London Fields (43 page)

'I expect you'll want to
be
on your way,' said Nicola, 'here's your — case. I put something in it for you.'

A coughing fit seemed about to free Keith indefinitely from the obligation of speech; but then he gulped suddenly with a thickening of the neck and said, 'Appreciate it.'

'Oh and Keith? You couldn't bear to have another go with the grinder, could you? It's there. It packed up again, I'm afraid.'

'Willco,' said Keith, gathering his things.

'Same time tomorrow?'

Keith looked at Nicola, at Guy, at Nicola. 'Er, yeah!' He nodded, and tubed his lips, and shuffled sideways towards the door.

'Goodbye, Keith,' she called, and turned to Guy. 'I'm sorry. What were you saying?'

He waited. Keith's strained whistle started up and retreated down the stairs. 'Is he,' asked Guy, sitting, and looking around, 'is he here
all the time
?'

'I'm sorry?'

Guy said reedily, 'I mean, if he's not actually in here it's quite a rarity if I don't see him on the stairs.'

'Keith?'

'I mean, what does he
do
here day in and day out?'

'Does he say anything to you?'

'What? On the stairs? No, he just says "Cheers" or "Innit" or something,' said Guy, as his hand sought his brow.

'I mean generally. He hasn't told you our little secret?'

'Whose little secret?'

'Keith's and my little secret,' Nicola smiled at Guy with rueful mischief. 'Oh well. I suppose it's got to come out. I'm afraid I've deceived you rather.'

'I see,' said Guy, and raised his chin.

'He'd be horrified if you knew,' she said, and looked closely into Guy's crippled face. Its weakness she identified for the hundredth time as something predetermined, already etched, something made for a specific purpose, but too long ago. 'And of course he's very worried that his wife will find out about it.'

'I think,' said Guy, 'I think you'd really better tell me.'

Well, in a minute, she thought. A few more choice ambiguities, perhaps. No — all right. Okay:
one
more. 'I mean, what does it matter if he's only a common working lad?' she asked. Then she widened her mouth and tented the lines on her brow and said with martyred calm: 'I
teach
him.'

'Keith? I don't understand.'

'Of course he's only just literate and a complete dunce in all sorts of ways but the desire is there, as it so often is. You'd be surprised. I learned that with my work in remedial reading.'

'When did all this start?'

'Oh, ages ago.' She frowned, seeming to remember. 'I gave him a copy of
Wuthering Heights.
I didn't know how serious he was but he persisted. And now we're doing it properly. We've just started on the Romantics. Look.' And she held up her Longman's
Keats.
'I'm wondering if it's wise to start him off on the Odes. Today we had a quick look at "Lamia". The story helps. I was thinking perhaps "La Belle Dame Sans Merci". Or "Bright Star". It's a favourite of mine. Do you know it? "Bright Star! Would I were steadfast as thou art"?'

'Nicola. Has he done anything to you?'

Even she had her doubts about the look of radiant puzzlement she now gave him — doubts about its supportability, in any scheme of things. 'I'm sorry?'

'Has he ever tried to make love to you?'

Slowly it formed, the pure incredulity. After a moment she put a hand over her mouth to catch a silent hiccup; then the hand moved upwards to her eyes.

Guy got to his feet and came forward. In no uncertain terms, and with his mind half-remembering some analogous recital, some previous exercise in illusion-shattering (when? how long ago? what about?), he told her what Keith and his kind were really like, how they thought of women as chunks of meat, their dreams of violence and defilement. Why, only today in a rough tavern Keith had been blustering about the uses he had put her to — yes, her name shared and smeared in gross fantasies of enslavement, humiliation, appetite, murder.

Nicola looked up. He was standing over her with his feet apart.

She said, 'Oh — does it mean that much? They believe in each other's lies just like they believe in television . . . What's that?'

'. . . What?'

She drained her face of all experience and raised it towards him. Then her head levelled again and she pointed with a finger.
'
That
.'

'Oh, that.’

'Yes. What is it?'

'What
is
it?'

'Yes.'

'You must know, you must have read . . .'

'Yes, but why is it so — so protuberant?'

'I don't know. Desire . . .'

'May I? It's like rock. No. Like that stuff that some dead stars are made of. Where every thimbleful weighs a trillion tons.'

