Will Self's Collected Fiction, Vol. 2 (2014), page 38
part #2 of Will Self's Collected Fiction Series
The grey manikin has twinkly black eyes. It’s a good dancer. It keeps right on with the nonsensical ditty, shimmying between my ankles. What the hell can it be? ‘See you here, girl. This is a lithopedion, little dead fossil baby of yours, yeh-hey!?’ It’s Phar Lap, the aboriginal man who hung out with me while I died. I must say that during the endgame there he began to irritate me considerably. I couldn’t altogether get where he was coming from – but needless to say it sounded religiose.
‘How would I know,’ I snap.
But Phar Lap pays this no mind, he simply squats down himself and gives the manikin a pat on its wrinkled brow with the very tip of his little finger. ‘Could be much worse y’know, girl,’ says Phar Lap Dixon. ‘Much worse than the little feller. You never have no abortions, no?’
‘No.’
‘Stillbirths?’
‘No.’
‘ ’Cos they snag round yer head some – to begin with, hey-yeh?’
‘What d’jew mean?’
‘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 back – see? But see, hey, if they’re real small they’re still attached to the woman, danglin’ off her, yeh-hey? Older kiddies – they don’t stick with you as much, grown-up kids not at all.’
‘Like life?’
‘No, not like life …’ He pauses, allowing some nurses to pass by. ‘In life, death drive you ‘part, yeh-hey? Now it drag you all t’gether. I wonder which you’ll like more. Anyway, you had a dead child, right?’
How typical of life – you have to fucking die in order for anyone to discuss what’s really bothering you. He’s like a reversed mushroom – this Phar Lap Dixon character – with his white hat and black stem. Still, his quiet insistence is beguiling. We link arms without touching and, guiding me as if I were a horse, with dips of his Stetson’s brim and cheek-sucking clicks, he leads me towards the stairs. Down we glide, following the dirty whorl of the rotten old Royal Ear, talking the while of David Junior.
The lack of touch I understand – no pain, no touch. The obliviousness of the staff we pass I get too – no touch, no pain, no pain-murderers, stalking in the night. This consciousness after death – well, clearly I made a colossal booboo. That painful, embarrassing world through which I dragged myself, smiling thickly, throwing the occasional tantrum, beset by irrational fears – that was purgatory. And this? This must be heaven.
Down past the posters advertising upcoming events in the worlds of pregnancy, lunacy, dental caries and drug addiction. Across empty seating areas where water-coolers gurgle indulgently. Then down past the painful paintings executed by the maimed, and the insipid, pastel watercolours of the whole. Finally, past the somnolent security guard, nodded out over his newspaper, and into the street. I look down to see what’s become of the lithopedion, but it keeps up well enough, grabbing the hem of my nightie and swinging itself from step to step. Tiny Tarzan.
Until we hit the street when, mysteriously, I find that the nightie has gone with the night, and I’m standing in the roadway naked and wattled, with the dawn seeping in. ‘Oi!’ I hail Phar Lap who’s rolling a cigarette one-handed. ‘What’s all this, then?’ All this is all this wobbling cellulite, all these spongy pounds the crab had snipped away. All this fat. I didn’t figure on being pudgy after death. Plump in the nether world. Rotund among the shades.
‘You can’t take it with you, girl.’
‘Not the nightie – this.’ I make fat shapes with my hands to cup what’s implied.
‘Oh, yeh-hey! That you get to keep. Heh! Not so subtle a subtle body, yeh-hey?’
This I don’t get – but I keep on at him. ‘I can’t go anywhere looking like this’ – absurd, I have done for years, we’re all naked underneath our clothes. ‘Anyway – where are we going?’
‘Dulston.’ It sounds like.
‘Dalston?’
‘No, Dulston.’
Dulston, eh, and I thought I knew most of London’s suburbs by name – even the utterly samey inconsequential ones. ‘What’re we going there for?’
‘Thass where yer gonna stay, Lily girl. Thass where yer new unit is. No more gabbin’ now – here’s the cab.’ A minicab pulls up to the kerb. It’s a sloppy, medium-old, four-door saloon. A Ford Granada or something like that. When I was a young woman I took an interest in cars. Cars like the eight-cylinder Buick I had in the late forties, which would pull up a one-in-eight hill at sixty in third. Big cars like spunky men lying underneath me – controlled by my feet, my calves, my thighs, my hands. The men grew older and less powerful. The cars smaller. I gave up on both kinds of transport.
