How the Dead Live (5 page)

‘That’s all right, Mrs Bloom, there’s a special place with Our Lord for the Israelites, y’know – ‘

‘I’m not Jewish, Sister.’

‘I’m sorry – I’d thought . . . the name . . .’ She wanted to say the nose – they all do.

‘I was married to Mr Bloom, for a time.’ The deception comes easily enough – since she made the initial mistake. ‘No, I’m not religious – I don’t believe in an afterlife, I don’t believe in Big Cosy Daddy, waiting to swing me up into the sky. When I die – I’ll rot. That’s all, Sister – that’s all.’

For a second I’m proud of this bravado, then she says, ‘Y’know, Mrs Bloom, not all of the exoteric symbolism of Christianity should be taken literally. I can understand you’ll not be wanting to see the minister, but Mr Khan – ‘

‘Fuck Mr Khan.’

‘Mrs Bloom – ‘

‘Fuck him, fuck him, I don’t wanna see him – don’ wanna see anybody – ‘And here I go again; the little stopper of pride has popped out of my gullet and a great foaming splurge of self-pity froths out in a spasmodic series of gulps, seagull cries, tears and then globs of white bile which have the ministering fundamentalist reaching for a cardboard kidney dish. Why shape them like kidneys – why not like a heart, or a lung, or a severed breast?

She leaves me after threatening me with the cold Steel, and I relapse into the
memento mori
nightmare which is dying. Half of everything gone – the flesh peeled back and the skull of things finally, irrevocably, exposed to view. I’m so shocked. You wouldn’t credit it that I’ve been feeling the lump for two years now, that I’m so familiar with it I’ve even given it a baby name. Minxie, I call her – because she’s going to annihilate me – the little minx. Yup, two years of the pet name, and then Steel’s sharp pal cut Minxie out. But when the stitches were removed from under my breast and I had the courage to examine it, I found Minxie still there and bigger than ever. I think.

Before I knew I had cancer I was seriously frightened that I would die of it. Die like my own mean little mother, win-nowed out by it until I was a wheezing grey cadaver, literally a mummy. Everyone I talked to, everything I read, everywhere I turned, I heard that smoking causes it – but I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t stop and I couldn’t stop and I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t fucking stop. I couldn’t stop when my lungs felt like they were full of napalm – that’s what they felt like. They were napalming the Viet Cong – and I was napalming my lungs with Camels, with Winstons, with Marlboros, even with when I was truly desperate –
British
cigarettes, with English
fags.
They were dropping Agent Orange on the forests – and I felt like I was coughing the shit up.

Dr Bridge, one of my second husband’s perennial squeezes. A dry thing. It must’ve been dusty when they did it together Yaws himself being such a dry stick. A dry shit. Any old shit on a kerbstone – that was David Yaws. Pass him by every city block. If only I had. Anyway this Bridge –
Virginia
Bridge, no less – she’d park up her ridiculously well-kept Morris Traveller, a silly little half-timbered car to go with her silly little half-timbered house, and come up to the bedroom where I lay drowning in my own phlegm. Then she’d sound me with her smooth, Atrixo-creamed hands, while speaking to me with her dry English accent, and say, ‘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 . . .’

I couldn’t listen to her. I was feverish, I was in pain – and she still wanted to chafe with my husband. Did she come to the house in order to speculate as well as employ her speculum? About what Yaws and I didn’t do together? Imagining Yaws’s and my daughters as possible versions of kids she might’ve had with him? 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 lay there and watched as black-and-white documentary clips of the era showing baboons with masks lashed on to their muzzles, forcing them to smoke, spooled behind my eyes. Give it up. I couldn’t – I’d rather die. Cigarettes were the best friends I’d ever had. More reliable than liquor, comforting – but not fattening. I’d sooner die.

Like the teeth, though – I had a fateful relationship with the unlucky Luckys. More than this, as I looked at Virginia’s equine teeth (how could she keep such tent pegs clean?), it occurred to me that it didn’t have to be my life on the line, someone else’s might do as well. Like Virginia’s. I closed my eyes tighter still– ‘ it’s an addiction like any other, Lily, it will take a few days ‘ – and willed Virginia Bridge to die: O Great White Spirit, if I give up smoking will you take this woman in my stead? Yup, it did. She died only a couple of years later, and let me tell you I was sorely tempted to take it up again. Only kidding. By then I had the anxiety even worse. Every year throughout the sixties, more and more evidence kept coming out about smoking. I felt as if all my life I’d been driving towards an intersection, while Death was speeding down the main road, the two of us on a collision course. Really I felt no better when I’d given up. I had about a motorway’s worth of tar to cough up, then I realised that I’d smoked so much that it was more than likely
too late already.
It was after-the–bloody-hemlock time. I began to refer to any discussion of cancer as being ‘a self-fulfilling prophecy’.

