London Fields

  A terrifying night in Brixton, watching Keith's darts match at the Foaming Quart. I lay down my life or what's left of it for this lousy novel and do I get any thanks?

  Pretty well every day now, at noon, I walk or drive to the tower block of Keith Talent, to take Kim off Kath's hands for an hour or two, to look after Kim - to protect and to cherish little Kim. Talent himself is rarely at home when I call. He is out cheating. He is at the Black Cross. He is in his garage, in his cave of darts. When I do run into him on these occasions he wears a hostile leer. Kath blinks up at me when I enter. She is sitting at the table with her head in her hands. I hope she will feel some benefit soon. But misery seems to have a way of making you forget what the other stuff is like, which is probably just as well, from misery's point of view, or you wouldn't put up with it. Sometimes you're down, and sometimes you're down. The rough with the rough. For worse and for worse.

  'Hi,' I said as I squeezed into the kitchen (Keith having passed me wordlessly at the door).

  'Oh, Sam.' She stood up — she paused. The aftermath of Keith's heavy breakfast still crowded the small table (which in turn filled the small kitchen): fat mug of cold tea, grease-furrowed plate, V-sign of cigarette butts in the dollop of brown sauce. Crazily Kath surveyed all this.

  'Why don't I take Kim out.'

  'Yes. That's best.'

  The child raises her arms to me as I lean to take her. She got used to me very quickly. I smoothtalked her into it. She came across. I have this way with chicks. Of course I don't want anything from her. Though the tales she could tell . . .

  I carry her to the Memorial Park — to the park, with its punks and drunks. I'm not really worried. The adult-and-infant combination is a relatively safe one; you don't get bothered, or not much anyway. Baby-related muggings have fallen off. The guy bending over the pram whispering threats with a broken beer bottle in his fist - now this is not a popular kind of guy. In slum-and-plutocrat Great Britain, so close to the millennium, he isn't popular, he is doubly unpopular; no one's behind him. Sentences reflect this. It's not worth it, for what the average mum has in her purse. So it doesn't happen. Or not much anyway.

  What impresses and stays with me is the power of the baby's face— the power. It is knit tight, like a tautly prominent navel, chockful of possibilities, tumescent with potentiae, as if the million things that could happen to her, the essences of the million Kims there might one day be out there, are concentrated in this powerful face . . . But I wonder. Nicola's face is powerful too. The very thinness of the skin that coats her closed eyes is powerful. Perhaps with her the effect is reversed or diametrical. Because Nicola's face, Nicola's life, contains only one future, fully shaped, fully designed, toward which she now moves at steadily climbing speed.

  So the municipal gardens, the harijan flowers, the pastel totems of the playground (how do we interpret them?), the untouchable youths in their spikes, the meteorology of the sky, the casteless old wedged into benches, and the baby with her sweet breath and faceted roundnesses, as tender as an eyeball. You wouldn't want to touch her. You wouldn't want anything to touch her.

  Chapter 9: Doing Real Good

  w

  earing housecoat and slippers, and carrying her mail in her armpit, Hope Clinch strode out on to the terrace, mechanically pausing to chuck a potted plant under the chin. The plant was an amaryllis, and had cost considerably more than the average weekly wage; but it wasn't thriving. It wasn't working. Soon it would have to be returned — by Melba or Phoenix, or by Lizzyboo. perhaps - to the dishonest florist for replacement or repair.

  She sat at the table and opened her first letter. Looking down, she said, 'I just talked with Melba. About Lady Barnaby. Disaster.'

  Guy had looked up from his crossword. He was still wearing his white cotton nightie. Guy often slept in a nightie. Hope had found this endearing for a while, fifteen years ago. 'Oh yes? Tell,' he said.

  Beyond their garden lay the communal green, moistly overgrassed in every season — but not in this season. Guy knew what female dogpee did to lawns; and it seemed to him that a bitch the size of a behemoth might have caused those swathes of brown. But dogs were not allowed in the communal garden. It was just the September sun that was doing it. The sun! Guy shut his eyes and wondered how something ninety million miles away could turn his lids into a Hockney swimming-pool awash with fresh blood . . . Out on the lawn, like milkmaids at work, small children played among the fat guards and fatter nannies, who lowed about them, urging caution. Marmaduke was not to be seen there. He was in his nursery, trying out a new au pair. They listened to his hearty ululations - Tarzan, as it might be, showing Jane how it went on the lianas — flinching every few seconds to the sound of some egregious collision. Guy smiled promptingly at his wife's bowed head. The marriage was there (breakfast being its chief sacrament), like the crockery on the awkward table, waiting to be invaded.

