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Epilogue

April 1999

We old women are easily erased from the picture of the last century. We’re an entire demographic grouping of Trotskys. Like the once dapper Jew, we too stand with nonchalant unease at the base of that wooden pulpit, hastily erected on the platform of the Finland Station. Shorn of moustache and goatee our collective chin is rounded, awfully vulnerable, already anticipating the cold smack of the assassin’s steel. Deprived of pince-nez our eyes are squinting into the limelight; what a mistake it was – we seem to be entreating future historians – to dress down for posterity. If only we’d kept our Trotsky costume on, not loaned our shoes to Lenin, then we wouldn’t be facing this airbrushing out, this un-developing, this eternal bloody deletion.

Where, oh where are the old women of the twentieth century? Where have we all gone? So few films, photographs and television pictures include us. Even when we were featured, the real intention was to emphasise the props: see how old that coat is/bulky that sack is/worn out those shoes are. And next to the great men of the age we were merely mothers, or women-old–enough-to–be-their–mothers, or women whose age made us childlessness personified, as time turned tail and our old vaginas, like ancient vacuum cleaners, sucked up the unformed, the unbecome, the unborn.

I’m not saying there haven’t been exceptions, many many exceptions, crowds of exceptions like babushkas picking coal from the slag heap of the century. A legion of remarkable individuals humping hobo bundles down the road to where the einsatzgruppen were hard at it. Notable personalities grasping small, knobbly-haired heads between our withered dugs as the Interahamwe rampaged through the garden death-burbs of Kigali. Yes, we have been there. And I suppose, given our invisibility, our uselessness as anything but extras or crew – the gaffers, key grips and best boys of history – it’s worth remarking that we were in fact there already. Yes, there before the director stopped shtupping his latest underage lover. There before the principals had any motivation, or the location had even been spotted. Like a herd of oblong-eyed goats, or a palisade of dead grass, or an enfilade of streetlamps, we were there. We old women – waiting for something to happen.

And if there are drifts of old women blowing across the fields of the living, why be surprised that the same is true of the afterlife? You look at the cityscape and see us tottering about in our insupportable hosiery. Look again and realise that while many of us are clinging on to the ledge of life, many more have let go already. As the living grow older, a sterile wad of humanity blocking up the generative drain, so we, the dead, accumulate like pennies on the ledges of a cascade game.

When the young die they’re full of beans. Lifehasn’t exhausted them – why should death? Anyway, there are always vacancies in the provinces, or even abroad, for the morbidly mobile. Many young and middle-aged British dead work in the Gulf, the States, or even fucking Germany. But dead old women? Who wants us? In death as in life, we are the pavement-strollers, the window-shoppers, the bored, bunion-hobbled bouleuardières. We’re there waiting for something – anything – to happen. So we can be photographed, or filmed, or videoed, a backcloth of hysterectomies, in front of which events can be played out again, yet never exhausted. History is never in the round – it’s always on a stage; and while the curtain may be death, why is it then that so many scrutinising eyes stud the proscenium, peering into the dimness of the stalls? Are they tragic or comedic masks – or not masks at all?

Earlier this evening – if this still is evening, we’ve waited so bloody long – I, Lily Bloom, picked my way down Old Compton Street. Yet another dead old woman patrolling the West End on a misconceived mission. My lithopedion scampered between my ankles, my Rude Boy was prancing in the road. Ahead of us the snake-hipped figure of Phar Lap Jones moved in and out of the gay throng. He may be old, but he’s black, he’s slim and – of course – he’s a karadji, a mekigar, a wizard. Full of buginja power, possessed of miwi magic. With his finely corrugated matt skin and his thriving restaurant business, he might, it’s often occurred to me, be the ultimate leather queen.

When I was alive I made it my business to zero in on my fellow biddies. Given a street scene like this – full of young people hurling themselves into the puppetry of lust, tying rubbery abandonment to their ankles and wrists before bungee jumping into orgasm – I’d’ve been taken by the tweed-wearers, the bearers of the capacious gusset and the porters of the nylon bag. The granny guild. I’d strike up conversations with these widows, spinsters and bints. I suppose I saw myself as a kind of reporter, researching a long article on the world, which turned out to be a profile of myself. I’d interview these old women, interrogate them as to who they were, what they were doing, where they were going, why they fucking bothered, and when they’d give it up. Later, I’d write their replies down in a notebook:

1. A Mrs Green, the widow of a minor civil servant. She lives in Hornsey in the house she owned with her husband, in a basement flat knocked out by the son and daughter-in–law who cannot wait to inherit.

2. She’s going to the Old Bailey to sit in the public gallery. It’s good, cheap, wholesome fun.

3. Her basement is hot in summer, cool in the winter; it’s good to get out.

4. It’s not a question that can be answered at her age. She understands that life is not so much a journey from one horizon to the next as a survey of the world all around.

