London Fields (53 page)

On screen, big Chick patrolled his coin-op store, appeared at the races in morning-suit and topper, was seen on horseback himself, then fishing at some blighted canal. Chick down the gym, with the chest-flexer, in the plunge pool, all chest gloss in the solarium — Chick, big Chick, with his ponies, his birds, his pitbull . . . And then Kim Twemlow, the ex-world number one, with his white shoes, his white belt, his shot face, saying, 'Look at the averages and it's got to be big Chick, by a mile. All credit to Keith for progressing as he has. Must have got his head beautiful for the big occasion and that. But on current form he's not fit to empty Chick's ashtrays . . .'

After a while Keith said hoarsely, 'So be it.'

'Who is this
Chick
person?'

He gave a taciturn version of the dispute with his old business associate. Of the rape of Chick's sister, and Keith's subsequent hospitalization, the smaller man had this to say: 'We came to blows over this bird, the big fella coming out second best. And now tomorrow night him and I have a rendezvous. To sort out who's number one once and for all.'

'Good, Keith. This could work for us. Now I expect you'd like to forget the pressures with a nice video. It's something a little bit special. On a Halloween theme. We're a few days late, but what of that, Keith.'

'Horror like?'

'In the old calendar it used to be the last night of the year. When all the witches and warlocks were abroad.'

As Keith trudged into the bedroom, Guy's limousine entered the grounds of the institution. The little TV screen within was now showing a colour-coded diagram of the uterus of the President's wife. The President's wife, so young, so blonde . . . Guy asked the driver if he wouldn't mind pulling over for a moment. The driver minded, but pulled over anyway. Guy bent his long body and out he climbed.

He made to straighten up — and nothing happened. The driver watched in settled distaste as Guy grunted, first with surprise, then with effort, and remained in a jagged crouch on the verge. After a second attempt, and a second failure, he backed himself on to a wooden bench. Here he rested with his fingers folded over the handle of the cane in soft support of his chin. Now he saw the L-shaped Tudor-type mansion, the slated roof and leaded windows, the pond like a silver coin pitched on to the front lawn; and he saw too the size and nature of the task ahead of him. Before, it was just something to be got out of the way as he sped towards something else — towards inevitability. But now of course it filled the sky. And the sky was falling.

The physics felt strange, the physics felt fierce. Gravity was pushing down on him, but if
Guy
pushed down, hard enough, on the cane, then, slowly, he went up, up.

As Guy straightened, Keith reclined, and made himself comfortable on Nicola's bed: a lengthy procedure. She plumped his pillows and pulled off his boots; Keith also suffered her to bring him a fresh can of lager from the fridge. Now he looked about with an inconvenienced expression for the box of paper tissues.

'Wait, darling,' she said. 'These might be more fun.' She opened a drawer and started browsing through it. 'All the good stuff seems to be in the wash. From the videos, Keith. Wait.' She turned, and bent forward, and reached up into her dress with both thumbs. 'Use these. We'll put them on your head until you need them. You can watch through the legholes. Might look rather comic on anyone but you, Keith.'

The black gusset puffed out for a moment as Keith said, 'Yeah cheers.'

She left him there, sprawled on the covers in his frilly gasmask. Then re-entered, in electronic form. On screen, she came into the bedroom slowly in black cape and thigh-high boots and witch's pointy hat. And as she turned and the black cape swirled you could see, within, the simple ways the simple shape (legs, hips, haunch, waist) can be made to shine on the reptile eye, and burn on the reptile brain. The glamour: charms, rhombs, wishbones, magic rings — gramarye, sortilege, demonifuge . . .

Keith was doing handsome.

Then she came into the bedroom slowly in black cape and thigh-high boots and witch's pointy hat.

Keith was doing handsome. Then the real thing —the necromancer — came into the bedroom.

It would go beautifully.

Guy muffled his delight when the matron or health-operative or death-concessionaire informed him that Mrs Broadener's condition was far advanced. She wouldn't understand what he said to her. And she wouldn't respond. With any luck. It would go beautifully. Hope disliked her mother, of course, and her mother disliked Hope; Guy had not seen Mrs Broadener for seven or eight years. The only thing he knew about this place, her last refuge, was a detail that Lizzyboo had let slip. Although no old lady would ever walk out of here, each old lady had to be able to walk in: company policy. Mrs Broadener had walked in; she wouldn't walk out. Now Guy moved through proliferating parlours: waiting-rooms, in various degrees of disguise. There appeared to be no other visitors.

