Read How the Dead Live for Free Online Page A

person, Ms Bloom?’
    ‘No, no I'm sorry.’
    ‘You’re sorry?’ He’s a fat thing, he hasn’t got a hungry cancer chomping up his breasts, breasts which jiggle most unpleasantly inside his pressed, near see-through, synthetic shirt. Why do they always wear translucent shirts, these people who have everything to hide?
    ‘Sorry that you’re labouring under the delusion you’ve helped me at all. Done anything for me whatsoever.’ And I pick up my abandoned Woman's Realm, get back to reading recipes I’ll never make, ever, for sure now. Picking apart knitting patterns in my mind.
    When I’ve absorbed another recipe for banana flapjacks perhaps the two hundredth of my life so far – I look up to see that Mr Khan is still there. Having failed with what he imagines to be a sympathetic approach, and rising to my rebuff, he adopts a more scientific one: ‘We – or rather I – wondered whether you might be able to help us, then?’
    ‘With what?’ I can’t believe this shlemiel.
    ‘We’re doing a study – a survey of patients . . . of terminal patients” – he’s squeezed it out at last, that terminal ‘terminal’, popped it like a cyanide capsule into the mouth of the conversation – ‘attitudes.’
    ‘Attitudes to what?’ Outside, on Grafton Way, I can hear the traffic whooping and growling. When I came into the hospital this time for the laughable operation (a lumpectomy-can you believe they really call it that? It’s like dubbing a heart transplant a ‘ticker swap’), it was such a relief to get out of the city, into a kind of refuge, but now I understand it’s no refuge at all. There ought to be a sanctuary inside the hospital where patients can hide from Khan and his ilk.
    ‘To, erm . . . to their quality of life.’ He’s got it out now and he’s obscurely pleased; there’s a thin smile seaming his stuffed, fat face.
    ‘Let me get this straight, you’re asking people who’re dying what their quality of life is?’
    ‘Ye-es, that’s it. I have a survey sheet . . . a questionnaire, if you’d like to see it?’
    ‘What do you expect to discover?’ My tone begins sharp but steady, but as I enunciate the hated words the pitch rises, the words fray and shred. ‘That the quality of a life gets better the nearer a cancer patient gets to death? Oh my fucking Christ I’m going to die. I can’t stand it I’m gonna die. Not me! Oh God-ohgod-ohgog-jeezus-ogod-og – “And here I go, choking into incoherent terror, the facade demolished by sledgehammer sobs. I moan and I pule and I groan and saliva loops from my slack jaws. It’s a most satisfying performance, I sense through the fog – for Mr Khan. After all, he’s a trained grief counsellor – and here’s plenty of grief. Sacks of it. But no – he can’t cope, he’s up and waddling off in the direction of the nurses’ station while I tear up the Woman’s Realm, lay waste to the paper Little England, and scream and cry.
    I’ve always had a talent for hysteria, for plunging over the black edge of a mood, but this black edge is so much bigger. It’s a Niagara, sucking into itself the whole water of my life. I feel like a stroke victim must – half of my world is gone. Half of that plastic water jug; half of that box of Kleenex; half of that fucking already half-eaten Battenberg cake which my junky daughter brought me yesterday afternoon; half of that crumpled tissue; that Staedtler HB pencil; that dust mote. For the first time in my life I can feel, utterly and incontrovertibly, what it’s like not to be me. What it’s like to be me feeling not me. It’s so lonely. I’m so fucking lonely. Who would’ve thought that me, who’s led a life that has known so much bloody loneliness, now has to face the solitude of death? I’m sobbed by racks. Oh my self – why hast thou abandoned me?
    Sister Smith, one of those West Indian women of landmass bulk, who could be any age between thirty and sixty, rips me into my plastic cocoon