How the Dead Live (8 page)

It’s a party. A party in his house. Kaplan and I barely have an icebox – let alone this Mercury rocket of chilliness. And Kaplan doesn’t really like bebop; sometimes I think he’d prefer to listen to klezmer. The party is full of arms – fifties parties always are. It’s the smoking, the puffing, the gasping. If you’re gonna hold on to one of these burning babies you have to port as well as aim it. So the arms are 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. But the house isn’t too smoky, because the windows are wide open to admit the thrumming heat of a New England evening in late June.

The man – whose name is Bob Beltane – isn’t smoking, which gives him a certain mystery. To add to his allure, Bob is a poet – and I think this fabulously cool. His verse isn’t that bad – perhaps a tad mannered, but he dares to recite it to me which I find irresistible. He also declaims other poets, and now I can tune in he’s saying, ‘. . . September, when we loved as in a burning house . . .’

‘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?’ To show I’m not kidding I flip my Zippo and apply an inch of ivory flame to the corner of one of Jean Beltane’s cookbooks, which are piled up on the ceramic-tiled breakfast counter. To do this I have to lean forward across Bob, so that my stomach momentarily nuzzles at his crotch. He recoils as if I’ve zapped him with a ray gun – and I recoil as well, shocked at how little of my belly there is. It’s as flat as a pancake and encased in slacks – black
slacks!
I’ve got some kind of a gingham shirt on, the tails of which are tied in a knot under my boobs. I’m thirty-three years old and I have my own teeth – even if they’re rotting in my head – and I know I’m going to live for ever In . . .

. . . Hendon. Crooked Usage – that’s the name of the road. A little elbow of three-up, three-down semis, angling away from and then back towards the Hendon Way. You can never get away from the Hendon Way. I’m having a recurring dream which is always set in the house Yaws and Charlotte and Natasha and I lived in. I may have swapped continents and changed men, but I still got a hateful house – another joint I could never be bothered to decorate, or maintain, or cherish. Which is perhaps why these characters have pitched up – a dusty mob of them. Not what you associate with London. London – even the ‘burbs – is a grimy enough city, but this crew are thick with real dust, whitish desert dust. They’re erecting a tent, or constructing a lean-to, maybe even a humpy. Whatever it is, it’s clear they’re intent on staying. One of them comes to the back door; I can see him from where I’m standing at the kitchen sink. I’ve got such dreamy views from all windows of the house at once. He’s wearing a white Stetson, of all things, and asks for water: ‘Git inny water, missus?’ he says. ‘Git inny water, missus?’ I feel that I have utterly
incomplete information
about all of this, a not unusual intimation whether I’m asleep or awake.

Chapter Three

‘G
ood morning, Lily.’

Morning – what the fuck’s she talking about, this bog-trotting drab? This isn’t morning, it’s grey and insipid outside – what the city that always sleeps palms off on its somnolent inhabitants as dawn. ‘What time is it, please?’ The ‘please’ is a compensation for my inner baddy thoughts. It always is – isn’t it. No politeness is ever justified. Even in
Pride and Prejudice
the Bennet sisters were fucking people over, and screwing them up, and shitting on them – when off the page.

‘It’s nearly six-thirty, you’ve been asleep for almost thirteen hours.’ That’ll be the diamorphine and the Valium, drugs so powerful they’re like the boots of heavy men stamping down on my neck.

Jesus – the pain in my
neck.
‘Oh God!’

‘Is it a pain?’

‘My neck – my neck, it feels like it’s broken.’

‘It’s the angle you’ve been lying at. I tried to move you late last night, but I’m afraid I wasn’t able.’ She’s up close now, my Deirdre, still in the ghastly yellow cardy. Amazing – I’ve never seen a ball of pus-coloured wool. ‘You were sweating a lot in the night as well.’

‘Was I.’ So unladylike, that, I must have a word with my sebaceous glands, whip them into shape.

