How the Dead Live (36 page)

Trees with tall straight trunks were spaced with sinister regularity, between small pools of absolute circularity, beneath a canopy of utter impenetrability. Natasha could see the first few curved lips, calling her in, but beyond it only the deepest darkness. Unafraid, she quickly descended and strode between the first few trees, marvelling at their natural artificiality. The water in the pools was oily black, but when she dabbled her naked toes in it she found it to be cool, not viscous at all. So cool, it could only be a relief to bathe in it, to plunge her hot, drunk head into it. To let this strange silent place, sober her up. Perhaps for ever?

The edge of the pool felt – to Natasha’s bushed, deserted hands – marvellously machined. As if a curved mattock blade had sliced it. On the inky meniscus of the water the end of her dangling mane lay like the legs of an insect. Her black outline faced the darkness below, which but poorly reflected the darkness above. She leant down and down and, eyes wide open, plunged in through the ceiling of the room, noticing first the chain that fell away below her for three feet. An oily, black chain, liberally dusted and entwined with a flex like a caduceus, which led to a bell-shaped shade – saving that from this, precipitate perspective, the shade was round. Then Natasha peered past the shade and saw first a windowsill, and far below that a swatch of Manhattan street life, pedestrians milling like hatted bugs, cars soundlessly trundling, and the canopy of a building across the way. Only then did she take in what was in the room itself.

Directly below and slightly to the right of Natasha’s vantage was the wide grey oblong of . . . a desk? Yes, a desk, with a grey steel surface. A desk, because at its edge was an onyx penholder, the old-fashioned kind with conical sockethousings set in ball joints. A desk, because of a fan of papers, some about to fall off. A desk, because of a black, buttoned box – an intercom? – to one side. A desk, because there was a man on it. A big man, naked save for an unbuttoned silk shirt. A naked man whose naked foot was pressed against the black box. A naked man, whose ass rested on the desk blotter.

Looking straight down, Natasha contemplated the flatly surreal juxtaposition of the flange of the man’s ass and the cut-off leather corner of the blotter. His penis lay, purple and glistening, in a rick of ginger pubic hair. Spots and smears of semen dotted and dashed his broad belly. His face was averted to hold a conversation with someone obscured by the shade. Someone who said, ‘And you wanna know why?’ in her Mumu’s tones, but half an octave higher, then moved out from below the lampshade. Blonde hair swept up and then rolled over bare shoulders in a wave which had recently witnessed a storm. Those shoulders were flushed pink. She bent, puckering deliciously at the hip, to pick up from the wooden floor a tangle of tan stockings and black suspenders, and Natasha could see, protruding from the deep ravine of her buttocks, the glistening spike of the woman’s pubic hair.

‘Why?’ said the man on the desk.

‘Because neither you,’ the young woman down below came fully into view, turning, hopping up, so that her rump was supported by the edge of the desk where the man lay, ‘nor your fucking pen,’ she arched to reveal her opulent breasts, her round belly, lifted one, long leg up, and bending it loosely across the other thigh, began to thread the foot into a roll of stocking, ‘has big enough balls.’ In the middle of the woman’s handsome face was a prominent keel of nose, to either side two steady, grey-blue eyes. In a big painted mouth a thin white cigarette burned, the smoke looping up lazily towards Natasha. Natasha couldn’t help but admire the insouciance of this young woman, who, so clearly, had recently been fucked over. Natasha, who was perplexed by her sense of kinship to this vision. Natasha, who recoiled as a coil of smoke from the past curled into her open eyes.

And in a whirl of limbs on the forest’s floor, Natasha had time to think of explanations – fatigue? the strangeness of the place? weak beer and strong weed? or had Gary perhaps spiked her with an antipodean psychotropic of rare exactitude? – before her hands grasped the lip of another pool and the momentum flung her face-down into another world.

Natasha’s lovely face projected from the unlovely grey surface of a dormant video screen. Below her on the stridently artificial desert floor, her Mumu – recognisable, instantly, by her thick wool tapestry-effect overcoat, her not inconsiderable bulk, her canvas Barnes & Noble book bag, her shoes like collapsed Cornish pasties, her prominent keel of nose – sat awkwardly askew, her legs curled to one side, one arm acting as stanchion, the other bringing a filter cigarette to her generously sour mouth. Mumu was in conversation with a white Stetson, the brim of which tipped up and down with wizardly emphasis, while from below came the clicking drone of blackfeller blarney. What could Mumu be doing here? Natasha might’ve asked herself. Why was she in conversation with the man who had got off the bus, the man Gary had called Phar Lap Jones?

