How the Dead Live (37 page)

Come on and let me buckle you into little combat trousers and track suits and even fucking dresses! All the while I’d buck and kick and yank at her hair, whirling my pudgy arms in wild haymakers, that would – bar-de-bar
–
every so often connect. Oh yes, I’m a past master of the voluntary involuntary action all right. Always have been. Yup, she’d dress me up in a velveteen dress, spangly tights, a miniature parka and tiny deck shoes. Then she’d let me clamp my plastic tiara on my head and she’d take this little JAP out with her when she went to make calls.

Her own wardrobe she was less fanciful about. This was dressing to undress, that much she understood. Gone were the days when she wore slinky fabrics for falling downstairs in. Oh no, her activities now demanded ligatures of slick material that cut to the quick of her, dividing her sex and ass like the core of a pear. Over this cord
–
pull it and she’d speak pretaped phrases: ‘My aren’t you .
. .’;
‘Oooh, don’t you .
. .’;
‘Mmm .
. .
can’t you .
. .’ –
went heavy, yet sheer, sixty-denier tights, which could be torn off easily without being laddered. She wore skirts like belts, and tops like sporting bras for this most unsporting activity. She put on zip-up knee-high boots and, to complete the dissemble, a heavy coat which could be wrapped round her then whipped open to reveal the goods.

Hey presto! And there was also the jewellery, the elongated rings
–
thumb, finger and pinkie
–
the angled bangles, the toe rings, all of them like the bits of a robotic exoskeleton. I suppose it pressed home the point that this was purely mechanical
–
what she was doing.

Yeah, she took me out with her, this mundane magician turning the oldest tricks in the world. She was that fucking mad and desperate. She’d leave me for ten, twenty, thirty minutes
–
however long it took
–
locked in some fucking vestibule at the Hilton, or the Royal Garden, or the Holiday-fucking-Inn. Playing with a dolly, while she was being one within feet. My presence kept them docile
–
the really mad ones
–
or so she liked to think. She’d even leave me outside in the minicab, brushing up on my Swahili. She had, like they all do, her cabbie accomplices.

Then we’d go and meet the Estate Agent in a restaurant or a bar in the West End, and he’d expatiate on his latest earth-shatteringly bad deal. Swapping this deed for that deed, indeed! The Estate Agent, with his mobile phone the size of a suppository and his handsome face all constipated with the rank, stinking jealousy which kept them both at it. Full-on.

They’d order up silly plates of food, expensive snacks for smack-heads
–
sun-dried this, wind-blown that, flambéed whatever
–
and cut off corners to poke in my little mouth. ‘Try some of this,’ they’d say, and, ‘Ooh
–
doncha think she might like that,’ my own burgeoning appetites putting to shame their diminishing ones
–
this fucking cuckoo in their nest.

Or nests, rather. We moved constantly, one step ahead of whichever Iranian, or Brazilian, or alumna of St Trinian’s the Estate Agent had last done a number on. That’s what they called it
–
‘doing a number’. ‘Why don’t we do a number on so-and-so,’ they’d chortle indulgently to each other, and plan

who next to fuck up or fuck over. Was there ever a duo for more indulgences than these two
–
they could’ve filled the medieval fucking Vatican’s order book. They were mad and beautiful, for a while. You’ll have seen their like, chucking chips on the wheel at Charlie Chester’s, or stoking up with Bellinis at the American Bar, and wondered how the hell they have the gall to exercise their timeless gangster chutzpah. How they can get away with it, while outside whichever joint it is they’re infesting crouch others of their ilk, the dirty panhandling ones, with stoles of giveaway blanket draped over their puny shoulders. The city’s neglected children, trying to get home from the shoddy, alfresco sleep-overs that have become their entire life.

The Ice Princess and her consort only got away with it for a while. After all, neither of them was as young as they used to be. And there was the kiddy
–
such a drain. And the drugs. It’s amazing they could take so many drugs, for so long, and still do any numbers greater than one. But then they’d both managed to get a few liver-enhancing years under their belt, and they both eschewed the needle, until this, their final tailspin down to the ground.

I suppose the question I ask myself now, as I hear the waking-up noises of newborn, Coborn House (trousers with writing on them being donned, dogs yanked, doors slammed, so that the scratch cards of no chance whatsoever can be bought from the meshed-in store below), the question now is – is this a good day to die?

