Читать книгу How the Dead Live - Уилл Селф - Страница 13
ОглавлениеChapter Three
‘Good morning, Lily.’
Morning – what the fuck’s she talking about, this bog-trotting drab? This isn’t morning, it’s grey and insipid outside – what the city that always sleeps palms off on its somnolent inhabitants as dawn. ‘What time is it, please?’ The ‘please’ is a compensation for my inner baddy thoughts. It always is – isn’t it. No politeness is ever justified. Even in Pride and Prejudice the Bennet sisters were fucking people over, and screwing them up, and shitting on them – when off the page.
‘It’s nearly six-thirty, you’ve been asleep for almost thirteen hours.’ That’ll be the diamorphine and the Valium, drugs so powerful they’re like the boots of heavy men stamping down on my neck.
Jesus – the pain in my neck. ‘Oh God!’
‘Is it a pain?’
‘My neck – my neck, it feels like it’s broken.’
‘It’s the angle you’ve been lying at. I tried to move you late last night, but I’m afraid I wasn’t able.’ She’s up close now, my Deirdre, still in the ghastly yellow cardy. Amazing – I’ve never seen a ball of pus-coloured wool. ‘You were sweating a lot in the night as well.’
‘Was I.’ So unladylike, that, I must have a word with my sebaceous glands, whip them into shape.
‘It might be a good idea to clean you up a bit, get you into a fresh nightdress for the day.’ She’s playing it quietly, clever Deirdre. She realises that although toothless, I can still bite. Now she’s close up I can smell soap on her. She must’ve brought her own, because I don’t recognise it. The odour is surprisingly pleasant, forcing on me the awareness of my own well-matured stench of sweat and disease. I feel like puking.
And do – ‘Heroosh!’ – an abrupt, third-personal, highly feminine piece of puking. Or so I like to think.
Deirdre and I now have to go through a whole rigmarole. She rocks me up and rolls me out of the bed – I’m so fucking weak, the latitudes of impotence extending from under my mutilated breast and circling the toxic planet that is my body. I’m far, far weaker than I was yesterday, my strength is gurgling out of me, all that anger – surely it can keep me alive? I keep flopping over the arms of the chair as Deirdre mops at me with flannels and bowls, flopping over like an unstandupable toy: ‘Whistler’s Incredible Dead Mother Push Her Over and She Stays There – For Ever’. Not funny ha-ha really, more funny peculiar.
Deirdre bundles up the soiled nightie and the soiled bottom sheet. Someone’s put a plastic sheet on the mattress underneath it. How sensible. It must be the same procedure for home deaths as it is for births. The chair she’s put me in is a little Regency fake which I recently had covered. Looked at this way, my decline has been sickeningly abrupt – there are library books unreturned, a tax return inadequately filed, letters unwritten, even appointments I’ve yet to cancel. Who knows, I might make a sudden recovery, Minxie might gather herself together and quit her temporary home, leaving me free to attend a flower show on Saturday with Susie Plender. O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
‘I’m sorry, Lily?’
‘Nothing, Deirdre, nothing at all.’
I don’t mind Deirdre; more than that – I’m grateful to her. Dying should be done with strangers – it’s not so bad for them, mopping up the sweat and puke. After all, it’s not as if the cancerous burglar has broken into their corporeal house, laid a tumour turd on their cellular carpet. So, I guess it’s a hell of a lot easier for them to clean it up. It must be the same with undertakers. They must be the jolliest guys around, going into work every day and knowing they’ll face tragedies not their own, such a relief. And English undertakers must be the jolliest of all, given their unrivalled propensity for schaden-freude: Ho-ho–ho! You’re lying down on the ground covered in blood, what a silly pratfall. They don’t need to be venal and money-grubbing the way Americans are, because they actually enjoy the work – they’d pay to do it. And anyway Deirdre holds me well, touches me firmly. She’s a nurse – I’m a child. This will be the only way the English handle me now, until they chuck my corpse in a cheap pine coffin with no bogus ceremony at all and I disappear up the pillar of chimney that supports the grey sky over Hoop Lane. I do so like Golders Green Crematorium – did you know that children under five are burnt for free? So very humane.
She dries me off, dresses me up, tucks me back in, smooths the duvet, smooths my hair. I wonder if all nurses played with dolls a lot when they were little girls?
