The Undivided Self

by Will Self

  And then, invariably, as I drew closer the likeness would evaporate. Not only wasn’t it Mother, but it seemed absurd that I ever could have made the mistake. This late-middle-aged woman looked nothing like Mother, she was dowdy and conventional. Not the sort of woman at all who would say of effete young men that they ‘had no balls’, or of precious young women that they ‘shat chocolate ice cream’. Yet each time the fact that Mother was dead hit me again, it was as if it hadn’t really occurred to me before and that her failure to get in touch with me over the past six months had been solely because she was ‘hellishly busy’.

  When I stopped seeing fake Mothers in the street I reckoned that I had just about accepted her death. Every so often I thought about her, sometimes with sadness, sometimes with joy, but her absence no longer gnawed at me like a rat at a length of flex. I was over it. Although, like Marcel after Albertine has gone, from time to time I felt that the reason I no longer missed Mother with such poignancy was that I had become another person. I had changed. I was no longer the sort of person who had had a mother like Mother. Mother belonged to someone else. If I had run into her at a dinner party fully conscious, she probably wouldn’t have recognised me. My mother was dead.

  All of this made the events that transpired in the winter of the year she died even more shocking. I was walking down Crouch Hill towards Crouch End on a drizzly, bleak, Tuesday afternoon. It was about three o’clock. I’d taken the afternoon off work and decided to go and see a friend. When, coming up the other side of the road I saw Mother. She was wearing a sort of bluish, tweedish long jacket and black slacks and carrying a Barnes & Noble book bag, as well as a large handbag and a carrier bag from Waitrose. She had a CND badge in her lapel and was observing the world with a familiar ‘there will be tears before bedtime’ sort of expression.

  The impression I had of Mother in that very first glance was so sharp and so clear, her presence so tangible, that I did not for a moment doubt the testimony of my senses. I looked at Mother and felt a trinity of emotions: affection and embarrassment mingled with a sort of acute embarrassment. It was this peculiarly familiar wash of feeling that must have altogether swamped the terror and bewilderment that anyone would expect to experience at the sight of their dead mother walking up Crouch Hill.

  I crossed the road and walked towards her. She spotted me when I was about twenty feet off. Just before a grin of welcome lit up her features I spotted a little moue of girlish amusement – that was familiar too, it meant ‘You’ve been had’. We kissed on both cheeks; Mother looked me up and down to see how I was weighing in for the fight with life. Then she gestured at the shop window she’d been looking into. ‘Can you believe the prices they’re charging for this crap, someone must be buying it.’ Her accent was the same, resolutely mid-Atlantic, she had the same artfully yellowed and unevened dentures. It was Mother.

  ‘Mother,’ I said, ‘what are you doing in Crouch End? You never come to Crouch End except to take the cat to the vet, you don’t even like Crouch End.’

  ‘Well, I live here now.’ Mother was unperturbed. ‘It’s OK, it’s a drag not being, able to get the tube, but the buses are fairly regular. There’s quite a few good shops in the parade and someone’s just opened up a real deli. Want some halva?’ Mother opened her fist under my face. Crushed into it was some sticky halva, half-eaten but still in its gold foil wrapping. She grinned again.

  ‘But Mother, what are you doing in Crouch End? You’re dead.’

  Mother was indignant, ‘Of course I’m dead, dummy, whaddya think I’ve been doing for the last ten months? Cruising the Caribbean?’

  ‘How the hell should I know? I thought we saw the last of you at Golders Green Crematorium, I never expected to see you in Crouch End on a Tuesday afternoon.’ Mother had me rattled, she seemed to be genuinely astonished by my failure to comprehend her resurrection.

  ‘More to the point, what are you doing in Crouch End? Why aren’t you at work?’

  ‘I thought I’d take the afternoon off. There’s not a lot on at the office. If I stayed there I’d just be shuffling paper back and forth trying to create some work.’

