Will Self: The Quantity Theory of Insanity: Reissued

The basement of No. 24 looked rather poky from the street; I couldn’t see in the windows without going down into the basement area. Before I could do so Mother appeared clutching a tea strainer in one hand. ‘Are you going to stand up there all afternoon? The kettle’s boiled.’ Death had done nothing to dampen down Mother’s impatience. She still carried around her a sense of barely repressed nervous energy; in a more active, physical age Mother would have probably broken horses, or gone raiding with the Bedouin.

I noticed as I stepped into the flat that Mother’s name was under the bell. For some reason that shocked me. I felt that Mother ought to be incognito. After all it was pretty weird her being alive after death. What if the Sunday papers found out? It could be embarrassing. I said, ‘Mother, why have you kept your name? Surely if you’re going to go on living in London you should change it? Aren’t the people in charge of death worried about publicity?’

Mother sighed with exasperation. ‘Look, there aren’t any “people in charge of death”. When you die you move to another part of London, that’s all there is to it. Period.’

‘But Mother, what about that performance at Golders Green? Weren’t you in that coffin?’

‘All right I’ll admit it, that part of it is a bit obscure. One minute I was in the hospital — feeling like shit, incidentally — the next I was in Crouch End and some estate agents were showing me around this flat.’

‘Estate agents! Dead estate agents?’

‘Yeah, they were dead too, the whole thing is self-administered, a bit like a commune.’

Mother’s eschatological revelations were beginning to get to me a little and I had slumped down on a sofa. My new vantage point jolted me into looking around the flat. I’d never seen a piece of elysian real estate before. What struck me immediately was that Mother’s final resting place, if that’s what it was, was remarkably like the flat she’d spent the last ten years of her life in.

There was the same large room with sofas and chairs scattered round it. There was a kitchenette off to one side, and high double doors at the end of the main room led to the bedroom. Through another door at the back of the room I could see a set of french windows and through them a small, well-kept garden. The flat was furnished haphazardly with odd posters and paintings on the walls and a lot of books; some shelved, others stacked on tables. A set of half-corrected proofs lay on the arm of a chair.

The principal difference was that whereas in the past it had been photographs of my brothers and me that had stood, either framed or mounted in plastic cubes, scattered around on the available surfaces, now the impedimenta that betrayed Mother’s affections were entirely unfamiliar to me. There were photographs of people I had never seen before. Young men who looked rather too smooth for my taste. And other, older people. A jolly couple grinning out from a particularly ornate silver frame looked like Cypriots to me. I picked up a postcard someone had sent Mother from Madeira of all places and scanning the back recognised neither the bright feminine hand, nor the scrawled male salutation and signature.

I was shocked by all of this, but kept silent. Once again I felt sure that if I pressured Mother she would tell me nothing substantial about the afterlife.

The kettle boiled. Mother filled the pot and placed it on a tray, together with cups, sugar, milk and a plate of my favourite chocolate chip cookies. She brought it over and placed it on the low table in front of where I sat. She poured me a cup of tea and offered me a cookie. The conversation lapsed for a while. I munched and Mother went into the kitchenette and opened a can of cat food. She let a couple of black kittens in from the back garden.

‘New cats, I see.’

‘Uh-huh, that’s Tillie and that’s Margaret.’ The cats lurked and smarmed themselves around the furniture. I wondered idly if they were familiars and if my mother had really always been the kind of witch my father had said she was.

I started browsing through the books. They weren’t the same as her mortal collection — I had those — but they covered the same ground: Virago Classics, a lot of Henry James and Proust in several different editions, scores of miscellaneous novels, books on gardening and cookery. By now I was quite openly looking for something, some clue. I couldn’t admit it to myself but once again Mother was managing to rile me as much dead as she ever had alive.

I went over to the phone table. There was an address book lying open which I started to flick through idly. Again there were the same kind of names, but they belonged to totally different people, presumably the ones in the photographs, the ones who sent cards. Mother had always struck up acquaintances fairly easily. It wasn’t so much that she was friendly as that she exuded a certain wholesome quality, as palpably as if a vent had been opened on her forehead and the smell of bread baking had started to churn out. In my view this wholesome quality was the worst kind of misrepresentation. If there had been such a body as the Personality Advertising Standards Commission, Mother would have been the subject of numerous complaints.

There were phone directories stacked under the table — phone directories and something else, phone-directory-shaped, that wasn’t a phone directory. I bent down and pulled it out by its spine. It was a phone directory. North London Book of the Dead , ran the title; and then underneath: A — Z . The cover was the usual yellow flimsy card and there was also the usual vaguely arty line drawing — in this instance of Kensal Green Cemetery. I started to leaf through the pages.

‘So, you’re not here five minutes and you want to use the phone,’ said Mother coming back in from the kitchenette.

‘What’s this, Mother?’ I held up the directory.

‘Oh that. Well I guess you might call it a kind of religious text.’ She giggled unnervingly.

‘Mother, don’t you think it’s about time you came clean with me about all of this?’

We sat down at the table (similar melamine finish, similar blue, flower-patterned tablecloth) with the North London Book of the Dead in between us.

‘Well, it’s like this,’ began Mother. ‘When you die you go and live in another part of London. And that’s it.’

‘Whaddya mean, that’s it?’ I could already see all sorts of difficulties with this radical new view of death, even if I was sitting inside an example of it. ‘Whaddya mean, that’s it? Who decides which part of London? How is it that no one’s ever heard of this before? How come people don’t notice all the dead people clogging up the transport system? What about paying bills? What about this phone book? You can’t tell me this lists all the people who have ever died in North London, it isn’t thick enough. And what about the dead estate agents, who do they work for? A Supreme Estate Agent? And why Crouch End? You hate Crouch End.’

‘It could have been worse, some dead people live in Wanstead.’

‘What about the people who lived in Wanstead when they were alive?’

‘They live somewhere else, like East Finchley or Grays Thurrock, anywhere.’

‘Mother, will you answer my questions, or won’t you?’

‘I’ll just get another cup of tea, dear.’

I wrung it out of her eventually. It went something like this: when you die you move to another part of London where you resume pretty much the same kind of life you had before you died. There are lots of dead people in London and quite a few dead businesses. When you’ve been dead for a few years you’re encouraged to move to the provinces.

The dead community are self-administering and there are dead people in most of the major enterprises, organisations and institutions. There are some autonomous services for dead people, but on the whole dead services operate alongside ‘live’ ones. Most dead people have jobs, some work for live companies. Mother, for example, was working for a live publishing company.