How the Dead Live Read online

  ‘What d’jew mean?’ His face was hidden by the brim of his ridiculous, white dude Stetson. In the small shadows a hand-rolled cigarette smouldered. At that time it was only the absence of pain that allowed me to concentrate, although ever since I’ve had plenty of time to run over all of this crap again and again in my head.

  ‘Dead foetuses, newborn babies, whatever. With mothers who have kids, y’know, and they’re young then –little, right. Well, when that woman dies they come and hang around. But see, hey, if they’re real small they’re still attached to the woman, danglin’ off her, see – like this smoke. Older kids – they don’t hang around as much, grown-up kids not at all.’

  ‘Like life?’

  ‘No, not like life . . .’ He paused, allowing some nurses to pass by, even though this was irrelevant. ‘In life, death drive you ‘part, yeh-hey? Now it drag you all t’gether. I wonder which you’ll like better. Anyway, you had a dead child, right?’

  ‘You know this?’ It was an old distress to me, a neat ring-pull on my canned emotions. A hungry pain, that loss – like the cancer.

  ‘What good’s a bloke like me for your death guide if I don’t know this stuff? No way to get you off the go-round without it, yeh-hey?’

  ‘There was a son. David. He died when he was nine.’

  ‘And that was back from where you came, your country, hey-yeh?’

  ‘Vermont. Not my country, it was where we lived at the time.’

  ‘Well, whatever, hey. It’ll take the little-boy stuff time t’get here see? But then he’ll bother you proper. Nine years is a bad age for a boy to die. They don’t take it well, yeh-hey.’

  In 1988, on the dark landing, Phar Lap Jones spoke the truth while Lithy gambolled at my feet. Lithy never had any resentment or blamed me for its partial existence. Not so its brother Rude Boy – what else to call him? ‘Dave’ hardly seems suitable – who stowed away on a 747 and pitched up a few weeks later, while I was getting to know Dulston and attending the meetings. Rude Boy was there to remind me for eleven long years – what it is to be a bad parent. Rude Boy is permanently arrested in the brattish mood of defiance that propelled him into the roadway, in front of the fifties fender which pulped his head then smeared it all over the asphalt. Now, in Old Compton Street, he’s at it again.

  In 1957, in Vermont, I’d caught him, playing out in the yard with two of his buddies. The three boys, naked save for their shorts, were smeared all over with black mud they’d manufactured using the hosepipe. ‘What’re you playing?’ I called to David from the back porch. ‘The nigger game!’ he shouted back. I burst through the screen door and was on him in two strides, grasped his blond hair, smacked his head once, twice, three times. He’d only said it by mistake – this much I knew even then, even in the first fog of anger. I knew also that what terrified me about these casually ejaculated globs of race hatred was that they must be my own. My own dark truffles of prejudice, swollen beneath the forest’s floor.

  So, I smacked him and he ran and he got hit and he died. Now he likes to play in traffic whenever he can – and he’s always blacked up for the nigger game. This evening, stood in the middle of Old Compton Street, still daubed with black New England mud, glistening on his straight, down-covered limbs, he shook his puny little fists at the illegal minicab drivers from Senegal, from Ghana, from Nigeria, and shouted at them, ‘Niggers! Niggers! Niggers!’ Not that they could hear him. They drove clear through him – like he was a will-o’-the-wisp bonnet mascot. Then he broke off and rounded on the cavalcade of clones. ‘Pansies! Queers! Bum boys! Irons! Nonces!’ he shrieked at them – and they too were oblivious. Hell, even if they could’ve seen him, what might they’ve thought? Nothing much. I’ve watched Rude Boy manifest himself tens of thousands of times in the decade we’ve been reunited – that’s what the angry dead do; the rest of us are transparent with indifference, as invisible as the living. But much to his own disgust – and my weary amusement – hardly anyone in London seems capable of acknowledging the presence of a naked, mud-caked nine-year-old American boy screaming obscenities at them. In techie jargon – that argot of built-in obsolescence – they cannot compute.

  It’s like the pimply plump blonde I saw on the concourse at Charing Cross Station the other morning. She was wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned ‘Hard Rock Cafe – Kosovo’. Har-de-hare When my two girls were little I took them to the first proper hamburger joint in London, the Great American Disaster on the Fulham Road. In time this transformed itself into the Hard Rock Cafe, and after still more vicious circularity, disasters were manufactured to decorate their sweat-shirts. Cool, huh?

