Читать книгу How the Dead Live - Уилл Селф - Страница 12
ОглавлениеChapter Two
I’m glad he’s got a ticket – although sad it’s only an interim, sixteen-pound, fine. He deserves an unfixed penalty, our Richard; a free-floating axe should swing permanently above his head, ready to cleave him if he ever does anything wrong. And wherein lies his fault, this upright entrepreneur who’s had the good grace to marry, look after and even be faithful to a daughter I myself could frankly do without? He’s successful – we don’t like that. After all, anyone can be a success, but it takes real guts to be a failure. Richard is gutless – which perhaps explains his boyish buoyancy. There’s nothing in that puerile belly of his save for the gas of marketing, without which – as any fule kno – there can be no oxygen of publicity.
So, we settle ourselves and our tumours in the blue confines of the Mercedes and set off. Richard is fuming a little – but only internally. The car is like Richard himself: stylishly unstylish, corpulent, solid, efficient. And navy – part of the senior German service. Mercedes pride themselves so much on the longevity of their vehicles it surprises me they bother to bring out new models at all. One would rather think that now, as we power down the home straight – I say ‘we’ advisedly-towards the millennium’s end, they’d reintroduce the older models again. ‘Ladies and Gentleman, meine Damen und Herren, Mercedes-Benz of Düsseldorf, for a few seasons automobile-manufacturers by appointment to the Thousand-Year Reich, are proud to present the all old, all new, Horseless Carriage! Assembled lovingly by three ancient artisans, veterans of the Battle of Sedan, the Horseless Carriage features an entirely wooden body and a solid metal dashboard! Vases and reticules are optional, but every single Horseless Carriage comes with antimacassars as standard – ‘
‘Look, Mumu,’ Natty breaks in – she’s in the back with me, the grown-ups are in front – ‘there’s Jewmar.’ And indeed there, on the corner of Prince of Wales Road, is Jewmar – or what used to be Jewmar when the girls were kids. All that remains now is the black outline of lettering stencilled on the brickwork. Jewmar – or Lewmar, to give it its correct name-was a dry-goods store owned by Lewis and Mary Rubens, the couple who lived next door to us in Hendon in the sixties and seventies. Lewis and Mary – hence Lewmar; hence, to our anti-Semitic wits, Jewmar.
I couldn’t believe the Rubenses when Yaws and I, together with Charlotte, aged one, moved to Hendon. Here, strained through net curtains, rustling about in a nylon, gingham-patterned house dress, and dumped down on a velour-covered three-piece suite, was all the sour, affected, sub-gentility of my own lower-middle–class, Jewish upbringing. The Rubenses’ place smelt of gefilte fish and matzo balls – despite the fact that Mary Rubens cleaned relentlessly; she was a laving engine. And once every surface was spotless she’d re-cover it with glass, or plastic, or vinyl. There were glass covers on all the tables, stippled strips of transparent vinyl on the edge of every carpet, plastic covers on the seats. The whole joint was encapsulated – but it only served to keep the odours in. Meanwhile, over the hedge, next door, I’d be popping Librium and ironing creases into Yaws’s shirts. After all, I’d married into true shabby gentility, and there were standards I had to fail to maintain.
Jewmar, its austere naves lined with boxes of Brillo pads and its rococo chapels writhing with mop-heads, has long gone, to be replaced by a branch of Waste of Paper, part of a nationwide chain that sells prints, posters, postcards and decorative stationery. These stores started up in the seventies, flogging post-hippy tat – flowery bookmarks, bookish flower presses, you know the cack. To kids mostly, I suppose. I remember the original outlet, which was in the basement of Kensington Market; and I recall too the tubby, pimpled, bum-fluffy proprietor, one R. Elvers. Yup, Elvers is the man behind Waste of Paper, which is why Natty says ‘Jewmar’ in this heavily ironic way, with the accent on ‘Jew’. Not that Elvers is Jewish, you understand, it’s only that like so many liberal Englishmen he finds our Jewish anti-Semitism hard to take. Ach me! So many people left to disparage – so little time.
