London Fields

  'It's so hot,' she said, as if in accusation.

  'Yes I know,' he said apologetically.

  For a while Guy attempted some praise of her bookshelves, and there were other marginalia (chess, Keith, the heat again); but it seemed heartless to tug on these tenterhooks. As gently as he could, he began. And her presence, her force field, went quite dead as it withstood the first volley of the disappointments he had brought her. With her hands clasped on her lap she sat bent forward on the sofa, the bare knees together, the ankles apart but the toes almost touching, like a child in the headmaster's study. Nicola's full face never flickered - except once, maybe, when he mentioned the man at Greenpeace, in whom the name Enola Gay had briefly rung a bell, another lead that led nowhere. It was almost a deliverance when grief came and those slow tears, astonishingly bright, began to map her cheeks.

  'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I'm so sorry.'

  A minute passed and then she said, 'I have a confession to make.'

  As she made it, as he heard it, a series of soft explosions, of intimate rearrangements, seemed to take place in the back of his skull. Delicious and multiform, a great heaviness exerted itself on him — the force of gravity, reminding you of all the power you need just to lug this blood around.

  'One other thing. I warned you I was a ridiculous person . . .'

  It was thrown out, with baffled impatience. Guy smiled to himself. Palely, inwardly, Guy smiled, and said, 'I guessed as much.'

  'You what? I'm sorry I... I didn't know people could tell.'

  'Oh yes,' he said calmly. 'In fact it's quite obvious.'

  'Obvious?'

  He had long guessed it, he now felt, the pinkness and purity of Nicola Six. And after all it wasn't such a rare strategy, not in these cautious times, these times of self-solicitude. It made sense, he thought - it rang true. Because if you took Hope away then Nicola and I are the same. Virgin territory. Guy was now feeling the novel luxury of sexual experience. He had never knowingly met anyone less experienced than himself; even Lizzyboo, with her four or five unhappy affairs, struck him as an amatory exotic (love-weathered), like Anais Nin. And this might even mean that I will be able to love safely.. . But where did the contrary impulse come from? What alternate message from what alternate world was telling him to wrench open that chaste white dress, to take that brown body and turn it inside out?

  'Only that you have this dark glow to you. Something contained. Untouchable.'

  In pathetic confusion she stood with her hands still clasped and moved towards the window. Guy groaned, and got to his feet, and crept up behind her.

  'Is this for me?' she asked. The globe stood there on her desk. She turned to him and raised both hands to her cheeks. 'It's still quite pretty, isn't it?'

  'My dear, you're —'

  'No, not me. The earth,' she said. 'Please go now.'

  '. . . May I call you tomorrow?'

  'Call me?' she said through her tears. 'This is love. You don't understand. Call me? You can do what you like to me. You can kill me if you like.'

  He raised a hand towards her face.

  'Don't. That might just do it. I might just die if you touch me.'

  Over breakfast the next morning Hope informed Guy that the car had been done again and he'd have to take it in. Guy nodded and went on with his cereal (the car got done about once a week). He watched his wife as she flowed up and down the kitchen in her dressing-gown. Previously, if she had known everything, she might have called a psychiatrist. But now, after yesterday, she might feel justified in calling a lawyer, a policeman ... As he got up to go Guy felt the need to say something to her.

  'What are those pills you're taking? Oh. Yeast.'

  'What?'

  'Yeast.'

  'What about it?'

  'Nothing.'

  'What are you talking about?'

  'Sorry.'

  'Christ.'

  The car got done about once a week. In the street Guy opened the door of the VW (it was never locked) and covered the broken glass on the driver's seat with the sign that said stereo already gone. He drove to the garage in St John's Wood. Before he climbed out he removed the service book from the frazzled wound in the dash where the stereo used to be (years ago). The usual shrugs and nods. As Guy waited for the usual unreliable promise he might have reflected on how easy the Other Woman had it: she didn't make you take the car in ever, and she swallowed her yeast in private.