A cigarette would be good now, though. Good here in an antiseptic ward. Blue smoke goes well with white linen. We may all live soapy, light-musical lives, but every woman has the right to die as Bette Davis.

A self-fulfilling prophecy. Nice, ringing phrase that – and I’ve always been something of a phrase-maker. I was a designer by training, not that I ever designed much of consequence except for the cap of a pen which has since been sucked by a billion mouths. It was a unique cap – they were generic mouths. That’s the way I look at it. Still, designing is a self-fulfilling prophecy – if it’s done right. But the thing about this particular self-fulfilling prophecy – death by cancer – was that the very articulation of the prophecy was bound to induce cancerous anxiety. Every time I said it, I knew it would come true. The self-fulfilling prophecy was itself a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even so, I was surprised to be diagnosed – funny, yeah? Real amusing.

I’d also said to the girls, who grew up with my dark moods, ‘At least we can be miserable in good surroundings.’ (Miserable because their father had left us; miserable because he hadn’t paid the utility bills so we had no heat or light or telephone; miserable because I couldn’t stop crying; miserable because I
couldn’t find my keys.)
At least we can be miserable in good surroundings – ha! What a fool I was – I got it the wrong way round; I should’ve said
good
in
miserable
surroundings – that would’ve been the right way to carry on. Maybe if I’d concentrated on doing that I wouldn’t find myself so fucking lacking in stoicism now, so scared of this pain, so sick of this nausea.

They give me drugs for the nausea – but they make me feel sick. Perhaps they’ll give me still more. Yeah – they’ll do that. They’ll load me up with pills until I’ll find myself cramming some into my mouth while I’m actually hurling others out. Ha-ha. Here comes Dr Steel, tripping over the swirly lino, in between the mobile biers. He wears a white coat which although lovingly cleaned and pressed (by Mrs Steel?) has been imperfectly dry-folded, so that the thick cotton forms a series of rigid, square panels. It makes him look like he’s wearing a peculiar tabard. St George, sneaking into the ward to do battle with the tumour dragon . . . ‘Hello, Doctor.’

‘Ms Bloom, your daughters are here to see you.’

‘Oh goody.’

‘Both
of them.’ I wonder which one it is he so disapproves of – either would be worthy of it. ‘But before they come through I wanted to have a word with you about the future.’

‘You mean the lack of one – for me.’

‘Look, I know I didn’t express myself terribly well this morning, I’m afraid that side of things isn’t my forte . . .’ No, I can guess that too. I think Steel is one of those doctors who doctors because he loves the
disease,
not the patient. Yeah, he loves the disease. He likes to look at microscope slides that show slivers cut from interesting cancers. He likes the surprisingly vivid colours and the complex whorls of tissue. Indeed, in his more reflective moments he’s subject to philosophising on the nature of cancer. He expatiates on the fact that cancer was unknown in the ancient world, that it seems to have arisen at the same time as human reason itself emerged from the darkness. After a couple of glasses of a good single malt, he’s probably been known to hazard that the peculiar morphology of certain cancers may be a function of their being, in reality, tiny cellular models of the Copernican universe itself! ‘. . . it’s never easy to tell somebody that there’s nothing much we can do.’

‘I feel for you – truly I do.’

‘Ms Bloom – this isn’t helping. You can stay here at UCH if you wish – although I know you’re as aware as I am that the bed is needed. Or I understand from Mr Khan that a bed could be made available for you at St Barnabas’s – ‘

‘The hospice?’

‘Yes, the hospice.’

‘In Muswell Hill?’

‘I believe so.’

‘I’m not dying in Muswell Hill – I wouldn’t even go
shopping
in Muswell Hill. I want to go home.’

‘Or, you can go home. Can your daughters arrange for nursing? You appreciate it will need to be round the clock?’ Or, or, or – but you note: no either.

‘One of them can.’

‘That would be Charlotte, would it?’

‘I can’t see Natasha organising anything much – can you?’

‘Erm, no, maybe not.’ He’s writing stuff down on a clipboard with a Bic Fine, gathering the panels of his virginal tabard about him. He’s beautifully shaved, Dr Steel, marvellously groomed. When he gets cancer – and he must, eventually, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy – it will be a nice orderly one, a tiny tumour in his brain which will simply push down on a vital artery, like a light switch, and turn him off. Leaving his clothes all neatly pressed and his body unsullied.