‘It might be a good idea to clean you up a bit, get you into a fresh nightdress for the day.’ She’s playing it quietly, clever Deirdre. She realises that although toothless, I can still bite. Now she’s close up I can smell soap on her. She must’ve brought her own, because I don’t recognise it. The odour is surprisingly pleasant, forcing on me the awareness of my own well-matured stench of sweat and disease. I feel like puking.

And do – ‘Heroosh!’ – an abrupt, third-personal, highly feminine piece of puking. Or so
I
like to think.

Deirdre and I now have to go through a whole rigmarole. She rocks me up and rolls me out of the bed – I’m so fucking weak, the latitudes of impotence extending from under my mutilated breast and circling the toxic planet that is my body. I’m far, far weaker than I was yesterday, my strength is gurgling out of me, all that anger – surely it can keep me alive? I keep flopping over the arms of the chair as Deirdre mops at me with flannels and bowls, flopping over like an unstandupable toy: ‘Whistler’s Incredible Dead Mother Push Her Over and She Stays There – For Ever’. Not funny ha-ha really, more funny peculiar.

Deirdre bundles up the soiled nightie and the soiled bottom sheet. Someone’s put a plastic sheet on the mattress underneath it. How sensible. It must be the same procedure for home deaths as it is for births. The chair she’s put me in is a little Regency fake which I recently had covered. Looked at this way, my decline has been sickeningly abrupt – there are library books unreturned, a tax return inadequately filed, letters unwritten, even appointments I’ve yet to cancel. Who knows, I might make a sudden recovery, Minxie might gather herself together and quit her temporary home, leaving me free to attend a flower show on Saturday with Susie Plender. O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

‘I’m sorry, Lily?’

‘Nothing, Deirdre, nothing at all.’

I don’t mind Deirdre; more than that – I’m grateful to her. Dying should be done with strangers – it’s not so bad for them, mopping up the sweat and puke. After all, it’s not as if the cancerous burglar has broken into their corporeal house, laid a tumour turd on their cellular carpet. So, I guess it’s a hell of a lot easier for them to clean it up. It must be the same with undertakers. They must be the jolliest guys around, going into work every day and knowing they’ll face tragedies not their own,
such
a relief. And English undertakers must be the jolliest of all, given their unrivalled propensity for schaden-freude: Ho-ho–ho! You’re lying down on the ground covered in blood,
what
a silly pratfall. They don’t need to be venal and money-grubbing the way Americans are, because they actually
enjoy
the work – they’d
pay
to do it. And anyway Deirdre holds me well, touches me firmly. She’s a nurse – I’m a child. This will be the only way the English handle me now, until they chuck my corpse in a cheap pine coffin with no bogus ceremony at all and I disappear up the pillar of chimney that supports the grey sky over Hoop Lane. I do
so
like Golders Green Crematorium – did you know that children under five are burnt for free? So very humane.

She dries me off, dresses me up, tucks me back in, smooths the duvet, smooths my hair. I wonder if all nurses played with dolls a lot when they were little girls?

‘Do you think you could manage a snack now?’

To my near infinite amazement I discover that I might be able to choke something down. ‘In the cupboard over the stove you’ll find some Ryvita – would you spread a couple with a little of the cream cheese in the fridge? And perhaps some fruit if there’s any?’ She shuffles off over the carpet I’ve never liked, into the kitchenette which has always been too small. I suppose I could’ve stayed at the house on Crooked Usage – the kitchen there was fine. But what would I’ve done in it? Cook gigantic meals I was incapable of eating without ballooning still more than I had? The entire fucking house was defaced with the evidence of my bouts with the bulge. On every wall there were pencilled lists of my daily weigh-ins: ‘April 5
^th
–186 lb. April 6
^th
–184 lb. April 7
^th
–183 lb. April 10
^th
– 189 lb. SHIT! SHIT! SHIT!’ I must’ve gone away for the weekend – to a fucking bakery.

