How the Dead Live Read online

  Praise for How the Dead Live:

  “How the Dead Live overflows with rhetorical ecstasy—arabesques of assonance and alliteration, puns peppering every paragraph, chiasmus turning clause after clause back on themselves like a hall of mirrors, page upon page enacting a giant oxymoron: loathing as glee.”

  —Carey Harrison, San Francisco Chronicle

  “Combine Katherine Anne Porter’s Granny Weatherall with Jonathan Swift’s satiric take on humanity, and you still won’t approach what’s going on in Will Self’s latest book.”

  —Judy Budz, New York Daily News

  “There must be a special place in hell for writers like Will Self. Some kind of Faustian literary pact seems the only way to account for nine rabidly original books in as many years. . . . Exuberant and fast-moving . . . By imagining the lives of the dead, Self is of course asking hard questions about how and why we live.”

  —Zsuzsi Gartner, The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

  “Scathingly satiric and prophetic . . . Self’s novel will surely figure on best-book lists this year.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “[How the Dead Live] may even be [Self’s] best work yet. What’s even more encouraging for admirers of Self’s work is that it gets better as it goes along.”

  —Chris Wright, The Boston Phoenix

  “[Lily Bloom] is an angrier, testier cousin to Daisy Goodwill, Carol Shields’ more good-natured Everywoman in The Stone Diaries. . . . Will Self’s literary magic makes Lily Bloom, a plant destined to shrivel rather than flourish, entirely unforgettable. Out of her long, mournful dying, her strange and tormented life and stranger afterlife, he has fashioned the most poignant, gut-wrenching art.”

  —Dan Cryer, Newsday

  “The irreverent Self’s deft use of parody compels us to reexamine our attitudes towards life’s last gasps.”

  —Time Out New York

  “[A] blistering critique of our excesses at the end of the twentieth century.”

  —David Farkas, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

  HOW THE DEAD LIVE

  HOW THE DEAD LIVE

  WILL SELF

  GROVE PRESS

  New York

  Copyright © 2000 by Will Self

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  Originally published in Great Britain in 2000 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, London, England

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  FIRST GROVE PRESS PAPERBACK EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in–Publication Data

  Self, Will.

  How the dead live / Will Self.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 9780802193377

  1. Americans—England—Fiction. 2. Hospital patients—Fiction. 3. London (England)—Fiction. 4. Terminally ill—Fiction. 5. Women patients—Fiction. 6. Aged women—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6069.E3654 H69 2000

  823’.914—dc21

  00–034144

  Grove Press

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  01 02 03 04 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Deborah

  ‘As though in an initiatory mystery play, the actors for each day of the bardo come on to the mind stage of the deceased, who is their sole spectator; and their director is karma.’

  W. Y. Evans-Wentz, Preface to

  The Tibetan Book of the Dead

  Epilogue

  April 1999

  We old women are easily erased from the picture of the last century. We’re an entire demographic grouping of Trotskys. Like the once dapper Jew, we too stand with nonchalant unease at the base of that wooden pulpit, hastily erected on the platform of the Finland Station. Shorn of moustache and goatee our collective chin is rounded, awfully vulnerable, already anticipating the cold smack of the assassin’s steel. Deprived of pince-nez our eyes are squinting into the limelight; what a mistake it was – we seem to be entreating future historians – to dress down for posterity. If only we’d kept our Trotsky costume on, not loaned our shoes to Lenin, then we wouldn’t be facing this airbrushing out, this un-developing, this eternal bloody deletion.

  Where, oh where are the old women of the twentieth century? Where have we all gone? So few films, photographs and television pictures include us. Even when we were featured, the real intention was to emphasise the props: see how old that coat is/bulky that sack is/worn out those shoes are. And next to the great men of the age we were merely mothers, or women-old–enough-to–be-their–mothers, or women whose age made us childlessness personified, as time turned tail and our old vaginas, like ancient vacuum cleaners, sucked up the unformed, the unbecome, the unborn.

