London Fields (31 page)

They parted. Yes, Guy and Nicola were to part. She stood. She stood there, corrected. She was mistress of herself once more. As Guy moved heavily towards the door he looked down at the velvet chair and saw the Valium she had thrown at him: not much of a missile, not much of a weapon, a yellow tranquillizer the size of a shirtbutton, and partly eroded by the sweat of her fist.

'I thought I might need it', she said, following his eyes (which were misting over at this comic poem of female violence), 'for after you left. But then I lost my temper. I'm sorry. I'm absolutely all right now. Go to your son. Don't worry. Goodbye, my love. No. No. Oh, be
gone.
'

Well he was gone now, and wouldn't be back. Guy was in his own bed, where he ought to be. He wouldn't be back — except perhaps in circumstances of great extremity. He found that the current situation, or the Crisis, had a way of prompting the most shameful fantasies — discrepant, egregious, almost laughably unforgivable. What if you survived into a world where nothing mattered, where everything was permitted? Guy lifted the single linen sheet. He had never thought of himself as being impressively endowed (and neither, he knew, had Hope). Who, then, was this little bodybuilder who had set up a gym in his loins? . . . So in his own way Guy Clinch confronted the central question of his time, a question you saw being asked and answered everywhere you looked, in every headline and haircut: if, at any moment, nothing might matter, then who said that nothing didn't matter already?

Just when you thought she was a complete innocent or 'natural' or maybe even not quite right in the head (manic depression? in mild,
interesting and glamorous form?), she came out with something really
devastating. How had it gone? Tainted. The money was
tainted.
Certainly those fuming fifties had quite a genealogy: privatized prisons under Pitt, human cargo from the Ivory Coast, sugar plantations in the Caribbean, the East India company, South African uranium mines. This was all true: sweatshops, sanctions-busting, slain rainforests, toxic dumping, and munitions, munitions, munitions. But none of it was news to Guy. As Nicola talked he had sat there listening to a kind of commentary on the last ten years of his life: the horrified discoveries, the holding actions, the long war with his father. For ten years he had been dealing with cruel greeds and dead clouds. Nowadays the company was a good deal cleaner. And a whole lot poorer. Hope's money stank too: everywhere, vast bites out of the planet. Go back far enough and all money stinks, is dirty, roils the juices of the jaw. Was there any clean money on earth? Had there ever been any? No. Categorically. Even the money paid to the most passionate nurses, the dreamiest artists, freshly printed, very dry, and shallowly embossed to the fingertips, had its origins in some bastardy on the sweatshop floor. She'd taken it. Nicola had taken it. That put paid to another thought, also uncontrollable (and here the linen sheet gave another jolt): her on a street corner and a man walking past in white flares (hello sailor), and the woman on her knees in the alley, and the money dropped on to the wet concrete.

Guy thought he heard Marmaduke screaming and looked with terror at his watch. No panic: time to get up. Time to return to the sinister cheer of the Peter Pan Ward. He heard the sound again, from the street; but he was accustomed, by now, to the auditory trickvalve that turned a fizzing pipe or a tortured gearbox — or even birdsong or Bach — into a brilliant imitation of his absent son's screams. As he climbed from the bed Guy heard the thump, and felt the internal shockwave, of the slammed front door. Five seconds later he had hopped into his trousers and was veering round the doorway with a whiplash of shirt-tails.

The child was home! The child was home, borne aloft, it seemed, on the shoulders of the crowd, the little hero returned from the war, and screaming himself black in the face. Guy skimpleskambled down the stairs and ran high-kneed through the hall with his arms outstretched. And as the child joyously launched himself into his embrace, and, with the familiar, the inimitable avidity, plunged all his teeth into his father's throat, Guy thought that he might have been precipitate, or inflexible, or at any rate none too kind.

A mile to the north, Keith Talent lit a cigarette with the remains of its predecessor and then pressed the butt into an empty beer can. Two new televised conversations joined the surrounding symposium. Several types of whining were going on: the giant's dentistry in the street below, Mr Frost above who was mad and dying, Keith's fridge, various strains of music, and Iqbala next door going on at her boyfriend about the clothes money he'd borrowed off her last week and promised to refund on Wednesday. Keith listened closer: someone somewhere was actually shouting, 'Whine! . . . Whine!. . .
Whine
!'
Ah yes. Keith managed an indulgent leer. That would be little Sue down below and to the left, calling to her son Wayne. There came another repeated shout: 'Sow!. . . Sow! . . .
Sow
!' That would be Kev, calling to Sue. Keith leered again. He and Sue had once been close. Or was it twice? His place. Kath in hospital. Now Keith called to his wife, who duly appeared in the doorway with Kim in her arms.