  ‘That’s an attitude problem talking, young man. You’ve got a good job there. What’s the matter with you? You always want to start at the top, you’ve got to learn to work your way up in life.’

  ‘Life, Mother? I hardly think “Life” is the issue here! Tell me about what it’s like to be dead! Why didn’t you tell any of us you were having life after death in Crouch End? You could have called …’

  Mother wasn’t fazed, she looked at her watch, another crappy Timex, indistinguishable from the last one I’d seen her wearing. ‘It’s late, I’ve got to go to my class. If you want to know about life after death come and see me tomorrow. I’m living at 24 Rosemount Avenue, in the basement flat, we’ll have tea, I’ll make you some cookies.’ And with that she gave me the sort of perfunctory peck on the cheek she always used to give me when she was in a hurry and toddled off up Crouch Hill, leaving me standing, bemused.

  What I couldn’t take was that Mother was so offhand about life after death, rather than the fact of it. That and this business of living in Crouch End. Mother had always been such a crushing snob about where people lived in London; certain suburbs – such as Crouch End – were so incredibly non-U in Mother’s book of form. The revelation that there was life after death seemed to me relatively unimportant set beside Mother’s startling new attitudes.

  I probably should have gone and told someone about my encounter. But who? All a shrink could have offered would have been full board and medication. And anyway, the more I told people how real the experience had been, the more certain they would become that I was the victim of an outlandishly complex delusionary state.

  I had no desire to be psychiatric cannon fodder, so I went off to see my friend and had a fulfilling afternoon playing Trivial Pursuit. Just suppose it was all for real? I had to find out more about Mother’s resurrection, she’d always been so emphatic about what happened to people after they die: ‘They rot, that’s it. You put ’em in a box and they rot. All that religious stuff, it’s a load of crap.’ Setting aside the whole issue of the miraculous I really wanted to see Mother eat humble pie over this afterlife issue, so much so that I went through the next thirty-odd hours as if nothing had happened. It was an exercise in magical thinking. I figured that if I behaved as if nothing had happened, Mother would be waiting for me, with cookies, in Rosemount Avenue, but if I said anything to anyone, the gods might take offence and whisk her away.

  Rosemount Avenue was one of those hilltop streets in suburban London where the camber of the road is viciously arced like the back of a macadamised whale. The houses are high-gabled Victorian, tiled in red and with masonry that looks as if it was sculpted out of solid snot. Calling it an avenue was presumably a reference to the eight or so plane trees running down each side of the road. These had been so viciously pruned that they looked like nothing so much as upturned amputated legs. Poised on the swell of the road I shuddered to myself. What had brought these macabre images into my mind? Was it the prospect of my second encounter with a dead person? Was I losing my balance? Examining myself I concluded in the negative. In truth suburban streets, if you look at them for long enough, always summon up a sense of mortality – of the skull beneath the skin. The Reaper always waits behind the bus shelter. You can see his robe up to the knee; the rest is obscured by the route map.

  The basement of No. 24 looked rather poky from the street; I couldn’t see in the windows without going down into the basement area. Before I could do so Mother appeared clutching a tea strainer in one hand. ‘Are you going to stand up there all afternoon? The kettle’s boiled.’ Death had done nothing to dampen down Mother’s impatience. She still carried around her a sense of barely repressed nervous energy; in a more active, physical age Mother would have probably broken horses, or gone raiding with the Bedouin.

  I noticed as I stepped into the flat that Mother’s name w
as under the bell. For some reason that shocked me. I felt that Mother ought to be incognito. After all it was pretty weird her being alive after death. What if the Sunday papers found out? It could be embarrassing. I said, ‘Mother, why have you kept your name? Surely if you’re going to go on living in London you should change it? Aren’t the people in charge of death worried about publicity?’

  Mother sighed with exasperation. ‘Look, there aren’t any “people in charge of death”. When you die you move to another part of London, that’s all there is to it. Period.’

  ‘But Mother, what about that performance at Golders Green? Weren’t you in that coffin?’