'Neutronium.'

'That's right. Neutronium. Would I bleed?'

'I don't know. You've gone on horses and things.'

'And this bit under here is important too, is it? Oops! Sorry. This is fascinating. And in some circumstances a woman will take this in her mouth?'

'Yes.'

'And suck?'

'Yes.'

'I suppose the idea would be to suck absolutely as hard as one could. What a strange thing to want to do.'

'Yes.'

'So regressive,' she said, and briskly stroked and patted him, as one might dismiss a friendly but unfamiliar animal. 'Though I can see it might be fun for you.' She was smiling up at him, her mouth like a split fruit. 'What's the line in "Lamia"? "As though in Cupid's college she had spent sweet days"? That really is the worst thing in all Keats. So vulgar. But Cupid's college is where you'd better send me for a while, until I know all the tricks.'

He left about an hour and a half later.

His ear was worse. At least three-quarters of his face was unrecallably numb, and heavy, too, to the muscles of the cheek. That was Marmaduke's work. But his good ear had also received a lot of attention, from Nicola's lips and tongue; as he came down the stairs, stepping from carpet to bare board, Guy realized that he was in fact clinically deaf. Outside made his lips feel raw and chapped from kissing — and these kisses so wolvish all of a sudden, especially when he felt her breasts which he was now permitted to do (from without only), and the breasts themselves so responsive and distended and seeming to link up with all the complications of his own low wound.

Across the street he rode, on his rogue boner. Pale rider. Under the fantastic clarity of the evening sky. He looked up. The moon certainly did look closer than usual, but beautifully close, and not yet shining, like the crown of a skull or a Goth helmet; and not just a mask or a shell but a body, with mass and depth, a heavenly body. And the only one we ever really see, the planets too small, the stars too distant, and the sun too vast and near for human eyes.

Dead cloud. Just then — awful sight. Just then he saw that a dead cloud was lurking above the near rooftops. Awful sight. What did it think it was doing there, so out of kilter? They were always lost, dead clouds, lost in the lower sky, trembling drunkenly down through the thermals, always looking in the wrong place for their brothers and their sisters.

Guy pogoed on. The world had never looked so good . . . Bright star! And with so much doubt gone he could reproach himself in full measure.

Well might Guy curse himself for a brute and a swine. His thoughts were all cross-purposed, while hers were all of truth and beauty, beauty, truth.

I
saw a dead cloud not long ago. I mean right up close. This was New York, mid-town, mid-August, the Pan Am building (you could feel its monstrous efforts to stay cool), the best piece of real estate in the known universe. How could some dump of a white dwarf or innocently hurtling quasar stand up to this golden edifice on heliographic Park Avenue? I was in Dr Slizard's office, just below the restaurant, the revolving carvery or whatever they have up there now. The dead cloud came and oozed and slurped itself against the window. God's foul window rag. Its heart looked multicellular. I thought of fishing-nets under incomprehensible volumes of water, or the motes of a dead TV.

'Science', said Slizard, in his epigrammatic style (his good colour, his busy eyes, his accountant's beard), 'is getting very good at explaining how it killed you. How it killed things. But we still don't understand dead clouds.'

Luckily I've known Slizard all my life. How else could I afford him? I always enjoyed his company, until I got sick. My father taught Slizard at NYU before he switched subjects. He used to come to the house one or two nights a week. He had long hair then. Now he has no hair at all. Only the talking beard.

Marius Appleby lives for the ritual of those morning swims, and so do I. Cornelia's breasts, apparently, are
magnificent, splendid, awesome, majestic
— and all the other words that mean 'big'. And we're only on page fifty-nine.

Cornelia has Afghani blood. She rides a horse like a crazed ghazi. She shaves her legs with a Bowie knife. Marius has yet to win a smile from her, a civil word. Old Kwango (bent, pocked, muttering), himself deeply roused by her, for all his years, suggests the time-honoured and locally popular strategy of
rape
,
where a man must roughly take what he claims to be his. Marius demurs. He's watched her with her bullwhip. But he also sees the need for something butch — some act of manly valour. Oh, it's tough, with Cornelia striding about so proudly and nobly the entire time. And she seldom has a stitch on.

