Will Self's Collected Fiction, Vol. 2 (2014), page 39
part #2 of Will Self's Collected Fiction Series
‘You see that, girl?’ says Phar Lap. ‘Another one of the newly dead.’
‘I gathered that, but where’re they going?’
‘Hey-yeh, girl – y’know there’s only one destination in the final taxi – ’
‘Dulston?’
‘Right.’
‘And … and this is it?’
We’ve zoomed off the Balls Pond Road, zoomed down a one-way street, turned in front of an old Victorian pub – which looks like a waterworks and is called The Waterworks – and are now standing at a junction by a gas station. Its oil-stained forecourt is like a dirty diagram of the world. And my death guide replies, ‘This is it.’ He lifts one of a pair of big, black boomerangs, which he has tucked between his seat and the door, and deftly slices the air. ‘There’s the cafe. All the drivers gonna stop, yeh-hey? Gotta get some tucker in – s’been a long long night for us, hey-yeh?’
The cafe is underneath one of the arches of a suburban branch line. It’s a Nissen-hut-shaped enclosure full – I assume – of steam and smell. But all I can see from the outside are whited-out windows, with star shapes of card taped on to them – menu items, presumably. Costas slews the car to a halt on an apron of tarmac, alongside twenty or so similar vehicles – rusting Fords, Vauxhalls, Toyotas and Mitsubishis. All of them have wonky aerials stuck on their trunks, earthed by scraps of old plastic bag. Across the bellying brickwork, which weeps mortar and bird shit, snakes the graffito ‘GEORGE DAVIS WAS GUILTY – AND NOW HE’S DEAD’. We clamber out and my calcified foetus comes with, hanging on to my foot. I’m not sure which aggravates me more – the lithopedion or my own bare-assed nudity. ‘Jesus, Phar Lap,’ I say, ‘I can’t go in there like this!’
Costas waddles round to where we stand. He’s even fatter than I am – and no one’s ever counselled him against the optical effects of horizontal-striped shirts. He’s so hairy he has noselocks. He’s one of those ugly people who used to make me feel happy to be alive. He unpops the trunk and there amidst oily clutter is a sad piece of individual Samsonite, identical to the case Charlie must’ve packed for me to go to the Royal Ear – but this one is brand-new. I open it. Inside are big, soft, old woman’s panties, ditto vest, ditto tented dress (‘Not the wigwam, Mumu!’ Natty silkily whines in my inner ear), ditto pasty shoes for minced feet swollen by half a century of standing still. All of the pathetic kit for this – my biggest adventure – is brand-new. All of it – and that makes it all still sadder. I pull the dress off its midget hanger, decant the shoes from their box, rip underwear and tights from cellophane. I dress without chagrin under the dark eyes of the dead men.
Costas leads the way into the Turkish baths of a cafe. Gushes of steam from an urn toiling on the Formica counter are doing mighty but insubstantial battle with the kraken tentacles of smoke from the fifty-odd fuming fags stuck in fifty-odd fuming faces. The tables are packed tight, twenty playing-card shapes laid out for a game of impatience. At each sits a trio as mismatched as Phar Lap, Costas and I. The newly dead are easy to spot – we all look simultaneously bemused and relieved. Relieved from the pain – whether it’s the hammer blow of violent extinction, or the quick-quick-slow scuttling crab, or the lightning lobe strike – and bemused by the outrageous dullness of the afterlife itself. The Charon-substitutes are Greek Cypriots to a man. They’re all paunch and trouser wrinkle, they make burning points with their cigarettes and chatter loudly. They sit back in their chairs, or forward, or ride them back to front, the way car jockeys habitually do when out of the saddle.
I whisper to Phar Lap, ‘Why’re all the final taxi drivers Greek Cypriots?’
‘Yeh-hey. Well – s’matter of opportunity, y’know. Big community of these fellers all round Dulston – in Dalston, Homerton, Hoxton, Clapton, Hackney, too – they know the territory, see? So they get the pick-ups. Still, it changes – used t’be all the drivers were proper Cockney cabbies, but last ten years gone death’s bin kinda deregulated. Yeh-hey?’