  Oh, that Rude Boy! All he’s learned in the eleven years he’s spent in England is a plethora of pejoratives. No trips to the Wigmore Hall to hear Beethoven string quartets for him. No expeditions up Piccadilly to buy Burberry. No wry browsing along the Bayswater Road on a Sunday afternoon, laughing at the kitsch dangling from the park railings. No-no. What that foul-mouthed kid likes is to do what he did then, run up behind me and plant one of his trowel feet – shaped like, as hard as – right in my fundament.

  ‘Yah!’ he screamed. ‘Fuck you, you bitch! Fuck you!’ The living may not feel or recognise or acknowledge the presence of the dead, but we can get to each other, as you know, when we’re not expecting the intrusion. Rude Boy’s foot usually passes right through me, but I was caught unawares – his sharp contempt lanced into my stupid, colourless indifference, and I turned to see his bony, mud-spattered little figure weaving away through the crowd. Having children may have been the whole point of life, but what it adds to death is dubious.

  ‘Rude Boy, yeh-hey!’ Phar Lap had backtracked to find out what was delaying me. ‘He never stops ridin’ you, hey-yeh?’

  ‘No, I guess not.’ We stopped. He rolled a cigarette, I got one out. We lit them.

  ‘Mebbe it’s time to tell ‘im goodbye, move on, hey-yeh?’ Phar Lap held his hand so it cupped my elbow and I turned to accompany him. Both of us pretended to touch.

  ‘I daresay that’s true – but can I?’

  ‘Yeh-hey. It’s not all gammin, y’know.’

  ‘What? Reincarnation?’

  ‘Yaka! Not a good word, that; iss like callin’ sickies who fuck with kiddies “child-lovers”, hey? No-no, y’see – you know this Lily stuff, we not gonna put it in a new body, yeh-hey? They don’t make one body serve two souls, or one soul serve two bodies. Cleverer than that. You used t’ think that you were your body – not so.’

  ‘Not so.’

  ‘No, what makes you Lily now? This lithopedion? This here cheeky one? Phar Lap has a way of gesturing all his own, elbows held tight by his serpentine sides, forearms angled out like the indicators on my father’s c.1927 Hupmobile. When he does this it’s impossible not to pay attention – he commands attention.

  We made it to the block after Patisserie Valerie, Rude Boy was in the roadway and Lithy lost in the velveteen folds of my sensible sack dress, when the entire frontage of the pub we were passing shivered, undulated and was then punched from within by an explosion. The matter percolated into the air like milk mushrooming into coffee. Coasters, bar mats, handles, straights, queers, the artworks formerly known as prints, stools, trousers, carousers, hearts, lungs, lights, blood, viscera, Britvic, gelignite, Babycham, carpet tiling, dry-roasted peanuts, penises – the entire gubbins of the bar gathered into a fisted force field and splurged into the street. I felt the afflatus of several souls stream through what might’ve been me, what might’ve been Phar Lap. Tatters of people. The blast curled around us, crinkling up the envelope of air as if it were paper.

  Then everyone in Old Compton Street was lying down – as if a malevolent god had announced a nap-time for all the children. The only individual standing was Rude Boy. ‘Faggots! Niggers!’ he screamed. Lithy, stunned, clung to my ankle, and dangled there hitching a lift as we skirted through shattered glass – which as ever looked disassembled to me, a window jigsaw – and shards of wood; and the children, who now st
irred, shuddering into shock; and the bystanders who unglued themselves from Pompeii poses; and the bits of the people. Goodnight mush.

  Phar Lap clicked into my inner ear, ‘Diddit with the punishment boomerang, hey. Walbiri one, hey-yeh. Very strong. Dragged it clear across the Balkans on my way back this time. Kickin’ up bi-ig death dust for this year, hey-yeh!’

  ‘Bullshit,’ was my snappy rejoinder. We slowed to turn the corner into Wardour Street, swerving to avoid a dead old prostitute coming the other way. I recognised her; she has so many foetuses floating around her head – each tethered by its own serpentine umbilicus – that among the locally deceased she’s known as Medusa. I went on disabusing Phar Lap: ‘It’s a fact written about in the press that this is the work of some far-right cell – an offshoot of the BNP, whatever.’

  ‘Yuwai – it’s speculated about. It’s a fact that we’re late yeh-hey?’