'Priscilla?' he said, when they were alone.

He stared down. At what? Something caught up in the more or less disgraceful struggle at the end of existence: the process from which so little can be salvaged. He took this person's hand and sat beside her.

'You remember me, don't you,' he began.
'Guy? Hope's husband? You're looking well. Thank you for seeing me. Uh — I bring . . . I bring good news! Everyone is well. Hope's wonderfully well. Marmaduke, your little grandson, is in tremendous form. A handful, as always, but . . .'

She watched him as he spoke, or she seemed to. Her face minutely bobbled on its spindle; the eyes swam in their huge new pools, but never blinked. Priscilla's hands were tightly clasped or fastened.

'Lizzyboo is full of beans. She's put on some weight recently but that's not the end of the world, is it? No, everyone's well and they send their love. It's wonderful, isn't it, it's so absolutely marvellous, I do think, when a family is really close, and everyone loves one another,' he said, and hesitated as he realized how quickly his face had covered itself in tears, 'and they, no matter what, they protect each other. And it's for ever.'

Suddenly she spoke. She just said: 'It's all —'

Guy waited. Nothing followed. 'Well. I suppose I'd better be thinking about going. Goodbye. Thank you for seeing me.'

'Shit,' she said.

He waited. 'Goodbye, Priscilla.'

Nicola and Keith were sitting up in bed together, smoking. They drew huskily on their cigarettes. Nicola raised her chin as she exhaled. She said,

'You're not to reproach yourself, Keith. It happens to everyone.'

'. . . Oh yeah? Well it ain't never happened to me before. No way.'

'Really? Never?'

'No danger. Me — I'm in there. Boof. Ain't never happened to
me
before.'

In fact, of course, it
had
happened to Keith before. It happened to Keith, on average, about five times a week. But it also didn't happen to him pretty regularly too. And in this case he felt he was entitled to a certain amount of bafflement, and anger. What was it? Her skinny ankles, maybe. All the
talking.
Or the way that, despite her evident litheness, she had felt so heavy — as heavy as an automobile, as heavy as the heavy Cavalier. It was like parking a pantechnicon, just trying to turn her over.

'I should imagine it even happens', she said, 'to Chick Purchase. Every now and then.'

'Way he treats minge he ought to be locked up,' said Keith soberly. He further reflected that Chick Purchase
was
locked up, pretty often, on bird-related matters, as well as in the normal course of business.

'You're a very sensitive man, Keith. As well as an incredible tyke and everything, with your rugged ways. You should give yourself credit for that.'

Keith flexed his eyebrows. Come to think of it, he was wondering why he didn't feel more angry. But anger didn't come. Self-pity came. Not the usual kind, which looked and sounded just like anger. A different kind: self-pity of a far nobler strain. 'Pressures of darts,' he said.

'Yes. And a little difficulty switching from one medium to another. That's what this whole thing is really about.'

'Yeah. Well.'

She saw that Keith's eyes were starting to pick out articles of his own clothing, flattened on the floor: the grovelling trousers, for instance, trampled, twisted-out-of.

'Early night and that. Compose myself for the big one. See how Clive's doing.'

'Oh Keith. Before you go.'

She picked up her black dressing-gown and left the room, returning almost at once with a silver tray: an imposingly expensive-looking bottle and two glasses, and some sort of device like a foreign lantern with tubes.

'This is as old as the century. Try some.
This
',
she said, 'is practically newborn, and just in from Teheran. I went to some trouble to get it.'

'Yeah I smoke a little keef,' said Keith. 'Now and again. Relax.'

'It may interest you to know, Keith, that the word "assassin" comes from
hashish.
Assassins — killers by treachery and violence. They used to give the men a good blast of this before they went out to do their stuff. And if they died in action, they were promised an immediate heaven. Of wine, women and song, Keith, And hash, no doubt.' A little later she said, 'But that's enough etymology for now. I'm beginning to sound like a schoolteacher. Why don't you just lie back and let me find out what makes this cock tick?'