I trail after him to where there’s a vacant table. Our trio – black face, brown face, sallow face – sit down with the red, brown and yellow sauce bottles. Yup, I can cope with the hacks, but the assembled death guides are much harder to come to terms with. These guys are all fucking weirdos. There are Amerindians with lip plugs the size of their own breakfast plates; saffron-robed Buddhist monks; Samoyed shamans in trimmed, reindeer-hide robes; Korean Taoists in shiny, black origami hats; Wolof witch doctors wearing ebony masks; Dayak cargo cultists sporting wickerwork beanies; and several ringers for Baron Samedi, all togged up in voodoo suits. ‘What community do they belong to?’ I say. ‘What unites these guys? Nothing save for worshipping the fucking fairies in lieu of the mighty dollar.’
‘Yeh-hey,’ Phar Lap predictably tics. ‘Fair dinkum, Lily m’girl. All us mob here – we’re mostly what’re called traditional peoples, yeh-hey? Seems like you Westerners can’t get no grasp on the death stuff, on the ungud, on nothing.’Less you have one of us to guide you. See – seems like when you b’lieve in nothing you gotta have guides who b’lieve in the never-never, see?’
‘Erm … I suppose so.’
‘No you don’t. Yer jus’ sayin’ it, Lily-girl. But anyway this ain’t no settin’ face to face with the Clear Light. Plenny of time for that. Now – let’s eat. What’ll y’have?’ He points a big black boomerang at the star-shaped bits of cardboard Sellotaped to the window. These announce the awful permutations of egg (poached, fried, scrambled to fuck), sausage, bacon, beans, black pudding, white pudding, fruit pudding, slice, two slices, beans and tomatoes. One is headed ‘Full English’, another ‘Full Irish’ and a third ‘Full Dead’.
When I first came to London in the late fifties the very words ‘full English’ gave me heartburn. Just saying them left a sticky film on the roof of my mouth. Mindjew, in those days – with rationing still within gut feeling – the cafe breakfast was more commonly ‘tea and two slices’. Two slices of thin white bread, lifeless flour slunks smeared with marge. Slices of no kind of life at all. Truth to tell, the English really loved rationing. It was the only thing that prevented them from swelling up and fucking exploding – given the lashings of carbohydrate they were wont to eat. Unnaturally, in time I too became inured – even accustomed – to the messy business of coating the walls of my stomach with a thick layer of grease. Like a cross-Channel swimmer I’d dive into the choppy, inland sea of my neuroses, fully, greedily, daubed.
Still, the past is another pantry. ‘Would you like breakfast in America?!’ the lithopedion warbles. I’d forgotten it – but here it is, squatting on the table, in between the sauce bottles.
Phar Lap ignores it. ‘Jeezus, Lily – what’ll y’have, girl?’
‘What d’jew recommend?’
‘I’d go for the full dead – ’
‘Youse are going for the full dead,’ Costas interjects, ‘youse always do.’ And the cabbie lights a Benson & Hedges, blows blue smoke in my face.
‘Full dead it is, then,’ I murmur, and Phar Lap sticks up three fingers, a signal acknowledged by the barrel-chested character tending the urn, who shouts back, ‘Three full dead – being exhumed!’ But I ignore this, because I’m on the verge of castigating Costas for his insensitive puffing, into the face of a woman who’s died of cancer only a few hours ago, when it hits me that the smoke doesn’t sting or irritate – it doesn’t even smell at all.
Nothing smells any more. I sniff the polluted air of the cafe with flared nostrils – but there’s no odour. None. No grease, no egg, no condemned meat – no whiff, no pong, no nothing.
‘Phar Lap,’ I say, ‘I can’t smell.’
‘Whozzat, Lily-girl – yeh-hey?’
‘I can’t smell.’
‘No, you can’t – nor will you. Yer dead, girl. Like I say – you’ve a subtle body now. It don’t make no reflection. It don’t get tired. It don’t need sustenance of any kind, no tucker, no rooting, no nothing – see. So, no smell – whyd’you need to smell, girl, see? Yeh-hey?’
‘But the breakfast – why do I need a full dead breakfast? And anyway – what do I do with the thing?’
‘You’ll see.’
‘Yeah – youse’ll see,’ Costas puts in, jabbing the air with his pill, ‘thass all youse’ll do now lady – see. Being dead is all about seeing and listening.’
And I do see – really I do. I see the full dead breakfasts approaching, rolled out by the barrel-chested Cockney man, one plate in each hand, the third balanced on his right wrist and a plastic bucket dangling from the left one. I see that all the other tables have a bucket beneath them, and that all the death guides are chomping up their full dead breakfasts; giving them a thorough mashing, then regurgitating the mush into the buckets – not always with the greatest accuracy. The newly dead all look pretty green contemplating this gross-out – and I guess I must too. ‘Ferchrissakes, Phar Lap, is this what you guys do instead of eating?’
