London Fields (49 page)

We put our clothes back on and went out walking, in the dripping alleys, the dark chambers of the elaborately suffering city. We're the dead. Amazing that we can do this. More amazing that we want to. Hand in hand and arm in arm we totter, through communal fantasy and sorrow, through London fields. We're the dead. Above, the sky has a pink tinge to it, the cunning opposite of health, like something bad, something high. As if through a screen of stage smoke you can just make out God's morse or shorthand, the stars arranged in triangles, and saying therefore and because, therefore and because. We're the dead.

A
LTHOUGH FOR HIM personally the future looked bright, Keith was in chronic trouble, as
cheats
and suchlike always were, with his Compensations.

His caseworker, a Mrs Ovens, was coming down on Keith hard. Increasingly riskily, he had skipped their last seven appointments; and the eighth, scheduled for the day after his historic victory at the Marquis of Edenderry, he had noisily slept through. Now, if he wasn't careful, he'd be looking at a court appearance and at least the threat of a mandatory prison term. Keith rang Mrs O. the next day on his carfone and ate shit in his poshest voice. For a consideration, John Dark, the iffy filth, would also vouch for Keith's good character. She gave him one last chance: on the morning of the Final of the Duoshare Sparrow Masters, if you please. And Keith hated this like a deformity because it was part of the failure he would soon be gone from: turbid queues, and the office breath of afternoons, and a press of difficulty, made of signs and symbols, that never began to go away.

Keith's Compensations. They really were a torment. Oh, the things he went through, the suffering he endured. For some people, it seemed, a fiver a week (split sixteen or seventeen ways) just wasn't good enough . . . Keith's Compensations represented the money he paid, or owed, for the injuries he'd meted out during a career that spanned almost two decades. You'd think that being a child prodigy in the violence sphere would have its upside Compensationswise, since some of the people you damaged and hurt (and naturally you were always going to be concentrating on the elderly) would be dying off anyway. But oh no: now you had to pay their relatives, or even their mates, so only the lonely forgave their debts, some of them going back twenty years, a crushed nosebridge here, a mangled earhole there, every one of them linked to double-digit inflation and continued-distress upgrade and spiralling medical costs and no end of a fucking pain all round.

'Is it your Compensations, Keith?' said Kath, as Keith replaced the carfone.

'I'll give you a Compensation in a minute.'

Thoroughly out of sorts, Keith was taking Kath to the hospital for her tube trouble, the ambulance service having been discontinued in their area for the foreseeable future. It was the first time since their marriage that Kath had been in Keith's car.

'What's that noise?' Kath asked, and looked more closely at the sleeping baby on her lap. 'Whimpering.'

Keith wrenched his head round to check on Clive; but the great dog was silent.

'And banging.'

Now Keith remembered — and scolded himself for not remembering sooner. Quickly he thumped a darts tape into the stereo and turned it up loud. 'It's the
next car,
' he said. They were in a traffic jam, and there were certainly plenty of other cars near by, and no shortage of banging and whimpering. 'All this
congestion,'
said Keith.

He dropped Kath and the baby at the gates of St Mary's. Then he drove round the first corner, pulled up, and got out. Preparing himself for yet more reproaches from the female end of things (even Trish would be ha ving a go at him later), Keith longsufferingly let Iqbala out of the boot of the car.

'Lady Barnaby,' said Hope. 'Oh that's awful.'

'What?'

'She's dead.'

'How did you —?' said Guy, lengthening his neck towards her.

'There's an invite here to her funeral or whatever.'

'How frightful,' said Guy.

They were having a late breakfast in the kitchen. Also present were Melba, Phoenix, Maria, Hjordis, Auxiliadora, Dominique and Marie-Claire. Also Lizzyboo, bent over her muffins. Also Marmaduke: having spent a lot of time noisily daubing his breakfast all over the table, he was now quietly eating his paint set.

'Oh I suppose we can get out of it,' said Hope.

'I think we ought to go.'

'What for? We don't care about her friends and relatives, supposing she has any. We never cared about her, much, and now she's dead.'

'Show respect.' Guy finished his bowl of HumanShit and said, 'I thought I might go in.' He meant the office, the City. Or that's what he would have meant if he hadn't been lying.

'Trading has resumed?'