Natasha might’ve asked these things – but she didn’t. Visionaries, notoriously, are quite free from ratiocination and devoid of insight. Visionaries’ prideful minds are, so often, like parted lips, ready to be filled by King Stuff. Natasha could’ve homed in on the Walbiri punishment boomerangs that lay on the false desert floor, and queried what exactly it was that they were affirming, these dark, sinister ticks. She didn’t. She lost concentration and her eyes wavered to the far side of a hundred feet of cracked white mud, to where a panel of desert horizon had been rolled back, revealing a swatch of the Thames’s north bank and a slice of Unilever House.

And all the rest of the night, Natasha Yaws pitched and yawed on the forest’s floor, rolling in visionary ecstasy from pool to pool, lying in awe and shaking her face from world to world. In one she saw the blond head of the elder brother she’d never known smashed all over the asphalt, while within her breast swelled dark truffles of inherited racial prejudice. In a second she jealously witnessed Virginia Bridge, dimly remembered from her own childhood, sound her Yahoo Mumu with her smooth, Atrixo-creamed hands, while speaking through Houyhnhnm teeth, saying, ‘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 . . .’ In a third, Natasha saw the arms all out at angles like the limbs of trees. Winstons and Pall Malls and Camels and Luckys and Newports, all fuming away wherever these particular people congregate. And heard the lustful burr of her Mumu’s voice: ‘Is it going to take that long?’

‘What?’

‘For us to love? D’jew think I should set the house on fire now? We could let the calendar look after itself, huh?’

She peered between her Mumu’s feet at the impacted leaves in Berkeley Square and felt the weight of inconceivable, middle-aged fatigue. She peered down the grooves of plebeian pine, as her poor old Mumu clawed the comestibles out and, cradling them like nutritious babies in her woolly arms, clumsily negotiated the five-barred gate. Natasha saw the trickle of blood lazily snake from beneath Mumu’s slacks, down her shin, into her sock. Like something they might both pick over later. From realm to realm, from sloth, to lust, to pride, to anger, to greed – and back again. In this, a humble outer stand of Phar Lap’s wood, a small plantation of the worlds available.

Dawn peeled back overhead and the gulf of the western sky drew a hard surface over the pools of the wood between the worlds. Natasha’s face emerged like a Polaroid from the limpid water, at first blurred – then overly exact. Hyper-real. Within minutes the burners on rocket earth had been cranked up to full thrust. She rose to her coltish height and her scratched, bloodied calves bent this way and that as she took up the strain of planetary revolution. She stared about her at the shrubbery. It was like all the rest, a stand of eucalyptus and mulga on a rough underlay of grass. In the gums overhead, kookaburras laughed snidely. To the east was a low escarpment, the shadow already retreating in its lee. Around her in the ticking undergrowth the mounds of magnetic termites, like miniature Mies van der Rohes, or the tomb-stones of alien warlords, provided savage orientation.

Natasha found her way back. She was fortunate to have come to her senses when she did, when the sun was low enough, the shadows long enough, the water still plentiful enough. She made it to Gary’s mudicar and woke him. The two of them drove back, east towards Stearns, all the baking day. It goes without saying that Gary was in it. Deep shit.

Natasha stopped long enough in Stearns to collect her little tote bag of pants and paints, her leather jacket and her R. M. Williams boots, her jeans and a trivia quiz book. She also took one of Gary’s black boomerangs – as a sinister souvenir. Up on the track she flagged down a passing Mormon-carrier, and they drove her to Tennant Creek. From Tennant she took the bus to Alice. From Alice she flew to Sydney. At Sydney she didn’t even quit the airport, but hung on in the terminal for thirty-six hours until a flight with a seat cheap and narrow enough became available. She boarded, and flew back around the world to the day before. From Heathrow she took the tube in to King’s Cross, feeling utterly spaced out by the confinement of this ancient muddy city on the banks of its mini-Euphrates. This uh-Ur. This mistake.

In Stearns, Gary pined away. The kid split. Gary ignored the fat young black men who came to play electric guitars, and after a while they ignored him. He pined – and he drank. He staggered across the track to the stores and bought carton after carton of Emu Export and NT Draught and Victoria Bitter and even Castlemaine – which the locals referred to, contemptuously, as ‘barbed wire’. Gary drank and the beer felt barbed in his rough throat. He switched to Bundaberg rum – but fared no better. He neglected everything. In front of the crappy little guvvie house, the once proud mudicar settled into the mud, which became dust, then became mud again. On the long-since rotted carpets lay greasy burger-wrappers and a mulch of mango pips, stalks and skin. In time a large mob of cockroaches moved in. Unlike Gary’s mind, the mudicar had become a full, rich environment. The people understood.

