How the Dead Live (16 page)

‘After yer dead, Lil’, there’ll be time, yeh-hey?’ It’s the aboriginal man again. He props his flat-iron butt on the bed and chats away unconcernedly. Not for him the overworked anxiety of the doctors, midwives and relatives. I’m not dying, though – I’m giving birth. ‘Whatever. Hey – y’know I’ll tek y’over, girl, yeh-hey?’ Over where? ‘The Styx, yeh? The river. See, yer karkin’ it, Lily– b’lieve me, girl. Goin’ to godzone. Like I say – but you gotta chance to get in the ungud, hey-yeh? T’git away from the go-round, y’know?’ I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about, but that being said, you’re an enjoyable companion. ‘Yuwai – we gonna be mates allrighty, Lily. Big-time, yeh-hey.’ The contractions are getting closer together . . . will you hold my hand? What should I call you? ‘Phar Lap Jones – you call me Phar Lap.’ It’s an unusual name. ‘Racehorse. Bigwinner for me when I was a lad, y’know. It’s a nickname – not my real one.’

He takes my leathery talon in his matt hand. He’s smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. Astonishing, on a hospital ward in this day and age. The smoke flows up over his more than full lips and gathers in his mirror-backed sockets, boiling like mist in a mountain defile, or the marcelled hair of my senior class, Long Island, 1939. I concede – it’s a late arrival, this child called Death. Who would’ve thought – given the long months of painful flushes, sweats and bellyaches – that I still had it in me? ‘Y’don’t, girl. Lily, listen . . . Y’dyin’, Me – this,’ he waves the cigarette, ‘not here. None of it. Not the ward. Not the hospital. Not cancer. Not death. Not here . . .’

Push! Push! Push! The high, distempered walls of the hospital room belly out then squeeze in, as if they were the womb and I the baby. Push. The stupid fucking baby. First one tiny foot emerges – all yellow with corns, bruised with bunions – then a second. A breech birth – no wonder it’s so fucking painful, it’s pedalling its way into the world. Then a thick hairball at the join of the yellow thighs, then a belly slack with births of its own. Then hacked-about dugs, then puny wattled arms – and finally, a brave little keel to keep it stable in the watery world. A brave keel and a full head of blonde hair. There it is, toothless, wizened on the bed, not arriving gently with that 30% cotton nightie all rucked up about its neck. How can a corpse sweat so?

‘Yer not a corpse.’

‘I’m sorry?’ So fucking English, that – I don’t like the person I’ve become.

‘Yer not a corpse – yer dyin’.’ I feel a sarcastic rejoinder swell in my mouth, but bite it back down – with my own teeth. Phar Lap is sitting at the end of the bed, still smoking, but I’m upright and I have my own teeth. My own teeth and my own fat, back again. Just as the crab has finally snipped it all away, so some other beast has pitched up and slapped it on to me again – like clay. I can also smell Phar Lap’s cigarette – and Phar Lap himself. The aboriginal man is feral and meaty, sanguinely scented. The whole confused rondo of death – the blue rhapsody, the gurgled fight, the crashing breakers of pain and nausea and fear – has abated. The others have gone and there’s only us, a woman in late middle age, not that well preserved, but still with her own teeth; and a middle-aged aboriginal man wearing black Levis, a plaid shirt and a white Stetson.

There’s an Anglepoise, the white, conical shade bent back to the wall, so that it spews out yellow light in a large circle. Through the open door I can see the ward is bathed with the dim, jaundiced light of nighttime institutions. Through the window I can see the orange-haloed streetlights. In the near distance I can hear the giant cutlery-drawer crash of lorries slamming down Gower Street. On the high locker by the bed is a digital clock. One of my daughters must have dutifully brought it from Bartholomew Road, so that its red eyes might blink the hour of my death: 3.27 a.m. I can smell Dettol.

‘We’ve a few minutes, yeh-hey?’

‘What’s that?’

‘We have a few minutes – see?’

‘For what?’

‘Like I was sayin’ – for you to see the Clear Light.’

‘The clear light?’

‘That’s right – the Clear Light. Wasn’t it you who once wrote, “The attachment to reality is horrible and possible"?’

‘That’s bizarre – I must’ve written that in a letter years ago. How d’jew know?’

‘1961. Listen,’ and he hunkers forward, ‘everything adds up here, you don’t have teeth any more, you don’t have fat, and aboriginal men don’t hang out in London hospital wards, in the middle of the night, smoking – geddit?’

While Phar Lap has done me the great service of making this speech in as near to Standard English as he can achieve he’s still not getting through to me. ‘What’re you saying?’

‘None of this is real, Lily. None of Lily is real. None of it ever has been. Dump your Lilyness now, girl. It doesn’t suit you. Dump it or go round in it again like a set of old clothes. Sell it on again. Sell it out again. You geddit?’

