How the Dead Live (23 page)

After half an hour they brought her an urn. Well, not exactly an urn, more of a giant, bronze-coloured, plastic Nescafé jar, complete with screw top. She cradled this bulky thing in her skinny, shot-to-shit arms, her shabby gloves grasping the lid of her dead mummy of a baby. Then she turned and walked away, back up Hoop Lane, still dry-eyed.

Now I concede, the smack must’ve stunned her along with the shock of it all. And having to do it on her own little lonesome had to’ve put a spanner in her Fabergé works. But even so – not to cry
at all.
Well, this did cut through my colourless, odourless, insensate stupidity of indifference. I tried rage on for size, like a hat, and it nearly fitted. I pronounced an anathema on my junky daughter. I lit a ciggie and, inhaling, remembered the words of a more famous puffer than I. Camus, dead at forty-seven in an auto wreck. ‘If a man does not cry at his mother’s funeral, the world will chop his head off.’ Quite so, Bert, quite so. And as for a daughter well, I shuddered to think. I shuddered to think.

Christmas 2001

I
shudder now. It’s cold in here. For some reason the Estate Agent opened the window in the kitchenette before it all happened. Before he lay down in slow stages. I
stand in here hungry, cold, and not a little weepy, looking up at the underside of the leaves of the hideous spider plant. How can you tell that a property’s empty? Because the spider plants have taken it over, colonised it with their sharp fronds. A very domesticated day of the triffid. Perhaps the spider plant will take over this property, now vacant save for little me? Proving that this was no symbiosis on their part
–
squatting in the corner looking fucking ugly, in return for three drops of Baby Bio and a few shaky dribbles of tepid tap water
–
but a rampant, parasitic war. Spider plants against all the rest.

Naturally it was the Ice Princess who did the watering, tending this appropriately ugly garnish with one of her characteristically absurd attempts at housewifery. In a while I’ll crawl up and take a look at her
–
but not now. Now it’s sufficient for me to stand here, under the spider plant, in the corner. If I
turn round I
can observe the ganglia of cabling sprouting from the back of the television, which once yoked it to the amplifier, the
CD
player, the tape deck, the record deck and the speakers. All the technically musical appurtenances of this most unmusical of households. This gravely quiet household. It’s amazing they managed to hang on to these black-box recorders for as long as they did, but they’re gone now
–
and so are their sounds. The least the Ice Princess and her swain could’ve done would’ve been to put the television on.

But then I
was forgetting
–
there’s no electricity.

Chapter Ten

I
’ve always managed to have a certain cold objectivity about my daughters, perhaps because of losing the loved son so early. And in the years following my own death I excelled myself. But then the perspectives afforded by my pulverised condition – the view from the Nescafé jar – supplemented my own Dulston prospect. Everyone who touched, or even beheld, that plastic pot of me, took a little bit away with them – a sarcastic smear of ash.

Natasha Yaws strode with purpose up Hoop Lane on that balmy morning in early May 1988. She’d descended a scant hour before from a house on Central Square. An oblong-fronted, mock-Regency affair of fake solidity but credible rectitude, where she’d spend the latter hours of darkness sitting, half-naked, on the edge of a man’s marital bed. She’d fallen in with the man at Russell’s in Kentish Town, where he’d been scoring cocaine. His wife and kids were away, and the nameless, never-to-be-named man had taken Natasha home with him in the first, cocaine flush of certainty that he’d be able to fuck her. Natasha had been confident he wouldn’t be able to – and she’d been right. She needed to be north in the morning – so why not grab two kinds of lift?

He’d lain in the marital bed casually rubbing the mush at his central juncture, while Phil Collins cried melodramatically from concealed speakers, feeling him coming in the air at night . . . O Lord!

