She’s walking out of Holloway in the morning. She’s planning to jump into a canal at midnight. In between – there’s everything.
London, 1990. Jiva is nineteen, tough as old boots, and scribbling her life onto a roll of prison toilet paper — because nobody counts bog paper.
A year later, from a candlelit attic in Kings Cross, she turns those notes into this.
She’s in Holloway for rioting against the poll tax. She’s out tomorrow morning. She already knows what she’s going to do when she gets out: mark the second anniversary of Harry’s death by jumping into Camden Canal to join him.
Harry was her boyfriend. He drowned, drunk, in the middle of the night. His red hair floated gently. She believes he’s still there, just under the water.
Jack Dempsey, London, 1980s – the years that became Jiva.
I woke up once in the middle of the night at the squat in Stockwell and Harry wasn’t on the mattress.
I got up. He was sitting on the floor with his back against the wall and his knees up, and he was singing to himself. Not a real song. Just like humming but with his mouth open a bit. Eyes closed. He didn’t hear me come in.
He looked like himself, that’s all. Like a person who was completely comfortable being alive at three in the morning on a cold floor in a broken squat in Stockwell with no audience and no reason.
I never told him I saw him.
I’ve never been able to do that — just be, without an audience. That’s why I invented you.
Jiva: The Necrophilia of Time is a raw, funny, heartbreaking descent into the London underground of squats, street life, prisons and ghosts — Camden pubs, Soho cafés that won’t serve you if your shoes are wrong, a Dutch marijuana farmer in Spain, a witch called Cloris, and Harry, always Harry, dead and absolutely everywhere.
This is a story about grief, freedom, class, and the terrifying weight of surviving the edges of society. It is also, somehow, very funny.
About Jack Dempsey
Jack Dempsey wrote Jiva from inside the same London world his narrator describes — the squats, the tunnels, the cold. Jiva is the companion novel to his memoir Half Alive, but where Half Alive is anarchic comedy, Jiva goes somewhere darker and stranger.