London Fields (14 page)

G
OOD MORNING, LADY B.'

'Good morning to you, Harry.'

'So,' he said as he swept through the door. 'Today's the big one.'

'I – I've been watching the news.'

Keith strode into the sitting-room and switched off the television, pausing briefly to wonder how much it would fetch.

'The weather there,' said Lady Barnaby. 'And Yugoslavia is listed as one of the –'

'All stuff and nonsense, Lady B. All stuff and nonsense. This the lot? Then we're off. Oh yeah. Lady B., we got a little prob. The motor's on the blink. Never mind: we'll take yours. The holiday of a lifetime. What, are you sure!'

Listening to Lady Barnaby's decidedly hysterical laughter, and calmly aware of the set of housekeys and documents she always kept in the glove compartment, Keith barrelled up the motorway, giving her 'It's a Long Way to Tipperary' and a lightly bowdlerized version of 'Roll Me Over in the Clover'. They drove through veil upon veil of scalding heatmist. The sky pulsed blue, blue, blue. Whereas the cyclones and ball lightning in Yugoslavia and Northern Italy had even made it on to the pages of Keith's tabloid.

'It seems silly to be going away in this weather.'

'Greenhouse,' said Keith dismissively.
'El Niño
innit. Tomorrow just be pissing down.'

The remark carried little conviction. But Lady Barnaby seemed to take a surprising amount of comfort from it. Her bones knew the old English weather; whereas Keith was accustomed to a more versatile sky. Just piss down is what it just didn't do in England, not regularly, not any longer. It did that now in places like California and Morocco.

'Look at the
congestion
,'
said Keith.

After a half-hour delay in the rotting exhaust-pipe of the access tunnel, and a rather longer wait at the short-stay carpark, Keith guided Lady Barnaby to the check-in stall at Terminal 2. Here the computer pronounced Lady Barnaby's ticket near-worthless. Keith took the news with cold resignation: the
cheat
at the bucket-shop had cheated him. What he didn't yet know was that the
cheat
who had cheated him had been cheated by the
cheat
who supplied the bucket-shop. As a result, Lady Barnaby was flying to a non-holiday, and flying one-way. Keith managed to panic her about missing her flight — and about losing her luggage, which they had luckily relinquished at the door. He stood there smoking and whistling and coughing and swearing as Lady Barnaby countersigned all but three of her traveller's cheques. She entered Departures in a ragged dash.

Vowing vengeance on her behalf, Keith picked up some bent duty frees from his contact at Freight, drove smartly to Slough for a breakneck get-together with Analiese Furnish, and then, back in London, rounded off a busy morning by selling Lady Barnaby's car.

'Enlah,' said the baby. 'Enlah,' said Kim. 'Enlah.'

Keith glanced up longsufferingly from his tabloid and his lunch. His lunch consisted of Chicken Pilaff and four Bramley Apple Pies. His tabloid consisted of kiss and tell, and then more kiss and tell, and then more kiss and more tell. Aliens Stole My Boobs. Marilyn Monroe And Jack Kennedy Still Share Nights of Passion: In Atlantis. My Love Muscles Tightened From Beyond The Grave. All his life Keith had been a reader of the most vulgar and sensational of the mass-market dailies. But two years ago he had made a decision, and gone downmarket: to the smaller-circulation
Morning Lark.
He was still adjusting to the wrench. The
Morning Lark,
in Keith's view, made up for what it lacked in coverage with a more positive and funloving approach to life. There was no chance of tragedy or disaster driving Beverli or Frizzbi off page three, or page two, or page one. And although the girls in the
Morning Lark
weren't as pretty as the girls in the mass-market daily, they were certainly more numerous. Ah, the lovely smile on her — cheers you up for the rest of the day.

But now Keith was soberly rereading the filler about the death toll in Yugoslavia. He pointed at the pram with a finger. Kath slipped slowly forwards from her chair.

'Enlah,' said the baby.

The pram dominated the hallway. The pram
was
the hallway, and more. Its handles stuck into the kitchen, its fluted bonnet took up half the lounge. Again Keith glanced up longsufferingly as Kath returned, or pivoted, with the baby in her arms. The baby, who was neither tired nor wet nor hungry, established position on her mother's lap, demurely.

Kath gave a quick nod and said, 'I'm very worried, Keith.'

Keith drank tea with a mouthwash action. 'Yeah?' he said.

'War,' said the baby.

Kath said, 'It's the news.'

'Oh that,' he said with relief.

'The verification,' said Kath.

'Lie,' said the baby.

Keith said, 'Nothing in it. What
reason
?
'

'I don't know. You look at the . . .'

