London Fields (34 page)

'I've got to stop,' he said with a sudden nod.

'Pardon?' came Melba's voice sweetly.

'Oh, I'm sorry, Melba. It's nothing.'

'The Effects of Thermonuclear Detonations', taken from something they referred to as 'Glasstone & Dolan (1977,3rd edn)', among the editorials on deforestation and nurses' pay, next to a report about Concorde moving into overall profit by the end of the year, and above the astronomy column, which said that the Apollo object torn loose from the asteroid belt would miss the earth by a quarter of a million miles. Which sounded good. But that was where the moon was. Farewells were sounding on the intercom when Guy crushed the newspaper into the bottom of the rubbish bin. He swallowed as he felt her force field leaving the house.

And the house was still there.

Guy peered into the hall. By the sound of it, Marmaduke had dispersed — upstairs with Phoenix and Hjordis, no doubt. Now Guy abruptly cringed to the greeting of Dink Heckler.

'Hey,' said Dink, and pointed with an index finger.

'Dink. How are you?'

'Good.'

The South African number seven was of course in tenniswear. His pressed shorts were candy-white against the scribbled slabs of his thighs. Encased in practically cuboid gyms, Dink's feet were planted stupidly far apart.

'You're playing', said Guy, 'in this weather?'

'For sure.' Dink stared through the half-glass front door at the bright October morning, and then stared back at Guy with an expression of fastidious disquiet. 'What's the matter? You see something I don't?'

'It's just the — the low sun. Rather blinding.'

Hope now came skipping down the stairs saying, 'That's good. She's starting today. At one.'

'
Is
she,' said Guy.

Hope looked at Guy, at Dink, at Guy again. 'Are you
okay
?
. . .
Actually I'm encouraged. I thought she was amazing. Marmaduke was quite silent with her. He looked completely stunned. She must have this terrific authority. You know he's having a
nap
up there?'

'Amazing,' said Guy.

Then Hope said with finality, 'I'm playing with Dink.'

Under the buxom duvet, in the vestiges of his wife's sleepy body-scent, behind half-drawn curtains, Guy lay staring at the ceiling, itself significantly charged with the milky illicit light of a bedroom still in use during the hour before noon. The trouble with love, he thought, or the trouble with this love anyway (it would seem), is that it's so
totalitarian.
In the realm of the intellect, how idle to look for the Answer to Everything; idler still to find it. Yet with the emotions . . . what's the big idea? Love. Love is the Big Idea. With its dialectical imperatives, its rewrites, its thought police, its knock on the door at three a.m. Love makes you use the blind man, makes you hope for death in Cambodia, makes you pleased that your own son writhes — deep in the Peter Pan Ward. Bring on the holocaust for a piece of ass. Because the loved one, this loved one, really could turn the house into a bomb.

He awoke around two. His mind was clear. He thought: it's over. It's passed on. And he tensed himself, listening for the first whisper of recurrence . . . Perfectly simple, then. He would tell Hope everything (though not about the money. Are you
serious?
)
and submit to his atonement. How marvellous, how beautiful the truth was. Ever-present, and always waiting. Love must be an enemy of the truth. It must be. And it kept on making you like what was bad and hate what was good.

Footsteps passed his room and climbed the stairs.

And now life lent a hand.

Through the throttled wire of a stray intercom he heard noises, voices, laughter. Hope and Dink, upstairs, changing. Having played, they were now changing, changing. A yelp,
I'm all sweaty
,
a comical interdiction,
Check it out
,
a trickle of zip then a hot silence broken by a gasp for air and her serious
Quit it!
. . .

And Guy thought: My wife doesn't love me. My wife has betrayed me. How absolutely wonderful.

Soon she entered, wearing a dressing-gown, the hair released from its grips, and with burning throat. 'Get up,' she said. 'He's sleeping now but you're on duty when Phoenix leaves. We're nannyless for the rest of the day. That bitch didn't show.'

In the next room along, Marmaduke, who had been up all night, lay sprawled in a shattered nap. Toys were scattered about the cot like munitions in a stalled war. The little prisoner, with his brutal Scandinavian face, was shackled in his woollen blankets, in his tumbling baby rope. Flattened with sweat was his duck-white hair . . . Even in sleep the child was not unmonitored, unmediated. Drinking a cup of instant coffee, Phoenix watched over him from the kitchen, closing her long eyes for several seconds at each indication that he might be about to stir.

