How the Dead Live (31 page)

‘. . . You’ll feel so lonely you could die.’ The tinny ululation loops me in, and in a single swivel I turn from young and thin and keening with grief to fat and old and boiling with anger. The blue sky falls away, the dirty walls rise up, and there at the door stands Bernie ushering me back into death, the permanent Then.

He grunted once as I squeezed past him to gain the stairway. Already, below me, I could hear Rude Boy’s clattered descent, the rattling crash of the basement door to number 27.

‘Aren’t you ever going to clear this shit-hole up?’ I enquired of mine host.

He didn’t have an eyelid to bat. ‘Yeah – well. Yeah. Busy at the moment, yeah?’

Oh yeah, busy all right, busy handing out paper packets of indulgence, busy listening for the wailing wall. Busy doing nothing, this Junky, the eighth fucking dwarf. If only I could’ve found a way to scare him off – but he’d already seen every horror show on offer. That much was clear.

Christmas 2001

High-heeled sneakers
–
verily, that’s what they are. They’re exactly like the basketball boots kids wore in the fifties rubber-soled, black or white canvas uppers, thick white laces, cross-threaded all the way up to the ankle
–
but they’ve got high heels. Fancy that. Imagine such an asinine article of footwear being sung into being by a nigger minstrel. They didn’t get to lie down by the waters of Babylon, nor did they rock in the bosom of Abraham, the chariot never swung low enough for them to catch a ride home, but they did get to wear high-heeled sneakers. If God exists, clearly he is a fashion-conscious queen, so much attention has he lavished on the accessories of this world, so little on its substance.

Not that I’m wearing high-heeled sneakers. The Ice Princess and her consort may have been ludicrous, but they never wasted hard currency on such soft tat. Not for me. Nope
–
I got a pair of fake Nikes, off a stall on the Mile End Road.
Gutter shmutter for a guttersnipe. ‘Nah
–
they’re not snide, mate!’ exclaimed the shabby man groaning beside the board of shoes. ‘Why’re they only two fucking quid then?’ replied the Estate Agent, cradling the little trainers in his swollen hands. ‘Take it or leave it, mate,’ said the shabby man
–
and the Estate Agent took it, because by then taking it was all he could do. Gone were his looks, gone was the fire in his belly, and his chutzpah was useless
–
there was no one left to charm save the Ice Princess, and she’d long since been inoculated. ‘T’a-ra,’ said the shabby man. ‘T’a-ra,’ said the Estate Agent. Tan-ta-fucking-ra, a futile fanfare for the common man.

Which English class do I truly prefer now I’ve had the opportunity to be the dunce in both of them?
(1
exclude the aristocracy on principle
–
and because they’re all fucking Krauts anyway.
)
The middle, with their ludicrous sense of wounded responsibility for a phantom imperial limb? Have you ever noticed how it’s they who apologise if you knock against them in the street or on public transport? ‘Sorry!’ they involuntarily bleat. ‘Sorry!’ Sorry for taking your land and the fruits of your labour, sorry for taking your men and killing them in our wars, and an especial apology for making you play fucking cricket.
So
very sorry for that, old black/brown/ yellow chap (delete as required). At least they’ve ceased referring to themselves as ‘one’, that peculiarly arithmetical form of the royal ‘we’. What can you make of people who talk about themselves so persistently in the third person? Only that they were doomed to be sucked into the estuary and have their vowels flattened by the tide of commonality.

And what of the lovelorn commonality I’ve spent the last year or two with? ‘Orlright luu,’ they say, or occasionally, ‘Orlright luv?’ they query. ‘Ta-ra luu,’ they say on parting, and, ‘ ‘Allo luu,
,
on arrival. There’s so much luv in their world – so little caring. Luv is to love as diesel is to petrol– a heavier,
more viscous, less incendiary form of affection. Not that they’re averse to petrol
–
these superannuated Cockneys, these fag-end easterners. They’re pretty adept with the petrol-soaked rags. They’re partial to posting them through the letterboxes of the black/brown/yellow (delete as applicable) who’ve cropped up on their estates. (And isn’t that
so
fucking English
–
difficult to imagine an American blue-blood inviting you to his project in the Hamptons.) Oh yes, the middle class say ‘Sorry!’ and shoo them away, straight into the luving arms of these diamond geezers, these pearly queens.