‘Do you think you could manage a snack now?’
To my near infinite amazement I discover that I might be able to choke something down. ‘In the cupboard over the stove you’ll find some Ryvita – would you spread a couple with a little of the cream cheese in the fridge? And perhaps some fruit if there’s any?’ She shuffles off over the carpet I’ve never liked, into the kitchenette which has always been too small. I suppose I could’ve stayed at the house on Crooked Usage – the kitchen there was fine. But what would I’ve done in it? Cook gigantic meals I was incapable of eating without ballooning still more than I had? The entire fucking house was defaced with the evidence of my bouts with the bulge. On every wall there were pencilled lists of my daily weigh-ins: ‘April 5th –186 lb. April 6th –184 lb. April 7th –183 lb. April 10th – 189 lb. SHIT! SHIT! SHIT!’ I must’ve gone away for the weekend – to a fucking bakery.
The seventies were my fattest decade. Overall I think the seventies were distinctly bulbous. People looked chunky, typefaces were rounded, writing implements penile. I liked to think I was maintaining an aesthetic unity, as my weight shot up to two hundred pounds and I became a Mrs Pepperpot of a woman. Sheer bravado – I hated it. I hated my fat. I’d sit sobbing on the side of my bed – things never change – and grab folds of myself up in order to present them individually with my derision. The effortlessly skinny girls would gather whispering on the landing – was it safe to approach the obese old dragon? Emphatically not. I loathed and resented the sylphs I shared the house with. I hated their nascent curves and their burgeoning sexuality – and probably showed it too much. Said too much about quite how shitty it can be to lie with a man. Said it to Natty – in baby talk, naturally. Pas devant les enga-fengas.
Up and down went the scales, the dial flickering over weeks and months. I reckon that between ‘73 and ‘79 I must have lost and regained, lost and regained getting on for seven hundred pounds – three whole obese mes Me-me-me. Then I stabilised as a fat old pear-shaped woman. Not obese, simply fat and old. It seemed that I’d acquired the naturally pear-shaped body of the middle-class, late-middle–aged English-woman. My adoptive country’s lard had taken me for its own. How nice. No wonder Hedley didn’t fancy me. Natasha caught me sobbing on a transatlantic call: ‘I was like a seal,’ I moaned, ‘like a seal.’ I was referring to my agility in bed, but he took it to be a reference to my size and replied, ‘It’s not that, Lily – it’s not that you’re fat, believe me – ‘ I hung up and saw black bangs dangling over the banisters. ‘Whyd’jew say that, Mumu? Whyd’jew say you were a seal?’
Here comes Deirdre with the inapposite slimmer’s snack. I don’t need fucking Ryvita – I need food substantial enough to give me back my life, my vigour, my health. I need to eat an entirely new Lily Bloom, so that she can be me. Deirdre’s put it all together quite well, and she’s found the grapes in the front room too, but I should’ve told her where the trays were, tucked beside the cooker, because the crackers are sliding around on that blue plate like pucks on an ice rink. Even when the plate’s propped on my withered boobs I can’t seem to keep the things still enough to grasp them. Deirdre’s set herself down in the blue chair and is ostentatiously pretending to read her notes from the nighttime. Oh Christ! If only now were the bite time, but I know it isn’t, even before the carious corner of one of the crackers stabs into my gum, underneath my bottom plate, and inflicts a wound nasty enough to bleed. Blood on the snacks.
Hedley. He’s still alive somewhere. He sent me a chess set only last year, even though he knows I don’t play. But then he does have a chess shop in the Village – and his house was always cheap. Dead cheap. He doesn’t own a car to this day doesn’t need one. He walks from the brownstone his gonif papa left him in the fifties, trolling down Broadway in a seersucker suit and a straw panama, all the way to the Village – where he sells his chess sets and his checker boards. Not exactly demanding work. It leaves him plenty of time to concentrate on the only problems he’ll admit into his life chess ones. Hedley, the last man who ever touched me intimately – saving Dr Steel, but then he’s barely human. More of an animated scalpel.
