London Fields (24 page)

Nicola blew her nose noisily and lay there clutching the rolled tissue. Two broad fronts: the cloudy trophies of Guy's archaic heart; Keith Talent, and his reptile modernity. She was an artist, in reasonable control, and knew everything that was going to happen, more or less. But she never knew this. She never knew this about her final project. She never knew it was going to be such hard
work.

The black cab pulled away, thanked and tipped by the, by the . . . Disgustingly attired (how
could
she?), and making her way into the pregnant blackout of the dead-end street. The car waited; now it nosed forward, with sidelights burning. The door opened.
Get in,
he said. And she had been so very very bad . . .
You.
Always you, she said. And in she climbed.

Nicola awoke, and heard the rain, and went back to sleep again, or she tried. The rain sounded like industrial gas escaping from the rooftops — tons of gas, enough to fill the storage vat that overlooked the Park (corseted and flat-topped, the snare in God's drum set). Mauling and worrying the pillows, she squirmed and bounced around the bed. She persevered for perhaps an hour while ten thousand sensations ran through her like a metropolitan marathon. She sat up suddenly and drank most of the pint of water that had colourlessly monitored her sleep. There came the sound of thunder, the premonitory basses and kettles of God's new drum solo. She hung her head. This morning, at any rate, Nicola Six could look forward to a whole day off.

She micturated angrily, as if trying to drill a hole through the hard marble. Having wiped herself she stepped on to the scales in her heavy white nightdress — her decidedly non-vamp nightdress, what she wore in bed when all she wanted was comfort, frump-warmth and comfort. The dial shivered and settled. Eh! But the nightdress was heavy, the sleepy in her eyes was heavy, her hair (she made a mustache of one of its locks) was heavy and smelled of cigarettes: the tobacco, not the smoke. With a silent snarl she cleaned her teeth for the taste of the toothpaste, and spat.

Back in the bedroom she drew the curtains and released the blind. She opened the window to the wet air: three inches, a distance that corresponded in her mind to a single raised notch on the passage thermostat. Normally, on a working day, she would have aired the bed — but she planned to return there very soon. Ten o'clock, and it was dark outside. Against such darkness the rain might be expected to take on the glow of silver or mercury. Not today. Even the rain was dark. She listened to it again. What was the point? What could the rain say but rain, rain, rain?

In ritual vexation she ran a tap for her morning tea. The tapwater, she knew, had passed at least twice through every granny in London. Previously she had relied on bottled water from France, more costly than petrol, until it was revealed that Eau des Deux Monts had passed at least twice through every granny in Lyon. You had to run the tap for at least ten minutes before it stopped tasting like tepid soy sauce. Just how much of people's lives was spent waiting for hot water to run hot, for cold water to run cold, standing there with a finger, pointing, in the falling column. She went and switched on the television: the soundless, telex-like news channel. Sternly she reviewed the international weather reports. MADRID 12 RAIN. MAGNITOGORSK 9 RAIN. MAHABAD 14 RAIN. MANAGUA 12 RAIN. The RAIN in the right-hand column formed a pillar of
drizzle.
That's right: it was raining all over the world. The biosphere was
raining.

With the tap still poling into the sink Nicola put on her dressing-gown and flew barefoot down the stairs for her mail. The men who lived beneath her . . . The men who lived beneath her got less and less keen on Nicola the nearer to the top they got. Speechlessly revered by the man in the basement, openly acclaimed and fancied at street level, she was heartily endorsed by the man on the first floor, who tended to pooh-pooh the suspicion of the man on the second, who none the less associated himself with the settled hostility of the man on the third. The man on the fourth floor didn't like her one bit. In fact, on almost any reckoning, she was ruining his life. She kept him up at night with her banging and pacing; his days she poisoned with her music, her frantic scene shifting, her vampire and vigilante videos; odds and ends tossed from her windows littered his balcony; three of his inner walls reeked of wet-rot from her leaking pipes, her overflowing baths . . .

