Decrepit families. Communities of crumblies. We take care of each other way beyond the use-by date. The Ghetto might be an unnatural creation, but what about us, its leftovers? At seventy-five I was the youngest surviving member of my family after Clem. I was supposed to take care of my incapacitated brother and orders from my authoritarian uncle.
“Bring his body to my house tomorrow” Val had said before leaving. “We will do an autopsy, just in case. I take the phone with me”.
I had nodded. It is the best way to get rid off his kind. Now I was alone with the stinking corpse of my dead brother and sadness fell on me.
It felt like ageing. Suddenly everything was heavy.
It is irrational, this sadness. After decades of scientific dictatorship, after Enlightenment, industrialisation, positivism, Kantism, Einsteinism, rationalism, Darwinism, Dawkinism, the great pantheon of isms, has ripped us all off all feeling, all meaning, has left us agog and panting, poor animal carcasses denied of desires and hunger, still quivering with the will to live but told that this will is irrelevant, that we are no more than old-fashioned mechanisms, too outdated to take the latest upgrades and dumped to rust. Rejected, famished, fighting to go through the day, neither hopeful nor despaired, simply hope-less, unable to breed, our community losing its bounds, talking to each other less and less, looking stupidly inside ourselves until hunger makes itself heard through our drug-induced stupors and throws us on the dump in search of anything carbonated to absorb, what reasons do we have left to mourn? My brother, my beloved brother, had it all: he could get all the love and sex he wanted while I was feeding him, washing him, watching him. To me he was a burden. He never asked me for anything, mind you. I just provided whatever help I thought I should. I have no doubt that everywhere on the dump other humans in the same situation react the same way. His death should have come as a relief - and there was relief in me. But also sadness: deep, shocking, transcendental sadness. I cried. I mourned, for two hours. I haven't felt that way since my sweet Mara left me, twenty years ago, to join the kids in the Ghetto.
This mourning, this is all that remains of my human soul.
I am lucky. Transcendence is a gift. Two hours is more than I could have hoped for. When I felt the wound close, my tears dry up, my stomach gurgle, I stood up from my armchair. I grabbed my brother's body by the feet, I dragged him outside. By the time I managed to pull him on my Tesco trolley I was out of breath and had to rest for a while. Inside the caravan I picked up an old flask of Farenheit perfume. Then I braced myself for the journey.
It was, I remember, the sweetest of evenings -or was it some resonance of my recent mourning, a softness of the heart, a leakage of the soul, resulting from the shock of losing a dear one, from the realization that there was still, on this decomposing world, something I cared for? The sun had disappeared behind the Shard, leaving an amber smear in the dark clouds. In the north, blinking with the lights of a million windows, the pure outline of Canary Wharf Ghetto was rising above the misshapen silhouettes of the dumps, the devastated grounds from which its mathematical perfection had surged. There, where humanity had suddenly become something greater than itself, where almost all the women had fled, where Beauty and Future were said to roam the streets.
"Ah, you would have been happy over there", I told my brother. "You wouldn't have left yourself die like you did."
How wrong I was about the Ghetto, my brother's death, everything!
Pushing my brother's body, absorbing the wonderful spectacle of the Ghetto at night, I made my way through the narrow alleys of Blackheath dump.
I took the long slow climb towards Greenwich Park. I was surrounded by the ghosts of South-East London. All around, under the heaps of rubble and paper, the green wet meadow of Blackheath Commons used to grow. Here the spike of All Saints Church used to pierce the dark clouds in winter and over there, in the East, the grotesque facade of the Clarendon used to blast its thousands lights, smearing the pale fog like fresh paint brushed, adorning the crisp clear summer nights with their tawdry glitter. Only the walls are left, cleanly cut three meters from the ground. The Clarendon's surroundings swarm with depressed old people attracted by the sheltering ghost of luxury. In rusty trailers, makeshift sheds, igloo-shaped brick structures they live the life of poverty we all know -but they still eat in silver and sleep in silk, as if these meaningless rags could keep them afloat while the world is sinking.
The path reached a high point, north of which Greenwich Park appeared: the ruins of the Observatory, the faded Meridian, the defunct Origin of the World. Behind it, across the river, Canary Wharf shone, eclipsing the resplendent half moon.
I took a westward turn and started down. Wider, smoother, the path there was dug with deep dried ruts. As we were going, Dead Fred in his Tesco Trolley was shaking. For a while he looked more drunk than dead.
What was it, I wondered, that he was listening to so intensely on the phone?