'Not yet,' he said. 'But Richard says it looks hopeful.' This was also untrue. On the contrary, Richard had said that it didn't look hopeful at all . . . Guy felt that he had just about reached the end of his capacity to inquire into contemporary history, into What Was Going On. He kept postponing that call to his contact at Index, somehow, to ask what the chances were that this time next week he would be folding his only child into a binliner. People were avoiding, avoiding. He cast an eye over Hope's mail: the goodbye to Lady Barnaby was all that was being offered in the way of social life, on which there seemed to be a merciful moratorium. But Richard, unmarried, childless — he loved nobody — was a mine of unspeakable information. That at the moment of full eclipse on November 5, as the Chancellor made his speech in Bonn, two very big and very dirty nuclear weapons would be detonated, one over the Palace of Culture in Warsaw, one over Marble Arch. That until the cease of the flow of fissionable materials from Baghdad, the Israelis would be targeting Kiev. That the President's wife was already dead. That the confluence of perihelion and syzygy would levitate the oceans. That the sky was falling —

Guy got up to go. As he drained his coffee cup he allowed himself a disbelieving stare at Lizzyboo, who was now addressing herself to the remains of Marmaduke's porridge. The bent head, and the motionless bulk of the shoulders beneath the dark blue smock, sent out a contradictory message: the self within was shrinking, even as the body billowed. And not long ago, only the other day, in her tennis wear . . .

Hope said, 'Before you go would you do the garbage and bring the wood in, and do the water-softener, and check the tank. And bring the wine down. And call the glazier. And the garage.'

The telephone rang. Guy crossed the room and picked it up. A brutish silence, followed by a brutish phoneme
—
some exotic greeting or Christian name, perhaps. Then the dialling tone.

'Wrong number.'

'All these wrong numbers,' said Hope. 'I've never
known
there be so many wrong numbers. From all over the world. We live in a time', she said, 'of wrong numbers.'

Nicola, who loved nobody, who was always alone, stared at the washing-up that lay there formlessly, awaiting resuscitation, awaiting form; dead and dirty now, the cups and saucers and glasses needed clean water, green liquid, brush, rag, and her gloved fingers, and then their pretty redeployment on the dresser's shelves. Excitingly, it was getting to the point where a teacup, say, could be used and put aside, unwashed (or thrown away, or shattered) — used for the very last time. Items of clothing could be similarly discarded. No more shampoo need be purchased now, no more soap, no more tampons. Of course she had plenty of money for luxuries and non-essentials; she had plenty of disposable income. And, in these last days, she would certainly give her credit cards a fearful ratcheting. The week before, her dentist and gynaecologist, or their secretaries, had coincidentally called, to confirm routine appointments, for scaling, smearing. She had fixed the dates but made no move for her diary . . . Now Nicola rolled up her sleeves and did the dishes for the last time.

Soon afterwards, as she was changing, the telephone rang. Nicola had had several such calls: a loan company, wanting to help her with her lease, which had just expired. She didn't care because she had a month's grace; and a month's grace was more grace than she would ever need. She heard the man out. Her lease could be renewed, with their help, he said, for up to a thousand years.

A thousand years. The loan company was ready, was eager, to underwrite a millennium. Hitlerian hubris. From what she knew about events in the Middle East, from what she gathered from what remained of the independent press (contorted comment, speculation), it seemed possible to argue that Hitler was still running the century — Hitler, the great bereaver. Although they were entering November now, there was still time for him to reap exponential murder. Because what he had done you could do a thousandfold in the space of half an afternoon.

Was she nervous? Without question it would be disagreeable, at this late date, to be upstaged by a holocaust. If history, if current affairs were to reach a climax on November 5 during the full eclipse, then her own little drama, scheduled for the early minutes of the following day, would have no bite, no content — and absolutely no form. And no audience. No undivided attention. On the other hand, you wouldn't want to miss that either, the big event. I identify with the planet, thought Nicola, with a nod, as she started getting dressed. I know just how it feels. They say that everything wants to persist in its being. You know: even sand wants to go on being sand. I don't believe that. Some things want to live, and some things don't.

As she clothed them she consulted her breasts, which told her that the big event wouldn't happen, and that the little one would.

'It is thought by some', read Keith,

1500BC! thought Keith.