Guy linked up again with his courier or expeditor at the airport in New London. Here he was told that, if he wished, he could get an air-taxi straight to Newark. With luck he might catch an earlier Concorde and shave perhaps half a day off his journey. The courier smiled and twinkled potently; everything was possible; his was the maximum-morale specialism of deeply expensive travel. At this point he paid off the chauffeur, whose disaffection remained secure against Guy's reckless tip. Outside in the warm dusk the light was the colour of a grinning pumpkin, Halloween light, promising trick or treat.

Before he retired to the Celebrity Lounge (there would be a slight delay) Guy wandered the concourses, full of love's promiscuous interest, among pantssuit and stretchslack America. Even though there was said to be less of it now, the human variety on display, with its dramatic ratios of size and colouring, still impressed and affected him. It was true that you did see signs of uniformity (one nation), all the people wearing off-white smocks and pink, gymkhana-sized rosettes, like that family over there, four of them, in perfect-family formation, man and woman and boy and girl, each with the squeamish smile of the future . . . Guy threw away his painkillers — their tubes and sachets. Everywhere young women looked at him with kindness. But of course there was only one woman who could really kill his pain. The eyes of certain faces, children's faces, made him wonder whether this whole adventure of his, so agitated and inspired, and so climactic, wasn't just a way of evading the twentieth century or the planet or what the one had done to the other.

Because love . . . But wasn't nature constantly asking you what all the fuss was about? It was hard to shirk this question when you saw them trouped together like that, the old ladies, walking down passages at five yards an hour, or humped on chairs in parlours, their heads trembling in anger and negation, insisting, saying never, never, never. All of them had been adored and wept over, presumably, at one point, prayed to, genuflected in front of, stroked, kissed, licked; and now the bald unanimity of disappointment, of compound grief and grievance. It was written on their mouths, on their lips, marked in notches like the years of a sentence. In their heads only the thoughts that just wouldn't go away, cold and stewed, in their little teapot heads, still brewing beneath frilled cozies of old-lady hair . . .
Whatever it was women wanted, few of them ended up getting it.

He advanced into the Celebrity Lounge, where there were complimentary coffee and free telephones, and where he hoped to finish
Love.

'Now,' she said. 'Stop
now.
'
And she hadn't even heard the telephone ring.

'Okay,' said Keith cheerfully (with that cheerful little throat-clearance on the consonant).

He climbed up her body until she felt the scrawny sharpness of his knees on her shoulders.

'Shut your eyes and open your mouth.'

But Enola Gay, being Nicola Six — Enola shut her mouth and opened her eyes . . .

'. . . Hello? Darling? I was just thinking about you,' she said. 'And having a rather blinding little weep.'

'Jesus,' said Keith.

'. . . Nothing. Do I? I can't imagine I'll be getting much sleep tonight, so do call later if you like. I just can't sleep for thinking about you. Yes, you know I sometimes suspect I'm never going to sleep again.'

Settling on the pillows like, Keith ran a hand down her throat as such, and reached for the brandy bottle innit.

'. . . Come to me, my darling. Come to me. At the speed of love.'

Dust storms grounded the midnight Concorde. Guy was driven from Newark to New York, and spent a few pricy hours at the Gustave on Central Park South. He couldn't sleep. TV said real estate and wrestling and medical ads and fireside shopping and pulpit stuff and last-best-hope stuff and dial 1-800. As he was driven through the city, towards Kennedy and the rerouted morning flight, he thought what he always thought when he was in New York now. He thought: where have the poor gone? The places where the poor shop, the places where the poor feed: where have they gone?

At the speed of love . . . He ran it through his head as he paced the VIP Lounge at five miles per hour. She can turn a phrase, that girl. Delightful. At the speed of . . . Yes, really quite lovely.

I guess it looks like a cheap shot, the revelation, at this stage, that Richard is Guy's brother. But I can only duplicate my own astonishment. It was news to me too. I could always go back and fix it. Now is not the time, though. It is not the time. It never is. It just never is
the time.

You could have knocked me over with a feather. Of course, if knocking me down with a feather were what anyone was interested in, I'd never get off the deck. They wouldn't even need the feather. I reach for a fresh sheet of paper and there's this splitcrack in my arm, as if some spore-coven or fat maggot has just detonated in the crimson innards of a log fire. Dying reminds me of something, something I'd just got over and successfully put behind me when, all of a sudden, I started dying. Middle age: that's what. Yes, it's perfectly okay, so long as you don't try anything too butch or sporty, like walking down the street for a pint of milk, or pulling the flush handle, or kicking off your shoes, or yawning, or reaching too sharply for the vitamin E, or lowering yourself with any suddenness into the herb-green bath. All that stuff is out. Like middle age, like my dreams, death is packed with information. At last you really find out the direction time's taking. Time's arrow. Time works! And, more than this, you are monstrous . . .