It seems to me that it would be a sensible course if I decided this myself, rather than leaving it until, in a weakened condition, I fall down the fucking stairs and pulp my head on the fender of skirting board by the door. Or succumb to the wild, exquisite pain of being more hungry than even I can believe and, staggering, dazed, inject myself with tetanus from one of the bent nails the Estate Agent left poking out of the window frames downstairs, when, in a crack-induced fit of late-adopted DIY enthusiasm (you couldn’t call it paranoia
–
his fears were entirely justified), he attempted to board up this, his final, squatted castle, from within. What a mensh. Not.

I could kill myself with their drug shit, but that is revolting. I could hang myself with any number of cords, ligatures and strings the terminally neglectful parents have left lying around. I could even
–
if the taps aren’t frozen
–
drown myself in the fucking bath. All that guff about how ninety per cent of accidents happen in the fucking home, but hey, so do ninety per cent of fucking suicides. Statistically we’re fools ever to curl up in bed with a good book, lest the madness seize us.

But I know I won’t take any of these options. Won’t take them as the cold day extends its fingers across the crappy carpet tiling, feeling up the exposed blue feet of the Ice Princess. Won’t take them as it retreats again. What the fuck am I waiting for? And why do I find myself crying? Crying for Mummy.

Chapter Fifteen

P
ride means never having to say you’re sorry. I mean to say, if I’m so right about everything, then what the hell do I have to be sorry for, exactly? Pride is the necessary, deep mother lode, from which daily truckloads of self-righteousness can be mined and brought to the superficial surface. Pride can be husbanded, nurtured and laid up for an uncertain future. Think of all those aristocratic fools dusting their Meissen, while the Red Army rapes their womenfolk next door. Hey,
do
stand on ceremony, guys. And another thing – pride is heritable. Indeed, there’s a prideful heritage industry. I mean to say, you don’t want to spend all those years accumulating pride only to throw it away in some mad spree. No, pass it down, brother, pass that pride down. You can only hope that the next generation to the manner born understand what to do with the stuff and don’t end up as deadbeat epigones, whiling their days away losing family pride at the humility racetrack.

Now, Richard Elvers had made a lot of pride of his own, and Charlotte Elvers had inherited a fair amount from her folks. And one final point needs to made about pride before I get on with the business of telling you how they spent theirs: there’s no counterfeiting at the pride mint. Absolutely not. I can assure you of this; Mother knows best. I don’t want to hear any of that crap about false pride, not now, not never. I don’t care if you’re Jonas Salk or a kid in a sulk – your pride is as good as any other cripple’s.

So, Charlotte Elvers, proud of her attainments in the show business of big business. Proud of her womanly figure. Proud of her houses and cars and all her other chattels. Proud of her father, the late, eminent, ecclesiastical historian (and it’s worth mentioning at this point that David Yaws came from a long line of Trollope readers), and proud of her mother. Not. No, not proud of me. So not proud of me that she’ll avoid any mention of exactly who I was, who I am.

Charlotte, with her Yaws mask Scotch-taped to her broad brow, has no difficulty passing herself off as a goy, natch. No autobiography of a mongrel for her. Charlotte is subject to
not mentioning the fact
that she is – according to whomsoever you might fucking care to ask – a Jew. A
Jewess,
even. Mindjew, in our increasingly enlightened time there isn’t much need for her to adopt –like the good, English chameleon she is – her protective colourlessness. Her studied indifference. Nowadays there are few of those awkward convocations where someone makes an anti-Semitic remark and everyone else gives silent assent.

Oh no, not nowadays. Not when the fucking Israelis are doing such a fantastic job of drawing fire by bombing refugee camps, cracking skulls, taking bribes, and generally behaving like an honest-to-God gang of .99-calibre fascist assholes. Nope, no need to be anti-Semitic with these shlemiels on the scene. Hell, even
Jewish
anti-Semitism doesn’t seem that outrageous any more. To be a Jew-hating Jew used to mean something, you could take
pride
in it; it put you up there with some of the finest minds of the last two centuries – but nowadays any little cut-about prick with an attitude can get away with it.

So, let me set the scene for you, cue up the denouement. It’s the autumn of ‘94. Charlotte the shiksa, with her sad, comical, dead-man’s face, stands in her squash-court–sized kitchen at Cumberland Terrace. Over the last couple of years the Elverses have bought the leases to several more of these apartments, and they’re generous-sized to begin with. Knocked together they make a veritable fucking
mansion,
a country townhouse ready and waiting for the son and heir. Except that there isn’t one. Charlotte isn’t quite sick enough to trick out any of the bedrooms as a nursery for the Anointed One, the slow messianic train coming. But even if she was, where would she begin? There are far too many rumpus rooms where no one romps, studies where no one reads, bathrooms where not so much as a cuticle is trimmed, and conservatories full of freshly-cut fucking flowers – for her to get to grips with it. The Elverses’ joint is so large now they have a fucking
switchboard.
And that’s just the London branch of the chain.