Natasha had sat on the edge of the big Slumberdown, half-naked to give the married man the necessary visual fodder, while she snarfed up the remains of his cocaine. She interspersed dirigible lines with chases of smack off of a generous foil hanky torn from a family-size roll, which she’d found in the immaculately white, family-size kitchen below. She’d only needed to strip off her funereal woolly and funereal blouse and funereal M&S black bra to give the man what he wanted. Ach! Such loveliness. Such high breasts, such long pink nipples, such a smooth back. Such a
pity
he was too far gone to see the raw pink pits in the crooks of her arms. Such a
shame
he wasn’t able to insist – once Rémy Martin and cocaine had done their work – on her removing the black skirt and the black tights, so that he might see the truly awesome mess she’d made of her nether regions with her sharp nails. Picking and slashing at her own long thighs, as she vented her hatred on half of herself. But he didn’t.

Now, Nescafé urn in her arms, Natasha banged the brass knocker on the big white door and waited for the married man to come running. Which he did, jerked awake from spunk-sodden sopor with a sudden awareness of
all
that had transpired. Could it be wife and kids prematurely returned? He pulled on trousers, shirt, kicked drug trash under the bed, limp-staggered down to the front door. But no – it was the tart without a heart. ‘G’gaa wh’ what?’ he gagged on the fresh, spring air. He was confused; the last time he’d seen her she’d been half-dressed, now she was over – and holding a bizarre jar. ‘What’s that?’

‘My mother,’ she tartly replied. ‘I need a cab for her – and me. I’m going to Regent’s Park. Give me the money, call the cab. Don’t worry – I’ll wait on the bench over there.’ She pointed with a black-sheathed finger.

Worry he might, at home in the mid-morning, his motherly neighbours perambulating around the square, greedy for indiscretion. ‘B-b-but . . . I thought . . . What?’

‘Don’t think – act,’ said Natasha. ‘Give me the money.’ He groped in his pocket and found a tenner. She swivelled on her synthetic heel, clacked across the road to the bench and sat down on it. He called the cab and as he dialled reflected, quite rightly, on his lucky escape.

At the sumptuous Cumberland Terrace apartment an odd trio awaited Natasha: the two mortally tubby Elverses, and the eelishly thin, immortal Esther. They talked small while anticipating large events. They sat at a big, round, pine table, with big, round, china teacups in their hands. This was domesticity with a generous shot of growth hormone. They weren’t to be disappointed.

The day before there had been a characteristic Natasha-Charlotte row, about the cremation. Esther had wanted to attend and Charlie didn’t see why she shouldn’t. Should-shouldn’t, shouldn’t-should had, in due course, given way to did-didn’t and the whole dull grind of inter-sibling abrasion. ‘If she goes, I don’t!’ Natasha plainted. ‘Mumu couldn’t stand her – and nor can I. Mumu would’ve hated her being there – and so would I. If she goes, I don’t – and you
know
what Mumu would think of that!’

Charlie had sobbed on her husband’s upholstered shoulder, beat her plump fists on the arm of a candy-striped divan, reversed the procedure. She decided she couldn’t go without Esther. That she’d better sit it out and endure developments.

Now, the entryphone burped and Charlotte went to spy on her sister courtesy of the CCTV system. How bad might she be looking? But of course, she was beautiful in her black pillbox hat – toque of the devil. The trio braced themselves as Natasha made her way up the wide, carpeted treads of the staircase. Richard Elvers said to his wife and her aunt, ‘Let’s humour her on this occasion, she’s been through a lot – we’ve all been through a lot as well.’ But there was nothing funny about Natasha and no point in humouring her.

‘Where the fuck were you – you bitch!’ Natasha spat at her sister from the door, ignoring her brother-in–law, blanking her aunt, and putting her jarred mother down on the thickly carpeted floor.

‘B-but you . . . You – ‘ such stuttering is all Natasha can elicit today.

‘I what?
What?!’

‘You, you said you’d go alone. That you’d only go alone. I was only doing wh – ‘

‘What! What were you doing – sitting here! With that . . . that . . .
bitch!’

