Will Self's Collected Fiction, Vol. 2 (2014), page 59
part #2 of Will Self's Collected Fiction Series
I’d given up on the meetings altogether. It was blindingly clear that the personally dead had nothing to teach me. It was little more than an anti-social club, and I am – as I think I’ve had cause to remark – not a joiner. Also, I couldn’t fail to notice, when I did from time to time drop in at the Community Centre, or St John’s, that there were hardly any of the same people there, none of the members I remembered from my first few years in Dulston. What had happened to them? Gone to Dulburb? The provinces? Or had they taken up short-term contracts in the Gulf? Or maybe, like me, they’d simply dropped out of the loop altogether, decided they had better things to do with the unlimited time available.
It dawns on me at last, too late, that they weren’t bullshitting after all. That they did have better leverage than I supposed. They were getting out big-time – getting out for good. Not simply dropping out to squat on the allotments behind Dulston Junction, like a few of the dead did. Growing vegetables they could never eat, while trying to ‘connect’ with the hop-head eco-warriors. This lot had taken up residence on platforms set among the branches of an ancient oak which leant over the railway tracks. They were gonna save it. What did they imagine would happen if it was hacked down? I mean, it’s not as if it was the bloody Tree of Life. Amazing that these kids – allegedly so in tune with fucking nature – didn’t even realise they were consorting with dead drabs. But then I suppose affecting a Palaeolithic line in clothing can scramble up anyone’s feel for the stuff of life. Egg test indeed. Don’t be vague – be vegan.
No, the personally dead weren’t bullshitting. There was something – or nothing – to their programme after all. There are no faces I recognise here in this ghastly waiting room, which Hartly has long since forgotten me in. We pitched up a while back (a long fucking while back), after Phar Lap, Rude Boy, Lithy and I took a black cab from Piccadilly. Suspicious, this, in itself – taking a black cab. The only cabs I’d ridden in for the past eleven years belonged to Costas and his pals who ran the Samsara Minicab Company. Sloppy old jalopies, driven with clutch-for-brake, by hairy dead men. But on this occasion Phar Lap gazumped the woman who had her arm up as if she were hailing Zeus himself. He wrenched the door open, and we all piled in. Not that the woman argued about it or anything – wouldjew? If you found yourself standing in Piccadilly, hailing a cab, and when it stopped a fat old blonde, a skinny Aboriginal and a naked nine-year-old boy beat you to the punch.
‘Where to, guv?’ said the self-employed Nazi in the front compartment, and Phar Lap replied, ‘Palmers Green.’
Oh goody, thought I, Palmers Green, another jerking odyssey out to London’s periphery. Another search for a run-down insurance office, or the colourless premises of a failed colour consultancy. Another visit to the deatheaucracy. Phar Lap and I settled down on the bench seat, Lithy and Rude Boy took the rumbles.
We U-turned away from the kerb. The Nazi shouted, as if throwing his grating voice at the back row of the Nuremberg stadium, ‘Watch where yer fucking going, you wanker!’ The intercom hissed at us, ‘Traffic’s diabolical up the other way – bin a bombing – orlright if I take the Embankment?’
‘Yer the expert,’ Phar Lap replied. How could he be so stupid? Even I, who hadn’t ridden in a black cab since before they had intercoms, knew this was giving the shnorrer an open fucking season to rook us. Embankment indeed. Still, it wasn’t me who was paying, so I sat back and tried to enjoy the ride.
Yup. Between May of ’96 and Christmas ’97, when I found out that Mr and Mrs Elvers had well and truly done the dirty on me, I was Dulston’s own sloth bear. I took languor to new troughs. Without straying too far from Argos Road, I entered an Olympic pentathlon in ennui and won every event. Running with boredom, hurdling over inertia, staying the put, throwing the indolence, shooting the tired breeze – I excelled in all fields of uncompetitive endeavour.