  Guy walked down Maida Vale. Having lost their leaves too early, the trees sunbathed, wrinkled and topless and ashamed. London birds croaked in pity or defiance. The sun was doing what it did and always had done, day and night, for fifteen billion years, which is burn. Why didn't more people worship the sun? The sun had so much going for it. It created life; it was profoundly mysterious; it was so powerful that no one on earth dared to look its way. Yet humans worshipped the human, the anthropomorphic. They worshipped promiscuously: anybody. An Indian keep-fit fanatic, an Ethiopian mass-murderer, a nineteenth-century American angel called Moroni - Guy's own Catholic God or Nobodaddy. Almost humorous in some lights, the down on her upper lip. The sun was a unit away: an astronomical unit. But today you felt that the sun was no higher than Everest. Not good to be out in it, really. Giver of all life, the sun was now taking life away, the lifetaker, the carcinogenic sun. A trick of perception, or is there a certain spacing in the join of her hips and legs, a curved triangle of free air between the thighs, just at the top? Guy walked on, down Elgin Avenue. He felt happy — in obedience, perhaps, to the weather (and if this sun were rendered in a children's book it would surely be smiling); happy anticipations, happy memories, an embarrassment of happiness. He remembered one morning over a year ago. Yes, he had just burped Marmaduke; in fact the child had been sick on his shoulder (the drycleaning man comes and scratches the corduroy with a doubtful fingernail and you say 'Baby sick', and everyone smiles, forgivingly, everyone under­stands). I was sitting on the bed with the baby, while she changed or bathed next door. I felt cold suddenly — his sick was cooling on my shoulder - and there was the baby's head, the hair slicked flat with womb-gloss, biospherical, like a world. Or a heavenly body. I felt its heat, the warmth of the baby's head, and I thought (oh these puns and their shameful mediocrity - but I meant it, I really meant it): I've got, I now have ... I now have a little sun.

  And God - look out! — the Portobello Road, the whole trench scuffed and frayed, falling apart, and full of rats. Guy could feel the street frisking him - to see what he had and what he might give up. A queue of tramps had formed at the gates of the Salvation Army Hostel, waiting for soup or whatever was offered, the troops of the poor, conscripts, pressed men, hard pressed. Tall, and with clean hair, clean teeth, Guy moved past them painfully, the tramps and their tickling eyes. All he saw was a montage of preposterous footwear, open at the toes like the mouths of horses, showing horse's teeth . . . Once upon a time, the entrance to the Black Cross was the entrance to a world of fear. Nowadays things had changed places, and fear was behind him, at his back, and the black door was more like an exit.

  Eleven-thirty, and the moment they'd all been waiting for: heralded by his dog, a plume of cigarette smoke and a volley of coughing, Keith Talent was so good as to step into the Black Cross. Keith's status, his pub twang, always robust, was now, of course, immeasurably enhanced, after the events of the previous night. An interested general murmur slowly coalesced into light applause and then slowly dissipated in fierce, scattered cries of goading triumph. Relief barman Pongo was the most eloquent, perhaps, when, having readied Keith's pint, he extended a plump white hand and simply said: 'Darts.'

  'Yeah well cheers, lads,' said Keith, who had a wall-eyed hangover.

  'You did it, man,' said Thelonius. 'You did it.'

  Keith rinsed his mouth with lager and said thickly, 'Yeah well he crapped it, didn't he. No disrespect, mate, but there's always going to be a question mark over the temperament of the black thrower. First leg of the second set I was way back and he goes
ton-forty and has three darts at double 16? When he shitted that I knew then that victory was there for the taking. In the third leg of the vital second set 1 punished his sixties and then - the 153 kill. Treble zo, treble 19, double 18. Champagne darts. Exhibition. That was probably the highlight of the evening. You can't argue with finishing of that quality. No way.'

  'It was a stern test,' said Thelonius deliberately, 'of your darting character.'

  Bogdan said, 'You responded to the - to the big-match atmos­phere.’

  'The choice of venue could have posed problems to a lesser player,' said Dean. 'You fended off the . . .'

  'You disposed of the . . .'

  'Challenge of the . . .'

  'Brixton left-hander,' said Thelonius with a sigh.