I fell on him orlrighty. Fell on him as I lunged for the Christmas cake. The irony is that the Estate Agent could be well-spoken
–
when he chose to be. But somewhere along the hideous line he travelled, the wind changed and blew the glottals far back into his throat, where they stopped, for ever. I fell on him and he was cold and stiff and unyielding.
So
much better than when he was alive
–
for then he was hot and warped and endlessly pliable. I can tell you there was a curiously pink froth at his blue lips. I can tell you about his rictus and his rigor and the feel of his dead flesh beneath my windy feet, my chubby body
–
but I could never describe how fantastic that icing tasted. How scrumptious it was to devour gobs of suety cake, and how little I minded having to search for currants and raisins in his matted chest hair.

That was hours ago. Mid-afternoon I guess. Since then I’ve knocked about the apartment a little
–
but then nowadays I knock about everywhere. For the last two nights I slept downstairs on the divan with the cushions humped round me for warmth
–
but it was still cold. Tonight it’s going to freeze, and little people like me feel the cold, don’t we? And there’s no one here to do hot potatoes on my chubby hands, or blow warm breath on my absence of a neck. The stairs here have treads but no backs, and as you ascend, the room below retreats in stripes ofshoddiness, framed by worn carpet. Dead ahead, as I crawl up the second flight, there’s a walk-in closet.

I’ve considered making every effort to get inside, by dragging stuff over so I can climb on top of it and reach the handles. But the only thing high enough is a table that the television up here occupies
–
and that television, portable though it is, is not portable by me. Even ifI could contrive this platform, I know the closet doors open outwards. The jerk of the catch freeing would be enough to propel me backwards down the stairs. Even if I could get inside, there’s little hanging there to cover myself with. How could a woman who made so many trips to Marks
&
Spencer come away with so little in the way of clothing? Oh, I know, I know orlrighty.

My bed isa barred cage-on-legs. It’s squeezed in the corner at this end of the room, behind the television, between the two windows and the two cold radiators set below them. Even when the radiators were hot it was fucking draughty, and I usually ended up at the other end ofthe room, on their bed, in between the Ice Princess and the Estate Agent, balancing
–
in my own mind
–
the benefit of their two kilowatts apiece against the likelihood that one, or other, or both of them might roll over in their smack stupor and crush the tiny life out of me.

She’s there, lying twisted at the hips, but her shoulders are flat against the single squashed pillow. She’s there, wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt, one arm flung out across the pillow next to her, the other curled against her upper thigh, as if mortality has surprised her in the act of drumming her fingers with boredom, or irritation. She’s there, the duvet
–
which is my only hope
–
mounded over her central parts. She’s there, her dark hair lying in a fan around her face, and her dull eyes wide open in astonishment. Doubtless she’s surprised at what’s happened to her. But I know I wasn’t.

Chapter Thirteen

F
or the next eighteen months I existed on that back porch, screened in by the red fog of anger. Sure, I did my goround, 24 × 7, 7 × fucking 52, but I was a whiter shade of my former pale shadow. ‘We skipped a light fandango!’ sang Lithy, as it did just that. The little ones asked to wee-wee, the walls moaned, the Fats jiggled, and Rude Boy gave me a knowing eye. I went to Baskin’s, I came back again. I went to Seth’s, I returned. I watched TV, listened to my little radio and stayed angry.
Very
angry. For if ever I let the anger drop, let the geyser subside, Rude Boy would beckon to me, lead me outside, call up for the key and take me back up to that attic full of grief, guilt and loneliness. Heartbreak Hotel indeed.

I existed in anger – and rage awoke me. I’d always had a temper and usually temporised, so this was quite like life. The anger seeped into every part of my no longer subtle body, like Three-in-One lubricating a rusty engine. My fat, old belly gurgled with annoyance, my saggy limbs shook with irritation’ my tired old sex grew gummy with pique, my internal organs played arpeggios of indignation. Even the parts of me that, when I was alive, were dead – my hair, my teeth, my toenails –
ached
with dissatisfaction. Have you ever seen a dissatisfied toenail? I think not.

