London Fields (52 page)

Double 17, thought Keith. Bad one. Come inside, you're looking at 1, double 8. But she don't even look thirty. Not nice either. Better go 10, double 10. Moisturizers innit.

'Now where are my keys,' she said.

Keith stared moodily at her stocking-tops as she led him up the stairs. She paused and turned and said,

'When you had two darts for the
66
pick-off. I thought you'd go 16, bull. But no. You went bull, double 8. Magic. That's finishing, Keith.'

'Yeah cheers.'

'And the 125! Everyone was expecting triple 19, big 18, bull. But you go
outer
bull, triple 20, tops. Brilliant kill . . . Keith! What's the matter? Why are you looking at me like that?'

'It's
treble.
Not triple. Treble.'

Nicola climbed the last flight with her head at a penitent angle. In the sitting-room she said cautiously,

'Darling what do you think? We could go and eat quite soon, or do you want to relax here for a bit first?'

'Never do that,' said Keith with a wipe of his palm. 'Not when I just come through the door. I get my bearings, okay?'

'Forgive me. Would you like to take your coat off and try it out?' she said, referring to the new dartboard of which she had taken delivery that afternoon. 'Whilst I go and get you your lager?'

'All in good time.'

'Do you like it?'

'No it's smart.' Keith took off his jacket and reached masterfully for his purple pouch. 'Wood-grained wall cabinet. Of mature mahogany.'

Nicola hurried to the refrigerator, where the cans of lager were stacked like bombs in their bay. He hadn't actually
said
she could fetch him a drink, and she did hope she was doing the right thing. She hesitated, listening for the thunk of his darts.

Over the next few days she took him (Keith) to illustrious old-style restaurants in whose velvet and candlelight he fuzzily shone with class dissonance, with villainy, with anticharisma; he sat with the tasselled menus and heard Nicola translate. She translated him (Keith) to sanctums of terrible strictness, accusatory linen and taunting tureens, where he always had what she had. She bought him (Keith) the dinky black waistcoats and black trimmed trousers that he loved; as a result, when he returned from the toilet to their table, hands would go up all over the room, like in class, when the pretty teacher asked an easy question. He never talked (Keith). He never talked. At first she assumed that he was in the grip of an inscrutable rage. Was he still brooding on her solecism with the
triple
?
Had someone spoken ill of the Marquis of Edenderry? Then she realized: he thought you didn't. He thought you didn't talk. Though others did. He sat there, chewing (Keith), with caution, without zest, deep in his dreams of darts. Or perhaps he was wondering why, in the fantasy, you felt at home in places like these, whereas of course you never did, and never would. With the waiters, Keith was as a fly to wanton boys; the lightest glance of the maitre d' could harrow up his soul. Nicola supposed that this explained the proletarian predilection for Indian food — and Indian waiters. Who's afraid of those brown-faced elfs? He once tried a glass of Mouton Rothschild (Keith) and spat it out into his napkin. She paid, ostentatiously, always querying the bill, while Keith turned a pensive stare on the chandeliers. He knew the required demeanour of the man shedding humble origins: you act as if you feel it's all your due. But he was having a job feeling that, these days, and a job acting it. When the godlike greeter talked to her in what was presumably French, when he advised and beseeched, wringing his hands, Keith always thought they were asking her what she was doing, going out with someone like him. Like him. (Keith.)

At home, though, in her flat, Keith was
it.
He came in at around ten or eleven and looked at her through the shards, the swirling parquetry, of his shuffled hungers. She dressed wealthily for him, to win that admiring sneer. Before he started on his lagers or his Lucozades he was served croissants, and devilish espresso, and once or twice she coaxed him into humour with a Tequila Sunrise, where something sweet fought the heavy tug of the booze. Then he threw darts all day, pausing only to acknowledge receipt of an exquisite snack, for example, and a lager served in the engraved pewter tankard she had bought him, or to relish a new video; with Keith now needing four or five of these a day, Nicola was far from idle! To begin with he desisted from his darts when the telephone rang and it turned out to be Guy, shouting through the ambient clatter of some airport or gas station; but after a while, such was his local suzerainty, he practised right through the calls. On one occasion Guy rang from a deserted motel and remarked on the background noise: Nicola said that it was probably a monitor or money meter, thus covering for the slow triple thunks of Keith's tungstens. When she talked to Guy she sounded like Keats. For Keith, this was all low heaven. He loved her as he would his own manager, in the big time. You sensed it the instant you stepped in off the street: the whole house stank of pornography and darts.