'Idea,' said the baby.

'Lager,' said Keith.

'Here,' said Kath.

'Adore,' said the baby.

'What's that?' said Keith, meaning the TV.

'Ordure,' said the baby.

'News. Nothing on the Crisis,' said Kath.

'I'll give
you
a crisis in a minute,' said Keith.

'Adieu,' said the baby.

'Lager,' said Keith.

'Adieu, adore, ordure, idea.'

The doorbell rang, or rattled faultily.

'Check it Kath,
'
he said in warning as she turned.

Keith sat up straight with long eyes and open mouth. If that was Kirk and/or Ashley and/or Lee, if that was the boys, then Keith had miscalculated, and seriously. Over the past week, with all this talk about the breaking of his darting finger, Keith had had time to ponder, with many an elegiac sigh, the steady erosion of criminal protocol. In the old days you kicked off by threatening someone's family. None of this nonsense about starting in on a man's darting finger. How about Kath and Kim? Weren't they worth threatening? But maybe that was what Kirk and Ashley and Lee had decided to do: threaten his family. (They couldn't have come here for Keith, after all, or not directly: home was the last place they'd reckon on finding him.) In principle he might have approved. Still, threatening his family wasn't any good if he happened to be
with
his family at the time. He could hardly hide under the bed. Hide under the bed? Keith? No way: there was ten years of darts magazines down there.

'It's all right. Just a woman,' said Kath.

Two beats later he heard the front door croak open, Kath's cautious
Yes?
and a foreign female voice saying,
Good afternoon. I'm your new worker.
Keith sank back.

Chronic innit, he thought (he was gorgeously relieved). Diabolical as such. They come in here . . .
Where's Mrs Ovens? Ah, well, I'm working in conjunction with her. We'll liaise.
Liaise. I'll liaise you in a minute. Keith thought of his probation officer, the absolute lustrelessness of her hair and skin and eyes and teeth, the vertical lines that busily lanced her upper lip. Runs me ragged. All this about the
Compensations.
He had skipped their last five appointments: she'd have him reporting on Saturday afternoons, minimum, or swabbing out the Porchester Baths.
And how is the little one?
Yeah, that's it. Call it the little one because she can't remember its name. How's diddums? How's toddles? They come in here . . .
And is your husband in employment at present?
Power like. Stick their fucking oar in. Got no kids or one family's not enough. Keith craned forward and saw one flat black shoe suspended in the air beneath the kitchen table and slowly rocking.

'And is your husband at home at the moment', he heard the voice ask, 'or is it you who's smoking all these cigarettes?'

At that Keith let out a savage and protracted belch, a belch that said to all that he would never yield.

Clive barked. Kath said, 'He is, yes. He's not been well.'

'So it would appear. The child . . . You're aware, no doubt, of the harm caused by passive smoking?'

'I smoked passively every day of my life and it never did me any harm.'

'Didn't it?'

Keith was now burping in varied and horrid volleys.

'I'm afraid I might have to see about a hygiene order.'

'Hygiene? Listen. I mean we haven't got what some have. We're just
trying,
you know?'

'You tell her, Kath,' shouted Keith.

'I mean you come in here . . .'

'Speak your mind, girl,' shouted Keith.

Kath said, 'I'm starting to wonder about what
you're
doing and how
you're
feeling. There's nothing I wouldn't do for my baby. Nothing.'

'Except you haven't got any
money,
have you. You just haven't got enough
money.
My God, the smoke. And I can't say I like the look of that dog. Do you abuse your daughter, Mrs Talent?'

'Oi!'

Keith could stand for this no longer. His protective instincts were stirred. Loyalty: it was a question of loyalty. Nobody talked that way about Keith's dog — or about his cigarettes, which were super-king-sized and had international standing. He was out of that bed by now and struggling with the mangled length of his ginger dressing-gown. Heavily he appeared in the doorway — brown-gowned Keith, fag in mouth, one arm working at the flapping sleeve, in variegated whiteness of pants and vest and flesh — and looked into the eyes of Nicola Six.

What was she doing?

What was she doing?

If the intelligent eye could lift off and climb past eaves and skylights, and speed over rooftops, and settle as it liked where people thought they were alone — what on earth would it see?

Nicola backing towards her bed with a glass of champagne in one hand and the other raised and beckoning, in black elbow-length gloves and a cocktail dress the colour of jealousy, and on her face an unrecognizable smile. Now she sat, and placed the glass on the bedside table, with a languid stretch of her wings, and remained for a moment in perfect profile, facing the window: pensively. Then her black gloves began to take rapt interest in the presumably exquisite texture of her dress — that bit that housed her breasts. Oh, the look of young wonder! She shook back her hair and started to unclasp.

