feel guilty? Not any more, not now. Junky will have to wait – I’ve had the diamorphine for my lonesome, and the Valium, and whatever other shit it was that Doreen gave me. Junky will have to wait now.

Doreen’s got me down and my little radio’s on, warbling. It’s the evening repeat of
The Archers.
People hate the way the media repeat things – but not I. I love it. I wouldn’t care if they echoed this episode again and again and again, as long as I was there to hear it, as long as I was still alive. From a region deep in the darkest, most diseased portion of me an old blues man is warbling. What is this, some song I heard when trailing my rag dolly behind me, clumping through the dirt on the other side of the streetcar line? Who knows, but it’s old, as old as me: ‘I wish I was a mole in the ground / Like a mole in the ground I would root that mountain down / And I wish I was a mole in the ground.’

Not long now. Next door there are voices raised above the pseudo farm life: ‘Do you think we should call her GP?’ I daresay Charlie already has her mobile phone out; she wields it as if it was the future itself.

‘I think it might be an idea. I don’t honestly think she’s going to be able to stay here much longer.’ But I want to stay here – I want to stay with you, Doreen. ‘But – ‘ And here her voice dips beneath my hearing range, allowing me to tune in to the other voices in the next room, Natasha and Miles bickering about where they’re going to eat. Who would’ve thought everything was going to happen so suddenly?

Chapter Four

S
ydenberg is on his way – goody gumdrops. Sydenberg, the last tailgating medic in a queue which stretches back to the late forties. You cannot fault me when it comes to providing employment for these interns, I’ve always been a zealous customer of the house call. For what is hypochondria, if not the midwife of all the other, littler phobias? When the girls were kids I’d get Virginia Bridge out at the drop of a hat. My motives were mixed, I guess, because as much as I wanted her insipid reassurance, I also liked to observe Yaws with his auxiliary squeeze. It amused me when, like a kid himself, he was confronted with an ice lolly in either hand, not knowing which one to lick.

I also liked the doctors’ being at my beck and call– or so I thought. I realise now that all I ever represented to them was diseased throughput; another sick shell of a human requiring a missing component to be bolted on. Modern Times – no wonder these assembly-line workers find themselves unable to cease making diagnoses when their day’s work is done. Sydenberg is by no means among the worst; certainly better than that snotty twerp Lichtenberg who ‘psychoanalysed’ me in the early fifties. I remember that all too well. He was a friend of Kaplan’s – and there was a sinister congruence in the attitude they’d take towards my
crise de nerfs
in any given week. I said at the time, ‘You two are in cahoots!’ but they denied it.

Lichtenberg was an orthodox Freudian who related every single aspect of my psyche to my early childhood. Well, while my childhood may have been extra shitty, I should’ve been concerning myself with Dave Junior’s – which was actually under way. But no, Kaplan was in favour of the analysis, the Eight Couples Who Mattered (our incestuously entwined coterie of friends) were in favour of it, and the fact that it kept me mired in the past hardly seemed relevant – at the time. Lichtenberg actually gave me
licence,
encouraged me to have affairs. He felt it would help me to undermine my negative relationship with my father. Bullshit. The truth was that all this Freudian sex talk was the preview, a blabbermouthed precursor of all the feckless promiscuity that was to follow in the sixties. Although not for me – by then I’d relapsed to the talking bit. Mostly. I wonder what Lichtenberg would say regarding the current impasse? Probably quote Freud: ‘The aim of all life is death.’ I wish I’d killed the creep when I had the chance.

From city to city, from burg to burg. Sailing through the bergs and into the arctic night. Sydenberg is one of those English Jews who are more English than the English. Actually, nowadays, almost anyone is more English than the English. Since the late seventies the English have abandoned their reserve, their coolness, their rustic urbanity. They’ve always complained about their ‘Americanisation’, meaning chain stores, supermarkets, advertising – but what they’ve failed to account for all along is the creeping cosmopolitanism that’s transforming their culture – if not their precious fucking society. I noticed in the seventies – that bulbous decade that the English were beginning to get wiseacre Jewish American humour, to find it genuinely funny – and that was the beginning of the end. The indigenous Jews were too dull and conformist a group to crack real jokes. They were the ones left behind in Liverpool while the rest of us headed on to the New World. As soon as they made some money they retreated, Rubens-like, to the ‘burbs, to live out their days in colourless indifference. Jewish Anglicans. The English had to turn to American Jewry for entertainment, and so began the proper Jewing of London. Now every little Cockney punk you meet cracks wise, kvetches, shmoozes and cheats. Great.

Anyway, Sydenberg – here he is: tall, stooping, grey, bespectacled. His suit – unlike my body – is double-breasted. He carries an ugly, modern, vinyl attaché case, which he places by the side of the bed before methodically retracting himself down to my level. Bedside manner – what an expression. All the doctors who’ve ever come to my bedside have looked, suitably enough, utterly uncomfortable. I mean, what could it be like for them to be completely at ease – to put you completely at ease? They’d have to put their cases down, then pull their pants off and get into bed with you. Now
that
would be a bedside manner.