Yeah – but y’know what? Jimmy cracked corn and I really don’t care. I’m annoyed that Richard has over two hundred Waste of Paper outlets. I’m aghast at the way he buys taste wholesale not just for his stores but for himself and his wife as well. Did he have any taste grubstake to begin with, I wonder, or has he never staked any claim at all? ‘Nearly home, Mother,’ says Charlotte – as if it were true. But now that we’re pulling up Kentish Town Road, and turning into Islip Street so as to negotiate the one way-system, I’m not so sure that this is my home at all any more.
When I think of the colossal effort I made to integrate with this neighbourhood when I moved here ten years ago, it makes me realise how pathetically small all my life’s endeavours have been. My efforts as a homemaker were like playing with kids’ constructor toys, Lincoln’s Cabins Stateside, and Betta Bildas when I crossed the pond. They were childish, out of scale, and inevitably, once I’d completed them, I’d smash them up in a giant fit of pique.
I have to say this much for David Yaws – in his demise he exhibited a genius for timing which was entirely absent in his life. Having been late for everything, he finally left me in the winter of 1970, not to shack up with Virginia Bridge, or Serena Hastings, or any of the other uptight genteel fucks he’d strung along since – in some cases – before the war. Nor did he get it together with Maria dos Santos, his fellow ecclesiastical historian and stereotypically hot Iberian lover. Maria was the one he actually chased all the way to Seville, where he howled outside her door like the dumb dog he was, until she had to climb off of her back terrace and go to her mother’s house, in order to telephone me, and ask me to leave a message at his fucking hotel to tell him to come home. No, not Maria – who I always rather liked anyway. No, he went off to Crouch End of all places, where he had effected a liaison with a little old lady called Wix, Wendy Wix. Who was so little and old and wrinkly and fucking genteel that according to the girls she was like a cross between a gnome and their grandmother.
I suppose Yaws was missing Mumsie, his mother, who he’d managed to neglect into the grave the year before. Either that or he really was a gerontophile. A sinister thought, but then as the decades passed and the prissily precise accents of his comfortably padded, inter-war youth were drowned out by the current babel, he must have developed a genuine yearning for a brief encounter with the past. That was all he got, for having failed as a gentleman, Yaws copped out of being a man as well. By dying. They said it was a heart attack, but this sounds far too speedy for Yaws who wandered through his entire life in slow motion. No, I’m more inclined to think that his mortal coil simply uncoiled. His tick-tock clock ran down and no one troubled to rewind it. His heart pittered, pattered, skipped a beat, thought, ‘Screw this,’ and halted. He was fifty-six, another droning male who failed to make it out of the killing jar.
How strange that Jews should’ve silted up the backwaters of suburban London. How peculiar for the diaspora to end behind net curtains. Net fucking curtains. Rather than going to Hollywood or the gas chambers I joined this gauzy crew. Richard turns the car carefully into Bartholomew Road and we purr down it, the Nazi suspension eliminating the potholes. Not that Kentish Town is anywhere near as dismal as Hendon; it’s wedged into the core of the city far more tightly, a sliver of a district. I moved here in 1979 when Natasha went to art school, and once again, as I’d done so many times before, I organised my own induction: getting a library ticket; finding out where the good deli was; pacing out walks; window-shopping; acquiring neighbours. Christ – I’m glad that’s all over with now, I don’t think I could stand to do it again. I’d sooner move back to Madison, Wisconsin. Where Dave Kaplan and I spent the Eisenhower years – or at any rate some of them. Madison – now there was a town for claustro-agro. A radial of avenues, swept by the chilly winds off the lakes, and all of them aiming towards the fake Capitol, the vanishing point of democracy.
‘We’re here, Mumu, let me help you out.’ Why’s she being so solicitous? Out the door in a flash, round to my side, and a rail of an arm to lean on. Oh! Pain and nausea. Which came first? Certainly the pain makes me feel sick, but could it be that it’s feeling nauseous that gives me such pain? We totter to the kerb. I’d forgotten it was spring, although in London this often only means a jaundiced outbreak of forsythia. The street looks different the way things do when you’ve been away; and when you’ve been in hospital the familiar usually looks tremendous, the vitality of the fresh outside a glorious part of recovery. With all three kids – even after the painful, embarrassing delivery of Natasha – I felt immeasurably better when I got out of the hospital. I’d like to say that it was the transcendent feeling of New Motherhood, of Cosmic Beginning – but it wasn’t. It was me being well again, de-lumped, un-bumped, unpicked and free.