Who was watching? Who saw her stand and lower the dress to her feet and step out of the lillybed in her high heels? And turn, and look up sleepily, and blow a little kiss, and wiggle a black finger. Nobody. Or nobody now. Just the single eye of the pistol-grip camera, placed on the chest by the door.

This would undoubtedly be for Keith.

'Jesus,' I asked her, 'what are you doing?'

'Oh, it's nice to get out and about. Look who's talking. What about you and your crazed excursion?'

I held up an open palm at her.

'Your love-quest . . . I'm sorry. Are you very sad?'

'I'll live,' I said. Not the happiest choice of words. 'It wasn't meant to be.'

Nicola nodded and smiled. She was sitting opposite me, the lower half of her body strongly curled into the lap of the wicker chair. It was about two a.m. When she spoke you could see deep darkness in her mouth. 'Your nerve went,' she said.

'Listen. We're not all puppetmasters like you. And even you need the run of the play. You need accidents, coincidences. I happen to know there's a nice little accident that'll help speed things up with Guy.'

'I do need real life. It's true. For instance, I need the class system. I need nuclear weapons. I need the eclipse.'

'You need the Crisis.'

Blinking steadily, she sipped red wine and lit another black cigarette. A strand of tobacco stuck to her upper lip until her tongue removed it. With gusto she scratched her hair, and then frowned at her fingernails, each of which seemed to contain about a quid deal of hashish. Yes, she certainly looked off-duty tonight. I'm the only one who ever sees her like this. She lets me. She likes me. I'm a hit with all the wrong chicks: Lizzyboo, Kim, Incarnacion.

'Nicola, I'm worried about you, as usual. And in a peculiar way, as usual. I'm worried they're going to say you're a male fantasy figure.'

'I
am
a male fantasy figure. I've been one for fifteen years. It really takes it out of a girl.'

'But they don't know that.'

'I'm sorry, I just
am.
You should see me in bed. I do all the gimmicks men read up on in the magazines and the hot books.'

'Nicola.
'

'So they'll think you're just a sick dreamer. Who cares? You won't be around for that.'

'You neither. I was thinking. You're hard to categorize, even in the male fantasy area. Maybe you're a mixture of genres. A mutant,' I went on (I love these typologies). 'You're not a Sexpot. Not dizzy enough. You're not a Hot Lay either, not quite. Too calculating. You're definitely something of a Sack Artist. And a Mata Hari too. And a Vamp. And a Ballbreaker. In the end, though, I'm fingering you for a Femme Fatale. I like it. Nice play on words. Semi-exotic. No, I like it. It's cute.'

'A Femme Fatale? I'm not a Femme Fatale. Listen, mister: Femmes Fatales are ten a penny compared to what I am.'

'What are you then?'

'Christ, you still don't get it, do you.'

I waited.

'I'm a Murderee.'

We went out walking. We can do this.
Oh —
what you see in London streets at three o'clock in the morning, with it trickling out to the eaves and flues, tousled water, ragged waste. Violence is near and inexhaustible. Even death is near. But none of it can touch Nicola and me. It knows better, and stays right out of our way. It can't touch us. It knows this. We're the dead.

My love-quest did something to me.
Heathrow
did something to me. I can still feel the burning vinyl on my cheek. What happens, when love-thoughts go out — and just meet vinyl?

Now I've had some bad airport experiences. I've been everywhere and long ago stopped getting much pleasure from the planet. In fact I am that lousy thing: a citizen of the world. I've faced utter impossibilities, outright no-can-dos, at Delhi, Sao Paulo, Beijing. But you wait, and the globe turns, and suddenly there is a crevice that fits your shape. Heathrow provided no such fuel for optimism, or even for stoicism. Zeno himself would have despaired instantly. The queues, the queues, cross hatched by the extra-frantic, the extra-needing. Too many belongings. Too many people all wanting to do the same thing . . .

And now the dreams have come. Something happened to me. I fell, down, down, tumbling end over end.

The dreams have come, right on schedule, as Dr Slizard warned. And if the dreams have come, then can the pain be far behind?

I always thought I was up to anything that dreams could throw at me: I'd just sleep right through them, and get some much-needed rest. But these dreams are different, as Slizard said they would be. After Incarnacion has been here the bed is plump and impeccably uniformed, and I repose trust in its square-shouldered pride, its bursting chest! On most nights, though, it looks about ready for me, intricately coiled, waiting for the stripped creature on his hands and knees.