Hedley. Together we would lie in the flat in Brooklyn I borrowed from Esther – ‘Darling it’s rent-controlled – so I can’t be assed to rent it!’ – naked on the bed, like two parentheses indicating the presence of passionate language, of sex. Of course, he’d never leave his wife. His invalided wife. I mean to say, he’d leave her – in order to come to me; but he’d always go back again. Back to put her on the machine (she is-was? – a diabetic), or take her off the machine, or give her a shot. I asked him once if, given that he had a mountain of cash in the bank, he couldn’t arrange for her to have a kidney transplant. He looked the most flustered I’d ever seen him, more abandoned by his reason than when he orgasmed. He said something about tissue types, rejection, unavailability, unsuitability – but I didn’t believe him. Like I say, the house was cheap; and more than that I think he actually wanted her to be housebound, wanted her there whenever he eventually came home. What a psycho. Good riddance.
Eight o’clock, and outside small birds are going ‘cheep’. I can hear cars grinding into motion and the relentless stutter of lorries on Kentish Town Road. Hard to believe, as I lie here listening to the Today programme, that six weeks ago I would’ve been leaving with them. The Italians call this kind of cancer ‘the whirlwind’, because it blows down on the person and winnows them right out, like a husk. It’s blown away all my precious routines, my rounds of errands, my staggered sociability, my little trips – all gone. And with them the people.
No need to see Susie Plender any more – although she’s called, naturally. No need to see Emma Gould either and hear about her latest man-trapping escapades. She’s not a fifty year– old woman – she’s a tethered goat. No need to see Jack Harmsworth, my alcoholic bibliophile friend – although him I could bear the most. Like Natty, I guess – addictive personalities are peculiarly restful to the dying, because like us they operate within tiny windows of temporal opportunity. And no need to call Mr Weintraub. No, actually I must call Weintraub, or get Charlotte to. I must sort out this tax business before – before – well, let’s just say it has to be dealt with. No need to see Tim, my boss, although the sweetie did come and visit me in the hospital last week. He was terribly uneasy and his wife, Lola, a squint-eyed Spaniard, kept looking around the ward as if she could see something we couldn’t. Something terrifying.
Nope, no need for any of them. Hedley’s history. Yaws is dead. Kaplan – well, Kaplan, there lies a tale. Anyway, I don’t expect to be hearing from him, oh no. It’ll be Natty and Charlotte and Steel and Deirdre from now on in. Not that Deirdre’s here for the duration; I can hear her next door passing the careful baton as I muse.
‘Here’s my time sheet, Mrs Elvers. Your mother had a very quiet night.’
‘Did she?’ You note there’s no move to informality from my stuck-up daughter.
‘Well, I say quiet, but in truth I have to say she’s . . . she’s . . .’
‘Fading fast?’
‘I – I wouldn’t want . . . it’s . . .’
‘Please, Mrs Murphy, please – don’t be afraid to express an opinion.’
‘She does appear to be in a rapid decline. It happens quite often – when a . . . terminal patient comes home.’
‘I see. Is your colleague here yet?’
‘No –’
‘Errrr!’ Yes she is, and hesitating for admittance – but no:
‘Hiya.’ It’s Natasha, come for her get-up, I daresay – well, I did tell her to – and:
‘Errr.’ A bit less insistent, that – it’ll be the Murphy-substitute, another certain woman of a certain age in the slick, professional housecoat of death. Their Father’s house has many mansions, and they’re intent on dusting the vestibules.
From the main room of the flat come scraps of conversations, leftovers of sentences which float through. Then there’s yet another burp from the intercom, and Molly, the Elverses’ maid, arrives to clean. Jesus! It must be like the stateroom scene from the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera in there. I wonder if I’d find them funny any more. I wonder if there’s a last particle of amusement left inside this rotting body. Perhaps if I vibrated at the right frequency the worms would quit me, like a stream of rats running out of Hamelin. In truth, I never thought them that funny. I always equated Groucho Marx with Hitler – saw him as Hitler, with his bogus, greasepaint moustache and his rapid-fire delivery of deranging demagoguery. Like Hitler and like my father, with his big hands, his scarred face, his Indian-head money clip, his wiseacre’s patter. ‘A child of five would understand this. Send somebody to fetch a child of five.’ So that he can perform unnatural experiments on it, flay its skin off for a nightlight’s shade. Yeah, nothing cosy about Groucho, giving the lie to Hitler’s own Semitism – surely only a Jew could hate Jews with such intensity, wish to rip out the kike sleeved within the Jew? I married Dave Kaplan, I understood later, because of his own – soon to be manifested – Jewish anti-Semitism. ‘Y’know Kaplan isn’t my real name,’ he used to say to people, ‘I changed it in order to appear Jewish – my real name’s Carter.’ And this from a man with such a melting-pot of features – it was irresistible.