I was disgusted by the escape of Pablo Escobar – I’d have liked to eviscerate him myself. The Serbian death camps revolted me – if I could’ve got to that fat fuck Milošević, I would’ve strung him up by his own quiff. In Nazi old Germany thugs burnt the hostels of the laughably-named
Gastarbeiter;
it would’ve pleased me mightily to stand these shaven-headed monstrosities to a drink of their own Molotov cocktails. That dimwit Polack in the Vatican had the temerity to admit that Galileo was right – as if the sun shone out of his own fucking heliocentric ass. The dishonourable, spunkdrunk governor from Arkansas planted his fickle shaft in the Oval Office before I could get to him – I thought I’d drown in my own gall. Those peaceful Hindus razed the Ayodha mosque until it was like unto a dungheap – what high, old Babylonian fun; eight hundred dispatched to the subcontinental twin town of Dultson – I wished I were Kali herself, so I might garrotte the lot of them. The Somalis shot each other’s starveling bones to pieces with the West’s charitable Death Aid – didn’t anyone have the wherewithal to bang their woolly heads together? In Britain the bog-trotters went abombing again – I’d’ve delighted in stuffing their blarneyholes with Semtex. Bombs in Manhattan, bombs in Bombay, barking-mad cultists in Texas – they all had their moment in the megaton sun of my ire. And another clever, famous, Jewish wiseacre fought another million-dollar suit against the shiksa he’d discarded in favour of her adopted child.

Oy-oy-oy gevalt!

In June of ‘93 twelve Bosnian boys were killed when the Serbian fascists shelled a football pitch in Sarajevo. Now this was excessive –
one
would’ve been enough; then at least they’d still’ve had a full team. It occurred to me that all violent deaths were like this – the elimination of substitutes. Mass warfare is the biggest confirmation that there’s a mass at all. The twentieth century in a lethal nutcracker. Thousands march down Whitehall every day, yet no one thinks to throw a can of paint over the bombastic statue of Field Marshal Haig, a man who presided over the deaths of a third of a million men, during six, short months in the mud fields of Flanders. Europe’s own Hiroshima.

When I came to Britain in the late fifties people still mused wonderingly over the way the First War had touched everyone. How there wasn’t a town, a village, a hamlet, a school, a business or a club that hadn’t lost its complement of men. On Remembrance Day, special reverence would be accorded to the sad old things who came tottering along Whitehall, beribboned with bravery, willing yet again to place themselves in the shadow of Haig’s stone horse. Parliamentarians to this day rise up on their hind legs and bleat and baa about the way these khaki ants sacrificed their lives for the preservation of free speech, of liberty. Freedom to do what exactly? Freedom
in
what precisely? Freedom to be part of the nest? Freedom to die of cancer? We’ve been given the great and glorious choice to do multiple-choice questionnaires. Mr Khan’s quality-of-life questionnaire for terminal patients.

Cancer and warfare. There are memorials in every town and village and hamlet to those who’ve shrivelled in the battle against the sarcoma; and of course, both forms of annihilation hammer home the same point – that those who survive do so arbitrarily. ‘It could’ve been me!’ scream the ones left behind-and only demented moralists dare to contemplate that it
should’ve
been them.

The anger subsided, leaving me deader than ever. Even if I could’ve been resurrected now, what place would there’ve been for me in the world? In the five short years since my demise, new models of car had come on the market, different makes of mobile phone; the people cut their hair in innovative styles. Beside these nineties folk – who were themselves unsurpassedly decadent – I would’ve appeared a walking continuity error. Lily Van-fucking-Winkle. I couldn’t get myself connected. I lay in bed and I smoked. I smoked B&H. I smoked lots of them. I had twenty-four hours every day in which to smoke – and no lungs to damage. I was merely a subtle set of bellows, a temporary confinement for the genie that eddied about me in the cold, front room of the basement. Where the tissue culture on the wall muttered to itself, and the eyeless golems of my own indulgence squatted, and the calcified cadaver of my own lust did its shimmy, and the angry child I’d slaughtered raved. And, lest we forget, outside the back window my dead grandchildren shuffled from one vestigial foot to the other. They always say it’s
so
much more satisfying being a grandparent – but compared to what, exactly?

