How the Dead Live (19 page)

‘Well – aren’t you gonna tell me?’

‘Fat and old, fat and old, fat and old, fat and old – ‘

‘Looks like you got the Fats, girl,’ my death guide finally answers. ‘Lotta people – specially women – do. Better go see ‘em – they’re like the lithopedion here.’ He gestures at the lithopedion, who sits on the gas fire’s brick surround, swinging its grey legs, singing, ‘I’m just a poor boy / I get no sympathy / Caught in a landslide / No escape from reality . . .’ in bizarre counterpoint to the ‘Fat and old, fat and old, fat and old, fat and old’ coming from next door.

I rise up and strike out for the door; Phar Lap and Costas follow me. In the bedroom there’s a terrible sight. It’s not scary – it’s terrifying, yet oddly pathetic as well. There’s a doppelgänger of myself, naked and shining, beneath the window. Another is trying to wedge itself under the bed, a third sits on the plush-covered mini-banquette in front of the dressing table. They’re disgustingly obese versions of me, all wobble and jounce, huge dewlaps of belly dangling to their knees. They’ve no eyes, hair or nipples, and they’ve the slack mouths I saw last on my own corpse. They’re the Pillsbury Dough girls of total dissolution. The one under the window has a hank of intestines wound round her forearms; which the one on the banquette is paying out, pulling off loop after loop of goo and feeding it through to the one under the bed. I can’t see what this one’s doing, but I can distinctly hear the ‘shuk-shuk’ of garden shears. They’ve got a beat going – these obese versions of me; and the ‘Fat and old, fat and old, fat and old, fat and old’ is a work song of sorts.

But when the gut gang see me they break off, huddle together, fall silent. Phar Lap and Costas nod their heads significantly. ‘Fair dinkum,’ says my death guide, ‘they’re Fats all right.’

The Fats whisper sour nothings to each other which sound like tummy rumbles: ‘What’d he say? Who’s he? There she is – ‘

‘And what, exactly,’ I assume a sang-froid worthy of the Aboriginal himself,
‘are
the Fats?’

‘Yairs . . . well . . . Y’did a fair bit of dieting while you were alive – yeh-hey?’

‘Urn . . . yes . . . I did.’ Did I hell– I dieted for suety Olde Englande. I obsessed about my weight so much that I probably
put more on,
simply by thinking it into existence. Kerrist! Those endless doodled figures on the wallpaper, those thick supplements and insipid juices, those minutely calibrated snacks – trimming the edge of a lettuce leaf in an attempt to negate another calorie. Those fucking Weight Watchers meetings. Did I diet? My whole existence during the seventies and eighties was defined by the continual struggle not to eat, not to stuff the hated world in my face.

‘See these Fats here, Lily, yeh-hey, they’re your fat. The fat you shed during all that dieting’ – a black mattock digs in the direction of the skein-holder – ‘and the fat you put back on again.’ And he gestures at the one who’s taking up the slack.

‘What about the one under the bed?’

‘She’s the fat you lost for ever – the stuff you dag-tailed.’

‘Oh, so I did actually manage to lose some . . . overall.’ Why should this give me any satisfaction now? Yet it does.

Phar Lap doesn’t answer. He’s extracting bits of paper, booklets and envelopes from a small straw bag he has slung over his shoulder. ‘Listen, Lily, I got you a few bucks here in me dillybag, sit-down money, see? And I’ve got you a map of Dulston and a list of meetings. Come in the other room.’

‘But what about these . . .’ I can’t address them so casually, the fat fiends with their Edgar Allan Poe faces.

‘The Fats? They won’t trouble you any more than the lithopedion here. They’re part of you, Lily-girl, see? No more terrifying than yer own mind, yeh-hey?’

So I follow him into the other room, and the Fats carryon muttering and unravelling the loops of gut. Phar Lap counts out exactly seventeen pounds and thirty-six pence. Both the notes and the coins are old, distressed.

Then Costas weighs in, ‘Youse gotta pay me now, Lily – gimme youse plates.’

‘Plates?’

‘Yeah – youse falsies.’

‘But – but I don’t have them any more.’

‘Look in the case,’ Phar Lap advises – and I do. There they are, wrapped up like they used to be on the rare occasions when I took them out. Wrapped up in new fat old lady’s pants, looking more fleshly now than prosthetic. I feel an affection for them – these prised-apart jaws – they were more a part of me than what I’ve become. Still– Charon is Charon, I guess, even if he only drives you across London, so I go next door and hand them over.

‘There’s a store up at the corner there, Lily, yeh-hey?’ says Phar Lap. ‘You can get cleanin’ stuff, give the place a goin’over, hey-yeh?’

‘And what’re you going to do now?’

