Waking Up Dead

by Nigel Williams

  Stephen pushed past Lulu to confront his mother’s former carer. Some of the hostility he had clearly felt towards Lulu but seemed frightened to express came out in his tone, the one he had used when trying to shut up unruly panellists on the current-affairs show he had hosted in days gone by. ‘Look, Mabel,’ he said. ‘None of us are very happy about the decision my mother seems to have made, without consulting any of us – except, possibly, George – but in your case I would remind you that you were well paid for what you did. I am fairly well known in my business. I am known. In the media world. If I could have earned as much as I do taking my mother on and off the lavatory perhaps I would have done it. We live in a business environment, Mabel. Money is the bottom line. If you did not want to do what you did, you need not have done it. We would have found someone else.’

  ‘Someone black, prob’ly,’ said Mabel, with utter contempt. ‘One of them Similians. With ’oom you is so sympathetic. You never bin down the fuckin’ Social, ’ave you, and seen ’em claimin’ benefit? Benefit! Loadsa benefit! I never got no benefit. I got nice middle-class people like you and George an’ yore mum promisin’ me a nice little windersill. Then she goes and ’ands it to that lesbian! You go down the Social, mate, an’ take a look at them Similians spittin’ on the English white workin’-class people such as myself. And now she gives it to that fuckin’ lesbian an’ ’er mate.’

  Unknown to Dawkins, Mullins and Vickers had come out from the kitchen and were standing directly behind her.

  ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if they did away wiv ’er,’ she went on. ‘They spit on decent people like myself and I spit on them.’ With which she spat juicily on the first step of the stair carpet.

  Lulu took another drink of Chardonnay and pushed past Stephen. For a moment George thought she was about to hit Mabel, but then, in a rare moment of solidarity with Esmeralda, she confined herself to saying, ‘You are spitting on Jessica’s daughter-in-law’s carpet, Mabel – and, if you have any points to make to Audrey Mullins, I suggest you make them to her directly. She is standing right behind you.’

  Lulu added a smile of staggering insincerity in the vague direction of Mullins and Vickers, who were both clutching glasses of lemonade. Mullins did not acknowledge this attempt to placate her. Drawing the codicil from her handbag she hissed at everyone in her line of vision, ‘None of you understood Jessica. Jessica was a saint. A saint. She and Vickers and I went walking in the Lake District. Just a stick and a bag and a sandwich and a beret. That is all you need.’

  All you need for what? thought George. He had, from time to time, accused his mother, in a jocular kind of way, of being a lesbian. She had not seemed in any way offended by the accusation, simply taking it as another example of her elder boy’s unhealthy obsession with sex. She had confessed to reading The Well of Loneliness as a young woman and finding it ‘disturbing’, although she refused, in spite of pressure from George, to amplify this remark. She was a woman whose primary friendships and loyalties were to her own sex. It was possible, he decided (although was this just another example of his wanting to think well of a woman who had, it was true, favoured him at the expense of her other children?), that Jessica really had thought Mullins would see fair play done because Stephen or certainly Lulu might have made sure that most of the money came to them. There was no way of knowing that now – or, indeed, of working out what Mullins and Vickers were going to do with twelve million smackers.

  ‘She loved you all,’ Mullins went on. ‘She was a wonderful mother. She believed in the things all our generation believed in.’

  ‘Fascism?’ said Stephen, with a flash of his wittier, pre-Lulu self. ‘The Anglican Church? The British Empire?’

  ‘Fresh air,’ said Mullins, to a determined sequence of nods from her friend. ‘Fresh air. We had no television. Jessica was the first person in her street to have a telephone. It was kept in the hall behind a green baize curtain and people came in to look at it. There were no motorways. No internet. You have no idea. No idea.’

  It was possible, thought George, that she was going to give the dosh to the National Trust. Although things were not supposed to get any worse when you were deceased, this could be a sign they were about to do just that. The National Trust! The Wehrmacht in green wellies. He would rather Stephen and Lulu got their hands on it – which, from the look of them, was exactly what they were about to try to do. Lulu was still smirking at Vickers, clearly having decided she had a better chance with the more passive of the two women, but Mullins was already turning away and heading back into the kitchen.