The seventies were my fattest decade. Overall I think the seventies were distinctly bulbous. People looked chunky, typefaces were rounded, writing implements penile. I liked to think I was maintaining an aesthetic unity, as my weight shot up to two hundred pounds and I became a Mrs Pepperpot of a woman. Sheer bravado – I hated it. I hated my fat. I’d sit sobbing on the side of my bed – things never change – and grab folds of myself up in order to present them individually with my derision. The effortlessly skinny girls would gather whispering on the landing – was it safe to approach the obese old dragon? Emphatically not. I loathed and resented the sylphs I shared the house with. I hated their nascent curves and their burgeoning sexuality – and probably showed it too much. Said too much about quite how shitty it can be to lie with a man. Said it to Natty – in baby talk, naturally.
Pas devant les enga-fengas.

Up and down went the scales, the dial flickering over weeks and months. I reckon that between ‘73 and ‘79 I must have lost and regained, lost and regained getting on for seven hundred pounds – three whole obese mes Me-me-me. Then I stabilised as a fat old pear-shaped woman. Not obese, simply fat and old. It seemed that I’d acquired the naturally pear-shaped body of the middle-class, late-middle–aged English-woman. My adoptive country’s lard had taken me for its own. How nice. No wonder Hedley didn’t fancy me. Natasha caught me sobbing on a transatlantic call: ‘I was like a seal,’ I moaned, ‘like a seal.’ I was referring to my agility in bed, but he took it to be a reference to my size and replied, ‘It’s not that, Lily – it’s not that you’re fat, believe me – ‘ I hung up and saw black bangs dangling over the banisters. ‘Whyd’jew say that, Mumu? Whyd’jew say you were a seal?’

Here comes Deirdre with the inapposite slimmer’s snack. I don’t need fucking Ryvita – I need food substantial enough to give me back my life, my vigour, my health. I need to eat an entirely new Lily Bloom, so that she can be me. Deirdre’s put it all together quite well, and she’s found the grapes in the front room too, but I should’ve told her where the trays were, tucked beside the cooker, because the crackers are sliding around on that blue plate like pucks on an ice rink. Even when the plate’s propped on my withered boobs I can’t seem to keep the things still enough to grasp them. Deirdre’s set herself down in the blue chair and is ostentatiously pretending to read her notes from the nighttime. Oh Christ! If only now were the bite time, but I know it isn’t, even before the carious corner of one of the crackers stabs into my gum, underneath my bottom plate, and inflicts a wound nasty enough to bleed. Blood on the snacks.

Hedley.
He’s
still alive somewhere. He sent me a chess set only last year, even though he knows I don’t play. But then he does have a chess shop in the Village – and his house was always cheap. Dead cheap. He doesn’t own a car to this day doesn’t need one. He walks from the brownstone his gonif papa left him in the fifties, trolling down Broadway in a seersucker suit and a straw panama, all the way to the Village – where he sells his chess sets and his checker boards. Not exactly demanding work. It leaves him plenty of time to concentrate on the only problems he’ll admit into his life chess ones. Hedley, the last man who ever touched me intimately – saving Dr Steel, but then
he’s
barely human. More of an animated scalpel.

Hedley. Together we would lie in the flat in Brooklyn I borrowed from Esther – ‘Darling it’s rent-controlled – so I can’t be assed to rent it!’ – naked on the bed, like two parentheses indicating the presence of passionate language, of sex. Of course, he’d never leave his wife. His invalided wife. I mean to say, he’d leave her – in order to come to me; but he’d always go back again. Back to put her on the machine (she is-was? – a diabetic), or take her off the machine, or give her a shot. I asked him once if, given that he had a mountain of cash in the bank, he couldn’t arrange for her to have a kidney transplant. He looked the most flustered I’d ever seen him, more abandoned by his reason than when he orgasmed. He said something about tissue types, rejection, unavailability, unsuitability – but I didn’t believe him. Like I say, the house was cheap; and more than that I think he actually
wanted
her to be housebound, wanted her there whenever he eventually came home. What a psycho. Good riddance.

