London Fields (27 page)

'It's filthy.'

'Persistent low atmospheric pressure innit.'

By moving his head a centimetre to the left, Keith indicated that Guy might join him. As Guy came forward he accidentally stepped on the surprising solidity of Clive's tail. Clive lifted his chin from the carpet and snarled or swore at Guy wearily.

'Sorry. Well,' said Guy. 'Haven't seen you for a while.'

Keith nodded. This was true. And what of it? Keith took the trouble to point out that he was the sort of bloke who had places to go and people to see. He wasn't the sort of bloke who just sat around getting pissed all day in the Black Cross on Portobello Road. No. Keith's restless nature demanded variety. This week, for instance (it laboriously emerged), he had been sitting around getting pissed all day in the Skiddaw on Elgin Avenue. But in fact Keith did look pleasantly surprised to be in the Black Cross. Why, Guy didn't know.

'Few drinks. Relax.' Keith suddenly refocused and said, 'Whew, mate, you don't look too clever. No. You definitely do look overly brill. It must be going round. I tell you who else ain't in the best of elph either. Neither.'

At the sound of her name (a duosyllable in this case: for a moment it sounded like a further grammatical adjustment) Guy felt something soft exploding in the transept of his chest. His head dropped and he reached out a hand for the bar. Nicola was suffering. This was heavenly news.

'Sad little smile on its face. Like — like she was pining. Pining. Pining its little heart out.’

Guy looked up. Keith seemed to be inspecting the saloon-bar ceiling — wondering, perhaps, how many Londons of cigarette smoke had gone into its golden brown. With evident relief he now talked of other matters, and Guy thought, with a mild seizure of affection: he knows. Keith knows. He has divined it. Nicola and I — in a sense we're way above his head. But he can see what binds us (the ropes of love); and with due respect.

'Here. I got one for you.'

Guy tried to concentrate. Keith was about to tell a joke — he was already chuckling ruminatively to himself. In the past Guy had struggled rather with some of Keith's jokes. They were often reasonably mild, turning on a childish whimsicality, a lugubrious pun. Only rarely, or relatively rarely, did Keith lean forward bearing his incisors and impart some tale about a rotten haddock and the knickers of an unfortunate lady. But that could happen to you anywhere. In the billiards room at the club. In a starred restaurant in the City. And as he had just shown, despite his superficial roughness Keith had a lot more natural delicacy than many of the —

'How can you tell when your sister's having her period?'

'Um,' said Guy. He didn't have a sister. He shrugged. He said, 'I don't know.'

'Dad's cock tastes funny!'

Guy stood and stared into the tempest of Keith's laughter. This tempest, this
tormenta,
kept on coming for a very long time, until, after a series of lulls and false calms, orderly waters returned once more. Guy was smiling palely.

'Gah!' said Keith, lifting a fist to his streaming eyes. 'Dear oh dear. Well. It puts a smile on your face. And you got to keep laughing. You got to. In this life . . . Dear oh dear oh dear.'

Now Guy hung back as Keith took his new joke on a tour of the pub. Its punchline was soon ricocheting from group to group. In the damp light there was many a spray of Scotch-egg crumbs, many a dull flash of Soviet dentistry. The joke went down well in all quarters, though one or two of the older women (were they really old or only old-young?) confined themselves to a long glance of affectionate reproach. Drinking brandy, seated by the back door, and scratching his neck, Guy watched all this in his numb fever. Compliments that come second-hand are said to be the sweetest; and never in his life had Guy Clinch been so flattered. He sat there pulsing with the flattery of love. Today's rushes, in the screening-room of his mind's eye, showed nothing more than repeated scenes of reunion, breathless and unfettered reunion. Just a hug. Not even a kiss . . . Not even a hug. These rushes were like the last frames
of Incident at Owl Creek,
with the dead hero racing through the dark dreamfields, and under false skymaps, racing towards her, and racing, and racing, and getting no nearer with each heartburning surge . . . God and Pongo took Keith aside and then he left hurriedly. He tried to shovel Clive up with his foot and then leaned backwards forty-five degrees on the lead, like the last man in a tug-of-war team. Twenty minutes later, as Guy was leaving, three men filed into the saloon bar and asked for Keith; they asked the pub for Keith — as if (Guy mused fleetingly) the black cross were daubed on the door and not on the sign above, and they were telling the pub to give Keith up or to bring him out. If Keith had been trying to avoid this trio (the white-haired one sported half a dozen earrings per ear, and had the blue lips of a cold child), then Guy didn't blame him: they did look extremely tiresome.