How wrong you were, Mrs Green. Indeed, I know you were wrong when I struck up that conversation with you, as you fumbled for the correct change by the ticket machine at Embankment, because this evening, as I paused by the sugary, munchy – and for me unreflecting – window of Patisserie Valerie, I saw you again. You were wearing the same worsted coat, now worsened by time, as you neatly stepped along the opposite sidewalk, hair coiled then crushed beneath a hat like a velour cowpat. Mrs Green, I never forget a face, even one as narrowly undistinguished as your own. Mrs Green, what were you doing in Soho? You have no need of butyl nitrate, or split-crotch panties, or charcuterie, or sushi. For shame.

Your husband died, aged sixty, in 1961. I first encountered you in 1974, when you were over seventy yourself. It’s 1999! Ferchrissakes woman – you’re ninety-fucking–five, yet don’t look a day older than you did during the Winter of Discontent (which is not now). ‘Has it not occurred to you, Mrs Green,’ I might’ve let drop as I came alongside, ‘that you must have died many years ago? That you are, indeed, dead – but won’t lie down?’

‘Ooh, I don’t think so, dearie,’ she might’ve replied. ‘I mean to say, I still keep my flat up, pay the bills and such, do the shopping, go to bingo. I shouldn’t be able to do all those things if I were dead, now would I?’

Oh but you can do them, Mrs Green. More than that, now that you’re freed from the relentless popping of your cellular bubblewrap such tasks are a breeze, n’est-ce pas?

‘But what about my Derek? He’d know I was dead – surely?’

‘Oh, would he now – good at keeping in touch, is he?’

‘We-ell, he’s busy – ‘

‘For life?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘For life – he’s been busy his entire fucking life, has he? Busy these past ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years? Too busy to bother with an Abbey Crunch and a cup of milky tea – is that it then?’

‘We-ell.’

‘Well – nothing, nada, rien du tout. The well of life – pah! The well of death, woman – that’s what you’re down. Nope you’re dead. The reason your son doesn’t keep in touch is that you’re dead – and he’s dead too! He died in the early eighties. First the cardiac arrhythmia, like a drum figure falling apart, then the big wrench to nowhere. Then Woking.’

‘Woking?’

‘Woking, Surrey, that’s where he’s spending his death. As to how come he doesn’t keep in touch? Well, the dead find it just as hard as the living, you know – keeping in touch. It’s an effort to call, to write, to pay a visit. Especially when your mother’s dead but doesn’t even realise it. Not that you don’t have your uses, you know.’

‘Uses?’

‘You’re an unquiet spirit – of sorts. Like all the unknowing dead, you’re an exchange point between the living and the dead. This is true of many who die in their sleep, or inattentively, in stupors and fogs. If you don’t know you’re dead – and nor do the living – then it’s easier for you to shout across the Styx than call along its banks. You could, for instance, take a message to my daughter Natasha.’ This might have galvanised decrepit Mrs Green a bit; no one has asked her to do anything much but pass things – and only small things at that – for the last quarter-century.

‘Your daughter, eh? What would you like me to say to her?’

‘That it would be a remarkably good idea for her to insist on an abortion – even at this late stage. Saving that, she should wrench the fucking being out of her fucked-up womb and expose it, cast it on the fucking ground – that’d be just peachy.’ Oh Christ – I’ve gone too far, she’s backing off, turning, gathering her legs beneath her like stilts, piles under piles. She’s moving away from me, fear and disgust curdling in her milky eyes. And that cowpat hat my dear!

‘You’d never have done it,’ my lithopedion said, scampering between my own warped calves, as is its wont.

‘I’m sorry?’ I’d propped my brow against the plate glass of the patisserie, where cream cakes, croissants, Danishes and petits fours were massing with my strange thoughts.

‘You’d never have done it – freaked out the old dead woman, Mrs Green.’ My lithopedion was conceived and died in 1967, during the autumn of my love, which accounts for its hokey youthspeak.

‘I forget that you know everything – have seen everything. I forget, I forget, I forget.’

‘Not everything.’ My lithopedion looked up at me with little, jet, periwinkle eyes. Mineral eyes. Its eyes have a black liveliness, so unlike its body, which is as grey as the York stone it stood upon. ‘But everything that happened after my conception – including those five minutes of conversation with Mrs Green at Embankment in October 1974 – I remember.’

‘You’re’ – and to the passers-by I suppose this looked perfectly natural, an elderly woman leaning against the shop-front and muttering at her swollen ankles – ‘a most sagacious lithopedion.’

‘I’m your lithopedion – your Lithy.’ Sad that all my schooling paid off only in these, the last hours we spent together. But in the end Lithy did become the child I’d always wanted for myself, wise enough and sufficiently eloquent to re-parent me.

‘Well, Lithy – and why wouldn’t I?’

For the first time in the eleven years we’d haunted each other, it stopped dancing and spoke clearly. ‘Because once you’d got going you’d’ve felt compelled to fill in all the detail. You’d’ve conjured up a charmless picture of her own demise for the poor, dead soul. A Zimmer-frame expiration, hmm? The retort-stand upon which time has experimented with human mortality, that’s the sort of observation you’d make – but far cruder. She got up, and on her way across the parlour to get more tea, stubbing the Axminster with the rubber stoppers, died there, before she could make it to the linoleum.’