Anyway, Charlotte, she activates a retro stainless-steel juicer and watches a column of bananas, prunes and whatnot turn to healthy pulp, while ruefully contemplating her younger sister. Fresh back from the back of Bourke, and newly dubbed Natasha Bloom. Yup, that Yaws never suited her, too ugly a tubercule for such a flawlessly olive skin. And Natasha isn’t simply olive now – she’s positively
dark.
I mean to say, it’s a wonder Immigration let her in at Heathrow, especially if they realised she was coming back to torture more victims with her sadistic pulchritude, her vicious beauty.

Yes, Natasha
Bloom.
Charlotte’s gone one way – Natasha the other. And while Natasha wouldn’t exactly say that she’s Jewish, she is prepared to admit to Jewish blood. ‘I have Jewish blood,’ she’ll say, as if –like the vampire she so clearly is – she keeps a vat of such in the fridge, to stop it congealing. Or, if pressed, ‘I’m half-Jewish – I get all of the guilt, but none of the community.’ Actually, Natty, there isn’t a community that’d accept you as member, even if you did choose to join it. Shit, you wouldn’t even be welcomed in at the Dulston Community Centre, and
that’s
saying something.

The two sisters contemplate one another, two leonine halves of one prideful being. Antipathy crackles in the air between them as Charlotte strikes down the barb that’s just been thrown. ‘No,’ she says, ‘we haven’t considered adopting.’

No indeedy.
Absolument non!
I mean, what’s the fucking point in acquiring quite this much pride if you’re simply going to throw it away on the first fucking epsilon semi-moron the social services are prepared to chuck your way? I mean to say, it’d be like leaving your fucking property to the state, saying, ‘Could we please pay more in the way of death duties? Pretty please?’

‘Have
you?’
Oh, nice but futile try, Charlotte, for you know as well as I do that mother denatured here has no more need of adopting than a consumer has of trading a wide– for a flat-screen TV, a Ford for another Ford, or a Patek Philippe for a Longines. Yes, oh witty irony, how strange to relate that Natasha Bloom only has to
rub past
a man in the fucking
hall
to get knocked up. It’s as if her entire, lusciously lucent, dewily downy skin were a fucking
flower,
tilted at exactly the right angle to collect whatever spore might be floating through the air.

Following a brace of scrape ‘n’ vacs in her teens, Natasha has always used a diaphragm
and
the pill,
and
insisted on condoms,
and
positively
slurped up
spermicidal lubricant, as if her vagina were possessed of capillary action. Excepting when she’s zonked, of course – then, as we know, anything can happen.

There’s nothing more seductive for the men who fall into Natasha Bloom’s clutches than the way she puts a condom on them, muzzles their shlongs in latex. Curiously, it’s the ultimate gateway to unfettered enjoyment for these saps. As she deliciously unrolls it with coolly deft fingers, they think to themselves ‘Oooh!’ and ‘Aaah!’ – she
really
doesn’t want a kid, she loves me for my stiff little self. She – ‘Aaah!’ – wants the push and shove just as much as me, which is why she’s fitting this one-fingered glove so expertly.

Ach! Such shtoopidity; they don’t seem to realise that this proficiency is the very hallmark of cupidity. I was a pretty dab hand with the things myself. The point being that once those cocks are, as it were, shrink-wrapped, they’re half-way to being harmless. Given the chance, Natasha would ply condoms with extra-thick, constrictor bands at their base. Bands that would tighten, so that, as with the devices farmers use to castrate sheep, eventually the portion would wither, blacken and then drop off altogether. Ah, Natasha, even the sight of a smoked eel makes her feel a little Bobbitty.

Still, her proficiency with condoms will stand her in good stead. She’s gotta have it – she’s gonna need it.

‘Nope.’ Natasha is munching on a peanut-encrusted chocolate bar which closely resembles a turd. She doesn’t need to watch her weight, unlike Charlotte, and she has the flawless white teeth of Dorian Gray. Life can be so unfair. ‘Although Russell and I are thinking of having a kid soon.’ Yup, they’re back together, and this time it’s official. ‘Now that he’s cleaned up his act – well, I think he’d make an excellent father.’

‘What! Russell!’ And enter Richard Elvers on socking big feet. Richard Elvers, grown still more corpulent despite his personal trainer. Richard who, having spent the first part of the decade humping for English pride, will now spend its middle years under the auspices of the idiotically-named Lord Churchill. Poor Richard, it would be difficult not to feel sympathetic towards him, if I weren’t so intrinsically unsympathetic, wrapped up in King Stuff as I am.