The weight of her head and the plumpness of her cheeks cause Kim to pout while she sleeps. Her arms are arranged in one of her Spanish-dancer positions. If you could take twenty snaps of the sleeping child and flick them in a booklet, she would perform the movements of the castanet artist, one hand aloft and curved, one hand lowered and curved also, and always symmetrical.

She stirred. Every time, now, I'm frightened she won't recognize me. People don't. People I haven't seen for three days look right through me. I myself keep going to the mirror for an update . . . Her breath was deeply charged with sleep; and she looked momentarily disgraceful, as babies can look, her face puffed, and latticed with the ephemeral scars of sleep. She focused on me, and pounded her legs — but almost at once her face formed an appeal, as if straining to tell me something, something like
you wouldn't guess what's been done while you've been gone.
Of course, as babies inch toward speech, and their expressions so intelligently silent, you expect the first words to penetrate, to tell you something you never knew. And what you get is stuff like
floor
or
cat
or
bus.
But then with a bent finger Kim pointed at a lesion on my arm and said, with clarity and conviction:

'Ouch.'

I was astounded. 'Ouch? Kim. My God. So you can talk now, can you?'

The baby had no more to add. Not for the time being. I carried her into the kitchen. Kath was elsewhere (in the bedroom). I made the formula and put a slow teat on the bottle. She cried when she saw it. She cried because she wanted it and crying was all she had. I fed her with frequent burp-stops and burp-outs. She wiggled a leg as she drank. For of course if a leg is dangling attractively, then a baby must wiggle it, must never miss the chance to wiggle it. Toward the end of the bottle I felt the warm seep-swell of her diaper. So I put the mat on the table and got ready to change her.

Then Kath intervened, appearing suddenly. 'Ah there,' she said. She took the child from my arms and the Huggy from my hand. Some mick rule here — a chill of priestcraft?

She went with the child into the living-room. I watched the baby's rolling face as it bobbed on Kath's shoulder. The astonished eyes.

'Ouch,' the baby said to me, before Kath shut the door.
'
Ouch
.'

' "For Galen knew that from that day forth he would always dream of she who had come to him that night in Toledo, and tousled him awake with a lover's impatience." There.' Nicola said nothing. 'Come
on.
It's so obviously terrible. It's not even literate. "Of
she
who." Of
her
who, for Christ's sake.' Nicola said nothing. 'The sentiment is repulsive enough. But I guess he didn't bother
you
with sentiment. Too busy climbing into his Beelzebub outfit.' Nicola said nothing. 'It's funny he's so bad at women. All powderpuffed and airbrushed. Without physical functions. He places them in that golden age, now alas long past. You know the one: before women went to the toilet.'

Nicola spoke. She looked at me mistily and said, 'You're wrong. His work speaks very directly to women because he idealized them so passionately. Isn't this a great theme — the struggle of the man, the warlike creature, to accommodate gentleness? Asprey is surely Lawrentian here.'

'. . . This shatters me, Nicola.' This shatters me. Because it discredits, it explodes her artistic sense. And her artistic sense is all I have to go on. 'Oh well. You must be a theatre-lover. More perversity. There's nothing there, in English anyway. Just Shakespeare, and that's that. Which is some kind of cosmic joke. As if Titian was a scene painter, or Mozart wrote movie scores. As if God just directed rep.'

I was now being a little too glib — or a little too something — for the enigmatic Miss Six. (These last sentences were in fact direct quotes from a long letter I was writing to Mark Asprey.) She left her chair and went to the table. She poured out and drank eight swallows of brandy. She looked at the black window. 'I go out walking,' she sang, 'after midnight, in the moonlight, just like we used to do. I'm always walking, after midnight. Searching for you.’

'. . . Your voice is pretty nice. I guess you sang when you did pantomime. But it's kind of a cold voice. Holds something back.'

When she sank down on the sofa beside me her legs went up about three feet in the air. Her gaze also had the caloricity of liquor. I felt I was fending it off.

'To work,' I said, and took out my notepad. 'Let me have some more on these nature rambles you take Guy on. These little love parodies — they're among the worst things you do.'

'You only have to write them up. I have to go on them. I hate walking. I mean,
where to
?
It's like being in an ad. An ad for menthol cigarettes — remember? In the days of threepenny bits?" She thought for a moment and said, 'No, it's like being in an ad for love. An ad for love.'