‘It has a certain dignity – put like that.’

‘Put like that, but you – you’d embellish the description. She died on the Zimmer, pitched forward, so that her body dangled over the crossbar. You’ve always said that all English women –’

‘Of a certain age, a certain class – ‘

‘Are pear-shaped, and in death Mrs Green inverts this state; when, quickening with putrefaction, pullulating with drosophila grubs, head swollen with fluid, she becomes – for the first time in decades – the body of the pear, rather than its stalk.’

‘Oh spare us this, Lithy, this pissy little guignol. Spare us, love – spare us. How about social services?’

‘Social services – don’t shake my tree, Mumsie, don’t beat me Daddy-o ten to the bar – ‘ and Lithy broke off to do a little dance, which was far more in character.

Lithy is a minuscule cadaver of a child – about half the size of a kewpie doll– who was misconceived, then died mislodged in the folds of my perineum. There it petrified for twenty-one years until I died in 1988. Then, with the first faltering steps I took after my death, it fell from under my nightie, and clattered on to the linoleum of the third-floor landing at the Royal Ear Hospital. Phar Lap Jones – who was removing me from my deathbed at the time – stopped, stooped and picked it up. ‘See you here, girl,’ he said in that cheek-clicking, palate-snapping, percussive take on the English language which I’ve never ever been able to take seriously. ‘This is a lithopedion, little dead fossil baby of yours, yeh-hey!?’

‘How would I know,’ I replied; at that time death had yet to mellow me.

“Cos I lu-urve yoo!’ warbled Lithy, who’d had twenty-one years to come up with a better line but whose material had been garnered mostly during the first few months it spent in the pink pleats, when the pop rhythms still resonated in my tautish belly. ‘I just like the things yoo-doo / Wo-on’t yooodoo-the-things-yoo-doo / Nya-nya-nya-nya-nya-nya-nyaaa! /Nya-nya-nya-nya-nya-nya-nyaaa!’ And, surprisingly nimble on its misshapen pins (in truth, little more than the stubs that confirmed it as the true inspiration for the rash of ‘Mother Goddess’ statues found on Neolithic sites), the lithopedion began as it has gone on ever since, weaving between my ankles, shaking its little tush.

‘Could be worse y’know, girl,’ said Phar Lap Jones. ‘Much worse than the little feller. You never have no abortions, no?’

‘No.’

‘Stillbirths?’

‘No.’

‘Miscarriages?’

‘Not that I’m aware of.’

‘ ‘Cos they snag round yer head some – to begin with, hey-yeh?’

‘What d’jew mean?’ His face was hidden by the brim of his ridiculous, white dude Stetson. In the small shadows a hand-rolled cigarette smouldered. At that time it was only the absence of pain that allowed me to concentrate, although ever since I’ve had plenty of time to run over all of this crap again and again in my head.

‘Dead foetuses, newborn babies, whatever. With mothers who have kids, y’know, and they’re young then –little, right. Well, when that woman dies they come and hang around. But see, hey, if they’re real small they’re still attached to the woman, danglin’ off her, see – like this smoke. Older kids – they don’t hang around as much, grown-up kids not at all.’

‘Like life?’

‘No, not like life . . .’ He paused, allowing some nurses to pass by, even though this was irrelevant. ‘In life, death drive you ‘part, yeh-hey? Now it drag you all t’gether. I wonder which you’ll like better. Anyway, you had a dead child, right?’

‘You know this?’ It was an old distress to me, a neat ring-pull on my canned emotions. A hungry pain, that loss – like the cancer.

‘What good’s a bloke like me for your death guide if I don’t know this stuff? No way to get you off the go-round without it, yeh-hey?’

‘There was a son. David. He died when he was nine.’

‘And that was back from where you came, your country, hey-yeh?’

‘Vermont. Not my country, it was where we lived at the time.’

‘Well, whatever, hey. It’ll take the little-boy stuff time t’get here see? But then he’ll bother you proper. Nine years is a bad age for a boy to die. They don’t take it well, yeh-hey.’

In 1988, on the dark landing, Phar Lap Jones spoke the truth while Lithy gambolled at my feet. Lithy never had any resentment or blamed me for its partial existence. Not so its brother Rude Boy – what else to call him? ‘Dave’ hardly seems suitable – who stowed away on a 747 and pitched up a few weeks later, while I was getting to know Dulston and attending the meetings. Rude Boy was there to remind me for eleven long years – what it is to be a bad parent. Rude Boy is permanently arrested in the brattish mood of defiance that propelled him into the roadway, in front of the fifties fender which pulped his head then smeared it all over the asphalt. Now, in Old Compton Street, he’s at it again.

