How the Dead Live (3 page)

‘You’ve set your heart on rebirth, then?’ Mr Canter said at one of our last encounters, his fingers steepled over the graveyard of an open file.

‘Yes, I think death has taught me all that it might.’ I had my knees drawn together, my hands clasped in my lap. I clenched my fists and – hey presto! A half-century sloughed off and I was back in the unsuccessful interviews at Barnard and Wellesley, where they looked at my prominent nose from all kinds of angles.

‘Oh really.’ Canter was wearing his habitual, primitive, Norfolk-cut, Jaeger wool suit. I recognised it from the off as one of George Bernard Shaw’s purpose-built garments, and pegged the deatheaucrat accordingly as a Shavian pacifist and freethinker of the Edwardian period. To begin with I was amused to see the people who run death sustaining their crankiness way past the grave – but perhaps it’s only the English who do this?

I’ve always suspected that death American-style would’ve been both glitzier and more convivial. That Bobby Franks would’ve waited the twelve years for Loeb to turn up, so that the two of them could be pals, play pinochle and wait for Leopold to come from South America. That even a pair like that would eventually knuckle under to the defeat of the will.

It’s a fact that you need a good background in bureaucracy to run death. I tested for a job with them a couple of years after I died, but, free of arthritis or not, I was told that my typing was too slow, my filing too haphazard. (Although there was general enthusiasm for me among the staff of the office where I was interviewed, when they heard about my background in pen design.)

Beyond this I don’t believe there’s any especial qualification, d’jew? After all, most of the deathly offices are hung with suits from all the decades of the last two hundred years or so. I’ve seen sharp 1950s sharkskin single-breasters, and tough 1930s twill sacks; 1890s nankeen frock coats and 1870s sawtooth cutaways. But mostly, the hideous brown-and-chalk-stripe double-breasteds of the 1940s predominate, I guess because this was when the bureaucratic type came to the fore – and we all went for a Burton. Left in charge by their more belligerent brothers, the paper-pilers and pen-pushers remained in the rear, both armies of non-combatants speaking ACRONYM, and perfecting the office management systems that would come to dominate the post-war world. Alan Turing was the originator of the spreadsheet, in case you didn’t realise.

‘Oh really.’ Canter said it again and I savour it anew. There are some good things about death as well as many bad ones. The good things include the time to sit and stare. There’s no hurry. In between the ‘Oh’ and the ‘really’ I had plenty of time to examine chipped chipboard partitions and dense slabs of MDF. Time to see that in this office – above a dry-cleaner’s premises on Willesden High Road – the Dexion cradle within which Canter’s department carts around its
nyujo
occupies a dominant position. Canter and his staff have always loved telling me, ‘Oh, you know, it’s a very fine
nyujo,
a very perspicacious one – we do so like to keep it with us.’

D’jew know the
nyujo?
It’s the petrified corpse of a long-gone scrivener, who saw fit to meditate himself into a crystalline state. The one belonging to this department achieved this by ceaselessly revolving on his Parker Knoll beneath an interminable succession of plastic demijohns of Buxton mineral water, upended by his disciples and set, one after the other, atop his Dexion cubicle. From time to time small basins of Tipp-Ex were thrown over his bowed head, staples fired at him from acolytes’ guns, labels of all sorts affixed – Post-it notes ditto. Over the years this figurehead has swollen to alarming proportions – a dumpy Buddha, encrusted with stationery. Yet still he’s humped from one defunct travel agency to the next busted electrical wholesaler’s in his papier-mâché palanquin.

I expect you’ve discovered they’re immensely proud of their statue of Anubis too? Pathetic isn’t it, the way they drag it around whichever block it is that they’re currently tenanting, as if it were a recalcitrant old pampered doggie. Still, I suppose it is.

The living, I guess, would expect the coincidence of different eras of suiting, and the presence of Cratchit clerks playing Nintendo, to give these offices an anachronistic air . We know it’s not so. It’s always the dumb mistake of the living to imagine themselves contemporary. ‘Every period I’ve lived through has seemed like now to me,’ my second husband was fond of saying – fondness was his forte. He was no more fond of me or his daughters or his mother than he was of his dog, or his golf bag, or his penis. Fondness was inscribed on his heart when I cut it out still beating. Only kidding.

