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

die: O Great White Spirit, if I give up smoking will you take this woman in my stead? Yup, it did. She died only a couple of years later, and let me tell you I was sorely tempted to take it up again. Only kidding. By then I had the anxiety even worse. Every year throughout the sixties, more and more evidence kept coming out about smoking. I felt as if all my life I’d been driving towards an intersection, while Death was speeding down the main road, the two of us on a collision course. Really I felt no better when I’d given up. I had about a motorway’s worth of tar to cough up, then I realised that I’d smoked so much that it was more than likely too late already. It was after-the–bloody-hemlock time. I began to refer to any discussion of cancer as being ‘a self-fulfilling prophecy’.
    A cigarette would be good now, though. Good here in an antiseptic ward. Blue smoke goes well with white linen. We may all live soapy, light-musical lives, but every woman has the right to die as Bette Davis.
    A self-fulfilling prophecy. Nice, ringing phrase that – and I’ve always been something of a phrase-maker. I was a designer by training, not that I ever designed much of consequence except for the cap of a pen which has since been sucked by a billion mouths. It was a unique cap – they were generic mouths. That’s the way I look at it. Still, designing is a self-fulfilling prophecy – if it’s done right. But the thing about this particular self-fulfilling prophecy – death by cancer – was that the very articulation of the prophecy was bound to induce cancerous anxiety. Every time I said it, I knew it would come true. The self-fulfilling prophecy was itself a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even so, I was surprised to be diagnosed – funny, yeah? Real amusing.
    I’d also said to the girls, who grew up with my dark moods, ‘At least we can be miserable in good surroundings.’ (Miserable because their father had left us; miserable because he hadn’t paid the utility bills so we had no heat or light or telephone; miserable because I couldn’t stop crying; miserable because I couldn’t find my keys.) At least we can be miserable in good surroundings – ha! What a fool I was – I got it the wrong way round; I should’ve said good in miserable surroundings – that would’ve been the right way to carry on. Maybe if I’d concentrated on doing that I wouldn’t find myself so fucking lacking in stoicism now, so scared of this pain, so sick of this nausea.
    They give me drugs for the nausea – but they make me feel sick. Perhaps they’ll give me still more. Yeah – they’ll do that. They’ll load me up with pills until I’ll find myself cramming some into my mouth while I’m actually hurling others out. Ha-ha. Here comes Dr Steel, tripping over the swirly lino, in between the mobile biers. He wears a white coat which although lovingly cleaned and pressed (by Mrs Steel?) has been imperfectly dry-folded, so that the thick cotton forms a series of rigid, square panels. It makes him look like he’s wearing a peculiar tabard. St George, sneaking into the ward to do battle with the tumour dragon . . . ‘Hello, Doctor.’
    ‘Ms Bloom, your daughters are here to see you.’
    ‘Oh goody.’
    ‘Both of them.’ I wonder which one it is he so disapproves of – either would be worthy of it. ‘But before they come through I wanted to have a word with you about the future.’
    ‘You mean the lack of one – for me.’
    ‘Look, I know I didn’t express myself terribly well this morning, I’m afraid that side of things isn’t my forte . . .’ No, I can guess that too. I think Steel is one of those doctors who doctors because he loves the disease, not the patient. Yeah, he loves the disease. He likes to look at microscope slides that show slivers cut from interesting cancers. He likes the surprisingly vivid colours and the complex whorls of tissue. Indeed, in his more reflective moments he’s subject to philosophising