In 1957, in Vermont, I’d caught him, playing out in the yard with two of his buddies. The three boys, naked save for their shorts, were smeared all over with black mud they’d manufactured using the hosepipe. ‘What’re you playing?’ I called to David from the back porch. ‘The nigger game!’ he shouted back. I burst through the screen door and was on him in two strides, grasped his blond hair, smacked his head once, twice, three times. He’d only said it by mistake – this much I knew even then, even in the first fog of anger. I knew also that what terrified me about these casually ejaculated globs of race hatred was that they must be my own. My own dark truffles of prejudice, swollen beneath the forest’s floor.

So, I smacked him and he ran and he got hit and he died. Now he likes to play in traffic whenever he can – and he’s always blacked up for the nigger game. This evening, stood in the middle of Old Compton Street, still daubed with black New England mud, glistening on his straight, down-covered limbs, he shook his puny little fists at the illegal minicab drivers from Senegal, from Ghana, from Nigeria, and shouted at them, ‘Niggers! Niggers! Niggers!’ Not that they could hear him. They drove clear through him – like he was a will-o’-the-wisp bonnet mascot. Then he broke off and rounded on the cavalcade of clones. ‘Pansies! Queers! Bum boys! Irons! Nonces!’ he shrieked at them – and they too were oblivious. Hell, even if they could’ve seen him, what might they’ve thought? Nothing much. I’ve watched Rude Boy manifest himself tens of thousands of times in the decade we’ve been reunited – that’s what the angry dead do; the rest of us are transparent with indifference, as invisible as the living. But much to his own disgust – and my weary amusement – hardly anyone in London seems capable of acknowledging the presence of a naked, mud-caked nine-year-old American boy screaming obscenities at them. In techie jargon – that argot of built-in obsolescence – they cannot compute.

It’s like the pimply plump blonde I saw on the concourse at Charing Cross Station the other morning. She was wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned ‘Hard Rock Cafe – Kosovo’. Har-de-hare When my two girls were little I took them to the first proper hamburger joint in London, the Great American Disaster on the Fulham Road. In time this transformed itself into the Hard Rock Cafe, and after still more vicious circularity, disasters were manufactured to decorate their sweat-shirts. Cool, huh?

Oh, that Rude Boy! All he’s learned in the eleven years he’s spent in England is a plethora of pejoratives. No trips to the Wigmore Hall to hear Beethoven string quartets for him. No expeditions up Piccadilly to buy Burberry. No wry browsing along the Bayswater Road on a Sunday afternoon, laughing at the kitsch dangling from the park railings. No-no. What that foul-mouthed kid likes is to do what he did then, run up behind me and plant one of his trowel feet – shaped like, as hard as – right in my fundament.

‘Yah!’ he screamed. ‘Fuck you, you bitch! Fuck you!’ The living may not feel or recognise or acknowledge the presence of the dead, but we can get to each other, as you know, when we’re not expecting the intrusion. Rude Boy’s foot usually passes right through me, but I was caught unawares – his sharp contempt lanced into my stupid, colourless indifference, and I turned to see his bony, mud-spattered little figure weaving away through the crowd. Having children may have been the whole point of life, but what it adds to death is dubious.

‘Rude Boy, yeh-hey!’ Phar Lap had backtracked to find out what was delaying me. ‘He never stops ridin’ you, hey-yeh?’

‘No, I guess not.’ We stopped. He rolled a cigarette, I got one out. We lit them.

‘Mebbe it’s time to tell ‘im goodbye, move on, hey-yeh?’ Phar Lap held his hand so it cupped my elbow and I turned to accompany him. Both of us pretended to touch.

‘I daresay that’s true – but can I?’

‘Yeh-hey. It’s not all gammin, y’know.’

‘What? Reincarnation?’

‘Yaka! Not a good word, that; iss like callin’ sickies who fuck with kiddies “child-lovers”, hey? No-no, y’see – you know this Lily stuff, we not gonna put it in a new body, yeh-hey? They don’t make one body serve two souls, or one soul serve two bodies. Cleverer than that. You used t’ think that you were your body – not so.’

‘Not so.’

‘No, what makes you Lily now? This lithopedion? This here cheeky one? Phar Lap has a way of gesturing all his own, elbows held tight by his serpentine sides, forearms angled out like the indicators on my father’s c.1927 Hupmobile. When he does this it’s impossible not to pay attention – he commands attention.

We made it to the block after Patisserie Valerie, Rude Boy was in the roadway and Lithy lost in the velveteen folds of my sensible sack dress, when the entire frontage of the pub we were passing shivered, undulated and was then punched from within by an explosion. The matter percolated into the air like milk mushrooming into coffee. Coasters, bar mats, handles, straights, queers, the artworks formerly known as prints, stools, trousers, carousers, hearts, lungs, lights, blood, viscera, Britvic, gelignite, Babycham, carpet tiling, dry-roasted peanuts, penises – the entire gubbins of the bar gathered into a fisted force field and splurged into the street. I felt the afflatus of several souls stream through what might’ve been me, what might’ve been Phar Lap. Tatters of people. The blast curled around us, crinkling up the envelope of air as if it were paper.