I was like the Inca sacrificial mummy they discovered that year, thrown up by a glacier in the Andes; perfect in every regard except for being frozen to death with my head bashed in. My little radio told me all the news that was fit for Estuarine accents to relate – and I’d thought the rotten plummy ones were bad! But I couldn’t’ve cared less about peace in Chechnya – I’d outlast it. And even though I’d thought Timmy Leary a fraud when I’d met him in the late fifties (one of Kaplan’s pals), I wouldn’t’ve bothered to tick him off if I’d met him now, walking the beach at Santa Dullica. Land-mine bans were not my concern, bombs in Manchester and Atlanta left me cold. The tiny horseman coughed up fifteen fucking million for his coughing-up wifey. So what. Truth itself was relaunched as a downmarket tabloid – but hell, we’d seen that one coming. In Belgium they found a basement full of horrors. Tell me about it. Not. In Jerusalem they had an almighty brawl over the tunnel under Temple Rock. The Yids wanted it – the yocks wanted it. And all this for a tunnel? Try riding on the fucking tube, you shmucks. In the States a sixty-six-year-old had himself bumped off by a computer. Doh! Like – aren’t we all being bored to death by the bloody things; no need to make a special effort. There was a fucking auction for Holocaust victims in Vienna. Kinduv like holding a sponsored pie-eating contest for Somalia – wouldn’tjew say? They re-elected the Prick in Chief from Arkansas – now that’s boreocracy for you. OJ paid out. Yawn. The dumpy Duchess won a million-dollar deal with Weight Watchers, and, I concede, I was mildly taken with the idea of what her Fats were gonna be like. The Human Fertilisation and Embryo Authority let a woman called Blood inseminate herself with her dead husband’s jism. That’s what I call tardigrade ejaculation. In LA some bozos tried to catch a comet tail and fell flat on their own overdoses. In France a poor everythingplegic wrote a novel with his eyelid. And they say the novel is dead. Another fucking Berg – this time the Gins – kicked the bongos and beat the retreat. Just down the road from Dulston, the off-the-peg mob cheered in a pop-eyed Bambi of a premier, as if it were some kinduva fucking revolution, when all it really meant was another excuse for a Waste of Paper. A computer beat the Jew Kasparov at his own game. Au revoir, clever clogs. The Swiss found four fucking billion of our money in their vaults. It was no good to me, but really, which hole did you lose that lot in, you Emmenthal-heads? The cancer-stick-makers had to cough up $370 million for Medicare. I wearily guffawed – too little, too late – and lit a B&H. Number seventy-six for the day. I was cutting down, remember. In Cambodia Pol finally got potted. In Florida a pansy nobody killed a pansy somebody ’cause he didn’t like the cut of his pants. Or so I surmised. In Paris, the tiny horseman’s clothes-horse bought the farm with weary predictability, galloping round the Périphérique late at night with her Arab rider. All London went meshugga. Even I hauled myself out of bed and shlepped down to Kensington Palace to get a look at this massacre of the blooms. Even I couldn’t be altogether indifferent to this unbelievable waste of cut flowers. I mean to say, they might as well have passed the cheques straight over to New Covent Garden, and cut out the dead fucking middle woman. Who at that moment was probably having intercrural sex with Georges Simenon in fucking Ennuyeuseville. She should care.
After that I pretty much relapsed into total torpor until December, when my heart-throb the Unabomber was forced to plea-bargain with the Justice Department. He took life rather than death – the noodge. I’d hoped he’d plump for Dulston, and the two of us could idle a few years away whittling together. D’jewknowhatlmean?
I must’ve missed out on the family-haunting for getting on for six months, but I was confident the Elverses were still hard at it. They had to be well on their way to completing twenty Churchillian treatment cycles by now. The good Lord had taken them for two hundred large and still – or so I suspected – Charlotte was no larger. When she did finally get pregnant, they were gonna be well and truly shtupped. I mean, what was Churchill gonna give them to go with their baby? A cuddly toy? A set of nursery furniture? What added value could his operation represent for people like the Elverses, people who had every material thing they already wanted, and plenty more besides?
It wasn’t until I was out of the tube at Warren Street and stomping through the gritty winds that scoot down the Euston Tower that it dawned on me – it was Christmas Eve. We Dulstonians didn’t set much store by religious festivals, and I think you can see our point of view.
