How the Dead Live (18 page)

‘Yeh-hey,’ Phar Lap predictably tics. ‘Fair dinkum, Lily m’girl. All us mob here – we’re mostly what’re called traditional peoples, yeh-hey? Seems like you Westerners can’t get no grasp on the death stuff, on the ungud, on no-thing. ‘Less you have one of us to guide you. See – seems like when you b’lieve in nothing you gotta have guides who b’lieve in the never-never, see?’

‘Erm . . . I suppose so.’

‘No you don’t. Yer jus’ sayin’ it, Lily-girl. But anyway this ain’t no settin’ face to face with the Clear Light. Plenny of time for that. Now – let’s eat. What’ll y’have?’ He points a big black boomerang at the star-shaped bits of cardboard Sellotaped to the window. These announce the awful permutations of egg (poached, fried, scrambled to fuck), sausage, bacon, beans, black pudding, white pudding, fruit pudding, slice, two slices, beans and tomatoes. One is headed ‘Full English’, another ‘Full Irish’ and a third ‘Full Dead’.

When I first came to London in the late fifties the very words ‘full English’ gave me heartburn. Just saying them left a sticky film on the roof of my mouth. Mindjew, in those days with rationing still within gut feeling – the cafe breakfast was more commonly ‘tea and two slices’. Two slices of thin white bread, lifeless flour slunks smeared with marge. Slices of no kind of life at all. Truth to tell, the English
really
loved rationing. It was the only thing that prevented them from swelling up and fucking exploding – given the lashings of carbohydrate they were wont to eat. Unnaturally, in time I too became inured – even accustomed – to the messy business of coating the walls of my stomach with a thick layer of grease. Like a cross-Channel swimmer I’d dive into the choppy, inland sea of my neuroses, fully, greedily, daubed.

Still, the past is another pantry. ‘Would you like breakfast in America?!’ the lithopedion warbles. I’d forgotten it – but here it is, squatting on the table, in between the sauce bottles.

Phar Lap ignores it. ‘Jeezus, Lily – what’ll y’have, girl?’

‘What d’jew recommend?’

‘I’d go for the full dead – ‘

‘Youse
are
going for the full dead,’ Costas interjects, ‘youse always do.’ And the cabbie lights a Benson & Hedges, blows blue smoke in my face.

‘Full dead it is, then,’ I murmur, and Phar Lap sticks up three fingers, a signal acknowledged by the barrel-chested character tending the urn, who shouts back, ‘Three full dead being exhumed!’ But I ignore this, because I’m on the verge of castigating Costas for his insensitive puffing, into the face of a woman who’s died of cancer only a few hours ago, when it hits me that the smoke doesn’t sting or irritate – it doesn’t even
smell
at all.

Nothing smells any more. I sniff the polluted air of the cafe with flared nostrils – but there’s no odour. None. No grease, no egg, no condemned meat – no whiff, no pong, no no-thing.

‘Phar Lap,’ I say, ‘I can’t smell.’

‘Whozzat, Lily-girl – yeh-hey?’

‘I can’t smell.’

‘No, you can’t – nor will you. Yer dead, girl. Like I say you’ve a subtle body now. It don’t make no reflection. It don’t get tired. It don’t need sustenance of any kind, no tucker, no rooting, no nothing – see. So, no smell – whyd’you need to smell, girl, see? Yeh-hey?’

‘But the breakfast – why do I need a full dead breakfast? And anyway – what do I do with the thing?’

‘You’ll see.’

‘Yeah – youse’ll see,’ Costas puts in, jabbing the air with his pill, ‘thass all youse’ll do now lady – see. Being dead is all about seeing and
listening.’

And I do see –
really
I do. I see the full dead breakfasts approaching, rolled out by the barrel-chested Cockney man, one plate in each hand, the third balanced on his right wrist and a plastic bucket dangling from the left one. I see that all the other tables have a bucket beneath them, and that all the death guides are chomping up their full dead breakfasts; giving them a thorough mashing, then regurgitating the mush into the buckets – not always with the greatest accuracy. The newly dead all look pretty green contemplating this gross-out – and I guess I must too. ‘Ferchrissakes, Phar Lap, is this what you guys do instead of eating?’

‘Yesh,’ he says, spearing a sausage, shoving it in.

‘But why – why bother?’

‘Ritual, Lily-girl. Me – I only have breakfast when I bring someone in, but the others, hell, they’ve eternity to spend here in Dulston, so why not bloody eat – even if they can’t swallow?’

‘And smoking,’ I turn to Costas, ‘why d’jew bother with smoking?’

‘Youse smoke one time, lady?’