  ‘All right I’ll admit it, that part of it is a bit obscure. One minute I was in the hospital – feeling like shit, incidentally – the next I was in Crouch End and some estate agents were showing me around this flat.’

  ‘Estate agents! Dead estate agents?’

  ‘Yeah, they were dead too, the whole thing is self-administered, a bit like a commune.’

  Mother’s eschatalogical revelations were beginning to get to me a little and I had slumped down on a sofa. My new vantage point jolted me into looking around the flat. I’d never seen a piece of elysian real estate before. What struck me immediately was that Mother’s final resting place, if that’s what it was, was remarkably like the flat she’d spent the last ten years of her life in.

  There was the same large room with sofas and chairs scattered round it. There was a kitchenette off to one side, and high double doors at the end of the main room led to the bedroom. Through another door at the back of the room I could see a set of french windows and through them a small, well-kept garden. The flat was furnished haphazardly with odd posters and paintings on the walls and a lot of books; some shelved, others stacked on tables. A set of half-corrected proofs lay on the arm of a chair.

  The principal difference was that whereas in the past it had been photographs of my brothers and me that had stood, either framed or mounted in plastic cubes, scattered around on the available surfaces, now the impedimenta that betrayed Mother’s affections were entirely unfamiliar to me. There were photographs of people I had never seen before. Young men who looked rather too smooth for my taste. And other, older people. A jolly couple grinning out from a particularly ornate silver frame looked like Cypriots to me. I picked up a postcard someone had sent Mother from Madeira of all places and scanning the back recognised neither the bright feminine hand, nor the scrawled male salutation and signature.

  I was shocked by all of this, but kept silent. Once again I felt sure that if I pressured Mother she would tell me nothing substantial about the afterlife.

  The kettle boiled. Mother filled the pot and placed it on a tray, together with cups, sugar, milk and a plate of my favourite chocolate chip cookies. She brought it over and placed it on the low table in front of where I sat. She poured me a cup of tea and offered me a cookie. The conversation lapsed for a while. I munched and Mother went into the kitchenette and opened a can of cat food. She let a couple of black kittens in from the back garden.

  ‘New cats, I see.’

  ‘Uh-huh, that’s Tillie and that’s Margaret.’ The cats lurked and smarmed themselves around the furniture. I wondered idly if they were familiars and if my mother had really always been the kind of witch my father had said she was.

  I started browsing through the books. They weren’t the same as her mortal collection – I had those – but they covered the same ground: Virago Classics, a lot of Henry James and Proust in several different editions, scores of miscellaneous novels, books on gardening and cookery. By now I was quite openly looking for something, some clue. I couldn’t admit it to myself but once again Mother was managing to rile me as much dead as she ever had alive.

  I went over to the phone table. There was an address book lying open which I started to flick through idly. Again there were the same kind of names, but they belonged to totally different people, presumably the ones in the photographs, the ones who sent cards. Mother had always struck up acquaintances fairly easily. It wasn’t so much that she was friendly as that she exuded a certain wholesome quality, as palpably as if a vent had been opened on her forehead and the smell of bread baking had started to churn out. In my view this wholesome quality was the worst kind of misrepresentation. If there had been such a body as the Personality Advertising Standards Commission, Mother would have been the subject of numerous complaints.

  There were phone directories stacked under the table – phone directories and something else, phone-directory-shaped, that wasn’t a phone directory. I bent down and pulled it out by its spine. It was a phone directory. North London Book of the Dead, ran the title; and then underneath: A–Z. The cover was the usual yellow flimsy card and there was also the usual vaguely arty line drawing – in this instance of Kensal Green Cemetery. I started to leaf through the pages.

  ‘So, you’re not here five minutes and you want to use the phone,’ said Mother coming back in from the kitchenette.

  ‘What’s this, Mother?’ I held up the directory.

  ‘Oh that. Well I guess you might call it a kind of religious text.’ She giggled unnervingly.

  ‘Mother, don’t you think it’s about time you came clean with me about all of this?’