  ‘We’re going to get some fresh air,’ she said, with some severity. ‘I think we all need clear heads at this moment.’

  Mabel Dawkins, who really was very drunk indeed, followed her. Stephen and Lulu stayed in the hall.

  ‘Well,’ said Lulu, ‘that was telling them, wasn’t it? When in doubt, Stevie, pick on the cleaner.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ said Stephen. There was a pleading note in his question, as if he thought Lulu might be about to dash into the garden and start to strangle Mullins and her partner.

  ‘I’m going to get this sorted,’ she said. ‘I’m going to have a word with the Mullins woman and let her know that, as immediate family, we have certain rights, certain legal rights, in Jessica’s estate, and I for one am not going to lie back and let her give it all to a dogs’ home!’

  No one, thought George had, so far, mentioned a dogs’ home. Did Lulu know something he did not?

  Lulu shouldered her way into the kitchen. Stephen stood there for a moment peering at his hands. He flexed the fingers. He seemed surprised they responded to him. Then he sat heavily on the first step of George’s staircase and took another long swig of the whisky. ‘Jesus!’ he said to himself, quietly. ‘Oh, Jesus Christ! What have I done?’

  George had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. After a while his brother got up and wandered back into the kitchen. Perhaps he, too, was in search of fresh air. George thought he ought to go and follow some, or all, of his principal suspects but just as he was about to do so Esmeralda came in and sat down exactly where Stephen had been sitting. Her eyes were red but she had not been crying. She looked blank, empty, and as if she wished all these people would go away. She had made them sandwiches and now she wished they would all go away. She had often, George reflected, felt like that at parties they had given when he had been alive.

  Was he condemned to spend all eternity in 22 Hornbeam Crescent? Was he not to be spared the sight of her growing older and more infirm? Of listening helplessly to Barry and Maurice argue about whether or not to put her into a home? Was he going to round the corner of the living room in 2040 to be greeted by Esmeralda’s ghost? Would the two of them have to gnash their teeth as newcomers painted over Esmeralda’s carefully chosen wallpaper and put in a panic room to replace George’s study?

  He fought off the idea of eternal death – almost as depressing as eternal life – and tried to savour the moment. To be glad that he could still see the woman he had loved in a way he could never have loved anyone else. He must make the most of such moments. Like hair and nails growing post mortem, George’s consciousness had lingered on a while but at any moment it could be snuffed out for – of this he was sure – it hung by an even finer thread than had his happy, undistinguished life.

  They had been, on the whole, happy, he and Esmeralda. If he could make his dead mother’s hair move or occupy, however briefly, the living body of his brother, surely he could let his widow know he was still there. That he was not gone for good. That he could see her – even if he could not touch or taste or smell her – and that he still loved her, had always loved her, loved her more now he was dead than when he was alive and had been so easily distracted by the vulgar business of surviving. By things such as … er … Biskiborne.

  His betrayal of Esmeralda still caused him pain, however long ago it was. If only he had told her about it. At least then she would have had the choice to st
ay with him or leave. As it was she was carrying around a false memory. A memory of a good man who, whatever his faults, had always been true to her. He had not been true to her. Or to anyone. Not to his youthful ideals of justice for all and a world not dominated by money and greed – the world that his children had inherited precisely because of the laziness and moral cowardice of his generation.

  He sat next to her on the first step of the stair. ‘Esmeralda,’ he said softly, ‘it’s me. It’s George.’

  She didn’t look up. She was staring at the floor, an untouched glass of wine in her hand. They had quite a large house, and after the children had left he would quite often call out to her and find she had not heard. As he had often done in life, he carried on anyway, as if she could hear him.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I don’t think I can have been an easy person to live with. I didn’t listen. For more than forty years you gave me good advice and I never listened. I didn’t appreciate you. I didn’t realize how lucky I was. You were…’

  He was about to use words like ‘honest’ and ‘faithful’ and ‘sexy’ and ‘wise’ and ‘passionate’ and, most of all, ‘true’ because that seemed to sum her up, but he knew he was never going to say them now as he had never done in life. There is never enough saying you love the people you love and never enough of the circumstances that don’t make such declarations sound false or self-seeking or just plain cheesy. And, for sure, thought George, saying them when you’re dead is completely fucking pointless.

