How the Dead Live Read Free Page B

turned to see his bony, mud-spattered little figure weaving away through the crowd. Having children may have been the whole point of life, but what it adds to death is dubious.
    ‘Rude Boy, yeh-hey!’ Phar Lap had backtracked to find out what was delaying me. ‘He never stops ridin’ you, hey-yeh?’
    ‘No, I guess not.’ We stopped. He rolled a cigarette, I got one out. We lit them.
    ‘Mebbe it’s time to tell ‘im goodbye, move on, hey-yeh?’ Phar Lap held his hand so it cupped my elbow and I turned to accompany him. Both of us pretended to touch.
    ‘I daresay that’s true – but can I?’
    ‘Yeh-hey. It’s not all gammin, y’know.’
    ‘What? Reincarnation?’
    ‘Yaka! Not a good word, that; iss like callin’ sickies who fuck with kiddies “child-lovers”, hey? No-no, y’see – you know this Lily stuff, we not gonna put it in a new body, yeh-hey? They don’t make one body serve two souls, or one soul serve two bodies. Cleverer than that. You used t’ think that you were your body – not so.’
    ‘Not so.’
    ‘No, what makes you Lily now? This lithopedion? This here cheeky one? Phar Lap has a way of gesturing all his own, elbows held tight by his serpentine sides, forearms angled out like the indicators on my father’s c. 1927 Hupmobile. When he does this it’s impossible not to pay attention – he commands attention.
    We made it to the block after Patisserie Valerie, Rude Boy was in the roadway and Lithy lost in the velveteen folds of my sensible sack dress, when the entire frontage of the pub we were passing shivered, undulated and was then punched from within by an explosion. The matter percolated into the air like milk mushrooming into coffee. Coasters, bar mats, handles, straights, queers, the artworks formerly known as prints, stools, trousers, carousers, hearts, lungs, lights, blood, viscera, Britvic, gelignite, Babycham, carpet tiling, dry-roasted peanuts, penises – the entire gubbins of the bar gathered into a fisted force field and splurged into the street. I felt the afflatus of several souls stream through what might’ve been me, what might’ve been Phar Lap. Tatters of people. The blast curled around us, crinkling up the envelope of air as if it were paper.
    Then everyone in Old Compton Street was lying down – as if a malevolent god had announced a nap-time for all the children. The only individual standing was Rude Boy. ‘Faggots! Niggers!’ he screamed. Lithy, stunned, clung to my ankle, and dangled there hitching a lift as we skirted through shattered glass – which as ever looked disassembled to me, a window jigsaw – and shards of wood; and the children, who now stirred, shuddering into shock; and the bystanders who unglued themselves from Pompeii poses; and the bits of the people. Goodnight mush.
    Phar Lap clicked into my inner ear, ‘Diddit with the punishment boomerang, hey. Walbiri one, hey-yeh. Very strong. Dragged it clear across the Balkans on my way back this time. Kickin’ up bi-ig death dust for this year, hey-yeh!’
    ‘Bullshit,’ was my snappy rejoinder. We slowed to turn the corner into Wardour Street, swerving to avoid a dead old prostitute coming the other way. I recognised her; she has so many foetuses floating around her head – each tethered by its own serpentine umbilicus – that among the locally deceased she’s known as Medusa. I went on disabusing Phar Lap: ‘It’s a fact written about in the press that this is the work of some far-right cell – an offshoot of the BNP, whatever.’
    ‘Yuwai – it’s speculated about. It’s a fact that we’re late yeh-hey?’
    Again he accelerated through the crowd ahead of me, a crowd which, as we strolled beyond its psychic shockwave, was exhibiting in reverse all the symptoms induced by the explosion. Sure, there were the emergency sirens’ synthesised whoops – but aren’t there always? And the pumped-up people seeking the violence anywhere but within themselves – but aren’t there all