How the Dead Live (39 page)

Allthis time they had to visit Churchill’s clinic for blood tests and scans. The treatment cycles played hell with their business cycle. Near the end of each one, Richard had to provide another semen sample, which was assessed, then washed yup, that’s what they called it – in preparation for fertilisation. Finally came the harvesting of Charlotte. The furrowed field of her laid out for Churchill’s combined probes and needles. One last big hit of human chorionic gonadotrophin before bed. Goodnight Ovalteenies. At the crack of dawn, the eggs were sucked from the mature follicles in her uterus, and bunged into a nice fattening nutriment with Richard’s squeaky-clean sperm. Then the whole primordial stock was chucked in an incubator to see if it would make soup.

Sometimes the embryologist found a normally developing embryo when she peered through her microscope twenty-four hours later – sometimes she found two. On other occasions there would be four – or none. There were decisions to be made – which to plant, which to discard, which to bung in the deep freeze to make Charlottes and Richards in the far distant future. The good Lord regarded this egg-selection business as his forte. Like a housewifely deity he would scrutinise the ontogeny through his microscope, then squeeze each egg with an eye-beam, deciding which of them were ripe, which ones made the cut.

Back in Cumberland Terrace, in the titanic flat, I watched Richard shoot up his wife with more human chorionic gonadotrophin, the two of them bent in grunting, painful, bloody consummation. Then the transfer. Back down to South Ken, up on the couch, in with yet another needle. There was an uncharitable première when she got to scrutinise Churchill’s choice on a monitor – weren’t they cute. Then, sedated, Charlotte was finally impregnated. What a fucking lottery! Only twenty per cent of the fertilised eggs had a chance of making it once they finally got back up Charlotte’s cervix. One in five! Bad odds at the humility racetrack. Still, I’ve gotta hand it to her – to them – for persistence. For, as cycle succeeded cycle, and the seasons ran into one another like the watery colours on a child’s painting, they kept right on.

More than this, I was actually proud of Charlotte and Richard. They were fighters, they were sticking at it, they wouldn’t give in. They were so charmless together; unlike Natasha they had no internal voices to wheedle them, saying, ‘C’mon – give up. You know you’ll never have a child. Give it up. Adopt while there’s still the remotest possibility. Don’t chuck away all your Waste of Paper . . .’

Yes, I felt proud of them, but then I daresay this pride had a good deal to do with the fact that during those years I was proud of
almost everything.
Proud of Russian plutonium-smugglers – hot dogs that they were. Proud of their president sleeping through Ireland. Proud of the Jackal– finally brought to bay. Proud of the ridiculous Englishwoman who shlepped around the world in eleven years. They say that when she reached John O’Groats she was X-rayed and found to have the pelvis of a seventy-year-old woman. Tell me about it, sister – perhaps it was mine? Proud of the cultists suiciding in Switzerland. Proud of Dean Rusk – un-be–fucking-lievably. Proud of Rose Kennedy – welcome on board. Proud of those Russkis again – inefficiently demolishing Grozny with artillery rounds and small-arms fire. Proud of Fred Perry – thanks for the titty-patches, feller. Proud of the Taliban – crazy headgear guys. Proud of the Turks – once you’ve denied the reality of one holocaust it’s
so much easier
to precipitate another. Proud of Michael Jackson, that whited-up shvartzer sticking it to the Yids. Proud of Timothy McVeigh – what a guy! Fascism American-style. Proud of the French – hey, they need all the pride they can get, to add to their European Economic Community pride mountain. Way to go, guys starting up with those nuclear tests again, just what the world needs in 1995. And while you’re at it – why the fuck didjew pardon Dreyfus? Surely some
humility gaffe
there. Proud of the British yomping into Sarajevo – you’re only a couple of years late, fellers, with your army commanded by Yaws. Proud of OJ – well, someone has to get away with it. Proud of Farakhan and his million men – give or take 600,000. Proud of Yigal Amir, who acted alone on God’s orders and had no regrets. Yet. Proud of the dumb Princess Sloane, left home all alone, while her hubby the tiny horseman went a-rogering. Tally hoI Proud of the University of Texas researchers, who isolated the gene that causes breast cancer. Thanks guys. Proud of the Tamil Tigers – you’re grrrreat! Proud of the First Lady with her legal bill
primus inter pares.
Proud of the Paddys bombing Docklands – a mere two dead and so much uggerly real estate demolished. Cool. Proud of the optical fibre that can transmit a trillion bits of information – twelve million phone calls at once, well just fancy that. Now we can all know what she said that he said that she said – to the power of fucking four hundred. Proud of the cloned sheep and George Burns – although it was hard to tell the difference. But mostly proud of the Unabomber arrested way out in Montana. Him I could’ve curled up with and done a little sly whittling. Doncha think?

