How the Dead Live (27 page)

I should’ve given her sharing some credence, but I assumed she was making it up. The dead don’t feel. The dead have subtle bodies. This kind of torment isn’t visited on us – or so I thought. I didn’t pay attention and instead I looked at her face, not so much freckled as an amalgam of freckles. Ach! Let’s hear it again from the Katzenjammer Kids – and
don’t listen,
never
listen.

Mostly Clive and I went to the meeting at the Community Centre, but from time to time we’d vary it and promenade to St John’s, at the top of Argos Grove. It was an undistin-guished, gloomy church. The Almighty was not accustomed to visiting it. Here, pinioned below the neo-Gothic needle, we’d sit in the asbestos vestry on wooden chairs in wooden rows. The Secretary there liked to officiate as if he were a priest. He set himself up behind a row of school desks so old they had built-in inkwells. I recalled the steel-nibbed dippers of my childhood; how the good kids always had dirty hands, because they got to fill the wells from the big, ribbed bottle. But the deceased members of this infantile class had fingers smudged with cigarette ash, and sat retelling the kind of tales that would’ve got you larruped senseless when I was a girl. Larruped until your union bodice was
inside
your tiny chest and your bob blown all to shit. Larruped by Mummy, when all you’d wanted, at the end of the day, was to open your mouth.

All this through a long hot summer. All this while the live culture was set in its soccer ways. The global tournament now had its own signature tune. At Baskin’s, where I laboured over press releases for water-coolers – even though the boss wouldn’t shell out for one for his own downtrodden – they played it all the time.
Nessun dorma.
Sleep-no-fucking-more. Abso-fucking-lutely. I lit another ciggie, Lithy vibrated in my dress pocket, a joyless buzzer. Baskin stared at me through an arch of ruptured ring binders. I mused, some men have hats of hair, others hair like hats, but how does a man get the urge to make himself
appear
as if he’s bewigged?

Natasha and Charlotte were both pregnant that summer. What peculiar duetting for these mismatched progeny of mine. I learned about it through Bernie, the unquiet spirit on the top floor. For two years now I’d been privy to his awful existence. The scrape-thump, scrape-thump of another homecoming from Seth’s, with yet another tin-foil crutch. The leaden tread on the creaking stair that meant he was off for his weekly trip to the heroin cash and carry; then the more sprightly thumping that betokened his return. These occurred with metrical regularity, you could’ve calibrated a nuclear clock by the ebb and flow of the man’s junk tide. Late at night, early in the morning and all through the day I was bothered by his customers’ peculiar cries. They stood by the front door, their feet level with the top of my bedroom windows, pressing their needy mouths against the brickwork and calling up to him. A vertical whispering gallery. ‘Ber-nie. Bern. Ber-nie. It’s me.’ So many mes – so much human mess.

It occurred to me, being the old sourpuss that I am, that I should challenge Bernie over this relentless traffic. It wasn’t altogether credible that anyone could go on shovelling this much heroin into themselves, and putting this much out, for bubkes. Mrs Seth was good enough to set me straight on the matter. ‘You have to understand, Mrs Bloom, that Mr Bernard was not having the intoxication from all the heroin he was taking when he was alive. That is the way with the junkies, you know. When they are addicted they take it solely to be normal.’

‘Yes, yes, I do know that – my daughter – ‘

‘Of course. I am sorry to be telling you what you know already.’

‘But what about once he’d died? Surely he noticed the difference?’

‘Well, absolutely not. No – not at all. You are knowing your neighbour Mr Cox, up in the second-floor flat. Well, one day he heard an almighty crash from Mr Bernard’s attic.’

‘Not so remarkable, that,’ I interposed, ‘it happens when – ‘

‘Yes, yes, it happens when he lifts up one leg to put on his underpants – ‘

‘And forgets that he’s already lifted the other.’

‘Absolutely so. Anyway – that is precisely what happened on this occasion. But furthermore, the unfortunate man fell right across his bar heater, which was on at the time, and, having mildly concussed himself on the bare boards, he remained lying there for a sufficient period.’

‘A sufficient period?’

‘Long enough for it to burn Mr Bernard to death. However,’ she lifted a jewelled finger, ‘not long enough for all the rubbish in the flat to catch fire. The first thing that he knew about it was when he came in to buy some foil and the boy here noticed that his belly area was all burnt away.’

‘And didjew tell him – inform him that he was all burnt up?’

