The Quantity Theory of Insanity Read Free Page A

let a couple of black kittens in from the back garden.
    ‘New cats, I see.’
    ‘Uh-huh, that’s Tillie and that’s Margaret.’ The cats lurked and smarmed themselves around the furniture. I wondered idly if they were familiars and if my mother had really always been the kind of witch my father had said she was.
    I started browsing through the books. They weren’t the same as her mortal collection – I had those – but they covered the same ground: Virago Classics, a lot of Henry James and Proust in several different editions, scores of miscellaneous novels, books on gardening and cookery. By now I was quite openly looking for something, some clue. I couldn’t admit it to myself but once again Mother was managing to rile me as much dead as she ever had alive.
    I went over to the phone table. There was an address book lying open which I started to flick through idly. Again there were the same kind of names, but they belonged to totally different people, presumably the ones in the photographs, the ones who sent cards. Mother had always struck up acquaintances fairly easily. It wasn’t so much that she was friendly as that she exuded a certain wholesome quality, as palpably as if a vent had been opened on her forehead and the smell of bread baking had started to churn out. In my view this wholesome quality was the worst kind of misrepresentation. If there had been such a body as the Personality Advertising Standards Commission, Mother would have been the subject of numerous complaints.
    There were phone directories stacked under the table – phone directories and something else, phone-directory-shaped, that wasn’t a phone directory. I bent down and pulled it out by its spine. It
was
a phone directory.
North London Book of the Dead
, ran the title; and then underneath:
A–Z
. The cover was the usual yellow flimsy card and there was also the usual vaguely arty line drawing – in this instance of Kensal Green Cemetery. I started to leaf through the pages.
    ‘So, you’re not here five minutes and you want to use the phone,’ said Mother coming back in from the kitchenette.
    ‘What’s this, Mother?’ I held up the directory.
    ‘Oh that. Well I guess you might call it a kind of religious text.’ She giggled unnervingly.
    ‘Mother, don’t you think it’s about time you came clean with me about all of this?’
    We sat down at the table (similar melamine finish, similar blue, flower-patterned tablecloth) with the
North London Book of the Dead
in between us.
    ‘Well, it’s like this,’ began Mother. ‘When you die you go and live in another part of London. And that’s it.’
    ‘Whaddya mean, that’s it?’ I could already see all sorts of difficulties with this radical new view of death, even if I was sitting inside an example of it. ‘Whaddya mean, that’s it? Who decides which part of London? How is it that no one’s ever heard of this before? How come people don’t notice all the dead people clogging up the transport system? What about paying bills? What about this phone book? You can’t tell me this lists all the people who have ever died in North London, it isn’t thick enough. And what about the dead estate agents, who do they work for? A Supreme Estate Agent? And why Crouch End? You hate Crouch End.’
    ‘It could have been worse, some dead people live in Wanstead.’
    ‘What about the people who lived in Wanstead when they were alive?’
    ‘They live somewhere else, like East Finchley or Grays Thurrock, anywhere.’
    ‘Mother, will you answer my questions, or won’t you?’
    ‘I’ll just get another cup of tea, dear.’
    I wrung it out of her eventually. It went something like this: when you die you move to another part of London where you resume pretty much the same kind of life you had before you died. There are lots of dead people in London and quite a few dead businesses. When you’ve been dead for a few years you’re encouraged to move to the provinces.
    The dead community are