Oh yes, with so much pride sloshing inside, I could afford to splash out a little. Hell, I even had some pride left over for Natty and Russ, that golden couple. Pride for them as they ducked and dived in the ponds of plutocracy, dipping their bills here, there and fucking everywhere. One month they’d be in an apartment in Mayfair – the next a penthouse in Paddington. They put on and removed their habitations the way other people did clothes. With their lunatic swaggering driving down Aldgate in a Golf cabriolet, the City putting on a ticker-tape parade of unpaid bills – they parodied the comfortable wealth of the Elverses. While, with their latexwrapped, spermicidal, easeful couplings, they mocked the Elverses’ urge to conceive.

No, not strictly accurate, that, for, as I trailed across town– sometimes on foot, often in buses, occasionally by tube reeling in the lifelines of my girls, I became aware that Russell’s occasional reefers were weaving themselves into a full sisal jacket. That his odd half of lager was becoming an odd bottle of Famous Grouse, or Stolychnaya. Then he did odd things. They fought, the two of them, the two ruddy ducks. They pecked at each other and complained, circling the pond in the gathering twilight of narcosis, not noticing that all the other birds had flown, that the hoary mantle was encroaching from the shoreline. That winter, with its chilly austerity, was coming.

Yes, it was really the Elverses who parodied Russ and Natty, what with their sniffing and shooting up drugs and their washing of the milky-white lode. It wasn’t to be long before such playground mockery – and why, oh why, do one’s children
never
grow up? – got to Russ and Natty, and they recommenced sniffing and shooting and washing up the milky-white lode.

I could see the future – and it wasn’t gonna work. The way they watched so many soap operas lying on their sofa. Listening to the synthesised arrhythmia of the signature tune, as if it would introduce a little more drama into their operatic lives. The way her voice impaled the octaves on its sharp spike. And the distorted leviathan’s moan of his lust – calling out to her from the deep. When he took her by force – which he did increasingly during the spring of ‘96 – it was distressing to realise that it was
he
who imagined himself the vulnerable one. The little girl.

After one purloined session, watching them tussle in a rented house in Notting Hill, I walked back into town along the side of Hyde Park. When alive I had, natch, belonephobia – a morbid anxiety of being pierced by needles, or any sharp thing. To walk like this, past a mile or more of iron railings, would’ve been impossible.
Inconceivable.
Even if I could’ve, I’d’ve listed, an old ship overloaded with fat anxieties. Death, I supposed, had given me at least this queer stability.

The kids chased in and out of the beech avenues. Lithy and Rude Boy, death’s kittens – ever sportive. We gained Park Lane and struggled across the three lanes heading north. We climbed the barriers on either side of the verge, then dodged the three lanes of traffic heading south. We tagged across Grosvenor Square and, as a small squall blew in, I looked back over my shoulder to see the tessellated greenery of Hyde Park, tossed with wind and drizzle, a verdant coping for the grey haunch of the American Embassy.

Even the noise of a city raving drunk on its own commerce fades if you tuck your head down and ignore it. While twomillimetre– thick hulls cut through the spray, I made my way to Berkeley Square and hunkered down on a bench. Here, then, there were never elms, simply great old plane trees, in a plain new place. I sat and lost myself in the damp leaves pressed into the pavement, a kiddy collage of anti-nature. Come in cigarette number 134,
your time is up.
I’d never felt, it occurred to me, more depleted by death. Or, to be correct, more indolent. The very effort needed to register my own fatigue was . . . too much. Seeing made me yawn.

Yawning summoned up Phar Lap, who came, picking his way between the sheltering tourists, from the Piccadilly side of the square. Phar Lap, looking unusually dapper in a brandnew Dryzabone, the waxed-cloth cape of the big coat giving him the gravitas of a black knight, or a city conquistador.

‘Feelin’ tired, are you, Lily-girl, yeh-hey?’

‘Mmph – yup.’