Then everyone in Old Compton Street was lying down – as if a malevolent god had announced a nap-time for all the children. The only individual standing was Rude Boy. ‘Faggots! Niggers!’ he screamed. Lithy, stunned, clung to my ankle, and dangled there hitching a lift as we skirted through shattered glass – which as ever looked disassembled to me, a window jigsaw – and shards of wood; and the children, who now stirred, shuddering into shock; and the bystanders who unglued themselves from Pompeii poses; and the bits of the people. Goodnight mush.

Phar Lap clicked into my inner ear, ‘Diddit with the punishment boomerang, hey. Walbiri one, hey-yeh. Very strong. Dragged it clear across the Balkans on my way back this time. Kickin’ up bi-ig death dust for this year, hey-yeh!’

‘Bullshit,’ was my snappy rejoinder. We slowed to turn the corner into Wardour Street, swerving to avoid a dead old prostitute coming the other way. I recognised her; she has so many foetuses floating around her head – each tethered by its own serpentine umbilicus – that among the locally deceased she’s known as Medusa. I went on disabusing Phar Lap: ‘It’s a fact written about in the press that this is the work of some far-right cell – an offshoot of the BNP, whatever.’

‘Yuwai – it’s speculated about. It’s a fact that we’re late yeh-hey?’

Again he accelerated through the crowd ahead of me, a crowd which, as we strolled beyond its psychic shockwave, was exhibiting in reverse all the symptoms induced by the explosion. Sure, there were the emergency sirens’ synthesised whoops – but aren’t there always? And the pumped-up people seeking the violence anywhere but within themselves – but aren’t there all the time? No, the bomb in Old Compton Street was a car crash and we hadn’t stopped to gawk. Under the fake-porphyry columns of the NatWest bank, Rude Boy was waggling his little dick in the unaware face of a Dutch tourist who was having her cheese-head cheesily portrayed by an Ethiopian economic migrant. Lithy shinnied up, arm over arm, to grab the bottom bead of my amber necklace, and pulled itself into the shelter of my bosom.

How strange it is never really to be able to touch another. During the sixties I always wondered at those astronauts, not being able adequately to describe what it was like to be weightless. I figured that maybe they sent really stupid people into space, but over the last eleven years I’ve learned that some sensations are like that. When you’re dead you can hold yourself against a thing, you can rub up and down, intent upon the precise degree of resistance the surface presents, but you won’t feel it; it doesn’t touch you. Still, we all do it – this pretence of touching one another. It seems to come naturally enough – wouldn’t you agree? – when you’re dead.

I’ve never altogether missed that aspect of life – the physical aspect, the insidey-outsidey part of it. I didn’t even have a dead little twin to meet on the other side – like so many do. The idiot twin in my life was that big blonde slab-body I shlepped around with me, all heavy and stupid and inert and smiling thickly, for my entire fucking adult life. And then the cancer yet! I had a ridiculously late menopause for a woman so obviously past it. Fancy that – hardly had I given a final flush to the bloody cistern of menstruation when the alarm went off somewhere and the cells began to divide.

Some wiseacre told me – when I was actually fucking dying – that a foetus undergoes far more rapid cell division during ontogeny than any cancer. Great. He died three years after me – cancer too – and at that time I was still naïve enough to imagine that what the afterlife chiefly provided were unrivalled opportunities for unbeatable gloating, unbelievable schadenfreude. So English, that – a nation who’ve always been convulsed by the world’s pratfall, when it was they who yanked away the chair. So, anyway, I went and had a look, maybe manifested myself a little – I don’t remember – but I tried to make his death a misery, whispering, ‘Dividing-dividing-dividing . . .’ in his ear. Who knows. Who knows.

In Piccadilly there were unquiet spirits aplenty, the futile shades of dead junkies and drabs and auto-accident victims, who make it their business to whirl distractedly around Eros’s standard. I’d like to see the seance that could get in touch with this roundabout of loons. I tell you I wouldn’t even have noticed this crappy cavalcade had it not been for Rude Boy, who always insists on joining in, ripping the ectoplasm from their shoulders, flinging it into the air like he was a pizza chef. I shouted at him to come on, and Lithy piped up as well, ‘Come on-comeon-Come on-comeon! D’you wanna be in my gang, my gang, my gang, d’you wanna be in my gang – oh yeah!’ And this did bring Rude Boy over, but only to cuff Lithy, who screeched and appealed to me, but I shoved it off and it kicked at Rude Boy and Rude Boy kicked out again. As ever it was difficult to tell what infuriated them more, their own hated consanguinity or their inability ever actually to land a blow, one on the other. So, they followed me on down through Piccadilly bickering and sniping and contradicting each other. Kids, huh.