It’s not like that now – I’m only coming home to die, so the street looks like crap to me, blobbed with dog shit; spattered with chewed-up gum; cluttered up with cars on either side. The bricks of the three-storey terraced houses are bilious in the sharp sunlight – what’s London made of? Why, London bricks, of course. I feel horribly exposed in my crappy old overcoat and my Cornish-pasty shoes, with my scalp showing through my sparse hair. Each step brings a dollop of bile into my mouth, so by the time we’ve reached the front door, entered it, broached the flat’s front door, shuffled across the vestibule, staggered through the front room, and made it into the bathroom, I’m ready to vomit. Which I do. Natty holds on to me all the while, not exactly whispering, but at any rate muttering reassurances. ‘That’s all right, Mumu, on you come now, don’t worry, that’s OK, on you come, there you go, do you want a flannel?’
A washcloth? Eurgh. It smells when I clean my face with it-everything smells too much. I long for the days when Churchill was in power and all I could smell was the smoke from my Winston. You couldn’t get them in England then, I had to have friends bring them over from the States. We stutter back into the main room of the flat, then through the double doors to my bedroom, where I sink down and Natty kneels to remove my pasties. My little flat – why can’t I keep it clean? Without Filipino assistance all the surfaces are covered in crumbs, the carpets wefted with cat hair, the lampshades furred with dust. But why should I bloody care? For once in my life, entropy is in fashion. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is the look for 1988. Says top designer Stephan Shylock, ‘No need to worry about taking the trash out, dusting, ironing, or cleaning the drapes. Let that dirt build up mightily and allow your living area to reflect your own inevitable dissolution . . .’ Pity Molly had to spoil the spoilage.
Where are my kitties? There were plenty at the hospital– or were those mine? Or has the Filipino sucked them up along with their hair? Do I even care? My girls will be adequate pet-substitutes – for now.
‘Mumu, d’you want to climb into bed?’ Why is she bothering me? It’s comfy here, slumped down on the bedside – why would I want to lower myself into that chilly linen tomb? Old Lazarus has just managed to clamber out of the last one. Buthey! It’s not up to me; she’s got me back on my feet and we stagger together like two marathon dancers nearing the end. Off with the coat – down with the dress. I only dress down nowadays y’know – I only wear dresses that can be taken down. My days of upwardly-mobile undressing are over now. I was never exactly free with my body, but before my second was born I had no qualms about crossing my arms and pulling my dress over my head. Then advancing, open to whichever man, open to the world.
‘That’s better.’ Better for who, exactly? Better for you, you round-heeled little tart? Better for you to have me supine so you can rummage through the flat and see if you can turn up any loose cash, dollars maybe left over from my last trip to New York. Whatever. Natasha would purloin a wad of zlotys if she thought her drug dealer would accept them. I used to be a big blonde with big tits and a big nose. Now I’m a big grey blob, with one and a half tits and a sharp beak. I’m a game bird – I hope. No, on reflection I fear, I quail.
‘Errrrrr!’ The flat has an intercom buzzer that sounds like hesitation.
‘That will be the Macmillan nurse,’ says Elvers – because he’s paying for it.
‘I’ll let her in,’ says Charlotte – because she is, too. Natty stays pennilessly put. Then a tangle of voices which I can’t be assed to unravel. They are, presumably, showing her the flat and going over the drugs with her –
The drugs! That’s why Natty was so keen to come back with us – she has her eye on the Oramorph (one milligram of morphine sulphate per cc of liquid), and the diamorphine (handy hexagonal pills, twenty-milligram blues and ten-milligram browns, to be taken sub-lingually), and the Valium – of course. I’ve already heard her thinking aloud about ‘when they’ll give her Brompton’s cocktail’. While Sister Smith knew better than to hand her the hospital-issue paper bag full of the stuff, she did give it to Charlotte. Natasha has swooped in its wake like a seagull. Jesus – how grotesque. You’re dying and your junky daughter comes over to rip off your pain relief’ – Natty!’
‘Yes, Mumu?’ Her lovely wasted head pokes through the double doors to the living room.
‘What’s the nurse like?’
