How the Dead Live (4 page)

‘No, that fuckin’ buju, girl!’ He made as if to pull me along with him and I followed in his wake, the two of us breasting the summertime crowds, who had now, like brown rats, sensed the explosion five blocks away by mood transmission. It made them all look as ugly as they are for a change. ‘You feel that, didya?’ he said.

‘What’s
that?’

‘No more of yer stupid colourlessness of indifference, hey-yeh?’

‘No, I really wanted to get in that alleyway – ‘

‘With me, yuwai, an’ you been thinkin’ ‘bout rootin’ long time now, yeh-hey?’

‘Ye-es.’

‘You’ve bin dead too long, girl, dead too long. Those dead souls on Old Compton Street, they passed clean through and you never broke step. I saw that.’

‘So you – you do think rebirth would be a good idea . . . in my case?’

He stopped again, this time right next to a woman who was squinting into the air, arm outstretched, as if hailing a cab driven by Zeus across the fiery evening sky. Phar Lap was so close to her that he damped himself down a little and so did I. We whittled our presences away. That’s what we dead do, isn’t it? Shave ourselves out of the designer-stubbled faces of the living. Rude Boy came and sat on the kerb by us. Lithy, amazingly, leant against Rude Boy’s knee. ‘Is it that you wanna get shot of these fellers, yeh-hey?’

‘No! I mean – maybe. I don’t know. But if J am reborn I’ve children to talk to among the living – even if I leave these two behind.’

‘Yeh-hey! You don’t wanna be alone ever, d’you Lily?’

‘Do you?’

‘I never am. Listen, don’ go crawlin’ into no cracks, not now. You hold back on those wantin’ feelings you’re gettin’, yeh? You do bad shit now and you’re done for girl, see? It’ll come back at you like this here kayan – see?’ He waved his big, black boomerang to bludgeon home his point. ‘Now snap it up – Mr Canter is waitin’ for you.’

He lifted his arm up in front of the vacant eyes of the living woman and grabbed the cab. That’s how I ended up here with you. Stuck here in the waiting room, anticipating my final encounter with the deatheaucracy – for the time being.

Christmas 2001

Yeah, but there was more, hindsight multiplying me like opposing mirrors set either side of a restaurant booth. Because as we boarded the cab I remembered. This rush across this West End, ignoring the bombing in Old Compton Street, forcing Rude Boy to keep the pace: we were in a hurry
– I
was in a hurry. Now, that’s one thing you never do when you’re dead. There’s no rush when you’re dead. You may have scrambled up the dark stairs to confront it, nose to the musty carpet, anticipating its horror for everyone of those fifteen steps, expecting it every inch of the half-landing. But there’s no rushing once you’ve seen him, her and it. No rushing once you’re there. Only pottering around. Pottering around for eternity.

Dying

‘It’s been quite a morning.’

The last words of Samuel Beckett’s father

Chapter One

April 1988

T
hey say you are what you eat and now that I’m dying I know this is the solid truth. Actually, it’s not only a solid truth – it’s a gelid one as well. It’s also a sloppy, tacky, congealed reality. It’s a pink blubbery blancmange of an evidence and a stringy gruel of proof. It’s a gristly confirmation which swells like a filament of meat caught between teeth. Not, you understand, that I’ve had my own teeth for years now, it’s just that recently I’ve found myself dreaming of teeth, of what it’s like to have your own teeth. Dreaming of having teeth again. Anyway – you are what you eat: in my case, this hospital slurry, which seems to’ve been put together – insofar as it’s cooked at all – for the express purpose of sliding through us near-cadavers as fast as possible.

‘No need to give them anything but swill,’ I can hear a pushy lack-of-nutritionist proclaim (funny how the profession attracts quite so many anorexics) at this meeting or that case conference; ‘they’re eating up half the budget of the NHS already – can that be right?’ No, maybe not, but I’ve paid my fucking taxes, or at least I hope that ridiculous little man Weintraub has by now.