  Keith turned to Guy Clinch, who was leaning on the pintable and watching them with a diffident smile. 'And you,' said Keith, coming towards him. 'And you,' he said, with prodding finger. 'You handled yourself superb. Handled himself excellent last night. Handled himself excellent.'

  Guy gazed gratefully enough into Keith's eyes — which did indeed (he thought) look most peculiar this morning. Keith's eyes contained a bright array of impurities and implosions, together with a vertical meniscus of unshed tears; but the strangest thing about them was their location. The mortified pupils seemed to be trying to put distance between either socket — they were practi­cally in his temples. My God, thought Guy: he looks like a whale. A killer whale? No. Some benignly wheezing old basker. A blue whale. A sperm whale. Yes and with the incredible pallor . . . Guy sipped his drink and listened to Keith's praise, and to the praise of Bogdan, of Norvis, of Dean and Pat and Lance. He inspected their faces for evidence of irony. But all he found was approval, and welcome.

  'I never knew,' said Keith, 'I never knew you was so tasty.'

  Had there, after all, been that much to it? After his meeting with Nicola, Guy returned home and spent teatime with Marmaduke. Hope was playing tennis with Dink Heckler. He then had a long shower (can be difficult, sometimes, getting all that custard and treacle out of one's hair), changed, and, at about seven, made his entry into the Black Cross. And into a delirium of darts. Banners and hats bearing the legend keith, and shouts of 'Darts, Keith!' and 'Keith!', and Keith himself, highly charged, hoarsely yelling 'Dartsl' Outside, two vans revved tormentedly. In they all piled, with the natural exception of Keith, who was relying on alternative transport. 'I'm taking him,' Fucker had said, 'in that fucker,' and pointed through the doors at a gunmetal Jaguar. Then Guy got forty minutes in the back of the van, where the whites and the Asians smoked and laughed and coughed all the way, and the blacks silent with unreadable hungers, and half-bottles of Scotch grimly and unquesti-oningly passed from hand to hand.

  'On the way in they was obviously going to start something,' said Dean.

  'Really?' said Guy, who hadn't noticed anything untoward, except for the jostling and the raillery, and a great presence, a great heat of bare black muscle. 'How could you tell?'

  'They stabbed Zbig One,' said Zbig Two.

  'Nothing serious,' said Keith. 'Zbig One? He's all right. Out next week some time.'

  The darts contest took place, not in the Foaming Quart proper (with its stained glass and heavy drapes and crepuscular funk), but in an adjoining hall, such was the intensity of the local interest. As Keith said, the fixture had captured the imagination of all Brixton. Standing ankle-deep in sawdust, Guy guessed that the hall had been used recently, and no doubt regularly, as a discotheque and also as a church; less recently, it had served as a school. He just sensed this. There were no especially pointed reminders of the establishments he had attended (their thousand-acre parklands, Olympic swimming-pools, computer studios, and so on); but the low stage, the damaged skylights, the Roman numerals of the clock, the quelling wood — all told Guy school. A boys' school, too. He looked around (this did worry him) and there were no women anywhere . . . Benches had been set out as in an assembly room, many of them tipped over in outbreaks of horseplay, and eventually everyone sat down. But when the match began, with no ceremony, everyone stood up. If everyone had sat down you could have watched from your seat. But everyone stood up. So everyone stood up.

  Not that there was a great deal to see, in the way of darts. Keith's opponent was very young and very black, and strikingly combined the qualities of violence and solemnity, the face perfect and polished, and the shaved head holding a tint of violet, like an impeccable penis, impeccably erect. With many hesitations and corrections, two old black men refereed and kept score with chalk and mike. Loping and sidling in electromagnetic shirt and toreador flares, Keith was easily the most coarse and slovenly figure on the stage; but he looked by far the best adapted.

  'You wound them up beautiful,' said Dean.

  'The hostility of the crowd', Keith agreed, 'put me under pressure. What they didn't know is — Keith Talent thrives on pressure.'

  'You wound them up beautiful,' said Dean.

  'Showmanship innit,' said Keith. 'Sheer showmanship.’