And you might’ve thought that Natasha had
really
gone too far now, if it wasn’t that this elegant, Nash apartment had – for the purposes of this shtick – become another waiting room on a timeless Ellis Island of crowded, over-emotional Jewry. Esther – far from swooning, or screaming, or otherwise manifesting Anglo-Saxon attitudes – sank quite disgracefully to the boards of her niece’s histrionic play. She trilled, ‘Oy! My faygeleh! My little Natty! Oy – come here darling, darling! Don’t cry so. Your mother dead – and you so sad, so sad.’ She sprightly rose, advanced towards Natasha and the two skinny Jews embraced, while the two tubby Gentiles looked on. What’s bred in the bony – and all that jazz. As if all this wasn’t bad enough – they smoked, Natty and Esther. They smoked big-time. Charlotte and Richard had given up. They were the kind of people who’d given up everything at least twice. Although when they’d taken it up again – in order to give it up once more – was difficult to ascertain. They’d given up smoking, drinking, eating and – the unkind might say – thinking. But they had to tolerate the junky and the aunty smoking two packs of Kools and drinking their tea, while goading each other into more emotionality than could rightly be contained even in this vast apartment, with its aircraft-hangar ceilings, its cliff-top cornicing, its massy mouldings, and its outsize eighties furniture arrayed in pastel riot. Esther and Natasha smoked and sobbed while the long, lipstick-stained butts piled up in the ashtray, building a burnt pagoda. Mumu’s cremains were tidied away.

It’s not easy being good, so the goodies eventually retreated to the kitchen, where they propped their comfortable rumps against the range and the worktop, while they deliberated on what to
do
about Natty – who so clearly was
out of control.
(Although, in truth, she had always been; it was just that now, given Mumu’s demise, they’d decided to take responsibility for it. Big booboo.)

‘I’ve already taken two days off from the office,’ said Richard, his face pinker than ever, his sandy hair ruffled with emotion. ‘I mean,’ he hurried on, ‘not that that means anything.’

But he needn’t have worried about upsetting his wife; Charlotte had had quite enough of her mother’s implosive death, and didn’t like the fall-in either. ‘Darling, I know what you’re thinking, but Esther won’t stay for long, she’ll want to get back to New York as soon as possible – but Natasha we’ll have to deal with. I think we should ask her to stay here, she’s got to kick the drugs. I spoke to Dr Steel about her and he had a word with a colleague. They’ll have a bed for her on the psychiatric ward at the Royal Free if we can hold on to her for a day or so.’

‘D’you think that’s wise? D’you think she’ll do it?’

‘It’s worth a try – we have to try. I’ve called Miles as well and he’s coming over – perhaps he can persuade her?’

Two hours went by, and forty-odd butts accumulated before Esther and Natasha went to lie down in adjoining bedrooms. The heroin had leached through Natasha’s system – and the cocaine was long gone. But it didn’t matter any more which end of the narcotic seesaw she was perched upon – she still lurched in short arcs of hysteria. Natasha was broke, of course, or she wouldn’t have dreamed of staying in this centrally-located country house hotel, with its plump, square flunkeys. True, Russell might well have scored for her, or given her tick if he was holding, but lately he’d been making odder demands upon her. Demands so peculiar that Natasha couldn’t get stoned enough to fulfil them without feeling
very bad.
She knew that she ought to get away from her sister’s, that soon she’d be immobilised, that the seesaw was rocking to rest.

She lay down on the Elverses’ brass one-and-a-half-size bed. She squirmed under the quilt and immediately was concussed by unconsciousness. Smack – such a good word that; such an apt example of psychic onomatopoeia. Natasha Yaws, smack-head. So true, so
just.