‘Work – I got work t’do jus’ like Costas. We
all
gotta work, Lily. Maybe I’ll see you at the meeting tonight? Maybe not.’

‘And if I don’t go to the meeting?’

‘You stay at home with the Fats, then, and – ‘

‘Me and you and a dog named Boo, loving and a-living off the land!’

‘ – the lithopedion here.’

He was right – I’d rather go to any kind of a meeting than sit around with the tiny calcified cadaver, the reanimated reminder of my sexual fecklessness. Let alone those Fats.

Chapter Eight

W
ell, what can I say, that’s how it was for me. Not so different to anyone else’s death, I guess. We’ve all got our own fucking sob stories in here – that’s for sure. Still, you might’ve thought that with the Fats kind of gibbering in the next room, and the lithopedion belting out its seventies ditties as it dragged at my feet, I wouldn’t have had any difficulty at all appreciating I was extinct. Not so. I can remember that first afternoon in the basement flat at 27 Argos Road as clearly as I can recall anything that happened to me before – or has transpired since.

Sure, I didn’t know it was Argos Road at that point – any more than I knew that the house number was 27. It was just a damp basement, in a dull suburb, of an immense city which I’d learnt to tolerate – but never love. And being dead? That no more registered with me – metaphysically speaking – than the ineffability of God’s name, or the Marian cult, or the Red Sea parting, or any other bit of religious mummery. An afterlife was as vastly improbable as Atlantis, a sunken continent of silly supposition, believed in only by credulous fools.

I suppose you’d expect my subtle body, the resurrection of my teeth, Phar Lap’s and Costas’s eccentricities to’ve made a big impression on me too, but this wasn’t so either. You’ve gotta believe me when I say that the hereafter, as it revealed itself to me on that spring day in 1988, seemed no stranger than my arrival in England for the first time in the winter of ‘58, when my pregnant belly – stuffed full of Charlotte – pressed against the railings of the
Queen Mary,
as it honked its way towards the dockside; while down below spread the waiting crowd, a field of cloth of gabardine, scattered with pink-featured flowers. One of which – and I searched it out at the time, believing, or willing myself to believe, that this meant love – was Yaws’s. So much for belief.

England, a country of profound, antediluvian backwardness, where the hearty homes wore their circulatory systems on the outside; a savage reminder of the fact that come winter, your own pipes would freeze quite as surely. England – quaint it ain’t. Not now, not then, not ever. I never loved the place, or the culture – or the people for that matter. I always kept my US passport in my handbag, ready to jump ship if the need arose. As for the Yaws family, with their nursery nicknames, their gentle bigotry (never hating anyone because they were black, or a Jew, or a woman, but simply disliking them for themselves alone –
and incidentally
their blackness, their Jewishness, their femaleness), their casual drunkenness (were they drunk, or slow-witted, or both?), and their determination to mortify themselves internally with vast carbohydrate repasts – set beside
them,
my death guide and the minicabbing Charon weren’t all that peculiar.

No, I figured this was only another scene change, a further forced march in Lily’s war. In the same way I’d jumped from Kaplan’s bed to Yaws’s, from the US of A to shitty little England, so I’d relocated – via the Royal Ear Hospital– from Kentish Town to Dulston. Now I’d have to go through the whole tedious business of acclimatising myself again. Getting the utilities sorted out, finding out where the local Sainsbury’s was, applying for a library card – all that crap. With the deficit of hindsight – and since when, for the neurotic at least, has it ever conferred any benefit? – I suppose it should’ve occurred to me that my indifference to the more cohesive aspects of life – such as mail redirection and healthcare – implied a rather more significant change of address than earlier moves. But take it from me – it didn’t.

Yeah, like I say, I recall the first day of the rest of my death perfectly; and see it as the other bookend to my arrival in literary ol’ England. Southampton, winter of ‘58, where ice streaked the cranes’ davits, and the land, the sea and the sky vied to out-murk each other. When it came time for me to quit the ship I cowered in my cabin, like a pale cow in an iron barn, until the lowing Yaws – ‘Lily? What’s the matter? I’ve been waiting on the quay for simply ages’ – came to herd me down the gangway. Simply ages –
so
Yaws; everything with him was
so
simple. How true to say that simplicity is all too often the last refuge of the complex. Yes,
simply ages
– that’s how long an eternity would be in Yaws’s company. Actually, that’s how long
five fucking minutes
was in Yaws’s company, once the thrill of leaving Kaplan, escaping the Eight Couples Who Mattered and avoiding the banshees of guilt surrounding Dave Junior’s death had worn off. Oh – and fleeing Jewmerica – that was a great escape as well.

