London Fields (13 page)

The telephone call had taken two and a half hours. Guy went out into the street and buttoned his jacket against the sudden cold. The clouds, which were behaving so strangely these days, had gathered themselves into a single cylinder, east to west, like a god's rolled towel, like the slipstream of a plane the size of America. He ran home ecstatically to relieve the nannies, get hollered at by Hope, and spend sixteen hours alone with Marmaduke.

At dawn on Monday morning Guy sat in the pale light of the kitchen. He had relieved Lizzyboo at about 3 a.m., and helped bandage her, after remarkable scenes in the nursery. But then, around five, something like a miracle happened. Marmaduke fell asleep. Guy's first impulse was to call an ambulance; but he was calmer now, content to monitor the child on the closed-circuit TV screen with the volume turned up full and look in on him every five minutes or so and feel his forehead and his pulse. For the time being Guy just sat there whispering words of thanks and pinching himself in the amazement of all this silence.

Quietly he approached the twin doors that led to the garden.

The garden twinkled and simpered at him in its dew. Guy thought of Nicola Six and the continuous and inexplicable waves of suffering which the planet had somehow arranged for her – the lips, the eyes, averted in their pain. He blinked, and imagined he could see a dark-braided girl playing alone beneath the curtain of the willow tree. Perhaps it was Enola, perhaps it was Enola Gay. Enola, searching for Little Boy.

Guy unlocked the doors to the garden.

'Guard, guard,'
Marmaduke would have said (it had previously
been
garner, garner
),
if he had been there to warn him. But Guy went out through the doors.

On Sunday he had walked with Nicola Six in London fields . . . Kneeling, the children launched their boats into the cold agitation of the water; the smaller craft wobbled all the more eagerly, as if activity could redress their want of size; among them, a black-sailed unfamiliar . . . Her story came at him now like a series of paintings, or
tableaux vivants –
no, more like memories of another life: the orphanage and charity school; her years as governess, nurse, novitiate; her current life of good works and scholarly seclusion.
Impeccable, innocent and tragic in her blond fur coat. . . Guy raised his fingertips to his eyelids, then lifted his head and stared. On days alone with Marmaduke, how he had tried to invest every minute with wonder and discovery. Daddy's getting dressed! Shirt, trousers, shoes, yes,
shoes.
Look: bathroom. Tap, sponge, toy boat! Now – ho ho ho – Daddy's making coffee. That's right: coffee. Not tea. Coffee! Oh, look out there. The garden,
and
flowers,
and
grass,
and
a little bird – singing! And such lovely clouds . . . The oohs and aahs of ordinary life had made little impression on Marmaduke, who just shouldered his course through the day with the usual grim ambition. But something had now made wonder work for Guy. He woke up and he thought, Air! Light! Matter! Serious, poor, beautiful: everything you care to name.

Marmaduke was stirring. Marmaduke was waking. Marmaduke was screaming. He's alive. Thank God, thought Guy. I'll not touch her. No, I'll not touch her. Ever.

I'd say she really did a number on Guy Clinch. No half-measures there. It beats me how she keeps a straight face.

She really did a number on him. What was that number? It was Six. Six. Six.

One thing about London: not so much dogshit everywhere. A lot still. Compared to New York, even old New York, it's the cloaca maxima. But nothing like it used to be, when the streets of London were
paved
with dogshit.

Explanation. The English still love their dogs, for some reason. But the dogs aren't living as long as they used to. Nothing is. It's weird. I mean, one expects snow-leopards and cockatoos and tsessebes to buy the farm eventually. But
dogs
?
I
have an image of fat Clive, sitting in a zoo.

How will we teach the children to speak when all the animals are gone? Because animals are what they want to talk about first. Yes, and buses and food and Mama and Dada. But animals are what they break their silence for.

Keith's account of the football match. I've heard many such summaries from him – of boxing matches, snooker matches, and of course darts matches. At first I thought he just memorized sections of the tabloid sports pages. Absolutely wrong.

Remember – he is modern, modern, despite the heels and the flares. When Keith goes to a football match, that misery of stringer's clichés
is what he actually sees.

A pleasant enough evening at the Clinches' last week. Publisher and his wife, architect and his wife, director of the National Portrait Gallery and his wife, sculptress and her husband. A lone tennis player called Heckler, the South African number seven. All the men were extremely attentive to Hope, and the thought occurred to me that she may be sleeping with one of them, or will be soon, which would liven things up even further.

