London Fields

  Now, against the background of the child's obscure agonies, a tremendously long silence gathered. This silence was shaped like a tunnel. It seemed to Guy that there was no way out of it, none at all -except full confession. Or this:

  'We could have another child,' he said, staring seriously at his wife.

  '. . . Are you out of your mind?'

  Guy's eyebrows lifted and he resettled himself like a moody pupil. It was true that they had been most gravely advised - on many different occasions, in many different clinics and consulting rooms, in Geneva, in Los Angeles, in Tokyo - to renounce the possibility of a second child, or to delay it indefinitely, or at any rate until Marmaduke was at least fourteen (by which time Hope, besides, would be fifty-one). The billionaire specialists and Nobel Laureate child-psychiatrists had always warned of the disturbing effect on Marmaduke if a little newcomer should succeed him. None had been heartless enough to suggest that the second child might be just like the first.

  'What if it's just like Marmaduke?' said Hope.

  'Don't say that. My God. What's he doing now?'

  'He's trying to make himself sick.'

  'But he's got his whole fist down there.'

  'He won't manage it.'

  Guy looked at Hope — surprised, heartened.

  'He threw up his tea long ago. And his milk and cookies. His only hope now is with the phlegm.'

  'He wasn't sick after lunch. Can't bear that noise. Or was he?'

  'Yeah - he slimed Melba. Then he bit Phoenix on the tongue. Quite far back. I hope she wasn't letting him French-kiss her again.'

  Guy uneasily reviewed Hope's policy about Marmaduke and kissing. Members of the staff were allowed to kiss Marmaduke. But only Hope was allowed to French-kiss him.

  'I had to call Terry.'

  Terry!'

  Even more uneasily Guy thought of Terry - his platform shoes, his brutal singlet. 'I hate Terry.'

  'So do I. He's strictly last-resort. And even he looked pretty shaken.'

  Guy looked down and gave a smile—not of affection but of wonder. He loved Marmaduke. He would joyfully die for Marmaduke. He would die for Marmaduke, not next week, not tomorrow, but now, right now. He loved Marmaduke despite the clear sense, constantly refreshed, that Marmaduke had no lovable qualities. Marmaduke gave no pleasure to anyone except when he was asleep. When he was asleep, you could gaze down at him and thank the Lord that he wasn't awake.

  'Oh yes,' said Hope. 'Lady Barnaby. She's been struck dumb.'

  'Literally?'

  'Yup. Since she got back. Shock.'

  That's terrible.'

  'You know what you look like?' said Hope. 'A hermit.'

  Guy shrugged and looked away. He didn't seem to mind the comparison. But then he looked back again: Hope was staring at him with concentration. He feared this stare. He readied himself.

  'Not a hermit who lives in a cottage,' she went on slowly. 'In the Orkneys or wherever. I mean the kind of hermit who lives in a hotel in Las Vegas. A sordid maniac with lots of money who never goes out. The kind of person who has a "shrine" in his bedroom for some fat dead moviequeen.'

  He had kept up with the Cambodia thing — with the remote and groping search for Little Boy and En Lah Gai: the displaced persons. Making his calls each morning at the office (it was his only reason for going in), Guy was by now on first-name terms with various contacts — various telephonic entities — at the American Refugee Committee, the British Refugee Council and the UN Border Relief Operation. His limp fingers regularly sought his brow as he sat there and listened to the war stories. Guy had grown up in the age of mediated atrocity; like everyone else, he was exhaustively accustomed to the sad arrangements, the pathetic postures of the dead. But you couldn't see Cambodia, the torturee nation, whose redoubling sufferings took place behind a black curtain or a slammed door. This darkness seemed to have a pornographic effect on the concerned imagination. You just couldn't escape the excitement in the voices that told tales of Cambodia. Guy himself had been sent copies of the satellite photographs and seen the death silhouette: the diagrammatic honeycomb was evidently a landscape, a wide horizon of human skulls. He too felt the excitement, the rush of boyish manliness, which in his case soon subsided into a distant nausea. The satellite massacres: human death as a god might see it. Guy's faith, a feebly gleaming heirloom (a locket, perhaps, that once belonged to his dead mother), was much tarnished for a while by the clear impossibility of anything surviving such a thorough subtraction of the human body. Take life away, and all you have is the anatomical torment of a single skull. 'I was there all through the Eighties,' one of the telephone ghosts roared at him (he was an American from UNBRO), bringing him messages from the other side. 'I have an image for you. You all set?' The voice was eager, greedy. 'A child's prosthetic foot, in a flipflop, marching to war. That's Cambodia, pal.' Guy nodded quickly, in placation. 'And there's no way out.'