Yeah, the unceasing awareness of underwear – I don’t miss it. I remember being in Tuscany, in the mid-seventies, and all I could focus on in a beautiful Renaissance palazzo I visited, the only fucking thing in room after room of paintings and furniture and glass and Christ knows what, was a door-lock which resembled a bra-hook – flat eyes. The only thing I could hang on to all that hot, scented, beautifully touchy-feely afternoon. Must’ve been ‘cause I had diarrhoea. It used to do that to me – crank up the unceasing underwear-awareness. Obviously.

Standing underneath Eros, I hoped the deatheaucracy had rented somewhere special for this meeting, because I wanted it to be a special meeting. I’d spent yonks dragging around their offices in Eltham, Ongar, Barking and Thurrock. You’re familiar with the premises they favour, leased with the evidence of failed businesses still stacked about: Nobbo pegboards, Sasco year planners, redundant Roladexes, outmoded computing equipment. Yeah, this is the kind of swinging scene the deatheaucracy favours. Indeed, it’s difficult – wouldn’tjew say – to see them in any other context, ratty little men in brown suits that they are. Just as it’s impossible to imagine them not twiddling with their computer-games consoles, or fiddling with their Gameboys. Why can it be that the people who run death have such a reliable appetite for gadgets, fads, crazes – anything, in fact, that will allow them the opportunity to fidget for hour after hour, while the traffic clots in the arteries outside, and we shades gather among the shadows in the waiting room.

Still, as you know, not all the people who run death are male; there’s the odd woman as well. And very odd they are too, these eternally plain Janes. They’re the kind of spinsters who came of age immediately after both wars – women existing within the vacuum of a permanently absented purée of masculinity. Beneath umbrellas of cashmere and cotton they scampered away their lives, eluding the damp mizzle of testosterone. Now they’re doing the same in death. Icky! Phar Lap says that most of these secretarial spinnies are unquiet spirits. But I protest that there’s nothing quieter than these desiccated women, who tiptoe into meetings, only to deposit another buff folder into the tatty fingers of Mr Glanville, Mr Hartly, or Mr Canter – the mister who’s given my application the most consideration over the years.

‘You’ve set your heart on rebirth, then?’ Mr Canter said at one of our last encounters, his fingers steepled over the graveyard of an open file.

‘Yes, I think death has taught me all that it might.’ I had my knees drawn together, my hands clasped in my lap. I clenched my fists and – hey presto! A half-century sloughed off and I was back in the unsuccessful interviews at Barnard and Wellesley, where they looked at my prominent nose from all kinds of angles.

‘Oh really.’ Canter was wearing his habitual, primitive, Norfolk-cut, Jaeger wool suit. I recognised it from the off as one of George Bernard Shaw’s purpose-built garments, and pegged the deatheaucrat accordingly as a Shavian pacifist and freethinker of the Edwardian period. To begin with I was amused to see the people who run death sustaining their crankiness way past the grave – but perhaps it’s only the English who do this?

I’ve always suspected that death American-style would’ve been both glitzier and more convivial. That Bobby Franks would’ve waited the twelve years for Loeb to turn up, so that the two of them could be pals, play pinochle and wait for Leopold to come from South America. That even a pair like that would eventually knuckle under to the defeat of the will.

It’s a fact that you need a good background in bureaucracy to run death. I tested for a job with them a couple of years after I died, but, free of arthritis or not, I was told that my typing was too slow, my filing too haphazard. (Although there was general enthusiasm for me among the staff of the office where I was interviewed, when they heard about my background in pen design.)

Beyond this I don’t believe there’s any especial qualification, d’jew? After all, most of the deathly offices are hung with suits from all the decades of the last two hundred years or so. I’ve seen sharp 1950s sharkskin single-breasters, and tough 1930s twill sacks; 1890s nankeen frock coats and 1870s sawtooth cutaways. But mostly, the hideous brown-and-chalk-stripe double-breasteds of the 1940s predominate, I guess because this was when the bureaucratic type came to the fore – and we all went for a Burton. Left in charge by their more belligerent brothers, the paper-pilers and pen-pushers remained in the rear, both armies of non-combatants speaking ACRONYM, and perfecting the office management systems that would come to dominate the post-war world. Alan Turing was the originator of the spreadsheet, in case you didn’t realise.

‘Oh really.’ Canter said it again and I savour it anew. There are some good things about death as well as many bad ones. The good things include the time to sit and stare. There’s no hurry. In between the ‘Oh’ and the ‘really’ I had plenty of time to examine chipped chipboard partitions and dense slabs of MDF. Time to see that in this office – above a dry-cleaner’s premises on Willesden High Road – the Dexion cradle within which Canter’s department carts around its nyujo occupies a dominant position. Canter and his staff have always loved telling me, ‘Oh, you know, it’s a very fine nyujo, a very perspicacious one – we do so like to keep it with us.’