Me, I am developing Lizzyboo. A fulsomely pretty girl. She is also voluble, indiscreet and, I think, not too bright. She's perfect for me.

So maybe I will have a little love-interest of my own. I need it. I sit here at Mark Asprey's vast desk. Incarnacion has adoringly divided his mail into two stacks: the love-letters and the royalty checks. Among the quills and antique inkwells there is an exquisite geometry set – nineteenth-century, Arabian. The clasp comes away with satisfying slickness. I'm going to try it.

Look at that. It's beautiful. Admittedly it took me all morning, what with the dummy-runs and everything, the ridiculous errors, all that shading. It was great, though. I felt about eleven. Bespectacled, hunched sideways over the desk with my tongue out the corner of my mouth, alone in the universe.

I took as my model the illustration in a booklet of Keith's,
Darts: Master the Discipline.
I also used the pen he gave me, the one shaped like a dart.

Look at that. It's beautiful. Oh, Keith – take me home!

I must avail myself of Mark Asprey's car, that dinky A-to-B device of his, which seems to shimmer to attention every time I walk past it and lour at me reproachfully on my return. The cab fares are killing me. It's curious. You seldom see a black London taxi any more. You can call them, and arrange a rendezvous within a mile of Marble Arch; but apparently they stick to the West End and the City. Black cabs are like the buggies on Central Park, a tourist thing, a nostalgia thing. And a money thing: they're blindingly expensive. The drivers wear modified beefeater outfits.

You can see how it happened. Envy-preemption. Or the simplest prudence. Black cabs are socially insensitive. Traffic jams can get ugly, or uglier still; people get dragged out of these burnished hearses. So nowadays cabs aren't even minicabs. They're just any old heap with a removable sign up on the dash. You get in front. Then the driver removes the sign. Or sometimes he doesn't. He leaves it there. It's okay. It's cool. It looks sufficiently shitty inside; no one outside can be bothered to mind.

The place in Clapham is a research institute. I sit and wait. It feels like school. It feels like London Fields.

The truth is I am stalled. You wouldn't call it writer's block. You might call it snooper's block. Tower block.

I can see Keith's tower block from the bedroom window. I scan it with Mark Asprey's powerful binoculars. He's up there on the eleventh floor. I bet it's the one with all the ruined satellite equipment dangling from the little balcony.

Chapter 7 looms like Keith's tower block. A fortress. There's no way in.

When I entered the garage for my first darts lesson Keith turned suddenly and gripped my shoulders and stared me in the eye as he spoke. Some kind of darts huddle. 'I've forgotten more than you'll ever know about darts,' says this darting poet and dreamer. 'I'm giving to you some of my darts knowledge.' And I'm giving him fifty pounds an hour. 'Respect that, Sam. Respect it.'

Our noses were still almost touching as Keith talked of such things as the
address of the board
and
gracing the oché
and the
sincerity of the dart.
Oh yes, and
clinicism.
He then went on to tell me everything he knew about the game. It took fifteen seconds.

There's nothing to know. Ah, were I the kind of writer that went about improving on unkempt reality, I might have come up with something a little more complicated. But darts it is. Darts. Darts . . . Darts. In the modern game, or 'discipline', you start at 50 – and score your way down. You must 'finish', exactly, on a double: the outer band. The bullseye scores fifty and counts as a double, too, for some reason. The outer bull scores twenty-five, for some other reason. And that's it.

In an atmosphere of tingling solemnity I approached the oché, or throwing line, 7 ft 9¼ ins from the board, 'as decided', glossed Keith, 'by the World Darts Federation'. Weight on front foot; head still; nice follow through. 'You're looking at that treble 20,' whispered Keith direly. 'Nothing else exists.
Nothing.
'

My first dart hit the double 3. 'Insincere dart,' said Keith. My second missed the board altogether, smacking into the wall cabinet. 'No clinicism,' said Keith. My third I never threw: on the backswing the plastic flight jabbed me in the eye. After I'd recovered from that, my scores went 11, 2, 9; 4, 17, outer bullseye (25!); 7, 13, 5. Around now Keith stopped talking about the sincerity of the dart and started saying 'Throw it
right
for Christ's sake' and 'Get the fucking thing
in there
'.
On and on it went. Keith grew silent, grieving, priestly. At one point, having thrown two darts into the bare wall, I dropped the third and reeled backward from the oché, saying – most recklessly – that darts was a dumb game and I didn't care anyway. Keith calmly pocketed his darts, stepped forward, and slammed me against a heap of packing cases. Our noses were almost touching again. 'You don't never show no disrespect for the darts, okay?' he said. 'You don't never show no disrespect for the darts . . . You don't never show no disrespect for the darts.'

