'Poor you. You're hungover. All that celebrating, I should think, from your darts. Well, you deserve it.' She reached out to help him off with his electric-blue windcheater, promising him a nice spicy Bullshot. 'Believe me,' she said, 'it's the best thing.'
Nicola halved the .lemon, opened the can of consommé, ground the pepper, poured the vodka. Every now and then she looked at him as she worked, shaking her head and whispering to herself. Her project had been to get through men — to get to the end of men. And what did that leave her with ? There he sat at the table, fiercely frowning over his paper, as if it were a route-map, guiding him to buried treasure. The round and hairless forearms lay flat on either margin. You could end the thing now: by going over and whisking it out from under his gaze. Keith would kill for his tabloid. Any day.
'Seychelles,' he said, impermissibly, as she placed the glass six inches from his fat right hand. Unable to do more for the moment, Nicola effaced herself, standing at the corner table and looking down blindly at her diary. Heat scattered through her. 'Bali,' he added . . . She had a question ready: to do with darts. In a silent trauma of contempt, broken only by the occasional incredulous cackle, Nicola had been watching the darts on television. A twenty-stone man threw a twenty-gram nail at a lump of cork, while the crowd screamed for blood. Tiddlywinks in a bearpit. This was some destiny.
Anyway she asked the question, and he answered it; then she moved up behind him and looked over his shoulder. The centre pages of Keith's tabloid were devoted to tabloid-sized photographs of the movie-star Burton Else and his bride Liana. Big Liana wore a small bikini. Burton Else wore some kind of thong or opaque condom. His head, no larger than an avocado, blazed out above an inverted pyramid of organ meat. The accompanying text concerned itself with the Elses' marriage agreement: damage-limitation for Burton, in the event of a divorce.
'Burton Else, innit,' said Keith, with what seemed to be a touch of pride. 'And Liana.'
'They come and they go,' said Nicola. 'Every few years the world feels the need for another male literalist.'
'Pardon?'
'I wonder how many million she gets a year,' Nicola continued, 'for going along with the notion that he isn't a faggot.'
Could anything surprise Nicola? Was she surprisable? One wonders. Keith now half-turned to her slowly, all patience lost, gone, as if she'd been bugging him for hours and this was it.
'Him?' he said loudly. 'Burton Else? Fuck off.'
She took a step backwards, away from this. Then she folded her arms and said, 'An obvious and well-known faggot. A celebrated faggot.'
Keith's eyes closed longsufferingly (give him strength).
She said, 'Come on. I mean, who cares, but look at his face. On top of that body? She deserves the money. It must be a full-time job looking the other way.'
'Not Burton Else. Not Burton.'
Nicola wondered how far she ought to go with this. It was, in fact, common knowledge about Burton Else. Anyone who followed the movies knew about Burton Else (and Nicola followed them closely). It was even clear from the trades: constant static between certain pressure groups and the studio lawyers. Yes, it was common knowledge about Burton: but not as common as the other knowledge about him, the big-screen and video knowledge, which said how much he loved his country and his women and his machine-guns. Burton had a new wife in every film (before she got slain by samurai or Red Indians or Guatemalans, or some other band of intellectuals): how these blondes adored their Burton, how they oiled and ogled him, and encouraged him with his bodybuilding! Christ, thought Nicola, hasn't everyone caught on by now? (She was intrigued by the homosexual world, but finally disapproved of it, because she was excluded from it.) The workout king, the erection lookalike: however fearless and patriotic you made him, however many wives and Bibles and three-foot Bowie knives you gave him, he still belonged to locker rooms, cuboid buttocks, testosterone hotels.
'Burton Else's a happily married man,' said Keith. 'He loves his wife. Loves the woman. Do anything for her.'
Nicola waited, thinking about love, and watching the dull invitation to violence subside in Keith's eyes.
'Camera don't lie like. That last film he was always giving her one. She wasn't complaining, no way. She said nobody did it quite like Burton.'
'Yeah,' said Nicola, and leant forward with her hands on the table like a teacher, 'and he probably had to stagger into his trailer or his bungalow to throw up between takes. He's a fruit, Keith. And as I said, who cares ? Don't worry. It does your masculinity credit that you can't see it. It takes one to know one. And you aren't one, are you Keith.'
'No danger,' he said automatically. Then for a few seconds he blinked steadily on a heartbeat rhythm. And his face creased in childish unhappiness. 'But if ... but then . . . but he . . .'
