London Fields

  In the upstairs bedroom Thelonius was rattling through the oddments on the dressing-table with truly unbearable agitation. Keith had never watched Thelonius at work before. A grave disappointment, with none of that relaxed concentration you're always hoping to see. He looked around for Mr and Mrs Poluck and soon picked them out, under a heap of clothes and upended drawers, and not stirring overmuch. Thus he also ascertained that there was nothing semi-violent about this particular crime. With a clear conscience, then, Keith strode up to the trembling figure of Thelonius and did two things. He tousled Thelonius's hair; he put a cigarette in Thelonius's mouth and lit it. Thelonius took one distracted drag before jerking his head back: enough. Keith left the butt on the dressing-table, among the specks of hair-dust. Bingo, thought Keith: DNA innit. Now Mr Poluck groaned; Thelonius shouted 'Where?' and thumped a gleaming gym-shoe down into his cheek. 'You don't do it like that, mate,' said Keith, peering about for something you could carry water in. 'You get them both sitting up and hurt one till the other . . . You know.'

  Keith had been hopeful at first. Nobody trusted banks any longer, thank God; and you could stroll out of the most improbable places with some quite decent lifesavings under your arm. But the bright dream was fading. Mr and Mrs Poluck were as tough as old boots — and as cheap. Thelonius did everything with tears of imploring rage in his eyes. What a life, eh? The exertion, the inconvenience, the unpopularity you incurred, and nothing going right any of the time. Keith had to do a bit of judicious slapping and shaking and hair-tugging. He disliked the touch of old bodies and wondered if it would be any better working with the very young. Looking round the room he felt something like bafflement or even sadness at the whole idea of human belongings: we get them in shops, then call them our own; we all had to have this precious stuff, like our own hairbrush each, our own dressing-gown each, and how soon it all looked like junk — how soon it got trampled into trash. For their part, to be fair, the Polucks did well, with no excessive complaint, seeming to regard the episode as largely routine. Keith met with, and longsufferingly endured, their stares of deep recognition, which wasn't a matter of putting a name to a face but of looking into you and seeing exactly what you were. No fun. No jewellery either. In the end they came wheezing down the stairs with a fake fur coat, a damaged TV set, a broken alarm clock and a faulty electric kettle. Then the stony light of Keith's garage and the bottle of porno passed through the dust to settle the crime buzz and crime flop that played on their flesh like fever.

  Those on the receiving end of violent crime feel violated: injury has been dealt out to them from the hidden chaos, which has shown itself briefly, and then returned to where it lives. Meanwhile, in chaos's hiding place, what happens? Rocks and shells catch and grate in neither sea nor shore, and nothing is clean or means anything, and nothing works.

  'I'm a piece of shit,' Keith whispered into his beercan. He thought of everybody else who never had to do this. Guy, Guy's wife, in endless mini-series. Shah of Iran. Tits. A rich bird: and then you're out of here.

  The money came in four buff envelopes. They contained used fifties. Much-used fifties. Sitting in his office (with its Japanese furniture and single Visual Display Unit and clean desk), Guy offered up his delicate and increasingly emotional nostrils to a familiar experi­ence: the scurfy smell of old money. It always struck him, the fact that money stank, like the reminder of an insidious weakness in himself. Of course, the poets and the novelists had always patiently insisted as much. Look at Chaucer's cock. Look at Dickens (Dick­ens was the perfect panning-bowl for myth): the old man up to his armpits in Thames sewage, searching for treasure; the symbolic names of Murdstone and of Merdle, the financier. But all that was myth and symbol, a way of saying that money could somehow be thought of as being smelly, of being scatological. It was frightfully literal-minded of money, he thought, to be actually stinking up the place like this. Pecunia non olet was dead wrong. Pecunia olet. Christ, heaven stops the nose at it... Guy sealed and stacked the packets. He couldn't wait to get rid of them — all this hard evidence of deception. So far, no outright lies. He fancied he had been rather clever with Richard, adopting the smug yet faintly rueful uncom-municativeness of someone settling a gambling debt. It had come naturally. But it seemed quite likely that men were just easier to deceive. Guy put the money into his briefcase and smoked half a cigarette as he contemplated - in its physical aspects only - the drive across town.