No matter how many times he pondered it, this passage never failed to bring a tear to Keith's eye. It entirely vindicated him. And Keith's plump teardrop might have contained tenderness as well as pride. The whole world was darts: well, maybe. But the whole world — on certain screens, in certain contingency plans — was definitely a dartboard. Keith bent open his notebook and slowly wrote:

While he was actually plagiarizing an earlier passage from
Darts: Master the Discipline,
Keith was also originating it in his inimitable way.

Now he contemplated that last sentence with the stern eye of the true perfectionist. He crossed out
fukcing
and put in
fucking.
An observer might have wondered why Keith took the trouble to make these deletions and insertions. Why correct, O Keith, when the words are for your eyes only? But someone watches over us when we write. Mother. Teacher. Shakespeare. God.

Oy! Ooh. That itch again. That abdominal vacuum. Chronic, innit. And suddenly, in one fell swoop, all his women had disappeared: just like that. Petronella had gone to Southend with her husband, Clint, on their honeymoon. Analiese was back in Slough (and the M4 traffic you just wouldn't believe). Debbee was sixteen. Iqbala, following her misadventure in the Cavalier, wasn't talking to Keith, or indeed to anybody else. And Sutra (Sutra!) had levered herself back into the world from which she had so surprisingly emerged: hurry, hunger, seen through window and windscreen — other women, more women, women found and unfound, and Keith up above, multiform, like a murder of crows, saying
caw, caw, caw . . .
Which left Trish. And he wasn't going round
there
again, no danger, after this morning and the state she was in. About an hour ago, at noon, he had popped into Nick's for a video. But Nick's videos, Keith decided, were like Chinese meals. As for Nicola herself, on this side of the screen, Nicola in the flesh, the mysterious flesh, with dark-adapted eye and unaccustomed lips, and the way she filled her dresses, Keith was neither patient nor impatient: even sitting next to you with thighs touching she was both near and far, like TV.

The telephone rang. As Keith crossed the garage to answer it, he was firmly of the opinion that success had not changed him.

'Keith Talent? Hello there. Good afternoon there. Tony de Taunton, executive producer.
Dartworld.
'

Oh yeah: Marquis of Edenderry . . .
Dartworld
?
Dartworld
!

'Congratulations,' said Tony de Taunton. 'Sterling effort there the other night. Smashing effort. Tight thing.' With terrible candour he went on, 'You were all over the shop there for a while. And with Paul Go
well
out
of form I thought, Hello. Dear oh dear. Blimey. It's going to be one of those nights. But you seemed to take heart there, with likkle Paulie throwing such crap. In the end, it was your character got you through.'

'Yeah cheers.'

'Now you watch the show don't you Keith.'

'Consistently,' said Keith fiercely.

'Right. Now with finals and celebrity challenges we do a short docu on the participants. You've seen them. Couple of minutes each. So we want to do you, Keith.'

Keith smiled cannily, unfoolably. '. . . But that's TV,' he said.

'Right. Like they say. You know: your lifestyle.'

'Kind of like a lifestyle feature.'

'You've seen them. Where you live, where you work, hobbies, family, interests: all this. Your lifestyle.'

Keith looked up: the stinking ruin of the garage. Tony de Taunton asked if they could start tomorrow and Keith said that they could.

'Address?'

Keith gave it helplessly. The wife, the dog, the joke flat.

'Smashing. See you there then. Goodbye there.'

Keith's face was all poll tax and means test as he dialled Nicola with shimmering fingers.

'Don't worry. Wait a while, and then try again,' said Nicola, and replaced the receiver. Then she put her hand back where it was before. 'My God. It's harder than the telephone. That was a wrong number. Another wrong number. It is. Even through this rather heavy tweed, it's harder than the telephone. It is. This isn't in nature, surely.'

Guy's face was trying to look pleasant; but its expression was unmistakably strained.

'Do other men become as hard as this?'

'Oh I expect so,' said Guy croakily. 'In the right circumstances.'

'Takes a bit of getting used to. I've been consulting my fiction shelves, without much luck. It seems to be the nature of the subject that the writer assumes a general stock of knowledge and procedure from which his characters subtly diverge. In code, usually. No help to me, I'm afraid.'

'Well this, after all,' said Guy (his head was tilted slightly), 'is definitely non-fiction.'

