London Fields (18 page)

Cross that firebreak, and then cross that one. Go too far in all directions. Extremity upon extremity, and then more extremity, and then more.

The moment I set eyes on him I thought Keith Talent was an anachronistic kind of character. I thought that time and inflation and the new demographics would have mopped him up by now or sent him somewhere else: to the North, or at least to the suburbs. Not so. The streets are full of jokers, dodgers, jack-the-lads and willie-the-dips — whole crews of Keiths . . . Of course, hardly any of them will make it, will win through to the Cavalier, the printed brochure, the dreams of darts. They will stay out there on the street until whenever, in dumb hats and seam-busted zootsuits, looking fantastically greedy and devious, and fooling no one.

Fagin himself would have nothing to do with them. He'd be horrified. And these are the best and the brightest (and Keith is the best and the brightest of the best and the brightest). The others are yokels and village idiots, turnip-swaggers, ditch people — but this is London; and there are no fields. Only fields of operation and observation, only fields of electromagnetic attraction and repulsion, only fields of hatred and coercion.

Only force fields.

Keith is anachronistic, too, in this matter of his libido. He's not in the satyromaniac league (and the satyromaniacs, I guess, will always be with us). He's an obsessional tailchaser of the type that was meant to have died out years ago. He drools and slurps at everything remotely bim-like on the street; he regales the entire pub with the things he does to Analiese Furnish and Trish Shirt; he'll even give you fifteen minutes (no
berk
protocols here) on how it went with Kath the other night. On top of all this he makes no secret of his heroics in the handjob realm. And on his diet I'm amazed he even gets around.

Is it just me, or does Keith's hormonal tumult have something to do with reduced life-expectancy? Never very extensive when looked at against an historical mean, Keith's life is now doubly compressed, condensed — and therefore speeded up. His life is on fast-forward, or picture-search. It's not just the animals who aren't living so long.

Now they're briefer still, but animals have always lived brief lives. What we take from animals, what we take from our pets (without trying, and without asking), is a lesson about death: an overview of the shorter span. After two cats and nine hamsters, the adolescent is a bit better equipped for the awful call to his grandmother's bedroom.

We're all keeping step, just about. At eight years of age, Clive is already an old, old dog.

To the movies with Lizzyboo Broadener. Lizzyboo: Hope's big little sister, taller, blonder, rounder faced, fuller figured. Lizzyboo's breasts are a family joke. Ah, those family jokes. Ah, those secondary sexual characteristics — those SSCs! This is the big question about Lizzyboo's breasts: where did they come from? No other Broadener, past or present, has got Lizzyboo's breasts. Hope hasn't got Lizzyboo's breasts. She makes do with Hope's instead, which are a whole lot smaller. It was felt (the family joke continues) that Marmaduke might give Hope Lizzyboo's breasts, or at least make Hope's bigger. But there's Marmaduke for you — disobliging to the last. When Marmaduke was done with Hope's breasts, they were mauled and drained and chewed and tugged all right, but no bigger. A lot sorer — but no bigger. And there's childless Lizzyboo (thirty-one, and just starting to worry) with her beautiful twins. It's very hot still, and she wears just a sleeveless T-shirt on the way to the flick. The clear lineaments of her embarrassing perfection spread agony on the street. The guys can't take it. She makes Keiths of us all — or everyone except me, everyone except the man at her side, who doesn't dare look. The SSCs on her. Will you look at those SSCs.

It was an old horror film, from the Seventies, a piece of shit called
The Dorm That Dripped Blood.
Various coeds got sliced up in their underwear. Chainsaw, hunting-knife, straight razor. The slicer was some species of ghoul, demon or zombie — definitely a dead guy at any rate — with a grudge against the Dean. He looked like a normal fat janitor most of the time, until he neared naked or lightly-clad female flesh: then the inner mutant burst out, rippling with worms and maggots and the usual appurtenances of the grave. I identified. Especially when, during a supposedly scary bit, Lizzyboo took my hand in hers. Hers is a warm hand, a light hand. I would have been more grateful for it, if I hadn't been dying. Her hand stayed where it was, well after
The Dorm That Dripped Blood
had stopped being scary, well after the ghoul had been torched and staked. The lights came up and she turned to me with her whole body and took her hand back with slow care. Her mouth was open. God, the wonder of female teeth.

'What did you think?' she asked, really wanting to know.

