London Fields (9 page)

L
IKE THE FLOWERS on a grave bearing the mother of a sentimental hoodlum, Keith's bouquet leaned and loitered in its bowl on the round table. Nicola always beheld these flowers with disbelief. The colours spoke to her of custard, of blancmange – a leaden meat tea served on pastel plates, the desiccation of a proletarian wake for some tyrant grandad, or some pub parrot of a granny, mad these thirty years.

She found that, far from brightening the place up, as Keith had predicted they would, the flowers rendered her flat more or less uninhabitable. In India (where Nicola had once been) certain colours are associated with the colours of certain castes. These were low-caste flowers, casteless flowers, untouchable flowers. But Nicola didn't throw them away. She didn't touch them (you wouldn't want to touch them). Keith Talent was expected, and the flowers would remain. Nicola didn't yet know that Keith's blue eyes were completely flower-blind or flower-proof. He wouldn't see the flowers, and he wouldn't see their absence. Just as a vampire (another class of creature that cannot cross your threshold uninvited) gives no reflection in glass or mirrors, so flowers, except in the common-noun sense (he knew birds liked them, as did bees), sent no message to Keith's blue eyes.

He telephoned on time, the day the flowers died. Even as she picked up the receiver she felt – she felt how you feel when the doorbell goes off like an alarm in the middle of the night. An unpleasant mistake, or really bad news. She steadied herself. After the repeated pips, themselves punctuated by Keith's ragged obscenities, she could hear the squawkings and garrottings of the Black Cross at a quarter past three. Even though pubs were now open more or less round the clock (there was one near the entrance to the dead-end street), they still exploded at the old closing times: coded memories deep in the genes of pubs . . . Keith's tone was mawkishly pally, seeming to offer the commiserations due to a shared burden (faulty household appliances; shoddy workmanship; life, life), as if they had known each other for years – which, in a sense, she thought, they almost had.

'Tell you what then darling,' he said with that lugubrious lilt, 'yeah, I'll be right over.'

'Sweet,' he added when Nicola said yes.

She arranged herself for Keith's visit with considerable care.

When Nicola was just a little girl she had a little friend called Enola Gay. Enola shared in all Nicola's schemes and feints, her tantrums and hunger-strikes, in all her domestic terrorism. She too had the knack or gift of always knowing how things would unfold. Enola didn't exist. Nicola invented her. When adolescence came Enola went and did a terrible thing. Thereafter she kept a terrible secret. Enola had borne a terrible child, a little boy called Little Boy.

'Enola,' Nicola would whisper in the dark. 'What have you done, you wicked girl? Enola!
Enola Gay . . .
'

Terrible though the child was, Enola shone through Little Boy with the light of many suns. Nicola knew that she would never generate such light herself. She was vivid; she was divinely bright; when she walked the streets she seemed to be lit by her personal cinematographer. But it wasn't the light that burned in Enola Gay from Little Boy. That light came from the elemental feminine power: propagation. If Nicola had had that light her power might have approached the infinite. But she didn't have it, and never would have it.

With her, light went the other way. . . The black hole, so long predicted in theory, was now, to Nicola's glee, established astronomical fact: Cygnus X-1. It was a binary system; the black hole was orbiting a star thirty times the mass of our sun. The black hole weighed in at ten solar masses, but was no wider than London, It was nothing; it was just a hole; it had dropped out of space and time; it had collapsed into its own universe. Its very nature prevented anyone from knowing what it was: unapproachable, unilluminable. Nothing is fast enough to escape from it. For mother earth the escape velocity is seven miles per second, for Jupiter thirty-seven miles per second, for the sun 383 miles per second. For Sirius B, the first white dwarf they found, the escape velocity is 4,900 miles per second. But for Cygnus X-1, the black swan, there is no escape velocity. Even light, which propagates at 186,287 miles per second, cannot escape from it.
That's what I am,
she used to whisper to herself after sex.
A black hole. Nothing can escape from me.

Sodomy pained Nicola, but not literally; it was its local prevalence, as it were, that pained her so greatly. It was the only thing about herself that she couldn't understand and wouldn't forgive. How
generally
prevalent was it (and an unwonted humiliation, this, to seek safety in numbers)? It wasn't like masturbation, which everyone secretly knew everyone secretly did, apart from the odd fanatic or ostrich or liar. Masturbation was an open secret until you were thirty. Then it was a closed secret. Even modern literature shut up about it at that point, pretty much. Nicola held this silence partly responsible for the industrial dimensions of contemporary pornography – pornography, a form in which masturbation was the
only
subject. Everybody masturbated all their lives. On the whole, literature declined the responsibility of this truth. So pornography had to cope with it. Not elegantly or reassuringly. As best it could.