  ‘Oh, George,’ said Esmeralda. ‘Oh, George! George! George!’

  That seemed to sum it up really. Tristan and Isolde. Romeo and Juliet. George and Esmeralda. He was dead. That made it really romantic.

  She got up wearily and clumped her way back into the kitchen. When George caught up with her, he saw that the party seemed to have got larger and more boisterous since it had begun. Did people gatecrash wakes? It rather looked as if they had been doing just that. In the far corner he spotted a couple in slightly modified mourning outfits. His suit and her dress were not quite black and the pair looked as if they might be funeral groupies, people who donned black ties and went out looking for free sandwiches in the homes of the recently bereaved.

  It was only when he noticed the size of the feet that George realized these two might be part of a police operation. Hobday, who had been talking to Esmeralda with tact and a gentle sympathy that George really appreciated, moved away from her and made his way over to them. He spoke very quietly to the woman, who, only now, George saw was none other than DC Purves. He had not recognized her.

  ‘Something,’ he said, ‘is going to go off soon. They are mullahed beyond belief. Try to keep an eye on our suspects.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Particularly Mr Pearmain’s brother. We had the results of the bank checks earlier today. It seems there is a very big hole in young Stephen’s account. Do not let him out of your sight.’

  ‘Will do, Boss,’ said Purves. ‘What about Dawkins?’

  ‘I like her for it as well as I ever did,’ said Hobday. ‘Keep a close eye on her. It seems she has quite a lot of previous. A brother who fell under a lorry in suspicious circumstances.’

  Suspects! Mabel Dawkins’s behaviour was, thought George, enough to qualify her as head of that particular field. She had opened the french windows and was leaning against them, drinking something straight out of the bottle that George recognized as a 1961 Pomerol he had been keeping for a Christmas he would never see. It did not seem to impair the flavour, as far as she was concerned.

  The rain was coming in against the windows in great spiky gusts blown across the large, wild garden, lashing the fruit trees, drumming against the wooden walls of the shed and rattling across the surface of the pond with the efficiency of a Gatling gun. At the far end of the garden, past the line of fruit trees, the poplars and the waste ground beyond them were all but blotted out by the sweeping field of water.

  ‘Rain on!’ she shouted out to the darkened garden. ‘Rain on, Macbeth! What do I care? I bin thrown out like a used condominium. What do I know abaht the finer thingsa life, eh? All I’m good for is wipin’ your mum’s bum!’ She leaned out into the darkness, feeling the rain on her face. The late-September light was almost gone. On the distant horizon of the suburb, lightning flickered as more rain came and the noise of the thunder grew ever closer. Mabel staggered out on to the patio, waving George’s bottle of Pomerol at the furious waters and the darkening sky.

  ‘Blow, winds, and crack your arse’oles!’ she yelled. ‘Fart, winds! Fart! She used ter fart. I’ve never ’eard anyone fart as long or as loud as the late Mrs Pearmain. I used to ’ide be’ind the livin’-room door an’ watch ’er. Long, loud, crackly farts. That was ’er. For all ’er piano teachin’. She wasn’t too posh to ’ave wind, was she? Wind! Wind! Wind!’

  She was in the middle of the patio now, swinging George’s precious bottle of claret round her head. For a moment he thought she was about to hurl it up at the windows of the house but then she thought better of it. She peered myopically at the label on the bottle, uttered three words, with supreme contempt, then turned on her heel and marched off into the dark spaces of the garden. ‘Beaujolais!’ she said. ‘Fuckin’ Beaujolais!’

  Stephen went to the door and, quietly, closed it. George noticed DC Purves move over to him as he walked back into the press of people, now all, as far as George could make out, incredibly drunk. You would have thought that a person without substance, such as he was, would have found it easy to move through the packed crowd but that did not seem to be the case. As George forced his way through, he seemed to be brought up uncomfortably close to each sweating, shouting face and, though this was not, of course, possible, to be pushed and jostled by those who had come to pay their respects to him in a way that was thoroughly unpleasant.