The driver of this jalopy is a Greek Cypriot. This I can tell from the iconostasis that is the dashboard. Tiny, gilt-framed pictures of a variety of saints, Madonnas and patriarchs, all looped together in a tangle of Christmas-tree lights and rosaries. On the back shelf of the car lies one of those nodding dogs, a black one with three yea-saying heads. The Cypriot has a greasy tonsure, a brown label of skin stuck down in thinning hair. He’s grinning, and rinky-dink bouzouki music is plinking away. All the seats in the car have those knobbly mats strapped on to them, as if this were orthopaedic transport for back-achers; the kind of people who say ‘My back’s killing me’ as if it were fucking cancer.
Phar Lap folds his length into the passenger seat and I take the rear, together with the lithopedion, which executes a neat forward flip from the sidewalk into the seat-well. Not I, though, I have to climb up into the car the way that fat people do, sideways, one leg provisionally advanced. For us fat, each footstep is an act of testing the world’s surface, trying to find out who’ll give way first.
No destination is requested, yet the Cypriot flicks into drive and we pull away smoothly up Huntley Street. But it’s not until we’re turning out of Grafton Way into Tottenham Court Road that I begin to appreciate how comfy this car is, how it glides along – more like some flying machine than an urban potholer.
But then it comes to me, I’ve forgotten that … ‘I can’t feel anything,’ I exclaim to Phar Lap, whose face cannot be seen in the rear-view mirror. The cabbie snaps off the tape machine.
‘Yer not gonna,’ growls my mentor.
‘I mean … it’s strange … but I can feel the insides of me … the disposition of my parts … And I can see the way my body fits into this seat, but it’s as if I’m resting on the surface, not pressing into it.’
‘Yairs.’
‘What?’
‘Yeh, thass right, Lily-girl. You ain’t got no physical body no more now, kiddo, jus’ this like subtle one, yeh-hey? This subtle one. It can’t reflect light. It can’t feel pain or pleasure. It don’t sleep or smell. It don’t need tucker. It don’t need grog. It don’t need this one.’ He makes a schoolboy’s obscene gesture with an eye and a hook of fingers. ‘It don’t need nothing.’
I think for a moment before coming back at him. ‘But no pain, right?’
‘Thass it, girl – no pain. Not for now, leastways.’
So, all have won – and all shall have prizes. My prize being the smashed crab, its pincers dislocated and laid alongside the white and brown mush of its flesh. No pain. It looks like an excellent deal to me. It feels like a great deal of numbness, like a whole body-shot of super-Novocaine, and an epidural for all eternity. I love it.
The cab pivots through ninety degrees under the bland graticule of the Euston Tower and glides on to the Euston Road, where we’re confronted by the unwelcoming Wellcome Institute. How many fucking times have I laboured along here on the way to work. A fat, old, bourgeois bag lady, weighted down by a Barnes & Noble book bag full of second-hand culture and wicked, carbohydrate snacks. The gritty city air gusting up my dress, blowing shrapnel in my eyes. My dentures clenched with the artificiality of my own efforts.
Dentures? Dreaming of teeth. Dreaming of teeth again. I have my own teeth back – that much I can feel. My own filled, bridged and promiscuously uneven choppers. Dunce-prize cuspids – hardly worth dying for. They should never have taken them out in the first place, but hell, they used to do that before they put fluoride in the water. They’d rip your fangs out without so much as a by-your-leave. Parents used to give their halitosis-haloed kids fucking dentures for their twenty-first birthday. The keys to the door leading away from pyorrhea. Jews especially – as if we were anticipating an evil demand for rotten enamel to build another foul shower-surround. So, then I had no teeth and a big appetite. Now I have teeth and no requirement for them. Quelle blague.
‘What y’thinkin’ ’bout, girl?’ Phar Lap swivels to show me his yellow eyeballs, his yellow teeth. Aboriginals – unlike African blacks – are entirely matt, there’s nothing oleaginous about their skin at all. No sallowness either. Just matt black. They’re definitely the ethnic minority the eighties have been crying out for.
‘You.’