When you came to sodomy . . . Instinct declared that nowhere near everybody did it, but one could harbour one's suspicions here too. Nicola remembered reading, with a blush of pleasure, that fully seventy-five per cent of female v. male divorce suits featured sodomy under one subhead or another, anything from
physical cruelty
to
unreasonable demands.
How unreasonable was it? How cruel? What did it mean when a woman wanted it? The tempting location, so close to its better sister . . . But wherever it was (in the armpit, behind the kneecap), it would have its attractions. Be literal, and look at the human mouth. The mouth was a good distance away. And the mouth got it too.

Literature
did
go on about sodomy, and increasingly. This hugely solaced Nicola Six. Now, if she could consider it as a twentieth-century theme . . . Just as Keith Talent would be proud to represent his country in an England shirt, so Nicola, in garterbelt and stockings and ankle-bracelet, would be perfectly prepared to represent her century. It started, she supposed, with Joyce, who was clearly interested in it: a murky
nostalgic.
Lawrence was interested in it: earth, blood,
will
(yes, and enforced degradation). Beckett was interested in it: a callowly uncomplicated yearning (Nicola decided) to cause distress and preferably damage, trauma, to the female parts. As for the Americans, they
all
seemed to be interested in it: with John Updike, it was mainly just another thing humans could do, and everything human interested Updike; of Norman Mailer one didn't need to inquire too deeply (a mere timekiller, before greater violence); Philip Roth, with what must be farcical irony, bedroom-farcical irony, refers to it as 'anal love'. V. S. Naipaul, on the other hand, who was very interested in it, speaks of 'a sexual black mass'. Well,
black,
anyway. And a black hole was mass, pure mass, infinite mass.

No, not everybody did it. But Nicola did it. At a certain point (and she always vowed she wouldn't, and always knew she would) Nicola tended to redirect her lover's thrusts, down there in the binary system . . . She had a thing of readying herself with the third finger of the left hand. The marriage finger. It was appalling, the crassness with which the symbolism suggested itself: the marriage finger, seeking a different ring, in the place whence no babies came. It was the only time she ever lost control. Not during (certainly not), but after, later, with silent tears of dismay. How much had she cried about it? How much tearfall? How many inches a year?

What saddened and incensed her was the abdication of power, so craven, the surrender so close to home. And power was what she was in it for. Nicola had lived deliciously; but she was promiscuous
on principle,
as a sign of emancipation, of spiritual freedom, freedom from men. She was, she believed, without appetite, and prided herself on her passionless brilliance in bed. But then, the subtle rearrangement, and the abject whisper . . . And it poisoned everything, somehow. Again, not literally. Although Nicola liked doing what nobody else did, although she liked danger, she didn't like
that
kind of danger, vandal danger, with no form to it. She was promiscuous, but her lovers weren't (they usually had wives instead); and her gynaecologist assured her, one night, when she still had time to care about such distant matters, that it was safe enough if you
did it last.
Well, when else would you do it – would you do the last thing? The thing itself was the last thing. It always seeded the end of the affair. And Nicola took some comfort from that fact: maybe it was just her strategy for sending love back the other way.

The only other compensation was an artistic one. At least it was congruous with her larger tribulation; at least sodomy added up. Most types have their opposite numbers. Groups have groupies. There are molls for all men, and vice versa. The professional has his perkie; scowlers get scowlies; so smuggles, loudies, cruellies. So the failed suicide must find a murderer. So the murderer must find a murderee.

After about fifteen minutes Nicola was sure that Keith was going to be late – significantly late. She changed her plan. She adopted Plan B. Her
life
had a Plan B, or it had had: to live on. But intimations of early middle age had settled that. With these intimations, other intimations: the second half of life; and natural death. These intimations were very informative, they were packed with news – and no thanks! You got old quick, like the planet. Like the planet, you could only prostrate yourself before the wonders of modern medicine, modern can-do. But can-do was nothing, when compared to already-done. You had to trust in cosmic luck. The heavenly operation, facelift, transplant. Divine rain.

She changed her immediate plans. Had Keith been prompt, he would have 'surprised' Nicola in tennis shorts, T-shirt and reversed baseball cap, the outfit she wore when, in an ecstasy of vexation, she did her weekly dusting. But he was late. So she took off her shorts and put her jeans back on and coolly went to the shops with the canvas bag.