'Oil,' said the baby.

Kath said, 'A flare-up. A flashpoint somewhere.'

'Eh?'

'Wall,' said the baby.

Keith said, 'Jesus. It'll blow over, okay?'

'Or,' said the baby.

'They've been cheating,' said Kath. 'Both sides. They've been cheating for fifteen years.'

'Who says?' said Keith. There was nothing about it in Keith's tabloid. 'TV?'

'I been down the library,' said Kath lightly. 'The proper papers.'

This touched a nerve in Keith (for he was very loyal to his tabloid, regarding its readers as one big family); but it also touched a chord. It was through the library that Kath had won Keith's heart. She had taught him how to read and write — easily the most intimate episode of his life. Oh, easily. The thought of it made tears gather behind his eyes, tears of shame and pride, tears of difficulty, of intimacy.

'Fuck off,' said Keith equably — his usual way of registering casual disagreement. 'So who's cheating who?'

'They both started cheating as a hedge against the other side doing so,' said Kath with the Irish fluidity that Keith had always silently admired, and now silently hated. 'They're accusing one another of non-compliance and inaccurate denial.'

Keith started on his first Bramley Apple Pie. He knew all about inaccurate denial. Keith used it a lot, this technique. He was forever inaccurately denying things. Quite recently he had had to do some very concerted inaccurate denial — with regard to his wife, instead of inaccurately (and routinely) denying to someone or other that this or that was stolen or worthless or broken or ruined, Keith had been obliged inaccurately to deny that he had given Kath non-specific urethritis. it was the sternest test this tactic had ever faced . . . Keith had been cheating on Kath with a girl who had been cheating on Keith. Her name was Peggy Obbs. First, Keith went round to the clinic; next, he offered a cash gift to Petronella Jones and a bottle of pills to Trish Shirt; then he hastened across town and started beating up Peggy Obbs. While he was beating up Peggy, Peggy's brother Micky came home and started beating up Keith. When Keith explained why he was beating up Peggy, Micky stopped beating up Keith and started beating up Peggy, with Keith's help. After that was over, things got a little unpleasant: he came home to find Kath crying by the cooker, and saw the doctor's slip and the chemist's bag. But Keith was ready. He denied it. He denied it hotly, indignantly, and inaccurately. He seized her shoulders and told her to put her coat on
that minute.
They were going straight round to the doctor and have
him
do some denying. He was kneeing her out of the door by the time she shook free and went to comfort the weeping baby. As Keith started off to the Black Cross he told Kath not to
dare
blame him for her woman's troubles ever again. For a couple of weeks he gave her hell about it, then let the matter drop, exhausted (apart from everything else) by all this inaccurate denial, which was admittedly effective but, he found, uniquely tiring. And, by the way, this non-specific urethritis wasn't the old kind of non-specific urethritis, which everybody in Keith's circle already had. It was the new kind of non-specific urethritis, implying widespread inflammation of the lumbar regions, heavy and repeated doses of antibiotics, and (in an ideal world) at least a couple of months in bed. But who could manage these months in bed? Who had time for them? The planet needed a couple of months in bed. But it wouldn't get them — it wouldn't ever get them.

Keith finished his fourth Bramley Apple Pie and said, 'Shut it.'

A soft female cough came through the kitchen wall from the neighbouring flat. Then they heard a contented swallow, and the sound a paper tissue makes when run across a smooth upper lip.

'Iqbala,' said Keith. 'She got a cold.'

'She got a new boyfriend too.'

'She
never
.
'

'Yodelling her head off again she was this morning. Like a pig having an operation.'

'. . . The dirty little bitch.'

'Hark at him so indignant. You never said anything about the other boyfriend.'

Keith fell silent. This was true. He never said anything about the other boyfriend. He never said anything about the other boyfriend because
he
was the other boyfriend. Many times he had slipped next door, one finger raised to his lips. Being indignant about the other boyfriend had proved to be quite beyond his powers. He just told Kath (and Iqbala) to turn the telly up loud.

Kath said, 'Look at that now.'

Little Kim was asleep, seated more or less upright on her mother's lap. The baby's powerful face, fully formed but in miniature, with its collection of glassy roundnesses, its crescents and half-moons, lolled forward on the white trim of her jumpsuit. The cheeks broadened at the base, pushing out the lower lip, as brightly succulent as a slice of sushi, the likes of which neither Keith nor Kath had ever seen.

'Good as gold,' he said. 'Get her down, girl.'