  The Yugoslavia trip,' said Hope, opening another letter and reading it. 'She arrived in the middle of the night. For some reason the plane went via Oslo. The next morning she was cleaned out by the cabbie who drove her to the hotel. Only it wasn't a hotel. You expect a toilet but this was ridiculous: some kind of barracks full of mad thugs.' Hope opened another letter and started reading it. 'At this point she completely flipped. No one knows quite what happened next but she was found a couple of days later wandering around Zagreb airport without any bags and without her glasses, which I feel kind of badly about.'

  'Marmaduke.'

  'Marmaduke. Someone at the consulate shipped her back. She got home and the house had been stripped bare. Melba says there's nothing there except floorboards and paint. Then she apparently passed out. But luckily she came to on the stairs just before the boiler exploded. It's still under a ton of water over there.'

  'How frightful. Is there anything we can do? Where is she now?'

  'In hospital.'

  'Insurance?' asked Guy doubtfully.

  Hope shook her head. 'She's wiped out.'

  'My God. So her marvellous young man —'

  'Wasn't so marvellous.'

  '. . . You can't trust anyone these days,' said Guy.

  'You never could,' said Hope.

  Now here came Marmaduke. Defeatedly watched by the stunned au pair (her presence diluted to a mere reflection in the glass), the little boy erupted through the double doors. Although Guy and Hope responded with grooved swiftness, Marmaduke was not to be denied. Surmounting Guy's challenge he harpooned himself face first into the table leg before Hope had a chance to lift the tray. Then the world rocked: broken glasses, chipped china, childblood, spilt milk, spilt milk.

  Saddened as he was by Lady Barnaby's recent reverses, Guy easily succeeded in keeping a sense of proportion. After all, when it came to tales of extremity in strange lands — disorientation, shelterlessness, blinded decampment — he couldn't help but feel he was playing in a higher league. Well, not playing, just watching: a pale spectator among tens of thousands, high up in the bleachers.

  All week he had been driving into Cheapside, quite early, and closeting himself in his office with his coffee and his four telephones. He dialled. His voice knew the circularizing tones of charity, the quiet cajolery of good works. Bad works are all about money. So are good works. But of bad works he was ignorant: and he knew it. Of course, you said the word Indochina and at once you caught the sound of breath escaping through telephone teeth — right through the receiver's helix and into your own inner ear. 'Forget about every­where else,' said his contact at Index, with a brio to which Guy was not yet attuned. 'Forget about West Africa and Turkmenistan. This is the shitstorm.' He'd had no idea. Nobody had any idea. It seemed that there was no idea. Faced with this, and confusedly feeling the need of some bold and reckless act, Guy went out and bought some cigarettes, and sat there awkwardly smoking as he dialled.

  Why was he doing this? Like everybody else, Guy had little appetite for the big bad news. Like everybody else, he had supped full of horrors, over breakfast, d
ay after day, until he was numb with it, stupid with it, and his daily paper went unread. The expansion of mind, the communications revolution: -well, there had been a contraction, and a counter-revolution. And nobody wanted to know. . . Why am I doing this? he wondered. Because it's good? Thought — consecutive thought — ended there. In his head Guy had rescreened his lunch with Nicola so many times that the film was worn thin, and pocked with the crud and curds and queries that tarnish tired eyes. He could see her throat, her moving lips. On the soundtrack her voice remained virginally clear, with its foréignness, its meticulous difficulty. She said she had Jewish blood in her. When Guy tried to pinpoint the attraction he thought not of her breasts, not of her heart, but of her blood, and her blood's rhythmic tug on him. What could you do with someone's blood? Smell, it, taste it, bathe in it? Make love to it. Share it. Perhaps you could put this down to protectiveness, which always contains something fierce, something animal. Was that what he was after? Was he after her blood?

