How the Dead Live (41 page)

I plodded up the expensive stairs cursing heavily. I manifested myself in the big hall, with its Italian marble floor and redwood-sized coat tree. I could hear the clink of crystal from the drawing room and voices raised in happy chatter. Hmm, I didn’t like that – what did they have to be so jolly about? Not only was the chatter happy, it sounded sinisterly familial, awfully child-oriented. I winnowed myself down to exiguousness, crept forward over the deep pile.

Jeezus-fucking-.-Kerrist! There they were, Mummy Elvers putting pressies under a convivial pine, a maid standing by with a silver salver of mince pies, the sherry glasses sparkling, and, on the Mercedes-sized ottoman, Richard Elvers sitting with a cute little boy on his knees. The child was about three, grinning hugely, and as black as my cold dead heart. I had no doubt at all that he was their very ownsome. The way they looked at him, the way he looked at them, the Bob Marley playing over the Bang & Olufsen – doubtless part of their goody-two–shoes acknowledgement of his Afro-Caribbean heritage – all of it smacked of perfectly achieved domesticity. The Elverses were at home at last. But a shvarzer kid? I never would’ve believed it of them.

Sure, I was pissed, but for some hours I didn’t believe the whole game was up for good. They may’ve capitulated and gone for adoption, but wasn’t it often the case that once this happened the frenzied inconceivables relaxed enough to do it? It wasn’t until I rifled Richard’s desk, and found the letters from Churchill which finally – after, you note, he’d trousered the money – confirmed that my son-in–law’s spunk was a tasteless condiment, irreversibly soured cream, that I accepted defeat. There was this – and there was worse. I hung around the New Elverses that yuletide, sopping up the atmos, and learned that they’d
sold
Waste of Paper, that they’d
given
a lot of the money away, and that they were
moving
to the boondocks, to concentrate on raising Junior. I was done for. I may’ve hated Dulston, but move to the English provinces? Fergeddit. I’d have to be doubly dead before I did
that.

Twenty-seven quid on the meter and Phar Lap didn’t quibble. Not only that, he even
tipped
Martin Bormann, despite his not letting us smoke in his precious fucking cab,
and
driving all the way out here to Palmers Green while gabbing to his friends on his mobile. What a shaven dickhead.

‘So, what’s it this time?’ I asked Phar Lap, as we debouched on to yet another grotty shopping parade. ‘A car-parts warehouse that’s gone down the tubes? A Citizens’ Advice Bureau that’s run out of it? What
charming
premises has the death-eaucracy seen fit to infest this month?’

‘Hey-yeh. Looks like it’s an old tooth-puller’s t’me, Lilygirl. We better head on in, yeh-hey?’ And he shouldered his wooden clutter. There seemed to be more of it all the time.

‘What’s that one?’ I asked him, indicating a painted stick a metre or so long as we trudged up the stairs.

‘This feller? Iss a pukamani, girl– death pole.’ He used it to push open the frosted glass door, and ushered me in for my long wait.

‘Ah, Ms Bloom,’ said Hartly, who we immediately encountered; he’d been trying to sucker a stuffed Garfield on to the door. ‘I’m afraid Mr Canter is occupied pro tern, but we’re pleased you’re here. Good of Mr Jones to bring you over. I understand the monies owing to the Revenue have been paid in full now.’

‘Is that so?’

‘It is, it is.’ Now he mentioned it I remembered that I’d paid it all off. I’ve alway been in such a muddle with money. ‘There aren’t, how shall I put it, any further lets or impediments, it’s just a matter of form-filling, checking bona fides, sorting out the paperwork.’

‘Oh, I couldn’t have guessed,’ I sneered.

Hartly smiled indulgently. ‘I’m afraid our waiting room is none too salubrious – it’s so hard to get the premises nowadays.’

‘You’re telling me.’ I looked around me at this long, narrow room. The mismatched chairs along each wall: plastic stacking; kitchen, with basket-woven seats; and padded office, with castors. These racks fixed to the walls, still holding leaflets on fluoride, flossing, caries and other, vitally interesting toothrot subjects. I contemplated the usual highly-coloured posters of the human mouth, with personal ads stuck among them. ‘Cat Seeks Good Home’, ‘Home Seeks Good Cat’. Somebody needs a cat exchange. Between the opposing rows of chairs there’s this long, low table, stacked with many, many copies of
Woman’s Realm, Reader’s Digest
and
Tatler.
Presumably the only people who ever came here to get their teeth fixed were illiterate female snobs. Oh yes, there are the dead waiting, but then they’re the usual gauzy crew, Cabbage Patch dolls without their identity papers, indistinct faces glanced at through the rain-spattered windows of public transport. Everynobodies.