‘Yesh,’ he says, spearing a sausage, shoving it in.
‘But why – why bother?’
‘Ritual, Lily-girl. Me – I only have breakfast when I bring someone in, but the others, hell, they’ve eternity to spend here in Dulston, so why not bloody eat – even if they can’t swallow?’
‘And smoking,’ I turn to Costas, ‘why d’jew bother with smoking?’
‘Youse smoke one time, lady?’
‘Smoke? Of course I fucking smoked – that’s why I’m dead!’
‘OK, OK – well, youse ever smoke in the dark?’
‘Occasionally.’
‘But not much – right?’
‘No, I guess not.’
‘Thass right – ’cos youse have to see it, right? See the smoke. Smoking’s as much seeing as feeling, so why not smoke – youse want one?’
I want a B&H more than the full dead – which anyway is exactly the same as a full English – so I take one and Costas gives me a light. The smokes plays painless chords in the accordion of my diseased lungs. ‘What’s this place called, anyway?’ I ask through my own ectoplasm.
‘No p’ticular name,’ Phar Lap replies, ‘we just call it the cafe.’ He wipes a glossy rime of egg from his matt top lip.
‘Is that because it’s the only one in Dulston?’
‘No – it’s just the one that’s bin ’ere the longest, yeh-hey? Dulston is what you’d call a cystrict.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘A cystrict – it swells up, then it leaks, then it swells up agin. It’s a cystrict.’ ‘I don’t follow.’
‘Aw – y’ll see – finished?’
‘I never began,’ I say, and stub my cig out in the egg’s yellow bull’s-eye. Full dead indeed.
‘Fine – we’re elsewhere, then.’ Our trio rises, weaves between the tables to the counter where, to my surprise, Phar Lap pays.
‘Why d’jew pay?’ I ask him as we stroll back to the car. ‘Surely you don’t need money in this place?’ He rounds on me. ‘Why not! Place has gotta run like any other. Streets gotta be cleaned, teachers paid, sewers sluiced out – it’s no bloody hotel, I’m tellin’ ya, Lily, dead people are jus’ like the livin’.’
‘Except we can’t feel, or smell, or love – ’
‘Or hurt! Or smell ourselves, or sweat, or any of that. There’s an upside to this, y’know,’ says Costas, who seems buoyed up by his gruelly repast, swinging himself into the front seat of the car with deathly vigour.
As we reverse into the roadway I press Phar Lap more. ‘So, if that’s where the newly dead and their guides eat breakfast, why are they serving ordinary meals?’
‘Yeh-hey. Well, the other mob come in, y’know.’
‘You mean the living?’
‘Who else.’
‘Oh, right – and you mean to say they aren’t terrified by the sight of a load of weirdos spitting pap?’
Phar Lap cants round to deliver his next line. ‘Lily – this is London, the whole bloody city is full of weirdos.’
‘So, there are living people in Dulston as well?’
‘No, I’m not sayin’ that, it’s just the place accommodates them if they turn up – like I say, it’s a cystrict.’
A cystrict. I think I’m getting the point, for, as the minicab slops along the road I begin to appreciate the character of Dulston. Sure, the clumps of houses, flats, commercial premises, warehouses, used-car lots and light-industrial units are the same as in any of the adjoining districts, but Dulston is even more characterless than other inner North East London suburbs I’ve known. The overwhelming impression the place gives is of colourlessness, an indifference towards municipal airs and graces.
Dulston is one of those districts you’re always finding yourself lost in, rather than arriving at. It’s the place you wind up in when you overshoot your destination or take the wrong turn. It’s the ’burb as displacement activity. Without even needing to question Phar Lap I realise that Dulston must be as big or as small as its beholders. It’s a hidden pleat in the city’s rolled-up sleeve; an invisible flare flapping in its trouser leg; a vent in the back of its jacket. Presumably, if the living stray into Dulston they see nothing of its true nature. For them it’s merely a drive-by span of inattention, a glimpse of their own speeding car warped in a showroom window – before they find themselves traversing Hackney Marsh, or gawping at the Stamford Hill frummers, or heading into town. Dulston: you wouldn’t know you were there at all – unless you were dead.