'I still don't get it. The Guy-torture. But I'm expecting some cool twist. Oh yeah. It's about time I saw one of these videos. One of these ads for sex.'

'There aren't any. I don't keep them. I hate them.'

'How very disappointing. I take it Asprey's snaps are a little out of date. How disappointing. How am I meant to describe the delights of your body?'

She reached for her top button and said, 'I'll take all my clothes off.' She paused. She leaned closer. 'Don't you feel we could be like terrible little cousins and show each other everything. All the sticky smelly bits. Look at you. You don't fancy it, do you, in flesh and blood. Listen. I have a confession to make. I have this shameful habit. Every day I go to a bad place and do a bad thing. Well, some days I manage not to — but then the next day I might do it twice. I go to the toilet. Come on, Sam. Help me beat this thing. You be my bathroom buddy. Every day, just after breakfast, when I feel the temptation — I can call you up and you can talk me down.'

'Nico
la
,' I said. I got to my feet. 'At least tell me this terrible thing you did. To Asprey. It might cheer me up.'

'I put a brick through his windscreen. A big un, too.'

'Oh, sure. Come on. That would be no more than routine.'

'I'm not saying.'

'Why?'

'Why? Why? Why do you think? Because it's too
painful
.'

She's right in a way. There is no language for pain. Except bad language. Except swearing. There's no language for it. Ouch, ow, oof, gah. Jesus. Pain is its own language.

The pain-kit arrived in good time. It came by courier, mid-afternoon, so I was able to call Slizard immediately. 'It's beautiful,' I croaked. 'Like a box of liqueurs. Or a chemistry set.' He knew I'd like all the labels: when it comes to pain-classification, he said, we're back in the middle ages, or the nursery. Suddenly I asked him, 'Hugo, what's happening? Worldwide I mean. I called some contacts in Washington. It's all leak and spin. Where's the
information
?
How are you seeing it?'

'. . . It's serious.'

'How so?'

'It's like this. The pressure is coming from two directions. Do you go in now, and take the chance, or let the system degrade further. The Pentagon is for going in; State would prefer to ride it out; the NSC is torn. There is hypertension, also dyspnoea. There may be embolisms. Me, I'm for ride-out. They must get past the millennium. They can't risk it now.'

'Hugo, what are we talking about here?'

He sounded surprised. 'Faith,' he said.

'Excuse me?'

'The President's wife.'

Our world of pain, as here arrayed and classified: how like life it is, how like childhood and love and war and art. Shooting, Stabbing, Burning, Splitting. Tugging, Throbbing, Flashing, Jumping. Dull, Heavy, Tiring, Sickening. Cruel, Vicious, Punishing, Killing.

'The single pill in the black bottle,' I said. 'With the modern skull-and-crossbones . . .'

'That's for when the living will envy the dead. That's for the most painful condition of all. Life, my friend.'

On
Aphrodite
,
Cornelia continues to disdain all congeniality. And all clothing. It's driving Marius and Kwango crazy.

It occurs to me that certain themes — the ubiquitization of violence, for example, and the delegation of cruelty — are united in the person of Incarnacion. There is, I believe, something sadistic in her discourses, impeccably hackneyed though they remain. I wonder if Mark Asprey pays her extra to torment me.

She has been giving me a particularly terrible time about the stolen ashtray and lighter. And I'm often too beat to get out of her way.
Endlessly, deracinatingly reiterated, her drift is this. Some objects have
face value.
Other objects have
sentimental value.
Sometimes the
face value
is relatively small, but the
sentimental value
is high. In the case of the missing ashtray and lighter, the
face value
is relatively small (for one of Mark Asprey's means), but the
sentimental value
is high (the gifts of an obscure but definitely first-echelon playmate). Being of high
sentimental value
,
these objects are irreplaceable, despite their relatively low
face value.
Because it's not just the money.

Do you hear her? Do you get the picture? It takes me half a day to recover from one of these drubbings. I am reminded of the bit in
Don Quixote
when Sancho has spent about fifteen pages saying nothing but look before you leap and waste not want not and a stitch in time saves nine, and Quixote bursts out (I paraphrase freely, but I really understand): Enough of thine adages! For an hour thou hast been coining them, and each one hath been like a dagger through my very soul.