'Now what? . . . The idea is, I suppose, to move the outer skin very gently against the inner. This tweed doesn't chafe you, does it? I imagine you've got pants on too or something?. . . And of course there are all these arrangements further down. Do they play a part? I suppose stroked or squeezed they might — Guy. Guy! What a ghastly face you just made!'

He tried to speak, reassuringly.

'What? Is it painful or something?'

'A little,' he mouthed.

'I don't understand. I thought it was meant to be
nice
.'

Guy did some explaining.

'Oh, darling! Sweetheart. You should have
said.
Oh it's too pathetic of me. Well let's . . . I'll . . .' She reached for his belt buckle. Then her long fingers paused and she smiled up at him self-deprecatingly. 'I've just thought of something. It's — it's sort of a game. I think it'll do the trick. And I'll try something really daring. Guy?'

'Yes?'

'You couldn't just leave me alone for a little while first, could you? Half an hour or something.' Again the smile of childish challenge. 'To screw my courage to the sticking place?'

He said 'Of course' so sweetly that she had a mind to cup his narrow cheeks in her hands and tell him how many, many, many men had written their names in come all over her stomach and breasts and face and hair. What signing sessions. What autograph hounds . . . But all she said was, before she let him out, 'You know, you make me so happy sometimes that I think I must be going to die. As if just to go on living were really too much to ask . . .'

In the market street he kept seeing piles of shoes, piles of hats, vastly tumbled, piles of handbags, piles of belts. Woundedly he walked, with a thumping in the drool-damaged ear. Guess who'd been there, when Guy arrived at Nicola's? Keith. Keith was on his way out. Keith was just picking up his things: while he finished doing so, Guy had been obliged to wait on the porch, shielding his eyes as he searched for the Cavalier under the low sun. The two men passed at the front door; Keith was looking fantastically washed-out but otherwise seemed very pleased with himself, justifiably, some might say, after his recent efforts at the Marquis of Edenderry. It was as unlikely as anything could be, Guy thought: but if he was being deceived, well, then it was quite a deception; and if Nicola and Keith were lovers, then it was some love. Goats and monkeys! Now a San Marco of pigeons patterned the street like iron filings drawn by the little boy's magnet. At the crossroads one pigeon in particular was eating pizza, and wanting more pizza, and risking pizzafication itself as a lorry loomed near.

Perverse and unchallengeable hunger attacked him. He entered the first food outlet he could find, a potato restaurant called the Tate or Tatties or was it Potato Love? The queue or flock was populous but swiftly flowing. At its head sat a Spanish girl in a steel pen. She took the laden paper plates from the hatch behind her and split each spud with a dab of marge or cheddar or hexachlorophene. Then she passed it through the Microsecond: and that's how long it took — half a pulse. Guy knew that the device used TiredLight, that adaptable technology. The food just goes on cooking, on your plate, in your mouth, in your guts. Even beneath the streets.

'Thank you,' he said, and paid the amount that was asked.

The girl was coarsely beautiful. But she probably wouldn't be that way for very long. There was the evidence of the mother, operating out of the hatch and framed in it like someone on a primitive TV set. But this was no cookery programme. It was about what kitchens tended to do to the female idea. And the daughter would get there quicker than the mother had, because the modern devices saved time but also used it up — sucked time out of the very air . . . Guy collected his plastic utensils and looked round for a stool. With difficulty he half-seated himself (that's better), and carefully parted the loose lips of his potato. Its core sizzled, smokelessly bubbling with TiredLight, but its surface was icy to the touch. He shuffled back to the penned girl.

'This potato', he said listlessly, 'is undernuked.'

Half a pulse later and it was dropped back on to his plate like a spent cartridge. Now it was overnuked. And suddenly ancient. Guy looked at the potato and then looked at the girl. With a pale smile he asked, 'Do you really expect me to eat this?' She just raised her eyebrows and inclined her head, as if to say that she had seen people eat worse. He left it there on the counter and walked back to Nicola. And on his way down the market street he kept seeing those heaps of gloves and hats and handbags, little shoes. And what was that supposed to remind you of? Guy thought he kept seeing heaps of glasses, heaps of hair.

'Now it's really a very simple game,' she began. 'And completely juvenile, of course. I learned it from some of the brassier girls at the children's home, years and years ago. It's called
dare.
It's also known as
nervous.
I believe it's played all over the world, as such things usually are. Playing
nervous
.'

