Waking Up Dead

by Nigel Williams

  ‘George! Have you no feelings at all? Are you dead to the world, George? Why are you just lying there like a toad when this terrible thing has happened?’

  From downstairs, someone – the Mullins woman? – was saying something about the police but here, in the bedroom, things had gone suddenly very quiet indeed. Esmeralda had whipped off the duvet. George knew that she had done this because he was aware, somehow, that it was lying in a tangled heap on the floor, some two yards from the bed.

  This was, in itself, unusual.

  For him to be able to do this, he should, logically, have lifted his head at some kind of angle to the horizontal and yet, in so far as he was aware of anything at all, he would have said that he was still offering an angle of 180 degrees to the plane surface on which he seemed to be fixed. He might have insisted he was lying down but his field of vision seemed to be that of a standing man. ‘Insisted’ was the wrong word. He was just lying down. That was all there was to it. He did not seem to have any choice in the matter.

  No. Not quite. Not quite that.

  ‘George! George!’

  Esmeralda seemed rather less assertive than usual. If George had not known her better, he might have said she was showing some concern for him. This was, he thought, very worrying. They had been married for an interminable length of time, but he had known her for much longer than that. They had met at St Jude’s Church of England Primary School, Putney, at about the same time as the Suez crisis. George had been – or so he told people at dinner parties – seven and a half years old. Esmeralda was nearly nine. She had hit him with the handle of her skipping rope. George had burst into tears. ‘It was all downhill after that…’ George often said, adding his carefully worked-up ‘boom’ laugh to let people know that it was supposed to be funny. He had said it so often that Esmeralda was now occasionally heard to remark that if he did so one more time she would hit him with something a lot harder than a skipping-rope handle.

  She never showed concern.

  ‘George! Oh, my God! George! What is it? George! Oh, Jesus Christ! Oh, no! Oh, fuck! Oh, no! George! George! George!’

  What was the matter with her this morning? She was leaving herself nowhere to go. If she carried on like this she was going to be in full hysterics by elevenses and as crazy as Ophelia in Act Four by lunchtime.

  She seemed to be putting her hand to his face. She did this with the kind of caution that suggested he was about to lift his head from the pillow and bite off one of her fingers. This, thought George, was excessive. No – he did not like being woken up but he was a reasonable man. His mother was dead. He was – in the fullness of time – going to make a real effort to respond to this news.

  Esmeralda’s voice had dropped to a whisper.

  ‘Speak to me, George! Say something, George! Tell me you’re still there, George! Just let me know you’re there! Oh, my God! Oh, darling!’

  Darling! This was obviously very serious indeed.

  ‘Darling! Tell me you’re not dead!’

  George pulled himself together. Or, at least, he had the illusion of doing some of the things associated with that course of action. He was pretty sure he had opened his mouth. He was almost positive he had lifted his left arm and even, perhaps, raised himself to a sitting position in order to let his wife know that, although he was sixty-five and then some, and not, admittedly, in superb physical shape, he was – in his opinion anyway – not actually dead yet.

  ‘Oh, Jesus Christ! Oh, God! Oh, no! Oh, fuck! Oh, for God’s sake! How can they do this? You can’t be! Oh, George! Oh, no!’

  She was in tears now. She was also leaning forwards and trying something she had not attempted for at least fifteen years – an early-morning embrace. It wasn’t a very successful one because, as far as George could tell (although he was beginning to lose confidence in the reliability of his senses), he did not make any kind of response. That was almost the strangest thing to have happened so far in this unpleasantly eventful morning. He usually tried to make some kind of response to a direct physical approach – even if it was only to tell her he had a headache. You had to take it where you could find it at sixty-five.

  His being dead might explain his lack of enthusiasm for a bit of pokey. Maybe he was dead. If he was, sex was liable to be out for the foreseeable future.

  ‘Come! Come up here! Please! Come here now! It’s George! This is unbelievable! I think George is dead too!’