Dear Dave – he styled himself ‘the Fatalistic Funnyman’, or even ‘the Ya-Ya Yid’. I suppose his defiance was beefed up all the more by my appearance – at that time willowy and very blonde. It was quite a thing in the forties, in the States, this marriage between a Jew and an apparent Gentile. When people caught on that I was Jewish as well it was already too late, we’d moved on, doubtless leaving an unpleasant taint behind us. Moved on. The late forties and early fifties were a succession of hole-in-the-wall appointments for Kaplan, whose communist sympathies made it impossible for him to teach politics with any candour. So he drifted into admin, which is how we ended up in Vermont, in 1955, in time for Dave Junior to rendezvous with that fender.
It destroyed the driver’s life – hitting my child. Destroyed it. He went crazy – or rather, he had a breakdown, and in those days, in that place, if it was severe enough they’d put you in an insulin coma and hook your temples up to the mains. I felt sorry for him even when I was caught in that vile ballet of shock – the five steps to where Dave and his pals were playing. Sorry because I was always guilty, ever in the wrong myself. I was on him in two strides, grasped his blond hair, smacked his head once, twice, three times. Then he was out in front of me, his narrow little ass covered in mud, out of the back yard, across the front yard, and then WHACK! A twisted scrap of flesh on the asphalt. The impact was so strong it split the child’s head in two. In two. His face was hanging off like a crumpled bit of cloth – and there was blood and grey stuff. Kaplan and I lasted a year after that. I don’t think he ever styled himself ‘the Fatalistic Funnyman’ ever again. Not after I’d taken all of my guilt out on him and remoulded whatever love we’d ever had for each other; fired it in a kiln of white-hot anger and smashed the fucking ugly memento.
‘Mumu?’ Here she is, looking scrubbed in jeans, sneakers, sweatshirt, black hair back in a ponytail. Looking very American today.
‘Natty.’ I’m alarmed by my croak, it sounds like ‘N’nerr’.
‘Mumu!’ She swoops down on me, crying. I suppose the junk is out of her system and a little of the real world is seeping in. She plants kisses on my moulting skull. ‘Mumu, Esther’s arrived.’
Esther, eh, now there’s a turn-up. ‘Where is she?’
‘At the Ritz, I think.’ Natch, although it could be the Royal Garden, or the Savoy, or Brown’s. ‘She called – she wants to come straight over.’
‘I don ‘wanner here.’
‘What?’
‘I donwannesther here.’ Only my older sister’s arrival could galvanise me in this fashion.
‘What do you mean?’ Her scrubbed appearance is being sullied by the seepage of sweat along her hairline.
‘We’ll meet her elsewhere – anywhere else we can.’ This morning I not only have to punch a hole through the nausea, I have to punch through indifference as well. It’s clear to me-transmitted on a special frequency employed by the British Broadcorpsing Corpsoration – that I no longer matter. Sure, I’m the pretext for an intense endgame, a dramatic enough finale, but then? I’ll be forgotten in months – years at the outside. Of that much I’m certain. Oh, I don’t doubt that the girls will remember me after a fashion, but there’ll be no gathering of people where my name will animate the conversation, no spirited chat that in turn will reanimate me. No, I know not. The Lily Bloom who commanded attention has quit already – except for this one final fling, this defiance of Esther. ‘I don’t want her coming here – she’s such a fucking snob.’
‘Oh Mumu – does it matter now?’
‘Now more than ever.’
‘Ms Bloom?’ It’s the new muck-shoveller and she’s black – natch.
‘Hi.’
‘I’m Doreen Matthews, I’ll be handling the day shift, I wanted to introduce myself.’
‘Pleased to meet you.’ She’s dazzling, this one, a coffee Nefertiti with sugar-almond eyes. I could look at her all day; women simply are more beautiful than men – just as Jews are smarter than the goyim.
‘How’re you feeling, Ms Bloom?’