There’s no mileage in crying for the Christian saviour when you’re dead already. I mean, the only thing that would happen on the Day of Judgement would be an influx of souls to our neck of the woods, pushing rents up to the fucking heavens. Not worth observing Ramadan either. So, food and water hasn’t passed your lips, or transgressed your teeth? Well, if you’re supping at the Dulston cafe, there’s no way you’re gonna swallow it. Honestly, I don’t think even the maddest of dead mullahs could get up a doctrinal argument over what we put in our mouths. I did see the Seths make a bit of a show once or twice on Diwali, their little boy chucking colourless water over Mr Bernard. But that was the Seths for you – they took to Dulston far better than I did. Typical of British Asians, always prepared to up sticks, die, and move on to the next retail opportunity.
Yeah, Crudmass. Deck the halls with Boston Charlie, tra-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la, Norah’s bleeding on the trolley, tra-la-la-la-la, la-fuck-ing-la. Tin-foil trees in the shop windows, red nylon stocking hats on the boozed-up brows of commuters. Bad cheer everywhere. All along Cumberland Terrace the rich had seen fit to dress their windows with too dear retro baubles. The fashion this year was for painted wood decorations and candles in lieu of fairy lights. Anything that made turn-of-the-century London look like turn-of-the-last-fucking-century Norway. The Elverses had outdone themselves in this regard. Typical of a childless couple, without a scintilla of abandonment in their corpulent frames, to make so much of this infantile saturnalia. Typical of Charlie in particular – that egregious wannabe Anglican.
I plodded up the expensive stairs cursing heavily. I manifested myself in the big hall, with its Italian marble floor and redwood-sized coat tree. I could hear the clink of crystal from the drawing room and voices raised in happy chatter. Hmm, I didn’t like that – what did they have to be so jolly about? Not only was the chatter happy, it sounded sinisterly familial, awfully child-oriented. I winnowed myself down to exiguousness, crept forward over the deep pile.
Jeezus-fucking-H.-Kerrist! There they were, Mummy Elvers putting pressies under a convivial pine, a maid standing by with a silver salver of mince pies, the sherry glasses sparkling, and, on the Mercedes-sized ottoman, Richard Elvers sitting with a cute little boy on his knees. The child was about three, grinning hugely, and as black as my cold dead heart. I had no doubt at all that he was their very ownsome. The way they looked at him, the way he looked at them, the Bob Marley playing over the Bang & Olufsen – doubtless part of their goody-two-shoes acknowledgement of his Afro-Caribbean heritage – all of it smacked of perfectly achieved domesticity. The Elverses were at home at last. But a shvarzer kid? I never would’ve believed it of them.
Sure, I was pissed, but for some hours I didn’t believe the whole game was up for good. They may’ve capitulated and gone for adoption, but wasn’t it often the case that once this happened the frenzied inconceivables relaxed enough to do it? It wasn’t until I rifled Richard’s desk, and found the letters from Churchill which finally – after, you note, he’d trousered the money – confirmed that my son-in-law’s spunk was a tasteless condiment, irreversibly soured cream, that I accepted defeat. There was this – and there was worse. I hung around the New Elverses that yuletide, sopping up the atmos, and learned that they’d sold Waste of Paper, that they’d given a lot of the money away, and that they were moving to the boondocks, to concentrate on raising Junior. I was done for. I may’ve hated Dulston, but move to the English provinces? Fergeddit. I’d have to be doubly dead before I did that.
Twenty-seven quid on the meter and Phar Lap didn’t quibble. Not only that, he even tipped Martin Bormann, despite his not letting us smoke in his precious fucking cab, and driving all the way out here to Palmers Green while gabbing to his friends on his mobile. What a shaven dickhead.
‘So, what’s it this time?’ I asked Phar Lap, as we debouched on to yet another grotty shopping parade. ‘A car-parts warehouse that’s gone down the tubes? A Citizens’ Advice Bureau that’s run out of it? What charming premises has the deatheaucracy seen fit to infest this month?’
‘Hey-yeh. Looks like it’s an old tooth-puller’s t’me, Lily-girl. We better head on in, yeh-hey?’ And he shouldered his wooden clutter. There seemed to be more of it all the time.
‘What’s that one?’ I asked him, indicating a painted stick a metre or so long as we trudged up the stairs.
‘This feller? Iss a pukamani, girl – death pole.’ He used it to push open the frosted glass door, and ushered me in for my long wait.