  Chapter Two

  George was pretty sure he wasn’t dead. If he were dead he wouldn’t know about it. If he knew about it – he wasn’t dead. I think therefore I am. The problem seemed to be that almost everyone else in the immediate vicinity seemed to think he was dead. They were pretty emphatic about it. Even if he had found a way of letting them know that he was still in there somewhere, he had the distinct impression that he would have been shouted down fairly rapidly. He became convinced, as the morning wore on, that some of them would have been prepared to whack him over the head with a length of lead piping in order to make their point. He was dead. That was the on dit.

  There was a lot of stuff round his bedside of the ‘How Can You Be Really Sure?’ variety. Everyone seemed to have views – most of them, as far as George could tell, gleaned from extensive viewings of CSI Miami or the adventures of Hercule Poirot. Someone suggested getting a mirror and holding it over his mouth. Someone else (Frigga) obeyed and the thing was done, but the only reward seemed to be a spectacular view of George’s molars. Esmeralda, who seemed alarmingly well up on techniques for establishing morbidity, put her index finger to a vein in his neck, listened intently for signs of activity in his chest and, at one stage, suggested putting a thermometer up his rectum. Nobody – including George – thought this was a very good idea.

  In the end it was Stephen, good old Stephen, who, with customary panache, took on the job of articulating the obvious. ‘What we still need, basically,’ he said, in the gravelly voice that had launched a thousand current-affairs programmes, ‘is a doctor. And we need one fast. Does anyone here know a good, level-headed, reliable local doctor?’

  Esmeralda had started crying again, perhaps out of pique that no one had favoured her thermometer-up-the-arse strategy, but she managed to get out the words ‘Nathaniel’ and ‘Pinker’. Yes, Nathaniel Pinker was a doctor. That was true. He was level-headed to the point of being pretty uninterested in all forms of disease unless they were ones he himself seemed to have contracted. He was utterly, utterly local. But a ‘good’ doctor? No. A ‘reliable’ doctor? Definitely not.

  ‘He’s a family friend,’ sobbed Esmeralda. ‘I’m not sure he could take … you know … seeing poor George in this … in this…’ She paused slightly, then went into a short burst of sobbing, moaning and rocking backwards and forwards that would not have disgraced Hecuba, on the walls of Troy, catching sight of her son’s corpse being dragged backwards through the dust behind Achilles’ chariot. ‘… in this … in this … condition!’

  ‘He’s a doctor,’ said Stephen, who seemed now to have taken charge of the proceedings. ‘He will have seen any number of dead bodies.’

  He had indeed, thought George, and many of them had been put in that state by his own lack of diagnostic skills. That being said, he reflected grimly, this was one of the few occasions when Nat was not going to be able to do serious damage to either him or his mother. They were both, as far as George could make out, beyond the reach of clinical error.

  As it turned out, of course, George could not have been more wrong.

  The Mullins woman and Beryl Vickers had appeared on the landing, within striking distance of the bedroom door. They were both doing a lot of the anxious quivering George had often noticed as a feature of women of a certain age. Their anxiety was, however, at the moment anyway, of a rather general kind. They could have been fretting about catching a train or the non-arrival of their old-age pensions. Even the Mullins woman’s large, knobbly features darted this way and that, giving her the look of a chicken searching th
e ground for uneaten seeds.

  Neither of them liked George. Mullins had once asked him why he was so fat and he had, in return, asked her how she’d got her designer stubble looking so authentic. Vickers was a craftier number – but she had given George quite a few peculiar looks over the years.

  ‘Somebody should be with Jessica,’ Mullins was saying. ‘I can’t bear to think of her being all alone down there.’

  How about moi? thought George. Do I have no need of company? And, if we’re thinking along those lines, what difference does it make to either of us? You could play poker on our exposed bellies if you so cared, couldn’t you? Aren’t we … er … dead?

  But Beryl Vickers and the Mullins woman were tiptoeing away to ‘be with Jessica’. From the look of them, thought George, it would not be long before they were both even more completely with his mother in whatever place God had chosen for dead and blameless women. Where do you go when you die? It was a question that had often occurred to him. It had never seemed likely that the answer might be 22 Hornbeam Crescent, Putney.