Punctilious, this one – I can tell, I’ve had my tilly punked more than most. ‘Lily, please. I feel better, since you ask.’
‘Then will you be needing these?’ She’s got the entire assortment with her – pain relief, anxiety relief, nausea suppressant. They should come in a dear little choccy box, with a book of words attached. Natty is looking avid, as if she might swoop down on Doreen’s palm and snaffle the drugs up like the raptor she is.
‘Yes, yes, I think it would be a good idea . . . you never know.’
So, pills mouthed then palmed, water dribbled, nurse exited and drugs passed on to lurking junky daughter. Charlotte understands immediately about Esther and goes to phone her – we’ll meet at Kenwood, in the Old Coach House. There’s considerable consternation about dragging my bag of bones out to the Heath, but then – as I observe to all and sundry – it’s· not going to kill me. The cancer’s going to kill me – but not before I’m a lot thinner, I hope.
‘Are you absolutely sure about this, Mother?’ Charlie is in another suit today, fresh from meeting with Wiggins Teape or Reed International. An A-line skirt is not her, her ass is too big, legs too chubby. But it’s cut exceedingly well; once you’re up above a 14 the best you can hope for is a clever cut – colour must be inconspicuous.
‘You know what she’s like, Charlie, I’m amazed she’s here at all.’
‘She’s genuinely upset, very tearful on the phone.’
‘Great.’ She’s going to live for ever, Esther, she’s never had a day’s illness in her life. She’s seventy years old, she smokes like a house on fire and she drinks as if she were trying to extinguish it. She spends more money than the Colombian government and earns more than the Medellin cartel. She’s a fucking nightmare – my sister.
Leaving the apartment proves difficult, a protracted, staggered departure, which sees me arrayed successively in day clothes, an overcoat, a rug, while supported by daughters and paid servitors. I feel Lear-like – and wouldn’t be that astonished if Natty were to begin addressing me as ‘Nuncle’. Charlie’s got the Mercedes today, Elvers must’ve walked in to the head offices of Waste of Paper. He’s the kind of man who likes to say, ‘Yes, I walk everyhere,’ as if he’d recently spent a summer crossing the Antarctic with Rheinhold Messner, not twenty minutes strolling through Regent’s Park from his Nash terrace apartment to his Terry Farrell office. What a creep.
We purr up Kentish Town Road and on up Highgate Road to Gospel Oak. There’s apple blossom and cherry blossom and light industrial units and gentrified nineteenth-century terraces and lots of cars. There’s London. I read in a magazine – not Woman’s Realm – that the human brain recognises composites rather than elements; which is why – I guess – I know this is London and not New York, or Chicago or Rome, because it doesn’t matter to me any more. I’ve shut down all the outlets and there are tacky signs up on the insides of my eyes: ‘CLOSING-DOWN SALE – ALL MEMORIES MUST GO!’
Memories of my dad and his card files of smutty gags; his Indian-head, mother-of-pearl money clip; his lack of funds for it to clip. In the Depression he took jobs doing anything. Esther told me once that he was a pimp for a while, and I can believe it. Although he wasn’t an overtly sexual man, there was a greasy feel to him, a greasy Jewish feel. I would imagine that he had a large pimp’s penis. But the job I remember best was the one he took closing down department stores. He was good at this – firing the staff, arranging for the stock to be discounted, selling the premises. He functioned better during the Depression than he did either before or after. Very much a twentieth-century man – my father. A boom-and–bust jockey. An economic cyclist.
We tip up on to the steep slope of Highgate West Hill and drive between wealthy villas. Then along the Grove at the top, past Yehudi Menuhin’s imposing house. I hate Menuhin. I sent Natty to audition at his school when she was eight. She was a not untalented little pianist – but I knew not good enough. But that isn’t why I hate him – I hate him because he never crossed a road alone until he was twenty-five, or so they say. Just fancy! The ultimate effete, artistic Jew – and this is meant to be impressive? This racial cosseting. Yuk. He’ll live for ever – of that I’ve no doubt. Live for ever in a gilded cage of sound, a eat’s cradle of golden harp strings. Double mint choc chip yuk. Thirty-two flavours of Baskin-Robbins’s best nausea.
