London Fields (37 page)

All her conscious life she had loved the dinosaurs (to this day she often imagined herself as a kind of moll tyrannosaurus, greedy, savage, faithless, yet still fought-over often and atrociously, and living for eighty million years). What killed
them
?
She had the theories cold. An exploding star that drenched the globe in cosmic rays. A meteorite shower that kicked up a coating of dust. A new breed of baby stealers, oviraptors, velociraptors. Or, more bathetically, and more hauntingly, the notion that evolutionary success, a billennium of good living, rendered them incapable of propagation. In other words (she put it), they got too fat to fuck. She played with the idea, trying to combine it with the death of love, and imagined the heavy richness of a distempered paradise, where something was not quite right; and here the ancient creatures slowly sensed that their world had begun to fall away. They smelled the death-ubiquity. It wasn't just that they were all too fat and generally out of shape. They weren't
in the mood.
And so beyond the fuming purple of the mire and beneath the blood-boltered sky, in a forest full of snoozing teeth and spikes, still shattered and reeking from another day of chase and snatch and chomp, on a low branch one lovebird turns to the other and says (she translated from the pterodactylese): 'Leave me alone. The scales have fallen from my eyes. You're a monster. Leave me alone. I'm not
in the mood
.'

Their story was over. More than that, their reality was concluded. You can feel it coming. Women would of course be expected to soldier on a little longer, with their biological imperative and so on, and the gentle feeling for children would naturally be the last thing to disappear, but women would never get very far with lovelessness and they too would weaken in the end. Nicola used to think (not often, and long ago) that even she might have been saved by love. Love was Plan B. But it never happened. She could attract it, she could bring love in, modern love anyway: she could make a man feel he was at last really living, she could give his world high colour — for a couple of months. But she couldn't generate it, she couldn't send love out. Not even kitten love, curled and purring, with kitty smile. And if love was dead or gone then the self was just self, and had nothing to do all day but work on sex. Oh, and hate. And death.

Keith coughed outside the bathroom door. This cough of Keith's started out as a butler's discreet reminder but quickly developed into a ragged diphtheria of barks and snarls. While it raged, while it wrecked itself on the other side of the wall, Nicola had plenty of time to take up the shower attachment and rinse her breasts, her belly, her deep backside, to pat herself down with a wide volume of towel, to take up position by the door in her pink bathrobe, and wait. He wouldn't want to face her. Sad animal, having sinned singly. Now he was wishing that he hadn't done it. In ten minutes he would be wanting to do it again.

'Are you all right?'

Keith gave a cough like a full stop.

'Off you run then. There's a present for you. On the table there.'

'. . . This?'

'It's a briefcase.'

'Looks . . . It's more like kind of a
satchel.
'

'Never mind. It's full of money.'

She opened the door a single notch, no greater distance than its own thickness. Just the lightest touch of force fields, the white steam and pink towelling and rosy flesh escaping like draught into the gloom of the passage: not much solider, in fact, than their congress of moments before, with her electronic presence meeting whatever issued from Keith's eyes. But still he looked up now in temporary terror from his nosebag of notes. His downturned face seemed adolescent, even childish. If she had yanked the door open and stepped out to confront him, he might have cringed, collapsed — he might have unravelled completely.

'Appreciate it,' he said. 'Genuinely appreciate it.'

'My pleasure.'

'And uh, loyal tape, Nicola. Quality. They ought to give you an Oscar.'

She paused and said, 'What should we call it, Keith?'

'Uh. Hang about. "Bobby. . ." Uh. Wait. "Bobby. . ." It's coming. "Bobby . . . on the Beat." There you are. "Bobby on the Beat."'

'Very good, Keith.'

'Or just 'Tithead".'

'"Tithead", Keith?'

'It's what you call them. The hat.'

'I see.' The plastic hat had cost £3.50 from the toyshop in Kensington Park Road. Everything else had come out of her actress trunk. How many other outfits could she find in there? Smouldering barrister. Lewd prison wardress. Had there ever been any lady executioners? A steaming Amazon, maybe, with lifted
panga.
She said, 'Always bring the satchel with you when you come to see me. Spend the money. There's lots more: it's all Guy's. Express yourself with it. Remember what
kind
of money it is, Keith. Get some new clothes. Accessories for your car. Relax with a few drinks. Clear your mind completely and concentrate on one thing. Which is?'