  Though of course, as always, there was a way out, it transpired — there was one way out. . . Guy had persuaded himself that he wasn't making a hobby of Cambodia. But this research of his remained in some sense a labour of love, a romantic duty, a means of thinking about Nicola in relative and arguable guiltlessness. No denying that a fantasy was being quietly and queasily unspooled. Guy would mount the stairs of her house (against a background of flags and bunting), coolly shepherding the two shy figures; Nicola would be ready on the top landing, her hands tightly clasped, with beautifully viscous tears on her cheeks. How the laughter of En Lah Gai would nervously sound as warming broth was prepared in the small kitchen! How the eyes of Little Boy would burn — would burn with unforgettable fire! And down there at hip height Nicola's fingers would entwine his own in fond conspiracy . . .

  Even Guy could tell that there was something wrong with this motion picture, something awful, something aesthetically disastrous. The scene would have a livid colour, the music would roll along in its corrupt or sinister gaiety, the dialogue would feel dubbed, and the actors would simper like charmless children on the brink of being found out. Again the word pornography came to rnind: to Guy's mind, where there wasn't any-where there wasn't any pornography.

  None at all? No, not really. There had been those occasions (increas­ingly frequent, until his operation) when a nurse holding a test-tube like a glass condom had disgustedly ushered him into a curtained room equipped with 'books' — torn heaps of men's magazines. Guy had turned the strange pages (in the end he relied on his wallet photograph of Hope). And there was the sprinkling of stag films he had been obliged to watch half of during business trips to Hong Kong and other eastern Mammons. Always there came a terrible moment, in between the carnal sections, when the cast stood around pretending to be interesting with all their clothes on, just like proper actors and actresses, obeying a properly inventive director, in a proper film. The imposture seemed to be doubly shaming for everyone, including the viewer. Even Guy could tell that his interest in Nicola Six and his interest in Indochina did not sit well together (with a wag of the head he thought of a plump pinup he had once seen, fondling a piece of hardware in a weapons brochure). Love and war-love and historical forces — did not sit well together.

  Besides, his musings were on the whole dreadfully tender and tentative. His dreams, which appeared to emanate from the pool of warm pressure in his chest, all followed adolescent storylines of surveillance, custodianship, brilliant rescue (rowing boats, a car's flat tyre magically repaired and replaced). He thought of her always, even at moments of sudden stress in the office or the nursery; her face was like a curlicue floating in his peripheral vision. Daily, cosynchron-ously, he dogged her through her day, her waking, her light breakfast, her idealized toilet — and so on. He thought of his thoughts as explorers, in virgin territory. Of course, he didn't know how much male thought had already gone into Nicola Six, those millions of man hours; he didn't know that every square inch of her had been ran­sacked by men's thoughts . . . Sometimes, to buy his weekly packet of cigarettes (or an extra dai
ly paper), he went to the shop near where she lived. As if round a doorway he bent and peered up the dead-end street. Seen through eyes of love, how fiercely she would have illu­mined the ordinary prospect: the trees already leafless in September, two builders eating Scotch eggs on a stoop, a dead cloud collapsing into the fog of dark rain. This day Guy straightened his dirty mack with a smile of pain, and walked back and round to the Black Cross.

  Keith was standing by the fruit machine, contentedly picking his teeth with a dart - or with the point of a dart, as Guy had learned to distinguish (flight, shaft, barrel, point), after a few of his early darting solecisms had been menacingly corrected, here in the Black Cross. Guy found that he was glad to see Keith, and took comfort also from the damp lineaments of the ruined pub. Conspicuous elsewhere, his own colourlessness easily merged with the circumambient grey. The white people in here were black-and-white people, monochrome, like World War II footage. Like World War I footage. Guy thought further of the stills that form the countdown to an elderly movie: 6, +, 5, *, blank, clapperboard; and the white areas of the screen grained with dust and nostril hairs, like the whites of soiled eyes. Keith always made Guy think of eyes.