I managed a cigarette every four minutes, fifteen an hour, three hundred and sixty each day. In two months of that summer I spent all of the money I’d saved working for Baskin. The front room became a worthless Fort Knox with its stacks of empty, gold, cardboard boxes. ‘She’s gone to seed, gone to seed,’ muttered the Fats, ‘she’s awfully seedy – she’s let herself go, let herself go.’ I ignored them. I listened to my little radio. ‘When a lovely thing dies, smoke gets – ‘ Lithy crooned and I tried to lash out. As required, I’d send Lithy or the Fats – they did everything together, entwined by flab – down to Seth’s to get another carton, but I had no intention of sallying forth. To Baskin I explained that I had chronic bronchitis, a reasonable explanation for my absence, given my advanced years and my heavy, dutiful smoking.

In bed and without the need to plump my pillows – what could be finer? In bed, blowing blue ploots of smoke into the rank atmosphere (no lungs, so no moisture, no colour change). I considered smoking experiments. Might I be able to build a Rube Goldberg contraption with which to feed myself ciggies? Acomplicated and implausible arrangement of wheels, cogs, pulleys and conveyor belts, rigged up to the engine of a dismembered Hoover, all with the aim of supplying me with ready-lit, correctly aligned pills. I’d resemble an early animated short –
Steamboat Lily
– and add at least twenty minutes to my daily smoking time. I meditated on having my own teeth again, on how they did wonders for inhalation and exhalation. Smoking with falsies had always been absolutely that. The loss of the cigs and the loss of my teeth. Always together.

In late July they released Demjanjuk – the car worker who claimed he’d never been involved with the assembly line of death at Treblinka. I felt myoId anger stir, but wouldn’t let it get the better of me. My counterpane world was absolutely that; I lay, a shloomp in a humped muddle of duvet, gazing up at the letterbox view of the outside afforded me. The tops of the bedroom windows framed three portions of the sidewalk. This grey view of slabs was striped by the railings, so that as legs went by, they flickered like zoetropes, or stop-action photographs. Cars seldom parked up outside the house. The dead – for reasons never altogether understood by me – didn’t bother too much with driving. Dulston was like the past in this regard; if you could get it together to drive, there was always somewhere to park. Like Crooked Usage in the sixties.

As I lay smoking, on the morning when the
Today
programme announced Ivan the Terrible’s acquittal, two neat wheels squeaked, crunched and grounded against the kerb. I could see a foot or so of the immaculately dusted, half-timbered bodywork; then one trim, court-shod, tan-hosed foot; then its accomplice. They clicked past the railings, then out of sight. I heard them clicking down the steps. There was a pause, followed by – a sharp rap on the knocker. Most peculiar – the dead never knocked, the door was always open. There was no point in locking it; I’d long since learned that if the shades wanted to get in they’d simply manifest themselves in the dank corridor.

‘Answer that, will you?’ I snapped at the Fats, and the three of them blindly bumped out of the room, squashing together in the doorway.

‘I’ve come to see Mrs Yaws.’ The clipped syllables evaded big teeth. ‘Is she at home?’

‘She’s let herself go,’ gabbled the Fats, ‘she’s fat and old. Fat and old.’

‘Could you tell her Dr Bridge is here?’ The classy dullard was unfazed by watching my personified weight. ‘No – don’t worry, I’ll tell her myself. In here, is it?’ And in she came,
Virginia
Bridge no less, the whole dry, tweedy, twinsetted, headscarved, equine length of the woman. Her pale blue eyes blinked and watered in the pale blue clouds of smoke from my umpteenth B&H of the morning.
‘Really,
Lily,’ said Virginia, crossing to the bedside, setting down her Gladstone, removing her tan suede gloves,
‘really.’