‘Ah, Ms Bloom,’ said Hartly, who we immediately encountered; he’d been trying to sucker a stuffed Garfield on to the door. ‘I’m afraid Mr Canter is occupied pro tem, but we’re pleased you’re here. Good of Mr Dixon to bring you over. I understand the monies owing to the Revenue have been paid in full now.’
‘Is that so?’
‘It is, it is.’ Now he mentioned it I remembered that I’d paid it all off. I’ve alway been in such a muddle with money. ‘There aren’t, how shall I put it, any further lets or impediments, it’s just a matter of form-filling, checking bona fides, sorting out the paperwork.’
‘Oh, I couldn’t have guessed,’ I sneered.
Hartly smiled indulgently. ‘I’m afraid our waiting room is none too salubrious – it’s so hard to get the premises nowadays.’
‘You’re telling me.’ I looked around me at this long, narrow room. The mismatched chairs along each wall: plastic stacking; kitchen, with basket-woven seats; and padded office, with castors. These racks fixed to the walls, still holding leaflets on fluoride, flossing, caries and other, vitally interesting tooth-rot subjects. I contemplated the usual highly-coloured posters of the human mouth, with personal ads stuck among them. ‘Cat Seeks Good Home’, ‘Home Seeks Good Cat’. Somebody needs a cat exchange. Between the opposing rows of chairs there’s this long, low table, stacked with many, many copies of Woman’s Realm, Reader’s Digest and Tatler. Presumably the only people who ever came here to get their teeth fixed were illiterate female snobs. Oh yes, there are the dead waiting, but then they’re the usual gauzy crew, Cabbage Patch dolls without their identity papers, indistinct faces glanced at through the rain-spattered windows of public transport. Everynobodies.
‘Nevertheless,’ Hartly continued, ‘the former tenants have left some reading matter behind, magazines and such, so please make yourself at home. You might like to pop in and see the nyujo in a little while – but only if you’re feeling up to it.’ And he disappeared through another door with a frosted-glass panel, briefly gifting me a view of the clerks, in their suits of all ages, drawing with spirographs, playing with Tamagochis, swapping Pokémon cards.
Phar Lap took a numbered slip from a dispenser and handed it to me. ‘Here you go, Lily-girl, yer number 1,347 – so I s’pose it’ll be a bit of a fuckin’ wait for you.’
‘Whaddya mean – for me? What about you?’
‘Well, yeah … it’s time I finally split the swag, girl, hey-yeh?’
‘I’m sorry – are you leaving me here?’
‘I’m a death guide, Lily-girl – thass my business with you. Yer not gonna be dead too much longer, so it’s time I was Elsewhere.’
‘Elsewhere?’
‘It’s a new night club I’m opening in Camden Town. Gonna be big, girl – no fuckin’ gammin about it, yeh-hey?’
Make myself at home in this provisional place? The idea was preposterous. I felt a sudden nostalgia for the basement at 27 Argos Road, for Dulston, for my little routines. Even for the Fats. ‘Oh well, I suppose I’ll have the kiddies to keep me company, at least.’
Phar Lap sucked his cheek in the negative. ‘Nah, the kiddies come with me, girl, yeh-hey? Iss not their go-round, girl, not theirs at all. This is all ’bout you, Lily-girl, all ’bout you.’
Lithy took it badly. ‘With your long blonde hair and your eyes of blue / The only thing I ever got from you was sorrow! Sorrow!’ I could almost see the tears glistening in its jet eyes. It staggered across the bumpy linoleum of the waiting-room floor, on the verge of being overcome, until Phar Lap scooped it up and popped it in his dillybag.
Rude Buy was equally moved. ‘Fuck off, you fat old bitch. You fucking murderess. You Myra Hindley – fuck off!’ He screamed his accusations one more time, before ramming his way back out the door. The last thing I – or should I say we? – saw of him was the tail of his coonskin cap. Why the fuck did I ever buy it for him? Oh, I remember – because he wanted to be the king of the wild frontier.
Phar Lap remained standing in front of me. ‘So this is it, girl, hey-yeh? Gotta few things here in me dillybag for you – if yer goin’, that is?’
‘Whaddya mean if?’ I was getting querulous – I’ve never liked goodbyes.