D’jew know the nyujo? It’s the petrified corpse of a long-gone scrivener, who saw fit to meditate himself into a crystalline state. The one belonging to this department achieved this by ceaselessly revolving on his Parker Knoll beneath an interminable succession of plastic demijohns of Buxton mineral water, upended by his disciples and set, one after the other, atop his Dexion cubicle. From time to time small basins of Tipp-Ex were thrown over his bowed head, staples fired at him from acolytes’ guns, labels of all sorts affixed – Post-it notes ditto. Over the years this figurehead has swollen to alarming proportions – a dumpy Buddha, encrusted with stationery. Yet still he’s humped from one defunct travel agency to the next busted electrical wholesaler’s in his papier-mâché palanquin.

I expect you’ve discovered they’re immensely proud of their statue of Anubis too? Pathetic isn’t it, the way they drag it around whichever block it is that they’re currently tenanting, as if it were a recalcitrant old pampered doggie. Still, I suppose it is.

The living, I guess, would expect the coincidence of different eras of suiting, and the presence of Cratchit clerks playing Nintendo, to give these offices an anachronistic air . We know it’s not so. It’s always the dumb mistake of the living to imagine themselves contemporary. ‘Every period I’ve lived through has seemed like now to me,’ my second husband was fond of saying – fondness was his forte. He was no more fond of me or his daughters or his mother than he was of his dog, or his golf bag, or his penis. Fondness was inscribed on his heart when I cut it out still beating. Only kidding.

Yaws kept prodigiously exact records of the Now during his entire lifetime, detailing every little particle of its extinction. When, after his own, I came to read them, they proved to my entire satisfaction that the over-examined life is hardly worth living; and that while ostensibly he had died of a routine cardiac infarction, he had in fact, like so many of his ilk – permanently adolescent, upper-middle-class, minor-public-school-educated Englishmen – strolled back to the Elysian pavilion, his entry in the scorebook marked ‘Retired bored’.

‘Oh really?’ Had Canter said it yet again? He’d definitely caught me eyeing the fucking nyujo, because he continued, ‘You hadn’t perhaps considered becoming a nyujo yourself?’

‘I’m sorry?’ I replied – although I’d heard him only too clearly.

‘Liberation through hearing on the after-death plane you’re familiar with it of course?’

‘Of course.’ They always talk like this, don’t they, the brown suits, the deatheaucrats, effortlessly rendering the transcendent banal. ‘But I’d rather set my heart on living again.’

‘We’ve got all sorts of new animating principles available, you know – fresh harvests of anencephalic stillborn infants coming through all the time – ‘ He broke off to address a passing clerk: ‘Mr Davis? You wouldn’t be so kind as to bring over the Roladex with the anencephalic stillborn infants’ animating principles on it, would you?’

‘Truly, I have no desire to be nyujo, and I’d rather counted on being me on the next go-round, as it were.’

‘You appreciate that you’ll actually be more you if you accept a new animating principle, hmm? There’ll be a more . . . how can I put it? ... porous barrier between your assemblages of memories.’

‘I know this, yes – but I won’t be me. Me. Me.’

‘Quite so.’

Yes, I kid you not – this is the kind of dreck he tried to palm me off with. Still, at least I wasn’t among the living, stumbling about the joint imagining themselves painted up with the present, when it ain’t necessarily so. Their minds are full of dead ideas, images and distorted facts. Their visual field is cluttered up with decaying buildings, rusting cars, potholed roads and an imperfectly realised sky, which darkens towards the horizon of history. They take in all ages in the one frame every time they snap the city with their Brownie brainboxes. Their very noses are clogged with dying hairs, moribund skin, stratified snot – they’re smelling the past; and feeling it too between their toes, their thighs, the pits of their arms: ssshk-shk! Peeling back the years. Whereas we, the dead, are the true inheritors of the Modern. The live lot assemble time into lazy decadences – ten-year periods of conspicuous attitudinising, which are only ever grasped in nostalgic retrospect. My second husband was a profoundly ancient man, a Neolithic stone-knapper. But we . . . we see it all; anachro-spectacles are the only ones we wear. So these interminable branch offices that I’ve revolved through, while Lithy sat in my lap and Rude Boy ranted in the vestibule, trying to piss on back numbers of the Reader’s Digest, haven’t been so strange, or so different.

Anyway, I’m getting off the point, which Canter never has. ‘Thank you, Mr Davis,’ he said, taking receipt of the relevant buff folder. ‘You see, Ms Bloom – or rather your death guide . . . Mr . . . Jones, ye-es Jones, may have told you – we have our own calculus here, our own ways of proceeding?’

‘I’m only too well aware.’

‘This isn’t’ – then he really did take off his wire-rimmed spectacles, and run his hand through his sparse, sandy hair, giving me time to appreciate, once again, that instead of being determined by the magisterially pompous English gentile who I’d thought was going to decide it, my fate was in the waxy paws of a ratty little Jew – ‘any longer a matter of how you conducted yourself on your last “go-round”, as you put it.’

‘Mr Canter, sir’ – such honorifics came naturally when I was addressing someone who hadn’t taken a shit since 1953 – I’m only too well aware of the implications of karma.’

