How the Dead Live (Factory 3) Read Online Free PDF Page A

bowing and rushing together in the spring wind far down in the garden and she said, you’ll remember this, won’t you? I knew I would never forget it and I said, I’m just completely in love withyou and she answered, but I’ll cheat you, you know. What, I said, with another man? No, she said, giving me a strange look, there are other ways. Do you want to cheat me? I said. If so, I’d better know. It’s just that there are other seducers than men, she said. I didn’t know what she meant at the time.
    She was writing a book (what else can you do in West Hampstead?) and was a philosophy student at University College. Her tongue was sharp, she hated errors and weak thinking; indeed, it was she who taught me to think (‘you know how to, but you don’t realize it yet’). My madness keeps me from going mad, she said, just after she had started to hit the cocaine (but I wasn’t living with her, and was too young then to know what she meant). She was left-wing and crossed picket and police lines with a flask of whisky in her pocket; she never had any fear of people at all. I don’t know how you can do it, I said, you’ve got more guts than I have, and she replied, it’s simply trust in people and in oneself.
    I never forgot that.
    We broke up, but there were times when she would sit for days and nights on end in some street where she thought I might pass, graceful and dark, smoking cigarette after cigarette (‘trying to get
off
it, you know’).
    But I had joined the police and had met Edie.
    One night when she was sitting like that on a street bench the law of course came up to her and said, waiting for someone, are we? and she nodded and said calmly, of course. My lover.
    She had great class. I tell you class is everything, even as you fall: your name is graven as you fall.
    ‘My role as a writer,’ she said, ‘is to survive and record.’ (But her work was in ruins, her book abandoned.) She was on heroin by then (‘it’s nothing, darling, just a kick’).
    On kicks get ill, on kicks get worse and die. Going up to London on the train from Maidstone where I was working when I heard she was dying, much too late to intervene, I felt her leave between my fingers at Malling, fly out into the dark air of late afternoon at Sydenham and breathe her last at Penge, marblewhite. At Victoria I got to a telephone and her mother explained about the overdose, the dirty needle – how she had spoken clearly of me once before coma and death. I walked up into Green Park. It was spring that terrible night and the trees in the park, buds scarcely formed, tumbled madly against each other in the wind, and there we were again by the window, her hand surging expressly into mine.
    My granny used to say there was hope in any garden; but I found none in Green Park.
    When I was a boy I once went down to a farm in Kent with my father and we watched three men kill a sheep with its head at the top of a flight of steps. It wouldn’t stay still to die even with its feet tied together, so the owner smacked it across the face to keep it quiet – he was a big man with red hair on his chest. Then he sharpened his knife and put it straight in the animal’s throat. How it bled down those steps! The farmer’s wife washed the blood away with buckets of water. Afterwards, while the men were butchering it, I looked up and watched a cloud of rain coming towards us across the flat fields; it was March. Then, when the work was finished, after my father had paid for the sheep and we had put the meat in our car, we all went into the kitchen. The men talked about money and rationing (which was why we had bought the sheep), the importance of hanging a carcass properly and the best way to tan a fleece. One of the men was an army deserter from Liverpool; his name was Kevin. He had split the carcass down the spine with an axe and after he had drunk his beer carried the liver down for us on a piece of old sheet, but he kept the head for himself.
    ‘We’ll have