How the Dead Live Read Free

of the pear, rather than its stalk.’
    ‘Oh spare us this, Lithy, this pissy little guignol. Spare us, love – spare us. How about social services?’
    ‘Social services – don’t shake my tree, Mumsie, don’t beat me Daddy-o ten to the bar – ‘ and Lithy broke off to do a little dance, which was far more in character.
    Lithy is a minuscule cadaver of a child – about half the size of a kewpie doll– who was misconceived, then died mislodged in the folds of my perineum. There it petrified for twenty-one years until I died in 1988. Then, with the first faltering steps I took after my death, it fell from under my nightie, and clattered on to the linoleum of the third-floor landing at the Royal Ear Hospital. Phar Lap Jones – who was removing me from my deathbed at the time – stopped, stooped and picked it up. ‘See you here, girl,’ he said in that cheek-clicking, palate-snapping, percussive take on the English language which I’ve never ever been able to take seriously. ‘This is a lithopedion, little dead fossil baby of yours, yeh-hey!?’
    ‘How would I know,’ I replied; at that time death had yet to mellow me.
    “Cos I lu-urve yoo!’ warbled Lithy, who’d had twenty-one years to come up with a better line but whose material had been garnered mostly during the first few months it spent in the pink pleats, when the pop rhythms still resonated in my tautish belly. ‘I just like the things yoo-doo / Wo-on’t yooodoo-the-things-yoo-doo / Nya-nya-nya-nya-nya-nya-nyaaa! /Nya-nya-nya-nya-nya-nya-nyaaa!’ And, surprisingly nimble on its misshapen pins (in truth, little more than the stubs that confirmed it as the true inspiration for the rash of ‘Mother Goddess’ statues found on Neolithic sites), the lithopedion began as it has gone on ever since, weaving between my ankles, shaking its little tush.
    ‘Could be worse y’know, girl,’ said Phar Lap Jones. ‘Much worse than the little feller. You never have no abortions, no?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Stillbirths?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Miscarriages?’
    ‘Not that I’m aware of.’
    ‘ ‘Cos they snag round yer head some – to begin with, hey-yeh?’
    ‘What d’jew mean?’ His face was hidden by the brim of his ridiculous, white dude Stetson. In the small shadows a hand-rolled cigarette smouldered. At that time it was only the absence of pain that allowed me to concentrate, although ever since I’ve had plenty of time to run over all of this crap again and again in my head.
    ‘Dead foetuses, newborn babies, whatever. With mothers who have kids, y’know, and they’re young then –little, right. Well, when that woman dies they come and hang around. But see, hey, if they’re real small they’re still attached to the woman, danglin’ off her, see – like this smoke. Older kids – they don’t hang around as much, grown-up kids not at all.’
    ‘Like life?’
    ‘No, not like life . . .’ He paused, allowing some nurses to pass by, even though this was irrelevant. ‘In life, death drive you ‘part, yeh-hey? Now it drag you all t’gether. I wonder which you’ll like better. Anyway, you had a dead child, right?’
    ‘You know this?’ It was an old distress to me, a neat ring-pull on my canned emotions. A hungry pain, that loss – like the cancer.
    ‘What good’s a bloke like me for your death guide if I don’t know this stuff? No way to get you off the go-round without it, yeh-hey?’
    ‘There was a son. David. He died when he was nine.’
    ‘And that was back from where you came, your country, hey-yeh?’
    ‘Vermont. Not my country, it was where we lived at the time.’
    ‘Well, whatever, hey. It’ll take the little-boy stuff time t’get here see? But then he’ll bother you proper. Nine years is a bad age for a boy to die. They don’t take it well, yeh-hey.’
    In 1988, on the dark landing, Phar Lap Jones spoke the truth while Lithy gambolled at my feet. Lithy never had any resentment or blamed me for its partial existence. Not so