London Fields (39 page)

He threw himself into his darts. Darts was in his blood (his only patrimony, except for the darts pouch itself and the Ronson cigarette-lighter). The darts in his blood coursed through him, feeding his darts brain. A darts brain, that's what he had: darts nerve, darts sinew. A darts heart. A darts soul. Darts. 158? Two treble 20s, double 19. Or two treble 18s, bull. Darts. 149? Treble 20, treble 19, double 16 (the best double on the fucking board). Darts. 120? You just shanghai the 20: treble 20, big 20, double 20. Tops. Darts. Darts, darts, darts. Darts.
Darts.
Keith Talent: Mr Checkout. Keith Talent — the man they call the Finisher.

When not actually practising his darts (brief breaks for a
porno
or two, and a ruminative smoke, as opposed to all the non-ruminative smokes he had while actually practising), Keith pored over his darting bible:
MTD: Master the Discipline: Darts:

Yeah, thought Keith. You capitalize.

Never ask about an opponent, thought Keith. You play the darts not the man.

1620! thought Keith.

'Heritage,' Keith murmured. Following an unwonted but enticing train of thought, Keith saw himself as a key figure at the court of King Arthur, hailed initially for his darting skills, but going on to win more general acclamation for his dirty jokes, his ability to hold his ale, his frenzied wenching. Not King Keith, granted (no way), but Sir Keith, possibly. Tall-backed chairs, and a great pile of Clives by the fire. Had enough, sleep there if you like. Once a simple country lad. Of humble extraction. Sings for his supper as such. And then until the wonderful lady, with her hanky, and her fan, and her heaving bosom, takes his hand and leads him up, up, to the great tower . . . All this the girl in the dead-end street was making possible. Keith realized, as he stood there in the dusty garage, his right toe on the chalk line, exactly 7ft 9¼ ins (2.37 metres) from the board, with his darts in his hand — Keith realized that his entire face was covered in tears. Gratefully, exaltedly, he raised the cigarette to his lips: a falling teardrop — here was more marksmanship — landed on its smoking coal. But by puffing hard Keith succeeded in keeping the fire alive.

Tears at the dartboard, lachrymae at the oché: this was Keith's personal vision of male heroism and transcendence, of male grace under pressure. He remembered Kim Twemlow in the semi of last year's World Championship. The guy was in agony up there (and now Keith flinched as he saw again the tear tracks on that trex-white face), trailing four sets to nil and two legs down in the fifth. No one, not even Keith, had given him a fucking prayer. A burst gastric ulcer, they said later, brought on by a few curries and a late night out. But what does the guy do? Calls a ten-minute medical delay, sinks a few Scotches, wipes away his tears, picks up his darts — and he throws. And he throws . . . Five-four it was in the end. And the next night he only goes out there and butchers Johnny Kentish in the big one. Seven-fucking-nil. INNIT.

Kim and Keith: they were men. Men, mate. Men. All right? Men. They wept when they wept, and knew the softnesses of women, and relished their beer with laughter in their eyes, and went out there when it mattered to do what had to be done with the darts. Take them for all in all. That was what the Guy Clinches of this world would never understand. Keith had often wondered why Nicola Six was doing him all these favours. And the thing or area known as his
character
was the last place he had looked for an answer. But now (the tears, the darts, the sawdust) it all seemed possible. We're talking success. And I can handle it. A guy like Keith — and she must have sensed this — there was nothing he couldn't do, there was nothing beyond him. A guy like Keith could go all the way.

The baby saw the father in his usual chair. She made towards him. After a while she was no nearer. After a while she was no nearer. Keith stepped over her from the living-room to the bedroom. The baby wheeled around, or she tried. Keith just got further off-centre. He stepped over her from the bedroom to the bathroom. The baby wheeled again. She pressed down on her hands and looked up and inquired of him. Keith bent and picked up the heavy life (and they
are
heavy, even the slightest of them, the possibilities, the potentiae, all densely packed) and took a single stride into the middle of the kitchen.

His wife stood there in her tired light. Wordlessly Keith offered her the smiling child. Without moving his feet he leaned back on the doorjamb and watched critically as Kath prepared the bottle, fumbling and staggering every now and then, little Kim hooked awkwardly over her thin shoulder. Keith sighed. Kath turned to him with a pale flicker in her face: a request for leniency, perhaps even a smile. Well, dream husband innit, thought Keith. Loads of money suddenly. Cheerful round the house. And all this was true, except for the bit about being cheerful round the house. Keith was in a constant and unprecedented fury round the house. Everything round the house prodded and goaded him.

He sat down and began on his Boeuf Stroganoff and Four Individual Milford Flapjacks. Keith's mouth was full, and he had been drinking all afternoon, and all morning, at the Black Cross, so he seemed to say,

'You got your
boeuf
statificate on you?'

