Waking Up Dead

by Nigel Williams

As if she had intuited this, Esmeralda had started to use the kind of hushed tones adopted by English middle-class agnostics in French cathedrals. ‘I’m going now, George. I’m going, darling. But I’m coming back. Oh, George. I can’t believe this is happening. How does God let something like this happen?’

  With remarkable ease, thought George. Sixty-five-year-old man dies in bed in Putney. So what? Teenage girls die of cancer every day. Thousands of men, women and children have been shot or blown up or tortured in Syria or Iraq. Any number of Jews in the Holocaust. God could do a lot better than one English pensioner if he really tried. He watched Esmeralda lift herself, heavily, from the bed and trudge off to the landing, presumably to get her sons up to speed on the body count at 22 Hornbeam Crescent, Putney. Her shoulders were bowed. Her big head drooped. She looked, as so often, like a refugee on her way out of a bombed city with all her worldly possessions packed into one shabby suitcase. That this bore no relation whatsoever to the real facts of Esmeralda’s life – a reasonably comfortable childhood in the country as the only daughter of a GP and his neurotic wife (both now, thankfully, in the same position as George), an Oxford education and a successful career as a teacher – did not inhibit the curious compassion she seemed to provoke in her husband.

  He felt sorry for her. Why was this? He was the one who was fucking dead.

  There were other things to wonder at. In the literature dealing with souls that had left the body – at least, the bits of it George had encountered – those who had known the pleasure of out-of-body experiences recalled floating around on the ceiling looking down at themselves with detached compassion. There were a whole lot of other things involved as well – a great deal of white light, a feeling of deep peace and a general sense that the afterlife had been designed by the guys who had brought you Apple computers.

  This did not seem to be happening to George. The things that made him what he was did not seem, at the moment, to be much in evidence at 22 Hornbeam Crescent – but he was pretty sure his soul was in the place where he usually looked for it (and usually failed to find it), i.e. inside George Pearmain. He did, however, have the uneasy feeling that it was not going to be there for much longer. At any moment, he told himself, he could be residing in thrilling regions of thick ribbed ice or rolling down a hill in some heavily spiked barrel towards a large bucket of shit.

  Dante, thought George, grimly, what a tosser! If he’d had anything remotely right about what lay in store for mortals such as George Pearmain, the next few years were going to be tough.

  In spite of the obvious dangers of his situation, though, he seemed to feel remarkably calm. He was ahead of the game. He was certainly much less anxious than he had been last night. Maybe he was still alive. Or, if he was dead, he was only technically dead. Maybe in a few minutes he would be up and about and annoying people. Although he had drunk nearly three bottles of Frigga’s parsnip wine last night, he did not have the slightest trace of a hangover. This not being able to move business wasn’t such a big deal. If he’d had a plan for the day, it had probably involved lying on his own in a darkened room for long periods. Which seemed to be what his family had in mind for him. Death was a pretty sure fire way of dealing with a hangover.

  An American insurance proverb, first heard long ago, floated across his mind: ‘Death is Nature’s way of telling us to slow down.’ George found, to his surprise, that he was laughing. He did not have any of the usual symptoms associated with laughter – spasm, hiccup or sneeze; what he felt was the essence of laughter, an intense perception of the absurdity and impermanence of things that was, if anything, more pleasurable and easier to savour than any chuckle, grin or snigger he had known when alive.

  His hearing was pin sharp, too. Downstairs he actually managed to hear Esmeralda whispering to Barry and Maurice, ‘It’s awful. Awful. Awful. First George’s mother. Then George. What is happening?’

  George wasn’t sure how she could be so precise about the times of death. Maybe she was sticking to the order in which she had discovered the bodies. Barry, as usual, was asking for details. He always looked after the details at Pearmain and Pearmain. His brother took care of the bigger questions – like where they went for lunch.

  ‘Someone broke into the house and attacked Granny savagely,’ said Esmeralda.

  ‘Was it Granny they were after?’ said Barry. ‘Were they … like … perverts with a thing about old people?’

  ‘We think,’ replied Esmeralda, ‘that it was a burglary that went badly wrong. Someone has smashed a pane in the french windows. And, of course, George forgot to close the security grille.’