When middle age comes, you think you're dying all the time. Dying is like that too. But here, finally, all resemblance ends. All resemblance ends.

Nine-thirty, on the morning of November 5.

Nicola has already been with me for over three hours. She's next door. . . I can hear her, pacing. Fortunately she is not demanding my undivided attention. She has had the decency, for example, to let me finish Chapter 21. I keep her fuelled with coffee. She had a shower. Later, she had a bath; and she asked for dental floss. When she isn't walking up and down she sits on the sofa in one of Asprey's dressing-gowns, not even smoking: she just stares at the window — at the low sun, which has now reached its apogee and will stay that low all day long until the moon intercedes, coming between the sun and our eyes. Every now and then she goes all trancelike and I can tiptoe off to the study, and write. But how she fills the flat, how her presence fills the flat, like a rich smell, or like anger. She's switched the TV on again, looking, no doubt, for news from Washington or Bonn or Tel Aviv, news of the storms, the tides, the moon, the sun (the sky is falling!), but looking through all this for a correlative, the thing out there that might say yes to the thing in here. Events, and possible events — the world has to
want
it. Whereas for me it's easier: the TV itself is my correlative, pandar, hack, mediator, foot-in-the-door, vile
paparazzo.

It's in the nature of an obsession, I suppose, that one will get to the bottom of whatever's available. One will tend to get to the bottom of it.

Next to Mark Asprey's baronial can there's a hip-high stack of assorted magazines. All they have in common is a certain amount of editorial matter about Mark Asprey: a profile, an interview, what he's pulling down, his favourite colour, who he's fucking. The mags get older and Mark gets younger as I work my way down the pile (the effect is speeded up by the increasing frequency of my visits). Until, last night, I find myself staring through tears of strain at paired photographs of Mark Asprey and Cornelia Constantine under the heading, DID THEY OR DIDN'T THEY? She says they didn't. He says they did.

Of
course.
Marius Appleby is a pseudonym. It's Asprey. I knew it: I wasn't even surprised. It was almost bathetic. What else could explain the familiar taste, and the poundcake richness, of my love-hate for
Crossbone Waters
?

Digging deeper into the stack, I find additional earlier reports: scandal, accusation. She sued him; he settled out of court; doubts linger. 'The book is all lies,' say Cornelia and her lawyers. 'What happened happened,' Asprey insists.

Naturally I now root for Cornelia. But two puzzles remain. In all there are about a dozen photographs of her, including some swimwear poses, and physically she measures up, except in two particulars. First, it is clear that Cornelia is dramatically flat-chested. The second point has to do with her face, or her expression, which never changes, and which bespeaks (or so this reviewer feels) really helpless stupidity.

What actually happened? I guess the person to ask, if it's the truth you want, would be old Kwango.

Before I could even bring this up with Nicola she said abruptly, 'I hate it here.' 'Yes, it is a little rich for some tastes.' 'It's the acme of vulgarity. But it's not just that. The gowns, the baubles, the awards and everything. They're all fake.' 'No.' 'Look at that translation. It's gobbledegook. He has them printed up.' 'But he's, he's so —' 'He just writes schlock plays and cute journalism. Christ, why do you think you never heard of him?'

I said, Then why does he do it?'

'Why do you think? To impress the gullible.'

'Whoops,' I said. 'I do beg your pardon.'

Regrettably, disappointingly, altogether unacceptably, and like all the other dying people I've ever come across, I am suffering from eructation and its related embarrassments. If I extrapolate from the death of my father, the death of my brother, the death of Daniel Harter, and the death of Samson Young, then I may conclude that buying it is a pretty windy scene . . . I'm glad I no longer have to hang out in the Black Cross, where I've experienced many armpit-torching moments. Nobody recognizes me in there (every day is like the first day), and I have to stand around behaving 'characteristically'.

The baby cries, the baby cries and turns, in its awful struggle to be a baby. Its struggle is with all that is changeless and unworkable. She farts with the effort. Whoops. Maybe farts are frowned on for no other reason than their connexion with mortal weakness, with being a baby, with dying. To her, to Kim, evidently, or so I've read, the breasts, the penis — these mean life. And the stool, the piece of ordure, this means death. But she shows no natural aversion, and babies find nothing disgusting, and don't we all have to be trained quite hard to hate our shit?

