London Fields

  The door opened. Guy looked up: Hope was summoning him with her strictest face. He trudged from the room in his enormous shoes. Hope knew: it was so obvious. Guy felt as though a new force had been introduced into nature, like gravity but diagonal and outwards-acting: it might take the lid off everything, the room, the house.

  'Well?' said Hope in the hall with her hands high on her hips.

  'I . . .'

  'We take her, right? We grab her. We gobble her up.'

  He hesitated. 'Has she any qualifications?'

  'I didn't ask.'

  'Has she any references?'

  'Who cares?'

  'Wait,' said Guy. At his back he felt the glare of what he assumed to be dramatic irony. 'Isn't she a bit goodlooking?'

  'What? It's incredibly quiet in there.'

  'You always said that the goodlooking ones weren't any use.'

  'Who are we to be picky?'

  Guy laughed briefly and quietly.

  'I mean,' continued Hope in a loud whisper, 'he's worked his way through all the ugly ones.'

  They heard a harsh moan from within. It was quite unlike any sound they had heard Marmaduke make before. The parents hurried in, expecting the usual scene. Nanny hunched in a corner or diagnosing some facial injury in the mirror. Marmaduke brandishing a lock of hair or a torn bra strap. But it wasn't like that. Enola Gay was looking up at them with unalloyed composure while Marmaduke Clinch backed away, nursing his wrist, and with a new expression on his face, as if he had just learnt something (one of life's lessons), as if he had never known such outrage, such scandal.

  The house was a masterpiece. How it scintillated, how it thrummed. So much canvas, and so much oil. How confidently it put forward its noble themes of continuity and repose, with everything beautifully interlinked. And Nicola's presence was like a fuse. Because she could make the whole thing go up.

  Of course, the house wasn't art. It was life. And there were costs. Naturally, money was one of them. The house didn't eat money. It scattered money. Money flew off it, like tenners fed to an open propeller. From miles around people came to scour and primp it, to doctor it for more use, more work. Scrubbers and swabbers on their knees, the quivering plimsolls of an electrician upended beneath the joists, a plumber flat on his back, a mangled sweep slithering up the chimney, labourers, repairmen, staggering installers, guarantee checkers, meter readers; and, of course, Marmaduke's many myrmid­ons. Sometimes Guy imagined it was all laid on for the child. The dinky boy-drama of skip-removal. The spillikins of scaffolding. All the ruin and wreckage.

  The other thing the house used up was order. Each day the doublefronted dishwasher, the water softener, the carrot peeler, the pasta patterner got closer and closer to machine death, hurtling towards chaos. Each day the cleaning-lady went home tireder, older, iller. A citadel of order, the house hurried along much entropy elsewhere. With so much needed to keep it together, the house must deep down be dying to collapse or fly apart. . . Feeling hunger, and the desire to do something suddenly serious, Guy went downstairs again, stepping over a carpet-layer and pausing on his way to exchange a few words with Melba, whose strength for years he had bought and sapped . . .

  His hands were steady as he poured milk and buttered bread. Now here was another conjugal secret: he pulled out the morning paper from beneath a stack of Marmaduke's toy brochures, where he had earlier hidden it from Hope, and turned again to the op-ed page. There was the article or extract, unsigned, offered without comment. Of course, in these days of gigawatt thunderstorms, multimegaton hurricanes and billion-acre bush fires, it was easy to forget that there were man-made devices — pushbutton, fingertip — which could cause equivalent havoc. But then all this stuff was man-made, not acts of God but acts of man ... So the first event would be light-speed. A world become white like a pale sun. I didn't know that. Didn't know the heat travelled at the speed of light. (Of course: like solar rays.) Everything that faced the window would turn to fire: the checked curtains, this newspaper, Marmaduke's tailored dungarees. The next event would come rather faster than the speed of sound, faster than the noise, the strident thunder, the heavensplitting vociferation of fission. This would be blast over­pressure. Coming through the streets at the speed of Concorde, not in a wave exactly but surrounding the house and causing it to burst outwards. The house, in effect, would become a bomb, and all its plaster and order, its glass and steel would be shrapnel, buckshot. No difference, in that outcome, between this house and any other. His house, the thrumming edifice of negative entropy, would be ordinary chaos in an instant, would be just like wherever Keith lived, or Dean, or Shakespeare. Then everything would be allowed. Guy shut his eyes and helplessly watched himself running north through low flames and winds of soot; then her room, torn open to a sick sky, and an act of love performed among the splinters - forgivable, but with her beauty quite gone, and everything spoiled and sullen and dead.

