The Quantity Theory of Insanity Read Free

always summon up a sense of mortality – of the skull beneath the skin. The Reaper always waits behind the bus shelter. You can see his robe up to the knee; the rest is obscured by the route map.
    The basement of No. 24 looked rather poky from the street; I couldn’t see in the windows without going down into the basement area. Before I could do so Mother appeared clutching a tea strainer in one hand. ‘Are you going to stand up there all afternoon? The kettle’s boiled.’ Death had done nothing to dampen down Mother’s impatience. She still carried around her a sense of barely repressed nervous energy; in a more active, physical age Mother would have probably broken horses, or gone raiding with the Bedouin.
    I noticed as I stepped into the flat that Mother’s name was under the bell. For some reason that shocked me. I felt that Mother ought to be incognito. After all it was pretty weird her being alive after death. What if the Sunday papers found out? It could be embarrassing. I said, ‘Mother, why have you kept your name? Surely if you’re going to go on living in London you should change it? Aren’t the people in charge of death worried about publicity?’
    Mother sighed with exasperation. ‘Look, there aren’tany “people in charge of death”. When you die you move to another part of London, that’s all there is to it. Period.’
    ‘But Mother, what about that performance at Golders Green? Weren’t you in that coffin?’
    ‘All right I’ll admit it, that part of it is a bit obscure. One minute I was in the hospital – feeling like shit, incidentally – the next I was in Crouch End and some estate agents were showing me around this flat.’
    ‘Estate agents! Dead estate agents?’
    ‘Yeah, they were dead too, the whole thing is self-administered, a bit like a commune.’
    Mother’s eschatological revelations were beginning to get to me a little and I had slumped down on a sofa. My new vantage point jolted me into looking around the flat. I’d never seen a piece of elysian real estate before. What struck me immediately was that Mother’s final resting place, if that’s what it was, was remarkably like the flat she’d spent the last ten years of her life in.
    There was the same large room with sofas and chairs scattered round it. There was a kitchenette off to one side, and high double doors at the end of the main room led to the bedroom. Through another door at the back of the room I could see a set of french windows and through them a small, well-kept garden. The flat was furnished haphazardly with odd posters and paintings on the walls and a lot of books; some shelved, others stacked on tables. A set of half-corrected proofs lay on the arm of a chair.
    The principal difference was that whereas in the past it had been photographs of my brothers and me that had stood, either framed or mounted in plastic cubes, scattered around on the available surfaces, now the impedimenta that betrayed Mother’s affections were entirely unfamiliar tome. There were photographs of people I had never seen before. Young men who looked rather too smooth for my taste. And other, older people. A jolly couple grinning out from a particularly ornate silver frame looked like Cypriots to me. I picked up a postcard someone had sent Mother from Madeira of all places and scanning the back recognised neither the bright feminine hand, nor the scrawled male salutation and signature.
    I was shocked by all of this, but kept silent. Once again I felt sure that if I pressured Mother she would tell me nothing substantial about the afterlife.
    The kettle boiled. Mother filled the pot and placed it on a tray, together with cups, sugar, milk and a plate of my favourite chocolate chip cookies. She brought it over and placed it on the low table in front of where I sat. She poured me a cup of tea and offered me a cookie. The conversation lapsed for a while. I munched and Mother went into the kitchenette and opened a can of cat food. She