‘Nevertheless,’ Hartly continued, ‘the former tenants have left some reading matter behind, magazines and such, so please make yourself at home. You might like to pop in and see the
nyujo
in a little while – but only if you’re feeling up to it.’ And he disappeared through another door with a frosted-glass panel, briefly gifting me a view of the clerks, in their suits of all ages, drawing with spirographs, playing with Tamagochis, swapping Pokémon cards.

Phar Lap took a numbered slip from a dispenser and handed it to me. ‘Here you go, Lily-girl, yer number 1,347 – so I s’pose it’ll be a bit of a fuckin’ wait for you.’

‘Whaddya mean – for me? What about you?’

‘Well, yeah . . . it’s time I finally split the swag, girl, hey-yeh?’

‘I’m sorry – are you
leaving me here?’

‘I’m a death guide, Lily-girl – thass my business with you. Yer not gonna be dead too much longer, so it’s time I was Elsewhere.’

‘Elsewhere?’

‘It’s a new night club I’m opening in Camden Town. Gonna be big, girl – no fuckin’ gammin about it, yeh-hey?’

Make myself at home in this provisional place? The idea was preposterous. I felt a sudden nostalgia for the basement at 27 Argos Road, for Dulston, for my little routines. Even for the Fats. ‘Oh well, I suppose I’ll have the kiddies to keep me company, at least.’

Phar Lap sucked his cheek in the negative. ‘Nah, the kiddies come with me, girl, yeh-hey? Iss not their go-round, girl, not theirs at all. This is all ‘bout you, Lily-girl, all ‘bout you.’

Lithy took it badly. ‘With your long blonde hair and your eyes of blue / The only thing I ever got from you was sorrow! Sorrow!’ I could almost see the tears glistening in its jet eyes. It staggered across the bumpy linoleum of the waiting-room floor, on the verge of being overcome, until Phar Lap scooped it up and popped it in his dillybag.

Rude Buy was equally moved. ‘Fuck off, you fat old bitch. You fucking murderess. You Myra Hindley – fuck off!’ He screamed his accusations one more time, before ramming his way back out the door. The last thing I – or should I say we?– saw of him was the tail of his coonskin cap. Why the fuck did I ever buy it for him? Oh, I remember – because he wanted to be the king of the wild frontier.

Phar Lap remained standing in front of me. ‘So this is it, girl, hey-yeh? Gotta few things here in me dillybag for you – if yer goin’, that is?’

‘Whaddya mean
if?’
I was getting querulous – I’ve never liked goodbyes.

‘Still one last chance to get off the go-round, girl.’ His voice had that peculiar clarity it always achieved at homiletic moments. ‘Still time to attach you to the hooks and eyes of grace. If you want it. If you can just – even for a few instants – achieve a one-pointedness of thought. B’lieve me, Lily Bloom, you won’t regret it.’ I stared into his mirrored sunglasses and saw there, peering back at me – and not looking nearly as bad as I’d thought I would after eleven years beyond the grave – myself. My own blue-grey eyes, my own prominent keel of a nose, my own high cheekbones – to
die
for. My own, thick, lustrous blonde hair. Nope – I didn’t look too bad at all.

‘So what’ve you got for me in your dillybag then?’ I asked him.

He reached into the woven straw pouch and pulled them out one at a time: raisins, with the bountiful Mediterranean lovely on the box; an orange; crispbread; six segments of cream cheese; a tin of Top Deck lager and lime; and finally – a Mars bar. ‘There you go, Lily-girl, bit of tucker t’keep you goin’. Yer hungry, yeh-hey?’

‘Hungry? I’m fucking
starving!’
I took the snack food from his cupped hands and tucked the items in my coat pockets. The Mars bar was the last to go in; I knew it’d be the first to come out.

‘Yer feelin’ hungry then, girl, hey-yeh?’

I was. After all this time, it was back gnawing at me, that wild exquisite pain of being hungry. The need for food and the want of it doing chemical warfare in my retorting belly. ‘Gonna put yer mind off rootin’ for a change, yeh-hey?’

And it has – the hunger. It’s got my mind off sex for the first time in months. The snacks were gone in seconds – you were here to see me gobble them up. And the Mars bar went first, as predicted. The little brown log of chocolate, turning to sludge in my mouth, trickling down my throat, penetrating me with its amorous sweetness. Gone in three bites. So good to eat with one’s own teeth again – not a bonus I was expecting. Then the raisins went, and the orange, the crispbread and the cheese. I washed the lot down with the Top Deck and didn’t even offer you any; but shit, you oughta assert yourself a bit more strenuously. When I looked up from my guilty repast, Phar Lap was gone. Very much his style, that – just fading out of the picture.