  I’m not saying there haven’t been exceptions, many many exceptions, crowds of exceptions like babushkas picking coal from the slag heap of the century. A legion of remarkable individuals humping hobo bundles down the road to where the einsatzgruppen were hard at it. Notable personalities grasping small, knobbly-haired heads between our withered dugs as the Interahamwe rampaged through the garden death-burbs of Kigali. Yes, we have been there. And I suppose, given our invisibility, our uselessness as anything but extras or crew – the gaffers, key grips and best boys of history – it’s worth remarking that we were in fact there already. Yes, there before the director stopped shtupping his latest underage lover. There before the principals had any motivation, or the location had even been spotted. Like a herd of oblong-eyed goats, or a palisade of dead grass, or an enfilade of streetlamps, we were there. We old women – waiting for something to happen.

  And if there are drifts of old women blowing across the fields of the living, why be surprised that the same is true of the afterlife? You look at the cityscape and see us tottering about in our insupportable hosiery. Look again and realise that while many of us are clinging on to the ledge of life, many more have let go already. As the living grow older, a sterile wad of humanity blocking up the generative drain, so we, the dead, accumulate like pennies on the ledges of a cascade game.

  When the young die they’re full of beans. Lifehasn’t exhausted them – why should death? Anyway, there are always vacancies in the provinces, or even abroad, for the morbidly mobile. Many young and middle-aged British dead work in the Gulf, the States, or even fucking Germany. But dead old women? Who wants us? In death as in life, we are the pavement-strollers, the window-shoppers, the bored, bunion-hobbled bouleuardières. We’re there waiting for something – anything – to happen. So we can be photographed, or filmed, or videoed, a backcloth of hysterectomies, in front of which events can be played out again, yet never exhausted. History is never in the round – it’s always on a stage; and while the curtain may be death, why is it then that so many scrutinising eyes stud the proscenium, peering into the dimness of the stalls? Are they tragic or comedic masks – or not masks at all?

  Earlier this evening – if this still is evening, we’ve waited so bloody long – I, Lily Bloom, picked my way down Old Compton Street. Yet another dead old woman patrolling the West End on a misconceived mission. My lithopedion scampered between my ankles, my Rude Boy was prancing in the road. Ahead of us the snake-hipped figure of Phar Lap Jones moved in and out of the gay throng. He may be old, but he’s black, he’s slim and – of course
– he’s a karadji, a mekigar, a wizard. Full of buginja power, possessed of miwi magic. With his finely corrugated matt skin and his thriving restaurant business, he might, it’s often occurred to me, be the ultimate leather queen.

  When I was alive I made it my business to zero in on my fellow biddies. Given a street scene like this – full of young people hurling themselves into the puppetry of lust, tying rubbery abandonment to their ankles and wrists before bungee jumping into orgasm – I’d’ve been taken by the tweed-wearers, the bearers of the capacious gusset and the porters of the nylon bag. The granny guild. I’d strike up conversations with these widows, spinsters and bints. I suppose I saw myself as a kind of reporter, researching a long article on the world, which turned out to be a profile of myself. I’d interview these old women, interrogate them as to who they were, what they were doing, where they were going, why they fucking bothered, and when they’d give it up. Later, I’d write their replies down in a notebook:

  1. A Mrs Green, the widow of a minor civil servant. She lives in Hornsey in the house she owned with her husband, in a basement flat knocked out by the son and daughter-in–law who cannot wait to inherit.

  2. She’s going to the Old Bailey to sit in the public gallery. It’s good, cheap, wholesome fun.

  3. Her basement is hot in summer, cool in the winter; it’s good to get out.

  4. It’s not a question that can be answered at her age. She understands that life is not so much a journey from one horizon to the next as a survey of the world all around.