‘What ’bout me, hey?’
‘What’re you for?’
‘Like I say, Lily. Like I tell you back in that place – I’m yer death guide, girl.’
‘So – guide me. Where the hell are we going?’
‘Do you know where you’re going to?/ Do you like the things that life is show-ing yoooooo? / Do you know!’ This is from the lithopedion, who perches on the very edge of the back seat, actually managing to swing its calcified little legs. I shall have to have a serious word with it about this behaviour when we arrive.
‘Like I say, girl – we’re goin’ to Dulston; it’s a ’burb like any other, yeh-hey?’
‘And where is Dulston?’ The minicab has nosed on to Pentonville Road. ‘I mean, we appear to be heading in the direction of Dalston.’
‘Yairs, well. It’s right alongside of it, y’know. It’s like a skinny district, yeh? One minute yer on the Kingsland Road, the next yer turnin’ into Dalston Lane. If yer not quick you can miss Dulston.’
‘So, it’s between Islington to the west and Dalston to the east?’
‘Thass right.’
‘And what’s to the south?’
‘Dalston again.’
‘And the north?’
‘Stoke Newington.’
‘That doesn’t make any sense. There isn’t anything between these parts of London. Not unless Dulston is a made-up estate agents’ kind of place.’
‘Could be that. Could be y’don’t know London quite as well as you think.’
‘I’m sorry – and how fucking well d’jew know it, then?’
Phar Lap waits a while before answering. Long enough for us to turn into Barnsbury Road and pass the Metropolitan Cab Office. Long enough for me to conclude that this isn’t the way I’d go to Dalston if I were driving. I’d head north and go over the Archway – detouring via Jack Harmsworth’s comfy, musty flat, at the top of the priests’ house off Hornsey Lane. He’d still be sleeping off last night’s gin when I tiptoed in. I’d have to prise the bottle from his blue hands. Still, I know he’d be glad to see me and we could have a cup of coffee together. Or I’d head south from here, cut through Covent Garden and pass by Emma’s chichi flat off Bow Street. I’ve never been by her place this early – I bet she sleeps clutching one of those teddies she collects, like a diminutive furry lover.
What am I thinking of? Neither of these routes to Dalston – or Dulston – is anything like direct. Anyway, I haven’t even driven the last couple of years. I gave the old runabout to Natasha, who, predictably, ran it into the ground. Also, I never call unexpectedly on these people. Not at this hour – not ever. It isn’t, as the prissy English would say, the done thing.
‘I know London well enough. Y’know, Lily, I’m a traditional feller, yeh-hey? I still sing the songs. So, when I came here for the bicentennial, yeh?’
‘The Australian bicentennial?’
‘Yairs. Mebbe. Anyway, when I came here for the bicentennial – on account of someone needing to point out what wholesale fuckin’ gammin it was – I planted my kayan right down on the carpet, in the terminal building at Heathrow, gave me bullroarer a swing, an’ dropped dead, hey? Dropped fuckin’ dead. Heart attack.’
‘So that was when?’
‘January, thereabouts.’
‘January? You’ve only been in London since January?’
‘Thass right.’
‘And you presume to tell me the way around town?’
‘Like I say, Lily, I’m a bit of a traditional feller. So I had to find out what the city songs were, y’know – ’
‘So how can you tell me you’re lo-one-ly, and say for you that the sun don’t shine? / Let me take you by the hand and lead you through the streets of London …’ the lithopedion croons, but we pay it no mind.
‘Had to go walkabout the place. Find out what makes it tick, yeh-hey?’
‘Are you dead?’ I lean forward and ask the Cypriot cabbie. I was going to tell him where to turn off the Liverpool Road, but I suspect my directions are of little use to him either.
‘Me – four years,’ the man replies, smiting his breast with a closed fist, as if proud of an achievement. ‘And the name’s Costas – if youse don’t mind.’
‘You must … You must …’ – I can’t believe I’m saying anything quite this trite, but still it trickles out – ‘… miss them a lot?’ In among the empty-eyed halo-heads on the dash are snapshots of curly-haired kiddies smiling out of lace, taffeta and other ruffs.
‘Not rrrreally,’ he rolls out a devilish r, ‘I see more of them now I’m dead than I did when I was alive.’
‘And … and they can see you?’