  'Fucking sickening. It disgusts me. No, it does.'

  'Absolutely vile.'

  'Wicked.'

  'It's filthy.'

  'Persistent low atmospheric pressure innit.'

  By moving his head a centimetre to the left, Keith indicated that Guy might join him. As Guy came forward he accidentally stepped on the surprising solidity of Clive's tail. Clive lifted his chin from the carpet and snarled or swore at Guy wearily.

  'Sorry. Well,' said Guy. 'Haven't seen you for a while.'

  Keith nodded. This was true. And what of it? Keith took the trouble to point out that he was the sort of bloke who had places to go and people to see. He wasn't the sort of bloke who just sat around getting pissed all day in the Black Cross on Portobello Road. No. Keith's restless nature demanded variety. This week, for instance (it laboriously emerged), he had been sitting around getting pissed all day in the Skiddaw on Elgin Avenue. But in fact Keith did look pleasantly surprised to be in the Black Cross. Why, Guy didn't know.

  'Few drinks. Relax.' Keith suddenly refocused and said, 'Whew, mate, you don't look too clever. No. You definitely do «oí look overly brill. It must be going round. I tell you who else ain't in the best of elph either. Neither.'

  At the sound of her name (a duosyllable in this case: for a moment it sounded like a further grammatical adjustment) Guy felt something soft exploding in the transept of his chest. His head dropped and he reached out a hand for the bar. Nicola was suffering. This was heavenly news.

  'Sad little smile on its face. Like - like she was pining. Pining. Pining its little heart out.’

  Guy looked up. Keith seemed to be inspecting the saloon-bar ceiling — wondering, perhaps, how many Londons of cigarette smoke had gone into its golden brown. With evident relief he now talked of other matters, and Guy thought, with a mild seizure of affection: he knows. Keith knows. He has divined it. Nicola and I — in a sense we're way above his head. But he can see what binds us (the ropes of love); and with due respect.

  'Here. I got one for you.'

  Guy tried to concentrate. Keith was about to tell a joke — he was already chuckling ruminatively to himself. In the past Guy had struggled rather with some of Keith's jokes. They were often reasonably mild, turning on a childish whimsicality, a lugubrious pun. Only rarely, or relatively rarely, did Keith lean forward bearing his incisors and impart some tale about a rotten haddock and the knickers of an unfortunate lady. But that could happen to you anywhere. In the billiards room at the club. In a starred restaurant in the City. And as he had just shown, despite his superficial roughness Keith had a lot more natural delicacy than many of the —

  'How can you tell when your sister's having her period?'

  'Urn,' said Guy. He didn't have a sister. He shrugged. He said, 'I don't know.'

  'Dad's cock tastes funny!'

  Guy stood and stared into the tempest of Keith's laughter. This tempest, this tormenta, kept on coming for a very long time, until, after a series of lulls and false calms, orderly waters returned once more. Guy was smiling palely.

  'Gah!' said Keith, lifting a fist to his streaming eyes. 'Dear oh dear. Well. It puts a smile on your face. And you got to keep laughing. You got to. In this life . . . Dear oh dear oh dear.'

  Now Guy hung back as Keith took his new joke on a tour of the pub. Its punchline was soon ricocheting from group to group. In the damp light there was many a spray of Scotch-egg crumbs, many a dull flash of Soviet dentistry. The joke went down well in all quarters, though one or two of the older women (were they really old or only old-young?) confined themselves to a long glance of affectionate reproach. Drinking brandy, seated by the back door, and scratching his neck, Guy watched all this in his numb fever. Compliments that come second-hand are said to be the sweetest; and never in his life had Guy Clinch been so flattered. He sat there pulsing with the flattery of love. Today's rushes, in the screening-room of his mind's eye, showed nothing more than repeated scenes of reunion, breathless and unfettered reunion. Just a hug. Not even a kiss . .. Not even a hug. These rushes were like the last frames oí Incident at Owl Creek, with the dead hero racing through the dark dreamfields, and under false skymaps, racing towards her, and racing, and racing, and getting no nearer with each heartburning surge . . . God and Pongo took Keith aside and then he left hurriedly. He tried to shovel Clive up with his foot and then leaned backwards forty-five degrees on the lead, like the last man in a tug-of-war team. Twenty minutes later, as Guy was leaving, three men filed into the saloon bar and asked for Keith; they asked the pub for Keith - as if (Guy mused fleetingly) the black cross were daubed on the door and not on the sign above, and they were telling the pub to give Keith up or to bring him out. If Keith had been trying to avoid this trio (the white-haired one sported half a dozen earrings per ear, and had the blue lips of a cold child), then Guy didn't blame him: they did look extremely tiresome.