  How wrong you were, Mrs Green. Indeed, I know you were wrong when I struck up that conversation with you, as you fumbled for the correct change by the ticket machine at Embankment, because this evening, as I paused by the sugary, munchy – and for me unreflecting – window of Patisserie Valerie, I saw you again. You were wearing the same worsted coat, now worsened by time, as you neatly stepped along the opposite sidewalk, hair coiled then crushed beneath a hat like a velour cowpat. Mrs Green, I never forget a face, even one as narrowly undistinguished as your own. Mrs Green, what were you doing in Soho? You have no need of butyl nitrate, or split-crotch panties, or charcuterie, or sushi. For shame.

  Your husband died, aged sixty, in 1961. I first encountered you in 1974, when you were over seventy yourself. It’s 1999! Ferchrissakes woman – you’re ninety-fucking–five, yet don’t look a day older than you did during the Winter of Discontent (which is not now). ‘Has it not occurred to you, Mrs Green,’ I might’ve let drop as I came alongside, ‘that you must have died many years ago? That you are, indeed, dead – but won’t lie down?’

  ‘Ooh, I don’t think so, dearie,’ she might’ve replied. ‘I mean to say, I still keep my flat up, pay the bills and such, do the shopping, go to bingo. I shouldn’t be able to do all those things if I were dead, now would I?’

  Oh but you can do them, Mrs Green. More than that, now that you’re freed from the relentless popping of your cellular bubblewrap such tasks are a breeze, n’est-ce pas?

  ‘But what about my Derek? He’d know I was dead – surely?’

  ‘Oh, would he now – good at keeping in touch, is he?’

  ‘We-ell, he’s busy – ‘

  ‘For life?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘For life – he’s been busy his entire fucking life, has he? Busy these past ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years? Too busy to bother with an Abbey Crunch and a cup of milky tea – is that it then?’

  ‘We-ell.’

  ‘Well – nothing, nada, rien du tout. The well of life – pah! The well of death, woman – that’s what you’re down. Nope you’re dead. The reason your son doesn’t keep in touch is that you’re dead – and he’s dead too! He died in the early eighties. First the cardiac arrhythmia, like a drum figure falling apart, then the big wrench to nowhere. Then Woking.’

  ‘Woking?’

  ‘Woking, Surrey, that’s where he’s spending his death. As to how come he doesn’t keep in touch? Well, the dead find it just as hard as the living, you know – keeping in touch. It’s an effort to call, to write, to pay a visit. Especially when your mother’s dead but doesn’t even realise it. Not that you don’t have your uses, you know.’

  ‘Uses?’

  ‘You’re an unquiet spirit – of sorts. Like all the unknowing dead, you’re an exchange point between the living and the dead. This is true of many who die in their sleep, or inattentively, in stupors and fogs. If you don’t know you’re dead – and nor do the living – then it’s easier for you to shout across the Styx than call along its banks. You could, for instance, take a message to my daughter Natasha.’ This might have galvanised decrepit Mrs Green a bit; no one has asked her to do anything much but pass things – and only small things at that – for the last quarter-century.

  ‘Your daughter, eh? What would you like me to say to her?’

  ‘That it would be a remarkably good idea for her to insist on an abortion – even at this late stage. Saving that, she should wrench the fucking being out of her fucked-up womb and expose it, cast it on the fucking ground – that’d be just peachy.’ Oh Christ – I’ve gone too far, she’s backing off, turning, gathering her legs beneath her like stilts, piles under piles. She’s moving away from me, fear and disgust curdling in her milky eyes. And that cowpat hat my dear!

  ‘You’d never have done it,’ my lithopedion said, scampering between my own warped calves, as is its wont.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ I’d propped my brow against the plate glass of the patisserie, where cream cakes, croissants, Danishes and petits fours were massing with my strange thoughts.

  ‘You’d never have done it – freaked out the old dead woman, Mrs Green.’ My lithopedion was conceived and died in 1967, during the autumn of my love, which accounts for its hokey youthspeak.

  ‘I forget that you know everything – have seen everything. I forget, I forget, I forget.’