Keith nodded grimly. 'My darts.'

'Your darts.'

'Ton-forty,' said Keith. 'Maximum. Bull checkout. Sincerity finishing.'

With satchel and toolbag Keith came carefully down the front steps. He halted. He adjusted his belt. He peered downwards at his zipper. He laughed loosely. Keith was in fact sustaining a mild attack of
esprit de I'escalier.
'Filth', he thought. Yeah. Would have been best. Just call it 'Filth'. Blimey. He looked up, back over his shoulder: the high windows burning in the low sun. Keith made a face. The face of a man recalling pain. But soon his violently buckled features resolved themselves into a forgiving sneer. Whistling, whistling piercingly (some sentimental ballad), Keith started forward, opened the garden gate, and headed for the heavy Cavalier.

Behind and to the right, flanked by flaking pillars in a doorway further up the dead-end street, Guy watched him go.

I receive a quite fantastically offensive letter from Mark Asprey. I've read it eight or nine times now and I still can't believe what he's trying to do to me. On Plaza notepaper:

I paced the room. I paced the room on my new
shtetl
legs — my twanging pool-cue legs. I tore at my hair.
What
hair? I phoned the Handicraft Press. Oh, the fearsome blast I would give Steve Stultifer. No answer. It was three a.m. over there. 'A poignant charm', Asprey goes on,

Of course, I knew that sales of my book were modest. But this is a savage blow. And the reviews were good. Both of them. And they printed so few — I mean, they can't have sold
any at all.

There goes my confidence. I could feel it leaving. I could even
hear
it: it rushed out the door and whistled through the street. Until this morning I was, as they say, up and down about this project of mine. Half the time I mentally polished my Pulitzer acceptance speech. The other half I planned incendiary suicide with
The Murderee
in my arms.

Let me soberly state that I don't think my book is really prizewinning material. Though the panel might feel differently about it if they knew it was true.

Christ, it's only just occurred to me: people are going to imagine that I actually sat down and made all this stuff up.

For now I devote myself to the small concerns. I go where even I feel huge and godlike.

My new project: teaching Kim Talent to crawl. I am her crawling coach. Kim and I are really working on her crawling. Crawl, crawl, crawl. And it isn't easy, in Keith's joke pad. I wait until Kath is asleep or out pacing the walkways with the alcoholic housewives, the tranqued mums, the bingoid single parents. I shove at the squat armchair until most of it is wedged into the hallway. Then I lay out a towel on the floor and plonk Kim down in the middle of it. I scatter rattles and squeaky toys at an inviting distance from her nose. In training shoes, in tracksuit bottoms (with my stopwatch and my steroids), I cheer her on from the touchline. Come on, Kim. You can do it, baby. Get out there and
crawl.

With tiny grunts and pants, with sublime patience and resolve, she squirms and edges and inches. The expression she wears is one of demure audacity. Do you really want to see something? Well watch this! Watch that!
I'll
show you . . . On she shoves and shoulders. She licks her lips. On she inches and edges. And what happens? She just goes backward. And not very far. How like life. How like writing. All that effort, and the result is just a small minus. She starts to frown and wince. She starts to see that it's a poor deal (and no one gave her fair warning). She starts to cry.

After some comfort, some juice, some deep breaths, she is ready to go again. She nods her head: she is ready. I cheer her on from the margin of the towel, as her frowning face recedes from the rattles, the squeaky toys. As her face recedes from me. Next door, the mother rests. Teaching Kim to crawl.

Kath doesn't let me change her any more. I wonder why. Some Irish imperative, as the child's first birthday approaches? I keep thinking I see bruises, welts, in the shadowy cracks of her Babygro.

Yesterday I arrived on the walkway, and stood there fidgeting with the key, wondering if I'd need it. I peered in through the window. Keith at the table, humped over his tabloid. Kath at the sink. And Kim on the floor, in her bouncer chair. But she wasn't bouncing. And she wasn't sleeping. Her shiny head was bowed; the shape of the shoulders . . . I thought of that terrible phrase. And I thought: Kim has what Kath has, what Keith has. It is called failure to thrive.

I hope I'm just imagining this. I'm waiting for the pain and it hasn't come. Slizard is amazed it hasn't come.

I'm wired for pain. My eyes are wired for pain.