‘So, you came home, Lily?’

‘As you can see, Dr Sydenberg, as you can see.’

‘How’s the pain?’

‘It hurts.’

‘And the nausea?’

‘Sickening.’

‘I see.’

He does see, he sees through thick bifocals which prise his oyster eyes open with enlargement. I wish he had a better bedside manner, though. I wish he’d get into bed with me – I want someone, anyone, to hold on to. I’ll try another tack. ‘I’m frightened.’

‘Of dying?’ Good man. Direct – I like that.

‘Of dying, of what they’ll do to me after I die.’

‘You told me that this didn’t concern you, that you’d told Natasha and Charlotte to have your body cremated and drop your ashes in a skip, or a bin, or anywhere.’

‘I’m worried they won’t – Charlotte’s too sentimental, and Natty’s too stoned.’

‘Well, given your convinced materialism this would hardly matter – would it?’

‘I don’t want to be embalmed.’

‘That’s an American thing – we don’t do that here. Remember, the vast majority of English people are cremated; I think it’s something like seventy per cent.’

‘I know – it’s a great country to burn a corpse in. They won’t even have to take my pacemaker out – ‘cause I don’t have one. D’jew think you can still feel it when they burn you?’

‘Lily.’

‘I’m serious. What if I’m wrong? What if you can feel everything, what if you can feel it when they crush your bones in the cremulator?’

‘Cremulator?’

‘It’s like a spin drier full of steel balls – they use it for bone-crushing, for making human bonemeal, so that the relatives aren’t freaked out by spare ribs or odd vertebrae when they collect the urn and sift through the leftovers.’

‘No, no, come now, this isn’t right – I think you must be suffering from taphephobia.’

‘What the hell’s that?’

‘An irrational fear of being buried alive.’

‘Unlike people who live on the San Andreas fault.’

‘Quite so.’

Wow, taphephobia. And I’d thought death was the great phobia-eradicator; now I discover that I’m to be irrationally fearful – even as I die. ‘How about decamping to Palermo?’

‘What?’

I can see that this conversation is beginning to discomfit him. Good – I can’t keep it up much longer. ‘Palermo – or Paris, anywhere where they have catacombs, where I can be strung up on a wire wearing my best M&S dress, my sensible flat shoes, my raincoat.’

‘That’s not altogether practical, is it?’

No, it isn’t, and I don’t want to hang around – I don’t want to be a
drag.
Nor do I want to be planted out in Wanstead at the municipal necropolis. I’ve had enough difficulties with paying for living space as it is; the idea of mortgaging a grave plot is unspeakable. I’ve read too much about it, I
know
what goes on. I even know that there are giant American corporations in the process of taking over the British cemetery industry. These saps – they think they’re going to heaven; but even if they are – which I very much doubt – their earthly remains are being transformed into a very worldly profit for fat, unscrupulous investors. Fools.

I’d like to convey some of this intelligence to Sydenberg, who’s been proving such a good listener, but by the time I realise my eyeshave been shut for a while, and then manage to open them, he’s gone next door for a case conference.

— I’m afraid there’s very little to be done.

— We understand. Do you think there’s any point in calling round the hospices?

— Not really, we can manage the pain just as effectively here. You’ve arranged for twenty-four–hour cover?

— Yes, so it’ll be here then?

— As long as there isn’t any major change, as long as it’s possible to give her her medication.

— And you think it will?

— It’s impossible to say; if there’s any radical acceleration, rather than . . . a slow fade, well, I’m afraid you’ll have to call UCH.

— She doesn’t want to die in the hospital.

— Frankly, Charlotte, it’s that she doesn’t want to die; your mother’s a relatively young woman to be dying. I think all this talk about remains and burials is a diversionary tactic. Has she discussed the future with you at all?

— A little. She slides in and out; sometimes she appears reconciled, but mostly she’s very very angry.

— Well, this is to be expected.

— I’d hoped she might be a bit more philosophic.

Philosophic – ha! That’s one of Yaws’s catch-words ‘ philosophic’. He was very phucking philosophic. Philosophic about everything but philosophy – that he couldn’t manage. Yaws was an ecclesiastical historian. He wrote his thesis on Trollope and the nineteenth-century clergy as depicted in his novels. I’m not saying it was a second-rate subject, but it was notable how many second-rate minds were engaged by it. I used to have to make tea for them, entertain greying perpetual students on perpetual, grey English afternoons: ‘Tell me, Mrs Yaws, which would be your favourite Barchester novel?’ Any that was in a small enough format for me to
shove it right up your ass you dumb motherfucker.
I wish I’d been less polite to these people, who didn’t matter at all, and more polite to the ones who did.