  Again he accelerated through the crowd ahead of me, a crowd which, as we strolled beyond its psychic shockwave, was exhibiting in reverse all the symptoms induced by the explosion. Sure, there were the emergency sirens’ synthesised whoops – but aren’t there always? And the pumped-up people seeking the violence anywhere but within themselves – but aren’t there all the time? No, the bomb in Old Compton Street was a car crash and we hadn’t stopped to gawk. Under the fake-porphyry columns of the NatWest bank, Rude Boy was waggling his little dick in the unaware face of a Dutch tourist who was having her cheese-head cheesily portrayed by an Ethiopian economic migrant. Lithy shinnied up, arm over arm, to grab the bottom bead of my amber necklace, and pulled itself into the shelter of my bosom.

  How strange it is never really to be able to touch another. During the sixties I always wondered at those astronauts, not being able adequately to describe what it was like to be weightless. I figured that maybe they sent really stupid people into space, but over the last eleven years I’ve learned that some sensations are like that. When you’re dead you can hold yourself against a thing, you can rub up and down, intent upon the precise degree of resistance the surface presents, but you won’t feel it; it doesn’t touch you. Still, we all do it – this pretence of touching one another. It seems to come naturally enough – wouldn’t you agree? – when you’re dead.

  I’ve never altogether missed that aspect of life – the physical aspect, the insidey-outsidey part of it. I didn’t even have a dead little twin to meet on the other side – like so many do. The idiot twin in my life was that big blonde slab-body I shlepped around with me, all heavy and stupid and inert and smiling thickly, for my entire fucking adult life. And then the cancer yet! I had a ridiculously late menopause for a woman so obviously past it. Fancy that – hardly had I given a final flush to the bloody cistern of menstruation when the alarm went off somewhere and the cells began to divide.

  Some wiseacre told me – when I was actually fucking dying – that a foetus undergoes far more rapid cell division during ontogeny than any cancer. Great. He died three years after me – cancer too – and at that time I was still naïve enough to imagine that what the afterlife chiefly provided were unrivalled opportunities for unbeatable gloating, unbelievable schadenfreude. So English, that – a nation who’ve always been convulsed by the world’s pratfall, when it was they who yanked away the chair. So, anyway, I went and had a look, maybe manifested myself a little – I don’t remember – but I tried to make his death a misery, whispering, ‘Dividing-dividing-dividing . . .’ in his ear. Who knows. Who knows.

  In Piccadilly there were unquiet spirits aplenty, the futile shades of dead junkies and drabs and auto-accident victims, who make it their business to whirl distractedly around Eros’s standard. I’d like to see the seance that could get in touch with this roundabout of loons. I tell you I wouldn’t even have noticed this crappy cavalcade had it not been for Rude Boy, who always insists on joining in, ripping the ectoplasm from their shoulders, flinging it into the air like he was a pizza chef. I shouted at him to come on, and Lithy piped up as well, ‘Come on-comeon-Come on-comeon! D’you wanna be in my gang, my gang, my gang, d’you wanna be in my gang – oh yeah!’ And this did bring Rude Boy over, but only to cuff Lithy, who screeched and appealed to me, but I shoved it off and it kicked at Rude Boy and Rude Boy kicked out again. As ever it was difficult to tell what infuriated them more, their own hated consanguinity or their inability ever actually to land a blow, one on the other. So, they followed me on down through Piccadilly bickering and sniping and contradicting each other. Kids, huh.

  Yeah, the unceasing awareness of underwear – I don’t miss it. I remember being in Tuscany, in the mid-seventies, and all I could focus on in a beautiful Renaissance palazzo I visited, the only fucking thing in room after room of paintings and furniture and glass and Christ knows what, was a door-lock which resembled a bra-hook – flat eyes. The only thing I could hang on to all that hot, scented, beautifully touchy-feely afternoon. Must’ve been ‘cause I had diarrhoea. It used to do that to me – crank up the unceasing underwear-awareness. Obviously.

  Standing underneath Eros, I hoped the deatheaucracy had rented somewhere special for this meeting, because I wanted it to be a special meeting. I’d spent yonks dragging around their offices in Eltham, Ongar, Barking and Thurrock. You’re familiar with the premises they favour, leased with the evidence of failed businesses still stacked about: Nobbo pegboards, Sasco year planners, redundant Roladexes, outmoded computing equipment. Yeah, this is the kind of swinging scene the deatheaucracy favours. Indeed, it’s difficult – wouldn’tjew say – to see them in any other context, ratty little men in brown suits that they are. Just as it’s impossible to imagine them not twiddling with their computer-games consoles, or fiddling with their Gameboys. Why can it be that the people who run death have such a reliable appetite for gadgets, fads, crazes – anything, in fact, that will allow them the opportunity to fidget for hour after hour, while the traffic clots in the arteries outside, and we shades gather among the shadows in the waiting room.