  Well, he had always told Esmeralda he didn’t want to move. ‘They’ll have to carry me out of Hornbeam Towers,’ he used to say at dinner parties. It looked as if, for once, George’s table talk had been bang on the money.

  There now seemed to be two emerging factions among the unusually large number of people who had stopped over last night in the hope of celebrating Jessica’s ninety-ninth birthday this afternoon. The Let’s-Be-With-Jessica movement, spearheaded by Beryl Vickers and the Mullins woman, had an early recruit in the form of Frigga. Frigga had never been particularly keen on her older brother’s company and trekking upstairs to be in the room with his corpse seemed a pretty low priority, as far as she was concerned.

  ‘I’m going to see if Beryl’s all right,’ she called, from downstairs, in her high, plaintive voice. ‘I’m worried about them. They were so looking forward to Mummy’s birthday. And I’ve made goulash.’

  This news brought forth more tears all round – a particularly appropriate response to Frigga’s goulash. His middle sister had no real aptitude for anything, apart from looking distressed, but ‘lack of aptitude’ didn’t really begin to describe her cooking. The red peppers and onions looked as if they had been butchered by some vegetarian Jack the Ripper, while the paprika lay in wait in dark, dangerous clouds in the gravy, like mist from the Red Planet. Sometimes, George remembered, she put beetroot in it …

  ‘I’ll call Nathaniel!’ Stephen was saying.

  Where were his sons? Why were they not rushing in to get a good look at his corpse? He’d understand if the lads decided to give it a miss. George liked his sons. One of his main ambitions in life was to spare them trouble; he would like them to remember him as he was last night, well, perhaps in the earlier part of last night. Had he chundered? Had he been singing Irish songs?

  ‘We’re back, motherfuckers!’ said Barry, down in the hall. The front door was opened and slammed, hard.

  They must have been out, thought George. Buying cigarettes?

  ‘Sssh! Please! Sssh! This is a House of Mourning!’ said the Mullins woman.

  ‘We know that, motherfucker,’ said Maurice, who, like his brother and George, enjoyed making the Mullins woman feel uncomfortable. ‘Which is why we come here as rarely as possible.’

  ‘Except,’ said Barry, ‘when our granny – who can’t even remember our motherfucking names – is being, like, ninety-nine! Hey!’

  George heard the rapid footwork, double high-five and loud whoop associated with the Belly Bump. Both George’s sons – who were about as close to twins as it was possible to be without actually being twins – were fat. George was fat. Barry was fat. Maurice was fat. Every male in his particular bit of the Pearmain family was fat. Not grotesquely or unpleasantly fat. Not wobbling or drooping fat. They were springily, energetically plump, a reminder of a time when people were not expected to look as if they were suffering from a wasting disease. There was a tautness in the Pearmain bellies that gave them the look of a highly sprung mattress, and when George’s two thirty-something boys were, as they seemed to be at the moment, pleased with the world and their place in it, they bumped bellies.

  George could hear one of his granddaughters, Bella, laugh. She liked the Belly Bump. The lads must have taken their girls round the corner.

  ‘Your grandmother,’ the Mullins woman was saying, in dramatic tones, ‘is dead. She may have been murdered. Your father is also dead. He is dead in his bed. We don’t yet know why he is dead.’

  George heard her hissed aside to Beryl Vickers: ‘He drank enough!’

  Neither Barry nor Maurice seemed to have worked out any kind of response to this news. At least, unlike everyone else in the place, they were not sobbing or trying to dash up the stairs to give him a last embrace. Chips off the old block, he thought, with grim satisfaction. I raised them tough. They are tough. They are estate agents of whom I can be genuinely proud.

  After a while he thought he heard Maurice say, ‘Shit,’ and emit a long, low whistle.

  After an even longer while, Barry added, ‘Bad call. Christ. Bad call.’

  That’s my boys! thought George.