‘Well, yes. We did. But it didn’t register with the man. Intoxicated in life, I suppose – now intoxicated in death. He merely zipped up his anorak. That is why he keeps it zipped up all the way like that. All the time. Besides that, he has kept on very much the way he did when he was alive. His room, you know, you should go up and see it, Mrs Bloom, it is an absolute messy place, all burnt and littered besides.’

I didn’t want to see Bernie’s room – I didn’t want to see Bernie. I had my own kids to think of, calcified Lithy, mudspattered Rude Boy. In death it was the lack of feeling that counted. And the live girls? Well, I’d visit them from time to time, braving the tube down to Regent’s Park, stomping to Cumberland Terrace where I’d catch Charlie and Richard trying to make a baby for their very ownsome. I even tracked out to the sticks and dropped in on Pullet Green, where Natasha was taking her medicine. Pullet Green turned out to be a Lutyens mansion, set among parched beds of tea roses – the soil so friable it looked like kitty litter – and balding lawns fringed by dusty rhododendrons. Here, in circles of dry yet weeping alcoholics, and clean but filthy-minded junkies, my younger bitch crouched and snarled, while being expensively coaxed out of her heroin kennel.

She bloomed – the roses didn’t. In four short months she went from dropping dead to drop-dead gorgeous. Ah Natasha! In this, the short, incandescent summer of her womanhood, she was the most beautiful she’d ever be. That springy structure was upholstered with genuine
curves
of olive flesh. Her breasts, when she exposed them – which she did with charming, apparently inadvertent frequency – were of a prominence and succulence to stare down any man of average height and commonplace tastes. Eyeball him into puling submission. I know so. I stood at her shoulder and looked into the mirror while she disrobed. My subtle body unseen behind her not so subtle one.

Yes, I sat in, not integrating with the group, while Peter Landon squeaked about the scuffed herringbone parquet in his rubber-soled deck shoes, fuelled by camomile and attempting to implant a particle of common sense in Natty’s fickle frontlet. No dice. Natasha never saw herself as on a par with her pickled peers, and in fairness to her – nor did they. She was so fucking lovely they all wanted her. Even Landon – and believe me he tried – found it so hard to be insensible to her charms that after one-to–one counselling sessions he had to go and jack off in the john.

No, you could take the drugs and booze out of Natty, but the addiction to the power of her own private place remained as deep and smooth and moist as the orifice itself. Nope, all they did at Pullet Green – all they
could
do – was to dry her out, set her up, and send her out again. Worse than that, all the group therapy, the individual therapy, the browbeating, the ego-cracking amounted to, in the end, was a peculiar kind of pruning. The tea roses withered in their cat trays, but the hungry bloom inside of Natasha simply put down deeper roots, put out more shoots, grew stronger, more convoluted. Then stronger still.

At the Elverses’ place I crouched in vestibules, hid myself behind sideboards, squeezed alongside overstuffed armchairs. I sought out places in the capacious apartment where I could witness the earthshaking rutting of these giant beasts. It occurred to me that this was the explanation for the extinction of the dinosaurs, all this monstrous coupling to so little effect. But let me get it straight, there wasn’t a scintilla of voyeurism on my part, that wasn’t what kept me coming back. I had enough fat action on show back home in Dulston. And enough in and out, claustro and agro.

No, I watched my daughter and her husband fuck because that was the best way to catch up on the world of the living. While they bucked and plunged, they tittled and tattled. Ripley, can you believe it – or not? But if I could’ve been jealous – I would’ve. All of my latter years, lovelorn, imprisoned by flab, ignored by men, I’d obsessed that everyone else was screwing on this industrial scale, making such masses of love.

If I phoned the spinster at Kentish Town Library to see if she had a book I’d ordered, I’d picture her, her cardigan sleeves stuffed with tumours of congealed paper hanky, face puckered up as she enunciated the dry words of our factual discussion. But below the desk I’d imagine a crouching satyriasis-sufferer, licking her out as if she were a huge icecream cone. His hindquarters crammed into the kneehole, his head rammed between her knees. Cowled by her tweed skirt and nylon slip, his jaws worrying at her like a terrier with some scraggy end.

But then that was my ill fortune – to reach obsolescence when around me the entire world was stripping off and flinging itself into paroxysms of limbs. By the early eighties I wouldn’t’ve been
that
surprised if an Iranian ayatollah had pulled off his black robes and streaked through the precincts of Qom. Or Margaret Thatcher had gone down on one of her ministers in the House of Commons, the rest of them forming a clapping, chanting circle – ‘Maggie! Maggie! Maggie! Out! Out! Out!’ Yup – everyone was fucking save for fat old me. And it wasn’t fair – I hadn’t
had enough.