I know it’s got to my liver, this cancer. I can feel it as we tilt down and turn into Hampstead Lane. I can feel the fucking thing swollen inside, each lurch of the car pressing on it so that, like a filthy sponge, it oozes poisons. The body’s oil refinery is itself polluted. The crazed enzymes have taken over the asylum – oh, for a sane axeman. Two fucking lumpectomies that fraudulent pal of Steel’s did on me. He scooped out my boobs like a counterman in Baskin-Robbins . . . Maybe I want ice cream, that’s why I keep thinking of it. ‘Natty.’
‘Mumu?’ She’s in the back with me again. She has darker skin than me – but finer-grained, to go with her long narrow nose, delicately flared cheekbones, violet eyes. Little bitch. When she was a child she went red in the sun, but if she’d let it get to her now she’d turn a pleasing olive. But she’d rather be sallow, clearly. Under her preppy clothing are track marks, sores, infections, all abraded by her serrated nails. I wonder how Miles can stand to touch her.
‘I wonder how Miles can stand to touch you.’
‘What?!’
‘I want an ice cream; no – an ice lolly.’
‘OK – they’ll have them at Kenwood.’ She heard me, but hey – let’s not make waves.
If I were dying when I should’ve, say in the late sixties, when I thought my head would explode with howling misery, when every time their father opened his fat mouth I thought I’d have to kill him, then – then I would’ve written the girls affectionate letters, telling them of my sadness, and how much I loved them, and how sorry I was to be leaving them. Too late. They’re here, they’re grown-up, they’re crap; and so we’ll bicker towards oblivion.
I must’ve dozed a little, or zoned out, because when when I’m conscious of myself again I find we’re hobbling down the hill towards Kenwood House, a fuzzy blob of off-white Palladian which wobbles amazingly for something so heavy. The girls have me under either arm and I’m saying to them, ‘You must remember how much easier dying is for a pessimist like me than it would be for someone who’d expected anything from life, who’d counted on anything.’
‘Yes Mum.’
‘I mean to say – I’ve always been hunkered down on the starting line, waiting for the pistol shot so I could race to the next bad thing.’
‘You wanted it badderly,’ says infantile Natty, in baby talk.
‘Oh, I did, I did.’ I clutch her hand tighter under my armpit, and I guess she thinks this affectionate, but it isn’t.
Kenwood. I’ve always known I was going to end up here. When I first came to London it was my favourite park. I’d come here alone and sit and read a book, or strike up conversations with old women, or down-and-outs. In the States I was never gregarious in this fashion, never. It was all that English dissimulation that forced my cards, made me play my crappy little hand: ‘Oh, how interesting – do tell me more.’ And they would, by Christ they would. That precious fucking reserve, it transpired, was only the thinnest of hoary mantles, beneath which was a positive torrent of chilly drivel. No, there’s nobody like the English for inconsequential chat and I hope they all fucking choke to death on it. ‘How’s the wea-theurgh!’
In the sixties this place was primmer, more proper. The prams looked positively nineteenth-century – great black things, pushed about by pudding-faced nannies and mums, all belted up in coats and hats and even gloves. Now it’s spring, and track-suited, androgynous parent-substitutes are shoving McLaren buggies loaded up with hothouse weeds. There are faggots flexing their muscles on the shaven grass. Yaws would come here every weekend before Sunday lunch and force the girls to accompany him. Yaws had played lacrosse when he was at the varsity. I kid you not. And he thought it would be nice for the girls to learn to play it with him. Nice for whom? Not me. I’d stay back in Hendon, overcooking Sunday lunch in the prescribed way. Granted – I’d take the task on, but what were we going to do otherwise? Yaws himself, notoriously, could survive for days on a heel of bread smeared with Frank Cooper’s Oxford marmalade. Cunt. To think I washed his underwear. Double cunt. Double choc chip cunt.