Before losing consciousness Marmaduke had gazed at and prodded the twin bruises on the back of his dimply fist. He regarded them with fear and admiration. Already he was forgetting the pain that had accompanied them, but something about the way they came to be there would live on gloriously in his mind. He wanted to do to someone else the thing that had been done to him. 'Nice,' he had whispered (as one might say 'nice' of a pretty girl in the street or of the straight drive on the cricket field: saluting skill, talent), before rolling over to twist himself into sleep, hoping to dream of the Pinching Game.

The Pinching Game was good. It was
nice.

'Ow! I say, that's quite a pinch. Well, two can play at that, young man. It's called the Pinching Game.'

Marmaduke waited.

'Do you want to play?'

Marmaduke waited.

'Now first — you pinch me as hard as you like.' Marmaduke pinched her as hard as he liked — which was as hard as he could.

'Good. And now I pinch
you.
'

Marmaduke watched, with stoned interest. Then his vision seeped through tears of pain.

'Now it's your turn again. You pinch me as hard as you like.'

Marmaduke reached out quickly. But then he hesitated. First looking up for a moment with an uncertain smile, he carefully gave the tenderest tweak to the back of her hand.

'Good. And now I pinch
you
.’

Although I don't eat much now I think I still have a good appetite for love. But it doesn't work out.

In all I spent six nights sleeping rough at Heathrow. Not much sleeping. But plenty of rough. And I despaired. The other people there were better at it than I was, stronger and quicker in the standby queue, with heftier bribes more heftily offered. I could see myself becoming, as the weeks unfolded, a kind of joke figure in the Departure Lounge. Then a tragic figure. Then a ghoulish one, staggering from news hatch to cafeteria with bits falling off me.

I think I still have a good appetite for love. But there's nothing I can eat.

Incarnacion relates that Mark Asprey was hardly to be seen here at the apartment. Her own eyes retreat and soften with a lover's indulgence as she talks of the kind of demand in which her employer constantly finds himself. This leads her on to explore one of life's enigmas: how some people are luckier than others, and richer, and handsomer, and so on.

Of course I'm wondering whether he took a stroll down the dead-end street.

In my new dreams I think I keep glimpsing Kim, and Missy, Missy, Kim. They're trying to be nice. But in my new dreams it just doesn't work out.

I love Lizzyboo in my own way yet when I consider her socio-sexual training or grounding I have the impression that there are only about four or five things that could ever really happen between her and men.

He Refuses To Make A Commitment. She Has A Problem Giving Him The Space He Needs. He Is Too Focused On His Career At This Time. They Think They Love Each Other But Given Their Temperamental Differences How Will They Ever Connect?

She's much more importunate these days, or she is when she's not eating. The restraints are gone. It's as if she's falling. She's falling, and at the usual rate of acceleration, which is plenty fast: thirty-two feet per second per second. Luckily, at least, with this falling business, it doesn't make any difference how heavy you are . . . I guess I could tell her I'm plain old fashioned. 'I guess I'm just a child of my time, Lizzyboo,' I can hear myself saying as I daintily remove her hand from my knee. Alternatively, there are any number of debilitating but non-fatal diseases I could bashfully adduce. Last night she took my hand on the stairs and said, 'You want to fool around?' Me? Fool around? Hasn't she heard that fooling around is on the decrease — though maybe it hasn't been, much, in her case, or not until recently. Dink Heckler, for example, has the look of a stern taskmaster in the sack. But she won't be getting any of that nonsense from me. I'm a child of my time.

In the wild days of my hot youth no one wanted to risk it and neither did I. Remember how it used to go . . . Are you free any night this week? I thought we might step out together — to the hospital. That nice place on Seventh Avenue. If it makes you feel more relaxed about it, bring your personal physician along. I'm bringing mine. I'll be around to get you about half past eight. In an ambulance. Aw honey, don't be late.

It's not quite like that any more. Let's consider. The vaulting viruses, all those wowsers and doozies and lulus, are of course increasingly numerous but they seem to have simmered down a good deal. Purely out of self-interest, naturally. They're only parasites, after all, and the career guest and freebie-artist doesn't really want to tear the whole place apart (except when unusually drunk). So the wisdom of evolution prevailed; they adopted a
stable strategy
,
with their own long-term interests held sensibly in view; and now they're just part of the dance. Besides, we all know we're not going to live for ever. We do know that. We forgot it for a while. For a while, the live-forever option looked to be worth trying. No longer. Even in California the workout parlours and singlet clinics are paint-parched and gathering dust. Three score and ten is a tall order, even for the very rich, even for someone like Sheridan Sick. We subliminally accept that life has been revised downward, and once again we start sleeping with strangers. Or some of us do. The act of love takes place in a community of death. But not very often. Just as you won't find much corridor-creeping in the modern hospice, despite all the superb facilities.

