How the Dead Live Read Free Page A

its brother Rude Boy – what else to call him? ‘Dave’ hardly seems suitable – who stowed away on a 747 and pitched up a few weeks later, while I was getting to know Dulston and attending the meetings. Rude Boy was there to remind me for eleven long years – what it is to be a bad parent. Rude Boy is permanently arrested in the brattish mood of defiance that propelled him into the roadway, in front of the fifties fender which pulped his head then smeared it all over the asphalt. Now, in Old Compton Street, he’s at it again.
    In 1957, in Vermont, I’d caught him, playing out in the yard with two of his buddies. The three boys, naked save for their shorts, were smeared all over with black mud they’d manufactured using the hosepipe. ‘What’re you playing?’ I called to David from the back porch. ‘The nigger game!’ he shouted back. I burst through the screen door and was on him in two strides, grasped his blond hair, smacked his head once, twice, three times. He’d only said it by mistake – this much I knew even then, even in the first fog of anger. I knew also that what terrified me about these casually ejaculated globs of race hatred was that they must be my own. My own dark truffles of prejudice, swollen beneath the forest’s floor.
    So, I smacked him and he ran and he got hit and he died. Now he likes to play in traffic whenever he can – and he’s always blacked up for the nigger game. This evening, stood in the middle of Old Compton Street, still daubed with black New England mud, glistening on his straight, down-covered limbs, he shook his puny little fists at the illegal minicab drivers from Senegal, from Ghana, from Nigeria, and shouted at them, ‘Niggers! Niggers! Niggers!’ Not that they could hear him. They drove clear through him – like he was a will-o’-the-wisp bonnet mascot. Then he broke off and rounded on the cavalcade of clones. ‘Pansies! Queers! Bum boys! Irons! Nonces!’ he shrieked at them – and they too were oblivious. Hell, even if they could’ve seen him, what might they’ve thought? Nothing much. I’ve watched Rude Boy manifest himself tens of thousands of times in the decade we’ve been reunited – that’s what the angry dead do; the rest of us are transparent with indifference, as invisible as the living. But much to his own disgust – and my weary amusement – hardly anyone in London seems capable of acknowledging the presence of a naked, mud-caked nine-year-old American boy screaming obscenities at them. In techie jargon – that argot of built-in obsolescence – they cannot compute.
    It’s like the pimply plump blonde I saw on the concourse at Charing Cross Station the other morning. She was wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned ‘Hard Rock Cafe – Kosovo’. Har-de-hare When my two girls were little I took them to the first proper hamburger joint in London, the Great American Disaster on the Fulham Road. In time this transformed itself into the Hard Rock Cafe, and after still more vicious circularity, disasters were manufactured to decorate their sweat-shirts. Cool, huh?
    Oh, that Rude Boy! All he’s learned in the eleven years he’s spent in England is a plethora of pejoratives. No trips to the Wigmore Hall to hear Beethoven string quartets for him. No expeditions up Piccadilly to buy Burberry. No wry browsing along the Bayswater Road on a Sunday afternoon, laughing at the kitsch dangling from the park railings. No-no. What that foul-mouthed kid likes is to do what he did then, run up behind me and plant one of his trowel feet – shaped like, as hard as – right in my fundament.
    ‘Yah!’ he screamed. ‘Fuck you, you bitch! Fuck you!’ The living may not feel or recognise or acknowledge the presence of the dead, but we can get to each other, as you know, when we’re not expecting the intrusion. Rude Boy’s foot usually passes right through me, but I was caught unawares – his sharp contempt lanced into my stupid, colourless indifference, and I