When Natasha awoke, seven hours later, in the early evening, Esther had already gone. Esther, a fleet old bird, winging her way back to the US of A. Ageless Esther Bloom, her stem of a body propped up in a padded first-class vase, on a British Airways flight out of Heathrow (‘the best bit of Britain so far as I’m concerned – yooknowhatlmean?’). Esther, watered by passing hostesses and leafing through the current number of
Fortune,
was already putting the last few days behind her. She’d take time out to process her little sister’s death when she’d dealt with her broker, her accountant, her tenants, her friends, the committee at the Met, her pet dogs, her tame faggots, and all the rest of the Manhattan menagerie which kept her from brooding. Kept her alive, in the present, not sunk in the hopeless past like her sad Lil, not endlessly reliving it and chewing it over, as if there were any way to change it. What could that provoke? Only a trip and a tumble, down the basement steps and into the jumble of memory. Their parents – their fucking parents. Ach! Such pretentiousness! Such stupid foolery! Denying their race, their religion, their debts, their lies – and for what? Doodly-squat. And Lily, sprinting through life bearing the eternal flame of internalised race hatred. Carrying it all the way to this grey, wet little island, where she ended up the widow of some dumb Englishman. Now she was dead herself, poisoned by her own incompatibilities.

Lily had always joined in with this idiocy – but not Esther. Esther went to shul, gave money to B’nai B’rith, visited Israel, wailed at the wall, screamed at Yad Veshem. Esther didn’t simply resign herself to being Jewish – she accepted it. Lily had nearly always tried to hide it from the world. ‘If no one knows,’ she told Esther one time when they were still young enough to speak seriously with each other, ‘I won’t have to react when some swine makes an anti-Semitic remark.’ Esther had roared with laughter. ‘If anyone makes an anti-Semitic remark around me I’ll smack him – or her – in the keister!’ And now Lily was dead of all that ulcerating self-hatred, those phobias, those useless husbands, these nudnik kids – and Esther? Esther was going to live for ever – so she lit another Kool and stayed that way.

Miles and Natasha sat and wept apart in the second spare bedroom of the Elverses’ apartment. Despite the late hour, Molly, the Filipino peon, was vacuuming up after Esther, trying to eradicate her smoke-cured, ageless air. JAP jerky. Through the wall came the distinctive noises of someone throttling a robot.

The two cried apart – because they couldn’t do anything much together any more. Not with Natty like this, skinny, scabby, sweaty; her black hair stuck down on one side of her pillow-creased face and flying away from the other; her nails bitten to the quick – the only thing that prevented her from picking at the sores on her legs. What a turn-off! Or so Miles, hypocritically, thought. For, in truth, he’d made love to her for the first time when she was precisely like this – and done it many times since. He’d pressed his soap-smelling, nicely compact, firmly muscled body against this scabrous streak, and hoped that at each contact point his own vitality would flow into her. He pushed himself up and moved over her with his electric mouth, pulsing between the abrasions, jolting to the side of wounds, conducting into her cunt.

Natasha would lie almost inert during these Frankensteinian sessions, only shocked a little by her own tardy orgasm. For what was Miles
for,
anyway – save this: to make love to her, to admire her, to bail her out of jail, or the clutches of other men, or the sludge of gutters. It was his
métier,
his expertise. He’d been trained up to it from birth. No, with Miles Natasha would allow herself to be made love to, like the exquisite mechanism she might’ve been, had it not been for this dynamo of self-indulgence which was her animating principle. And for a big-cocked, hard-assed, cranked-up, solid fuck? For that she went to Russell. Russell who, with his pimp-size prick and his own implausible good looks – hawkish face, olive skin, chestnut locks – was in every way a match for Natty. Russell with his endless patter, his casual anarchism, his plangently sexy amorality, his violence, his madness, his not-being-nice-Milesness.

So, Miles cried for himself and Natasha cried for herself, and eventually Miles broached the subject of his quest into the bedroom. ‘Natty, Charlie and Richard and I – ‘

‘What?’ Quick off the mark there – such consensus was, in and of itself, deeply suspicious.