Yaws kept prodigiously exact records of the Now during his entire lifetime, detailing every little particle of its extinction. When, after his own, I came to read them, they proved to my entire satisfaction that the over-examined life is hardly worth living; and that while ostensibly he had died of a routine cardiac infarction, he had in fact, like so many of his ilk – permanently adolescent, upper-middle-class, minor-public-school-educated Englishmen – strolled back to the Elysian pavilion, his entry in the scorebook marked ‘Retired bored’.

‘Oh really?’ Had Canter said it yet again? He’d definitely caught me eyeing the fucking
nyujo,
because he continued, ‘You hadn’t perhaps considered becoming a
nyujo
yourself?’

‘I’m sorry?’ I replied – although I’d heard him only too clearly.

‘Liberation through hearing on the after-death plane you’re familiar with it of course?’

‘Of course.’ They always talk like this, don’t they, the brown suits, the deatheaucrats, effortlessly rendering the transcendent banal. ‘But I’d rather set my heart on living again.’

‘We’ve got all sorts of new animating principles available, you know – fresh harvests of anencephalic stillborn infants coming through all the time – ‘ He broke off to address a passing clerk: ‘Mr Davis? You wouldn’t be so kind as to bring over the Roladex with the anencephalic stillborn infants’ animating principles on it, would you?’

‘Truly, I have no desire to be
nyujo,
and I’d rather counted on being me on the next go-round, as it were.’

‘You appreciate that you’ll actually be more
you
if you accept a new animating principle, hmm? There’ll be a more . . . how can I put it? ...
porous
barrier between your assemblages of memories.’

‘I know this, yes – but I won’t be me. Me. Me.’

‘Quite so.’

Yes, I kid you not – this is the kind of dreck he tried to palm me off with. Still, at least I wasn’t among the living, stumbling about the joint imagining themselves painted up with the present, when it ain’t necessarily so. Their minds are full of dead ideas, images and distorted facts. Their visual field is cluttered up with decaying buildings, rusting cars, potholed roads and an imperfectly realised sky, which darkens towards the horizon of history. They take in all ages in the one frame every time they snap the city with their Brownie brainboxes. Their very noses are clogged with dying hairs, moribund skin, stratified snot – they’re smelling the past; and feeling it too between their toes, their thighs, the pits of their arms: ssshk-shk! Peeling back the years. Whereas we, the dead, are the true inheritors of the Modern. The live lot assemble time into lazy decadences – ten-year periods of conspicuous attitudinising, which are only ever grasped in nostalgic retrospect. My second husband was a profoundly ancient man, a Neolithic stone-knapper. But we . . . we see it all; anachro-spectacles are the only ones we wear. So these interminable branch offices that I’ve revolved through, while Lithy sat in my lap and Rude Boy ranted in the vestibule, trying to piss on back numbers of the
Reader’s Digest,
haven’t been so strange, or so different.

Anyway, I’m getting off the point, which Canter never has. ‘Thank you, Mr Davis,’ he said, taking receipt of the relevant buff folder. ‘You
see,
Ms Bloom – or rather your death guide . . . Mr . . . Jones, ye-es Jones, may have
told
you – we have our own calculus here, our own ways of proceeding?’

‘I’m only too well aware.’

‘This isn’t’ – then he really did take off his wire-rimmed spectacles, and run his hand through his sparse, sandy hair, giving me time to appreciate, once again, that instead of being determined by the magisterially pompous English gentile who I’d thought was going to decide it, my fate was in the waxy paws of a ratty little Jew – ‘any longer a matter of how you conducted yourself on your last “go-round”, as you put it.’

‘Mr Canter, sir’ – such honorifics came naturally when I was addressing someone who hadn’t taken a shit since 1953 – I’m only too well aware of the implications of karma.’

‘On the before-death plane perhaps – but after death? You died, in 1988, owing over two thousand pounds to the Inland Revenue. Monies which had, subsequently, to be disbursed by your estate –’

‘Is this strictly relevant?’

‘Oh yes, accounts are accounts – and we are – ‘

Accountants. Save for his peculiar colleagues, Mr Canter is well-nigh indistinguishable from Mr Weintraub, who, when I saw him for the last time – the cancer scooping out my left boob as if it were a fucking avocado – assured me he’d take care of the relevant returns . . . sitting in his aggressively Artexed office, off the North Circular by Brent Cross, playing with a Bic Cristal and annotating the accounts I myself had laboriously put together.