In bed again, leaning on a rampart of pillows, with her tea tray and her mail . . . And there was a time, five years ago, three years ago, when her mail weighed in at half a stone, and smelled of toilet water and potpourri: well-turned tributes, grovellings, poems, invitations, and a lot of free airline tickets. Now? Cathode script from computerized mailing lists. 'Richard Pinkley has completed the preparation of his Autumn Exhibition and is pleased to invite you to the Preview.' '
I
don't
care
,'
said Nicola. 'Lucky you! Your name has been selected for a chance to win the holiday of a lifetime with Vista International!' '
I
don't
care
,'
said Nicola. 'We understand that the lease on your property will shortly expire and we would be delighted to help you with your relocation in any way we can.' '
I
don't
care
,'
said Nicola. Her lease was due to expire at the end of December. Short lease. None of this millennial stuff: nine hundred and ninety-nine years. Just thirty months was all she had wanted. The lease was running out; and so was her money.

Now the real toilet — beginning with the toilet. The toilet: rightly so called. Interesting word, toilet. 'Toilet.'
Toilet.
'Arranging the hair . . .
(make
one's
toilet) . . . an elaborate toilet; a toilet of white satin . . .
(room containing lavatory) . . . (Med.) cleansing of part after an operation or at time of childbirth . . .The reception of visitors by a lady during the concluding stages of her toilet; very fashionable in the 18th C . . . Preparation for execution (in Fr. form
toilette)
.'
Toilet was right. She had known girls who went to the toilet in fleeting thoughtlessness: it was something that got done between doing other things. Nicola wasn't like that. Nicola was heavy weather. She realized, with regret (but what can you do?), that she was mannish when it came to the toilet. Not ridiculously mannish: she didn't need a pack of cigarettes and
War and Peace
and a section of horse-brass to chew on; she didn't need to hold up traffic beforehand, and clear the street with a bullhorn. Yet the whiteness of the bowl was tinged with difficulty, with onerousness. She flipped up her non-vamp nightdress and sat there making unreadable faces. It shouldn't really happen to a heroine — or only behind closed doors. But the reception of visitors by a lady during the opening stages of her toilet was very fashionable in the twentieth century. And now the twentieth century was coming to an end.

Naked, she weighed herself a second time, while the bath thundered — while it slobbered and rumoured. Then, in an abrupt about-turn, the full-length mirror . . . Yes! Good, still good, all very very good. But time was getting ready to finger it, to make its grab; time was drying that belly with the heat of its breath. She looked at the pots and tubs on the bath's rim; cleansers, conditioners, moisturizers. She looked at the nail varnish, the hair dryer, the fairground lights of the dressing table — the mirror hours, the looking-glass war! No one could seriously stand there and expect anybody to be forever having to do with all
this
shit.

Something about the indomitability of the human spirit (and felt death in its full creative force): back into battle she came the next day, pressing forward under the spiked dome of her black umbrella. Fresh air — or fairly fresh anyway, relatively
free-range
and corn-fed: outer air, not inner air, not just personal gas. In bygone times of average lassitude she had been capable of spending a week and a half wondering whether to post a letter or return a library book or paint her toenails. But these days (the last days) her need for activity was clearly desperate. She swayed in the rain as she re-experienced the killing etiolation of the previous day, all its pale delinquency. Sitting there beside the bookcase, trying to read, in a growing panic of self-consciousness. Why? Because reading presupposed a future. It had to do with fortification. Because reading went the other way. She sent the book flying through the air with its petticoats flapping.
Women in Love
!
She wanted a drink, a pill, a drug (she wanted a Greenland of heroin), but she didn't want it. She wanted the concentrated, the consuming, the undivided male attention known as sexual intercourse (imagine the atomic cloud as an inverted phallus, and Nicola's loins as ground zero), but she didn't want it. Formerly the telephone would have led her off into altered states. And now the telephone's tendrils led nowhere. All you could do was heavily move from room to room to room . . . So it was good to get out and busy oneself with something really useful.

