London Fields (57 page)

Keith ran low towards the heavy Cavalier.

I must go back to London Fields — but of course I'll never do it now. So far away. The time, the time, it never
was
the time. It is a far, far . . . If I shut my eyes I can see the innocuous sky, afloat above the park of milky green. The train track, the slope, the trees, the stream: I played there with my brother as a child. So long ago.

The people in here, they're like London, they're like the streets of London, a long way from any shape I've tried to equip them with, strictly non-symmetrical, exactly lopsided — far from many things, and far from art.

There's this terrible suspicion. It isn't worth saving anyway. Things just won't work out.

Be gone now, for the last act.

D
OWN THE DEADEND street the car was waiting. And so was I . . .

I'm here. I'm in it. And how
strange
it is in here, fish-grey, monkey-brown, all the surfaces moist and sticky, and the air no good to breathe. Already destroyed. And not worth saving.

The car was there on the other side of the dead-end street. When midnight struck or tolled I crossed the road and bent my body and looked in through the broken window, broken by my own hand, so long ago. The murderer turned toward me.

'Get out of the car, Guy. Get out of the
car,
Guy.'

He was crying. But so what? We're all crying now, from here on in.

It was Guy. Of course it was. After a thousand years of war and revolution, of thought and effort, and history, and the permanent millennium, and the promised end of mine and thine, Guy still had all the money, and all the strength. When Keith came running low across the carpark, Guy was waiting, with all that strength. They squared up to one another. And Keith lost. For the second time that night, Keith tasted defeat: obliterating defeat. He got driven into the ground like a tentpeg. Where was he now? Somewhere: cradled, perhaps, in the loving arms of Trish Shirt.

'Look what she's done to me.'

'Get out of the car, Guy.'

'Look what she's
done
to me.’

We closed our deal. As he walked away he hesitated, and turned with a wide wag of the head.

'Jesus, Sam, don't do this for me.'

'Isn't it always someone else? Who does it.'

'Don't do this for me.'

But he kept on going.

The black cab has pulled away, unrecallably. Here she comes now on her heels, crying, shivering, through the smell of cordite. There are still fireworks in the sky, subsiding shockwaves, the memory of detonations, cheap gunfire, whistling decrescendo and the smoke of burnt guys. I can see marks on her face. Another hour with Chick and he might have saved us all the trouble. He might have saved us all the goddamned grief. I flicked on the lights and the car lumbered forward. It stopped and idled. I opened the passenger door. I said,

'Get in.'

My face was barred in darkness. But she could see the car-tool on my lap.

'Get
in
.'

She leaned forward. 'You,' she said, with intense recognition. 'Always you . . .'

'Get in.'

And in she climbed.

There are one or two things left to write.

That pill went down easily enough. I have about an hour. All told. For now I feel great luxury. I was seven when I learned the facts of life. I learned the facts of death even earlier. Not since then, I realize, not once, have I felt such certainty that the world will keep on going for another sixty minutes.

She outwrote me. Her story worked. And mine didn't. There's really nothing more to say. Always me: from the first moment in the Black Cross she looked my way with eyes of recognition. She knew that she had found him: her murderer. I wonder if she knew there'd be a queue . . . 'I've found him. On the Portobello Road, in a place called the Black Cross, I found him.' Imagination failed me. And all else. I should have understood that a cross has four points. Not three.

I've just taken a casual glance at the beginning — who knows, with a little work, it might somehow accommodate a new ending. And what do I see? Chapter 1: The Murderer. 'Keith Talent was a bad guy . . . You might even say that he was the worst guy.' No. I was the worst guy. I was the worst and last beast. Nicola destroyed my book. She must have felt a vandal's pleasure. Of course, I could have let Guy go ahead and settled for the 'surprise' ending. But she knew I wouldn't. Flatteringly, she knew I wasn't quite unregenerate. She knew I wouldn't find it worth saving, this wicked thing, this wicked book I tried to write, plagiarized from real life.

Originally I'd planned to do a final chapter, in the old style: Where Are They Now? It hardly seems appropriate. But still, in life's book a little I can read. Pale Guy will go home, on his hands and knees. We made a deal. Keith's fate is of course more uncertain — Keith, with his cultured skills, his educated release. But he will be linked to Guy, through the child. I made Guy swear. To do
what's right.
In the end, he delegated cruelty. I, kindness, or paternalism, or money. It was the best I could do.