‘Look, Richard,’ she prettily mews, ‘I know you and Russell don’t exactly see eye to eye’ – on the contrary, they have, that’s the problem – ‘but he’s clean now and he’s doing well with this property-development gig. In fact, he’d like to have a word with you about an old school he and his partner are buying down in Hackney.’

I bet he would. Probably wants some notionally clean capital for this, another of his filthy deals. Still, you have to hand it to Russell, he got out at the right time. Did his own cold turkey, his own six weeks at Pullet Green – Class of ‘92: ‘A bad attitude can sometimes get you through – shit floats’ and has brought all of the twisted acumen he deployed engendering tiny dreams to this, the big nightmare of property development. Sure, Russell hasn’t exactly stayed abstinent he likes his puff and the odd glass of designer lager – but he’s off the hard stuff. When Natasha turned up at his new place in Docklands, stoned again, ready to resume their old shenanigans, Russell, to his credit, slapped her about in a new way, cleaned her up again, moved her in, togged her out. Now they’re very much the upcoming couple in town. Russell does up the apartments, Natasha furnishes their communal areas with corporate art.

‘He’s given me a budget of ten grand to sort out this other building, the one he’s just finished in St Katharine’s Dock,’ Natasha boasts to her sister, ‘and it’s gonna look really good when I’ve bought the daubs. I’m going round some galleries this afternoon – you wanna come with?’

‘You’ve got to be joking,’ her sister shoots back. ‘Anyway, Richard and I have an important appointment.’

There’re other things I like about Russell as well. I admire his dark good looks – he and Natty go well together. I like his uncompromising, East End Jewishness too. Russell’s family never moved beyond the pale, never went for the colourless indifference of the northern ‘burbs. They stuck it out down the Mile End Road, shneidering out of premises in Whitechapel, attending services with the dwindling congregation at shul, going for the occasional shmeiss at the steam baths in Hackney. They kept faith with their Cockney patter – the word of God the costermonger – and have spawned another generation of chancers like Russell, living off his wits, winging it, like a dark angel passing over the feast of commerce.

They stand in direct contrast to the likes of Lord Churchill, the leading British authority on infertility, whose clinic is the venue that afternoon for the first of a series of appointments which, over the next five years, will steadily accrue phenomenal importance for Mr and Mrs Elvers.

Lord Churchill – paternal grandfather’s moniker Jakob Rotblatt – has consulting rooms in South Kensington, within convenient hobbling distance of his own private clinic. It’s there that the majority of his patients tend to put up, while visiting London for their treatment cycles. It’s an irony which hasn’t escaped Churchill himself that most of his success stories relate to the people of the Other Book. The women whose eggs he cossets and coddles, shakes and stirs, transports hither and thither, are black-bell-tent campers, with foil beaks, fresh in from the Gulf. He has to examine them in conditions of the most stringent purdah, the afflicted parts of their bodies portioned out for him, one at a time, like pieces of chicken-fed chicken. It’s as if through such procedures he were undertaking to raise, through artificial conception, a West London army to further the jihad.

Not that Churchill’s only patients are Arabs. Even to those very close to the good Lord, it’s not entirely certain whether the ‘Lord’ part of his name is a title. It could be a first name, a student sobriquet, or only the first barrel of the shotgun combination ‘Lord-Churchill’. Certainly, it’s true that the good Lord has been instrumental in assisting friends – and even a few members – of the incumbent regime towards conception. But would this be sufficient grounds for ennoblement?

Richard and Charlotte think so, as they watch him make allusive shapes in the air with the index finger of either hand, delineating the possible diagnoses, treatments and prognoses. Lord Churchill conducts human destiny with superb artistry, knowing that the most sure-fire salesmanship a doctor can display is to
make
with the hands,
lay on
the hands. In some alternative lifetime Churchill would’ve been a spieler in Brick Lane, piling up dinner plates, side plates, saucers and cups into a great rosette of crockery, then pounding it down: ‘Orlrighty, my loves –look at that! Never a breakage. Fine new china. Six of everything – t’you, ten quid. Only a tenner. Who’s got the gumption? Who’s got the cash!?’ But instead it’s petri dishes he’s piling up, and injections of hormones, and incubators, and the knocked-up price is in the ten-grand region.

Still, the hands are superb. When Churchill rises from behind the desk and wiggles across the consulting room’s thick, endometrial carpeting, his marvellously ugly face – like a clenched fist in a glove puppet – his barrel chest and skinny legs make him appear not unlike a highly motile sperm himself. Inspiring
enormous
confidence in the Elverses.