  Everything was going perfectly normally or acceptably but he was finding it impossible to meet her eye. He could point his face in the right direction, and try to will himself into her looming gaze. At one juncture he made it as far as her bare shoulder before his vision went veering off to some arbitrary point on the bookcase, the carpet, his own huge shoes. Otherwise, Guy clung to the belief that he was behaving with conviction and control. The tremendous snaps of his briefcase locks seemed to underscore his worldliness, the briskness of all his dealings. This was certainly one way of doing it: you gave the money, as it were disinterestedly; and then the adult verdict. Guy laid out the envelopes on the low table, and mentioned one or two of the slight difficulties he had encountered. Directing a rictus smile towards the ceiling, he spoke, for instance, of the tenuous connexion between the endlessly malleable symbols on the display screen and the hard cash in one's hand, with all its bulk and pungency.

  'Will you do me the kindness', said Nicola Six, 'of looking at me when we're talking?’

  'Yes of course,' said Guy, and steered his stare into the sun of her face. 'I do apologize. I — I'm not myself.'

  'Aren't you?'

  With a limp hand half-hooding his eyes (it was all right so long as he concentrated on the cleft between her chin and her lower lip), and with his legs crossing and uncrossing and recrossing, Guy ventured to speak of the recent struggles of his son Marmaduke, of the successive nights in hospital, the sleeplessness, the serious thinking ... By now Guy was staring at the bookcase again. As he began to outline the chief theme of all this serious thinking, Nicola said,

  'I'm sorry to hear that your little boy's been ill. But I must say I think it's rather tactless of you to bring that up now. If not downright cruel. Under the circumstances.'

  This promised something inordinate, and Guy was duly alarmed. He couldn't help feeling the pathos of her formulations (how theatrically we speak when we're moved); at the same time, he couldn't help feeling that her choice of outfit was perhaps a trifle unfortunate. Well, not 'choice': arriving several minutes early, he had caught her, she said, between her exercises and her shower. Hence the little tennis skirt or tutu or whatever it was, at the brim of her bare legs; hence the workout top, which was sleeveless. Also backless. The effect was altogether inappropriate, what with those girlish white socks she must have quickly slipped on. He looked her in the eye and said, 'Under the circumstances?'

  Now it was her turn to look away. 'I see,' she said, with deliberation, 'I see that once again I am a victim of my own inexperience. It's an awful handicap. You never know what other people might reasonably have in mind.' She hugged herself, and gasped softly, and said, 'You want to go. Of course. You want to be safe again. Away from complication. I understand. May I. . . ? Before you go, may I say something?'

  She stood up with her eyes closed. She came towards him, loose of body, with her eyes closed. She knelt, and folded her arms to make a pillow for her cheek on his knees, with her eyes closed. The room darkened. Guy felt that intimacy could actually kill you — that you really could die from all this pressure on the heart.

  'It's sad, and ridiculous, but I make no apologies, I suppose. We can't help wanting what we want. Can we. It may have sometimes seemed that I singled you out for a purpose. You were to take me out of my life. Take me to the other side. Through love. Through sexual love. But really my plan went deeper than that. I'm thirty-four. I'll be thirty-five next month. The body ticks. I... I wanted to bear your child.'

  'But this is too much,' said Guy, sliding his knees out from under her an
d trying to clamber himself upright. 'I'm speechless. I can't breathe either! I think it -'

  'No. Go. Go at once. And take your money with you.'

  'It's yours. And good luck.'

  'No. It's yours.'

  'Please. Don't be silly.'

  'Silly? Silly? I can't accept it.'

  'Why?'

  'Because it's tainted.'

  How incredibly lucky that everyone was at the hospital. Let's hear it for hospitals. And for asthma, and for eczema, and for infant distress. By the time he got home, Guy was in no condition to dissimulate, to act normal, whatever that was. He was in hospital shape himself, cottony, lint-like, as if his torso were just the bandage on an injured heart. In the second drawing-room he threw off his jacket and watched himself in the mirror as he raised the brandy bottle to his lips. Then a cold shower, and the welcome coldness of the sheets . . .How, exactly, had the fight started? It started when she threw something at him, something so small that he barely saw its passage or felt its impact on his chest. Then she was on her feet and thrusting the envelopes at him, and he held her slender wrists, and then the staggered collapse backwards on to the sofa — and there they were, in clothed coition with their faces half an inch apart. For a moment Guy could feel the hard bobble at the centre of everything.

