London Fields (56 page)

T
HE BLACK CAB will move away, unrecallably and for ever, its driver paid, and handsomely tipped, by the murderee. Disgustingly attired (how
could
she?), she'll click on her heels down the dead-end street. The heavy car will be waiting; its lights will come on as it lumbers towards her. It will stop, and idle, as the passenger door swings open.

His face will be barred in darkness, but she will see cracked glass on the passenger windowframe and the car-tool ready on his lap.

'Get in.'

She will lean forward. '
You
,'
she will say, with intense recognition. 'Always you.'

'Get
in
.'

And in she'll climb . . .

Disgustingly attired: how
could
she? In white thin strapped tanktop picodress, cauterized at the waist, promoting all the volume of the secondary sexual characteristics, and so tight below that the outlined panties give a nappy-puff to the rounded rear; and bare-legged, with scarlet satin shoes, the heels unforgivably long, heels that would look longer still (the suggestion was) when their shadows played on the backs of berks! Her hair was sprayed with glitter, and savagely tousled. As she made her way to the studio she selected a good brick wall, steeped in London smoke and moisture, and went and pressed her rump against it. The dress was man-made, drulon, trexcett, man-made in every sense, made by men with men in mind. She wanted to walk the whole way there, to test her nerve and tauten her breasts.

She shimmied her rump against the moist brick wall. Of course, there was no mirror, and she couldn't really check; but the contact felt just right.

Keith said, 'Where's the pub then?'

'Pub? What pub?' Tony de Taunton looked at Keith curiously.

'The venue. The —' Keith snapped his darting finger — 'the Chuckling Sparrow.'

'There's no
pub.
Don't you think we have enough grief already, Keith. Without wheeling a couple of hundred pissers in and out of here four nights a week.' As he spoke, Tony de Taunton gave Keith a glass of low-ale and led him by the arm to the window. 'No no, friend. All those jolly butchers and smiling grannies — that's library stuff. We use cutaways and dub the pub later.'

'Common sense,' said Keith. They were standing in a cavernous lot, full of hidden noise. Shifters and fixers moved stoically about with planks under their arms. All were expert noisemakers. Sheets of silver cardboard imparted the spectral light of watery dreams. On the wall was a sign bearing the saddest words Keith had ever read: NO SMOKING. Also a mirror, in which he made out a funny-looking bloke in a wrinkled red shirt: TV's Keith. There
was
a bar, though, with four or five stools you could perch on. But none of that fog and gurgling clamour that he had come to think of as his darting lifeblood. Where the pub parrot, effing and blinding on its soiled hook? Where the pub dogs, whinnying in nightmare beneath the round tables?

'Look. Here comes Chick,' said Tony de Taunton. 'You got to like his style.'

A cream Rolls-Royce had pulled up in the carpark below. Two men climbed out slowly.

'Where are
your
guests, Keith?'

'Be along. Who's that with him?'

'Julian Neat.'

Julian Neat: agent to the darting stars. Agent to Steve Notice, to Dustin Jones.

'Yes. They say Chick's all signed up.’

Nick and Chick had come in through different doors but they made their entrances together, which was frankly ideal for television's Keith Talent, who, by this stage, felt he could do with a little support — felt, indeed, that he might die or go mad at any second. She pushed past the greeters and moved with hesitant hurry towards him. He had never seen her looking quite so beautiful.

'Oh my Keith.'

'Where you
been,
girl?'

'What happened? Did you lose your keys? I saw your darts clothes were still on the chair.'

'Where you
been,
girl?'

Imploringly she flattened herself up against him. 'I'll tell you about it later. Making arrangements. For us, Keith. We're going on a wonderful journey.'

'Break it up, you two,' cajoled Ned von Newton: Mr Darts. 'Come and be friendly.'

They went to join the others at the semicircular bar. Keith strolled over with some insouciance (he saw the way that Chick clocked Nick). She was holding his hand — gazing, with the demurely gratified eyes of love, at TV Keith.

Guy stood with his back to the building, facing the flatlands of demolition. Squares of concrete, isolated by chicken wire, in each of which a bonfire burned, baking the potatoes of the poor. Apparently cleansed by its experiences of the afternoon, the moon outshone these fires; even the flames cast shadows.