  We sat down at the table (similar melamine finish, similar blue, flower-patterned tablecloth) with the North London Book of the Dead in between us.

  ‘Well, it’s like this,’ began Mother. ‘When you die you go and live in another part of London. And that’s it.’

  ‘Whaddya mean, that’s it?’ I could already see all sorts of difficulties with this radical new view of death, even if I was sitting inside an example of it. ‘Whaddya mean, that’s it? Who decides which part of London? How is it that no one’s ever heard of this before? How come people don’t notice all the dead people clogging up the transport system? What about paying bills? What about this phone book? You can’t tell me this lists all the people who have ever died in North London, it isn’t thick enough. And what about the dead estate agents, who do they work for? A Supreme Estate Agent? And why Crouch End? You hate Crouch End.’

  ‘It could have been worse, some dead people live in Wanstead.’

  ‘What about the people who lived in Wanstead when they were alive?’

  ‘They live somewhere else, like East Finchley or Grays Thurrock, anywhere.’

  ‘Mother, will you answer my questions, or won’t you?’

  ‘I’ll just get another cup of tea, dear.’

  I wrung it out of her eventually. It went something like this: when you die you move to another part of London where you resume pretty much the same kind of life you had before you died. There are lots of dead people in London and quite a few dead businesses. When you’ve been dead for a few years you’re encouraged to move to the provinces.

  The dead community are self-administering and there are dead people in most of the major enterprises, organisations and institutions. There are some autonomous services for dead people, but on the whole dead services operate alongside ‘live’ ones. Most dead people have jobs, some work for live companies. Mother, for example, was working for a live publishing company.

  ‘OK. I think I’ve got it so far, but you still haven’t explained why it is that no one knows. Now I know I could shout it to the rooftops. I could sell my story to the tabloids.’ I was getting quite worked up by now, hunched over and absent-mindedly gobbling chocolate chip cookies with great gulps of tea. I didn’t even notice the kittens eating my shoelaces. Mother was imperturbable.

  ‘The funny thing is, that very few people seem to meet dead people who they know. It just goes to show you how big and anonymous the city really is. Even when people do meet dead friends and relatives they don’t seem inclined to broadcast the news.’

  ‘But Mother, you’ve always had an enquiring mind, you always thought you’d rot when you died. Why haven’t you got to the bottom of all this? Who’s the main man? Is it the “G” character?’ />
  ‘How should I know? I work, I go to my class, I feed the cats, I see a few friends, I travel. I’m not clever like you, if I do reflect on it at all it seems wholly appropriate. If I had spent days trying to visualise the afterlife I probably could have only come up with a pale version of the very real Crouch End I’m now living in.’

  ‘What class?’

  Mother gestured at the phone directory. ‘The people who compile the phone book hold regular classes for people who are newly dead. They run through the blue pages at the beginning of the book and explain the best and most appropriate ways for dead people to conduct themselves.’

  ‘I should imagine that there are a lot of newly dead people who are pretty badly traumatised.’ I probably said this with unwarranted enthusiasm. I was still trying to look for the gaping holes in Mother’s suburban necro-utopia.

  ‘Oh no, not at all. Put it like this: most people who’ve had painful illnesses, or are lonely, are only too relieved to discover that instead of extinction they’re getting Winchmore Hill or Kenton. The classes only go to underline the very reality of the situation. There’s something immensely reassuring about sitting on a plastic chair in a cold church hall reading a phone book and watching a pimply youth trying to draw on a whiteboard with a squeaky magic marker.’

  ‘I see your point. But Mother, you were always so sparky and feisty. It’s out of character for you to be so laid back. Aren’t you curious to get the whole picture? What happens in other cities? Is it the same? If dead people move to the provinces after a while don’t these areas get clogged up and zombified? There are a million questions I’d like the answers to. You always hated groups and here you are submitting to indoctrination in a religion ostensibly run by dead employees of British Telecom. Why? For Christ’s sake, why?’