The ceiling of Marmaduke's nursery swarmed with strange shadows, Medusa heads, beckoning goblins . . . Children love their toys, don't they. It's so obvious. But why? Why do they?

'Please
don't do that, darling,' he said.

Guy was sitting on a low chair, surrounded, like Joan of Arc, by kindling — in his case the scattered planks of a wooden train-set, together with a few torn picture-books and eviscerated teddy-bears. Turning from the wrecked mobile, Marmaduke was now 'playing' with his toy castle. It was 5.45 in the morning.

Children love to touch their toys because their toys are the only things they
can
touch: the only things they can touch freely. Man-made objects, blunted, detoxified, with pleasure possible and pain counterindicated. Or that was the idea. Marmaduke could find mortification almost anywhere. A fluffy birdling was cute enough until a child engulfed his own larynx with it.

'Milt,' said Marmaduke, without turning round. 'Big it.'

Guy looked at his watch. He went and unlocked the crammed refrigerator on the landing. He returned with a full bottle — and four whole-wheat biscuits, which the child now repulsively dispatched.

'My God,' said Guy.

'More big it,' said Marmaduke out of the corner of his mouth (its centre being occupied by the bottle). 'More big it.'

'No!’

'More big it.'

'Absolutely not!'

The teat slid from Marmaduke's lips. 'Big it. More big it. . .' Instead of raising his voice, Marmaduke lowered it: he sometimes got a far more chilling effect that way. 'Big it, Daddy. More big it . . . More big it, Daddy . . .'

'Oh all right. Say please. Say please. Say please. Say please.'

'Police,' said Marmaduke grudgingly.

Toys were symbols — of real things. That toy monkey stood for a real monkey, that toy train for a real train, and so on: in miniature. But there seemed to be a disturbing literalism abroad in Marmaduke's nursery. That toy baby elephant, for instance, pink and gauzy and five feet high, with its imperial tassels and convincing little howdah (the launchpad of many sickening falls): the baby elephant was about the size of a baby elephant. And the same sort of thing could be said for Marmaduke's howitzers and grenade-launchers and cartridge belts, not to mention all the plastic broadswords and cutlasses and scimitars —
and
his cudgels and knobsticks and battleaxes. Marmaduke's latest deployment (part of a permanent modernization programme), a DID, or Deep Interdiction Device, a pucklike boobytrap which could take out three or four toy tanks at a time, was certainly far larger than the actual contrivance now fielded by Nato. Nato. Assault Breaker. How old it all was. Though Marmaduke himself would unquestionably favour First Use. Marmaduke was a definite First-Use artist. Fight like hell for three days and then blow up the world.

The door opened. Hope stood there, in her small-hour glow. A sentinel in a white nightdress. One arm was raised, as if to hold a candle. He became aware of the sound of rain on the streets and rooftops.

'It's six.'

'He's being very good actually,' Guy whispered. The lines of his brow invited and encouraged Hope to contemplate her son, who was playing with his toy castle, methodically weakening each ridge of the outer rampart before snapping it off. Doing this caused him to grunt and gasp a good deal. Only the very old grunt and gasp so much as babies. In between (Guy thought), we strain all right yet keep holding silence.

'Upstairs.'

Upstairs on the third floor there was a room known locally as the Padded Cell. It was furnitureless and covered in three thicknesses of duvet, wall to wall, floor to ceiling. Its only irregularity was a chest-high ledge with an extra duvet and some pillows for attending adults to climb up to and throw themselves down on. Thither they carried the screaming child . . .

Outside, day was forming in terms of rain-deadened light; Guy now joined his wife between the sheets. Rolling his neck, he took one last look at the monitor: a ceiling-to-floor shot of Marmaduke silently screaming his head off in the Padded Cell. As he screamed, Marmaduke bounced skilfully on his slippered feet, trying to generate enough height for a damaging dive. Guy sank back. His wife searched him for the reliable body warmth he knew she still needed him for.

'It's our cross to bear,' she said vaguely.