The rain made toadstools of the people on the street. They had a toadstool smell, too (a sodden softness), she noticed, as the wet souls converged at the entrance to the underground, faceless stalks, in mackintoshes, beneath the black flowers of their umbrellas. But Nicola's personal cinematographer (the cause, perhaps, of all her trouble) was still hard at work, and lit her like a chasuble. It was hot, and the rain was hot, but Nicola would be cool. She wore a plain dress of silvery linen. The rain would ruin it, the scuff and the shuffle and the tyre squirt would certainly ruin it (her shoes were
already
ruined). That didn't matter. Because she was killing off her clothes, one by one. In the damp-dog airlessness of the train (a taxi would have taken all morning), Nicola suffered a sense of deafness from the sleeping pills she had eventually taken the night before. And she also feared an incriminating pallor. Yesterday had devolved into an epic of largely pleasureless — and entirely solitary — excitation: the terrible teenager's clogged
cafará.
And yet the adolescent (she now formulated it to herself), no matter how terrible, no matter how torpid and graceless and hormone-slowed, always had the prospect of love. Nicola did not have the prospect of love — love, which distinguishes this place from all others in the universe. Or it tries. Indeed, her flexings and squeezings, her compulsive caresses of the self, were further haunted by the thought that nothing significantly better was taking place anywhere on earth: no act of love that was undesperate, unmediated, unsneeringly observed. She was wrong about that, wrong also about the way she looked, though in the Spanish burnish of her face there was maybe half a dab of hoar, the hoar of smoke or cloud or milk. Now Nicola stared at a schoolboy until he vacated his seat for her, like a somnambulist. Proudly she sat, and looked straight ahead.

An hour and a half among the warm dust and the microphotography of the Public Records Office in Marylebone High Street gave her everything she needed to know about Walker Clinch. She knew the evidence would be there and of course it was, superabundantly. Thence to the nearby Wallace Collection, where she made a twenty-pence purchase: a single postcard. On the front was a suit of sombre armour, the tin soul of a robowarrior slain long ago. On the back, this:

She had written these words in a state of simulated self-pity and indignation, but as she read them now, why, Nicola fairly beamed. Oh the very land where they grew the trees that yielded the paper for writing love-letters on — its soil was dying, neutered with chemicals, overworked, worked to dust. She had this idea about the death of love . . .

Which began with the planet and its fantastic
coup de vieux.
Imagine the terrestrial timespan as an outstretched arm: a single swipe of an emery-board, across the nail of the third finger, erases human history. We haven't been around for very long. And we've turned the earth's hair white. She seemed to have eternal youth but now she's ageing awful fast, like an
addict
,
like a waxless candle.
Jesus, have you seen her recently
?
We used to live and die without any sense of the planet getting older, of mother earth getting older, living and dying. We used to live outside history. But now we're all coterminous. We're inside history now all right, on its leading edge, with the wind ripping past our ears. Hard to love, when you're bracing yourself for impact. And maybe love can't bear it either, and flees all planets when they reach this condition, when they get to the end of their twentieth centuries.

Nicola found a chair and placed the card in the thick envelope she had brought along for it. She addressed it to Guy's office (and imagined his face reflected in a visual display unit, and branded by the green figures). In her manly wallet Nicola's fingers finally found one last creased stamp. As she licked, a queue formed ahead of her in her mind, edging towards the turbaned shadow in its caged stall at the subsidiary post-office. But then she nodded, realizing that this letter was the last she would ever send, this stamp the last she would ever lick. Good, good. Stamp queues (in fact queues of any kind) put Nicola into a daylong fury. You bought thousands and then the following week the price of mail went up again. No more of that. Good: one more of life's duties, one more of life's pieces of shit, discharged for the very last time.

With the promise of a little danger money Nicola secured a black cab and sailed up, high on Westway to keep her date for lunch.