When Nicola walked the streets she was lit by her personal cinematographer, nothing too arty either, a single spotlight trained from the gods. She had a blue nimbus, the blue of sex or sadness. Any eyes that were available on the dead-end street would find their way to her: builders in the gutted houses, a frazzled rep in a cheap car, a man alone at home pressing his face against the window pane with a snarl. There were three shops at the junction: tobacconist's (and sub-post-office); Asian grocery (and off-licence); and, incongruously, a travel agent's, a shop that sold travel. At the first Nicola bought fuses, and picked up her French cigarettes. The tiny old creature behind the counter (impossible to entertain the idea that she had ever been a woman) ordered the cigarettes especially; and Nicola felt the ghost of an obligation to give warning to stop: I can tell her I've quit, she thought. At the grocer's she bought lemons, tonic, tomato juice and what she confidently hoped would be her last-ever plastic bottle of toilet cleanser. The tobacconist overcharged her, the grocer gave short measure . . . Passing the travel agent's, with its great lists of destinations (and prices, hysterically reduced, in normal times, but now brutally upped: even Amsterdam cost the earth), Nicola abruptly realized that she would never go away again. Would she, ever? Not even a few days with Guy in Aix-en-Provence or a weekend with Keith in Ilfracombe or Jersey or some other paradise of duty free? No. There just wouldn't be time.

On the way back, near the entrance to the dead-end street, she was stared at by two builders who sat half-naked eating Scotch eggs and drinking beer on the porch steps of a corner house they were supposedly or at any rate cursorily renovating. Nicola had noticed them before, this exemplary pair. One was sixteen or seventeen, lean and suntanned and wholly delighted by the onset of his powers; the other, the senior man, puffy, thirty, with long hair and few teeth, and quite ruined, as if he got a year older every couple of months. The boy climbed to his feet as Nicola approached.

'Miss World!' he said in a quavering voice. He wore an expression of ironic entreaty. 'Give us a smile.
Please.
Ah, come on – light up. It might never happen!'

Nicola smiled. Nicola turned to him as she passed and smiled beautifully.

She arranged herself for Keith's visit with considerable care, despite the fact that she knew how things would go anyway, more or less. Of course, she was in a funny situation with reality (though this never occurred to her with any weight), coaxing it into a shape she knew it already had – somewhere, in phantom
potentia . .
. Simply doing the next thing that came naturally, Nicola had what she called a whore's bath, standing naked on a towel before the basin and the mirror. As she washed, she mentally developed an erotic design. It would be humiliating, and quite unnecessary, to think too specifically on the matter; but one had to be prepared. Taking an example at random, the pretty divots of her armpits, so aromatic and erogenous, so often praised and slobbered over, clearly such excellent value – these might have to go. He might want them shorn. Not yet. It would depend.

Her underwear she selected without a flicker of hesitation: suspender-belt, stockings, brassiere – but all white this time, all white. She sat on the bed, tipping backwards, then stood up with her head bent sharply, making the right adjustments. Nicola was amazed – Nicola was consternated – by how few women really
understood
about underwear. It
was
a scandal. If the effortless enslavement of men was the idea, or one of the ideas (and who had a better idea?), why halve your chances by something as trivial as a poor shopping decision? In her travels Nicola had often sat in shared bedrooms and cabins and boudoirs and powder parlours, and watched debutantes, predatory divorcees, young hostesses, even reasonably successful goodtime girls shimmying out of their cocktail dresses and ballgowns to reveal some bunched nightmare of bloomers, tights, long Johns, Y-fronts. A prosperous hooker whom she had hung out with for a while in Milan invariably wore panties that reminded Nicola, in both texture and hue, of a bunion pad. To ephemeral flatmates and sexual wallflowers at houseparties and to other under-equipped rivals Nicola had sometimes carelessly slipped the underwear knowledge. It took about ten seconds. Six months later the ones that got it right would be living in their own mews houses in Pimlico and looking fifteen years younger. But they mostly got it wrong. Over-elaboration or lack of self-love, or sheer lack of talent; plus minor vagaries, like the persistent and profitless fallacy of
black
underwear, which showed the right brothelly instinct, and beat boxer shorts and training-bra, but missed the point. Perhaps women couldn't believe how simple men really were – how it could all be decided in five minutes at the hosiery store. At this particular end of this particular century, they wanted tight bright white underwear, white underwear. They wanted the female form shaped and framed, packaged and gift-wrapped, stylized, cartoonified, and looking, for a moment at least, illusorily pure. They wanted the white lie of virginity. Men were so
simple.
But what did that do to the thoughts of women, to the thoughts of women like Nicola Six?