‘So you – you’re not real?’

‘Yer fuckin’ teeth woman, think about it – yer fuckin’ teeth!’ Back comes the aggressive Strine. He grinds his rollup out on the lino, stands. He’s wearing elastic-sided boots. Riding boots. They’re all dusty. I’m doing my best to think about nothing – but I’m thinking about my teeth. I’m thinking of all the uses I could put them to, how they can chomp and grind and chew and crunch lovely food. And I’m thinking about my flesh – how it can be held and stroked and palped and needed. And Phar Lap says, quite out of the blue, ‘Fuck it, girl – too late.’

Dead

‘I plan to retire around five years after I die.’

Warren Buffet

Chapter Seven

T
he corpse on the bed is childishly small. On that point, at least, it transpires everyone was right. The sight of my body after death moves me to self-pity. Poor little me. Poor little old me. Poor little old dead me. There was a final ‘Hereugher – ‘. A breath left unfinished – like a drink too many. Then the last quiver of the pallid, caved-in cheeks. Then nothing. The digital clock blinks 3.28 a.m. and it’s over. My life is over. This has to be the major breakthrough in cancer treatment we’ve all been waiting for, for so very long. Now they’re no longer needed they come, if not exactly running, at any rate briskly to the scene. The junky daughter itching and scratching in her dirty daywear, the straight daughter businesslike in showy pyjamas and a presentation dressing gown. She didn’t fucking bother to bring one in for me, now did she?

It was the efficient sister, the brunette, who alerted them. She has the air of a major-domo – she’s officiating at this burlesque death scene. I’m surprised to see her lean down and put her ear to the slack pocket that was once my mouth. Is she checking for breath, or words? She straightens up. ‘Yes, your mother appears to have passed on.’

‘Oh,’ Charlotte replies. She’s shocked certainly – for this is an indifferent ‘oh’, an ‘oh’ someone might come up with in response to the news that a cup of tea had been made for them. Shock is the body’s way of rendering profound experiences temporarily prosaic. Shock is a badly constructed narrative. News of tea that’s been made is followed, in a contrived fashion, by the pretext for drinking it.

‘I’ve paged Dr Bowen – she’s on call.’

‘Oh – right.’ And they wait, visibly swaying – all three of them – from heels to balls and back again. There’s no small talk to be made about this admittedly large situation. I suppose I could’ve hoped for some hysteria – if not from sensible daughter, at least from over-emotional junky daughter. But clearly – she’s fixed. She always scratches when she’s fixed – and then everything is just peachy. Serrated nails paring peachy skin.

Bowen, a sad-faced lesbian in her early forties, comes up sneakily in flats. The lapels of her white coat are heavy with madly protesting buttons – SANE, MIND, MENCAP – any old acronymic crap she can lay her quick-bitten fingers on. She’s a pitiable thing. I recall her telling me that oncology wasn’t her ‘thing’. I should say so, she’s too sluttish to make a good cancer doctor. For cancer you need the offices of a dashing blade –like Steel. Anyway, dear old Bowen – or Jane, as she would prefer to be called – has her way with me. She rummages around in my sad sack nightie, partially exposing my hacked-about dugs, then applies her stethoscope. Hohum, while you’re dying they’ll expend resources on the fanciest of technologies, but once you’re dead all they do is put a rubber tube in their ear and listen – for nothing.

Bowen and the sister run through a checklist of vitally absent functions and the sister ticks them off – each with a flourish of brushed-steel Parker on clipboard. She then hands the list to Bowen, who signs it without any emphasis, muttering me ‘dead at 3.47 a.m.’, Time flies when you’re disembodied. ‘What happens now?’ Natty asks. She’s still in the prosaic phase of shock, the enquiry seemingly about plans for a group outing – although this is belied by the goo that spews from her nose. She may be stoned on heroin, but she’s withdrawing from her Mumu.

‘Your mother’s body will remain here for tonight, but obviously you’ll need to engage an undertaker as soon as possible. Did your mother have any strong opinions about what she wanted?’

Both of my girls laugh at this, but it isn’t a nervous titter of English embarrassment, it’s a dirty chuckle of Jewish cynicism, one that should rightfully be accompanied by a derisive reiteration: ‘Did my mother have any strong opinions?’ Like, is Paris a city, you shmuck? But they don’t follow through – neither of them has the necessary gall. ‘No, no,’ Charlie answers, ‘she was very much an atheist, and didn’t want any fuss –’

‘Yeah,’ Natasha butts in, ‘she said we should just burn her and dump her in a skip . . .’