  'What did you throw at me?' he said.

  'A Valium.'

  He snorted quietly. 'A Valium?'

  'A Valium,' she said.

  With relief, almost with amusement, Guy readjusted his shocked body; and even his peripheral vision managed to renounce all but the quickest glint of her leggy disarray. Soon he found himself lying on his back with Nicola's head resting on his chest, his nostrils tickled by her hair as she wandered weepily on. Here she was giving him the detailed confession: how she had hoped to step with him into a world of physical love; how they might, if he, the perfect man, agreed, and after 'a lot of practice', try to make a baby; how thereafter she would be content if he looked in once a week, or perhaps twice, to play with his little daughter and (the suggestion was) to play with his little daughter's mother. This dream, of course, she now cancelled and cursed ... 'A lot of practice': there was something pitiably callow about the phrase. There was plainly something else about it too; callow or not so callow, the words entrained a physical reaction, one that tended to undermine his murmured demurrals and tender mewings. Guy hoped she hadn't noticed the ignoble billyclub which had now established itself athwart his lap. And when she accidentally rested her elbow on its base (turning to ask if this was all just sentimental tosh), Guy was glad he couldn't see his own archly agonized smile as he slid out from under her.

  They parted. Yes, Guy and Nicola were to part. She stood. She stood there, corrected. She was mistress of herself once more. As Guy moved heavily towards the door he looked down at the velvet chair and saw the Valium she had thrown at him: not much of a missile, not much of a weapon, a yellow tranquillizer the size of a shirtbutton, and partly eroded by the sweat of her fist.

  'I thought I might need it', she said, following his eyes (which were misting over at this comic poem of female violence), 'for after you left. But then I lost my temper. I'm sorry. I'm absolutely all right now. Go to your son. Don't worry. Goodbye, my love. No. No. Oh, be gone.'

  Well he was gone now, and wouldn't be back. Guy was in his own bed, where he ought to be. He wouldn't be back — except perhaps in circumstances of great extremity. He found that the current situation, or the Crisis, had a way of prompting the most shameful fantasies — discrepant, egregious, almost laughably unforgivable. What if you survived into a world where nothing mattered, where everything was permitted? Guy lifted the single linen sheet. He had never thought of himself as being impressively endowed (and neither, he knew, had Hope). Who, then, was this little bodybuilder who had set up a gym in his loins? ... So in his own way Guy Clinch confronted the central question of his time, a question you saw being asked and answered everywhere you looked, in every headline and haircut: if, at any moment, nothing might matter, then who said that nothing didn't matter already?

  Just when you thought she was a complete innocent or 'natural' or maybe even not quite right in the head (manic depression? in mild,

  interesting and glamorous form ?), she came out with something really

  devastating. How had it gone? Tainted. The money was tainted.

  Certainly those fuming fifties had quite a genealogy: privatized prisons under Pitt, human cargo from the Ivory Coast, sugar plantations in the Caribbean, the East India company, South African uranium mines. This was all true: sweatshops, sanctions-busting, slain rainforests, toxic dumping, and munitions, munitions, muni­tions. But none of it was news to Guy. As Nicola talked he had sat there listening to a kind of commentary on the last ten years of his life: the horrified discoveries, the holding actions, the long war with his father. For ten years he had been dealing with cruel greeds and dead clouds. Nowadays the company was a good deal cleaner. And a whole lot poorer. Hope's money stank too: everywhere, vast bites out of the planet. Go back far enough and all money stinks, is dirty, roils the juices of the jaw. Was there any clean money on earth? Had there ever been any? No. Categorically. Even the money paid to the most passionate nurses, the dreamiest artists, freshly printed, very dry, and shallowly embossed to the fingertips, had its origins in some bastardy on the sweatshop floor. She'd taken it. Nicola had taken it. That put paid to another thought, also uncontrollable (and here the linen sheet gave another jolt): her on a street corner and a man walking past in white flares (hello sailor), and the woman on her knees in the alley, and the money dropped on to the wet concrete.