Film, Keith, she could have said. Film. All that not real. Not real.
It was six o'clock precisely, though, and the telephone rang, right on the button, and Nicola smiled ('This is a tape'), and did her thing with Guy.
Later, after her own film show, as she escorted a hugely, an almost speechlessly gratified Keith to the stairs, as she prepared to usher him out into the wind and the rain, Nicola said reflectively, strollingly (her hands in the trouser pockets of the pluming suit),
'He's a romantic, remember. So work on that. Tell him I'm pale and drawn. Tell him I sit by the window, sighing. Tell him I finger the beautiful globe, and ruefully smile, and turn away. You know the sort of stuff. In your own style, Keith, of course.'
'Jack Daniels.'
It seemed now that she would finally have to kiss him. Well, he asked for it. Nicola felt a noise, a soft rearrangement, go off inside her, something like a moan - one of those tragic little whimpers, perhaps, that thwarted lovers are said to emit. She breathed deep and leaned down and offered Keith the Rosebud: fish mouth, the eyes thankfully closed. 'Mah,' she said when it was over (and it lasted half a second).
'Patience, Keith. You'll find with me,' she said, 'that when it rains, it
pours. Look!’
Jack and the Beanstalk. How the young legs sped up into the purple tunic. And the impetuous, the life-loving smile!
'Jim Beam. Benedictine. Porno.'
'What?'
'Porno. It's this drink. You get it down the Golgotha. Or by the case from the bloke at BestSave. Dead cheap, cause it's been nicked twice.'
'. . . Run along, Keith.'
'Yeah cheers.'
She came back into the sitting-room and, seeing a patch of brief and sudden sunlight on the sofa, flopped herself down in it, her limbs outstretched, like a dark star. Nicola's round tummy pushed upwards three or four times as she laughed —in helpless exasperation. Yes, all right. Porno: porno. Yes of course. If you must. Surprisingly, Nicola disliked pornography, or she disliked its incursion into her own lovelife. Because it was so limited, because there was no emotion in it (it spoke straight to the mental quirk), and because it stank of money. But she could do pornography. It was easy.
A performing artist, a bullshit artist, something of a piss artist, and a considerable sack artist, she was also an artist; and although she knew exactly where she wanted to go, she didn't always know exactly how she was going to get there. You could never admit this, however, even to yourself. You had to make the mind shoot like a puck over all that creaky ice. You trusted your instinct, or you were dead. She laughed again, with a brisk snort that had her stretching for the paper tissues (now who planned that—who planned that burst bubble of humorous mucus ?), as she remembered the killer line she had laid on Guy Clinch. 'There's just one other thing: I'm a virgin.' A virgin. Oh, yeah. Nicola had never said those words before, even when she had the chance: twenty years ago, in that little gap between finding out what it meant and ceasing to be one. She had never said it when it was true (especially not then. And would it have made much odds to the drunken Corsican in his mag-strewn boiler room, beneath the hotel at Aix-en-Provence?). 'I'm a virgin.' But there was a first time for everything.
br />
The joke was, the real joke was . . . she had come close - she had come that close — to muffing her big line. She almost said something that would have wrecked the whole performance. Really, the actress training was a liability in real life: if you're the dramatic type anyway, then don't go to Drama School. Because the associations of the moment, the tears, the indignation, the extremity, had prompted another line, another lie, one she had delivered pretty well routinely throughout her teens and twenties, in ultimatum form, on the crest of various rages, various dissolutions. She almost said: 'There's just one other thing: I'm pregnant.' Whoops! Now that would have been quite bad. No coming back from there. 'I'm pregnant.' Those words, at least, had fairly often consorted with the truth. She didn't go on about it or anything, internally or otherwise, but she acknowledged the scar tissue of her seven abortions.
Nicola blew her nose noisily and lay there clutching the rolled tissue. Two broad fronts: the cloudy trophies of Guy's archaic heart; Keith Talent, and his reptile modernity. She was an artist, in reasonable control, and knew everything that was going to happen, more or less. But she never knew this. She never knew this about her final project. She never knew it was going to be such hard work.
The black cab pulled away, thanked and tipped by the, by the ... Disgustingly attired (how could she?), and making her way into the pregnant blackout of the dead-end street. The car waited; now it nosed forward, with sidelights burning. The door opened. Get in, he said. And she had been so very very bad . . . You. Always you, she said. And in she climbed.