This must have been some story, and of the highest form. My brother would not have fallen for less. He was a delicate soul, the kind that feeds on beauty rather than truth. This is what the story must have been: beautiful, full of heroism and love, death, pain, elation and joy. A story where the best people suffer and die for the good reasons. A story full of awe and fear, a tragedy, a story of life as it should be, but also of life as it can be, a story from before the Ghetto, before the dumps, from before that before, before electricity and its parasites, a simple story of men and women, naked in body and mind, a story from before stories themselves.
No, my brother would not have fallen for less. Both of us used to read a lot. Our caravan was full to the brim with our five thousands accumulated books (and a mess of old computers, TV screens, speakers, clothes and frames). There was just enough space for our two enormous armchairs. We had found them on Blackheath dump, near where the Princess of Wales used to be. They were covered in worn-out floral fabric. They were too big for the caravan. We had struggled to shove them in. They had become our whole living space: we ate on them, slept on them, died on them.
With him gone, what was I to do with the vacant armchair? What could I possibly find which would fill such a huge space?
I soon reached Depford. I turned into Pagnell Street where the stench of rotting bodies hit me.
It is sudden like that. One second you are surrounded by the familiar scent of metal, oil, acid, rotting food, dirty waters, unwashed humans. The next, passed the enormous red rusted carcasses of the tractors cemetery, it chokes you as if you were burying your head in the heap of compost flesh. It is a physical contact, that smell: it is a giant, limp, flabby, stinking hand which, as you turn the corner of Pagnell Street, wraps itself around your face.
Although I had passed this street many times, I had never taken a close look at the body dump. The former children playground was all fenced. Tens of braziers were providing a hellish light, full of smoke and jumping shadows. The concrete ground around the fence had been kept clear of rubbish. Two inscriptions spelled in large capital letters could still be seen, stretching over twenty yards:
I see people sitting, shadows dancing and birds flying
the first one read.
I touch soft petals and icy puddles, rough hard bark and
smooth, green leaves
the other said. Dated from 2012 they were both signed by pupils from Childeric Primary School -pupils today lost to the Ghetto-. I remember wondering what they were looking like over there, trees, leaves, birds, shadows.
Beyond the fence, where swings and scaffolding for kids once stood, is now the mass grave where all the dumps come to drop their dead, from New Cross to Lewisham, from Greenwich to Brockley. Narrow wooden bridges span over the pit like strips of pastry over a giant meat pie.
When I arrived quite a few people where queuing - old people carrying, on a great variety of trolleys, sledges and stretchers, older bodies stripped of their clothes. Among the crowd of old men I was granted this rare and delicious sight: two women, draped in black, their wrinkled faces bathed in tears. They hugged and comforted each other. The men, rushing their business of dumping whomever they had brought, were swarming around them.
I almost ran to the nearest bridge, pushing whoever was in my way. All around me arguments burst out: two men looking like brothers dropped the body they were bringing. A group of five people in their sixties were shouting in each other's face. The tallest pushed the smallest, who bent his knee in the other's groin. In front of me, blocking my way, a fat black guy was unloading three corpses, tipping them over the fence wherever they would fall.
"You're supposed to drop them from one of these bridges" I said.
"Fuck you. You're not happy, go somewhere else".
"A good burial you're giving them. I'm sure they would appreciate".
"Listen" he said, hastily spraying the dead with cheap perfume, "Mind your business, will you? I don't even know these blokes, I'm just doing a job here. I'm the undertaker for Peckham High Street's dump. So move away, there's a woman over there who's been waiting for me her whole life."
"And what makes you think you have a chance? With all the competition?"
"Ah, yes, but how many of them have a job, you reckon, hmm? You have a job yourself?"
He looked at my sheepish face.
"That's what I thought. Out of my way, loser."
It has become so difficult to be a woman on the dumps. For the few who decided to stay, public appearances have become a hassle. Most of them are married and stay indoors like my aunt Nassir, Val's wife. Actually I have not met one single woman in the twenty five years I have spent on the dump. For a widow, staying alone is just too dangerous, even amid a population of pensioners. There is no space for love and no time for sorrow.
I gave up. "I would rather give you a heartfelt funeral than humiliate myself with that horde of dogs" I told my brother. I pushed the trolley onto the bridge. The stink made me retch.
I spotted four fresh naked corpses, almost intact, good looking men in their forties. I jostled Fred on my shoulders and tossed him on top.
I had left him his clothes. He landed with a muffled thud in an awkward position, his face pressed against a hairy armpit, his right arm hugging a chest. "There you go", I said. "They look like the youngest bodies around. I hope you will enjoy them for a little while". I poured the perfume on him. I scratched a match and threw it. Of course the heap is too wet, the weather too cold, the dump too crowded with rats and worms for a body to burn.
Even our cremations are symbolic. Even our symbols show their bare bones.
Behind me the crowd was fighting for the favours of two sterile females.
This must be the end of a civilization.