  Though planetary and twentieth-century, and entirely typical of both, the events in Indochina demanded to be thought of astronomi­cally. To begin with, they were obscure, distant, they were deepest black. The Proxy War had put a curve on things when both sides agreed, or when 'both sides agreed', to play their game in the dark. This condition they quickly brought about by a declared policy, much publicized in the press and on television, of killing all journalists. No longer could the foreign correspondents hop from foxhole to foxhole with their media tags in their hatbands and then telex their stories over cocktails from the garden rooftops of scorched Hiltons. In response, rogue camera crews chartered jeeps and choppers; malarial war-freaks climbed out of opium bunks and firmed up their stringerships; one-legged photographers with lumps of Ho's shrapnel still lodged in their brainpans stood on border roads with their thumbs in the air. They went in, but they didn't come out. Guy smoked and flinched and rubbed his eyes, and wondered whether anyone could really bear to watch.

  What came out came out slowly or wrongly or weakly, like tired light. On the one hand the monosyllabic affirmatives or distracted giggling of survivors thrown clear by the crash or the blast; on the other, the unsleeping testimony of the satellites, triumphantly affectless, seeming to exclude everything human from their diagrams of the dead - corpse fields, skull honeycombs. This was a new kind of conflict; spasm war and unfettered war and, unavoidably, superwar were among the buzzwords; proxy war because the world powers seeded it and tested weapons systems in it and kept each other busy with it; but the money was coming from Germany and Japan (and China?), and other brokers of the balance of power. 'If you want to get an idea of what's happening there,' said his informant at the Red Cross, 'read an account of what the Khmer Rouge did in the Seventies and multiply everything by ten. Body count. Area involved. No. Square it. Cube it.' Guy did just that. And here was the astronomical. Because if millions were circling in the vortex of war, then other millions needed to know whether they were living or dead, and if there were millions who cared for the millions who cared, then pretty soon . . . pretty soon . . .

  He had never felt more alive.

  He had never felt happier - this was the ugly truth. Or not for many, many years. He came home in the evening to his wife's surprised approval (he suddenly had value after his day at the office -novelty value, as well as the usual kind) and to Marmaduke's derisory atrocities. He fixed Hope's drink and took it to her at the dressing-table and kissed her neck, his mind on other things, other necks. It was drunk-making stuff all right, an excitation that sparkled the way her tonic did when it hit the ice. She patted his office cheek and smoothed his calculator brow, confident that he was out there making money. And what was he really doing? Guy had need of the great chaos he had tuned into. Feel the tug of mass misery and you want more - more misery, more mass. You have to get addicted. No wonder everybody on the sidelines had the urge to paint it black.

  'Tough day?'

  'Not really.'

  'Poor you.'

  Poor them. But good, good! His motives didn't bear inspection, not for an instant. He thought (when he thought) that he was learning something about life, which always meant death. He thought he had a chance to do real good. His motives didn't bear inspection. Nor did they get any. Love, of all things, saw to that — modern love, in some wild new outfit. I've got enough now, surely to God. Call her tomorrow then, he thought, as he zipped Hope up.

  Guy was coming along nicely. He was doing real good.

  Lost, then, in his new mood of exalted melancholy, Guy climbed the stairs to Nicola Six's door — past the prams and bikes, the brown envelopes, the pasted dos-and-don'ts of parenthood, citizenship, community. He paused halfway up, not for rest but for thought. You know of course that it's a myth or half-truth about the inexorable prosperity of the Asian subculture in the United States. The first wave of mostly middle-class Vietnamese - they did well, right enough. But the next lot, the Cambodians: just imagine. The last time you saw your house it was a hundred feet off the ground and in flames, with your mother and your father and your six children inside it. You'd need time to recover from that. After that, you'd want a rest before taking on America. And presumably the next batch, if it ever comes, the next batch will be even more ... As Guy went on up he heard somebody coming down: a sniffling, shuffling figure, with heavy boots. Guy stood to one side on what he assumed to be the penultimate landing, his chin abstractedly upraised. And all this was on top of the crisis, or rather beneath the crisis, under its wing. This idea of the delegation of cruelty . . .

  'Hello, mate.'

  '-Keith ... Sorry, I'm half-asleep.'

  '1 know the feeling.’