She likes me. She digs me. Why? I have one or two ideas on this. Mainly she likes me because Hope does too. I detect considerable sexual influence, or sexual plagiarism, between these sisters.
Lizzyboo
may be the kind of girl who isn't quite sure who she likes until prompted by a larger approval. I felt this approval, even as we walked to the movie, the image of Guy and Hope looming in the air behind us (smiling encouragingly, her hand resting on his shoulder), like parents. Secondly, of course, I am generally retiring with the ladies, and this has a lulling effect, especially on very pretty blondes with big SSCs, accustomed as they are to living in a garrison of hard-on and hairtrigger. I have never screwed around (why
not,
God damn it?) and I have never minded not screwing around (until now), and I think it shows. I'm certainly unlikely to have any of those unpleasant diseases. Thirdly — or maybe this is just point 2(b) — I'm not interested. Which is always a come-on. Genuine lack of interest is bound to work in your favour. And when you're dying (I find), you really have no problem playing it cool.

After our kiddie movie we enjoyed milkshakes in a café on Kensington Park Road. It's all very difficult. She likes me. She puts a hand on my forearm for emphasis. She practically wets herself at all my jokes. She brandishes those SSCs. Lizzyboo digs me, which is just as well, because if she wants to find the way to my heart she's going to need a fucking shovel. She's going to need to dig up London Fields. Lizzyboo is so pretty and keen and affectionate and straightforward that I'll have to come up with a really world-class excuse.

Got some good stuff about Guy's crush on her. Then I said I had to go home and work on my novel.

No word yet from Missy Harter, or from Janit Slotnick, or indeed from Barbro McCambridge. The minute after I Fed-Exed the first three chapters off to Hornig Ultrason (at trouncing expense) I sat there by the phone waiting for it to ring — to ring, to bounce about on its cradle, like in a cartoon. But three days now and nothing.

A terrifying night in Brixton, watching Keith's darts match at the Foaming Quart. I lay down my life or what's left of it for this lousy novel and do I get any thanks?

Pretty well every day now, at noon, I walk or drive to the tower block of Keith Talent, to take Kim off Kath's hands for an hour or two, to look after Kim — to protect and to cherish little Kim. Talent himself is rarely at home when I call. He is out cheating. He is at the Black Cross. He is in his garage, in his cave of darts. When I do run into him on these occasions he wears a hostile leer. Kath blinks up at me when I enter. She is sitting at the table with her head in her hands. I hope she will feel some benefit soon. But misery seems to have a way of making you forget what the other stuff is like, which is probably just as well, from misery's point of view, or you wouldn't put up with it. Sometimes you're down, and sometimes you're down. The rough with the rough. For worse and for worse.

'Hi,' I said as I squeezed into the kitchen (Keith having passed me wordlessly at the door).

'Oh, Sam.' She stood up — she paused. The aftermath of Keith's heavy breakfast still crowded the small table (which in turn filled the small kitchen): fat mug of cold tea, grease-furrowed plate, V-sign of cigarette butts in the dollop of brown sauce. Crazily Kath surveyed all this.

'Why don't I take Kim out.'

'Yes. That's best.'

The child raises her arms to me as I lean to take her. She got used to me very quickly. I smoothtalked her into it. She came across. I have this way with chicks. Of course I don't want anything from her. Though the tales she could tell . . .

I carry her to the Memorial Park — to the park, with its punks and drunks. I'm not really worried. The adult-and-infant combination is a relatively safe one; you don't get bothered, or not much anyway. Baby-related muggings have fallen off. The guy bending over the pram whispering threats with a broken beer bottle in his fist — now this is not a popular kind of guy. In slum-and-plutocrat Great Britain, so close to the millennium, he isn't popular, he is doubly unpopular; no one's behind him. Sentences reflect this. It's not worth it, for what the average mum has in her purse. So it doesn't happen. Or not much anyway.

What impresses and stays with me is the power of the baby's face —
the power.
It is knit tight, like a tautly prominent navel, chockful of possibilities, tumescent with potentiae, as if the million things that could happen to her, the essences of the million Kims there might one day be out there, are concentrated in this powerful face . . . But I wonder. Nicola's face is powerful too. The very thinness of the skin that coats her closed eyes is powerful. Perhaps with her the effect is reversed or diametrical. Because Nicola's face, Nicola's life, contains only one future, fully shaped, fully designed, toward which she now moves at steadily climbing speed.

So the municipal gardens, the
harijan
flowers, the pastel totems of the playground (how do we interpret them?), the untouchable youths in their spikes, the meteorology of the sky, the casteless old wedged into benches, and the baby with her sweet breath and faceted roundnesses, as tender as an eyeball. You wouldn't want to touch her. You wouldn't want anything to touch her.