Vladimir Nabokov, encouragingly, was a champion insomniac. He believed that this was the best way to divide people: those who slept; those who didn't. The great line in
Transparent Things,
one of the saddest novels in English: 'Night is always a giant but this one was especially terrible.'

Fee fie fo fum, goes the giant. How did VN ever slay the thing? I wander. I write. I wring my hands. Insomnia has something to be said for it, in my case. It beats dreaming.

God knows why but I've started
Crossbone Waters.
Travel. Borneo. Handsome Marius Appleby and the glamorous photographer who's been assigned to him, Cornelia Constantine. It's an awful little piece of shit. But there's the adventure, and the love interest, and I have to admit I'm hooked.

Now wait a minute. How did Asprey know about me holing up at Heathrow? I don't think I said anything to Incarnacion (with whom he is in constant and sinister touch). I don't think I've ever said anything to Incarnacion, except 'Really?' and 'You don't say?'

So who does that leave? Perhaps, in a sense, I'm being wise after the event —though 'wise'might be putting it a bit high. Just now I was sitting at his desk next door. I noticed, on the expanse of green leather, some new displays of trinketry, the altered disposition of the mailstacks. I imagined Asprey pottering here, with his plumed pen and his calculator. Idly I reached out and tried the locked drawer. It opened smoothly to my jerk.

Notes, letters, cards. Photographs.

Well, there's no longer any very pressing need for me to ask Nicola to show me what she looks like in the nude. But I think I'll ask her anyway.

'It's too adorable,' said Nicola. 'And did you both have little animal nicknames?'

'You have to realize', I said, 'that I was a tremendous sweetie before all this started.'

'Let me guess. You were Daddy Bear, and she was your little cublet.' 'I'm not saying.' 'Little meals on trays. Warmed slippers.' 'Me correcting proofs. Her reading manuscripts. Happiness.' 'And she always did what Daddy Bear said?' 'Not at all. In fact she was on the bossy side. I used to call them the Hitler Sisters. Her and Page. Another tomboy. They were always pouring with blood from some fight they'd just had. Like you and MA.' 'I'm getting the picture. You were Goody Two-Shoes. And she was little Miss Bossy Boots. What did she look like? It's too adorable.'

I got to my feet and went and stood over her. I produced the wallet photograph, Missy eight years ago, brightly lit: the tidal drifts of down from temple to jawbone.

'Mmm,' she said. 'Still. You must have hardly dared to pinch each other, in case you woke up. To the twentieth century.'

I couldn't resist it. I produced the second photograph and held it up to my face. 'What kind of camera did Mark Asprey use? One with a time delay? Or did you employ some sniggering third party?'

Nicola took a time delay before she said, Time delay.' And she said it softly.

I said, 'No dreaming here. Plenty of pinches. Fully awake.'

She flinched as I tossed it on to her lap. She straightened, and said, 'I suppose you and Missy never went in for any of that.'

'Actually we did try spanking once. It hurt. My hand, I mean. I even said, "Ow." '

'I can see it does look rather ugly,' she said, and her long fingers began to tear. 'It was what he liked. And one will do things for . . .'

'Yes. Well you did say you were "stupid" for him.'

'For a genuine artist.'

'Come on. It's shit. Oh come
on
.'

'I absolutely don't agree. There's a purity in his work that reminds one of Tolstoy.'

'Tol
stoy
?' I just couldn't take this. It was like the world. It was like fundamentalism. The planet was insane. The truth didn't matter. As I picked up my coat I said, 'Did you see him? When he was here.'

She made no reply.

'It's over between you two. Isn't it?'

'Some things are never over.'

There is a woman who stands in the middle of the Tavistock Road, for an hour every evening, just after dusk, with her head up and her arms outstretched: cruciform.

Not old, not shabby, not stupid-looking, she stands right there in the middle of the street. She smiles fixedly at the oncoming cars, which slow down as they pass, and the drivers stare — but few shout out. Actually, it is terrible, this smile of hers: martyred, trusting, admonitory. Why doesn't somebody come and drag her off somewhere? One drunk is all it would take. When you drive by, and especially if you approach her from the rear, you always think of car metal meeting female flesh and blood, the forced and instant rearrangements of collision, with flesh and blood going where it suddenly has to go. She's perfect for the book, but I can't think of any good way of getting her in.

She's out there now. I can see her from the window. Why don't they come and take her away? Oh, why don't they
come
?