She enters and pulls the doors to before replying. ‘She’s wearing a ghastly yellow cardy which makes her skin look sallow and ugly.’
‘Indeed – and d’jew think that reflects on her healing arts?’
‘Dunno – you asked what she was like. Charlotte’s showing her the kitchen and Richard’s making up the sofa bed for her.’
‘What time is it?’
‘It’s nearly five, Mumu.’
‘You must be feeling sick, precious – tell Charlotte to bring my drugs in.’ That gets her trotting off coltishly – my little junky pony.
‘Aren’t you feeling well, Mum? Are you in pain?’
Oh yes – it pains me to see your round face. It pains me to see that I’ve squeezed out a further dollop of Yaws’s white, adipose body. Never allow yourself to be swayed by a man with a surname that can be read backwards. ‘I want my pills.’
‘Dr Bowen thought you wouldn’t need any more until this evening.’
‘Well . . .’ It’s becoming a real effort to say things; I have to punch a hole in the wobbling membrane of nausea that envelops me, simply in order to ejaculate them. ‘I don’t believe Dr Bowen is that sympathetic. I mean – it isn’t her fucking pain!’
‘I’ll get them.’
More muttering behind the doors, then they swing open again. Why am I insistently reminded of cowboys being thrown out of saloons in old westerns? It’s the movies, kid – enjoy. Natty was right about the cardigan. ‘Ms Bloom?’ She’s revolting – arguably more cadaverous than me; a ministering angel – of death. ‘I’m Deirdre Murphy.’ I’m an authority on arrogant contempt – perhaps the world’s fore-most. ‘I’ll be looking after you for the night.’ She has a rapid yet limpid voice – no Irish accent.
‘You’re a bit early, aren’t you?’
‘Normally the night nurse will come on at eight in the evening and stay ‘til eight the following morning, but the agency thought it would be a good idea if I came earlier this evening so that you wouldn’t have to deal with two new carers in the one day.’
‘How considerate of them.’ To consider their own profits.
‘Yes, well, we are here to help.’ Indeed you are, you’re helping me to let go of life already – with cardigans like that loose on the surface of the world, it’s no longer a safe place for anyone with any sartorial taste. ‘Your daughter said you wanted some pain relief?’ She’s got the bag.
‘Yes, where they took the stitches out – it’s very raw.’
She disappears into the bathroom and I can hear her stacking the packets and pots of pills. She reappears with the Oramorph.
I wave her away. ‘No, no, I need a pill – that stuff doesn’t work.’
‘You’ve already had twenty milligrams of diamorphine today, Ms Bloom – any more will make you awfully constipated.’
‘Awfully?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘There’s nothing awful about my constipation, madam. I cherish it. I hated having to crap – and now it’s over.’
‘I – I was going to ask you if you’ll be needing a portable commode?’
Only to stuff your head down. ‘No, no – that won’t be necessary, just gimme the pill.’ And she does, worn down by my irony. I put it in my mouth and when she turns away palm it. If life has been a prison – what better time to break the rules than when you’re dying? I wish I’d had more sex – and more unsuitable sex. Now one of my descendants will have to have it on my behalf – a groaning legacy. ‘And Deirdre.’
‘Yes, Ms Bloom?’
‘Call me Lily, please, and would you send Natasha through now?’ All this coming and going – so little discussion of the Great Masters.
‘Yes, Mumu?’
‘There you go, honey.’ I display the brown pill in my palm.
‘What?’
‘Here’s some heroin for you, darling, better you should take a pill than make your arms more of a pin cushion than they are already. What’s this . . .’ I squint at the pill, which is slick with saliva, ‘. . . ten milligrams, is that enough to hold you?’
‘Not quite – but why’re you doing this, Mumu?’
‘Not quite, huh? Go in the bathroom and get me the pot.’ She complies and I shake her out two more. ‘Enough now?’
‘Yuh.’ She dry-swallows them. ‘But why, Mumu?’
‘Listen, I’ve been to those crappy meetings ‘cause of your drug problem, I’ve sobbed in doctors’ waiting rooms and casualty wards, and you’re still taking this shit – though Christ knows what it does for you, it does nothing for me. So, if you want to hang out here with me I don’t want you always on the lookout for cash to steal, or drugs, and I don’t want that junky pal of yours coming round here either what’s he called?’
