How the Dead Live (38 page)

And me. Because I’ve accompanied them to South Ken. I’ve taken to hanging out with them again. I’ve begun to view spending time with the Elverses as being in the manner of an occupation. Accordingly, I’ve taken more – and increasingly protracted –leaves of absence from KBHL Corporate Communications. Until, at the point where it must’ve become clear to them that I wasn’t really working there at all, they sacked me. The bumptious little prick who I reported to reported me to another bumptious little prick. Ah capitalism! It’s gonna be a ten-thousand-year reich of a billion bumptious little pricks. Personnel had me into its drawer of the mirrored cabinet. ‘You understand, Ms Bloom,’ said Miss Ever-so-Modern, ‘that given you haven’t been with us for very long, we’re in no position to offer you much in the way of a severance payment. I hope you don’t mind me asking, but do you have a personal pension plan?’ One more mirrored building I wouldn’t have to look into, seeing nothing of myself, going nowhere.

I laughed like a loon all the way back to Dulston, Lithy gambolling beside me on the tube, singing in the street, ‘It’s good to touch the green, green grass of ho-ome!’ Not that the dead chunk of calcification knew anything about grass, or home, or touching. Still, years now of shushing, tushing and generally admonishing my never-to-be-child had started to pay off. It was mentally growing up. It was now possible to hold a conversation verging on the adult with Lithy. Lithy who, it transpired, had the sassy irreverence and anarchic acumen I’d tried to inculcate in my daughters, but without Natasha’s deep well of neediness, or Charlotte’s constricting chain of snob shops.

With Rude Boy, on the other hand, there’d been no change. He was the same as ever, impersonating the wheelchair-bound by twirling his hands at his sides while screaming ‘Um-diddyum-diddy!’, half-mooning the elderly with his muddy ass, freaking out small kiddies by manifesting himself in the margins of their vision. At least he wasn’t so clingy. I’d leave him at Argos Road when I went to work, now I left him for whole nights as well. Shit – what could happen to him anyway?

‘So, what do we do now?’ Lithy said, back-flipping from gutter to sidewalk as we neared home.

‘Well, I suppose we’ll have to visit the deatheaucracy. See if there’s an eternity benefit available, or anything of that ilk.’

The deatheaucracy were tenanting a busted car-hire operation in Acton that winter. One of those clock-card ladders was tacked up on the wall by the door of the place. When you arrived you were required to punch a card and put it in the appropriate slot. As you know, wherever the deatheaucracy pitch up there’s a waiting system of a kind, whether deli-style tickets like these, or an electronic signboard like in a post office. Three or four of the dead –looking dead ordinary – sat on functional benches, leafing through a dismemberment of week-old newspapers.

Eventually my number was up, and leaving Lithy in the waiting area I trailed behind a clerk sporting a bumfreezer, through a claustrophobic succession of rooms, each one more crowded with life-size, cardboard cut-out, stand-alone figures than the one before. These rigid men leant about the place, their cardboard supports long since torn away. They were all the same guy, a young executive in a dark, double-breasted suit, waving a bunch of keys, with a speech bubble coming out of his mouth. This said, ‘I’VE GOT HIRE POWER – HAVE YOU?’ ‘They put them in here when the business went under,’ explained Hartly, the bumfreezer clerk. ‘Frightful bore, but still, we won’t be staying for long. Have you said hello to the
nyujo
yet?’ I said hello to their precious fucking
nyujo,
which was being daubed with Copydex by one of the plain Janes.

A few of the suits were hanging around the place. Two sizes sat with their jackets off, trading baseball cards from their waistcoat pockets. Another, in a blue blazer, fired Buck Rogers’s rocket pistol X2-31 at a hippy in a Mao jacket who sported a Zapata moustache. ‘Zap-zap-zap,’ the toy went. Other deatheaucrats were playing mah-jong or Diplomacy, Scrabble or Monopoly, or working their way through all 43,252,003,274,489,856,856,000 possible combinations of Rubik’s cube. They ignored us as we passed. They concentrated on their dead crazes and their ceaseless smoking. Like Phar Lap, the deatheaucrats rolled their own. It gave them another excuse for a good fidget and pocketful of paraphernalia.

Hartly showed me into Canter’s partitioned office.

‘Ah, Ms Bloom.’ Canter looked up from his paperwork, put down his Papermate, adjusted the collar of his Jaeger jacket. ‘You may leave us, Hartly – do something useful, like taking Anubis for a walk on Turnham Green.’

