Free How the Dead Live by Will Self

Jewmar.
    I couldn’t believe the Rubenses when Yaws and I, together with Charlotte, aged one, moved to Hendon. Here, strained through net curtains, rustling about in a nylon, gingham-patterned house dress, and dumped down on a velour-covered three-piece suite, was all the sour, affected, sub-gentility of my own lower-middle–class, Jewish upbringing. The Rubenses’ place smelt of gefilte fish and matzo balls – despite the fact that Mary Rubens cleaned relentlessly; she was a laving engine. And once every surface was spotless she’d re-cover it with glass, or plastic, or vinyl. There were glass covers on all the tables, stippled strips of transparent vinyl on the edge of every carpet, plastic covers on the seats. The whole joint was encapsulated – but it only served to keep the odours in. Meanwhile, over the hedge, next door, I’d be popping Librium and ironing creases into Yaws’s shirts. After all, I’d married into true shabby gentility, and there were standards I had to fail to maintain.
    Jewmar, its austere naves lined with boxes of Brillo pads and its rococo chapels writhing with mop-heads, has long gone, to be replaced by a branch of Waste of Paper, part of a nationwide chain that sells prints, posters, postcards and decorative stationery. These stores started up in the seventies, flogging post-hippy tat – flowery bookmarks, bookish flower presses, you know the cack. To kids mostly, I suppose. I remember the original outlet, which was in the basement of Kensington Market; and I recall too the tubby, pimpled, bum-fluffy proprietor, one R. Elvers. Yup, Elvers is the man behind Waste of Paper, which is why Natty says ‘Jewmar’ in this heavily ironic way, with the accent on ‘Jew’. Not that Elvers is Jewish, you understand, it’s only that like so many liberal Englishmen he finds our Jewish anti-Semitism hard to take. Ach me! So many people left to disparage – so little time.
    Yeah – but y’know what? Jimmy cracked corn and I really don’t care. I’m annoyed that Richard has over two hundred Waste of Paper outlets. I’m aghast at the way he buys taste wholesale not just for his stores but for himself and his wife as well. Did he have any taste grubstake to begin with, I wonder, or has he never staked any claim at all? ‘Nearly home, Mother,’ says Charlotte – as if it were true. But now that we’re pulling up Kentish Town Road, and turning into Islip Street so as to negotiate the one way-system, I’m not so sure that this is my home at all any more.
    When I think of the colossal effort I made to integrate with this neighbourhood when I moved here ten years ago, it makes me realise how pathetically small all my life’s endeavours have been. My efforts as a homemaker were like playing with kids’ constructor toys, Lincoln’s Cabins Stateside, and Betta Bildas when I crossed the pond. They were childish, out of scale, and inevitably, once I’d completed them, I’d smash them up in a giant fit of pique.
    I have to say this much for David Yaws – in his demise he exhibited a genius for timing which was entirely absent in his life. Having been late for everything, he finally left me in the winter of 1970, not to shack up with Virginia Bridge, or Serena Hastings, or any of the other uptight genteel fucks he’d strung along since – in some cases – before the war. Nor did he get it together with Maria dos Santos, his fellow ecclesiastical historian and stereotypically hot Iberian lover. Maria was the one he actually chased all the way to Seville, where he howled outside her door like the dumb dog he was, until she had to climb off of her back terrace and go to her mother’s house, in order to telephone me, and ask me to leave a message at his fucking hotel to tell him to come home. No, not Maria – who I always rather liked anyway. No, he went off to Crouch End of all places, where he had effected a liaison with a little old lady called Wix, Wendy Wix. Who was so little and old and