‘Russell.’
‘Yeah, Russell. Him I could really do without seeing. So, if it’s all the same to you I’d as soon I was your pusher for the time being – suit you, madam?’
Oh, it suits her all right. I can see that. I thought heroin made people who took it comatose zombies. In my own case it would be all but impossible to tell the difference, but Natasha is peculiarly charged by the drug – and even by the mere anticipation of its effects. She shifts from being vulnerable and skittish and withdrawn to being strong and steady and extrovert. She’s told me before that it makes her feel ‘complete’ and ‘confident’, and I can see what she means. When she’s off heroin she’s a fucking nightmare – when she’s on it she’s a peach. It’s not what a mother should feel about her daughter, but I do, I do, I do. She’s positively cantering around the room now, hanging my clothes in the closet, ordering my bedside table – books neatly stacked, little radio to the fore. ‘Do you want me to crash here, then? Stay in the flat?’ She stays at Russell’s flat, I know. It’s right around the corner from here, over a bookie’s on the main road. Natasha stays there so she can have her fix in the morning – her ‘get-up’, she calls it.
‘No, that won’t be necessary – there isn’t any room anyway. Besides, I thought you were staying with Miles at the moment?’ Miles is the boyfriend – there would have to be a boyfriend. Natasha couldn’t live without a boyfriend.
‘Oh yeah – but . . . well y’know.’
‘What, what do I know?’
‘He’s so dull.’ Oh yes, my daughter the thrill-seeker. Perhaps if I hadn’t brought her up to thrive on high drama she wouldn’t approach her life in this stagy fashion. My mistake. I would say mea culpa, but in the commercial premises I currently lease there’s a discreet sign by the cash register that reads: NO LIABILITY IS ACCEPTED FOR ANYTHING WHATSOEVER. FOREVER.
‘Well, are you staying with him?’
She is. This is confirmed by another burp of hesitation from the intercom – Miles has arrived. Miles by name, miles by nature – for he walks, rides and drives many many of them in pursuit of the lovely Natasha. I feel like drawing nice Miles to one side and warning him that this will always be his fate. That he will spend a lifetime trailing after this no-cash cow, as it grazes on other men and more drugs; and that if he’s fool enough to impregnate her it will be worse still. He’ll find himself shouting through letterboxes to check that his kid is still alive, that its mother hasn’t dropped dead from an overdose, leaving it to bang around by itself, in a squat full of rusty nails angled so as to inject tetanus. Poor Miles.
In he comes, looking dutiful – as if he were my son. He opens the double doors like a flunkey or an ambassador, parting them in front of his face, then deftly marrying them again behind his ass. ‘Mumu?’ He partakes of the family lingua franca, the gooey argot. ‘How’re you feeling?’
‘All the better for being home, Miles.’ I manage to look at him with feigned betterness concealing my real bitterness. He’s a severely attractive young man, straight black hair, burnished features – he’s far more handsome than anyone I’ve ever been with. Not that I could’ve summoned up a smidgen of lust for him, even before Minxie came along. No, my lust grew old along with me. In my thirties I only found thirty-year– old men attractive; in my forties, forty-year–olds; and in my fifties, men who were, quite frankly, moribund. Now my lust has died alongside them – and so I’m dying. How I used to hate putting on the convict’s costume of feminine allure, so that all the arrows pointed towards my sex – yet how I miss it now. It transpires that my life may well have been for lust.
‘I was going to take Natasha to a film – if that’s all right with you?’
‘Perfectly fine, although I shan’t be accompanying you.’
‘Would you like me to bring the telly in here?’
‘No, don’t worry, I’ve got my little radio. I like the BBC voices. I like the news bulletins. I bet they’ll have them even in the grave.’ His shapely mouth becomes amorphous with concern, but he doesn’t blink. Bit of a catastrophile, our Miles comes of being raised by a drunk old hippy. He’s told me that he spent much of his childhood prising her insensate fingers from bottles of Merrydown cider, and checking to see Isis (that’s her name – I kid you not) hadn’t wet herself. Yup, he’s right at home with the incapacitated, is Miles, which is presumably why he finds Natty so bloody irresistible.