So, I’m to die here, am I? Here in my dingy little flat. I’d better do an inventory of my dying space, my ideal tomb, my gentrified sarcophagus. This latter meaning – as I know only too well– ‘flesh-eater’. Hear that, Minxie? You’re not the only flesh-eater around here. And the cancer, like the faithful dog it is, gives me a maul with its deathly awl. I’d almost forgotten what a wild, exquisite pain there is to being hungry – until
you
reminded me. So, tatty furniture, mismatched pots, boxes of postcards – why the fuck did I buy them? Memo for Another Lifetime: never buy more postcards than you’re going to send, no matter how attractive the pictures are. Bibelots; books; racks of shabby tent clothes; cupboard bottoms carpeted with pasty shoes; baskets and shoeboxes crammed with damned knitting and odd bits of sewing that’ve gone to hell; drawers full of sad underwear and sadder letters. Letters – why keep letters? Do I want to read letters now? Do I fuck. In the kitchenette cupboards there are jars of congealed preserves; in the bathroom cabinets there are half-used cans of talcum powder and suspect unguents – bring them to me! Bring me my chattels! I want to die with a pot of blackcurrant conserve in one hand and a straw place mat in the other. I want to expire with all the records of my tortured heart, the minutes of my faithless meetings and the proceedings of my dishonourable societies to hand. Don’t I just. Aren’t I
keen.

As is Dierdre, who’s arrived and processes across the bedroom to where I lie, news of Ivan Boesky burbling in my ear. ‘How are you feeling, Lily?’ she enquires.

‘Downsized,’ I reply. ‘They’re selling off bits of me, leaving only the profitable core.’ I want to say more, but I can’t, because there’s a new sensation to contend with, making me more fearful than the terror, sicker than the nausea. It’s the mother of all sensations for this mother – who’s always had to run and hide when things got too much to bear. I’m paralysed. I can’t move, I can’t blink my eyes. There’s a fat bastard sitting on my chest crushing the life out of me and it isn’t me any more. Deirdre gets a fork of hand behind my neck and lifts me up far enough to drop the pills into my mouth, then tips my head back so that water can be poured to sluice them down my throat. Pain relief has now become an engineering work rather than a medical operation.

‘There you are,’ she’s got me back down on my pallet, ‘I’ll mop your face and neck with a flannel – you’ll feel more comfortable.’

When I was a functioning mother I had this routine down pat, the index finger tightly cowled with hanky; the child’s mouth imprisoned on my hard hand, the tiny gummy lips attacked with the adamant prong. If I’d only known this technique was going to be applied to me again, I’d never have been so brutal.

— I just thought I’d drop by, see how she is.

— She’s as well as can be expected, Natasha. She’s sleeping now.

— It’s – it’s Deirdre, isn’t it?

— That’s right.

— D’jew think it’s gonna be soon?

— That’s not the sort of thing I’d like to say.

— But what d’jew think?

—
[Sigh]
I’ve seen people in your mother’s condition linger for weeks and months or go in seconds and hours. Death, Natasha, doesn’t abide by our schedules.

— I’m going to the loo.

Natasha’s normally husky voice has gone up half an octave and the vibrato is quite intense. I can smell the fearful sick sweat come off of her as she canters through my bedroom – why doesn’t somebody give the junky pony a rub-down? I can hear the Vent-Axia stirring up the lint in there and the taps running and the loo flushing and she seems to be out in seconds and rummaging in the bedside-table drawers.

— Are you looking for something?

— Just a letter – a bill; I left here.

— There’s some papers on the table by the front window.

— Oh, oh – are there?

Busted. Deirdre’s quite a smooth operator – despite the cardy. She’s got little Natty’S number. I daresay Deirdre hasn’t a great deal of time for spoilt middle-class brats like mine. She’s certainly not about to let Natasha walk off with my medication. Damn – I should’ve given her a supply while I still could. Now it’ll be Chez Russell– I wonder how many miles she’s managed to put between herself and Miles? I don’t even hear her go – my own daughter; but then I didn’t feel myself deanimate – and this is my own body.

I remember this lack of sensation; it’s happened enough times to me in this bedroom, usually in a ginny mist, a forest of juniper. Lying here, desperate to get to sleep, the World Service revolving in my ear. So desperate to sleep, thoughts buzzing in my skull, pinging off the inside of my eyelids. Eyelids which at first cannot be opened and then can’t be shut; which are rolled up like recalcitrant blinds. Then it occurs to me – my body has fallen asleep while my mind is still awake, hence the paralysis. It’s a reversible jacket of a mind, mine is; ever ready to play an ironic trick and confound me. It’s petrifying – this paralysis. Ha-ha. I thought you became petrified
because
you were terrified – but now I realise that the reverse can also be the case.