  Aha! thought George. The honeymoon period is over. Not more than a few hours dead and my closing minutes on the planet are already being scrutinized for errors of judgement.

  ‘Was Dad murdered?’ Maurice was saying, in a smaller voice than George was accustomed to hearing from him. He felt something that was close to a pang as he heard his younger son sound something he very rarely was: serious.

  ‘We don’t think so,’ George heard Stephen say, in his Refugees in Africa voice, compassionate but tough, as opposed to his Many Dead in Libya voice, angry and confused. ‘We think your dad just died in the night. We have no idea why. It could be his heart. It could be his lungs. Or his brain. He may have had a massive stroke, a lesion in his brain that just whacked him out of court in seconds. As if a bomb hit him. I saw a guy hit by a bomb in Iraq. One minute he was there. Next minute he was quite definitely not. He was in thousands of pieces all over the walls of this mosque. It’s a bit like that.’

  George was pretty sure his brother had never been to Iraq or, if he had, it was for five minutes in the Green Zone, but so decisive and clipped was Stephen’s voice that it was hard to believe he had not seen a great many things that made his older brother stiffing in the marital bed look pretty small beer.

  ‘He wouldn’t have known a thing about it,’ went on Stephen, even more decisively, ‘if he was asleep. Which he was. He was spark out. He was pissed. Last night he was pissed. I was pissed. We were all pissed. He went to bed. He passed out and, you know, wham, bam, thank you, ma’am. Kapow! Kerchunga! Cheerio!’

  That was, thought George, supposed to comfort them. It did not seem to have that effect on Esmeralda, who sounded as if she was now gearing up for a full-scale musical account of George’s lineage and achievements, whatever they might be. It was hard to tell what effect Stephen’s latest piece-to-invisible-camera was having on Barry and Maurice.

  They regarded their uncle with a kind of amused distrust that George had once thought normal in nephew/uncle relationships but now thought might be something to do with his own cautious but provisional affection for his younger and (admit it, George) more successful brother.

  ‘Pinker knows his stuff,’ Stephen was saying in crisp, purposeful tones. ‘He’s a good doctor. A capable man. I mean, I’ve never been treated by him but he always seems a level-headed bloke to me. Which is what we need right now. There’s no sense in running round like headless chickens. Even if that’s what we feel like doing.’

  Esmeralda started to howl. Perhaps, thought George, as a form of protest at having to listen to a man she referred to – often to his face – as a pompous bastard. Her tears had absolutely no effect on Stephen but, then, for as long as they had known each other, nothing either said or did had any effect on the other.

  ‘I know what you’re going through, Esmeralda,’ went on Stephen, dropping his voice slightly and sounding much as he did whenever he had to announce the news of a bomb blast or major road accident on the BBC. ‘Lulu had a dodgy smear some years back. I went through hell.’ He paused, very briefly. Then – in case there was any danger of interruption – added, ‘Death is so final. It is the hardest thing we have to deal with. I went through this when my father died. I just couldn’t believe I was never going to see him again but, of course, I didn’t.’

  Esmeralda was now, George felt, definitely keening.

  ‘Today of all
days,’ Stephen was saying. ‘Mother’s birthday. My God! A day of celebration. A large-scale celebration. Of Mother’s ninety-ninth. And not only is she dead but people are coming to the house, including Lulu, of course, who is, even as we speak, on her way to…’ A note of genuine panic came into his voice: ‘Lulu! Lulu’s coming! Oh, my God! My God! I’d better phone her!’

  Then, abandoning all pretence of having been in charge of the proceedings, George’s younger brother started to prod furiously at his mobile. George could hear the ping of the keys. Suddenly he stopped. ‘No. I’d better email her. She prefers email. She hates voicemail. Email would be more appropriate. Email it is.’

  George could not quite understand why there should be any etiquette about the way in which the news of his – and indeed his mother’s – death should be circulated. Email. Text. Voicemail. The odd black-edged note. As far as he was concerned they were welcome to rush out into Hornbeam Crescent and scream it at the June sky. Still, Stephen’s concern for his wife’s feelings was touching. OK, he seemed to think her peace of mind was more important than his brother croaking or his mother being bludgeoned to death, but you had to get your priorities right, did you not?

