How the Dead Live Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.

Dying
‘It’s been quite a morning.’
The last words of Samuel Beckett’s father

Chapter One
    April 1988
    T hey say you are what you eat and now that I’m dying I know this is the solid truth. Actually, it’s