How the Dead Live by Will Self Read Free Book Online Page A

anybody – ‘And here I go again; the little stopper of pride has popped out of my gullet and a great foaming splurge of self-pity froths out in a spasmodic series of gulps, seagull cries, tears and then globs of white bile which have the ministering fundamentalist reaching for a cardboard kidney dish. Why shape them like kidneys – why not like a heart, or a lung, or a severed breast?
    She leaves me after threatening me with the cold Steel, and I relapse into the memento mori nightmare which is dying. Half of everything gone – the flesh peeled back and the skull of things finally, irrevocably, exposed to view. I’m so shocked. You wouldn’t credit it that I’ve been feeling the lump for two years now, that I’m so familiar with it I’ve even given it a baby name. Minxie, I call her – because she’s going to annihilate me – the little minx. Yup, two years of the pet name, and then Steel’s sharp pal cut Minxie out. But when the stitches were removed from under my breast and I had the courage to examine it, I found Minxie still there and bigger than ever. I think.
    Before I knew I had cancer I was seriously frightened that I would die of it. Die like my own mean little mother, win-nowed out by it until I was a wheezing grey cadaver, literally a mummy. Everyone I talked to, everything I read, everywhere I turned, I heard that smoking causes it – but I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t stop and I couldn’t stop and I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t fucking stop. I couldn’t stop when my lungs felt like they were full of napalm – that’s what they felt like. They were napalming the Viet Cong – and I was napalming my lungs with Camels, with Winstons, with Marlboros, even with when I was truly desperate – British cigarettes, with English fags. They were dropping Agent Orange on the forests – and I felt like I was coughing the shit up.
    Dr Bridge, one of my second husband’s perennial squeezes. A dry thing. It must’ve been dusty when they did it together Yaws himself being such a dry stick. A dry shit. Any old shit on a kerbstone – that was David Yaws. Pass him by every city block. If only I had. Anyway this Bridge – Virginia Bridge, no less – she’d park up her ridiculously well-kept Morris Traveller, a silly little half-timbered car to go with her silly little half-timbered house, and come up to the bedroom where I lay drowning in my own phlegm. Then she’d sound me with her smooth, Atrixo-creamed hands, while speaking to me with her dry English accent, and say, ‘Lily, really, I mean to say, you can’t expect me to go on treating you for chronic bronchitis if you aren’t prepared to give up smoking. I mean, it’s not as if you don’t know the facts . . .’
    I couldn’t listen to her. I was feverish, I was in pain – and she still wanted to chafe with my husband. Did she come to the house in order to speculate as well as employ her speculum? About what Yaws and I didn’t do together? Imagining Yaws’s and my daughters as possible versions of kids she might’ve had with him? I can believe that. She had a crippled husband. Paralysed from the waist down. Lucky for Virginia it wasn’t from the waist up. Anyway, I lay there and watched as black-and-white documentary clips of the era showing baboons with masks lashed on to their muzzles, forcing them to smoke, spooled behind my eyes. Give it up. I couldn’t – I’d rather die. Cigarettes were the best friends I’d ever had. More reliable than liquor, comforting – but not fattening. I’d sooner die.
    Like the teeth, though – I had a fateful relationship with the unlucky Luckys. More than this, as I looked at Virginia’s equine teeth (how could she keep such tent pegs clean?), it occurred to me that it didn’t have to be my life on the line, someone else’s might do as well. Like Virginia’s. I closed my eyes tighter still– ‘ it’s an addiction like any other, Lily, it will take a few days ‘ – and willed Virginia Bridge to