London Fields (30 page)

'Bingo,' said Keith.

Little did they know that the place they were about to burgle — the shop, and the flat above it — had already been burgled the week before: yes, and the week before that. And the week before that. It was all burgled out. Indeed, burgling, when viewed in Darwinian terms, was clearly approaching a crisis. Burglars were finding that almost everywhere had been burgled. Burglars were forever bumping into one another, stepping on the toes of other burglars. There were burglar jams on rooftops and stairways, on groaning fire-escapes. Burglars were being burgled by fellow burglars, and were doing the same thing back. Burgled goods jigged from flat to flat. Returning from burgling, burglars would discover that they had been burgled, sometimes by the very burglar that they themselves had just burgled! How would this crisis in burgling be resolved? It would be resolved when enough burglars found burgling a waste of time, and stopped doing it. Then, for a while, burgling would become worth doing again. But burglars had plenty of time to waste — it was all they had plenty of, and there was nothing else to do with it—so they just went on burgling.

'Sonofabitch!' said Thelonius.

'What?'

'Torch onna blink!'

They thrashed around for a while by the light of Keith's Ronson. Thelonius found the till, smashed it open and triumphantly wrenched out a fistful of luncheon vouchers.

'LVs, man. Sonofabitch LVs.'

'Wait a minute,' said Keith, with a sweep of his dark-adapted eyes. 'I know this place. It's just a fucking corner shop. There's no
videos.
All they got here's a load of fuckim porp pies!'

Thelonius had hoped or predicted or at any rate affirmed that the owners would not be there when they called — would, in fact, be enjoying a late holiday on the west coast of England. How was it, then, that they could hear footsteps on the floor above, and the sounds of exasperated protest? The owners, of course, had gone nowhere: much impoverished by recent burglaries, they were stopping home. Thelonius looked up. 'Joolery, man,' he said, with the sudden calm of deep inspiration. 'She dripping with joolery.' He ducked into the back room and climbed the stairs with long silent bounds. Acting on pure instinct, Keith slowly filled his pockets with cigarettes. He went to the front door and opened it, wondering what he was feeling. Down All Saints, outside the Apollo, great numbers streamed against the light. Keith stuck his head out and had a look at the shop sign. Yeah, that's right. N. Poluck, the sign said grimly. Cornish Dairy. Confectioner & Newsagent. Yeah: tabloids, packet cakes, and milk cartons. Old Polish couple ran it, with an air of great depression and disobligingness. Typical
corner
shop: never had anything that anybody might ever want. Long live CostCheck and BestSave. Keith shut the door. Then, having checked the Eat-By date on the cellophane, he ruminatively consumed a pork pie.

In the upstairs bedroom Thelonius was rattling through the oddments on the dressing-table with truly unbearable agitation. Keith had never watched Thelonius at work before. A grave disappointment, with none of that relaxed concentration you're always hoping to see. He looked around for Mr and Mrs Poluck and soon picked them out, under a heap of clothes and upended drawers, and not stirring overmuch. Thus he also ascertained that there was nothing semi-violent about this particular crime. With a clear conscience, then, Keith strode up to the trembling figure of Thelonius and did two things. He tousled Thelonius's hair; he put a cigarette in Thelonius's mouth and lit it. Thelonius took one distracted drag before jerking his head back: enough. Keith left the butt on the dressing-table, among the specks of hair-dust. Bingo, thought Keith: DNA innit. Now Mr Poluck groaned; Thelonius shouted
'Where?
'
and thumped a gleaming gym-shoe down into his cheek. 'You don't do it like that, mate,' said Keith, peering about for something you could carry water in. 'You get them both sitting up and hurt one till the other . . . You know.'