The other thing about this slick cuisine is, natch, that it doesn’t repeat on you. Or rather, neither its odour nor its substance is likely to rise up in the faces of those poor overworked nurses. Good thing. We seldom get cheese — never smoked fish. Eggs are boiled to shit. Hard ovals of desiccated shit. No pickles. No rich sauces. No onions and emphatically no garlic. Not that I really liked such food when I was well, it’s just that now, now that I’m dying, I realise that this capacity certain foodstuffs exhibit of reappearing in your mouth, spontaneously, hours after they’ve been consumed, is very much a sign of life. Life in its very repetitiousness. Life
going on.
I could murder for a shmaltz – now that I know I’m definitely going to die. After my teeth were taken out, in the mid-sixties – ‘63, ‘64, weird not to remember – I thought that I’d become immortal. I’d always assumed that I’d die with my teeth because they were so fucking painful. Anything that painful – I unreasoned – even if it didn’t kill you itself, would surely be the end of you when it went. You’d die of bliss. But now, teeth or not, I’m dying.

I’m absolutely certain that I’m going to die because half and hour ago nice Mr Khan, the clinical psychologist attached to the ward, came and told me I was. Some wiseass once said that the miracle of lifewas that we all might die at any minute – but that we live as if we were immortal. I wish I could get this wiseass by his scrawny throat and throttle his life right out of him. Did he have any idea what it’s like when you
know
the hour of your own death? And when it’s announced to you thus: ‘Erm – ah. I understand, Ms Bloom, that Dr Steel spoke to you this morning?’

‘Yes, he did.’ I put my crappy women’s mag to one side, I show my dentures to the nervous Mr Khan. I’m being a good little cancer-ridden old lady. So easy to be like this when you don’t have any legs. Legs make men think about pussy – even old pussy; and no one has legs in bed – not unless you’re in there with them.

‘Did he have a word about palliative care?’

‘About giving me palliative care? Yes he did, thank you.’ I’m still giving Mr Khan the glad eye but it’s beginning to dim slightly, because let’s face it, affirmative action or not, it’s very difficult to see what the point of puffed-up Mr Khan really is. Sure, he’s perfected that clever little Uriah Heep act which makes him appear ever so ‘umble to his clients and employers, but my teeth aren’t simply long – they’re fucking eternal! And I know this covers up a typical subcontinental mummy’s boy, a puling bully who lords it over the womenfolk when he gets home from a hard day talking crap to the dying.

‘I’m sorry there isn’t anything more that we can do for you . . . I can . . . do for you. Are you a religious person, Ms Bloom?’

‘No, no
I'm
sorry.’

‘You’re sorry?’ He’s a fat thing, he hasn’t got a hungry cancer chomping up his breasts, breasts which jiggle most unpleasantly inside his pressed, near see-through, synthetic shirt. Why do they always wear translucent shirts, these people who have everything to hide?

‘Sorry that you’re labouring under the delusion you’ve helped me at all. Done anything for me whatsoever.’ And I pick up my abandoned Woman's
Realm,
get back to reading recipes I’ll never make, ever, for sure now. Picking apart knitting patterns in my mind.

When I’ve absorbed another recipe for banana flapjacks perhaps the two hundredth of my life so far – I look up to see that Mr Khan is still there. Having failed with what he imagines to be a sympathetic approach, and rising to my rebuff, he adopts a more scientific one: ‘We – or rather I – wondered whether you might be able to help
us,
then?’

‘With what?’ I can’t believe this shlemiel.

‘We’re doing a study – a survey of patients . . . of terminal patients” – he’s squeezed it out at last, that terminal ‘terminal’, popped it like a cyanide capsule into the mouth of the conversation – ‘attitudes.’

‘Attitudes to what?’ Outside, on Grafton Way, I can hear the traffic whooping and growling. When I came into the hospital this time for the laughable operation (a lumpectomy-can you believe they really call it that? It’s like dubbing a heart transplant a ‘ticker swap’), it was such a relief to get out of the city, into a kind of refuge, but now I understand it’s no refuge at all. There ought to be a sanctuary inside the hospital where patients can hide from Khan and his ilk.

‘To, erm . . . to their quality of life.’ He’s got it out now and he’s obscurely pleased; there’s a thin smile seaming his stuffed, fat face.