On the eve of Bonfire Night, of Final Night, a couple of hours before the TV teaser — Keith's docu-drama — was about to be screened, Nicola decided to spare him the usual gauntlet of tuxed torturers and took Keith for a light supper at 192, the media restaurant in Kensington Park Road. He sat there with his orange juice, warily awaiting the sushi she had suggested he try.

'A penny for them, Keith?' said Nicola gently.

He said nothing.

192. The best thing with that is: smack in a maximum. Psychological body blow. Leaving 12. But if you come inside, leaves
6
. 6.
Double 3. Murder. Avoid it. Here's another way it can happen. You're on 57 and go for 17 to leave tops — and hit the treble. 51. Leaves 6. Or you're going for double 14 and hit double 11. Leaves 6. Wrong bed. Or you're on double 9, pull one, and hit 12. Leaves
6.
Or God forbid you're on double 11 and you hit double 8! Wrong bed. Leaves 6. Wrong bed. Nasty, that. Fucking wicked. Murder.

A fourteen-hour wait in the VIP Lounge at Heathrow; the Mach II to Newark; the helicopter to Kennedy; the 727 to Middletown; the limousine to New London. America moved past him behind treated glass. The pain had now spread downwards as far as his calves and upwards as far as his nipples. Every tick of the second hand on his watch administered an exquisite squeeze to the trauma of his being. He looked out at the cordoned, the sweated fields of New England, and at the woodlands, also brutally worked, but still holding their twiggy, ribboned, Thanksgiving light. Impossible even to imagine that Mohawk and Mahican had once wandered here — yes, and Wampanoag, Narraganset, Pequot, Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Abnaki, Malecite, Micmac. He had a sense, as you were bound to have in America now, of how a whole continent had been devoured, used up, chewed up.

The night before he had tarried in Middletown, at a recently opened airport hotel called the Founding Fathers. Again he had run into indefinable difficulties as he tried to persuade the managerial staff that he was neither poor nor mad nor ill. One of the troubles seemed to centre on his new habit of giggling silently to himself. Perhaps he looked like one of the first English sailors, panting with scurvy, his turn-ups swinging round his calves. In any case his iridium and titanium credit-cards prevailed. After a shower he made a second successful call to the retirement home and confirmed the appointment with his mother-in-law. After a Virgin Mary in the Mayflower Room, he had an early dinner in the Puritan Lounge. By his plate lay the two books she had given him: one for the way out, one for the way home. It was over Stendhal's
Love
that he now frowned and chuckled and mused . . . In his room he made the last call of the day to Nicola, who despite the late hour and the bad line (the metronomic thunks of the money meter) gave him an extraordinary fifteen minutes on her plans for his return. This complicated his next action: a manoeuvre of long-delayed self-inspection, achieved naked, with one foot up on the writing-desk before the mirror. Mm, quite bad. Possibly rather serious. It really was the sort of sight that would have the nurses scampering from the Delivery Room. There were some tangy tints of green in there, and the surface was rippled as if in a sharp breeze; but overall his flesh was almost picturesquely blue. The blue, perhaps, of the blue lagoon. He fell asleep wondering what would happen if you transposed the heroines of
Macbeth
and
Othello.
With a Scottish Desdemona there would be no story, no plot, no slain kings. But with a Mediterranean Lady Macbeth you might have got a stranger tale, and a bloodier one, because such a woman would never have looked so kindly on Cassio's cares, and might have headed straight for Iago . . . Now he rode on to New London.
Love
nestled on his lap, also the second book, as yet unopened, something called
The Light of Many Suns.
Guy wasn't reading: the migraine in his groin had somehow established connexions with the blinding ballsache in his eyes. He watched the news on the limousine's TV, as it were reluctantly and askance, in the same way that the chauffeur watched his unreassuring passenger, with stolen glances in the rearview mirror. The President had made his decision. They were going in. They had decided to operate on the President's wife.