'I once slept', she said experimentally, 'with the Shah of Iran.'

Nicola paused. Keith blinked and nodded. She gave him time to work out the dates: Nicola would have been fourteen at the time of the Shah's death. But of course he didn't work it out.

'I was twenty-one at the time. The Shah of Iran, Keith.'

'The towelhead,' Keith said firmly.

She looked at him with her head at an angle.

'But they're religious,' he went on.

'No
no.
This was before the revolution. The Shah . . . the Shah was the king, Keith. An extremely profligate one, too. Have you never heard tell, Keith, of the Peacock Throne? Anyway he scoured the planet for the very best and hottest young women, and paid them lots of money to go to bed with him. It was quite an experience.’

The dark-suited waiter approached, rubbing his hands together and saying, 'Is everything all right, sir?'

'Uh,' said Keith, 'give us some fucking privacy here, Akhbar, okay?'

Keith was waiting for her when she arrived, stolidly established in the very hearth of the dark restaurant. Offered a treat lunch anywhere he liked, Keith had unhesitatingly opted for the Retreat from Kabul, describing it, after some encouragement, as providing a whiff of the Orient at a competitive price. 'Afghani innit,' he had added. 'And you can't beat a good hot curry. No way.'

The murderer remained seated as she approached his table. Nicola wondered whether it was the light, or the food he was already eating, or some routine proletarian ailment he had come down with — but Keith's face was quite yellow. The kind of yellow you saw in a healing black eye. 'Don't be shy, darling,' he said, and tensely opened a hand at the opposite chair. He had the pint of lager and the cigarette and the tabloid and the half-finished sandwich of poppadam and pickle. 'Akhbar! A menu for my uh, for my uh — give her a menu, and don't gimme no meat. What, in here? Three hard-boiled eggs and bung my special sauce on it. Not a germ on earth'll live through that. No danger.' Nicola returned the menu unopened and ordered her first gin and tonic, pleading a diet. For ten minutes or so Keith poured scorn on diets, arguing that you had to keep your strength up and that men preferred fat women. Then his meal arrived. Three additional waiters and two smocked cooks stood and watched, murmuring eagerly among themselves. The murmuring ceased, on the instant, as the first spoonful of sauce entered Keith's mouth, and then you could hear through the hatch an explosion of adolescent laughter — from the boys in hell's kitchen . . . He chewed, then stopped chewing, then chewed again, exploratively, like a puppy testing a hard chocolate. He closed his eyes and fanned his hand placatingly. When, at last, he started to speak, there was so much smoke coming out of his mouth Nicola thought for a moment that he must have quietly lit another cigarette. Keith asked Akhbar to correct him if he was wrong but didn't he ask for the hot one?

'I was having breakfast alone at the Pierre in New York,' Nicola later resumed, 'as was my habit in those days. Two men approached me. Swarthy, and mean of forehead, but perfectly polite and very expensively dressed. Compliments were paid, and an envelope was produced. A promissory note for $50,000 and undated first-class air ticket, return, to Teheran. One night with the Peacock. I later learned that the Shah had many teams of such people at work in all the great capitals, recruiting hefty starlets from Los Angeles, the palest blondes from Stockholm and Copenhagen, fantasy sex-scholars from the geisha houses of Tokyo and Osaka, hysterical goers from Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro, Keith. Quite a thought! The wide world was his brothel. Now that's imperialism. I mean, you have to think: how did he
dare?

At this point Keith extended a dissenting forefinger. His sympathies, clearly, were as yet very much with the Shah. He sat hunched forward over his meal, the spoon limply dangling as he finished a long mouthful. Smoke was coming out of his nose now, too, as he said, 'Ah. But for him
—
no way would that be out of order for a towelhead Royal. Ancient privilege as such. A right exercised from way back. Time immemorial.'