'Got my what?' asked Kath cautiously. Could it be that Keith was now complaining about her cooking, something he had never done before? She gave him what he wanted. Her hotpots and fondly spiced Irish stews had ceased unremarked about three days into their marriage.

'The bit of paper that says how old you are.'

'Not on me, no, Keith.'

He straightened a fork at her. 'When was you born then?'

'. . . Born?' said Kath, and named the year.

He stopped chewing. 'But that means you ain't even twenty-two yet! Got to be some mistake, love. Got to be . . . You know what it's like ? It's like an horror film. You know, where the bird's okay until the last five minutes. Then she's just this boiler. Suddenly she's just ash and smoke. Ash and smoke.'

Keith completed his meal in silence, with a couple of breaks for cigarettes. Then he said, 'Come on, Clive. Up you get, mate.'

The great dog climbed stiffly to its feet, one back leg raised and shivering.

'Come on, my son. Don't sit around here in this fuckin old folks' home, do we.'

Grimly, his long head resting on an invisible block, like an executionee, Clive stood facing the front door.

'No way. We're off.' He looked at his wife and said, 'Where? Work. In the correct environment.' He extended an indulgent knuckle to the baby's cheek, and then added, with perhaps inordinate bitterness, 'You just don't comprehend about
my
darts, do you. What my darts means to me. No conception.' His eyebrows rose. His gaze fell. He shook his head slowly as he turned. 'No . . .
conception.
'

'Keith?'

Keith froze as he opened the door.

'Would you give her a bottle when you come in?'

The shoulders of Keith's silver leather jacket flexed once, flexed twice. 'Ask me no questions,' he said, 'and I'll tell you no lies.'

Down on the street Clive lent his lumpy cooperation as Keith hauled him into the front passenger seat of the heavy Cavalier. So they weren't walking, not tonight. The dog could already taste the moist carpet of the loved pub, his aromatic lair in the corner beneath the table, the place that smelled of many things but mostly his own archaeological deposits, his drooling growls, his whimpering sleep, his maturity, his manhood, the distant fluxes of his distant dog days. Clive had spent about two years of his life in this agreeable spot: dog years, too, seven times longer, or quicker, than the human reckoning. Now, before they got there, Clive had reconciled himself to a chilly wait of ten or fifteen minutes, alone, on the front seat. But he could handle it.

Like a dog itself the car lumbered through the lampless streets, on snuffling treads, with yellow eyes, heading for Trish Shirt's.

While Keith drove, Guy showered. With costly inerrancy the bubbled pillar of water exploded on his crown; below, supplementary waist-high jets also sluiced his thighs, his insubstantial backside; and his great feet slapped about in the twirling wash. It's the Coriolis force that makes water spin like that; in the southern hemisphere it spins the other way, clockwise; and on the equator it doesn't spin at all. Guy looked down through the tempest, through the privatized prisms: yes, the bodybuilder was back. Like Terry. It had returned, recurred,
craning
into being, dumb and hopeful. The sheep look up. He had had this tumescence now, it seemed to him, for almost a month. And it was the
same
tumescence, not a series of new ones. In this respect it resembled Marmaduke's tantrums or screaming fits, which could be seen as essentially the
same
tantrum or screaming fit: twenty months old and beginning on the day he was born. Tumescence and tantrum alike spoke eloquently of mysterious pain. It hurt now, for example. Just as Marmaduke hurt now (hear him holler). It hurt a lot all the time. For the past few days Guy's groin had entertained an ache of steady severity; it seemed to drift or cruise about in his lower systems, variously snagging itself in his spine, his scrotum, his guts. Chainmailed in money, in health (he felt fine), in caution, Guy had never had much to do with
pain.
Except that shiner: pure instinct
—
the dear fist. How could pain ever find him? So in a way he welcomed and honoured it, the pain. It was like the pain in his heart, in his throat; it was love, it was life. He didn't want to touch it, the pain, didn't want to disturb or molest it. No. You wouldn't want to touch it.

And now it juddered before him like a vacated diving-board as he strode from the shower to the billowcloud of the Turkish towel, and he tented it tenderly in white cotton shorts, and dressed the pain quickly, and looked for a way out of the house on his taut leash, past the quiet wall of his wife's contempt — a contempt not doubled but squared or cubed by the presence of the sister, silently eating.

'Is the milk on?' said Hope.

By averting her eyes a quarter of a degree, Hope might have seen for herself that the child's bottle was indeed warming, like a missile in the silo of its Milton. But this was an expression of her higher responsibility (she was measuring medicines): so might the brain surgeon tell the lab char to give her mop a good squeeze.

'Yes,' said Guy. 'The milk's on.'

On the steps, the doublefronted house looked down on him, proudly — the masterpiece, the swelling arsenal of negentropy. All around the pressure was gathering, in pounds per square inch.

Nicola Six had just got Enola Gay out of Phu Quoc and was in the process of ferrying her to Kampot when Guy said suddenly,

'So really you see quite a lot of Keith.'

'. . . Yes. He's in and out a good deal.'