  ‘Not everything.’ My lithopedion looked up at me with little, jet, periwinkle eyes. Mineral eyes. Its eyes have a black liveliness, so unlike its body, which is as grey as the York stone it stood upon. ‘But everything that happened after my conception – including those five minutes of conversation with Mrs Green at Embankment in October 1974 – I remember.’

  ‘You’re’ – and to the passers-by I suppose this looked perfectly natural, an elderly woman leaning against the shop-front and muttering at her swollen ankles – ‘a most sagacious lithopedion.’

  ‘I’m your lithopedion – your Lithy.’ Sad that all my schooling paid off only in these, the last hours we spent together. But in the end Lithy did become the child I’d always wanted for myself, wise enough and sufficiently eloquent to re-parent me.

  ‘Well, Lithy – and why wouldn’t I?’

  For the first time in the eleven years we’d haunted each other, it stopped dancing and spoke clearly. ‘Because once you’d got going you’d’ve felt compelled to fill in all the detail. You’d’ve conjured up a charmless picture of her own demise for the poor, dead soul. A Zimmer-frame expiration, hmm? The retort-stand upon which time has experimented with human mortality, that’s the sort of observation you’d make – but far cruder. She got up, and on her way across the parlour to get more tea, stubbing the Axminster with the rubber stoppers, died there, before she could make it to the linoleum.’

  ‘It has a certain dignity – put like that.’

  ‘Put like that, but you – you’d embellish the description. She died on the Zimmer, pitched forward, so that her body dangled over the crossbar. You’ve always said that all English women –’

  ‘Of a certain age, a certain class – ‘

  ‘Are pear-shaped, and in death Mrs Green inverts this state; when, quickening with putrefaction, pullulating with drosophila grubs, head swollen with fluid, she becomes – for the first time in decades – the body of the pear, rather than its stalk.’

  ‘Oh spare us this, Lithy, this pissy little guignol. Spare us, love – spare us. How about social services?’


  ‘Social services – don’t shake my tree, Mumsie, don’t beat me Daddy-o ten to the bar – ‘ and Lithy broke off to do a little dance, which was far more in character.

  Lithy is a minuscule cadaver of a child – about half the size of a kewpie doll– who was misconceived, then died mislodged in the folds of my perineum. There it petrified for twenty-one years until I died in 1988. Then, with the first faltering steps I took after my death, it fell from under my nightie, and clattered on to the linoleum of the third-floor landing at the Royal Ear Hospital. Phar Lap Jones – who was removing me from my deathbed at the time – stopped, stooped and picked it up. ‘See you here, girl,’ he said in that cheek-clicking, palate-snapping, percussive take on the English language which I’ve never ever been able to take seriously. ‘This is a lithopedion, little dead fossil baby of yours, yeh-hey!?’

  ‘How would I know,’ I replied; at that time death had yet to mellow me.

  “Cos I lu-urve yoo!’ warbled Lithy, who’d had twenty-one years to come up with a better line but whose material had been garnered mostly during the first few months it spent in the pink pleats, when the pop rhythms still resonated in my tautish belly. ‘I just like the things yoo-doo / Wo-on’t yooodoo-the-things-yoo-doo / Nya-nya-nya-nya-nya-nya-nyaaa! /Nya-nya-nya-nya-nya-nya-nyaaa!’ And, surprisingly nimble on its misshapen pins (in truth, little more than the stubs that confirmed it as the true inspiration for the rash of ‘Mother Goddess’ statues found on Neolithic sites), the lithopedion began as it has gone on ever since, weaving between my ankles, shaking its little tush.

  ‘Could be worse y’know, girl,’ said Phar Lap Jones. ‘Much worse than the little feller. You never have no abortions, no?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Stillbirths?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Miscarriages?’

  ‘Not that I’m aware of.’

  ‘ ‘Cos they snag round yer head some – to begin with, hey-yeh?’