The only thing that remains unchanged in this ersatz landscape are the little brown men. They’re exactly the same, in their trilbies and brogues, spiking litter, checking notices to see that they’re officious, driving dinky vans full of dead leaves. The suits themselves may be nylon now – they certainly look cheap – but the men are as fawn as ever. Fawn-coloured – and they look like fauns too. Camden Council must have an Affirmative Faun Action Programme. I’ve never seen a truly brown little brown man, though, never. The brown men are important – they minister to the memorial benches. I always fancied a memorial bench: ‘In Loving Memory of Lily Bloom 1922–1988, Who Loved to Take Our Products on This Bench. Hoffmann La Roche’. But when I looked into it two years ago (I did this when I discovered the lump, did it even before I called Sydenberg, the GP), I discovered that the Heath was bench-saturated, that if you wanted to evoke even the tiniest bit of recall here in the future, you’d have to have your name put on a marker along with a lot of others. Doubtless, as with the benches, relatives scatter ashes around these markers. A delicious irony – those of us Jews who escaped the Holocaust, none the less interred in mass graves with our kikey kind. How unkind.
Inside the tea place it’s dark, despite the whitewash on the walls. This is the old stable block of the house, and even now or maybe especially now – with its stalls full of horse-faced Englishwomen slurping down Earl Grey, it feels like one. The only non-horsey face in the place is a version of my father’s. A smaller, painted version of his face – like Dad’s funerary mask. A Jewish face. A New York Jewish face. An Upper East Side New York Jewish face. A UESNYJF. Esther, my sister.
‘Lily!’ She’s on her sharp heels pointing her beak at me, and her claws are out.
‘Esther.’ My piece of dead veal collides with her facial. Esther doesn’t have a face any more – only a facial. Not that she’s had nips and tucks – she knows better than to do that, because she’s going to live for ever. If she has a facelift now, in thirty or forty years’ time she’ll be looking like Methuselah.
‘How are you?’ Incredible, only the tactless can live for ever – that much is obvious. ‘Let me look at you.’ Why would you wanna do that, dumb ass? Well, let her –looking is all you’ll get.
I slump there in my cancer cloak while the world goes on dancing about me. They give me a little pot of Cornish ice cream, which sits in front of me on the table uneaten. I mean to say – it’s hardly likely to repeat on me, now is it? And anyway – I asked for a lolly. I regard Esther critically; it’s interesting looking at a version of yourself that has achieved immortality, courtesy of Saks Fifth Avenue, Tiffany, Bergdorf Goodman and all the other temples of dressage – which is what these English horses could do with, even my little ponies. Americans always look so clean and scrubbed and presentable – is it any wonder I ended up a slut living in this dungheap? Is it any surprise I lost my teeth grazing on this rotten dump?
Esther has brought presents for the girls. Yup, Tiffany thought so. A brooch for Charlie, which she’ll treasure along with the rest of her hoard, and a little gold watch for Natty, which she’ll pawn the first time she claps eyes on some dangling balls that aren’t attached to a man. They chat away as if I wasn’t here. Esther tells them about her hotel, her art gallery, her other shops, her properties, this business, that business. Natty’s lovely head is heavy with heroin now – that much is obvious – but Charlie keeps on nodding and interjecting and chatting with her mummified aunt. Her made-up aunt.
I had hoped that seeing Esther would provoke some flood of recall. I wanted – God knows why – to immerse myself in childhood again. I wanted to summon up sarsparilla and kewpie dolls, baseball cards, jitterbugging, kreplach, jitneys, the surrey with the fucking fringe on top. I wanted us to mull over the proportions of all the houses and apartments we grew up in and the foibles of all the friends we’d had. I wanted to reach back to a time when Esther and I loved each other more than anything else in the world, when the only thing in the world we feared were our poor, sad, frightened parents. I wanted to turn the leaves of the high-school yearbook with Esther (Class of ‘35 – ‘A flair for business is an ornament for the whole world’) back to a happier time. But now I set eyes on her, all I can think of is ‘The Relic’ by Donne, and how, despite the fact that her expensive watch is shackled on to her skeletal wrist, she’s going to live – while I’m definitely going to die.
One thing to be grateful for is that there’s no waitress service here. Esther always abuses servants with her familiarity – ‘Hi! What’s your name, then? Mark, eh? I bet you’ve made one here . . .’ – effortlessly engendering their contempt. And mine. Although it’s not hard to feel contempt for surly English service. England – where the waiters respond to any orders that transgress the menu as if it were carved in stone and they were terrifying and incomprehensible heresies. ‘Hold the mayonnaise?! You mean to say the world is round?! God is dead?! Good and evil are conterminous?!’ There’s one thing I can do for Esther, though, one bequest her lumpy, liverish, cancerous, moribund sister can give her, and that’s to not talk about anything of consequence whatsoever. Don’t talk about dying. Don’t rupture her great reservoir of denial and watch her sang-froid escape into the hell of the present. Heat up, bubble, boil, evaporate –leaving this little old Jewish lady just as terrified as this big dying one. Oh no, save her. Together with her savings.