Eight o’clock, and outside small birds are going ‘cheep’. I can hear cars grinding into motion and the relentless stutter of lorries on Kentish Town Road. Hard to believe, as I lie here listening to the
Today
programme, that six weeks ago I would’ve been leaving with them. The Italians call this kind of cancer ‘the whirlwind’, because it blows down on the person and winnows them right out, like a husk. It’s blown away all my precious routines, my rounds of errands, my staggered sociability, my little trips – all gone. And with them the people.

No need to see Susie Plender any more – although she’s called, naturally. No need to see Emma Gould either and hear about her latest man-trapping escapades. She’s not a fifty year– old woman – she’s a tethered goat. No need to see Jack Harmsworth, my alcoholic bibliophile friend – although him I could bear the most. Like Natty, I guess – addictive personalities are peculiarly restful to the dying, because like us they operate within tiny windows of temporal opportunity. And no need to call Mr Weintraub. No, actually I
must
call Weintraub, or get Charlotte to. I must sort out this tax business before – before – well, let’s just say it has to be dealt with. No need to see Tim, my boss, although the sweetie did come and visit me in the hospital last week. He was terribly uneasy and his wife, Lola, a squint-eyed Spaniard, kept looking around the ward as if she could see something we couldn’t. Something terrifying.

Nope, no need for any of them. Hedley’s history. Yaws is dead. Kaplan – well, Kaplan, there lies a tale. Anyway, I don’t expect to be hearing from him, oh no. It’ll be Natty and Charlotte and Steel and Deirdre from now on in. Not that Deirdre’s here for the duration; I can hear her next door passing the careful baton as I muse.

‘Here’s my time sheet, Mrs Elvers. Your mother had a very quiet night.’

‘Did she?’ You note there’s no move to informality from my stuck-up daughter.

‘Well, I say quiet, but in truth I have to say she’s . . . she’s . . .’

‘Fading fast?’

‘I – I wouldn’t want . . . it’s . . .’

‘Please, Mrs Murphy, please – don’t be afraid to express an opinion.’

‘She does appear to be in a rapid decline. It happens quite often – when a . . . terminal patient comes home.’

‘I see. Is your colleague here yet?’

‘No –’

‘Errrr!’ Yes she is, and hesitating for admittance – but no:

‘Hiya.’ It’s Natasha, come for her get-up, I daresay – well, I did tell her to – and:

‘Errr.’ A bit less insistent, that – it’ll be the Murphy-substitute, another certain woman of a certain age in the slick, professional housecoat of death. Their Father’s house has many mansions, and they’re intent on dusting the vestibules.

From the main room of the flat come scraps of conversations, leftovers of sentences which float through. Then there’s yet another burp from the intercom, and Molly, the Elverses’ maid, arrives to clean. Jesus! It must be like the stateroom scene from the Marx Brothers’
A Night at the Opera
in there. I wonder if I’d find them funny any more. I wonder if there’s a last particle of amusement left inside this rotting body. Perhaps if I vibrated at the right frequency the worms would quit me, like a stream of rats running out of Hamelin. In truth, I never thought them
that
funny. I always equated Groucho Marx with Hitler – saw him as Hitler, with his bogus, greasepaint moustache and his rapid-fire delivery of deranging demagoguery. Like Hitler and like my father, with his big hands, his scarred face, his Indian-head money clip, his wiseacre’s patter. ‘A child of five would understand this. Send somebody to fetch a child of five.’ So that he can perform unnatural experiments on it, flay its skin off for a nightlight’s shade. Yeah, nothing cosy about Groucho, giving the lie to Hitler’s own Semitism – surely
only
a Jew could hate Jews with such intensity, wish to rip out the kike sleeved within the Jew? I married Dave Kaplan, I understood later, because of his own – soon to be manifested – Jewish anti-Semitism. ‘Y’know Kaplan isn’t my real name,’ he used to say to people, ‘I changed it in order to appear Jewish – my real name’s Carter.’ And this from a man with such a melting-pot of features – it was irresistible.