Keith had been hopeful at first. Nobody trusted banks any longer, thank God; and you could stroll out of the most improbable places with some quite decent lifesavings under your arm. But the bright dream was fading. Mr and Mrs Poluck were as tough as old boots — and as cheap. Thelonius did everything with tears of imploring rage in his eyes. What a life, eh? The exertion, the inconvenience, the unpopularity you incurred, and nothing going right any of the time. Keith had to do a bit of judicious slapping and shaking and hair-tugging. He disliked the touch of old bodies and wondered if it would be any better working with the very young. Looking round the room he felt something like bafflement or even sadness at the whole idea of human belongings: we get them in shops, then call them our own; we all had to have this precious stuff, like our own hairbrush each, our own dressing-gown each, and how soon it all looked like junk — how soon it got trampled into trash. For their part, to be fair, the Polucks did well, with no excessive complaint, seeming to regard the episode as largely routine. Keith met with, and longsufferingly endured, their stares of deep recognition, which wasn't a matter of putting a name to a face but of looking into you and seeing exactly what you were. No fun. No jewellery either. In the end they came wheezing down the stairs with a fake fur coat, a damaged TV set, a broken alarm clock and a faulty electric kettle. Then the stony light of Keith's garage and the bottle of
porno
passed through the dust to settle the crime buzz and crime flop that played on their flesh like fever.

Those on the receiving end of violent crime feel
violated
:
injury has been dealt out to them from the hidden chaos, which has shown itself briefly, and then returned to where it lives. Meanwhile, in chaos's hiding place, what happens? Rocks and shells catch and grate in neither sea nor shore, and nothing is clean or means anything, and nothing
works.

'I'm a piece of shit,' Keith whispered into his beercan. He thought of everybody else who never had to do this. Guy, Guy's wife, in endless mini-series. Shah of Iran. Tits. A rich bird: and then you're
out
of here.

The money came in four buff envelopes. They contained used fifties. Much-used fifties. Sitting in his office (with its Japanese furniture and single Visual Display Unit and clean desk), Guy offered up his delicate and increasingly emotional nostrils to a familiar experience: the scurfy smell of old money. It always struck him, the fact that money stank, like the reminder of an insidious weakness in himself. Of course, the poets and the novelists had always patiently insisted as much. Look at Chaucer's cock. Look at Dickens (Dickens was the perfect panning-bowl for myth): the old man up to his armpits in Thames sewage, searching for treasure; the symbolic names of Murdstone and of Merdle, the financier. But all that was myth and symbol, a way of saying that money could somehow be thought of as being smelly, of being scatological. It was frightfully literal-minded of money, he thought, to be actually stinking up the place like this.
Pecunia non olet
was dead wrong.
Pecunia olet.
Christ, heaven stops the nose at it . . . Guy sealed and stacked the packets. He couldn't wait to get rid of them — all this hard evidence of deception. So far, no outright lies. He fancied he had been rather clever with Richard, adopting the smug yet faintly rueful uncommunicativeness of someone settling a gambling debt. It had come naturally. But it seemed quite likely that men were just easier to deceive. Guy put the money into his briefcase and smoked half a cigarette as he contemplated — in its physical aspects only — the drive across town.

Everything was going perfectly normally or acceptably but he was finding it impossible to meet her eye. He could point his face in the right direction, and try to will himself into her looming gaze. At one juncture he made it as far as her bare shoulder before his vision went veering off to some arbitrary point on the bookcase, the carpet, his own huge shoes. Otherwise, Guy clung to the belief that he was behaving with conviction and control. The tremendous snaps of his briefcase locks seemed to underscore his worldliness, the briskness of all his dealings. This was certainly one way of doing it: you gave the money, as it were disinterestedly; and then the adult verdict. Guy laid out the envelopes on the low table, and mentioned one or two of the slight difficulties he had encountered. Directing a rictus smile towards the ceiling, he spoke, for instance, of the tenuous connexion between the endlessly malleable symbols on the display screen and the hard cash in one's hand, with all its bulk and pungency.

'Will you do me the kindness', said Nicola Six, 'of looking at me when we're talking?’

'Yes of course,' said Guy, and steered his stare into the sun of her face. 'I do apologize. I — I'm not myself.'

'Aren't you?'

With a limp hand half-hooding his eyes (it was all right so long as he concentrated on the cleft between her chin and her lower lip), and with his legs crossing and uncrossing and recrossing, Guy ventured to speak of the recent struggles of his son Marmaduke, of the successive nights in hospital, the sleeplessness, the serious thinking . . . By now Guy was staring at the bookcase again. As he began to outline the chief theme of all this serious thinking, Nicola said,

'I'm sorry to hear that your little boy's been ill. But I must say I think it's rather tactless of you to bring that up now. If not downright cruel. Under the circumstances.'