The second lesson was a nightmare too. The third is tonight. Warily I eye my pimpish darts pouch. £69.95, darts
compris,
courtesy of Keith.

Guy came over just now, for tea, and I returned his short stories with a few words of quiet discouragement. He was right: they weren't any good or anything. He's a sweetheart, and he has some nice perceptions; but he writes like Philboyd Studge. I told him, with an inner titter, that the stories ran too close to life.

He just gathered them up shyly, nodding his head. See, he didn't care any more. He didn't care. Just smiled and gazed out of the window at the speeding clouds. All in all, debriefing him was quite a sweat. I was reminded of the line in
More Die of Heartbreak,
and I checked in the dictionary: the second definition of
infatuation
is 'inspired with extravagant passion'; but the first definition is 'made foolish'. Guy asked my advice about Nicola. I gave my advice (it was bad advice), and with any luck he'll take it.

Then he left. I walked him downstairs and out into the street. The pigeons waddled by, in their criminal balaclavas. Pigeons have definitely seen better days. Not so long ago they were drawing Venus's chariot. Venus, goddess of beauty and sensual love.

Somewhere else in
More Die of Heartbreak
Bellow says that America is the only place to be, because it contains the 'real modern action'. Everywhere else is 'convulsed' in some earlier stage of development. That's true. But England feels like the forefront of something, the elegiac side of it, perhaps. It makes me think of Yeats's lines (and here my memory still holds):

Now I must go to Keith's garage. How I suffer for my art.

Midnight. I return in a state of rapture. I have an hysterical urge to burst right into Chapter 7, to write all night and beyond! Oh, something is tickling my heart with delicate fingers . . .

Easy now. Courage. What happened?

Keith and I were packing up after my darts lesson. I sat there on a stolen case of
porno.
The atmosphere was better tonight, because toward the end I threw a treble 20. That's right. I got a dart to go in the treble 2.0, the flattened nose of the board's face – the treble 20, what darts is all about. Keith picked me up and whirled me around in the air. Actually, it was bound to happen in the end. The darts went wherever they liked, so why not into the treble 20? Similarly, the immortal baboon, locked up with typewriter and amphetamines for a few Poincaré time-cycles, a number of aeons with more zeros than there are suns in the universe, might eventually type out the word
darts.

I was sitting there going on about how tired Kath must be and how good I was with children. I also threw in some lies about the impossible squalor of my earlier years. So many times I've said all this – I'm almost toppling over with boredom myself.

'Oh, sure,' I said. 'When I was your age I was still dodging the shit in the South Bronx. The rats were this big. You'd come out of the walkup and see the body of a child, like a broken –'

'You got the –?'

I gave him the £50. Intolerably he started talking about darts again – my darts, or rather my
mechanical security.
We began to leave. I grimly assumed that we would be looking in at the Black Cross for a nightcap and a few dozen games of darts. But as we went out through the little door Keith paused and looked at me unhappily.

'We going indoors,' he said. 'First.'

For the 300-yard journey we relied on the heavy Cavalier. We parked under the shadow of the craning block – which sparked and flickered like ten thousand TV sets stacked up into the night. Keith hurried. He summoned the elevator but to his silent agony the elevator was dead or elsewhere. We climbed the eleven floors, passing a litter of sick junkies sprawled out on the stairs in grumbling sleep. With referred rage Keith denounced them through his wheezes: a mixture of personal oaths and campaign slogans from the last election. We walked the walkway. Avoiding my eyes he leaned on the bell. And when the door opened I . . . I understand. I understand how Guy felt, as the veil went up (like a curtain or a skirt) to reveal the woman in the Black Cross. It comes in leaps and bounds. Sometimes it comes, not as thunder, but as lightning. Sometimes love comes at the speed of light. There's just no getting out of the way.

Faded, patient, Kath Talent stood in the kitchen colours, in the pale margin of the kitchen. She had Kim in her arms. And the child . . . the child was an
angel.