‘Feelin’ all wrung out, yuwai?’ He joined me on the bench, took the bullroarer and his boomerangs out from the coat folds, set them on the ground. We must’ve been visible because a passer-by looked at us with mild interest. The old woman, the Australian black – another pair of misfits in the ill-fitting city.

‘My feet would be killing me if I weren’t dead.’

‘Ha! Issatso. Listen – you bin seein’ Mr Canter, hey-yeh?’

‘Oh, I went to see him a while back about a grant now I’ve stopped working.’

‘And yer still hangin’ roun’ yer girls, yeh-hey?’

‘If you can call it that – being unseen and not heard.’

‘I can see I’m gonna have to remind you all the fuckin’ time, girl. All the fuckin’ time. Don’t hang ‘round the buju, Lily-girl, specially not yer daughters’.’ He got the makings of his shrivelled cigarettes out and put one together. The rain didn’t bother him. ‘Wulu?’ he clicked, and I gave him a light. ‘Listen, go see Canter again. They’re down off the Walworth Road this month, old office block called Providence House. Go talk to him – he wants to see you, yeh-hey?’

‘What about?’

‘Taxes – you owe taxes, hey-yeh?’

‘Taxes? Whaddya mean? I’m not on any Revenue computer

– I’m dead.’

‘Yaka! Not now – before, taxes from before. You gotta settle up if you want to go back.’

‘You’re kidding, surely.’

‘Listen, Lily-girl,’ he stood to leave, ‘there are some certainties, yeh-hey?’ And was gone.

I went back to see Canter again. Admired their precious fucking
nyujo,
patted their bloody Anubis. I joshed the clerks playing with their clackers, or bouncing through the old offices on their orange Spacehoppers, rubber horns clenched between their decadently suited thighs. I listened to Canter, I watched him tot it up on an old Burroughs adding machine, crank the handle, pronounce the sum proffered to him on the paper tongue. ‘Two thousand, three hundred and thirty-four pounds and twenty-three pence exactly. That’s what’s owing, Ms Bloom. You will have to settle via us before there can be any possibility of your regaining the before-death plane. You do appreciate this, I trust.’

‘No, I don’t fucking appreciate it – and I don’t trust you.’

‘One thing you may certainly trust is my advice in respect of the time you’ve been spending at the Churchill Clinic. You really should desist, Ms Bloom, now your, ahem, feelings are resuming – there are no simple mechanisms involved in this pro –’

‘In reincarnation – that’s what you’re talking about, isn’t it? Admit it.’

‘Reincarnation is far too crude a concept for looking at these things. Why – the paperwork alone would preclude such an idea. There are numerous interview committees, each necessitating the most stringently-compiled presentations, and none of this cuts against the grain of pure chance. To adventitiously pursue the possibility of being – in some sense
reborn
as your daughter’s child. Well, surely you can appreciate that this is the flimsiest of fantasies, the vastest of improbabilities. You’d be far better advised,’ he ran on in the face of my blank hostility, ‘to consider the animating principle of an anencephalic stillborn infant, as I believe I’ve already mentioned.’

‘You have – Jesus, you have. A more porous barrier – I know, I know.’

‘Even a lithopedion, such as I believeyou yourself conceived in . . .’ – he swivelled his chair, banged open the cabinet, flicked through the cardboard squeezebox – ‘. . . 1967, would be, ahem, a better idea.’

‘Why d’jew clear your throat?’ I was on him in an instant.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Why d’jew clear your throat? – You haven’t got anything there to clear.’

‘I hardly think – ‘

‘No, you don’t think. Listen, I’m not gonna sit around and sop up this mishegass for eternity, I’ve got kids to look after. And I don’t trust you one little bit, Mister “ahem”, not one little bit. I think you’re holding out on me – I think I have
incomplete information.’

‘You can think what you like, Ms Bloom.’ He was reinforced in his free-laced straight-thinking by the arrival of a departmental Jane, who picked up the Tupperware plate of Nice biscuits and looked down at him with an expression of protective admiration. ‘You can think what you like, but until the monies owed to the Revenue are remitted, you won’t be travelling anywhere much. Saving Dulston, that is. Now, unless you have any proposals concerning a payments schedule I bid you good day, Ms Bloom, I bid
you
good day.’

I swear he actually said this and, moreover (good Canteresque word, that), took the lapels of his Shavian jacket in hand at the same time, like the skilled advocate of cycling and vegetarianism that he so clearly was, had been, and would remain evermore.