  The ceiling of Marmaduke's nursery swarmed with strange shadows, Medusa heads, beckoning goblins . . . Children love their toys, don't they. It's so obvious. But why? Why do they?

  'Please don't do that, darling,' he said.

  Guy was sitting on a low chair, surrounded, like Joan of Arc, by kindling - in his case the scattered planks of a wooden train-set, together with a few torn picture-books and eviscerated teddybears. Turning from the wrecked mobile, Marmaduke was now 'playing' with his toy castle. It was 5.45 in the morning.

  Children love to touch their toys because their toys are the only things they can touch: the only things they can touch freely. Man-made objects, blunted, detoxified, with pleasure possible and pain counterindicated. Or that was the idea. Marmaduke could find mortification almost anywhere. A fluffy birdling was cute enough until a child engulfed his own larynx with it.

  'Milt,' said Marmaduke, without turning round. 'Big it.'

  Guy looked at his watch. He went and unlocked the crammed refrigerator on the landing. He returned with a full bottle — and four wholewheat biscuits, which the child now repulsively dispatched.

  'My God,' said Guy.

  'More big it,' said Marmaduke out of the corner of his mouth (its centre being occupied by the bottle). 'More big it.'

  'No!’

  'More big it.'

  'Absolutely not!'

  The teat slid from Marmaduke's lips. 'Big it. More big it. . .' Instead of raising his voice, Marmaduke lowered it: he sometimes got a far more chilling effect that way.'Big it, Daddy. More big it. . .More big it, Daddy . . .'

  'Oh all right. Say please. Say please. Say please. Say please.'

  'Police,' said Marmaduke grudgingly.

  Toys were symbols - of real things. That toy monkey stood for a real monkey, that toy train for a real train, and so on: in miniature. But there seemed to be a disturbing literalism abroad in Marmaduke's nursery. That toy baby elephan
t, for instance, pink and gauzy and five feet high, with its imperial tassels and convincing little howdah (the launchpad of many sickening falls): the baby elephant was about the size of a baby elephant. And the same sort of thing could be said for Marmaduke's howitzers and grenade-launchers and cartridge belts, not to mention all the plastic broadswords and cutlasses and scimitars — and his cudgels and knobsticks and battleaxes. Marmaduke's latest deployment (partof a permanent modernization programme), a DID, or Deep Interdiction Device, a pucklike boobytrap which could take out three or four toy tanks at a time, was certainly far larger than the actual contrivance now fielded by Nato. Nato. Assault Breaker. How old it all was. Though Marmaduke himself would unquestionably favour First Use. Marmaduke was a definite First-Use artist. Fight like hell for three days and then blow up the world.

  The door opened. Hope stood there, in her small-hour glow. A sentinel in a white nightdress. One arm was raised, as if to hold a candle. He became aware of the sound of rain on the streets and rooftops.

  'It's six.'

  'He's being very good actually,' Guy whispered. The lines of his brow invited and encouraged Hope to contemplate her son, who was playing with his toy castle, methodically weakening each ridge of the outer rampart before snapping it off. Doing this caused him to grunt and gasp a good deal. Only the very old grunt and gasp so much as babies. In between (Guy thought), we strain all right yet keep holding silence.

  'Upstairs.'

  Upstairs on the third floor there was a room known locally as the Padded Cell. It was furnitureless and covered in three thicknesses of duvet, wall to wall, floor to ceiling. Its only irregularity was a chest-high ledge with an extra duvet and some pillows for attending adults to climb up to and throw themselves down on. Thither they carried the screaming child . . .

  Outside, day was forming in terms of rain-deadened light; Guy now joined his wife between the sheets. Rolling his neck, he took one last look at the monitor: a ceiling-to-floor shot of Marmaduke silently screaming his head off in the Padded Cell. As he screamed, Marmaduke bounced skilfully on his slippered feet, trying to generate enough height for a damaging dive. Guy sank back. His wife searched him for the reliable body warmth he knew she still needed him for.