How the Dead Live Read Online Free PDF

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