Did he go? People are always doing that now – they don’t say goodbye to me, they just leave. I guess they think all conversations with me are now intrinsically valedictory – no need to say goodbye to the old bat, she’s already gone. And it’s true – I do feel detached. I feel detached the way I did in the months of dropsical pregnancy that led up to David and Charlotte and Natasha. At the time I thought it peculiar that I seemed to be absenting myself while these very important guests were arriving for life’s party – but now I see it’s all connected, there’s a compensatory arrangement – arrivals and departures. Terminal life.

I suppose I must’ve slipped into unconsciousness for a couple of minutes, because when the girls arrive they wake me with their bickering.

‘I don’t mind giving you the money – I just don’t want any crap about a loan.’

‘But I’ll pay it back.’ This wheedling voice is naturally sonorous and beautiful.

‘No you won’t, you never do.’ This reasonable, mature tone is strangulated by class.

‘I will – I’m gettin’ a job.’ This mockney is so wrong.

‘A job? You?’ This hauteur is entirely believable.

‘At the dogs – Hackney Dogs.’ Hackney – how utterly unsuitable for this, this . . .

. . . vision of a thing. She’s beautiful all right – my Natasha. She ought to be in elbow-length white gloves and writing on her dance card with a silver propelling pencil. Instead she’s got the sleeves of a black cashmere cardigan pulled down to her wrists. I wish she’d shoot up in the soles of her feet. Her black hair looks as if its been cut with pinking shears. Her blue eyes have kohl round them, obscuring blacker circles. She’s stoned – of course. Her pupils blighted points in each wilted iris. She’s an inch or so taller than I used to be – five-eleven, I guess – but Natasha is coat-hanger thin. The last time I saw her naked I could count all of her ribs. They should’ve given
her
a fucking mastectomy – she’d never’ve noticed. Still, she’s riding on her cheekbones, my youngest. Her cheekbones and her charm. How can anyone with that generous a mouth be so ungiving? It doesn’t matter, though, because it isn’t Natty’s place in life to give – she’s a taker. She’ll take any man’s heart, or wallet, and nowadays his credit cards and mobile phone too. Yup, I wonder if it’s this ability she has – to solicit the answer ‘Yes’ before she’s even posed the question – that has made her so incapable of resisting her own inner voices, her own charming demons. ‘Have some heroin, Natty?’ they sweet-talk her; and she replies, ‘Sure, why not?’ She says she’s a painter – and it’s true that she went to art school. Unfortunately, she’s not well-to-do enough to be one of those girls-who-paint, so she has to be a woman who daubs on walls. She was doing a ‘Muriel’–as she terms it – for some community centre, but judging from the bicker that’s history.

‘The dogs, how suitable,’ says Charlotte. ‘It’ll be easy for you to get there, you know the way already.’

‘Oh fuck off, you materialist bitch. If you don’t want to lend me twenty quid – don’t. Spend it on a pedicure, or a massage. Go and get your bourgeois bum sluiced out at the Sanctuary see if I fucking care.’

‘Twenty pounds is quite a lot of money.’ How like Charlotte to say ‘twenty pounds’ like that. Deadpan. She knows the value of the words that are money. I peel up an eyelid to regard them both. Natty is standing by the sharply arched triptych of mouldering Gothic window. My bed’s in a bay-I’m in abeyance. It suits her – the combination of grime and the ecclesiastical. It’s easy to imagine her as the Madonna of grunge. Charlotte has taken Dr Steel’s place on the chair by the bedside table. She’s brought flowers and a bottle of barley water. I asked her for the barley water yesterday afternoon when this was what I desired more than anything else in the world; more than light, more than life, more than love. That was yesterday afternoon – now I’d sooner vomit again than drink the muck.

It’s a bit like Charlotte, the barley water – both are things the anticipation of which far surpasses their actuality. No, worse than that – both are things you only want when they aren’t there. Charlotte is one of those women – she is a woman, not a girl, although she’s only thirty as against Natty’s arrested twenty-seven – who make it their business to maximise what nature has given them. She’s a big, blonde, lumpy thing, like me. Sometimes she reminds me so much of the gaucheness of my own youth that I can hardly bear it. Yup, she looks like me: five-ten, carrying at least a hundred and fifty pounds; big, dirigible tits, still firm; high hips; thick hair. A no-messing, big, blonde woman. She’d be able to carry it off – just as I did – given the nose, but she doesn’t have the nose, not the prominent keel that has guided me through life’s seas. Oh no. Where it should’ve been sunk is her father’s little blob, David Yaws’s button nose.
‘Retroussé’,
his mother used to call it. ‘Porcine is what you mean,’ I’d reply.