‘No-no – I’m not about to do this to them – they’re little childrens. I wouldn’t want to scare them none. Now – theirs mothers, that’s not same thing.’
I want to pursue this subject a little more but Costas has to execute a tricky manoeuvre which I myself know only too well: the slide down the side of the station, the whip round Highbury Corner and on to St Paul’s Road. By the time we’re halted again at the junction of Essex Road I haven’t exactly lost interest, but I’ve collapsed into a state which – faute de mieux – I can only call a colourless stupidity of indifference. I’ve always thought London was this, anyway – a colourless stupidity of indifference. Even in this lemon dawn of late spring, with the sunlight turning everything Janus-faced with darkness and light, there’s still no relief. The city is an encrustation upon a scab, cigarette ash flicked on to cigar ash. Terrace upon terrace of knock-kneed, terminally warped Victorian townhouses, with shitty council blocks sticking them apart. The shopping parades aren’t festive enough to warrant the moniker, they’re parodies of commerce, every third window boarded up and plastered with flyposters for pop and politics. Very occasionally a triangle, or a quadrangle, or a trapezoid of closed-off space insinuates itself between the brick bluffs, the dirty turf marked out for the lost game of life, with no-goal posts in its pissy corners.
Five a.m., and the city is rolling over in its clay riverbed and feeling the gravel of sweaty repose. Five a.m., and the human collectivity is rubbing the gunge of urbanity from its filmy eyes, farting the gas of lack-of-utility, and yawning asthmatically as it struggles to inhale another day. Planeloads of sleepy dust are touching down at Heathrow. Terminal morning. Is it my imagination, or is this road even more saggy and daggy than usual? True, it’s a journey I’ve only ever done for workaday purposes, or to undertake merciless errands. Going to squats to pick up my junky daughter, prise her loose from the carpets of ‘friends’. Or to discharge her from dying in hospitals, when she’s anaesthetised herself against the intolerable pain of her bourgeois affluence.
Even so, I know the Balls Pond Road – who doesn’t? And this isn’t it. This is some further division of the polarised city – with its poor to the east, its rich to the west. The terraces are more warped – totally cockeyed, with their front steps collapsing, their roof tiles flaking like hard scalp. The little council estates seem even littler, their red-bricked walkways but pillbox slits from which the inhabitants might indifferently regard – should they even be able to – the colourless stupidity of the city all around. And the shops – is it my imagination, or are they more run-down than ever, offering fewer goods, with hardly any cards taped in their filmy windows, offering utterly useless services?
Phar Lap Dixon sits with sharp knees against the dashboard, sharp shoulders against the seat, the crown of his white Stetson floating along the black crown of the road. He turns from time to time, adjusts his sunglasses, peers at me with world-weary amity. Costas drives with surprising verve for a man who’s been dead since the early eighties, swerving the car this way and that, grabbing at the shift and banging his corpulence forward on to the pedals, then back on to the knobbly seat. The bundle of votive knick-knacks dangling from the rear-view mirror jangles. ‘How can he drive,’ I interrogate Phar Lap, ‘when he’s immaterial – or isn’t his body as subtle as mine?’
‘Yeh-hey. Well, yer gettin’ curious, girl – an’ y’know, more’ll be revealed. You didn’t learn life in one day – death won’t be any different.’
Not only is Costas driving with considerable ferocity, but there are other vehicles doing just the same – making a getaway into the Islington panhandle. Apart from the occasional doodling milk-float, or heavy lorry stomping through, these dawn racers have the roads to themselves. From what I can see they’re all driven by Costas’s brethren, and they all have nodding Cerberuses on their back shelves, and they all carry recently expired passengers. Fords full of infarctions, Toyota-loads of tachycardia, Vauxhalls freighted with valvulitis. I guess they aren’t playing chicken with one another – because they’ve nothing to be afraid of. A Datsun of such raddled antiquity that its bodywork is entirely oxidised orange cuts in front of us by inches as we slow for a light. But Costas, instead of beeping or berating, merely laughs, ‘There’s Spiro – he’s frisky this morning!’ Then pulls alongside. The Datsun also has bead covers on its seats and another Greek at the wheel. In the back sits a whey-faced man who clutches the driver’s headrest. He’s agonised, on shpilkes.