The ninety-second biodoc on Keith Talent was watched by 27½ million people — in the UK, in Scandinavia, in the Netherlands, in the rockabilly states of America, in Canada, in the Far East and in Australia. It was watched by darts lovers everywhere, and then shot out into space at the speed of light.

It was watched by Nicola Six, perched on Keith's knee.

Go-getting Keith Talent is an upcoming merchandizer operating out of London's West Kensington.

To the hectic tumbles of a xylophone solo, Keith was seen nodding shrewdly into an intercom. Between his finger and thumb he rolled a biro shaped like a dart.

In the elegant West London flat where Keith lives and works, the calls come winging in from Munich and LA. In business as in darts, no way does Keith play to come in second best. Winning is what it's all about is Keith's byword. Never far from Keith's side is his trusty girl Friday Nicky with a helping hand.

Assistant Nicky, in T-shirt and jeans and dark glasses, appeared behind her boss with several sheets of paper, which Keith started nodding shrewdly at before they were in front of his face. One hand rested on his shoulder as she pointed with the other. Now an establishing shot of the Marquis of Edenderry, and then Keith's emotional face filling the screen.

'
I'm basically the sort of guy who likes to relax with a few drinks with the guys. Here. With the bestf
—
with the bestf
—
with the best support of any pub in London
.'

Nicky was sitting beside him. He seemed to have her in a kind of headlock. The xylophone solo had given way to Hawaiian guitar. Keith drew near-tearfully on his cigarette.

Dartwise, Keith is known for his clinical big finishes. The 170s, the 167s, the 164s, the 161s. 'The 160s.'
(This was Keith, pitilessly offhand.)
'The 158s. The 157s. The 156s. That's correct. The 155
s.
Some question my power. But come Friday I intend to silence the critics.'

Keith and Nicky strolled out into the carpark, hand in hand, their linked arms swinging.

A bachelor, Keith and Nicky have as yet no plans to wed. But one thing is certain.

There was a fish-eye rearview shot of the Cavalier, and the sound of heavy-metal, and then the car fired off into the distorted street.

Keith Talent is going a long, long way.

'. . .
But Keith,' said Nicola in a stunned voice, during the commercial break. 'You were quite amazing. A true natural. The TV camera
loves
you, Keith.'

Keith nodded, rather sternly.

'I only wonder slightly what your wife will make of it.'

He looked at her with qualified hostility, as if unsure whether or not he was being trifled with. Nicola was aware that Keith was in a state of near-psychotic confusion on this point. And she didn't know the half of it. In fact he was still clinging to the notion that the biodoc would be screened only at those locations where it had been filmed: her flat, and, of course, the Marquis of Edenderry. But even Keith found the notion tenuous; growing doubts about it had tempted him to tamper with the TV at Windsor House, in the only way he knew how, by switching it off and putting his boot through it. In the end he shrank from such sacrilege, and just went on telling Kath that — although reason declared that there wasn't much point in the TV biodoc unless it was on TV — the TV biodoc wasn't
on
TV.

'Still,' she said, 'who stands behind you now? Who is it who really understands about your darts?'

'Shut it,' said Keith, who in a sense was feeling more and more at home down the dead-end street. A commercial break had just ended and before another one had the chance to begin a voice was saying,

. . .
a little look at Keith's opponent for the big one, and Kim Twentlow will be saying why he thinks it's going to be a little bit special. After this.

Now although Keith never asked about an opponent, he'd naturally been keeping up with events (by means of half-hourly telephone calls). The second semi-final of the Duoshare Sparrow Masters was to have been disputed by Keith's old enemy, Chick Purchase, and the young unknown from Totteridge, Marlon Frift. But there'd been a problem, and a postponement. Following a night out, Marlon had had a heart attack; and there were still doubts about his fitness.

Nicola waited for the start of the organ solo and then said, 'Who is it, Keith?'

'Never ask about an opponent. Immaterial as such. You play the board not the — jammy bitch's bastard.'

. . .
due to the very sad Marlon Frift tragedy. By a walkover.