'Time immemorial? Time immemorial?
No, Keith
,'
she said, with soothing urgency. 'The Shah's father was just some corporal in the army before he made his
coup.
The purest scum, Keith. The Peacock was born a pauper. You see what I'm saying? It's all will and accident. Anyone can burst out. You can burst out.'

Slowly Keith looked down and to the right, frowning. Nicola lip-read his thoughts. TV. Robes. Hot out there. Yul Brynner. Keith in equivalent finery. The Shah of Acton. Keith of Iran. He savoured a fresh spoonful. Smoke was now coming out of his ears.

'Well I said yes, of course. $50,000 was quite a lot of money in those days, and I was intrigued. And unattached. You remember those TV ads for sunglasses I showed you?'

'How could I ever –?'

'That's what I looked like. The CD pimps gave me a couple of fancy presents — jewellery, Keith — and said I would be hearing from them. Nothing happened for a while. Then the telephone call, the limousine, more presents, Kennedy Airport.'

'New York? Love the place. Love it.' He chewed on. Was it Nicola's fancy, or was smoke now coming out of his
eyes
?

'At the other end they took me off to some resort in the south. First, a searching medical. Then I sunbathed for a week: if you were brown already, the Shah liked you browner. The Scandinavian blondes and the pale colleens, I imagine, were kept in a cupboard under the stairs. Plus several hours a day of massage, and workouts with the Shah's dirty-minded physios. Exercises designed to enhance one's twang and twist and give. People do want value for money, don't they, Keith.’

'Definitely,' said Keith seriously. He had stopped eating. An obscure agitation began to play over his lumpy brow.

'I was told it was going to happen in the Summer Palace at Qom. But there was a hitch. I was driven to Teheran. The Sharina was abroad somewhere, frenziedly shopping. You can imagine the scene, Keith, I'm sure: the salutations, the gifts, the pre-war champagne, the flaming dinner on the dusky terrace. There was some kind of demonstration in the square outside which soon developed into a riot. But there we were, with the Smalltalk and the servants . . . I was led off. Humming maidens prepared me. Then a middle-aged French madame with big tits and rockinghorse eyes came in, practically armoured in bracelets and necklets and armlets, and spent about forty-five minutes listing all the treats that the Shah would be expecting of me. Final ablutions, perfumes, oils, unguents, Keith. Two lines of the choicest cocaine. And the most miraculous underwear. The panties, I would guess, were worth about a thousand times their weight in gold.'

Keith lit a cigarette. His fingers flickered like the flame. He stared at her with ponderous illegibility. Most of the time Keith's lips were easy to read — his forehead was easy to read. But not now.

'The thing was they didn't weigh
anything.
I'm very interested indeed in underwear, Keith, as you will soon cheerfully discover, but I've never in my life come across anything like those panties. Elite silkworms, no doubt, specially bred and trained. Cool-pants silkworms. It was quite a sensation, pulling them up tight, as instructed. Quite insubstantial but palpably there, like wetness.'

A pulse passed, and he nodded at her to proceed.

'When the Shah eventually removed this shrunken wisp he threw it with gusto high towards the domed ceiling. The panties hovered, Keith, in the warm thermals of the air, and began to fall, like an autumn leaf. When he was finished, they were still falling. And His Excellency took his time. I couldn't sleep because of the gunfire. At noon the next day another pimp appeared and drove me to the airport.'

'Djyou.' Keith cleared his throat and said, 'Did you see him again?'

'The CD pimp?'

'Yeah. No, the . . . His Excellency.'

'The Shah never slept with the same whore twice. And I think I must have been one of his last flings. Six weeks later there was the revolution. And the Shah was dead within a year. But he did look in the next morning and used me rather brutally on the way to a meeting with his American advisers and his Chiefs of Staff. I begged him for those panties — I
begged
him, Keith — but they were already being microtweezered and blowdried for the next slice of . . . Are you all right?'

'Nicola?'

She felt a light shock at the sound of the three syllables. This was Keith's high style.