I can’t be damned to listen to people’s chatter any more. Everything they say bears upon a future that doesn’t include me. I don’t even notice if it’s Esther who leaves, or us. The fact that I’ll never see her again is obscurely satisfying – and I prevented her from visiting my shitty little apartment, propping her narrow JAP ass on my dusty cushions. She’s the sort of woman who wants the earth girdled with a sanitary strip-for the duration of her stay, which, as I believe I’ve mentioned, will be for ever.
We’re in the car again and heading down the hill from Highgate. Charlie is a very good driver, much less impetuous than I used to be, far steadier. She knows how to pilot this big Kraut box, this steel egg-carton containing a diseased yolk. Pain has been cracking on the edge of me for hours now. I’m drenched with sticky pain, and Natty’s lying – cool and dry-on an ottoman of my heroin.
Miles is waiting outside when we get back, resting his beauty on a wall. I wonder how many he’s travelled to get here this time? He’s a law student, he studies hard – what’s he doing with this skittish trash? They unload me and hustle me inside, to where Molly and Doreen have made enormous inroads on the entropy. Seat covers have been cleaned! Shelves dusted! This is real housework going on. I like to think I could’ve been a good housewife – I should’ve adored to keep house for a man I admired. I’d’ve ironed Trotsky’s shirts like a dervish, then made love to him like a seal. But the men I was with were always feeble suppliants, wanting sex the way little boys want sweets. Pathetic. No wonder I’d discover myself day after day cursing and moaning and even screaming as I wiped up their shit, cooked for them, ordered their little play-dens. I’m glad that’s over. I’m glad house-cleaning is over. Goodbye Jif, fare thee well Flash, au revoir Harpic – I’m sure we’ll meet again some su-unny da-ay.
They’ve cleaned the flat up because they’re going to sell it. Charlotte’s going to sell it. I wish my will wasn’t in order, I’d’ve liked to gift little Miss Yaws at least a duplex of litigation, if not Bleak House itself.
Competent black hands are all over me now – and d’jew know what? I don’t care. I can feel each black handprint as she pushes and plumps me like a pillow, but there’s no Pavlovian revulsion, no sick decoction of petty-minded bigotry. I used to torment Yaws: ‘You’re the fucking black man’s burden!’ I’d scream at him. ‘Look in the fucking dictionary, you creep! Read it – “a contagious disease of Negroes characterised by raspberry-like tubercules on the skin” – that’s you, pardner, that’s you!’ Usually, at around this stage I’d begin hitting him, and wouldn’t stop until one of the kids intervened. Do I feel guilty? Not any more, not now. Junky will have to wait – I’ve had the diamorphine for my lonesome, and the Valium, and whatever other shit it was that Doreen gave me. Junky will have to wait now.
Doreen’s got me down and my little radio’s on, warbling. It’s the evening repeat of The Archers. People hate the way the media repeat things – but not I. I love it. I wouldn’t care if they echoed this episode again and again and again, as long as I was there to hear it, as long as I was still alive. From a region deep in the darkest, most diseased portion of me an old blues man is warbling. What is this, some song I heard when trailing my rag dolly behind me, clumping through the dirt on the other side of the streetcar line? Who knows, but it’s old, as old as me: ‘I wish I was a mole in the ground / Like a mole in the ground I would root that mountain down / And I wish I was a mole in the ground.’
Not long now. Next door there are voices raised above the pseudo farm life: ‘Do you think we should call her GP?’ I daresay Charlie already has her mobile phone out; she wields it as if it was the future itself.
‘I think it might be an idea. I don’t honestly think she’s going to be able to stay here much longer.’ But I want to stay here – I want to stay with you, Doreen. ‘But – ‘ And here her voice dips beneath my hearing range, allowing me to tune in to the other voices in the next room, Natasha and Miles bickering about where they’re going to eat. Who would’ve thought everything was going to happen so suddenly?