As he turned he saw a hooded figure by the doorway. He halted.

'They're in there,' it said.

Guy thought: it's a girl. He moved closer. One of Keith's women. The ruined blonde who —

'Keith,' said Trish Shirt. 'And . . . Nicky.' She sighed nauseously. 'Now they getting married like.'

'I hardly think so.'

'They are. It was on the telly.' She leaned forward and placed a hand on his arm. 'Say I'm waiting. Tell Keith. Forever in a day like. I'll always be waiting.'

When Guy got up to the lot he hung back by the door, able to linger, it seemed, in a frenzy of unobtrusiveness. At first all he felt was simple disappointment. He had hoped Nicola would be there, and she wasn't. Nicola wasn't there. He could see a girl in the group round the bar, under a bulb of light: she looked a lot like Nicola. She
was
Nicola, almost certainly. But she was somebody Guy didn't know.

He'd thought Trish seemed disembodied, in her hood, neutered, an
it
not a she — or just non-human. But the girl at the bar, unhooded, turned to the light, indeed fully opened out towards the world, was less human than the thing in the hood.

Nicola was laughing with her mouth as long and wide as it would go. The energy equation here could be represented as something like
x
 = 
yz
²
,
y
being a certain magnitude of solitary female beauty,
z
being the number of men present, and
x
the Platonic gang-rape which, in certain possible futures, might harden into action. It had to be said that the men around her only frowned and smiled, as if chastened by her colour, her volume, her spin of ravenous risk. Where does the guest look when the host's little girl is doing her somersaults for him: it's so transparent? But this was no little girl. As she worked herself backwards on to her stool she gave a vivid flinch and turned to Keith like one confidently seeking forgiveness; and there was no way out of joining Nicola in her amusing struggles with the hem of her dress. Their indivisible attention: that's what she had.

Keith watched her proudly. And Chick watched her — Chick, Chick Purchase, large, delicate, deliberate, thick-haired, deep-voiced, and dangerous, with hardman or just criminal glow, like an actor, like a star, who accepts the role that the ordinary imagination assigns him. In his face you could see the associated pleasures of making love to women and of causing harm to men, or beyond that even, to the links between disseminating life and ending it. There was also something ridiculous, sinisterly ridiculous, in the way he looked: he dressed like a girl, he dressed like a chick. He filled the flow of his trousers with some of the lilt that a girl would, and his shirt had a flounce to it, the kind of flounce chicks like. But this was no little girl. There was no mistaking his sex. Chick? In the tight waist-to-thigh panels of his orange trousers, it was visible, and sinisterly ridiculous. A slobberer for skirt: that was how come he hadn't yet gone all the way, in crime or darts. Tonight, no roadshow hopeful or wet T-shirt at his side: only, in the cream Roller, Julian Neat, who looked like what he was, a successful middleman, in an exhausted culture.

'The past is past,' Keith was saying. 'Let's forget any unpleasantness and shake on it. Fair enough, mate?’

'Okay,' said Chick deeply. 'Tell me something, Keith. What's a girl like this doing with a little coon like you?'

'Chick,' said Julian Neat.

'See?' said Keith.

'I think that's very unfair, Chick,' said Nicola earnestly. 'Keith's very good at darts.'

'Okay, break it up, you lot,' said Miles Fitzwilliam as he approached, pulling his headphones away from his ears. 'Pre-match interview.'

The two contestants slid ponderously from their stools.

Guy saw his chance. But his chance of what? For one thing, he seemed to have forgotten how to walk.

Nicola saw him: she smiled and waved with puppet animation. As he crossed the vault the hope gathered in him that she would become the woman he knew; but she just went on getting stranger. Stranger smile, and stranger eyes. When he was near enough he said experimentally,

'Hello.'

'
Silence. Oi
!'

She pouted a kiss at him and prettily crossed her lips with a cautioning forefinger.

'Obviously,' Keith was saying to the camera, which was jack-knifed in fascination a foot from his face, 'hopefully'll the best man win. When we go out there.' He realized that more was expected of him. 'So let's hope the bloke, the guy with the, the superior technique will, will run out winner against, against the man with the . . . least good equipment. Dartwise. At the death.'