  Maybe his increasing control over the world around him was having side effects. Or, rather, perhaps the control was merely a symptom of something rather more sinister. Maybe soon he would start to have sensations – heat, cold, the air on his face. Maybe he was about to live again! The thought of being reborn was frightening. Perhaps he had already been reborn. Or, at least, was moving towards being involved with something along those lines. The Buddha, from what little George could remember of him, had had quite a number of previous lives and, though George’s recall of this was hazy in the extreme, took the view that the object of a good and spiritual life was to stop being born again.

  This seemed thoroughly sensible. One life was enough for anyone, wasn’t it?

  Was he perhaps one of the guests at his own funeral? It presumably would take a bit of time to realize that that was so. As far as George could recall, it had taken the Buddha some considerable time to figure out he had once been someone else. You couldn’t just segue neatly from George Pearmain into, say, Sam Dimmock the gay dentist and if he was Sam Dimmock the gay dentist he—

  My God! Surely he wasn’t Sam Dimmock the gay dentist. He very much did not want to be Sam Dimmock the gay dentist. He would have to have sex – oral and anal sex – with Sam’s boyfriend, the retired BBC producer Mike Larner. Even worse he would have to say things like ‘I love you, Mike. I want to hold you and care for you.’ This was insupportable. George was not prejudiced. He liked gay men fine. He just did not want to be one. Not just yet anyway.

  Sam Dimmock was over in the corner, talking to a small man whom George couldn’t remember ever having met.

  ‘George,’ the small man was saying, ‘was one of my dearest friends. My very dearest friends.’

  ‘He was,’ said Sam Dimmock the gay dentist, ‘a truly great bank manager.’ George had, he recalled, once lent him thirty thousand pounds of NatWest’s money. Those were the days. George was pretty sure he couldn’t be Sam Dimmock. Sam Dimmock was right there in front of him saying the kind of things Sam Dimmock usually said. He would know if George had interfered with him.

  Except you probably didn’t realize you were someone else until it was too late. There wasn�
�t much of the original G. Pearmain left. Maybe this was the moment at which it all dribbled away into the consciousness of a gay dentist. In a desperate attempt to hang to what might, possibly, be left of his original self, George swayed nervously towards Nat Pinker and Dave Macready. They were standing apart from the crowd, having the kind of conversation that George felt might get him back on the rails. They were nodding in a measured, blokey way that might provide reassurance he was not about to turn into someone else.

  There was not much to choose between him and Nat. They were pretty much the same in all respects. If one of them had transmigrated into the soul of the other no one would be any the wiser.

  ‘I think,’ he heard Nat say, in his amazingly reassuring doctor’s voice, ‘that actually George probably did die of a heart attack. The hemlock was a factor. Sure. Hemlock is not the kind of stuff you want to quaff in large quantities but George was an accident waiting to happen, really – bless him. I don’t think the hemlock did any more than tip him over the edge.’

  ‘Right,’ said Macready, nodding eagerly – a technique he had evolved over years in the newspaper business to get more and more out of his interviewees or, as he often used to call them, ‘his victims’. ‘I imagine they’ll be wanting to call you in as a defence witness if they ever bring his murderer to trial.’

  Nat laughed amiably, even though he was aware of Macready’s slight look to the left as if to say, ‘Get this guy! Get a load of this guy!’ ‘Fair point,’ he said. ‘Fair point.’

  Already George felt better but, even as he regained his bearings and reminded himself that he regarded the teachings of the Buddha to be almost as suspect as those of every great religious leader ever born, he realized he had lost sight of all his targets. He could not see Stephen. He could not see Mabel Dawkins. Was she still out in the garden? Was Stephen with her? He looked around wildly and saw, sitting on her own, on a chair by the wall the disconsolate figure of Beryl Vickers. From time to time she peered into the darkness outside. Perhaps, thought George, she was about to follow her companion’s recipe for health and happiness and go out into the torrential rain and menacing, ceaseless wind for a bit of fresh air. It was only when he got right up to her that he heard what the gentle soul was saying. She was whispering, to no one in particular, that her friend Audrey Mullins had gone missing.