How the Dead Live

by Self, Will

  ‘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.

  So, she’s got Yaws’s nose and the rest of his face too. At times like these, as I bleary at her, it looks to me as if a snapshot of Yaws’s face has been Scotch-taped on to hers. It might seem wrong of me to dislike my elder daughter on the grounds of her close resemblance to her father, but hell, it’ll do. What other grounds should I dislike her on? That she’s taken the place of the brother who died before she was born? Yeah – that’ll do fine too. How about the fact that she’s precise, neat and efficient – all those things I never managed. Mm – complementary, I’d say. Poor Charlotte, with her middle-aged, middle-class, quintessentially English face, all scrunched up with the effort of dealing simultaneously with her junky sister and her dying mother. Lucky she has Mr Elvers to rely on. Not that her husband is in evidence – he’ll be in the day room using the payphone, or his mobile phone, or leaning out the window so he can shout instructions to passers-by in the street. He’s nothing if not communicative, our Mr Elvers.

  ‘She’s awake, Natty, be quiet now.’

  ‘I didn’t say any – ‘

  ‘Sssh!’

  ‘Girls? Is that my girls?’

  ‘We’re here, Mum.’ Charlotte leans forward and takes my hand, swollen with arthritis, in hers – which is merely swollen.

  ‘Is that you, Charlie?’ I’m cramming as much wavering sincerity into this as I can.

  ‘Yes, Mum, it’s me.’

  ‘Then why’ve you got a snapshot of your fucking father taped on your face?’

  Charlotte recoils, Natty laughs. ‘All right there, Mumu? Still wisecracking, are we?’ She leans down and plants a kiss on my mouth which is more like a blow.

  ‘Mother!’ Charlie exclaims – she’s always chosen to regard my hatred of her paternity as a mischievous bit of play-acting. ‘Dr Steel has had a
talk with us both.’ And now I know the game is up. While it was only the doctors, the nurses, the Mr Khans who knew, it couldn’t be true. It was a messy but implausible fact – to be whisked away in a cardboard kidney dish. But now Charlie knows, efficient Charlie, well– my bones might as well already be being pulverised in that cremulator. I bet as Steel and she talked she was taking notes in her Filofax, under neatly underlined headings: Death certificate; Undertakers; Funeral. Dusted and done – that’s Charlie.

  ‘Natty-watty.’

  ‘Mumu.’

  ‘My baby.’ I open my arms and somehow she manages to curl her near-six feet of limbs into my embrace. I can smell the henna in her hair and feel the coarseness of it against my sallow cheek, but she feels good, feels like my baby. When she’s my baby – I’m hers. It’s like that with the youngest child – for their whole life they make you feel like the youngest. I can never see any of David Yaws in her at all.

  ‘D’you wanna go homey, Mumu?’

  ‘It’s shitty in here, Natty – the food’s shit, the decor’s shit; and my dear – the people.’

  ‘You go home, Mumu. I’ll come with and look after you, promise.’

  ‘I thought you had a new job?’ Charlotte says.

  Natasha rears up. ‘I do – but what’s more important, eh? Making money or looking after your dying mother, hmm? No – don’t answer that.’

  ‘There are practicalities to consider’ – Charlotte was born to say things like this. ‘Mum will need proper nursing. I assumed you’d want to go back to the flat, Mum, so Richard’s arranging for nursing cover and I’ve sent Molly round to clean it up – OK?’

  ‘I guess so.’ Guess so only because Molly – Charlie and Richard’s Filipino factotum – has different ideas about cleaning to me.

  ‘Now Mum – you can’t be ill in a messy house.’

  ‘I’ve been ill in it these last two years; what you mean is I can’t die in a messy house. Go on, say it. Messy-messy–messy. Die-die–die.’

  ‘Mu-um!’ they chorus; and both are at one with this: the continual need to bring up Mummy, admonish Mummy. What will they do when I’m gone? There won’t even be this to hold them together.

  But it’s good to keep up the contemptuous, dismissive, cynical pose – it keeps the fear at bay. I don’t want to break down in front of them, not now. There’ll be plenty of time for that later.

  ‘Dr Bowen – the senior registrar – she’s doing your discharge now.’

  ‘It won’t be the first time.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘She’s had to deal with a fair few of my discharges recently.’

  ‘Oh Mother, really!’ I’m really, really, really, actually sick and tired of hearing that ‘really’. My life really might be worth fighting for if I could be certain that after they’d burnt out my remaining hair with their radiation and poisoned me with their drugs, no one would never ever say ‘really’ in that tone again, within my earshot. But Natty doesn’t say ‘really’ – she wouldn’t be so crass. She laughs instead. She’s an earthy soul, my Natty. A farter and a laugher. Mind you, washed and groomed and suited and booted, Natasha looks as if she shits chocolate ice cream; whereas poor old Charlie only ever looks like she thinks she does. ‘Richard will hang on and we’ll drive you back in a bit – he’s got the Merc.’

  ‘Oh goody.’

  ‘I’ll come too, Mumu. I’ll make you your favourite snack of the moment when we get there.’

  ‘Double-chocolate–fudge goody in that case.’ And while I sink back into the pillows (incidentally, the one good thing about modern British hospitals – good, big, clean, nicely plumped pillows; if it weren’t for them this joint really would be the bed and breakfast of the soul), the two of them begin gathering up my pathetic little valise’s worth of shampoo sachets and books and women’s magazines and underwear. All my life my underwear has troubled me– soon, at last, I’ll be free of it. The Playtex Shroud – separates you from life, lifts you up to heaven.