‘– concerned here with totting up
all
the relevant columns. We’ll be doing this for most of the next year, so don’t be alarmed if your neighbours – you live in Dulburb?’

‘Dulston,’ I grunted.

‘Dulston, quite so, a lovely area, very much village London. Anyway, if you should hear that certain enquiries are being made about you, rest assured that it’s only us. And now,’ he screwed his doughy butt into the swivel chair as if he were intent on sodomy, ‘there’s the matter of sex.’

‘Sex?’

‘Indeed, you will not, I hope, find yourself too discomfited by a resumption in sexual feelings, hmm? Merely psychic to begin with, but very real for all that.’ He paused for effect and a zombie brought in tea and Nice biscuits.

Mr Canter and I sat either side of them for the remainder of the interview. After I’d left, another zombie returned to take them away. Funny how we dead never eat – yet still, some of us love to serve food.

Well, that was one of the last encounters with Canter, as I say. And earlier this evening, in Piccadilly now, I was beset by a liquefying inundation of orgasms – of dicks stirring me up. When I was abandoned in the wastes of late middle age, my flesh folding, then frowning into sour slackness, I wanted my sex cut out – and so it was; in death, at least. Who cut the cookie with the cookie cutter? But ever since Miles and Natasha got down to it in the gauche apartment on Regent’s Park Road, I’ve been tormented by lust and jealousy. Who’d ever have thought they’d be welcome again in this old house, behind this envious green door? Ethereal fingers prinking my pussy. My first husband, jolly Dave Kaplan, he used to say that his beard was like ‘wearing a pussy on my face – I’ve only got to stroke my chin and I feel real comfy’. It’s Dave I thought of in Piccadilly. Or rather, it was the incongruous liver spot, adrift in his sparse hairline, that I pictured. It was always this scrap of yellow-brown I focused on as I willed myself towards another orgasm of crushing non-spontaneity.

Years after the marriage was over – the late sixties to be vaguely precise – when we’d occasionally meet in Manhattan for lunch – those good, wholesome divorcees’ lunches, the only ones people who’ve been sexually involved can have and still enjoy their food – he divulged that while I was looking at his liver spot and imagining myself ecstatic, he was concentrating hard on the mole on my chin, while willing himself to detumesce.
‘Touche pas!’
I laughed, and raised my glass of Zinfandel. ‘Yes,’ he continued, ‘I’ve spent possibly years of my life entirely absorbed in the pimples, blemishes and other imperfections of beautiful women.’ And as if called to stimulate himself by this revelation, he meditatively stroked his pussy.

Spontaneous or not, I did use to orgasm with Kaplan. I did clutch his arched neck, groan, say things – I did that crap. I loved sex – or rather, like so many women of my era, I loved the idea of sex. Sex garbed in romantic weeds, sex with strong self-assured men rather than puling boychicks. Set against imaginings like these the real thing was never that great, natch; the dildo would have to be dressed. I knew even then, from talking to the boychicks themselves (and was there ever a century like the twentieth for chewing things over; ‘Time as a Cud’ – discuss), that their chief sexual hang-up was the reverse of mine – a hang-down, if you like. For all these guys sex was
too
sexy. That’s why Dave confined himself to the mole.

We’d gone a couple more blocks and I couldn’t see Phar Lap Jones ahead of me, when ‘Oimissus!’ – there he was, sitting, back against the wall, beside one of the alleyways that leads into the Albany. With the brim of his white Stetson pulled down low, he wasn’t much more than black jeans, bullroarer and outsize punishment boomerangs. He looked just like any of the other alien sophomores who’ve enrolled for this year’s London Summer School of the Didgeridoo. ‘Oi!’ He’d managed to mooch a meat pie from somewhere along the way. Strange, this being Kebabistan, rather than Fish-and-Chiplington. He chews up these hassocks of mince and onion after he’s skin-popped them with brown sauce. It’s a newly-coined Strine tradition of his. Meat-pie dreaming – I guess. But he never swallows it, none of us does, do we.

Anyway, as I say, there he was in the alleyway and I felt this aching desire to get in there with him, to cram myself inside that gully of old bricks. I was half-convinced that for the first time in eleven years I’d get some abrasion, some rasp-between Phar Lap and the wall, that is. I may even have begun insinuating myself, because he said, ‘Juda! Lily, not in there, girl, that’s bad, you can’t go in there.’

‘Where? The Albany?’