As Slizard foretold, the dreams are not recuperable by memory, or not yet anyway, and this suits me right down to the ground. I have the impression that they deal with the very large and the very small — the unbearably large, the unbearably small. But I can't remember them, and I'm glad. Bad news for me, these dreams turn out to be bad news for Lizzyboo, too. I always used to think how heavenly it would be — at least in the abstract — to wake up to her, to wake up to all that honeytone and health (the sun lights this scene gently: her back bears warm creases from the press of her fanned hair; and then she turns). No longer. I'm not going to wake up to anybody ever again. I couldn't let Lizzyboo wake up to me, a gaunt zero, zilched by death. I can feel the unslept hours and the unremembered dreams queuing in waves above my head.

Quaintly, Slizard advises me not to eat cheese. This from his office in the Pan Am building in New York, the envy of the universe. I heed his words. Cheese? No thank you. I stay right off that shit. Don't grate no cheese on my pasta. Not a single Dairylea split with Kim. At the Black Cross, I take a pass on the cheese-and-onion crisps. Offered cocktails at the Clinches', I don't touch so much as a cheese football. And yet when I sleep what reeking stiltons, what slobbering camemberts and farting gorgonzolas come and ooze across my sleep.

Lizzyboo says she eats too much when she is unhappy. She tells me this, between mouthfuls, in the Clinch kitchen. She tells me more over her shoulder from the icebox or the cooker. It's a terrible thing with her. Always the kiddie stuff: fish fingers, milkshakes, baked beans, sticky buns. Her weight shoots up. Lizzyboo and her weight! I didn't know? Yes, the slightest sidestep from her starvation diet — and grotesque obesity is at the door with its bags. I wonder if it can be the force of suggestion, but over the past few days a quarter-moon seems to have formed beneath her chin, and an extra belt of flesh around her midriff. She takes her head out of the bread-bin to tell me that she doesn't know what she's going to do about it.

Although I could point a finger at the world situation, I'm clearly meant to take the blame for this. For this disaster also I am obliged to pocket the tab. 'Come on, honey,' I say to her. 'There are plenty of fish in the sea.' Again, a poor choice of words, perhaps. Because there aren't plenty of fish in the sea, not any more. Lizzyboo shakes her head. She looks at the floor. She gets up and heads for the grill and sadly makes herself a cheese dream.

When entering America these days it is advisable to look your best. Wear a tuxedo, for instance, or a vicar outfit. Penguin suit, dog collar: take your pick. Me? I looked like a bum, in bum suit, under bum hair, on bum shoes, when I crept into a cab, twenty miles from Missy Harter. My eyes felt as red as cayenne pepper — as red as the digital dollars on the cabby's money clock. It was night. But I could see the cabby's signs as clear as day. Passengers were asked to stow their own bags (DRIVER HANDICAPPED) and, of course, to refrain from smoking (DRIVER ALLERGIC). PLEASE TALK LOUD was a third notification of the cabby's many disabilities and cares. Even with three of the four lanes down we made good speed into the city. Just enough moon to see the clouds by, clouds shaped like the tread of a gumboot, or a tyre, or a tank. Over the sky's sandflats the gibbous moon seemed tipped slightly sideways and smiling like a tragic mask. Beneath, half-cleared rustbelt. SHERATO. TEXAC. Even the big concerns losing their letters. Then the city: life literalized, made concrete, concretized, massively concretized. Here it comes. And as we passed the Pentagon, the biggest building on earth, visible from space, I saw that every last window was burning bright.

That was my American dream. America? All I did was dream her. I woke up and I was still in Heathrow Airport, with my cheek on the hot vinyl. For fifteen minutes I watched a middle-aged man chewing gum, the activity all between the teeth and the upper lip, like a rabbit. And then I just thought: Enough.

It was hard getting back into London: I nearly flunked even that. Even getting back into London took my very best shot (No danger. You won't get a cab here, pal. No way). Before, I never thought I'd be able to live with myself if I failed to get to Missy and America. But maybe I can. After all, it won't be for terribly long.

That
dream
. . . So dogged, so detailed — so literal. One of those dreams where things happen at the same speed as they do in real life. It included a convincing four-hour wait in Reimmigration. Missy Harter used to dream like that, always; she used to lie by my side, and spend half the night in the Library of Congress or shopping at Valducci's. Something tells me that I won't dream like that ever again. From now on, each night, it'll be special relativity — Einsteinian excruciation. So maybe the American dream was a farewell to dreams. And to much else.

What was I doing? The whole thing, the whole love-quest, the whole idea: it was from another world. Forget it. Turn back. Back to try the art and dice with death and hate, and not fight for love in some unreal war . . .