‘As you wish,’ said Hartly, with ill grace. It was never possible for me to ascertain where authority lay with the deatheaucrats. While Canter nominally took control of my case, on occasions I’d heard him answer in the same surly fashion to Hartly, Glanville, or even Davis. The whole organisation has too many Indians and no discernible chiefs at all, wouldn’tjew say?

‘Ms Bloom,’ Canter pressed on, ‘apparently you’ve given up your job?’

‘News travels fast.’

‘Oh, well-nigh instantaneously.’

‘I’m getting too old for it.’

‘You’re no older than you were the day you died. Have you, perhaps, been having some . . . mmm, how can I put it?’

‘Feelings?’

‘Precisely so.’ He shuffled a couple of file cards. ‘Jealousy in the early sixties, anger in the late fifties, pride going back to the Second War and so forth?’

‘Ye-es, those would be the ones.’ The deatheaucrats always know everything, yet understand so little. ‘But they don’t altogether – ‘

‘Impinge? Well they wouldn’t, would they? Given your subtle body. It’s more in the manner of seeing feelings, isn’t it? Looking in on them from outside, revisiting the sights.’

Loathsome man. I was more than glad I hadn’t got the job with them. A plain Jane came in with the obligatory Nice biscuits and the rancid tea. She looked at me with ill-concealed pique and eased herself out again.

‘Going to the meetings, are you?’ Canter pressed on, peering at me through a rimless pince-nez he’d poked up on to his shnozzle.

‘Now and then.’

‘Not according to our records. Listen, Ms Bloom, may I be candid?’

‘What’s the sense in being anything else?’

‘You’re still preoccupied with the affairs of the living. This observation of your daughters, this entering into their lives. Mr Jones should encourage you to desist. There’s nothing to be gained now. You’d be far better off considering a move to Dulburb, or even further afield. I understand that your elder daughter, Mrs . . .?’ Another search for facts – when were these assholes going to get computerised.

‘Elvers.’

‘Yes, Elvers. She’s about to undertake fertility treatment, if I’m not mistaken.’

‘Could be.’

‘I wouldn’t make the mistake of spending too much time with her during this, if I were you. There could be complications.’

‘Oh.’ I got up to leave; I’d had enough of the interview. I pulled my gloves on – it seemed the appropriate action. ‘I’m not really interested in your advice on the matter,
Mister
Canter, I only came here to enquire whether there might be some cigarette money available now that I’ve quit my job?’

‘Only the most nugatory amount. I think the current grant stands at around a hundred and fifty pounds per calendar month.’

‘That will be sufficient. I won’t bother you any further.’

‘Good day, Ms Bloom, see the cashier on your way out. And do try and think about what I’ve been saying.’

But I didn’t – why would I? I went back to Cumberland Terrace, I took up my station at the Elverses’. I went with Charlotte and Richard to their consultations with Churchill.

My daughter had already been through a battery of tests and examinations with her own doctor, but the good Lord liked to do things properly. And although she’d been pregnant once before, it’d only been managed after the most strenuous sexual callisthenics. Churchill already had a picture of a complex of problems that were hampering the Elverses’ ability to conceive. Charlotte had some endometriosis, although not enough to block her tubes. Richard’s sperm were sluggish and some of them were abnormal, but they could still do the crawl. There was no doubt that Charlotte’s tension and anxiety were affecting ovulation. Ha! Her inability to conceive had become a self-fulfilling prophecy. But there was also hostility between her refined cervical mucus and his coarse sperm.

Churchill did more tests. He probed her with his clever hands, both he and Charlotte revelling in mutual appreciation of each other’s lack of embarrassment. This, Churchill reflected, is what gynaecology
should
be like – having a compliant patient, who had long since ceased to view her body as anything other than a vessel for procreation. He took blood, he took cervical mucus, he did a laparoscopy to check out her internal layout. He did a hysterosalpingography – purely because he liked impressing his patients by pronouncing the word. He did abdominal ultrasound scanning and an endrometrial biopsy. He pronounced himself satisfied and packed her off to lunch on the fifth floor of Harvey Nichols.