  Still, as you know, not all the people who run death are male; there’s the odd woman as well. And very odd they are too, these eternally plain Janes. They’re the kind of spinsters who came of age immediately after both wars – women existing within the vacuum of a permanently absented purée of masculinity. Beneath umbrellas of cashmere and cotton they scampered away their lives, eluding the damp mizzle of testosterone. Now they’re doing the same in death. Icky! Phar Lap says that most of these secretarial spinnies are unquiet spirits. But I protest that there’s nothing quieter than these desiccated women, who tiptoe into meetings, only to deposit another buff folder into the tatty fingers of Mr Glanville, Mr Hartly, or Mr Canter – the mister who’s given my application the most consideration over the years.

  ‘You’ve set your heart on rebirth, then?’ Mr Canter said at one of our last encounters, his fingers steepled over the graveyard of an open file.

  ‘Yes, I think death has taught me all that it might.’ I had my knees drawn together, my hands clasped in my lap. I clenched my fists and – hey presto! A half-century sloughed off and I was back in the unsuccessful interviews at Barnard and Wellesley, where they looked at my prominent nose from all kinds of angles.

  ‘Oh really.’ Canter was wearing his habitual, primitive, Norfolk-cut, Jaeger wool suit. I recognised it from the off as one of George Bernard Shaw’s purpose-built garments, and pegged the deatheaucrat accordingly as a Shavian pacifist and freethinker of the Edwardian period. To begin with I was amused to see the people who run death sustaining their crankiness way past the grave – but perhaps it’s only the English who do this?

  I’ve always suspected that death American-style would’ve been both glitzier and more convivial. That Bobby Franks would’ve waited the twelve years for Loeb to turn up, so that the two of them could be pals, play pinochle and wait for Leopold to come from South America. That even a pair like that would eventually knuckle under to the defeat of the will.

  It’s a fact that you need a good background in bur
eaucracy to run death. I tested for a job with them a couple of years after I died, but, free of arthritis or not, I was told that my typing was too slow, my filing too haphazard. (Although there was general enthusiasm for me among the staff of the office where I was interviewed, when they heard about my background in pen design.)

  Beyond this I don’t believe there’s any especial qualification, d’jew? After all, most of the deathly offices are hung with suits from all the decades of the last two hundred years or so. I’ve seen sharp 1950s sharkskin single-breasters, and tough 1930s twill sacks; 1890s nankeen frock coats and 1870s sawtooth cutaways. But mostly, the hideous brown-and-chalk-stripe double-breasteds of the 1940s predominate, I guess because this was when the bureaucratic type came to the fore – and we all went for a Burton. Left in charge by their more belligerent brothers, the paper-pilers and pen-pushers remained in the rear, both armies of non-combatants speaking ACRONYM, and perfecting the office management systems that would come to dominate the post-war world. Alan Turing was the originator of the spreadsheet, in case you didn’t realise.

  ‘Oh really.’ Canter said it again and I savour it anew. There are some good things about death as well as many bad ones. The good things include the time to sit and stare. There’s no hurry. In between the ‘Oh’ and the ‘really’ I had plenty of time to examine chipped chipboard partitions and dense slabs of MDF. Time to see that in this office – above a dry-cleaner’s premises on Willesden High Road – the Dexion cradle within which Canter’s department carts around its nyujo occupies a dominant position. Canter and his staff have always loved telling me, ‘Oh, you know, it’s a very fine nyujo, a very perspicacious one – we do so like to keep it with us.’

  D’jew know the nyujo? It’s the petrified corpse of a long-gone scrivener, who saw fit to meditate himself into a crystalline state. The one belonging to this department achieved this by ceaselessly revolving on his Parker Knoll beneath an interminable succession of plastic demijohns of Buxton mineral water, upended by his disciples and set, one after the other, atop his Dexion cubicle. From time to time small basins of Tipp-Ex were thrown over his bowed head, staples fired at him from acolytes’ guns, labels of all sorts affixed – Post-it notes ditto. Over the years this figurehead has swollen to alarming proportions – a dumpy Buddha, encrusted with stationery. Yet still he’s humped from one defunct travel agency to the next busted electrical wholesaler’s in his papier-mâché palanquin.