  Guy thought he heard Marmaduke screaming and looked with terror at his watch. No panic: time to get up. Time to return to the sinister cheer of the Peter Pan Ward. He heard the sound again, from the street; but he was accustomed, by now, to the auditory trickvalve that turned a fizzing pipe or a tortured gearbox - or even birdsong or Bach — into a brilliant imitation of his absent son's screams. As he climbed from the bed Guy heard the thump, and felt the internal shockwave, of the slammed front door. Five seconds later he had hopped into his trousers and was veering round the doorway with a whiplash of shirt-tails.

  The child was home! The child was home, borne aloft, it seemed, on the shoulders of the crowd, the little hero returned from the war, and screaming himself black in the face. Guy skimpleskambled down the stairs and ran high-kneed through the hall with his arms outstretched. And as the child joyously launched himself into his embrace, and, with the familiar, the inimitable avidity, plunged all his teeth into his father's throat, Guy thought that he might have been precipitate, or inflexible, or at any rate none too kind.

  A mile to the north, Keith Talent lit a cigarette with the remains of its predecessor and then pressed the butt into an empty beer can. Two new televised conversations joined the surrounding symposium. Several types of whining were going on: the giant's dentistry in the street below, Mr Frost above who was mad and dying, Keith's fridge, various strains of music, and Iqbala next door going on at her boyfriend about the clothes money he'd borrowed off her last week and promised to refund on Wednesday. Keith listened closer: someone somewhere was actually shouting, 'Whine! . . . Whine!.. . Whine? Ah yes. Keith managed an indulgent leer. That would be little Sue down below and to the left, calling to her son Wayne. There came another repeated shout: 'Sow!. . . Sow! . . . Sow!' That would be Kev, calling to Sue. Keith leered again. He and Sue had once been close. Or was it twice? His place. Kath in hospital. Now Keith called to his wife, who duly appeared in the doorway with Kim in her arms.

  'Idea,' said the baby.

  'Lager,' said Keith.

  'Here,' said Kath.

  'Adore,' said the baby.

  'What's that?' said Keith, meaning the TV.

  'Ordure,' said the baby.

  'News. Nothing on the Crisis,' said Kath.

  'I'll give you a crisis in a minute,' said Keith.

  'Adieu,' said the baby.

&
nbsp; 'Lager,' said Keith.

  'Adieu, adore, ordure, idea.'

  The doorbell rang, or rattled faultily.

  'Check it Kath,' he said in warning as she turned.

  Keith sat up straight with long eyes and open mouth. If that was Kirk and/or Ashley and/or Lee, if that was the boys, then Keith had miscalculated, and seriously. Over the past week, with all this talk about the breaking of his darting finger, Keith had had time to ponder, with many an elegiac sigh, the steady erosion of criminal protocol. In the old days you kicked off by threatening someone's family. None of this nonsense about starting in on a man's darting finger. How about Kath and Kim? Weren't they worth threatening? But maybe that was what Kirk and Ashley and Lee had decided to do: threaten his family. (They couldn't have come here for Keith, after all, or not directly: home was the last place they'd reckon on finding him.) In principle he might have approved. Still, threatening his family wasn't any good if he happened to be with his family at the time. He could hardly hide under the bed. Hide under the bed? Keith? No way: there was ten years of darts magazines down there.

  'It's all right. Just a woman,' said Kath.

  Two beats later he heard the front door croak open, Kath's cautious Yes? and a foreign female voice saying, Good afternoon. I'm your new worker. Keith sank back.

  Chronic innit, he thought (he was gorgeously relieved). Diabolical as such. They come in here . . . Where's Mrs Ovens? Ah, well, I'm working in conjunction with her. We'll liaise. Liaise. I'll liaise you in a minute. Keith thought of his probation officer, the absolute lustrelessness of her hair and skin and eyes and teeth, the vertical lines that busily lanced her upper lip. Runs me ragged. All this about the Compensations. He had skipped their last five appointments: she'd have him reporting on Saturday afternoons, minimum, or swabbing out the Porchester Baths. And how is the little one? Yeah, that's it. Call it the little one because she can't remember its name. How's diddums? How's toddles? They come in here . . . And is your husband in employment at present? Power like. Stick their fucking oar in. Got no kids or one family's not enough. Keith craned forward and saw one flat black shoe suspended in the air beneath the kitchen table and slowly rocking.