W
EARING HOUSECOAT AND slippers, and carrying her mail in her armpit, Hope Clinch strode out on to the terrace, mechanically pausing to chuck a potted plant under the chin. The plant was an amaryllis, and had cost considerably more than the average weekly wage; but it wasn't thriving. It wasn't working. Soon it would have to be returned — by Melba or Phoenix, or by Lizzyboo, perhaps — to the dishonest florist for replacement or repair.

She sat at the table and opened her first letter. Looking down, she said, 'I just talked with Melba. About Lady Barnaby. Disaster.'

Guy had looked up from his crossword. He was still wearing his white cotton nightie. Guy often slept in a nightie. Hope had found this endearing for a while, fifteen years ago. 'Oh yes? Tell,' he said.

Beyond their garden lay the communal green, moistly overgrassed in every season — but not in this season. Guy knew what female dog pee did to lawns; and it seemed to him that a bitch the size of a behemoth might have caused those swathes of brown. But dogs were not allowed in the communal garden. It was just the September sun that was doing it. The sun! Guy shut his eyes and wondered how something ninety million miles away could turn his lids into a Hockney swimming-pool awash with fresh blood . . . Out on the lawn, like milkmaids at work, small children played among the fat guards and fatter nannies, who lowed about them, urging caution. Marmaduke was not to be seen there. He was in his nursery, trying out a new au pair. They listened to his hearty ululations — Tarzan, as it might be, showing Jane how it went on the lianas — flinching every few seconds to the sound of some egregious collision. Guy smiled promptingly at his wife's bowed head. The marriage was there (breakfast being its chief sacrament), like the crockery on the awkward table, waiting to be invaded.

The Yugoslavia trip,' said Hope, opening another letter and reading it. 'She arrived in the middle of the night. For some reason the plane went via Oslo. The next morning she was cleaned out by the cabbie who drove her to the hotel. Only it wasn't a hotel. You expect a toilet but this was ridiculous: some kind of barracks full of mad thugs.' Hope opened another letter and started reading it. 'At this point she completely flipped. No one knows quite what happened next but she was found a couple of days later wandering around Zagreb airport without any bags and without her
glasses,
which I feel kind of badly about.'

'Marmaduke.'

'Marmaduke. Someone at the consulate shipped her back. She got home and the house had been stripped bare. Melba says there's nothing there except floorboards and paint. Then she apparently passed out. But luckily she came to on the stairs just before the boiler exploded. It's still under a ton of water over there.'

'How frightful. Is there anything we can do? Where is she now?'

'In hospital.'

'Insurance?' asked Guy doubtfully.

Hope shook her head. 'She's wiped out.'

'My God. So her marvellous young man –'

'Wasn't so marvellous.'

'. . . You can't trust anyone these days,' said Guy.

'You never could,' said Hope.

Now here came Marmaduke. Defeatedly watched by the stunned au pair (her presence diluted to a mere reflection in the glass), the little boy erupted through the double doors. Although Guy and Hope responded with grooved swiftness, Marmaduke was not to be denied. Surmounting Guy's challenge he harpooned himself face first into the table leg before Hope had a chance to lift the tray. Then the world rocked: broken glasses, chipped china, childblood, spilt milk, spilt milk.

Saddened as he was by Lady Barnaby's recent reverses, Guy easily succeeded in keeping a sense of proportion. After all, when it came to tales of extremity in strange lands — disorientation, shelterlessness, blinded decampment — he couldn't help but feel he was playing in a higher league. Well, not playing, just watching: a pale spectator among tens of thousands, high up in the bleachers.

All week he had been driving into Cheapside, quite early, and closeting himself in his office with his coffee and his four telephones. He dialled. His voice knew the circularizing tones of charity, the quiet cajolery of good works. Bad works are all about money. So are good works. But of bad works he was ignorant: and he knew it. Of course, you said the word Indochina and at once you caught the sound of breath escaping through telephone teeth — right through the receiver's helix and into your own inner ear. 'Forget about everywhere else,' said his contact at Index, with a brio to which Guy was not yet attuned. 'Forget about West Africa and Turkmenistan. This is the shitstorm.' He'd had no idea. Nobody had any idea. It seemed that there was no
idea.
Faced with this, and confusedly feeling the need of some bold and reckless act, Guy went out and bought some cigarettes, and sat there awkwardly smoking as he dialled.