And Nicola. Necropolitan Nicola, in her crimson shoes. Poor Nicola - she was so
cold.
It made it easier: even that she planned. 'I'm so cold,' she kept saying. 'I'm so cold.' And: 'Please. It's all right to do it . . . It's all right.' And after the first blow she gave a moan of visceral assent, as if at last she was beginning to get warm.

Yesterday, in the hour before dawn and her arrival, I had a prophetic dream. I know it was prophetic because it's now come true. Yesterday I dreamt I ate my teeth.
That's
what murder feels like. I failed, in art and love. I wonder if there's time to wash all this blood off my hands.

Letter to Mark Asprey

You return, I fear, to a scene of some confusion. I will be lying on your bed, quite neatly, I hope, eyes open to the mirrored ceiling, but with a stoical smile on my face. In the car on the ledge, under a sheet, lies another body, rather less peacefully composed.

On your desk in the study you will find a full confession. That's all it is now. Perhaps it is also an elegy to the memory of an unfortunate lady, whom you knew. But I can't justify any of it and am indifferent to its destiny. I die intestate, and without close family. Be my literary executor: throw everything out. If an American publisher called Missy Harter makes inquiries, do me the courtesy of delivering a final message. Send her my love.

Even the dream tenant should always sign off by apologizing for the mess — the confusions, the violations, the unwanted fingerprints. This I do. You will encounter the usual pitiful vestiges of an existence. The usual mess. I'm sorry I'm not around to help you put everything into shape.

PS: If you have an hour or two, you might care to look at a little something I left on the drawing-room table: a brief critique of the Drama.

PPS: You didn't set me up. Did you?

Letter to Kim Talent

I find I am thinking of the words of the exemplary War Poet: 'It seemed that out of battle I escaped . . .' The poem is a vision or a premonition of death (accurate, alas: his death was days away), in which the war poet — himself a forced collision, himself a strange meeting — joins his counterpart, his semblance, from the other side: 'I am the enemy you killed, my friend:

I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now . . .'

There is a third sense in which the poet was himself a strange collision. He was young; and the young aren't meant — the young aren't scheduled — to understand death. But he understood.

Also I am haunted by the speech of surrender of the Indian Chief Joseph, leader of the Nez Percé: subjugated, and then defeated in battle (and then routinely dispossessed):

I am tired of fighting . . . I want to have time to look for my children and see how many I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead . . . From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever. 

Even when we don't have any, we all want time to do this, time to look for our children and see how many we can find. With fingers all oily from being rubbed together, in ingratiation, vigil, glee, fear, nerves, I cling to certain hopes: hopes of you. I hope that you are with your mother and that you two are provided for. I hope your father is around somewhere — controllably. Your beginning has been hard. Your continuation, not so hard. I hope.

Two years ago I saw something that nobody should ever see: I saw my little brother dead. I know from the look on his face that nothing can survive the death of the body. Nothing can survive a devastation so thorough. Children survive their parents. Works of art survive their makers. I failed, in art and love. Nevertheless, I ask you to survive me.

Apparently it was all hopeless right from the start. I don't understand how it happened. There was a sense in which I used everybody, even you. And I still lost . . . Blissful, watery and vapid, the state of painlessness is upon me. I feel seamless and insubstantial, like a creation. As if someone made me up, for money. And I don't care.

Dawn is coming. Today, I think, the sun will start to climb a little higher in the sky. After its incensed stare at the planet. Its fiery stare, which asked a fiery question. The clouds have their old colour back, their old English colour: the colour of a soft-boiled egg, shelled by city fingers.

Of course you were far too young to remember. But who says? If love travels at the speed of light then it could have other powers just on the edge of the possible. And things create impressions on babies. It really is the case. Everything created impressions on you. The exact crenellations of a carpet on your thigh; the afterglow of my fingerprints on your shoulders; the faithful representation of the grip of your clothes. A bit of sock elastic could turn sections of your calves into Roman pillars. Not to mention hurts, like the bevel of some piece of furniture, clearly gauged on your responsive brow.

In a way, too, you were a terrible little creature. If we were out together, on a blanket in the park — whenever you caught my eye you would give a brief quack of impending distress, just to keep me on alert. You were a terrible little creature. But we are all terrible little creatures, I'm afraid. We are all terrible little creatures. No more of that. Or of this.

So if you ever felt something behind you, when you weren't even one, like welcome heat, like a bulb, like a sun, trying to shine right across the universe — it was me. Always me. It was me. It was me.