Guy bent his throbbing neck and kissed her mouth, which was half-open and half-awake and tasted of dreams and fever. He lay there vigilantly, hoping and not hoping. The weak delirium of dawn, when the body is childishly tired and tender, with surprising tangs and hurts and tastes: it had happened, during shared insomnias, after summer balls, and, much longer ago, at the end of nights of soldierly study. Is
Troilus and Cressida
an anti-comedy? Explore the formation of the Special Relationship . . . He was in fact grotesquely erect: the skin down there was tugged tight as a drum. His auxiliary heart, refusing to become disused, or taken lightly. Just by pressing into the linen here one could perhaps quite easily . . .

'I'll do it,' murmured Hope, sliding from the bed in quiet animal obedience — for Marmaduke's great cries were by now of the volume and timbre that no mother could sleep through. It was morning. Today was another day.

He turned on to his back. He had this toy of Nicola in his head, oval, blue-backed, like a Victorian miniature. Symbol of the real thing. The real thing. Three brutal jolts would certainly finish it. But all kinds of considerations — including squeamishness, another kind of
amour propre,
and the thought of all the mess it would leave — combined, as always, to stay his hand.

You wouldn't want to play with it like that.

Two days later Guy did something ordinary. And then something strange happened.

He helped a blind man cross the street. And then something strange happened.

On Rifle Lane a very old blind man was standing at the zebra crossing. Rangy, propulsive, briskly strolling, Guy paused when he saw him. It was perhaps not such a common sight, not any more. One doesn't often see the blind in the streets now. One doesn't often see the very old. They stay inside. They don't come out much, not any more. Not this year.

Tall, thin, the blind man stood with blind erectness, backward-tending, as road and pavement users crisscrossed past. Something wavery in his stance suggested that he had been there for some time, though he showed no distress. In fact he was smiling. Guy strode forward. He took the blind man's blind arm. 'Would you like a hand, sir?' he asked. 'Here we are,' he said, guiding, urging. On the far kerb Guy cheerfully offered to take the blind man further — home, anywhere. Sightless eyes stared at his voice in astonishment. Guy shrugged: offer the simplest courtesy these days and people looked at you as if you were out of your mind. And then astonishment became general, for the blind man tapped his way to the nearest wall, and dipped his head, and used his eyes for something they were still good at. Tears came from them readily enough.

Guy reapproached the blind man with embarrassment and some panic.

'Leave him,' said an onlooker.

'Leave him alone, for fuck's sake,' advised another.

Guy wandered off into the rain. Hours later, at home, when his confusion and his heartbeat had started to steady, he thought of something he had read somewhere . . . about the traveller and the starving tribe. How did it go? The sun-helmeted anthropologist revisits a tribe which he had once celebrated for its gentleness. But now the tribe was starving; such food as there was went to the strong; and the strong laughed at the weak, the flailing, fading weak; and the weak laughed too. The weak laughed too, sharing in the hilarity of vanished feeling. One time, an old woman stumbled on the edge of a drop. A passing strongman — a food expert, a swaggering food champ — helped her over the edge with a kick in the rump. As she lay there, laughing, the traveller hurried forward to give comfort. And the comfort was intolerable to her. Two strokes of the hair, soft words, a helping hand:
this
was what made the woman cry. The present seemed perfectly bearable — indeed, hilarious — until you felt again what it was like when people were kind. Then the present was bearable no longer. So the old woman wept. So the blind man wept, They can take it, so long as
no one
is kind.

Guy was kind, or kind that day. It was all right for him. He had Nicola's postcard in his pocket. The suit of armour: the brave words. Any other time he might have walked right past. Love is blind; but it makes you see the blind man, teetering on the roadside; it makes you seek him out with eyes of love.

'Darling? Come and sit on my lap.'

'. . . Go way.'

'Come on. And read a book. Come and sit on Daddy's lap. There's a good boy.'

'Zap.'

'Lap. Very good!
Good
boy. Look. Food. You like food. What's that?'

'Bam.'

'Bam?. . . Spam. Sssspam. Very good. What's that?'

'Agh.'

'Egg, yes. Egg. What's that? . . . What's that? . . . We're in the garden now. What's that? What's that, darling?'

'Dick.'

'Stick. Very good. Sssstick. Now here's a flower. Say "flower" . . . Those are the petals. And this bit down here is —'