  George could hear his brother talking to his over-intelligent phone. Stephen’s latest machine was too elaborate to be called a mobile and worthy of a far more laudatory adjective than ‘smart’. It was a kind of Jeeves, coping with all of Stephen’s many, many administrative requirements. Including the well-being of the very scary woman who had been George’s sister-in-law for more than twenty years.

  ‘Is Lulu free?’ he heard Stephen say. ‘Because my mother is dead!’

  ‘Lulu is not dead,’ said Stephen’s phone, in tones as almost totally drained of emotion as its owner’s. ‘Lulu is in Basingstoke.’

  ‘My mother,’ said Stephen, slowly, ‘is dead.’

  ‘Your mother is not dead,’ said Stephen’s phone. ‘It is her birthday. You must go there. Now.’

  ‘Shut up, Jacqui!’ said Stephen, in a voice that indicated, for the first time, some of the tension coiled within him. ‘My mother is dead!’

  ‘I am sorry for your loss,’ said Stephen’s phone. ‘Would you like a list of reliable florists?’

  ‘I want,’ said Stephen, ‘to send Lulu an email. I want you to send her an email.’

  ‘Email,’ said Stephen’s phone, ‘is a method of exchanging digital messages whose invention is sometimes credited to Howard Proez of Boston in 1964, but in fact is—’

  Before it could go any further into the controversy surrounding this – to George anyway – no longer relevant invention, the bell rang. Esmeralda thundered towards the door and George heard the unmistakable tones of the man who was his friend, his doctor, and now the person with the task of letting the world know how, why and when G. Pearmain had died.

  Let’s hope, he reflected, he’s better with dead patients than live ones.

  Chapter Three

  Nathaniel Pinker – or ‘Dr Nat’ as he was known in Putney – was, according to Sue Pankworth, Esmeralda’s semi-friend from Roehampton, ‘the handsomest doctor in SW15’. George had never had the opportunity to examine any of the other male doctors in his postal area – though Percy Lewens from the East Sheen borders was widely concerned fairly doable – but he was prepared to concede, and even to look a little proud, that he was on close terms with a hot sexual property.

  Nat had the look of a man sculpted out of high-quality toilet soap. His dark, close-clustered curls suggested one of the racier Greek gods and his upper body was generally considered to be something into which any red blooded woman would be keen to sink her teeth.

  ‘It’s his lips,’ Geraldine Fairclough-Henley had hissed to Esmeralda at her fortieth wedding anniversary party. ‘They’re sort of bee-sting lips. And when his little tongue peeps out between them you just want him to…’ At which she waggled her behind in a way George had found disturbing in a sixty-two-year-old grandmother.

  ‘I’m here,’ George heard him say, in the deep, reassuring voice that had so confidently announced so many wrong diagnoses. ‘I’m here.’

  Esmeralda had stopped howling. George was never quite sure how far she trusted Nat. If only because he had spent so many hours watching her listen to his wife on the subject of his many crimes. George didn’t want to know most of the things he had been told about a man he’d thought of as a friend. Was it relevant to their relationship for George to know that Dr Nat liked to be given a hand job in the shower? Did he care that the man thought UKIP were ‘the party of the future’? Veronica Pinker was absolutely entitled to consider her husband ‘boring, boring, boring’, but George did not wish to know this. Or that Nat often pleasured her in front of Channel 4 News.

  Esmeralda had been known to use the B word about her friend’s husband, but that, as far as George could make out, did not stop her fancying him or – on this occasion anyway – accepting comfort from the man.

  ‘I was shouting at him…’ George heard her snuffle, ‘… and calling him a toad … and the next thing he was dead…’

  Let that be a lesson to you, thought George.

  ‘One minute I was abusing him! A minute later he…’

  ‘I know,’ said Nat. ‘It happens all the time.’

  ‘It does,’ sniffed Esmeralda. ‘I’m always calling him a toad.’

  ‘Death takes absolutely no account of our feelings,’ Nat was saying, in a low, soothing voice. George was almost certain he was enfolding Esmeralda in his well-toned arms. His voice was testament to the fact that what he lacked in medical knowledge he more than made up for in bedside manner. ‘It just comes along and changes everything like a … like a…’ he hunted for a way to complete the simile ‘… like a … rhinoceros barging into the furniture.’