'The boiler and so on.'

'The boiler. And the pipes,' said Nicola (who in truth knew even less about this kind of thing than did Keith Talent).

'Do you ever — does he ever have you go up ladders or anything like that?'

Guy crossed his legs and realigned his buttocks. He was, he realized, succumbing to a reckless agitation. Not that the evening had — on paper anyway — provided much excitement so far: a two-hour one-man play, translated from the Norwegian and performed in a Totteridge coffee-bar, about the demise of the reindeers; then a simple though no doubt perfectly nutritious meal in a vegetarian Bangladeshi restaurant in Kilburn. There had certainly been no anxiety about running into anyone he knew. But Nicola at night was a novelty, and a revelation (and in the City money was moving in strange ways and Guy felt again that the time was short. Short, short was the time) . . . The sun does many things but it's far too busy to flatter the human being with its light. Human beings do that, with
their
light. Guy didn't quite say it to himself, but human light made Nicola look experienced: the thinness or fineness of the skin round the hollows of jaw and cheekbone; the dark breadth of the mouth. And how incontrovertibly illicit were the shadows of the apartment, the folds of her silver-grey cashmere dress, the glaze of her legs. At eleven o'clock at night — at her place — love was no allegory.

'Let me think. Does he have me go up ladders. No.
He
goes up ladders.'

'He doesn't get you in corners. By the sink or something.'

'In corners . . . No I don't think so.'

'How does Keith strike you? Generally, I mean.'

She shrugged minutely and said, 'I suppose he's rather an attractive character.'

'Of course you know', Guy heard himself saying, 'that in some ways he's little better than a common criminal. Or worse.'

'Or worse? Guy, I'm shocked. I think it's so unkind to judge people by hearsay. Or by their backgrounds.'

'Just so long as you know. I mean, you haven't found anything missing. Cash. Jewellery. Clothes.'

'Clothes?'

'Scarves. Belts. He might give them to his girlfriends. He's got lots of girlfriends, you know. Underwear.'

'Whatever would Keith want with my underwear?'

'These questions will seem quite pointless to you. But has he ever got you in the airing-cupboard.'

Nicola did a slow frown and said, 'It's funny you should mention the airing-cupboard.'

Guy sat back. He stretched his neck and looked along his nose at her.

'The other day there was some sort of problem to do with the airing-cupboard. Some . . . pipe thing. Well it's awfully cramped and stuffy in there, And I was wearing my short blue thing I do my exercises in.’

'Go on,' said Guy regally.

'Well he told me to read the nipple gadget on the stopcock. Are you sure you want to — it's all rather shaming. I had to strain upwards to see the dial. I had one foot on the chair. And one on the towel rack. Rather an undignified sight. And very uncomfortable, with my legs stretched apart like that. And then . . .' She gave a secretive smile.

'What?'

'You'll never guess.'

'I think I can. Keith did something. Didn't he.'

'No no. Keith was in there, in the bathroom, testing the temperature level in the bidet. No. The towel rack slipped and I tumbled to the floor with all the sheets and everything coming down on top of me!'

Guy smiled palely.

'Fortunately I was able to collect myself completely by the time he hurried along to help. No, the real reason I need him here so much — and you're not to be cross or tease me. The real reason . . . is the little one.'

'I'm sorry?'

'O
h
. If at the other end of a great chain of ifs and buts, and far in the future and everything, if there is a future, and only when you want to, we do decide to have a baby daughter, then there are all sorts of things I might as well get done now. And if we're going to make any progress this evening then do please come and sit over here. I'm dying to do some kissing.'

Guy left about an hour later, soon after midnight. And something happened, just before he left, something dramatic, something painful — though Guy would later derive much complicated comfort from the incident. First he had paid a stooped visit to the bathroom, where, gasping and wincing, he had rearranged himself with the aid of his belt and the vibrant elastic of his boxer shorts. In the hall he joined Nicola, who stood in profile with her arms folded. This', she said, 'is the famous airing-cupboard.' In they peered. 'Come on,' she said, and stepped inside. Sober Guy suddenly felt rather drunk: the pine racks of bedding, the polythene puff of the heater, the narrow space where a man and a woman might very well contend with certain harassing proximities. 'You can just imagine me up there,' she said, as she turned to him, 'with one leg here and one leg there. Careful.'. . . As had been the case before, their farewell kisses, being emblems of their own termination, were by far the most liquid and distended of the evening; and the heat in there was so furtive, so feminine . . . Not that their bodies were actually touching or anything like that; but Guy could feel the ghosts of various contours, of promising pendencies, or perhaps just the electric field, the cashmere nimbus, of her dress. To further this delicious calibration he slightly bent and parted his legs, urging himself forward half a famished millimetre. At one point, as she breathed thickly into his ear, his hand moved from her shoulderblade to the surprising bounty of her armpit, and then hovered and fell (he thought he heard a moan of assent) on her waiting breast.