Strange to relate, while my daughters are actually talking, giving the first speeches of any kind to be uttered on my behalf since my demise, I find myself moving, drifting away, strolling off. I can still hear the conversation under way behind me, but it’s quite irrelevant. It’s like snatches of surrealism – ‘-ime for’, ‘–eared we would’, ‘-entional mistake’ – overheard as you wend your way through a crowded airport departure lounge. I’ve strolled outside the death chamber and see that it’s no more than a glassed-in cubicle, partitioned off from the rest of the ward. Death on national insurance, well, it had to be better than death on the instalment plan. American death.

I’m gliding along the cool, stone floor of the ward, peering at the faces smeared on the pillows, when the hem of my nightie billows, and there’s the clattering of stone hitting stone. I squint down and there, pirouetting between my knees, is a tiny grey manikin. It’s no more than a couple of inches high and has the aspect of a foetus, but a foetus of around twenty years of age. Curious, I bend down to examine the creature. Its tiny mouth opens and closes, and hunkering right down I can hear that it’s singing: “Cos I lu-urve yoo! / I just like the things yoo-doo / Wo-on’t yooo-doo–the-things–yoo-doo / Nya-nya-nya-nya-nya-nya-nyaaa! / Nya-nya-nya-nya-nya-nya-nyaaa!’ I’m not exactly shocked – that would be prosaic – more amazed. This amazement must be a dam in the present, because banking up behind it I sense an inundation of awe about what’s transpired. I’m thinking. I’m me. I’m dead.

The grey manikin has twinkly black eyes. It’s a good dancer. It keeps right on with the nonsensical ditty, shimmying between my ankles. What the hell can it be? ‘See you here, girl. This is a lithopedion, little dead fossil baby of yours, yeh-hey!?’ It’s Phar Lap, the aboriginal man who hung out with me while I died. I must say that during the endgame there he began to irritate me considerably. I couldn’t altogether get where he was coming from – but needless to say it sounded religiose.

‘How would I know,’ I snap.

But Phar Lap pays this no mind, he simply squats down himself and gives the manikin a pat on its wrinkled brow with the very tip of his little finger. ‘Could be much worse y’know, girl,’ says Phar Lap Jones. ‘Much worse than the little feller. You never have no abortions, no?’

‘No.’

‘Stillbirths?’

‘No.’

‘ ‘Cos they snag round yer head some – to begin with, hey-yeh?’

‘What d’jew mean?’

‘Dead foetuses, newborn babies, whatever. With mothers who have kids, y’know, and they’re young then –little, right. Well, when that woman dies they come back – see? But see, hey, if they’re real small they’re still attached to the woman, danglin’ off her, yeh-hey? Older kiddies – they don’t stick with you as much, grown-up kids not at all.’

‘Like life?’

‘No, not like life . . .’ He pauses, allowing some nurses to pass by. ‘In life, death drive you ‘part, yeh-hey? Now it drag you all t’gether. I wonder which you’ll like more. Anyway, you had a dead child, right?’

How typical of life – you have to fucking
die
in order for anyone to discuss what’s really bothering you. He’s like a reversed mushroom – this Phar Lap Jones character – with his white hat and black stem. Still, his quiet insistence is beguiling. We link arms without touching and, guiding me as if I were a horse, with dips of his Stetson’s brim and cheek-sucking clicks, he leads me towards the stairs. Down we glide, following the dirty whorl of the rotten old Royal Ear, talking the while of David Junior.

The lack of touch I understand – no pain, no touch. The obliviousness of the staff we pass I get too – no touch, no pain, no pain-murderers, stalking in the night. This consciousness after death – well, clearly I made a colossal booboo. That painful, embarrassing world through which I dragged myself, smiling thickly, throwing the occasional tantrum, beset by irrational fears – that was purgatory. And this? This must be heaven.

Down past the posters advertising upcoming events in the worlds of pregnancy, lunacy, dental caries and drug addiction. Across empty seating areas where water-coolers gurgle indulgently. Then down past the painful paintings executed by the maimed, and the insipid, pastel watercolours of the whole. Finally, past the somnolent security guard, nodded out over his newspaper, and into the street. I look down to see what’s become of the lithopedion, but it keeps up well enough, grabbing the hem of my nightie and swinging itself from step to step. Tiny Tarzan.

Until we hit the street when, mysteriously, I find that the nightie has gone with the night, and I’m standing in the roadway naked and wattled, with the dawn seeping in. ‘Oil’ I hail Phar Lap who’s rolling a cigarette one-handed. ‘What’s all this, then?’ All this is all this wobbling cellulite, all these spongy pounds the crab had snipped away. All this
fat.
I didn’t figure on being pudgy after death. Plump in the nether world. Rotund among the shades.

‘You can’t take it with you, girl.’

‘Not the nightie – this.’ I make fat shapes with my hands to cup what’s implied.

‘Oh, yeh-hey! That you get to keep. Heh! Not so subtle a subtle body, yeh-hey?’