Since then the hunger’s come galumphing back. Wild hunger come to drag me away. I dunno why Hartly said ‘former tenants’, because through the door at the far end of the waiting room I can hear, from time to time, the painful whine of a water drill. If I’m not very much mistaken, somebody’s doing dentistry in there. Still, no sex obsession, and that’s a thing to be grateful for, because now I come to relate all this stuff to you, it occurs to me – perhaps just a tad belatedly – that it’s sex that got me into this whole fucking thing in the first place. You wanna know about lust? I’ll tell you about lust.

It was within a few short weeks of the revelations chez Elvers. I was lying on the bed at home, smoking and listening to my little radio. The announcer – now speaking in a broad, northcountry dialect – told us that Benjamin Spock was dead. Fuck – Spock! Finally one of us. How many times had I leafed through his book looking for ‘colic’ while one or other of the kids writhed and moaned on the bed beside me. Spock, with his good, strict, common sense, which a nudnik like me found it impossible to apply for more than minutes at a time. If only I’d actually had kids
with
Spock, then there’d have been a chance of them turning out OK, not dead, or addicted, or mindless.

Thinking about Spock as a potential father led on, fairly logically, to thinking about
doing it
with Spock. Now what would that be like! I’d always fancied the idea of a doctor as a lover – they know where everything’s kept and all that jazz. Suddenly I found myself not only giving the question due consideration – looking into his spectacles, helping him off with his white coat – but
getting aroused.
Getting horny. Obviously I couldn’t feel my juices quicken, or my nipples erect – but my mind was in a fever of wanting it. And it stayed that way for the next year and a half.

I wouldn’t have minded doing it with Pol Pot – sure, he was short, but in my experience the small, tough guys are often the best cocksmen. Such a pity he bought the killing fields in May of ‘98. And that guy Marcel Papon, I didn’t doubt he sent Jews to the gas chambers, but you had to hand it to him,
so
dapper in court. He went down for ten years – I wouldn’t have minded joining him in his cell for a little dual confinement, d’jewknowhatImean? And those crazy skinhead boys in Saxony-Anhalt. They scored eighteen per cent in the federal elections. I bet there was fine carousing in the bierkellers that night – and I could’ve handled a bit of rough myself. Yup, my lust was indiscriminate. I’d thought myself a puppet of it when alive, but this was
ridiculous,
if I could’ve I would’ve screwed
anything.
Bambi Blair and wet-lips Adams – I wanted to make a threesome with them during the Anglo-Irish talks. Hell, what about throwing in a brace of fat Unionists for good measure? Rioting towel-heads on the West Bank? Maybe they’d calm down if they had the opportunity to spend a few minutes apiece drying me off. You
know
what sexual repression can do to a man. I couldn’t weep when the Ol’ Blue Eyes dulled – but unlike the rest, I’d have done it with him on his fucking deathbed. I had no shame. Roy Rogers could sing in my country any time he pleased, I’d’ve known how to pull
his
Trigger.

All through the first nine months of ‘98 I lay in bed and psychically squirmed, while the Fats boggled outside, and Lithy faked orgasm humming ‘Je t’aime’. Even HeLa got uncommonly hot, and as for Rude Boy – well, you can imagine. I had to get up in the end. I coped well enough with being dead, fat, and old – but filthy-minded? Well, I ask you.

With the Elverses gone and me jobless there weren’t a lot of places to hang out. Anyway, I was worried that my new-found lasciviousness would make it hard for me to stay sufficiently exiguous. What if one of the myriad men I ogled in the street caught me at it? A fine old to-do there’d be then. Nope, I decided to go check up on my youngest and her swain. If ever there was anyone who could turn me off like a fucking light switch it was Natasha. Even before she’d become a thoroughgoing
whore,
she was nothing but a tart. It was bad attitude. The internal voices wheedling her: ‘Why not let him screw you, Natty? You’ll feel attractive – for a while.’ That was her all right, bartering her diminishing stock of self-esteem for five-pound chips of men’s lust. Attagirl.

Natasha and Russell were on the skids by then. They were still managing to keep up appearances, but then appearances were all they’d ever had. They were living in a ritzy apartment in Imperial Mansions, one of the modern blocks at the Lord’s Cricket Ground end of Regent’s Park Road. Russell had conned the place – fully furnished – out of some putz who thought he’d see a return for extending an arm of friendship to this duo. Idiot, they only extended their own arms nowadays in order to plunge needles into them. They kept up their belief that their lives were magical by performing elaborate tricks with smoke and mirrors. And when she was on crack, Natasha would crack herself open for anyone.