‘Let me get this straight, you’re asking people who’re dying what their quality of life is?’

‘Ye-es, that’s it. I have a survey sheet . . . a questionnaire, if you’d like to see it?’

‘What do you expect to discover?’ My tone begins sharp but steady, but as I enunciate the hated words the pitch rises, the words fray and shred. ‘That the quality of a life gets better the nearer a cancer patient gets to death? Oh my fucking Christ I’m going to die. I can’t stand it I’m gonna die. Not me! Oh God-ohgod-ohgog-jeezus-ogod-og – “And here I go, choking into incoherent terror, the facade demolished by sledgehammer sobs. I moan and I pule and I groan and saliva loops from my slack jaws. It’s a most satisfying performance, I sense through the fog – for Mr Khan. After all, he’s a trained grief counsellor – and here’s
plenty
of grief. Sacks of it. But no – he can’t cope, he’s up and waddling off in the direction of the nurses’ station while I tear up the
Woman’s Realm,
lay waste to the paper Little England, and scream and cry.

I’ve always had a talent for hysteria, for plunging over the black edge of a mood, but this black edge is so much bigger. It’s a Niagara, sucking into itself the whole water of my life. I feel like a stroke victim must – half of my world is gone. Half of that plastic water jug; half of that box of Kleenex; half of that fucking already half-eaten Battenberg cake which my junky daughter brought me yesterday afternoon; half of that crumpled tissue; that Staedtler HB pencil; that dust mote. For the first time in my life I can feel, utterly and incontrovertibly, what it’s like not to be me. What it’s like to be me feeling not me. It’s so lonely. I’m so fucking lonely. Who would’ve thought that me, who’s led a life that has known so much bloody loneliness, now has to face the solitude of death? I’m sobbed by racks. Oh my self – why hast thou abandoned me?

Sister Smith, one of those West Indian women of landmass bulk, who could be any age between thirty and sixty, rips me into my plastic cocoon with her arms arching like leaping seals, then sits down heavily near my mutilated breast. She’s already got the unputdownable beaker, the easy-to-swallow capsule. ‘Here,’ she says – and I take the Valium. I’ve no problem with that; after all, I’ve taken a raft of the things thus far – why stop now? In the seventies, when I patrolled daily with depression’s black guard dog, I used to pass by suburban newsagents, and seeing those sweetie-dispensers outside (you know the ones – ten pence for some gum and a plastic charm) I’d imagine them full of five-, ten-, even twenty-milligram Valiums. Go in, and the old stick behind the counter – hair greased straight back, cigarette fuming in his face – might say, ‘Bad news today, Mrs Yaws, very bad news. Bomb in a pub in Guildford, many dead. Scenes of terrible carnage. Senseless slaughter. Unspeakably awful. Unimaginably evil. You’ll be wanting a Valium with your
Guardian?’

‘There, love,’ says Sister Smith, ‘there you go.’

Gulp! I can feel her yellow-tinged, calloused palm through the brushed cotton of my nightie. A curious confusion of senses – and this alone serves to calm me, because it’s only with blacks that I imagine I can feel their colour. What could whiteness feel like? A stupid colourlessness of indifference, I daresay. But the blacks – whom I touch always unwillingly – they
feel
black, or yellow, or brown, or in the case of the old man I tried to comfort after he’d been knocked down by a car outside John Lewis’s on the Finchley Road – grey. He felt grey.

‘I have to say, Mr Khan’s not the best clinical psychologist we have here at the hospital, y’know.’

‘I-I know. Believe me – I know. Ogodogodogod . . .’ I would certainly like to hug Sister Smith. She’s built to hug me, she’s big enough to hug me. My mother was too petite to give me a proper hug once I was seven – not that she would’ve wanted to, for fear of rucking up her perfect bodice. And as for my father – I never called him Daddy; I never called him nything – he’d lift me up under my arms and swing me, but only as if intent on letting go.

He really is well-meaning . . . but no one can find the right words exactly . . .’