'Nick, I'm desperate.' He clenched a crackling fist just under his nose. 'I'm fucking desperate. I got to have it
now.
Now. Not soon. Not next week.' At this point, even more surprisingly, he straightened a sallow middle finger. 'Or I just kiss goodbye to this. See? I got to have it
like now.'

'What?'

'The money!'

'Oh for Christ's sake.'

Keith leaned back and imposingly drew in breath through his nose. She saw that the yellow in his face wasn't the colour of need or fever; it was the colour of fear, open pored, like a grapefruit.

'You don't know the kind of pus I'm dealing with here. Okay, call me a cunt, I took double money on the street. Plans of mine did not reach fruition. Now I made the list and come Friday I get a kicking and they break my fucking darting finger and all.' Again the sallow digit was held up for admiration or review. 'That's how low they'll stoop. See, it brooks no delay. This happens, I'm
out of it.
I'm history. I'm a fucking dinosaur.'

'All right. See Guy tomorrow. Tell him this. Call me when it's done.'

With a genuine performance ahead of her
—
albeit a matinee or a dress rehearsal — Nicola the love actress felt better, felt much better: she felt twice the price. You see how thin, how poor it would all be, without Guy? The next morning, stern-faced and motionless in the scarcely bearable heat of her bath, with one steaming shank hooked over the side, she gave herself up to the disciplined play of thought. The tale of Ali Baba and the Magic Panties had not gone down as well, or as enlighteningly, as she had hoped. It hadn't been much fun to tell, either (Plan A: have fun telling the story; Plan B: don't have much fun telling it), under the glare of Keith's rancid inscrutability, his wide eyes tipped at an angle, as if he was trying to identify something — the number of a bus slowly surging through the rain, a racing result on the back page of an evening paper. Was he unmoved? Could it be that Keith was cold to the notions of enthusiastic whoredom, foot-deep luxury, tyrant sex, and gravity-defying underwear? A Shakespearean lament would be in order (the world was out of joint) if Keith didn't like underwear, invaluable underwear, underwear worth all his tribe. Perhaps, however (and here her fringe fluttered, as she gasped upwards to cool her brow), Keith just liked
cheap
underwear. One thing, anyway: he believed her story. He fully credited her Arabian Night. A reliable taxonomy of Keith's mind, his soul, his retractile heart
—
it couldn't be done. None of it parsed, none of it scanned. His libido would be all tabloid and factoid. Such a contemporary condition was pretty well recognized, if imperfectly understood. It had to be said that Nicola liked the idea of trying to get to the bottom of it. Synthetic modernity (man-made), qualified by something ancient and ignoble and reptilian. Like darts: a brontosaurus in nurene loons. All the more reason, then, to wipe the money fear off his face, to see what was in him (his dreams and dreads, the graphs and spools of his nocturnal erections) and find out what would move him to murder.

Wearing a T-shirt only and sitting on a towel, in the kitchen, with the spread newspaper, the pot and the wooden spoon, Nicola depilated her legs for the last but one time; she unpeeled the sections of simmering beeswax, like industrial elastoplasts, from her smarting calves; she sang while she worked . . . Nicola didn't know this (and knowing it wouldn't have made any difference), but she was emerging from the kind of mid-project doldrums that all artists experience, in the windless solitude halfway between outset and completion. The thing is there now, and you know you can get to the end of it. It is more or less what you wanted (or what you felt you'd finish up with); but you start to wish that the powers that be, the talent powers, had thrown you a little further or higher. How to keep that spring in the stride, that jounce in the rump, as black-stockinged Jack mounts the beanstalk for the hundredth time? The tricks she was going to play on Keith and Guy were
good
tricks; but they were low and cruel and almost unrelievedly dirty. If she could do it all sitting upright, fully clothed (indeed, beautifully turned-out), pressing buttons with impeccable fingertips, and not a hair out of place! But it wasn't going to be like that. She would have to get all hot and sweaty, and roll up her sleeves and her skirts, and put in a lot of time down there on the kitchen floor.