‘On the before-death plane perhaps – but after death? You died, in 1988, owing over two thousand pounds to the Inland Revenue. Monies which had, subsequently, to be disbursed by your estate –’

‘Is this strictly relevant?’

‘Oh yes, accounts are accounts – and we are – ‘

Accountants. Save for his peculiar colleagues, Mr Canter is well-nigh indistinguishable from Mr Weintraub, who, when I saw him for the last time – the cancer scooping out my left boob as if it were a fucking avocado – assured me he’d take care of the relevant returns . . . sitting in his aggressively Artexed office, off the North Circular by Brent Cross, playing with a Bic Cristal and annotating the accounts I myself had laboriously put together.

‘– concerned here with totting up all the relevant columns. We’ll be doing this for most of the next year, so don’t be alarmed if your neighbours – you live in Dulburb?’

‘Dulston,’ I grunted.

‘Dulston, quite so, a lovely area, very much village London. Anyway, if you should hear that certain enquiries are being made about you, rest assured that it’s only us. And now,’ he screwed his doughy butt into the swivel chair as if he were intent on sodomy, ‘there’s the matter of sex.’

‘Sex?’

‘Indeed, you will not, I hope, find yourself too discomfited by a resumption in sexual feelings, hmm? Merely psychic to begin with, but very real for all that.’ He paused for effect and a zombie brought in tea and Nice biscuits.

Mr Canter and I sat either side of them for the remainder of the interview. After I’d left, another zombie returned to take them away. Funny how we dead never eat – yet still, some of us love to serve food.

Well, that was one of the last encounters with Canter, as I say. And earlier this evening, in Piccadilly now, I was beset by a liquefying inundation of orgasms – of dicks stirring me up. When I was abandoned in the wastes of late middle age, my flesh folding, then frowning into sour slackness, I wanted my sex cut out – and so it was; in death, at least. Who cut the cookie with the cookie cutter? But ever since Miles and Natasha got down to it in the gauche apartment on Regent’s Park Road, I’ve been tormented by lust and jealousy. Who’d ever have thought they’d be welcome again in this old house, behind this envious green door? Ethereal fingers prinking my pussy. My first husband, jolly Dave Kaplan, he used to say that his beard was like ‘wearing a pussy on my face – I’ve only got to stroke my chin and I feel real comfy’. It’s Dave I thought of in Piccadilly. Or rather, it was the incongruous liver spot, adrift in his sparse hairline, that I pictured. It was always this scrap of yellow-brown I focused on as I willed myself towards another orgasm of crushing non-spontaneity.

Years after the marriage was over – the late sixties to be vaguely precise – when we’d occasionally meet in Manhattan for lunch – those good, wholesome divorcees’ lunches, the only ones people who’ve been sexually involved can have and still enjoy their food – he divulged that while I was looking at his liver spot and imagining myself ecstatic, he was concentrating hard on the mole on my chin, while willing himself to detumesce. ‘Touche pas!’ I laughed, and raised my glass of Zinfandel. ‘Yes,’ he continued, ‘I’ve spent possibly years of my life entirely absorbed in the pimples, blemishes and other imperfections of beautiful women.’ And as if called to stimulate himself by this revelation, he meditatively stroked his pussy.

Spontaneous or not, I did use to orgasm with Kaplan. I did clutch his arched neck, groan, say things – I did that crap. I loved sex – or rather, like so many women of my era, I loved the idea of sex. Sex garbed in romantic weeds, sex with strong self-assured men rather than puling boychicks. Set against imaginings like these the real thing was never that great, natch; the dildo would have to be dressed. I knew even then, from talking to the boychicks themselves (and was there ever a century like the twentieth for chewing things over; ‘Time as a Cud’ – discuss), that their chief sexual hang-up was the reverse of mine – a hang-down, if you like. For all these guys sex was too sexy. That’s why Dave confined himself to the mole.

We’d gone a couple more blocks and I couldn’t see Phar Lap Jones ahead of me, when ‘Oimissus!’ – there he was, sitting, back against the wall, beside one of the alleyways that leads into the Albany. With the brim of his white Stetson pulled down low, he wasn’t much more than black jeans, bullroarer and outsize punishment boomerangs. He looked just like any of the other alien sophomores who’ve enrolled for this year’s London Summer School of the Didgeridoo. ‘Oi!’ He’d managed to mooch a meat pie from somewhere along the way. Strange, this being Kebabistan, rather than Fish-and-Chiplington. He chews up these hassocks of mince and onion after he’s skin-popped them with brown sauce. It’s a newly-coined Strine tradition of his. Meat-pie dreaming – I guess. But he never swallows it, none of us does, do we.

Anyway, as I say, there he was in the alleyway and I felt this aching desire to get in there with him, to cram myself inside that gully of old bricks. I was half-convinced that for the first time in eleven years I’d get some abrasion, some rasp-between Phar Lap and the wall, that is. I may even have begun insinuating myself, because he said, ‘Juda! Lily, not in there, girl, that’s bad, you can’t go in there.’

‘Where? The Albany?’

‘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.