‘If there’s anything I can do, Mumu – anything at all.’
What service does he imagine he can perform for me? Does he really want to give me an enema, a blanket bath, an injection? Or is his heart set on something even more sinisterly invasive? Is he looking at me in the way Dr Steeldoes, seeing the patient as merely the container of the disease? Steel, a pathologist manqué if ever there was one, clearly cannot wait to unzip me and have a look at my malignant goodies. Good luck to him – I’ll be elsewhere. ‘No, Miles – you head off. And Miles.’
‘Yes, Mumu.’
‘Natty’s had thirty milligrams of my diamorphine, so don’t let her anywhere near that creep Russell, OK?’
‘OK Mumu.’ He withdraws, his idol face determinedly void of consternation at this bizarre role I’ve adopted.
Yes, Miles. Trying to look sharp and hip and funky in his all-black denim costume, his three earrings, his teased hair. Miles, who like so many of the kids of bohemians is in fact desperate to conform. Miles, who would’ve made the perfect partner for Charlotte. Charlotte, who now bustles in efficiently with what appears to be – actually is – a checklist. ‘Mum, I’ve filled in Deirdre on the kitchen, the heating and the cats. Richard has arranged for Molly to come by for an hour each morning and give the place a once-over. Natty says she’ll check on you later, and I’ll be back late tomorrow morning – I have an early meeting.’
‘OK.’
This downbeat reply doesn’t please her, and her fat lips give a Yaws moue, as if disappointed in the world that has been organised. ‘Are you OK, Mum?’
‘Charlotte,’ I lever myself up on the pillows so that I may get more uncomfortable, ‘I’m not going to go gently.’
‘I hadn’t thought so.’
‘I’m scared.’
‘So am I.’ She comes over and kisses me on the forehead. I cry a little and when she’s comforted me a little I forget that she’s there and even who she is. When I remember – she’s gone; and so, apparently, are the black-denim twins.
With the girls and their swains departed, I’m free to meditate on the way time will drag to the fore their presently obscure resemblances. With Charlotte, as I say, so far there’s nothing but Yaws, and with Natasha there’s still nothing of him. But I know this isn’t true, know it from my own experience. As I’ve grown older, increasingly the disliked and heavy face of my Aunt Rhea has stared back at me from the glass. This face has been hidden from me for all these years and comes upon me now in mockery – or so it seems. I wonder who’ll rise up to mock my two? Neither will know until they reach the age I was when I raised them. Then the memories of their own bodies will inform them who they genuinely are. What if they turned out to be Aunt Rheas as well? That would be worth waiting for – the three fat Rheas sitting stitching malicious tapestries together. I think not.
I guess I kept the delusion of being my own woman too long, blowing hot and cold so that eventually I was annealed by my neuroses. If I was my own woman, why was it that these impersonal anxieties and mass phobias could jerk me around so, like a dope on a rope? Let alone lust. Or even: let alone lust! Lust was a positive high-tension cable, plugged into my core, activating a near-epileptic seizure of conviction that this was the one thing I had to do in life.
Deirdre comes tiptoeing through to check on me. ‘Would you like a snack, Ms – Lily?’ Sounds like ‘Mizz Lily’ and for a moment I’m back in the thirties being waited on by a negro-which is what they were then. What’s she gonna offer me, corn pone? Jell-O?
‘Thank you, Deirdre, I’m not hungry.’
And she withdraws through the double, ceiling-high doors, which are really the only original feature left in this heavily converted apartment. And isn’t the same true of me? All that was once me has been dispersed through the flux of a thousand thousand experiences. The ‘I’ has been partitioned off, remodelled, resurfaced and re-insulated, so that it cannot even remember what the original dados or mouldings were like. They say ninety per cent of house dust is dead human skin – and that’s me. Dust on a windowsill, in a converted apartment, in a foreign city.
I suppose I should’ve written a memoir before it was too late, but unlike fucking Lady Asquith I never kept a diary. The towns and cities and areas I’ve lived in, on two continents, over sixty-five years, merge into a composite Unpleasantville. The people I’ve known are resolved into types, appearing to me now as a play set of plastic figurines: ‘Typical People of the Eastern Seaboard of the USA and London England from the Twentieth Century – .030 Scale’. Only lust can grab me in its bra-cinching hook eyes, drag me down through the undertow of nausea, into a past which could be mine.