  The hostility of the crowd, Guy had noticed, was certainly marked. Early on it assumed the form of screaming and coin-throwing and foot-stomping, together with at least three quite serious attempts on Keith's life. Later, though, as Keith's darts told, as the crowd's dream was pricked into nightmare .. . there was much weeping and keening and beseeching (had the women got in here at last?), and Guy watched a man holding a slice of beerbottle to his own neck, muttering fast with his lids half-shut and flickering. On stage, Keith responded - with showmanship. This showmanship consisted of a wide variety of obscene gestures, a series of feinted kicks aimed at the heads of the groundlings, and a habit (especially incensing) of appearing to free, or of actually freeing, his underpants from between his buttocks just as he turned and prepared to throw.

  Anyway, after half an hour in the howling bodyheat, with Guy contributing to both the heat and the howl, shouting 'Darts!' and 'Keith!' and 'Darts, Keith!' with more and more licence, it seemed to be generally agreed that the match was over and that Keith had won it. In a flourish of forgiveness Keith turned to his opponent, who advanced on him suddenly with one dart raised like a knife.

  'Stabbed himself. In the hand. With his own dart.'

  'Passions were running high,' said Norvis.

  'Yeah,' said Keith. 'Beyond a doubt he was rueing that costly miss in the second set.'

  'Had to be,' said Dean. 'Had to be.'

  It was in the carpark that Guy was unanimously held to have distinguished himself. He thought back: the ground's scooped and rutted surface exposed by the line of headlights under the familiar blackness of a London night, and the blackness of the human line in front of the two vans and Fucker's Jag, torches, eyes and teeth, the jink of chains, the smell of petrol or kerosene. At this point Keith himself had fallen silent and hung back, a part of the company enfolding him, their champion or thoroughbred.

  'I'd have gone in there myself,' said Keith.

  'Nah.'

  'Didn't want to give them the satisfaction.'

  True, Dean, true,' said Keith. 'Conserving my energies. Already pondering the quarter finals as such.'

  But Guy had gone in there. He made his way forward, with rectilinearity, with giraffe straightness of posture; and the lack of hesitation, the unanswerably clear ring of his voice as he simply said 'Excuse me', and, when the black boy ran at him, 'Don't be a tit', and went on through; and then, once the line had been broken to let him in, how everything just fell away . . . Guy sipped on drink and praise, and wondered. His father had been brave. In the war he had risen to brigadier, but he made his name as a teenage lieutenant in the guerrilla action in Crete, coming down from those hills coated in blood and medals. The night before, Guy had sensed no personal danger. He felt the black crew had something else in mind, something inscrutable. And anyway the carpark and its actors had seemed to occupy no more than ten per cent of his reality. At any moment, with mighty bounds, he could be free. Free, on the mighty bounds, the qu
antum leaps of love.

  'No,' said Keith, peering at him earnestly with his soaking eyes. 'No. You did real good.'

  If I'm brave, thought Guy, or brave for now, then what do I feel in the street (the way the air just shakes you down, that Guernica of hoboes toes!), and still feel? Not fear, then. Shame and pity. But no fear.

  A little later, at Keith's suggestion, they repaired to the Golgotha for a discreet glass of porno. The bar was three drinkers deep, and as they waited Keith cocked a tenner and turned sideways to Guy, saying, 'You uh, see that Nicky then?'

  Guy considered. He often had trouble with Keith's tenses. 'Yes, I saw her - that time . . .'

  'Helping her out.'

  That's right.'

  That's right.'

  It couldn't be said that a silence fell between them, for there were no silences in the Golgotha. But by the time they reached the bar (where they would remain as long as possible, like everybody else, out of brute territoriality), a hiatus had arrived and now made itself comfortable, getting fatter and fatter and shoving out its elbows.

  Guy said, 'I was . . . Sorry?'

  'No. You was saying?'

  'No. Go ahead. Please.'

  'No I was just saying — I can't be doing with all these birds. Saps a man's darts.' Keith coughed for a while and then said tearfully: 'I respect my body. I got to take care of myself. Now. Onna darts. It's tough, with all this spare minge around but you got to draw the line somewhere. You got to.’