This promised something inordinate, and Guy was duly alarmed. He couldn't help feeling the pathos of her formulations (how theatrically we speak when we're moved); at the same time, he couldn't help feeling that her choice of outfit was perhaps a trifle unfortunate. Well, not 'choice': arriving several minutes early, he had caught her, she said, between her exercises and her shower. Hence the little tennis skirt or tutu or whatever it was, at the brim of her bare legs; hence the workout top, which was sleeveless. Also backless. The effect was altogether inappropriate, what with those girlish white socks she must have quickly slipped on. He looked her in the eye and said, 'Under the circumstances?'

Now it was her turn to look away. 'I see,' she said, with deliberation, 'I see that once again I am a victim of my own inexperience. It's an awful handicap. You never know what other people might reasonably have in mind.' She hugged herself, and gasped softly, and said, 'You want to go. Of course. You want to be safe again. Away from complication. I understand. May I . . . ? Before you go, may I say something?'

She stood up with her eyes closed. She came towards him, loose of body, with her eyes closed. She knelt, and folded her arms to make a pillow for her cheek on his knees, with her eyes closed. The room darkened. Guy felt that intimacy could actually kill you — that you really could die from all this pressure on the heart.

'It's sad, and ridiculous, but I make no apologies, I suppose. We can't help wanting what we want. Can we. It may have sometimes seemed that I singled you out for a purpose. You were to take me out of my life. Take me to the other side. Through love. Through sexual love. But really my plan went deeper than that. I'm thirty-four. I'll be thirty-five next month. The body ticks. I . . . I wanted to bear your child.'

'But this is too much,' said Guy, sliding his knees out from under her and trying to clamber himself upright. 'I'm speechless. I can't breathe either! I think it —'

'No. Go. Go at once. And take your money with you.'

'It's yours. And good luck.'

'No. It's yours.'

'Please. Don't be silly.'

'Silly? Silly? I can't accept it.'

'Why?'

'Because it's
tainted.
'

How incredibly lucky that everyone was at the hospital. Let's hear it for hospitals. And for asthma, and for eczema, and for infant distress. By the time he got home, Guy was in no condition to dissimulate, to act normal, whatever that was. He was in hospital shape himself, cottony, lint-like, as if his torso were just the bandage on an injured heart. In the second drawing-room he threw off his jacket and watched himself in the mirror as he raised the brandy bottle to his lips. Then a cold shower, and the welcome coldness of the sheets . . . How, exactly, had the fight started? It started when she threw something at him, something so small that he barely saw its passage or felt its impact on his chest. Then she was on her feet and thrusting the envelopes at him, and he held her slender wrists, and then the staggered collapse backwards on to the sofa — and there they were, in clothed coition with their faces half an inch apart. For a moment Guy could feel the hard bobble at the centre of everything.

'What did you throw at me?' he said.

'A Valium.'

He snorted quietly. 'A
Valium
?'

'A Valium,' she said.

With relief, almost with amusement, Guy readjusted his shocked body; and even his peripheral vision managed to renounce all but the quickest glint of her leggy disarray. Soon he found himself lying on his back with Nicola's head resting on his chest, his nostrils tickled by her hair as she wandered weepily on. Here she was giving him the detailed confession: how she had hoped to step with him into a world of physical love; how they might, if he, the perfect man, agreed, and after 'a lot of practice', try to make a baby; how thereafter she would be content if he looked in once a week, or perhaps twice, to play with his little daughter and (the suggestion was) to play with his little daughter's mother. This dream, of course, she now cancelled and cursed . . . 'A lot of practice': there was something pitiably callow about the phrase. There was plainly something else about it too; callow or not so callow, the words entrained a physical reaction, one that tended to undermine his murmured demurrals and tender mewings. Guy hoped she hadn't noticed the ignoble billyclub which had now established itself athwart his lap. And when she accidentally rested her elbow on its base (turning to ask if this was all just sentimental tosh), Guy was glad he couldn't see his own archly agonized smile as he slid out from under her.