Richard came to see Churchill and the doctor talked to him, man to sperm. Churchill told him how lucky he was not to have idiopathic oligospermia – and Richard couldn’t but agree. To have slow, fucked-up sperm was one thing, but to have
none at all,
that would look like carelessness. Churchill told Richard that even his normal, motile sperm might have undetectable chromosomal abnormalities. But he needn’t feel singled out by this, it was quite possible that his wife’s eggs were reaching their sell-by date as well. Some men, Churchill prated, are born without a vas deferens at all, or their urethra – foolish tube! – emerges on the underside of the penis. Others have retrograde ejaculation, which is pretty damn stupid; so they inseminate their own bladders, giving birth to their own pissy babies. ‘But you’ve done that,’ I mouthed at Elvers from the corner of the room, ‘you’ve done that already – and it’s I who must face the consequences. At the cat-flap, day after day, moaning for admission.’

Another possibility was – and Churchill was buoyed up by this one, for it was an area of doubly fruitful research – that Richard’s immune system reacted to his own sperm as if it were a foreign body, as if he’d drunk some other guy’s spunk. These weren’t the good Lord’s words – they’re my own. Anyway, the important thing was to take the pith out of Richard and have plenty of the life force
on tap.
If he could’ve, Churchill would’ve demanded litres of the stuff from every man who walked into the room, the Lord’s lust for sperm was so great.

Churchill told Richard to take his time; he’d go out and get a cappuccino while his patient frothed. There were any number of images on offer, carefully stored in a Chinese lacquer bookcase. Erotica of many stripes, woodblocks, etchings, dry points, even fucking
oil paintings.
Oh yes, Churchill certainly expected his patients to be of a refined character, the sort of men who whacked off to Degas and got a hard-on looking at a Gauguin. There were even – should Richard be of a coarser grain – actual
photographs
of naked women. Full frontal split-crotch shots, just in case he was forgetting what it was he was here for, and where it was all going to.

Richard thanked Churchill and took the plastic pot. He promised he’d do his best to come with the goods. Left alone, Richard eschewed the good Lord’s cabinet of arty delights. He ignored the pornography and relied on his own procreative imagination. I watched him, a ponderous man, blurring into middle age, standing by the consulting-room window looking at the square outside. Staring at the posh, antiquated, knickerbocker-wearing kids, with their still posher, still more antiquated, Norton nannies. And visibly regretting – or so I imagined – every single lost ejaculation of his twenty-odd productive years. Every stiffened sheet and starched handkerchief, every wasted bit of tissue paper. All that wrist-acheto no avail. He jacked himself off on lost time, did Richard, and I watched him. It’s absurd, I know, but I thought I should
engage
with Richard a little more now, try and feel a little for him. He was, after all, still my son-in-law. Prince Stuff.

All this hanging around the doctor’s office was hell on my smoking; I had to cut back to fewer than a hundred and thirty a day. I spent bizarre evenings watching Churchill and his lab technicians doing tests. They placed her mucus and his semen together on a slide and let the goo fight it out. They put bets on the results and drank beer out of Pyrex beakers. What a wag that Churchill was!

Come the winter, Churchill had us back in his consulting room and laid out the possibilities. He was no nearer to comprehending how the Elverses had managed to conceive once, but were now unable to, than when he’d started the hundred-guinea-per-hour meter. There were myriad possible factors, but none of them alone was sufficient. ‘I don’t recommend such a course lightly,’ he said weightily, ‘but if you’re intent on trying, and you feel you have the
complete information
necessary to give informed consent, you might try
in vitro
fertilisation.’

Oh, they wanted to try – why wouldn’t they? After all, they were now as rich as fucking Croesus, and given their grossly stultified imaginations, and their gross houses stuffed with chattels, they had little precious else to spend the money on.

Churchill described the treatment cycle. The drugs he’d use to suppress Charlotte’s pituitary system and the temporary menopause they’d induce. The drugs he’d then employ to stimulate her ovaries and ruff up her follicles. The ultrasounds and blood tests they’d be doing all along to check everything was going OK. Then he got to the hard part. Even if she could cope with the mood swings, the abdominal bloating, the rashes and the muscle-aches, there was still no guarantee that any given treatment cycle would be worth completing. Did they
still
want to go through with it? You bet your ass they did.

Then came the hard-drug education. Churchill and his storky assistants showed Charlotte how to sniff Zoladex on the first day of her period. It made her feel high just knowing she was finally under way, even if in the wake of her sniffing sessions came these crippling mood swings, waves of hormonal
weltschmerz.
After day fourteen of Charlotte’s cycle, when they’d checked to see that her ovaries were well and truly dormant, they taught Richard how to shoot his wife up with human menopausal gonadotrophin. He had to get a grip on a fucking big hypo for this job, and shoot the shit clear inside Charlotte’s muscles. To begin with it made him feel quite nauseous – but not as sick as her.