No, or even fucking vaguely, or so it seems. Yes, I should like to be hugged by Sister Smith and feel her great reef of bosom support my shattered, decaying one . . . Full fathom five thy excised lump lies . . . I should like her yellow palms on my sallow shoulders. I should like to smell the coconut oil on her skin, the PH-balanced conditioner in her crinkly hair, but this would not be a good idea.

I’m sitting on the veranda of the old house in Huntingdon, Long Island, which we had, briefly, when I was a child. I’m sitting on the lap of a woman as solid as Sister Smith and as black and sweet-smelling. The sun is hot then cool on my neck as Betty plaits my long, blonde hair. Even then it was the best thing about me. Can she be doing anything as obvious as humming a hymn? Yes, she is. She’s a religious woman although when she did house-cleaning it would be the blues. ‘Titanic Man’ for the bathroom, ‘St Louis’ for the kitchen. She’s doing my hair in a French plait, up and over and through. Hairy pastry. And while she plaits I’m kissing her. The softest and lightest of kisses on her neck and on her collarbone where it rises from her house dress. I’m being scrupulous with these kisses, they’re really air kisses, perturbations of the atmosphere immediately above Betty, because I know – or I think I know – that this irritates her. But I want to kiss Betty because I love her. No, not love her – she’s my world. Like all loving adult carers of small children, she has defined the world itself for me. My world is Betty – not the earth. Things can be assimilated in as much as they conform-or diverge – from this Bettyness.

Yes, I’m kissing Betty and I’m smelling Betty and I’m even subtly rubbing a bit of Betty’s old house dress in between my thumb and finger – because she’s my security blanket too when I’m torn from her and deposited hard on the boards. ‘You bad girl! You bad, bad girl! You
never ever
do this again. Never. Do you understand me? Do you!’ One slap cross my tiny face, then back, then a third. My mother slapped me the way British actors playing Gestapo officers were later to slap their interrogation victims – but she wasn’t pretending. Her diamond ring drew my blood and became this little girl’s worst enemy. It was so out of proportion – the colossal violence from this petite, blonde woman – that Betty herself was stunned, left half-risen from the old rocker, her face a racist caricature of minstrel shock.

I never kissed Betty again. She stayed with us until I was fifteen – but I never touched her again. We would talk and I would confide and she would sympathise – but we both knew we could never touch each other ever again; that for me black flesh was an anathema. An evil substance. I cannot touch black people – unless I have to. How unfair that they may have to touch me. I do so hope I’m unconscious before it happens. And I find myself saying to Sister Smith, ‘Will I know it when I die?

‘Hush now,’ Sister Smith puts a hand up and dabs at my dregs of hair – black women, blonde hair, my whole life has been wrapped in this skein – but draws back when she senses me stiffen. ‘Y’know, you’re not bein’ good to yourself, girl – Lily. Dr Steel, he means well, but he’s – how can I put it now – he takes a rather
technical
view of these things. He doesn’t explain so well – did he say what you should be expecting?’

‘He said that this time they couldn’t get all the tumour, that it had hypo– hypo – ‘

‘Hypostasised, yes, well, that jus’ means it’s spread, you see.’ ‘Anyway – that we could go on with chemo, with the ray gun, with a dancing shaman if I liked, but that he thought . . . he thought . . .’

‘That there was no point now. That it would be better to accept it an’ die with a little dignity – he said that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, he’s nothin’ if not dependable like that, but he’s not a believer, y’know, he doesn’t have no saviour so he can’t comfort himself – poor man.’

Saviour. That’s done it. Sister Smith is undoubtedly one of the rocks the Church is built upon. Although in her case it’s probably a small revivalist chapel. I can see the tiny building in my mind’s eye, actually shaking as Sister Smith and her sisters slam out the gospels. I notice now what I should’ve before that wedged in the brown ravine of her cleavage is a gold cross. Her saviour must be tiny, it occurs to me – probably because my sardonic voice is the one that will be silenced last-if this is big enough to nail him up on. ‘Thank you, Sister – but I’m not religious.’ It’s probably the most sisterly thing I’ve said in years – which is how long since I’ve had cause to thank my own.