This I don’t get – but I keep on at him. ‘I can’t go anywhere looking like this’ – absurd, I have done for years, we’re all naked underneath our clothes. ‘Anyway – where
are
we going?’

‘Dulston.’ It sounds like.

‘Dalston?’

‘No,
Dulston.’

Dulston, eh, and I thought I knew most of London’s suburbs by name – even the utterly samey inconsequential ones. ‘What’re we going there for?’

‘Thass where yer gonna stay, Lily girl. Thass where yer new unit is. No more gabbin’ now – here’s the cab.’ A minicab pulls up to the kerb. It’s a sloppy, medium-old, four-door saloon. A Ford Granada or something like that. When I was a young woman I took an interest in cars. Cars like the eight-cylinder Buick I had in the late forties, which would pull up a one-in-eight hill at sixty in third. Big, cars like spunky men lying underneath me – controlled by my feet, my calves, my thighs, my hands. The men grew older and less powerful. The cars smaller. I gave up on both kinds of transport.

The driver of this jalopy is a Greek Cypriot. This I can tell from the iconostasis that is the dashboard. Tiny, gilt-framed pictures of a variety of saints, Madonnas and patriarchs, all looped together in a tangle of Christmas-tree lights and rosaries. On the back shelf of the car lies one of those nodding dogs, a black one with three yea-saying heads. The Cypriot has a greasy tonsure, a brown label of skin stuck down in thinning hair. He’s grinning, and rinky-dink bouzouki music is plinking away. All the seats in the car have those knobbly mats strapped on to them, as if this were orthopaedic transport for back-achers; the kind of people who say ‘My back’s killing me’ as if it were fucking cancer.

Phar Lap folds his length into the passenger seat and I take the rear, together with the lithopedion, which executes a neat forward flip from the sidewalk into the seat-well. Not I, though, I have to climb up into the car the way that fat people do, sideways, one leg provisionally advanced. For us fat, each footstep is an act of testing the world’s surface, trying to find out who’ll give way first.

No destination is requested, yet the Cypriot flicks into drive and we pull away smoothly up Huntley Street. But it’s not until we’re turning out of Grafton Way into Tottenham Court Road that I begin to appreciate how comfy this car is, how it glides along – more like some flying machine than an urban potholer.

But then it comes to me, I’ve forgotten that . . . ‘I can’t feel anything,’ I exclaim to Phar Lap, whose face cannot be seen in the rear-view mirror. The cabbie snaps off the tape machine.

‘Yer not gonna,’ growls my mentor.

‘I mean . . . it’s strange . . . but I can feel the insides of me . . . the disposition of my parts . . . And I can
see
the way my body fits into this seat, but it’s as if I’m
resting
on the surface, not pressing into it.’

‘Yairs.’

‘What?’

‘Yeh, thass right, Lily-girl. You ain’t got no physical body no more now, kiddo, jus’ this like
subtle
one, yeh-hey? This subtle one. It can’t reflect light. It can’t feel pain or pleasure. It don’t sleep or smell. It don’t need tucker. It don’t need grog. It don’t need this one.’ He makes a schoolboy’s obscene gesture with an eye and a hook of fingers. ‘It don’t need no-thing.’

I think for a moment before coming back at him. ‘But no pain, right?’

‘Thass it, girl – no pain. Not for now, leastways.’

So, all have won – and all shall have prizes. My prize being the smashed crab, its pincers dislocated and laid alongside the white and brown mush of its flesh. No pain. It looks like an excellent deal to me. It
feels
like a great deal of numbness, like a whole body-shot of super-Novocaine, and an epidural for all eternity. I love it.

The cab pivots through ninety degrees under the bland graticule of the Euston Tower and glides on to the Euston Road, where we’re confronted by the unwelcoming Wellcome Institute. How many fucking times have I laboured along here on the way to work. A fat, old, bourgeois bag lady, weighted down by a Barnes & Noble book bag full of second-hand culture and wicked, carbohydrate snacks. The gritty city air gusting up my dress, blowing shrapnel in my eyes. My dentures clenched with the artificiality of my own efforts.

Dentures? Dreaming of teeth. Dreaming of teeth again. I have my own teeth back – that much I
can
feel. My own filled, bridged and promiscuously uneven choppers. Dunce-prize cuspids – hardly worth dying for. They should never have taken them out in the first place, but hell, they used to do that before they put fluoride in the water. They’d rip your fangs out without so much as a by-your–leave. Parents used to give their halitosis-haloed kids fucking
dentures
for their twenty-first birthday. The keys to the door leading away from pyorrhea. Jews especially – as if we were anticipating an evil demand for rotten enamel to build another foul shower-surround. So, then I had no teeth and a big appetite. Now I have teeth and no requirement for them.
Quelle blague.