‘Smoke? Of course I fucking smoked – that’s why I’m dead!’

‘OK, OK – well, youse ever smoke in the dark?’

‘Occasionally.’

‘But not much – right?’

‘No, I guess not.’

‘Thass right – ‘cos youse have to see it, right? Seethe smoke. Smoking’s as much seeing as feeling, so why not smoke youse want one?’

I want a B&H more than the full dead – which anyway is exactly the same as a full English – so I take one and Costas gives me a light. The smokes plays painless chords in the accordion of my diseased lungs. ‘What’s this place called, anyway?’ I ask through my own ectoplasm.

‘No p’ticular name,’ Phar Lap replies, ‘we just call it the cafe.’ He wipes a glossy rime of egg from his matt top lip.

‘Is that because it’s the only one in Dulston?’

‘No – it’s just the one that’s bin ‘ere the longest, yeh-hey? Dulston is what you’d call a cystrict.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘A cystrict – it swells up, then it leaks, then it swells up agin. It’s a cystrict.’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘Aw – y’Il see – finished?’

‘I never began,’ I say, and stub my cig out in the egg’s yellow bull’s-eye. Full dead indeed.

‘Fine – we’re elsewhere, then.’ Our trio rises, weaves between the tables to the counter where, to my surprise, Phar Lap pays.

‘Why d’jew pay?’ I ask him as we stroll back to the car. ‘Surely you don’t need money in this place?’ He rounds on me. ‘Why not! Place has gotta run like any other. Streets gotta be cleaned, teachers paid, sewers sluiced out – it’s no bloody hotel, I’m tellin’ ya, Lily, dead people are jus’ like the livin’.’

‘Except we can’t feel, or smell, or love – ‘

‘Or hurt! Or smell ourselves, or sweat, or any of that. There’s an upside to this, y’know,’ says Costas, who seems buoyed up by his gruelly repast, swinging himself into the front seat of the car with deathly vigour.

As we reverse into the roadway I press Phar Lap more. ‘So, if that’s where the newly dead and their guides eat breakfast, why are they serving ordinary meals?’

‘Yeh-hey. Well, the other mob come in, y’know.’

‘You mean the living?’

‘Who else.’

‘Oh, right – and you mean to say they aren’t terrified by the sight of a load of weirdos spitting pap?’

Phar Lap cants round to deliver his next line. ‘Lily – this is London, the whole bloody city is full of weirdos.’

‘So, there are living people in Dulston as well?’

‘No, I’m not sayin’ that, it’s just the place accommodates them if they turn up – like I say, it’s a cystrict.’

A cystrict. I think I’m getting the point, for, as the minicab slops along the road I begin to appreciate the character of Dulston. Sure, the clumps of houses, flats, commercial premises, warehouses, used-car lots and light-industrial units are the same as in any of the adjoining districts, but Dulston is even more characterless than other inner North East London suburbs I’ve known. The overwhelming impression the place gives is of colourlessness, an indifference towards municipal airs and graces.

Dulston is one of those districts you’re always finding yourself lost in, rather than arriving at. It’s the place you wind up in when you overshoot your destination or take the wrong turn. It’s the ‘burb as displacement activity. Without even needing to question Phar Lap I realise that Dulston must be as big or as small as its beholders. It’s a hidden pleat in the city’s rolled-up sleeve; an invisible flare flapping in its trouser leg; a vent in the back of its jacket. Presumably, if the living stray into Dulston they seenothing of its true nature. For them it’s merely a drive-by span of inattention, a glimpse of their own speeding car warped in a showroom window – before they find themselves traversing Hackney Marsh, or gawping at the Stamford Hill frummers, or heading into town. Dulston: you wouldn’t know you were there at all – unless you were dead.

It’s no revelation to me either when Costas angles the minicab into a road lined with late Victorian houses not dissimilar to the one I lived in in Kentish Town. No bolt from the blue when we halt outside one midway along. Costas and Phar Lap are out on the sidewalk by the time I’ve disencumbered myself. Peculiar, to move with the gait I used to have yet feel none of the discomfort of swollen feet, or riding underwear, or fatty ballast. The lithopedion comes too, chanting, ‘This is the sound of the suburbs!’ as I start for the stairs up to the front door. I’m gonna have to address this problem – but for now there’s the new apartment to consider. ‘Am I on the first floor?’

Phar Lap isencumbered with his wooden paraphernalia; bits of wood clack against the railings he’s walking beside. What a kid. He calls me back. ‘No, Lily-girl, you gotta go down, y’know. Basement, for now – mebbe go up a floor in time.’