Nicola applauded silently; then her palms came to rest, as if in prayer.

'I'm confident, Miles,' Chick was chipping in. 'Got to be, with those averages. And — see, Keith and I go back a bit. And I know he's got this funny habit. Of bottling it. At the death. Frankly, I just hope it's not too one-sided. For darts' sake.'

'Thanks, lads. Five minutes, yeah?'

Nicola wiggled a finger and Guy moved closer. 'Darling,' said her hot breath, 'don't worry! — this is only a dream.'

Keith's heart leapt or jolted when he saw the new arrival: Kim Twemlow, the ex-world number one, with his smile, his jewelled shirt, his white shoes. The guy was like a god to Keith, no matter about his orange-peel face. Let others dwell on that funny lump in his side, that walking-frame. He had a good head of hair, for thirty-eight. Just that some of us live so full, our flames burn so bright, that the years go past not singly but six or seven at a time, like the years of dogs.

As for Guy, Keith saw him and closed his eyes and reopened them elsewhere.

Julian Neat was telling another one.

Nicola was laughing with her mouth as long and wide as it would go, when Guy stepped forward.

'
You're going back with me
.'

They all turned.

'
You're going back with me
.'

They all stared. They all stared at this bit of unnecessary unpleasantness. The pale loiterer with his boiled eyes. Nicola's expression showed that although she always tried to see the amusing side of things, well, on this occasion she really
was
rather shocked.

Guy seized her wrist and she gave a practised shriek as her stool slewed. Round about now Keith was always going to be stepping in.

'It's over. Don't be a prick.'

'You're going back', said Guy, with immaculate enunciation, as if perhaps she hadn't heard or understood, 'with
me
.'

She looked at him. Her upper lip hovered over her teeth. 'No I'm not. What for? To talk about love, and Enola Gay? No I'm not. I'm not going back with
you
.'

'Right,' said Keith to the nape of Guy's neck. 'She's going back with me. For more of what she got last night. She's going back with me.'

'No I'm not. No way. Innit. I'm not going back with
you
.'
They all waited.

'I'm going back with
him
,'
she said, leaning forward and placing her hand on the penis of Chick Purchase.

Guy left, but Keith was going nowhere.

They said they'd put the sound on later, that inimitable pub bustle, the whoops, the laughter, the crack of glass, even the computerized thunks of dart meeting board. So the buzzers buzzed, and shifters fixed, and fixers shifted: each noisemaker made his noise. Also the steady belching of the cigarette-smoke simulator, sending its grey clouds out over the occluded oché. Laughter remained, but it wasn't pub laughter. It was the laughter of Julian Neat, Kim Twemlow, and Nicola Six.

'Keith . . ? Shame it didn't go your way, Keith,' said Malcolm McClandricade. 'But it's not the end of the world. Sorry, Dom?'

'They're saying they can't use it.'

'There you go, Keith! Spare your blushes down the Marquis. Well. That's a relief all round.'

'They're saying they're using it. Thought they had a ladies' semi but they ain't.'

'Sugar. How'll they fill it? All we got's ten minutes.'

'They going to bung in a pub song or something. A knees-up. And a raffle or something.'

'Jesus. Still, Keith. Not surprising you didn't do yourself justice. With that handful. Talk about trouble. Keith? Keith? Dry your eyes, old son.'

'He's okay?'

'What do you think?'

'Get a car round?'

'Keith?'

But Keith snapped out of it, out of his ruined dream, his trance of darts. He stood up and said with boyish directness, 'I could point to the finger injury I was nursing. But tonight's been a valuable experience for me. For my future preparation. Because how's your darts going to mature, Malcolm, if you don't learn?'

'That's the right attitude, Keith.'

'Because she's dead. Believe it. You know what she is, Malcolm? She's a fuckin organ-donor. Do that and live? No danger. She's history, mate. You hearing me?'

'Anything you say, Keith.'

Will be taken down and used . . . He spun round the shaking cage of the spiral staircase. Every impact of his boot was louder, harsher, his force and mass growing with all that was neg and anti. Then he hit the cold night air, and saw the moon — redder, to his eyes, than the midday sun.