The local quack understood as well. Gary would have to go south for treatment. He left the mudicar for the skinny old men, but the fat young ones took it, and ripped the shit out of the shocks in two days of ‘roo-hunting. Gary went south and the treatment didn’t work. The medics were at a loss to understand why a man as young as this had developed cirrhosis with such scary alacrity, his liver flayed with scars, engorged with sarcomas.

From King’s Cross, Natasha took a cab up the Balls Pond Road, and at an indistinct point – not quite at Dalston Junction, nor exactly past it – she had the driver drop her off. From here on she’d only ever walked. There was a confusing character to this district, a delusive mounding and bunching of the streets, parklets and estates, that made it hard to direct a driver. Especially one who navigated the city using an internal map of Maputo, or Conakry.

In Adelaide, Gary’s liver swelled and swelled – and then ruptured. Bythe time this news made it back to Stearns – and how soon is Now? – it was understood by all and sundry that his liver had ‘just kinduv exploded – fuckin’ blew up’.

It was summer in London, an intensely sticky summer, when the childish gods the citizenry worshipped seemed to have drenched the very fabric of the city in Coca-Cola, dripped it with melting ice lollies, gummed it up with old Wrigley’s. With each long denim stride Natasha took, the city clamped its greedy, sweaty paw tighter round the seasoned stick of her, licking at her cool beauty with its tasteless, polluted tongue. She recognised the petrol station on the corner, turned down Corinth Way and continued until she recalled the phone box at the mouth of Sparta Terrace, She walked along the terrace, past the narrow house-fronts, where from the open sashes gauzy waves lapped at the paintwork. She crossed Syracuse Park, noting that while the one o’ clock club had its share of plastic earthmovers and wooden trucks, the workmen and drivers were absent. She turned the corner of Athens Road and, hurrying now, failed to notice the one individual she’d encountered since turning off the Balls Pond Road. On a wall, outside the corner shop, sat a small, immaculately dressed Asian boy, playing with a toy metal car, a toy plastic cow and a toy plastic harmonica.

Natasha turned into Argos Road and strode along to number 27. She called up, ‘Bernie, chuck down the key.’ And after a junky’s eternity – and how soon is Now? – it came sailing down, tied to some green sisal, like a tiny metal kite in the lifeless air. Was it Natty’s imagination – which admittedly had been rather too fertile of late – or could she hear whispering from the basement flat?

Christmas 2001

I used to hate napping in the afternoon; I’d always awake feeling infinitely sad, or crankily wound up, or even just fucking miserable. It felt like the day had been broken in two
–
into two, short, unbearable days, instead of a single,

long, barely tolerable one. ‘Ooh,’ they’d say, ‘she’s all cross because she’s fallen asleep. Because she’s napped.’ Yeah, caught napping by the world, and whoever I thought I was turned inside out like a sock.
So
I’d wail and I’d thrash, and I’d arch my back like a seal
–
like a fucking seal
–
diving beneath the polar ice, until they’d say, ‘All right, Miss Tantrum, we’re gonna leave you until you recover yourself!’ But I never did recover myself. I never fucking did.

The Ice Princess climbed under this cold giant nappy wearing her last trendy threads, her velveteen combat trousers. They have six empty pockets and are camouflage-patterned with malformed kidneys of black, yellow and khaki. I wish I could send every shmegegge I’ve seen in the last couple of years sashaying around wearing combat trousers straight into combat. I wonder how they’d react when tank-loads of huzzaing towel-heads appeared in the narrowed lenses of their fashion eyewear, and they had to put their militaristic gear to the test? The nineties ended with these pinheads observing a wide plain of destruction through such cramped apertures. Who the fuck did they think they were kidding? I’ve seen glasses come and go. In the seventies the
dernier cri
in frames were shaped like the rims of TVsets, or lavatory seats, and they goggled through these bulbous panes at the bulbous decade. Now everything’s narrowed right down. Yup, I wish I could send them into combat. And I wish I could send all the kids I see sporting full-length puffa coats the kind that look like sleeping bags with arms attached somewhere truly icy, to sleep off their identities. And I wish I could dispatch to a township all the creeps who flop along Greek Street in designer shoes modelled on third-world fucking sabots cut from car tyre. There they could drink puddles and get righteously screwed up the ass. Then they’d be copacetic. Truly, is there anything the world hath to show more asinine than a footwear fetish? Shake-spear kick in the rear. The Ice Princess used to dress me up like a little accessory when she was in funds, natch. All that time I spent longing to be the kind of female who cared more about these things, who took the time to groom and dress and preen and prink. I got it – brother I got it. Then she’d say, to whichever shnook happened to be in train at the time, whichever ugly was burnishing her by association, ‘Oob, she hates getting dressed. Hates it. Come on, Delilah. Come on!’ But I had
–
I have
–
a whim of iron.