  But Keith did look different. And it wasn't just the liontamer getup and the freshly blowdried hair. Actually these extras seemed to go against the new slant of his presence, which was one of furtiveness or humility. He stood on restless legs with his head bowed, clutching some sort of bathroom attachment to his chest — and a book, a paperback. Neither was Guy empty-handed. He couldn't deliver two grateful refugees, but he had a present with him, a present for Nicola Six. He had thought long and fervently about this present. What could he buy her? A Titian, a yacht, a diamond as big as the Ritz. Guy had wanted to buy her the earth, but he had bought her a globe. Not the old kind: the new kind. A literal globe, the planet as seen from space, heavy, mysterious, baby-blue in its shawls. He held it, like Hamlet.

  Suddenly Keith shrugged and wagged his chin sideways and said, 'I just been — helping out.'

  'Yes of course. That's what I'm here for too.'

  'Same difference.'

  'I'm trying to help her trace someone. Without much luck, as it happens.'

  'Still. You do what you can.'

  'Exactly.' Guy looked at Keith now with pitying fondness. Poor Keith . . .

  'Oh yeah. You coming tonight?'

  'I'm sorry?' said Guy.

  Keith stared at him with full hostility. 'To the darts.'

  'The darts, yes. Of course. Absolutely.'

  'BMW. Mercedes 190E. 2.5—16. Uh, it's up there, mate.'

  And Keith shuffled and sniffed and hurried off down the stairs -with that book under his arm . . .

  Guy called her name in the passage, and advanced with respectful evenness of tread. The sitting-room was empty. It was also much as he had imagined: interesting disarray beneath a lowish ceiling (tall Guy warily sensed a certain pressure on his crown), a teacup here, a foreign magazine there, past-their-best tulips collapsing over the sides of a glass bowl (as if seasick), a certain indolence in the furnishings, the usual pistol-grips and worn webbing of too much video equipment (his own house was a Pinewood of these inexpen­sive toys), the tobacco tang of thoughtful bohemianism. On the table beneath the window, by the wicker chair, an unfinished letter. . . 'Nicola?' he said again, with a light shake of the head. Her voice, somewhat muffled, responded from the neighbour room with a patent untruth: she said she wouldn't be a second. He glanced uncensoriously at his watch, and stood t
o attention with his hands behind his back. After a while he moved to the window and looked backwards over his shoulder and then sideways at the writing pad. 'Dear Professor Barnes,' he read. 'Thank you for sending me Professor Noble's paper, which I'm obliged to say I found misleading and shoddily argued. I take his word for it that artists often have sexual relations with their subjects. One is amply persuaded that such things happen. But his anecdotes can have no useful bearing on the representational argument. I was on pins, wondering when he was going to say that Rembrandt's portraits of Saskia — or, perhaps, Bonnard's of Marte - were "suffused" with sexual knowledge, or reflect on the painter's yearning to "get inside" his sitter, or recliner. Such coarse speculation is where this line always leads. To lend a personal note,' read Guy, completing the page. His hand reached out to turn it. But then he desisted with a soft shudder. She knows about art, he thought bracingly. And a beautiful hand: not as strictly elegant as Hope's, rounder, more expressive, with something of Lizzyboo's feminine corpulence. It abruptly occurred to Guy that he had never done anything like this before. He had never been alone with a woman of his own age in the place where she lived, and in secret, without Hope knowing. Nicola's sitting-room was 'much as he had imagined'. What, exactly, had he imagined? He could claim, perhaps, that his reveries were chaste. But his dreams went their own way. Well, he thought, we can't help dreaming what we dream. Guy swept his gaze round to the bookcase and approached it with brisk relief. He took out The Rainbow and looked at its opening page. What was it Keith had with him? Ridiculous. Slipped my mind. Villette? The Professor? Shirley? No, much more obvious but not Jane Eyre . . .

  I see. She's obviously been crying, Guy said to himself as Nicola stepped out of the bedroom. Her colourful face addressed him declaratively - saying what, he didn't know. It didn't strike Guy that her erectness at such a moment was unusual, because Hope was like that too: she always addressed you with her tears, or their aftermath; she would never cringe or hide. Looking past Nicola for an instant Guy saw in the mirror the sorry anarchy of neglected linen. Yes: the habitat of deep, deep depression. My God, look! - the poor creature can hardly walk. Such disorientation in the tread. And the suffering face, seeming to flex from inner pain. Mm. Nasty welt or spot on the cheekbone there. Of course these days even the most radiant complexions . . . She'll bump into that table if she's not careful. Whoops. It's the same thing I always have with her, the urge, the need to reach out and steady her, if I dared.