  There was a silence. Then—

  ‘I understand,’ said Nat, slowly and carefully, ‘that some bastard of a burglar broke in and battered George’s mum to death, then went upstairs and killed him in his bed.’

  ‘That,’ said Stephen, crisply, ‘may be how it happened. I’ve called the police. They’ll send whoever they think is appropriate. We know two people are dead. My mother was battered to death. There are signs of a break-in. George seems to have died in the night, as far as we can see. Is there any relationship between the two deaths? Why did they happen at the same time? Did they happen at the same time?’

  He stopped. Stephen’s pieces to camera had been famous for his way with rhetorical questions. It wasn’t, however, just the questions that made you think he was in the middle of a filmed report for some long gone TV news programme. He started to pace up and down the hall, doing the slicing-the-air gesture with his right hand that had made him, about thirty years ago, almost famous. He finished the broadcast in fine style.

  ‘We do not yet know. The police will have a view on that. As they do. And you will take a view from the medical perspective. Hopefully, at some stage, we will reach some kind of conclusion, although God alone knows what it will be!’

  There was a long silence while Nat absorbed this information. Then he said, ‘Which one would you like me to look at first?’

  ‘I’m not sure it makes any difference,’ said Stephen, in the sort of voice that gave the impression he would have enjoyed a full and democratic debate about whether it did. ‘They’re both dead. As far as we can tell. But we’re not doctors. You are a doctor. We’re in your hands, old boy.’

  Another long pause. Then Nat replied, ‘I think I’ll take a look at George first. He was my friend. If there’s any chance at all that he’s not dead I’d like to, you know, give him the benefit of the doubt!’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Esmeralda. ‘Thank you, darling Nat.’

  Well, get a move on, thought George. Don’t spend all day talking about it. I’m only one floor up, guys. And, while we’re at it, what’s with this ‘darling Nat’ business?

  ‘George was sixty-five,’ went on Nat, who still did not seem over-keen on establishing whether
G. Pearmain was or was not clinically dead. ‘Mrs Pearmain was ninety-nine. George had a few more years left. Or has, possibly. If he’s still alive. Let’s hope so. Let’s hope to God that is the case. There are conditions that simulate death. Catalepsy, for example. It’s a kind of trance.’

  ‘George was quite often in a kind of trance,’ said Esmeralda. ‘For quite long periods he just used to sit there and stare at the wall. I was quite often critical of him because of it.’ Suddenly she began to howl in a spectacular fashion.

  ‘Edgar Allan Poe had it,’ said Stephen, keen, as always, to show off his stock of cultural references.

  ‘Sometimes,’ said Nat, who had, George was fairly sure, never heard of Edgar Allan Poe, ‘the lack of a pulse, or the apparent lack of a pulse, does not imply that death is present.’

  Neither he nor Stephen nor, indeed, any of them seemed to be showing any sign of heading up to the first floor and trying a bit of emergency resuscitation. So far, George reflected bitterly, no one had even thought to whack him on the chest. What was needed here was a bit of action. He might have been better pegging out in the Putney Leisure Centre – a place well supplied with defibrillators – rather than the master bedroom at 22 Hornbeam Crescent.

  Finally he heard the sound of Nat’s expensive leather shoes hitting the staircase with almost grudging slowness. As he came closer and closer to where George was lying, he continued to improve the moment with snippets of medical knowledge. Snippets, thought George glumly, were about as far as Nat went, these days.

  ‘Verifying death is not easy,’ George heard him say, in his deep, evenly accented tones. ‘In 1905, for example, a French doctor was so keen to be absolutely sure his patient was actually dead that he inserted a needle into the patient’s heart. It turned out he was alive. Well, he had been alive until the doctor had stuck a needle in his heart but, you know, you have to admire the thoroughness.’

  Esmeralda sobbed.

  ‘But don’t worry, darling…’ Darling! ‘… I won’t be doing any of that. There are tests I can do. It may be that George has had a stroke. He didn’t take much exercise. He was a drinker. He smoked cigars. He was overweight. It’s amazing he’s got this far, really.’