I am the father of Missy's baby. Or Sheridan Sick is. ('I suppose it's Side's.' 'Don't
call
him that.' 'It's his
name,
isn't it?') She flies over to England. To be by my side. Or for an abortion. I hear a ring on the bell and I go and answer and she's there . . . I'd have no time for her, one way or the other. Only time to write it down.

Missy had to go. For reasons of balance. Reasons of space. She belongs to some other version. She preferred to run her own life. She didn't want artistic shape. She wanted to be safe. Safe, in America, at the end of the millennium.

I still believe love has the power to bring in the loved one, to reel her in. You can send the line out halfway across the planet and it will bring the loved one in. But I don't even try and call her any more. Love failed, in me. It was sapped by something else.

She has her slot in my dreamlife, as if the dreams were vestiges of the love power. These dreams of Missy are like Missy's dreams, very logical and realistic — not like the nuclear sizzlings of my nightmares. We keep having this conversation. On the Cape. I say, 'Nurse me.' She says, 'What about your book?' I say, 'I'll give it up. I want to give it up. It's a wicked book. It's a wicked thing I'm doing, Missy.'

Then she says, 'Watch the girl. Be careful. There's going to be a surprise ending. It isn't Keith. It's the other guy.'

When I let her in this morning around six-thirty she looked so transparently ruined and beat — and so transparent: ghostly, ghosted, as if the deed were already done and she had joined me on the other side. After a few showers, and several cups of laced coffee, she started telling me about it: the night of hate. At one point, quite early on, I looked up from my notes and said, 'That's outrageous. Oh, my poor readers. Shame on you, Nicola. Shame on you.' I asked why in Christ's name she hadn't kicked Keith out after the initial fiasco. So much better thematically. And a nice contrast with Guy. 'It would have meant that nobody really had you.' 'Only you.' 'This doesn't have anything to do with me . . .'

'You're worried about Guy, aren't you. You think he's the one. You think it's going to be him, don't you. It won't be. I swear. You love him, don't you.'

'I guess I do. In a way. He must have called me twenty times from the States. He says I'm his best friend.
Me.
Where
are
everyone's friends? Where's everyone's family? Where's Kath's family? Why isn't she smothered in sisters and mothers? You can rest up but I'm going to be tearing around all day. I can't handle this physically. The airport! How'll I get a cab? I can't bear these novels that end in mad activity. "Jane? Call June and tell Jean about Joan. Jeff — get Jim before Jack finds John." All this goddamned fetching and carrying. How're you supposed to do any
writing
?
My leg hurts. Heathrow!'

'Easy.
Calm down. It'll all work out. Here's what you do.'

It didn't sound too bad, after she mapped out my schedule for me. And I was more relieved than intrigued, for instance, when she said I'd get a three-hour writing break between nine and midnight . . . I looked up at her. She had just brought me another cup of coffee and was standing beside me, carelessly stroking the back of my neck with the knuckles of her left hand.

'Mark Asprey might show up,' I said. 'I really hope there's no unfinished business between you two.'

'He won't be here until tomorrow,' she said. 'When I'll be gone.'

Nicola was looking out, at the window, at the world. Her slender throat tautened, and her eyes filled with indignation or simple self-belief. She had about her then the thing of hers that touched me most: as if she were surrounded, on every side, by tiny multitudes of clever enemies.

Just come in again. And must now go out again.

I write these words to keep my hand steady. And because nothing means anything unless I write it down. I can't go out there, not just this very second. But of course I'll go. I'll go. There is some kind of absolute obligation here.

The phone rang and the instant I picked it up I felt a breeze of awfulness whistling liplessly down the line. How could I get it so wrong? How could I not see? Everywhere there are things that I'm not seeing.

'Kath,' I said, 'what happened? Where are you?'

'Somewhere else. The baby — go and get the baby. I'm a wicked woman, Sam.'

'You . . . No you're not.'

'Then what is it? Tell me what it is.'

'It's just the situation.'

As I hung up, Nicola came out of the bathroom and I said,

'You're wearing
that?
Oh my God, look at us. And you know what the worst thing about everything is? About you. About the whole story. About the world. About death. This: it's
really happening
.'