Nicola awoke, and heard the rain, and went back to sleep again, or she tried. The rain sounded like industrial gas escaping from the rooftops — tons of gas, enough to fill the storage vat that overlooked the Park (corseted and flat-topped, the snare in God's drum set). Mauling and worrying thepillows, she squirmed and bounced around the bed. She persevered for perhaps an hour while ten thousand sensations ran through her like a metropolitan marathon. She sat up suddenly and drank most of the pint of water that had colourlessly monitored her sleep. There came the sound of thunder, the premonitory basses and kettles of God's new drum solo. She hung her head. This morning, at any rate, Nicola Six could look forward to a whole day off.
She micturated angrily, as if trying to drill a hole through the hard marble. Having wiped herself she stepped on to the scales in her heavy white nightdress—her decidedly non-vamp nightdress, what she wore in bed when all she wanted was comfort, frump-warmth and comfort. The dial shivered and settled. Eh! But the nightdress was heavy, the sleepy in her eyes was heavy, her hair (she made a mustache of one of its locks) was heavy and smelled of cigarettes: the tobacco, not the smoke. With a silent snarl she cleaned her teeth for the taste of the toothpaste, and spat.
Back in the bedroom she drew the curtains and released the blind. She opened the window to the wet air: three inches, a distance that corresponded in her mind to a single raised notch on the passage thermostat. Normally, on a working day, she would have aired the bed—but she planned to return there very soon. Ten o'clock, and it was dark outside. Against such darkness the rain might be expected to take on the glow of silver or mercury. Not today. Even the rain was dark. She listened to it again. What was the point? What could the rain say but rain, rain, rain?
In ritual vexation she ran a tap for her morning tea. The tapwater, she knew, had passed at least twice through every granny in London. Previously she had relied on bottled water from France, more costly than petrol, until it was revealed that Eau des Deux Monts had passed at least twice through every granny in Lyon. You had to run the tap for at least ten minutes before it stopped tasting like tepid soy sauce. Just how much of people's lives was spent waiting for hot water to run hot, for cold water to run cold, standing there with a finger, pointing, in the falling column. She went and switched on the television: the soundless, telex-like news channel. Sternly she reviewed the international weather reports. madrid 12 rain. magnitogorsk 9 rain. mahabad 14 rain. managua 12. rain. The rain in the right-hand column formed a pillar of drizzle. That's right: it was raining all over the world. The biosphere was raining.
With the tap still poling into the sink Nicola put on her dressing-gown and flew barefoot down the stairs for her mail. The men who lived beneath her . .. The men who lived beneath her got less and less keen on Nicola the nearer to the top they got. Speechlessly revered by the man in the basement, openly acclaimed and fancied at street level, she was heartily endorsed by the man on the first floor, who tended to pooh-pooh the suspicion of the man on the second, who none the less associated himself with the settled hostility of the man on the third. The man on the fourth floor didn't like her one bit. In fact, on almost any reckoning, she was ruining his life. She kept him up at night with her banging and pacing; his days she poisoned with her music, her frantic scene shifting, her vampire and vigilante videos; odds and ends tossed from her windows littered his balcony; three of his inner walls reeked of wet-rot from her leaking pipes, her overflowing baths . . .
In bed again, leaning on a rampart of pillows, with her teatray and her mail. . . And there was a time, five years ago, three years ago, when her mail weighed in at half a stone, and smelled of toilet water and pot-pourri: well-turned tributes, groveilings, poems, invitations, and a lot of free airline tickets. Now? Cathode script from computerized mailing lists. 'Richard Pinkley has completed the preparation of his Autumn Exhibition and is pleased to invite you to the Preview.''I don't care,' said Nicola. 'Lucky you! Your name has been selected for a chance to win the holiday of a lifetime with Vista International!' 'I don't care,' said Nicola. 'We understand that the lease on your property will shortly expire and we would be delighted to help you with your relocation in any way we can.' 'Idon't care,' said Nicola. Her lease was due to expire at the end of December. Short lease. None of this millennial stuff: nine hundred and ninety-nine years. Just thirty months was all she had wanted. The lease was running out; and so was her money.