'Don't know it. What happens?'

She laughed rosily. 'Not a great deal. You put your hand on my throat, say, and let it descend until I say
nervous.
Or on my knee. Or I put my hand on your tummy and move it slowly downwards.'

'Until I say
nervous
?'

'Or until
I
say
nervous.
Shall we play? I suppose,' she said, revealing the white strap of her brassiere beneath her shirt and producing a blush, 'I suppose it would be fairer if I took this off. Turn away.’

Guy turned away. Nicola stood, unbuttoning her shirt. Leaning forward, she unhooked herself and slowly released the brocaded cups. She gave a special smile.

Next door, wearing Y-fronts, earphones, and a frogged smoking-jacket she had recently bought him, Keith lay slumped on Nicola's bed. He was watching the proceedings on the small screen. His peepers bulged. His kisser furled into a collusive sneer. Nicola rebuttoned briskly, to the top, to the brim of the brimming throat. Keith was shocked. He had always suspected that when Guy and Nicola were alone together they just talked about poetry. Keith shrugged limply.

'Jesus, some mothers,' he murmured to himself.

And so they played
nervous, nervous, nervous.
Nicola played
nervous,
though she wasn't nervous (she was playing), and Guy played
nervous,
though he wasn't playing (he was nervous). 'Undo the top button. And the next. Wait . . .
Nervous.
No, go on . . . Not
nervous.
You can kiss them.' And there they were, so close together, in fearful symmetry. Guy dipped his lips to them. What could you say about
this
breast. Only that it was just like
that
breast. Why compare them to anything but each other?

Hello, boys, thought Keith. Nice bouncers she got. Pity a bit on the small side. Still you lose respect after a while for the bigger tit. Good laugh at first. Now Analiese . . . He wiped his sniffer.

With blips and bleeps and scans and sweeps their hands moved up their thighs. His fingers reached the stocking tops and their explosion of female flesh.
('Nervous
!'
she sang.) Hers were warm and heavy as they moved in beneath his belt.

'Nervous
?'
she asked.

'. . . No,' he said, though he was. 'But
I
am,' she said, though she wasn't. 'But I'm not,' he said, though he was.

Working him up to a fever pitch innit, thought Keith. He made a liquid sound with his gnashers. Nervous? He'll be a fucking nutter in a minute. Here —

'Does it feel as it should feel?' she was asking.

'Yes very much so.'

Keith felt the soft arrival of sweat on the palms of his feelers. He looked away for a moment, as if in pain. Then he felt a lash of panic that almost flipped him on to the floor as Nicola said,

'Quick. Let's go to the bedroom.'

With a great jerk Keith struggled himself upright. He paused: it's okay. He lay back again, listening to his steadying ticker and Nicola saying,

'No — here — now. Stand up. All these buttons. It seems to . . . I'll have to . . .'

'Oof,' said Keith, He whistled hoarsely, and those blue gawpers filled with all their light. Blimey. No, you don't — you don't do that. Not. To a guy. You don't, he thought, as his flipper reached down for his chopper. You don't do that to a guy.

'Lie down. And close your eyes.'

So Keith saw it all and Guy saw nothing. But Guy felt it. Guy did all the feeling. He felt the hands, the odd trail of hair, the hot and recklessly expert sluicings of the mouth. And other strange matters. A suspicion (a fleeting treachery) that now, after this, he could be free and safe and home, the fever passed, and her forgotten, and the long life waiting with child and Hope. But then too there were consequences: immediate consequences (the male animal, never lost from thought). Soon, and with embarrassing copiousness . . . he might drown her. He might drown them both. Physical fear was never wholly absent in his intimate dealings here down the dead-end street, down the dead-end street with the mad beauty, when she was taken by sexual surprise. He held her head. The world was dying anyway. Towards the end, which never came, he said helplessly,

'I'm . . . I'm . . .'

Then something happened — something tiny in the layered swellings.
'
Enough
,'
he said, and pulled her clear from the struggle, and at last was lost from thought.

She was kissing his eyes. He blinked out at her.

'You sort of fainted,' she said. 'Are you all right? You sort of fainted.'

He looked down. It was all right. He hadn't made a mess of things.