  Many of George’s friends often asked, with an edge of malice, if his children were named after the Bee Gees. He would tell them that Maurice was named after the French singer who had given their father so much pleasure with the song ‘Sank ‘Eavern Fur Leedle Gurls’ while Barry was named after the eponymous hero of Thackeray’s masterpiece. If they didn’t know what ‘eponymous’ meant, or that George thought Barry Lyndon was Thackeray’s best novel, they could, in George’s view, just go and fuck themselves.

  Barry Lyndon, George thought, had just the right combination of greed, charm and misplaced ambition to serve as a role model for youth seeking to survive the modern world and, in fact, he was happy to see that both his sons had these qualities in spades.

  Esmeralda had not deserted him, although George was beginning to wish she would find something to do other than sit by his cadaver looking miserable. She was still doing the rocking backwards and forwards but, to her credit, she had eased back on the sobbing and the sighing. ‘Oh, darling George,’ she was saying, ‘oh, darling, darling George. Oh, my darling. What has happened to you?’

  ‘I am dead, motherfucker!’ George wanted to say, but, of course, as a direct result of the validity of his intended response, found it impossible to get it out there in front of the public. What had happened to him happened to a lot of people. What was so unusual about it? He had been a bank manager. He had retired. He had drunk a lot. He had eaten even more. He had smoked the odd cigar. And now he was dead. Get with the programme.

  She began to do something George instantly recognized as ‘keening’. Wikipedia, which had, until recently, been George’s sole source of knowledge about everything, described this as an improvised vocal lament, usually by a female, over a body awaiting burial. He wasn’t, surely, quite at that point yet, was he? Wasn’t Esmeralda getting a bit ahead of herself? She was, thank Christ, not yet at the stage of listing the genealogy of the deceased, praising his achievements or bemoaning the woeful state of those left behind – but she looked as if she might get around to that at any moment.

  Women, thought George, were extraordinary. Only a few minutes ago she had been telling him he was a worthless sod who had no right to live and now here she was, carrying on as if the world had just lost a man who had had the edge on Mozart, Galileo or Charles Dickens. She was, he reflected, behaving not unlike his mum had behaved when confronted with the human remains of George Pearmain Senior in that side-room at Putney Hospital thirty-odd years ago. And Jessica – when her husband was alive – had been unstinting in her criticism of him. ‘I packed a bag many a time,’ she used to say. ‘Many a time I packed a bag.’

  Death, in the short term anyway, seemed to improve people’s standing. Maybe George was about to look forward to a few weeks of universal praise. Certainly, from the way Esmeralda was
behaving, you would have thought no one had ever stiffed before.

  What was it the Mullins woman had said? George’s mother had been murdered. That couldn’t possibly be right. Who would want to murder Mrs Jessica Pearmain? Apart from Esmeralda. And Stephen. And George. And that bloke who was married to the woman who ‘cleaned’ for her.

  ‘Mabel does so much more than clean,’ the old bat used to say. ‘She’s a personal friend.’

  Yeah. A personal friend who lifted her on and off the lavatory and listened to her endless attempts to explain the plot of The Sound of Music (‘It’s about this very nice Nazi aristocrat with lovely blond-haired children, who is being hunted by some bad Nazis!’) and who, every third Saturday, lifted her off her sofa and let her stagger round the garden to look at the lovely birdies.

  Mabel had been mentioned in Jessica’s will, in all her wills, and there were a few of them. Mabel was a person, who, in George’s view, would have had no compunction whatsoever about murdering an old lady in order to get her hands on a few thousand quid. How had they done it? Had she been stabbed? Strangled? Gassed? Poisoned? And why did Mullins seem so confident about the fact that George’s mum had been illegally offed? She had always been pretty emphatic about the fact that Jessica was being done down by her family (‘You never go to see her George. ‘She loves you George. Show her you love her’). Perhaps Mullins’s love for Mrs Pearmain Senior was so intense that she felt the need to deprive the world of a presence too exquisite to bear before the old bat got any closer to three figures.

  ‘Old bat’ was not a nice phrase to use about one’s mother. She was dead. But, then, so was George, it seemed. They were, at long last, even. The living were the ones who had to respect the dead. He was relieved of responsibility.