Now the real toilet—beginning with the toilet. The toilet: rightly so called. Interesting word, toilet. 'Toilet.' Toilet. 'Arranging the hair . . . (make one's toilet) . . . an elaborate toilet; a toilet of white satin . . . (room containing lavatory) . . . (Med.) cleansing of part after an operation or at time of childbirth . . .The reception of visitors by a lady during the concluding stages of her toilet; very fashionable in the 18th C . . . Preparation for execution (in Fr. form toilette).' Toilet was right. She had known girls who went to the toilet in fleeting thoughtlessness: it was something that got done between doing other things. Nicola wasn't like that. Nicola was heavy weather. She realized, with regret (but what can you do?), that she was mannish when it came to the toilet. Not ridiculously mannish: she didn't need a pack of cigarettes and War and Peace and a section of horse-brass to chew on; she didn't need to hold up traffic beforehand, and clear the street with a bullhorn. Yet the whiteness of the bowl was tinged with difficulty, with onerousness. She flipped up her non-vamp nightdress and sat there making unreadable faces. It shouldn't really happen to a heroine—or only behind closed doors. But the reception of visitors by a lady during the opening stages of her toilet was very fashionable in the twentieth century. And now the twentieth century was coming to an end.
Naked, she weighed herself a second time, while the bath thundered - while it slobbered and rumoured. Then, in an abrupt about-turn, the full-length mirror . . . Yes! Good, still good, all very very good. But time was getting ready to finger it, to make its grab; time was drying that belly with the heat of its breath. She looked at the pots and tubs on the bath's rim; cleansers, conditioners, moisturizers. She looked at the nail varnish, the hair dryer, the fairground lights of the dressing table— the mirror hours, the looking-glass war! No one could seriously stand there and expect anybody to be forever having to do with all this shit.
Something about the indomitability of the human spirit (and felt death in its full creative force): back into battle she came the next day, pressing forward under the spiked dome of he
r black umbrella. Fresh air - or fairly fresh anyway, relatively free-range and corn-fed: outer air, not inner air, not just personal gas. In bygone times of average lassitude she had been capable of spending a week and a half wondering whether to post a letter or return a li brary book or paint her toenails. But these days (the last days) her need for activity was clearly desperate. She swayed in the rain as she re-experienced the killing etiolation of the previous day, all its pale delinquency. Sitting there beside the bookcase, trying to read, in a growing panic of self-consciousness. Why? Because reading presupposed a future. It had to do with fortification. Because reading went the other way. She sent the book flying through the air with its petticoats flapping. Women in Love! She wanted a drink, a pill, a drug (she wanted a Greenland of heroin), but she didn't want it. She wanted the concentrated, the consuming, the undivided male attention known as sexual intercourse (imagine the atomic cloud as an inverted phallus, and Nicola's loins as ground zero), but she didn't want it. Formerly the telephone would have led her off into altered states. And now the telephone's tendrils led nowhere. All you could do was heavily move from room to room to room ... So it was good to get out and busy oneself with something really useful.
The rain made toadstools of the people on the street. They had a toadstool smell, too (a sodden softness), she noticed, as the wet souls converged at the entrance to the underground, faceless stalks, in mackintoshes, beneath the black flowers of their umbrellas. But Nicola's personal cinematographer (the cause, perhaps, of all her trouble) was still hard at work, and lit her like a chasuble. It was hot, and the rain was hot, but Nicola would be cool. She wore a plain dress of silvery linen. The rain would ruin it, the scuff and the shuffle and the tyre squirt would certainly ruin it (her shoes were already ruined). That didn 't matter. Because she was killing off her clothes, one by one. In the damp-dog airlessness of the train (a taxi would have taken all morning), Nicola suffered a sense of deafness from the sleeping pills she had eventually taken the night before. And she also feared an incriminating pallor. Yesterday had devolved into an epic of largely pleasureless - and entirely solitary - excitation: the terrible teenager's clogged cafará. And yet the adolescent (she now formulated it to herself), no matter how terrible, no matter how torpid and graceless and hormone-slowed, always had the prospect of love. Nicola did not have the prospect of love—love, which distinguishes this place from all others in the universe. Or it tries. Indeed, her flexings and squeezings, her compulsive caresses of the self, were further haunted by the thought that nothing significantly better was taking place anywhere on earth: no act of love that was undesperate, unmediated, unsneeringly observed. She was wrong about that, wrong also about the way she looked, though in the Spanish burnish of her face there was maybe half a dab of hoar, the hoar of smoke or cloud or milk. Now Nicola stared at a schoolboy until he vacated his seat for her, like a somnambulist. Proudly she sat, and looked straight ahead.