Who was he, this big, pink, wet-mouthed guy, who’d roughly taken me a couple of times in the back of his rental Chrysler? He bit my tits. I think with Yaws I mistook shock for orgasm, and inevitably orgasm for love. But the weird way of it was that as with any other lover, Yaws became a physical archetype to me. All men in one – and all therefore hateful.

Yaws took me back to the first of a succession of uncomfortable flats; where drying racks hung with diapers and underwear were forever collapsing in tangles of cloth and strut, like the wrecks of early aircraft. Miss Wrong-Brothers couldn’t fucking keep them clean –let alone aloft. Then, when I was pregnant with the second Miss Yaws, we ended up at Crooked Usage, where everything settled into a routine of neglect. Jesus-fucking–Christ, if
you’d
lived in Hendon in the sixties you’d know what living death was like. Dulston, by comparison, was a gas – albeit an odourless one. After all, I’d been living in purgatory the last fifteen years of my life. Extinction was all I’d expected – so is it any wonder that the very shoddy solidity of the basement was enough to stifle my normally raging curiosity?

I ignored the Fats and suffered the lithopedion. I went out to the shops to get cleaning materials. Surely, I reasoned, I’d still be able to smell ammonia? To tell shit from Shinola?

In the street it was sunny. Phar Lap was right – the subtlety of a subtle body was lost on a clumsy simp like me. It
felt
drier, crisper, warmer than the dank basement. Free of pain and the galumphing towards death, I felt as if
I
were drier, crisper and warmer too. Besides, so much of life consists in such distancing, such purely conjectural sensual delights – could death be any different? There was even fucking
cherry
blossom, pink and white frou-frous of unseemly frivolity, frothing from under the solid skirts of the late Victorian houses. Houses which, with their four storeys of frigid urbanity on top and their dank basements submerged, were like inverted icebergs. As I trolled towards the corner shop, with my death grant jingling in my dress pocket, I was buoyed up, almost girlish.

I passed a few people on my way, but they looked no more nor less zombie-like than any you veer past in any city street. A too tall girl with ends split from crown to collar, dabbing leaky lids with a slunk of tissue; a decayed stump of an old man in a tent of mac, testing each paving stone with a rubber stopper; an off-colour Asian gent with a meticulous fringe of grey moustache. Their eyes took me in, blinked me out.

The corner shop was set
into
the corner – like a corny postmodern piece of detailing. Inside it was a turmeric-scented grotto festooned with merchandise of all kinds – from cardboard bandoleers loaded with penknives, to plaits of onions, to hanks of liquorice strings. In the darker recesses of this trading lair lurked freestanding postcards racks, plastic baskets full of vegetables, shuddering freezer cabinets, and forgotten shelves clustered with the souls of soup cans.

The counter was almost submerged by a wave of cheap stuff, but through a gap between the till, a stack of the
Dulston Advertiser
and the albino dreadlocks of some mop-heads, I received instruction from a tiny, Indian woman in an immaculate sari. She sent me hither and thither, paying me out on a threnody of directions, to save from her labyrinth this lovely canister of bleach, that beautiful bottle of all-purpose floor cleaner, and those alluring scourers. Sitting behind her on a high stool, a small boy in pressed grey shorts played with a toy metal car, a toy plastic cow and a toy plastic harmonica. As I went back and forth I observed him carefully balance these atop his thighs. He tried car on top of cow on top of harmonica, then harmonica on top of cow on top of car, as if he were investigating the possibility of new Hindu cosmologies.

When I’d liberated the cleaning materials, I paid the tiny lady.

‘You must be the new lady,’ she said – clearly she was a ladies’ lady. ‘The one who’s moved in at number 27.’

‘That’s right,’ I replied, pleased to’ve been acknowledged. Perhaps this move to Dulston, this further assimilation, would be easier than I’d feared. ‘The flat’s a terrible mess,’ I told her, ‘it looks as if it hasn’t had a decent spring-clean in twenty years.’

She gave a subcontinental snort, ‘Er-hoo’ – impacted with layers of meaning – ‘yes, that is rightly true. Rightly true. Mr Buzzard was never one for cleaning – an unquiet spirit, you understand? He has moved now. Moved on to Bicester outside Oxford. Honestly, Mrs . . .?’

‘Bloom.’

‘Mrs Bloom. There are a lot of unquiet spirits at 27, don’t let them annoy you. Don’t let them get the upper hand. Is this your lithopedion?’

She leaned through the gap and peered at the lithopedion, who was sitting on the very edge of a banana box, swinging its stubby grey legs and fluting another of its tacky ditties: ‘Streets are all empty / No one around / Everyone’s gone – to the mo-on!’

‘And what is your name then, Sunny Jim?’ she asked. I was dumbfounded – it hadn’t occurred to me to address it directly.

