Read How the Dead Live for Free Online

not only a solid truth – it’s a gelid one as well. It’s also a sloppy, tacky, congealed reality. It’s a pink blubbery blancmange of an evidence and a stringy gruel of proof. It’s a gristly confirmation which swells like a filament of meat caught between teeth. Not, you understand, that I’ve had my own teeth for years now, it’s just that recently I’ve found myself dreaming of teeth, of what it’s like to have your own teeth. Dreaming of having teeth again. Anyway – you are what you eat: in my case, this hospital slurry, which seems to’ve been put together – insofar as it’s cooked at all – for the express purpose of sliding through us near-cadavers as fast as possible.
    ‘No need to give them anything but swill,’ I can hear a pushy lack-of-nutritionist proclaim (funny how the profession attracts quite so many anorexics) at this meeting or that case conference; ‘they’re eating up half the budget of the NHS already – can that be right?’ No, maybe not, but I’ve paid my fucking taxes, or at least I hope that ridiculous little man Weintraub has by now.
    The other thing about this slick cuisine is, natch, that it doesn’t repeat on you. Or rather, neither its odour nor its substance is likely to rise up in the faces of those poor overworked nurses. Good thing. We seldom get cheese — never smoked fish. Eggs are boiled to shit. Hard ovals of desiccated shit. No pickles. No rich sauces. No onions and emphatically no garlic. Not that I really liked such food when I was well, it’s just that now, now that I’m dying, I realise that this capacity certain foodstuffs exhibit of reappearing in your mouth, spontaneously, hours after they’ve been consumed, is very much a sign of life. Life in its very repetitiousness. Life going on. I could murder for a shmaltz – now that I know I’m definitely going to die. After my teeth were taken out, in the mid-sixties – ‘63, ‘64, weird not to remember – I thought that I’d become immortal. I’d always assumed that I’d die with my teeth because they were so fucking painful. Anything that painful – I unreasoned – even if it didn’t kill you itself, would surely be the end of you when it went. You’d die of bliss. But now, teeth or not, I’m dying.
    I’m absolutely certain that I’m going to die because half and hour ago nice Mr Khan, the clinical psychologist attached to the ward, came and told me I was. Some wiseass once said that the miracle of lifewas that we all might die at any minute – but that we live as if we were immortal. I wish I could get this wiseass by his scrawny throat and throttle his life right out of him. Did he have any idea what it’s like when you know the hour of your own death? And when it’s announced to you thus: ‘Erm – ah. I understand, Ms Bloom, that Dr Steel spoke to you this morning?’
    ‘Yes, he did.’ I put my crappy women’s mag to one side, I show my dentures to the nervous Mr Khan. I’m being a good little cancer-ridden old lady. So easy to be like this when you don’t have any legs. Legs make men think about pussy – even old pussy; and no one has legs in bed – not unless you’re in there with them.
    ‘Did he have a word about palliative care?’
    ‘About giving me palliative care? Yes he did, thank you.’ I’m still giving Mr Khan the glad eye but it’s beginning to dim slightly, because let’s face it, affirmative action or not, it’s very difficult to see what the point of puffed-up Mr Khan really is. Sure, he’s perfected that clever little Uriah Heep act which makes him appear ever so ‘umble to his clients and employers, but my teeth aren’t simply long – they’re fucking eternal! And I know this covers up a typical subcontinental mummy’s boy, a puling bully who lords it over the womenfolk when he gets home from a hard day talking crap to the dying.
    ‘I’m sorry there isn’t anything more that we can do for you . . . I can . . . do for you. Are you a religious