And I was back there with her – really. Back at Crooked Usage. Back in that anachronistic period of the early sixties when there was nightly television news
and
coal was still delivered. Coal in dusty blue-black sacking; coal, as dense as the smog it generated. The sixties, a decade of thick, yellow smog and swinging sputum. On the crappy copy of a Hepplewhite bedside table sit several flat packs of du Maurier filters. Beside these is a Daphne du Maurier novel, its paper cover bent to buggery. There’s a cut-glass ashtray full of butts – one of which is still smouldering – and I’m lighting up another with my smogodynamically-shaped Ronson.

The bedside table has three drawers. There’s one for medicaments: sodium amytal capsules; a pot of attractive yellowand-green Librium; the proprietaries – Venos useless cough syrup, dumb Disprin, asinine Anadin; and tampons – because, of course, I’ve got my period. Blood at one end – sputum at the other. It’s enough to make you retch. Drawer number two has a bottle of Haig laid end-on in it, couched with Kleenex. Virginia has adjured me time and again not to drink liquor on top of the barbs, but what care I?

Drawer number three is full of snack food, purloined over the past few days from the cold kitchen. There’s half a pack of fucking Huntley and Palmer’s Toytime biscuits. They’re square, slick things, with icing pictures of trains and teddies on them. When I crunch them with my rotting fangs, they turn my mouth painful and gritty. I do this frequently. I also munch on Crawford’s Ginger Ruffles and squidge on Nestlé fruit drops, nor am I averse to the occasional excruciating worrying that’s required to dispatch a tablet of Callard & Bowser’s butterscotch. Yup – I sneak down to the cold kitchen and I steal the kiddies’ cookies and sweeties. Then I come back up here and get snacked out.

Virginia’s got me upright, the buttons of my nightie undone, and is sounding me with her smooth, Atrixo-creamed hands, while speaking to me with her dry English accent. ‘Lily, really, I mean to say, you can’t expect me to go on treating you for chronic bronchitis if you aren’t prepared to give up smoking. I mean, it’s not as if you don’t know the facts . . .’

The facts are that every month or so Yaws goes away to play golf, with his peer group of permanently prepubescent, ex-minor-public-schoolboy pals. In provincial towns she liaises with him in prim guesthouses. They’re so respectable that their adultery is never suspected. At night, on brushedcotton sheets, they chafe together. He ejaculates dust into her sandy vagina. I tolerate this in the mad way you do when you’re not sure you require the pipe that is his forever being knocked out on your mantel, the dottle gagging in your throttle. Not true. I was riven with jealousy, hacked out with the adze of it – a dugout canoe of yearning.
I
wanted to be the one who stood, with an ice lolly in each hand, not sure which one to lick. Not Yaws. Not Virginia, who, pausing from her soundless, insensate sounding, peers around the room at the blubbery golems, the lithopedion, Rude Boy, the sarcoma wall-covering . . . has she come to the basement flat in order to speculate as well as employ her speculum?

About what Yaws and I didn’t do together? Or Kaplan? Or Bob Beltane? Or King Stuff? Is she imagining all this as a possible version of her own afterlife? I can believe that. She had a crippled husband. Paralysed from the waist down. Lucky for Virginia it wasn’t from the waist up. Anyway, I lie here and black-and–white documentary clips of that era showing baboons with masks lashed on to their muzzles, forcing them to smoke – spool behind my eyes. Give it up. I couldn’t – I’d rather die again. Cigarettes are the best friends I’ve ever had. More reliable than liquor, comforting – but not fattening. I’d sooner die a thousand deaths. Roll me over in the clover. Roll me over and let me expire again.

The fucking cow – fucking with my bull. The whole fucking herd of them, being serviced by a husband with a dripping, yard-long pizzle. Jealousy courses through me – a green circulatory system. All the wives I ever betrayed, all the wives who ever betrayed me. I see them congregating in a field and cunting up to form a gay rondo of congress that excludes me utterly. I stand in a fucking cowpat, a sad little thing, while they whoop and low and grind and groan. Little boxes, little boxes . . . and they all look just the same / And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky . . . and they all look –