‘Lithy,’ the lithopedion squeaked.

‘Do be quiet now, Lithy – there’s a good child,’ she told it and it was. ‘You have to be firm with a lithopedion, Mrs Bloom. They know no better than to be blurting out any old nonsense that comes into their heads. It’s usually pop music because it penetrates through to where they’ve been caught up in your . . . folds.’ She bunched up her sari to illustrate her point.

I was impressed by this useful dope – so much better than Phar Lap’s pidgin mysticism. ‘Urn . . . You don’t mind me asking, Mrs . . .?’

‘Seth.’

‘Mrs Seth. I’ve got some . . . Fats, is it . . . Fats in my flat are they dangerous?’

‘No, not exactly, Mrs Bloom. Most people’s Fats are rather adolescent, if you see what I mean.’

‘Adolescent?’

‘Yes, you see they’re totally made up from gained and lost fat. Fat that is usually the result of those childishly indulgent binges on chocolate, sweets and what have you. So the Fats have that character. They’ll sulk, answer back at you, mutter unpleasantly, and play loud music, but you can get them in line – if you are persistent.’

A bell tinkled and another customer descended into the shop. It was a shocking-looking man of indeterminate middle age, his hair a fright wig, his chin a frightful beard. A toilet brush of a man. What skin I could see – his hands, his cheeks, his forehead – was covered with burns and abrasions. He wore flared jeans so small they rose up like culottes on his scrawny shanks, and a cheap nylon anorak zipped up to his throat. His eyes were small-calibre bullet holes, shot through to the wreckage of his mind. Near the door he bent down in slow stages to seize a metre-long box of tin foil from a bottom shelf. Junky, I concluded, and gave Mrs Seth the conspiratorial look of the socially acceptable.

To my surprise she didn’t return it; instead she returned my change and whispered, ‘I know what you’re thinking, Mrs Bloom, but he’s a good customer. You’ll be wanting to go to the meeting later on – I’ll call by for you at seven o’clock.’ Then she turned to the junky, who was staggering towards us, and beamed at him. ‘Hello, Mr Bernard, how are you today then?’

I gathered up my shopping and left.

All that afternoon I did my best to put the basement in some kind of order. In the cupboard under the stairs I found one of those ridiculous old carpet-sweepers, the kind that ploughs the dirt and fluff into two parallel lines. I dragged the damn thing back and forth, back and forth, over the dank carpets. I shooed the Fats away from the sludge pile of mattresses in the bedroom and hauled them out into the front area, where they dried in the fresh air. ‘What’s she doing?’ they chided me. ‘Cleaning – ha! Silly old cow – why bother?’

Every wipeable surface I wiped, then scoured with Flash. In the kitchenette I attacked the greasy lino with a clean mop-head and didn’t leave off ‘til it resembled the pomaded conk of a fifties zootsuiter. In the lavatory I turned five J-cloths the same colour as the urine-stained fitments. Then I had to chase the Fats off again, flicking globs of crap at them with the daggy rags. ‘What’s she doing! Ooh! Stop that – ooh! Leave us alone!’ Mrs Seth was certainly right about the Fats; despite their bizarre appearance there was nothing intrinsically frightening about them at all. Their blindness was for real, and it took them ages to grope their way into a room, or turn the telly on, or even creep up behind me so they could stand wobbling like three hideous turkeys, gobbling, ‘Fat and old, fat and old, fat and old.’ I soon grew used to herding them ahead of me, just as I became accustomed to telling Lithy to ‘pipe down!’ – one of Yaws’s Victorian catch-phrases.

I hadn’t planned on resuming domesticity quite so soon – in fact, within hours of my death. But what the hell, when I considered the torments I’d left behind it didn’t look too raw a deal. Anyway, cleaning wasn’t so bad when you couldn’t
feel
the filth beneath your fingernails, or the dust as it shot up your nose. Sure, if I homed in on the task at hand, the sight of what I was doing and the disposition of my limbs as I did it were enough to remind me of a lifetime’s faithless prostration before the household gods. Of the repetitive taking of the Pledge, the endless staring through Windolene darkly, the eternal coming of the bleached Lord in a burst of Vim.

By seven that evening I was fed up to the back of my resurrected teeth with the whole sordid business. The very
lack
of fatigue – of knee-ache and house-crone’s elbow – that these labours should’ve made me feel was exhausting. My vigorous cleaning wasn’t doing much for the place anyway, only provoking the patterns that screamed from the walls, harping on the ancient distress of the abused furniture, goading the sick fixtures and the ill fittings. When the bell rang I put on my coat – which I found in the bedroom folded over my suitcase – told the Fats to ‘be good’ while I was gone, tucked Lithy in a pocket and met Mrs Seth at the door.