It’s no revelation to me either when Costas angles the minicab into a road lined with late Victorian houses not dissimilar to the one I lived in in Kentish Town. No bolt from the blue when we halt outside one midway along. Costas and Phar Lap are out on the sidewalk by the time I’ve disencumbered myself. Peculiar, to move with the gait I used to have yet feel none of the discomfort of swollen feet, or riding underwear, or fatty ballast. The lithopedion comes too, chanting, ‘This is the sound of the suburbs!’ as I start for the stairs up to the front door. I’m gonna have to address this problem – but for now there’s the new apartment to consider. ‘Am I on the first floor?’
Phar Lap is encumbered with his wooden paraphernalia; bits of wood clack against the railings he’s walking beside. What a kid. He calls me back. ‘No, Lily-girl, you gotta go down, y’know. Basement, for now – mebbe go up a floor in time.’
So, down we go into the tawdry little area with its bins that look like rubbish. Phar Lap has a bunch of keys chained to the hip of his skinny jeans. He deals one out and unlocks the heavy door, with its architrave of London grunk, its lint-trailing draft-includer, its four whirl-of-distortion glass panes. He shoves it open into a vestibule which is dank to the point of musty saturation. I follow his flat ass; Costas comes behind with the sad Samsonite. The lithopedion warbles, ‘Another suitcase in another hall / Where are you going to?’ And we tour my new quarters.
The deformed corridor staggers along the left-hand side of the basement, and the first door off to the right limps into a mouldering bedroom. The bed’s a shapeless pagoda of three double mattresses. There’s a naked dressing table with a tip-tilting oval mirror; a freestanding thirties wardrobe, like a mahogany plinth; and three sash windows which aren’t admitting much at all. There’d be dust motes in here if it wasn’t so damp. The poor mites in the soggy old mattresses must be swimming for their fucking lives.
The next watery closet along is a sitting room. This comes complete with a Danish ancient armchair (x 2), some crappy lamps set on insignificant occasional tables, and a period gas fire piled with a miniature, flame-snagging ossuary. Somewhere Sweep could commit fucking suttee. Oh, and a bad-news bookcase with a Good News Bible in it, together with eight mildewed copies of the Reader’s Digest. Perched on top of this is a tiny, old, black-and-white telly – like a bird box. But there’s more – less more. With the lithopedion batting past my ankles, the party gains the end of the corridor and the fetid horrors of the kitchenette and bathroom. Shitty units clutter both pigeonholes. In New York – given the overall decrepitude of the basement – these would be rustling with roaches. But I know what’ll be in these without needing to look: six laid-off wads which were once copies of the Daily Worker, seven mismatched Tupperware cups and saucers, five belly-up wood-lice. That’s it.
The kitchenette has a gas stove and a fucking meat safe. Still, I shan’t be cooking in it – so what the hell does that matter. No cooking – no reheating a saucepan of coffee even. And no ablutions in the bathroom, where a pre-shrunk shrink – Shtikelberg perhaps? – might sit alongside the dugout enamel couch on a cork-topped stool of unspeakable shoddiness. The very heads of the rivets that pinion the mirror to the seeping wall are rimmed with shit. The splashback is grouted with effluent. And throughout the entire apartment the walls are covered with bilious lozenges, or garish parallelograms, or clashing cones. Wallpapers of sixties vintage, which were designed by English hicks imagining a psychedelic experience, when succumbing to the effects upon their inner vision of two pints of fucking Strongbow. There’s unfit carpeting too, the kind that looks like underlay. If I could squidge it with each footstep – I would.
It’s unspeakably awful. I slump down on one of the chairs in the sitting room and my gaze wavers from Phar Lap to Costas to the lithopedion. This is the spring season in hell. Sitting room is right, I guess. Yaws used to call the ratty reclining space of the house on Crooked Usage the ‘drawing room’. The pretentious shmuck. Still, ‘living room’ is so non-U, and totally out of the question now. ‘Ferchrissakes Phar Lap this joint is terrible. If I weren’t dead already this’d kill me off once and for all – you can’t expect me to stay here!’
‘Everyone’s gotta start somewhere, Lily-girl, yeh-hey.’ He’s unfazed. ‘An’ anyways – what choice you got? You don’t know bugger-all about Dulston. You need this unit – which is mine t’give, yeh-hey? You need me big-time. You need the meetings as well.’
‘Meetings?’
‘Yairs – meetings. Induction kinduva thing. They’re held all the time, all over Dulston. You gotta go, Lily – else you won’t know nothing about death, won’t get to yabber with the rest, won’t be able to function, yeh-hey?’