So, down we go into the tawdry little area with its bins that look like rubbish. Phar Lap has a bunch of keys chained to the hip of his skinny jeans. He deals one out and unlocks the heavy door, with its architrave of London grunk, its lint-trailing draft-includer, its four whirl-of-distortion glass panes. He shoves it open into a vestibule which is dank to the point of musty saturation. I follow his flat ass; Costas comes behind with the sad Samsonite. The lithopedion warbles, ‘Another suitcase in another hall / Where are you going to?’ And we tour my new quarters.

The deformed corridor staggers along the left-hand side of the basement, and the first door off to the right limps into a mouldering bedroom. The bed’s a shapeless pagoda of three double mattresses. There’s a naked dressing table with a tip-tilting oval mirror; a freestanding thirties wardrobe, like a mahogany plinth; and three sash windows which aren’t admitting much at all. There’d be dust motes in here if it wasn’t so damp. The poor mites in the soggy old mattresses must be swimming for their fucking lives.

The next watery closet along is a sitting room. This comes complete with a Danish ancient armchair (x 2), some crappy lamps set on insignificant occasional tables, and a period gas fire piled with a miniature, flame-snagging ossuary. Somewhere Sweep could commit fucking suttee. Oh, and a bad-news bookcase with a
Good News Bible
in it, together with eight mildewed copies of the
Reader’s Digest.
Perched on top of this is a tiny, old, black-and–white telly – like a bird box. But there’s more –less more. With the lithopedion batting past my ankles, the party gains the end of the corridor and the fetid horrors of the kitchenette and bathroom. Shitty units clutter both pigeonholes. In New York – given the overall decrepitude of the basement – these would be rustling with roaches. But I know what’ll be in these without needing to look: six laid-off wads which were once copies of the
Daily Worker,
seven mismatched Tupperware cups and saucers, five belly-up wood-lice. That’s it.

The kitchenette has a gas stove and a fucking
meat safe.
Still, I shan’t be cooking in it – so what the hell does that matter. No cooking – no reheating a saucepan of coffee even. And no ablutions in the bathroom, where a pre-shrunk shrink – Shtikelberg perhaps? – might sit alongside the dugout enamel couch on a cork-topped
stool
of unspeakable shoddiness. The very heads of the rivets that pinion the mirror to the seeping wall are rimmed with
shit.
The splashback is grouted with
effluent.
And throughout the entire apartment the walls are covered with bilious lozenges, or garish parallelograms, or clashing cones. Wallpapers of sixties vintage, which were designed by English hicks imagining a psychedelic experience, when succumbing to the effects upon their inner vision of two pints of fucking
Strongbow.
There’s unfit carpeting too, the kind that looks like underlay. If I could squidge it with each footstep – I would.

It’s unspeakably awful. I slump down on one of the chairs in the sitting room and my gaze wavers from Phar Lap to Costas to the lithopedion. This is the spring season in hell. Sitting room is right, I guess. Yaws used to call the ratty reclining space of the house on Crooked Usage the ‘drawing room’. The pretentious shmuck. Still, ‘living room’ is
so
non-U, and totally out of the question now. ‘Ferchrissakes Phar Lap this joint is
terrible.
If I weren’t dead already this’d
kill me off
once and for all – you can’t expect me to stay here!’

‘Everyone’s gotta start somewhere, Lily-girl, yeh-hey.’ He’s unfazed. ‘An’ anyways – what choice you got? You don’t know bugger-all about Dulston. You need this unit – which is mine t’give, yeh-hey? You need me big-time. You need the meetings as well.’

‘Meetings?’

‘Yairs – meetings. Induction kinduva thing. They’re held all the time, all over Dulston. You gotta go, Lily – else you won’t know nothing about death, won’t get to yabber with the rest, won’t be able to function, yeh-hey?’

‘Mores than thats,’ Costas puts in, lowering his broad bottom into the other Danish ancient chair and sparking up another B&H, ‘iss frightening, y’see. There’s scary stuff you need to prepare y’self for.’

‘Scary stuff?’

‘Sure.’

‘Scary stuff in a suburb called Dulston? A suburb full of dull cafes, tedious streets, boring buildings, and this – this
crappy
flat?’

‘Yeah, even
in
this crappy flat.’

On cue, there’s the most peculiar sound of murmuring and cackling from the bedroom. It’s faint but clearly audible. Colourless voices intoning, ‘Fat and old, fat and old, fat and old, fat and old . . .’

‘What the hell’s that?’ I snap.

‘Fat and old, fat and old, fat and old, fat and old,’ the murmuring continues. Phar Lap and Costas have sly little smiles perched on their foreign faces.