Why was he doing this? Like everybody else, Guy had little appetite for the big bad news. Like everybody else, he had supped full of horrors, over breakfast, day after day, until he was numb with it, stupid with it, and his daily paper went unread. The expansion of mind, the communications revolution: — well, there had been a contraction, and a counter-revolution. And nobody wanted to know. . . Why am I doing this? he wondered. Because it's good? Thought — consecutive thought — ended there. In his head Guy had rescreened his lunch with Nicola so many times that the film was worn thin, and pocked with the crud and curds and queries that tarnish tired eyes. He could see her throat, her moving lips. On the soundtrack her voice remained virginally clear, with its foreignness, its meticulous difficulty. She said she had Jewish blood in her. When Guy tried to pinpoint the attraction he thought not of her breasts, not of her heart, but of her blood, and her blood's rhythmic tug on him. What could you do with someone's blood? Smell, it, taste it, bathe in it? Make love to it.
Share it.
Perhaps you could put this down to protectiveness, which always contains something fierce, something animal. Was that what he was after? Was he after her blood?

Though planetary and twentieth-century, and entirely typical of both, the events in Indochina demanded to be thought of astronomically. To begin with, they were obscure, distant, they were deepest black. The Proxy War had put a curve on things when both sides agreed, or when 'both sides agreed', to play their game in the dark. This condition they quickly brought about by a declared policy, much publicized in the press and on television, of killing all journalists. No longer could the foreign correspondents hop from foxhole to foxhole with their MEDIA tags in their hatbands and then telex their stories over cocktails from the garden rooftops of scorched Hiltons. In response, rogue camera crews chartered jeeps and choppers; malarial war-freaks climbed out of opium bunks and firmed up their stringerships; one-legged photographers with lumps of Ho's shrapnel still lodged in their brainpans stood on border roads with their thumbs in the air. They went in, but they didn't come out. Guy smoked and flinched and rubbed his eyes, and wondered whether anyone could really bear to watch.

What came out came out slowly or wrongly or weakly, like tired light. On the one hand the monosyllabic affirmatives or distracted giggling of survivors thrown clear by the crash or the blast; on the other, the unsleeping testimony of the satellites, triumphantly affectless, seeming to exclude everything human from their diagrams of the dead — corpse fields, skull honeycombs. This was a new kind of conflict;
spasm war
and
unfettered war
and, unavoidably,
superwar
were among the buzzwords;
proxy war
because the world powers seeded it and tested weapons systems in it and kept each other busy with it; but the money was coming from Germany and Japan (and China?), and other brokers of the balance of power. 'If you want to get an idea of what's happening there,' said his informant at the Red Cross, 'read an account of what the Khmer Rouge did in the Seventies and multiply everything by ten. Body count. Area involved. No. Square it. Cube it.' Guy did just that. And here was the astronomical. Because if millions were circling in the vortex of war, then other millions needed to know whether they were living or dead, and if there were millions who cared for the millions who cared, then pretty soon . . . pretty soon . . .

He had never felt more alive.

He had never felt happier — this was the ugly truth. Or not for many, many years. He came home in the evening to his wife's surprised approval (he suddenly had value after his day at the office — novelty value, as well as the usual kind) and to Marmaduke's derisory atrocities. He fixed Hope's drink and took it to her at the dressing-table and kissed her neck, his mind on other things, other necks. It was drunk-making stuff all right, an excitation that sparkled the way her tonic did when it hit the ice. She patted his office cheek and smoothed his calculator brow, confident that he was out there making money. And what was he really doing? Guy had need of the great chaos he had tuned into. Feel the tug of mass misery and you want more — more misery, more mass. You have to get addicted. No wonder everybody on the sidelines had the urge to paint it black.

'Tough day?'

'Not really.'

'Poor you.'

Poor them. But good, good! His motives didn't bear inspection, not for an instant. He thought (when he thought) that he was learning something about life, which always meant death. He thought he had a chance to do real good. His motives didn't bear inspection. Nor did they get any. Love, of all things, saw to that — modern love, in some wild new outfit. I've got enough now, surely to God. Call her tomorrow then, he thought, as he zipped Hope up.

Guy was coming along nicely. He was doing real good.