1955. Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis are duelling through the door. It’s a jizzed jazz scherzo, so jizzy that globs of jizzum must be shooting out of their horns. I’m leaning against a General Electric fridge of such purring, juddering, aerodynamic aspect that were I to unsuck the rubber-flanged door and climb inside, settle myself comfortably in amongst the bowls of chopped liver, the packets of frankfurters, the crinkly heads of lettuce, it might well lift off for the Forbidden Planet. Yup, Dizzy and Miles are going at it next door, and I’m leaning in here talking with a man who isn’t my husband. He’s a tall, stooped man – quite unlike Dave Kaplan – and he’s wearing a suit, which Kaplan would never do. We’re talking around Norman Podhertz and the New Republic, or the poetry of William Carlos Williams, or the pickling of Einstein’s brain, but we’re talking about lust. Sex. Screwing. He’s saying, ‘I want to screw you, but I don’t want to break up my marriage.’ And I’m saying, ‘Let’s just make love – and damn the consequences.’ I communicate this by staring straight into his remarkably deep, black eyes. He expresses his demurral by peering at a point just above my left shoulder, a vantage allowing him to see his wife’s arms, which are waving about animatedly in the next room. It’s 1955 – and I’m armed with my own teeth.
It’s a party. A party in his house. Kaplan and I barely have an icebox – let alone this Mercury rocket of chilliness. And Kaplan doesn’t really like bebop; sometimes I think he’d prefer to listen to klezmer. The party is full of arms – fifties parties always are. It’s the smoking, the puffing, the gasping. If you’re gonna hold on to one of these burning babies you have to port as well as aim it. So the arms are all out at angles like the limbs of trees. Winstons and Pall Malls and Camels and Luckys and Newports, all fuming away wherever these particular people congregate. But the house isn’t too smoky, because the windows are wide open to admit the thrumming heat of a New England evening in late June.
The man – whose name is Bob Beltane – isn’t smoking, which gives him a certain mystery. To add to his allure, Bob is a poet – and I think this fabulously cool. His verse isn’t that bad – perhaps a tad mannered, but he dares to recite it to me which I find irresistible. He also declaims other poets, and now I can tune in he’s saying, ‘. . . September, when we loved as in a burning house . . .’
‘Is it going to take that long?’
‘What?’
‘For us to love? D’jew think I should set the house on fire now? We could let the calendar look after itself, huh?’ To show I’m not kidding I flip my Zippo and apply an inch of ivory flame to the corner of one of Jean Beltane’s cookbooks, which are piled up on the ceramic-tiled breakfast counter. To do this I have to lean forward across Bob, so that my stomach momentarily nuzzles at his crotch. He recoils as if I’ve zapped him with a ray gun – and I recoil as well, shocked at how little of my belly there is. It’s as flat as a pancake and encased in slacks – black slacks! I’ve got some kind of a gingham shirt on, the tails of which are tied in a knot under my boobs. I’m thirty-three years old and I have my own teeth – even if they’re rotting in my head – and I know I’m going to live for ever In . . .
. . . Hendon. Crooked Usage – that’s the name of the road. A little elbow of three-up, three-down semis, angling away from and then back towards the Hendon Way. You can never get away from the Hendon Way. I’m having a recurring dream which is always set in the house Yaws and Charlotte and Natasha and I lived in. I may have swapped continents and changed men, but I still got a hateful house – another joint I could never be bothered to decorate, or maintain, or cherish. Which is perhaps why these characters have pitched up – a dusty mob of them. Not what you associate with London. London – even the ‘burbs – is a grimy enough city, but this crew are thick with real dust, whitish desert dust. They’re erecting a tent, or constructing a lean-to, maybe even a humpy. Whatever it is, it’s clear they’re intent on staying. One of them comes to the back door; I can see him from where I’m standing at the kitchen sink. I’ve got such dreamy views from all windows of the house at once. He’s wearing a white Stetson, of all things, and asks for water: ‘Git inny water, missus?’ he says. ‘Git inny water, missus?’ I feel that I have utterly incomplete information about all of this, a not unusual intimation whether I’m asleep or awake.