I met her eleven years ago. We felt safe. More than that. We felt solved. We were
solved.

Now she won't talk to me. My name is muck at Hornig Ultrason. I'm not feeling very well, and I
haven't got any money.

I find myself indulging in vulgar reveries of a movie sale.

There must be a dozen hot actresses who would kill for the part of Nicola Six. I can think of several bankable stalwarts who could handle Guy (the ones who do the Evelyn Waugh heroes: meek, puzzled, pointlessly handsome). As for Keith, you'd need a total-immersion expert, a dynamic literalist who'd live like a trog for two or three years as part of his preparation for the role.

The only difficulty is Marmaduke. Typical Marmaduke. Maximum difficulty. Always.

Maybe you could dispense with an infant star and go with a little robot or even some kind of high-tech cartoon. It's amazing what they can do.

Or, because age and time have gone so wrong now, why not a youthful dwarf, wearing diaper and baby mask?

It's all gone wrong. The old are trying to be young, as they always have, as we all do, youth being the model. But the young are now trying to be old, and what is this saying? Grey-locked, resolutely pallid, halt in step and gesture, with panto-hag makeup, crutches, neck-braces, orthopaedic supports.

Then the next thing. You start fucking around with the way your babies look. First, you fuck around with the way
you
look (turn yourself into a bomb site or a protest poster), then, with that accomplished, you start to fuck around with the way your
babies
look. Dumb hairstyles — lacquered spikes, a kind of walnut-whisk effect. Magentas and maroons, wheat-and-swede combinations. I saw a toddler in the park wearing an earring (pierced), and another with a tattoo (bruised songbird). There are babies tricked out with wigs and eyeglasses and toy dentures. Wheeled in bathchairs.

Now I know the British Empire isn't in the shape it once was. But you wonder: what will the
babies'
babies look like?

Lizzyboo and I go to the new milk bar on Kensington Park Road. Her treat. She insists. The place is called Fatty's, which strikes me as unfortunate, and bad for business. On the way Lizzyboo will eat an ice cream or a hot pretzel or a foot-long hotdog. Once there, once actually in Fatty's, she will start on the milkshakes, with perhaps a banana split or a fudge sundae. Over these dishes she will sketch in the prospect of lifelong spinsterhood.

This afternoon, a blob of chocolate somehow attached itself to her nose. I kept assuming she would eventually notice it — would feel it, would see it. But she didn't. And I let too much time pass, too much nose time, too much chocolate time. It was a big relief when she excused herself and went to the bathroom. As she lifted herself from the chair I observed that the zipper on her skirt was warped with strain. At least five minutes later she returned, and the blob of chocolate was still in place.

'Sweetheart,' I said, 'you have a blob of chocolate on your nose.'

She was mortified. 'How long has it been there?' she said tightly into her compact.

'Since way back. Since you had the eclair.'

'Why didn't you
tell
me?'

'I don't know. I'm sorry.'

Because to have done so earlier would have involved an admission of intimacy. Because it suits me if she looks ridiculous. Because I didn't know she had stopped looking in mirrors.

They both turn heads, these girls I squire. Lizzyboo by day. Nicola by night. They both embody whatever it is that means men
have
to look.

And what is it? One of the many messages that pulses off Lizzyboo has something to do with babies. It says: Big me. I'm big already but make me bigger. Let the SSCs get to work. Give these breasts a job. I lay it all before you, if you're the one. If you're the one, then I lay it all before you.

Interestingly, Nicola's appearance makes no mention of babies. All she has to say on that subject is Watertight Contraception. I'm not going to lose my figure and get up in the middle of the night. I won't be time-processed, medianized — not by
you.
It would have to be something special, something unique, something immaculate.

Like the Virgin Mary: Nobodaddy's Babymamma.

It doesn't particularly matter that I'm going blind because I can't read anyway. Five minutes with
Macbeth
on my lap and I'm in a senile panic of self-consciousness. Mark Asprey's many bookshelves are shelved with books but there's nothing much to read. It's all stuff like Good Bad Taste or Bad Good Taste or Things You Love to Hate or Hate to Love or why it's Frivolous To Be Important or The Other Way Around.

I get stuff from Nicola but who am I kidding. There are things I'm not seeing, or not understanding. The only writer who gives me any unfeigned pleasure is P. G. Wodehouse. And even him I find a bit heavy. He takes a lot out of me. Scratching my hair, with soft whistles, with lips aquiver, I frown over
Sunset at Blandings.

Pretty soon I'll be obliged to ask Nicola to show me what she looks like in the nude. I find I'm looking forward to it. I can't imagine she will deny me this simple request. She knows how seriously I take my work.