Richard had just about had enough, when finally, with one last slap and shudder, he unleashed a single spermatozoa feistier than all the rest. One little elver strong enough to swim through the seas of hostile mucous. One shred of DNA, which, if it could only burrow into the ball, set off the chain of replication, would, after many moons, be in a strong position to inherit an extensive chain of Waste of Paper outlets. Branches now such a part of the economic tree that to visit a shopping precinct was to be visited by one of the Elverses’ stores. In between Woolworth’s and M&S, or in between McDonald’s and Barelays, or in between the NCP and the war memorial. Leaves within branches.

Natasha, on the face of it, kept to all the suggestions made to her by the counsellors at Pullet Green. But then when did Natasha’s face mean anything but betrayal? They told her to go from primary to secondary treatment – so she did. She stayed in a bungalow at the bottom of the grounds. She attended many, many more group-therapy sessions. She began going to Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings in the vicinity, where she made a highly personal impression on all who saw her, and heard her speak.

She did voluntary work at the local old people’s home, where she listened to the whisperings of the temporary residents. Although not too closely. Had Natasha been truly attentive, leant into the toothless mouths, placed her tidbit of an ear within a tongue’s length of these old slobberers, she might’ve interpreted their whispers for the imprecations they truly were. ‘Go away! Piss off! Fuck off!’ That’s what they were saying, irked by her beauty, peeved by her youth, and annoyed by her useless concern.

At the bungalow she mended the leaking shower-surround with a giant syringe-like device, which extruded pink mastic. It made her think of shooting up. It made her think of penetration by Russell. The two were scrambled in her addled mind. The counsellors suggested she not make any major decisions for the first year of her recovery – so she put a brave face on it. She’d stay with Miles, who, although branded an ‘enabler’ and a ‘codependent’ by the counsellors, was also held to be a steadying influence. Yup, she’d stay with poor Miles because he was Natasha’s ticket out of the institution. Charlotte waived her share of Mumu’s flat – what need had she of this leftover space anyway? The plan was that Natty and Miles would move in there together. Their world would be steady.

Miles came to Pullet Green and booked a room at a bed and breakfast in nearby Reigate. He attended a family meeting with Peter Landon, who couldn’t believe this pretty boy’s good bad luck in catching the tumultuous termagant who was Natasha Yaws. The next day Natasha went out on an afternoon pass and met Miles in the town. They had a strange burger. They looked in shop windows. With much sarcasm they bought postcards at a branch of Waste of Paper. If the pus fairy had sprinkled their cheeks they might’ve been teenagers. Eventually they snuck into the B&B and Natasha milked Miles dry. Under the cold scratchiness of the quilt, he asked her if she loved him. Natasha shuddered, despite the black sweater she’d declined to remove – she had the goose bumps of the rejector. ‘Of course, silly,’ she said. But really it was he who was silly, of course.

In his trademark Adidas black, silk-effect track suit, and with his innately black, silkily violent, depraved heart, Russell entrained for Reigate from Victoria. Having engaged the jolting toilet, he smoked crack in a stem of Pyrex piping. He vigorously exhaled the toxic spume through a ventilator grille. When he was vacant, he vacated the toilet and went to stand, jolted up and decoupled on the jolting coupling between two carriages.

At Reigate station Russell encabbed, instructing the bemused Sikh driver to take him to a grid reference he’d marked on a 1:50,000-scale map of the locale. Having successfully negotiated two parallel barbed-wire fences, Russell angled across a wheatfield towards a ship-shaped copse. Chest-deep in the golden waves, Russell checked his diver’s watch and noted – militaristic, efficient bastard he was – that all was in synchrony.

Natasha waited for him, crouching in a small hollow of last year’s dry leaf mould. When her commanding officer arrived she wasn’t required to rise, merely to salute his thick stripe with her lovely lips. Shewas completely naked – he fully clothed. But she hadn’t felt so hot in weeks. When he was spent, he ordered her about face and fired a salvo inside her – he had so much ammunition to give. There were no words wasted between them. There were no words at all. What a relief for Natasha, who was saturated with talk. What a balm to have at least twenty minutes of non-communication; sandwiched as they were between a group-therapy session and a counselling session with Peter Landon. The previous day she’d used Miles, then she was used by Russell. That afternoon Natasha sat with twigs, frass, seed cases and pupae in her hair and euphemised to Landon. The sick Ceres. The blighted Aphrodite.