Lost, then, in his new mood of exalted melancholy, Guy climbed the stairs to Nicola Six's door — past the prams and bikes, the brown envelopes, the pasted dos-and-don'ts of parenthood, citizenship, community. He paused halfway up, not for rest but for thought. You know of course that it's a myth or half-truth about the inexorable prosperity of the Asian subculture in the United States. The first wave of mostly middle-class Vietnamese — they did well, right enough. But the next lot, the Cambodians: just imagine. The last time you saw your house it was a hundred feet off the ground and in flames, with your mother and your father and your six children inside it. You'd need time to recover from that. After that, you'd want a rest before taking on America. And presumably the next batch, if it ever comes, the next batch will be even more . . . As Guy went on up he heard somebody coming down: a sniffling, shuffling figure, with heavy boots. Guy stood to one side on what he assumed to be the penultimate landing, his chin abstractedly upraised. And all this was on top of the crisis, or rather
beneath
the crisis, under its wing. This idea of the delegation of cruelty . . .

'Hello, mate.'

'– Keith . . . Sorry, I'm half-asleep.'

'I know the feeling.’

But Keith did look different. And it wasn't just the lion tamer getup and the freshly blowdried hair. Actually these extras seemed to go against the new slant of his presence, which was one of furtiveness or humility. He stood on restless legs with his head bowed, clutching some sort of bathroom attachment to his chest — and a book, a paperback. Neither was Guy empty-handed. He couldn't deliver two grateful refugees, but he had a present with him, a present for Nicola Six. He had thought long and fervently about this present. What could he buy her? A Titian, a yacht, a diamond as big as the Ritz. Guy had wanted to buy her the earth, but he had bought her a globe. Not the old kind: the new kind. A literal globe, the planet as seen from space, heavy, mysterious, baby-blue in its shawls. He held it, like Hamlet.

Suddenly Keith shrugged and wagged his chin sideways and said, 'I just been — helping out.'

'Yes of course. That's what I'm here for too.'

'Same difference.'

'I'm trying to help her trace someone. Without much luck, as it happens.'

'Still. You do what you can.'

'Exactly.' Guy looked at Keith now with pitying fondness. Poor Keith . . .

'Oh yeah. You coming tonight?'

'I'm sorry?' said Guy.

Keith stared at him with full hostility. 'To the darts.'

'The darts, yes. Of course. Absolutely.'

'BMW. Mercedes 190E. 2.5—16. Uh, it's up there, mate.'

And Keith shuffled and sniffed and hurried off down the stairs — with that
book
under his arm . . .

Guy called her name in the passage, and advanced with respectful evenness of tread. The sitting-room was empty. It was also much as he had imagined: interesting disarray beneath a lowish ceiling (tall Guy warily sensed a certain pressure on his crown), a teacup here, a foreign magazine there, past-their-best tulips collapsing over the sides of a glass bowl (as if seasick), a certain indolence in the furnishings, the usual pistol-grips and worn webbing of too much video equipment (his own house was a Pinewood of these inexpensive toys), the tobacco tang of thoughtful bohemianism. On the table beneath the window, by the wicker chair, an unfinished letter. . . 'Nicola?' he said again, with a light shake of the head. Her voice, somewhat muffled, responded from the neighbour room with a patent untruth: she said she wouldn't be a second. He glanced uncensoriously at his watch, and stood to attention with his hands behind his back. After a while he moved to the window and looked backwards over his shoulder and then sideways at the writing pad. 'Dear Professor Barnes,' he read. 'Thank you for sending me Professor Noble's paper, which I'm obliged to say I found misleading and shoddily argued. I take his word for it that artists often have sexual relations with their subjects. One is amply persuaded that such things happen. But his anecdotes can have no useful bearing on the representational argument. I was on pins, wondering when he was going to say that Rembrandt's portraits of Saskia — or, perhaps, Bonnard's of Marte — were "suffused" with sexual knowledge, or reflect on the painter's yearning to "get inside" his sitter, or recliner. Such coarse speculation is where this line always leads. To lend a personal note,' read Guy, completing the page. His hand reached out to turn it. But then he desisted with a soft shudder. She knows about art, he thought bracingly. And a beautiful hand: not as strictly elegant as Hope's, rounder, more expressive, with something of Lizzyboo's feminine corpulence. It abruptly occurred to Guy that he had never done anything like this before. He had never been alone with a woman of his own age in the place where she lived, and in secret, without Hope knowing. Nicola's sitting-room was 'much as he had imagined'. What, exactly,
had
he imagined? He could claim, perhaps, that his reveries were chaste. But his dreams went their own way. Well, he thought, we can't help dreaming what we dream. Guy swept his gaze round to the bookcase and approached it with brisk relief. He took out
The Rainbow
and looked at its opening page. What was it Keith had with him? Ridiculous. Slipped my mind.
Villette? The Professor? Shirley?
No, much more obvious but not
Jane Eyre . . .