To free the passage they backed the pram into the kitchen. To accommodate the pram, the table had to be shoved still tighter to the walls; Keith then faced the draining task of pushing Clive in under it with his feet. When two adults were active in the kitchen they performed closely, as in a dance, almost a smooch. But Keith wasn't feeling affectionate. His mode changed. He thought of Guy's house and found himself in the rare state of total cluelessness; he had no clue to that kind of space and what it might mean. Keith grew up in a low-rent basement flat in Chesterton Road (about six streets further down the Grove from Lansdowne Crescent), where, so far as he knew, his mother lived on speechlessly. Two rooms, kitchen and bathroom. All his youth he had sat in this flat and wondered how he was going to get out of it. Conversely, a great deal of his adulthood had been spent wondering how he was going to get back into it. A while ago he learned that on his mother's death the flat would revert to the council, and that, in Keith's estimation, was the end of that. It was certainly the end of his mother. He confronted the image, the bright astronomy, of what Guy had and Keith's stream of consciousness simply stopped flowing. It dried up. TV, he thought. It was the best he could do.

Kath edged back into the room. Keith dogged her with his eyes, revising his catalogue of her physical deficiencies. Everything he cherished, everything he looked for in a woman, Kath didn't have. She was no Analiese Furnish or Debbee Kensit, no stocky little braburster with pumpkin bum and milkbottle legs. (Maybe short legs were shortcuts . . .Yeah. They didn't mess about. Short legs were shortcuts to the biz.) When he met her five years ago she looked like the girl in the advert for double cream: the eyebrows rurally pale, the hair and its innocent russet. Now she looked to Keith like a figure glimpsed at dawn through a rainy windscreen.

'Look at the state of you,' said Keith, and watched her shoulders tighten over the sink.

She paused in her work. 'I'm tired,' she said to the window. 'I'm so tired.'

You don't say, thought Keith. Oh really. He couldn't express let alone feel any sympathy for someone so proclaimedly in need of an ambulance. And when you considered the simple heroism with which Keith endured his bad chest, his curry-torn digestive system, the itchings and burnings of his sedimentary venereal complaints, his darts elbow, his wall-eyed hangovers . . .

He stood up, saying, 'I happen to be under considerable pressure at the minute. I work my guts out.' He made an expansive gesture. 'Who do you think's paying for all this?' In the kitchen, or indeed anywhere else in the flat, making an expansive gesture was not necessarily a good idea. One of Keith's outflung hands banged into the door, the other into the fridge.
'Get your head down now, for Christ's sake.'

'I think I will.'

'What. After you made my tea?'

'Yes,' said Kath. 'After.'

An hour later Keith sat catching up on his viewing, his knees inches from the screen (not that he had much say in where his knees went).

'Enlah,' said the baby. 'Enlah, Enlah, Enlah, Enlah.
Enlah.
Enlah Enlah Enlah Enlah Enlah Enlah Enlah Enlah . . .'

With a sigh and some slow nodding Keith extinguished his most recent cigarette, switched off the shootout he was watching, and climbed to his feet. He looked down at Kim, whose moses-basket was wedged between the TV and the inactive two-bar fire. He stretched, barking his right elbow nastily against the wall, and flexed his back, yawning, until his head bumped into the door. . . Outside, the balcony was strewn with satellite receivers, all stolen, all broken. No space out there. No space where Clive could furiously swivel.

Keith shook Kath awake and then took the dog for his evening walk — Keith always did this, religiously, when he wasn't up to no good elsewhere. All you had to do was step into the street and you were surrounded by royalty. The Prince Albert, the Duke of Clarence, the Earl of Warwick. Maharajah Wines. In the yellow light of the shops, while Clive sniffed at some or other excrescence, Keith looked again at a certain brunette in the
Morning Lark.
She was pretty. Her name was Pritti, too — or Pritti, at any rate, was what she called herself, with grinning literalism. A bit like Nicola, thought Keith. Or Nikki. But Nicky wasn't pretty exactly, like Pritti. I blew that one. Or go round there and teach her a lesson . . . The arguable connexions between pin-ups and pornography and sex and violence: just to clear
them
up, while Keith is at hand. With people like Keith, a pin-up was enough to get him going, going in that general direction. But almost anything was enough to get people like Keith going. Five minutes in a populated region of Saudi Arabia would get Keith going. And you can't yashmak female reality, with its legs, its breasts, its hair, its eyes . . . A shame about Petronella getting married like that, even though she was tall and skinny, but still quite keen by the sound of her. Thus Keith would pay another farewell visit to Trish Shirt. Later. He walked the full 300 yards and let Clive precede him into the Black Cross, not wanting to miss Guy.