  Of course in the sixties, when the girls were small, I still wore pantyhose and girdles, or stockings and girdles, or just fucking girdles. Anything to flatten that great Ceres of bellies, and strap myself into sylphhood. First came the girls – then the fucking girdles. If I wore stockings I’d snap them on to eyes that were actually attached to the girdle – what an embrasure of nylon and rubber and steel. In the sixties, spontaneous sex was unbelievably difficult to achieve. Any level of arousal whatsoever was bound to be damped down by the time he’d managed to insinuate a hand inside this lot-let alone a dick. It was like a three-minute air-raid warning: ‘Aawooo! Aaaawoooo! Sex coming! Sex coming!’ And quick, quick boys – an ecstasy of fumbling; but then, ‘Aaaawoooo Mum-may!!’ The not-all-clear sounded and it was too fucking late. Not that I enjoyed their father’s love-making much – but it was the principle that counted. When I grew up, sex really mattered. We didn’t have drugs, or many consumables – but we could hump. We’d come of age during the Second War, when it was de rigueurto rock ‘n’ roll with all and sundry. Then came the fifties and sixties, when every car that backfired sounded to me like a ten-megaton detonation. The Cold War didn’t exactly give me the hots, but along with many many others I assumed that what I’d want to do while it all came crashing down was screw with Dr Strangelove.

  That or kill the kid. Or both. Kill the kid while screwing Strangelove – that was the early sixties for me. But really it was kill the kid. ‘When they drop the bomb we’ll have to kill the kid,’ I’d say to David Yaws. ‘You realise that, don’t you’ I’d say it over dinner; in those days everything was over dinner – ‘because even if we survive the bombs they drop on London, we’ll wish we hadn’t. It’ll be the kindest thing to do.’

  ‘Really, Lily,’ he’d reply, shovelling his food up in the English fashion, the fork a little bulldozer, the knife a petite barrier, ‘the Soviets may have walked out of this round of negotiations, but they’ll be back. They know a nuclear war would be madness – just as Eisenhower does.’ Christ! What a sententious prick the man was. He always spoke as if he himself had recently been consulted on the matter in hand: ‘Is that Mr David Yaws, the ecclesiastical historian?’ ‘Speaking.’ ‘I have the Chairman of the Politburo on the telephone for you . . .’ While I could hardly bear to look at a newspaper, Yaws devoured crisis after crisis, confident that none of it would touch him, that he’d sail on by as he always had.

  Yaws had been in the Royal Navy during the war. ‘I was on the North Atlantic convoys’ was the way he used to put it, in lounge bars, golf-club bars, train buffets – wherever he could adopt the correct hands-in–flannel-trouser–pockets pose. But the truth was he’d been at the pushing-off point for the Atlantic convoys. He was the guy who checked they had enough bullets and biscuits or whatever it was they took with them. He was the fucking quartermaster. And he wasn’t out there in the ocean getting his balls frozen, oh no, not Yaws. No, he was tucked up on shore in the Orkney Islands, billeted in a cosy farmhouse with a lonely farmer’s wife. I daresay there are a few middle-aged Orcadians walking around now with Yaws masks on. Amazing that such a slow-witted man should have had such a slick dick.

  It’s the baby talk that made me remember all this, the baby talk I talk with Natty. I always talked too much baby talk with her, which must be why she’s turned out such a baby. I talked it with Charlotte as well, but I think that was to try and make her seem more like a baby and a little less like a scaled-down version of Yaws. One night in May of 1960, Yaws and I went to have dinner with his sister and brother-in–law. Bunny, that was his sister’s name. The whole family had corny nicknames, the world was their nursery. Anyway, Bunny had gone to the trouble of getting us quail. The little birds lay on our plates with their feet clawing at the rim and their heads bisected and laid alongside. This was so we could lick the brains out of them like the sweetmeats they were. I quailed over the quail. The idea of crunching into the eggshell heads revolted me, all the more so because the assembled company were doing
just that, and noisily. I felt like I was in a Kafka story. When I tasted the flesh it seemed fishy to me, and when they weren’t noticing I tucked my brace up under a big, limp lettuce leaf.

  ‘Lily thinks we’ll have to kill Charlotte if they drop the bomb,’ Yaws said, and Bunny and Mr Bunny cackled obligingly. To me it sounded like ‘Lily tinks we’m gonna kill Charlie-warlie when bomb-urns goes off.’ Both baby and, curiously, black talk. When we got home that evening and Yaws turned on the television, the news was being broadcast in baby talk: ‘De Soviets dem do’ wanna negoshyate. Dem angwy. Dem no like West. Dem baddies.’ I told Yaws the newsreader a drunk whose shtick was being so – was talking baby talk, but he paid it no mind. The next day, after Mrs Dale’s Diary, I heard a radio announcement in baby talk, and when Yaws got back from the university he found me telling Charlotte, who was two, that she would have to die – in baby talk, naturally. Virginia Bridgewas round with her black Gladstone before you could say ‘barbiturate’. Or even ‘bar-bar-boo-boo-bituate’.

  It was barbs in those days. Virginia called it the ‘yellow medicine’, but I knew damn well what it was. She kept me lounging on a yellow chemical bed for the next six months, and then I discovered I was pregnant with Natasha. I wonder if it helped usher her into the arms of Morpheus, that amniotic bath of yellow medicine? It helped usher me into even greater anxiety. After David was born, in 1948, I was claustrophobic; after Charlotte was born ten years later I was agoraphobic. But after Natasha was born in 1961 I couldn’t stay in or go outside. I would stand in the back doorway, the baby in my arms, wavering between the awful non-alternatives. I suppose that’s one good thing to be said about dying: it gathers together all those irrational fears and effortlessly trumps them with the Big One. All bets are off. Rien ne va plus.