  Tve got to stop,' he said with a sudden nod.

  'Pardon?' came Melba's voice sweetly.

  'Oh, I'm sorry, Melba. It's nothing.'

  'The Effects of Thermonuclear Detonations', taken from some­thing they referred to as 'Glasstone & Dolan (1977,3rd edn)', among the editorials on deforestation and nurses' pay, next to a report about Concorde moving into overall profit by the end of the year, and above the astronomy column, which said that the Apollo object torn loose from the asteroid belt would miss the earth by a quarter of a million miles. Which sounded good. But that was where the moon was. Farewells were sounding on the intercom when Guy crushed the newspaper into the bottom of the rubbish bin. He swallowed as he felt her force field leaving the house.

  And the house was still there.

  Guy peered into the hall. By the sound of it, Marmaduke had dispersed — upstairs with Phoenix and Hjordis, no doubt. Now Guy abruptly cringed to the greeting of Dink Heckler.

  'Hey,' said Dink, and pointed with an index finger.

  'Dink. How are you?'

  'Good.'

  The South African number seven was of course in tenniswear. His pressed shorts were candy-white against the scribbled slabs of his thighs. Encased in practically cuboid gyms, Dink's feet were planted stupidly far apart.

  'You're playing', said Guy, 'in this weather?'

  'For sure.' Dink stared through the half-glass front door at the bright October morning, and then stared back at Guy with an expression of fastidious disquiet. 'What's the matter? You see something I don't?'

  'It's just the — the low sun. Rather blinding.'

  Hope now came skipping down the stairs saying, 'That's good. She's starting today. At one.'

  '/s she,' said Guy.

  Hope looked at Guy, at Dink, at Guy again. 'Are you okay?. . . Actually I'm encouraged. I thought she was amazing. Marmaduke was quite silent with her. He looked completely stunned. She must have this terrific authority. You know he's having a nap up there?'

  'Amazing,' said Guy.

  Then Hope said with finality, 'I'm playing with Dink.'

  Under the buxom duvet, in the vestiges of his wife's sleepy body-scent, behind half-drawn curtains, Guy lay staring at the ceiling, itself significantly charged with the milky illicit light of a bedroom still in use during the hour before noon. The trouble with love, he thought, or the trouble with this love anyway (it would seem), is that it's so totalitarian. In the realm of the intellect, how idle to look for the Answer to Everything; idler still to find it. Yet with the emotions . . . what's the big idea? Love. Love is the Big Idea. With its dialectical imperatives, its rewrites, its thought police, its knock on the door at three a.m. Love makes you use the blind man, makes you hope for death in Cambodia, makes you pleased that your own son writhes -deep in the Peter Pan Ward. Bring on the holocaust for a piece of ass. Because the loved one, this loved one, really could turn the house into a bomb.

  He awoke around two. His mind was clear. He thought: it's over. It's passed on. And he tensed himself, listening for the first whisper of recurrence . . . Perfectly sim
ple, then. He would tell Hope everything (though not about the money. Are you serious?) and submit to his atonement. How marvellous, how beautiful the truth was. Ever-present, and always waiting. Love must be an enemy of the truth. It must be. And it kept on making you like what was bad and hate what was good.

  Footsteps passed his room and climbed the stairs.

  And now life lent a hand.

  Through the throttled wire of a stray intercom he heard noises, voices, laughter. Hope and Dink, upstairs, changing. Having played, they were now changing, changing. A yelp, I'm all sweaty, a comical interdiction, Check it out, a trickle of zip then a hot silence broken by a gasp for air and her serious Quit it!. . .

  And Guy thought: My wife doesn't love me. My wife has betrayed me. How absolutely wonderful.

  Soon she entered, wearing a dressing-gown, the hair released from its grips, and with burning throat. 'Get up,' she said. 'He's sleeping now but you're on duty when Phoenix leaves. We're nannyless for the rest of the day. That bitch didn't show.'

  In the next room along, Marmaduke, who had been up all night, lay sprawled in a shattered nap. Toys were scattered about the cot like munitions in a stalled war. The little prisoner, with his brutal Scandinavian face, was shackled in his woollen blankets, in his tumbling baby rope. Flattened with sweat was his duck-white hair . .. Even in sleep the child was not unmonitored, unmediated. Drinking a cup of instant coffee, Phoenix watched over him from the kitchen, closing her long eyes for several seconds at each indication that he might be about to stir.

  Before losing consciousness Marmaduke had gazed at and prodded the twin bruises on the back of his dimply fist. He regarded them with fear and admiration. Already he was forgetting the pain that had accompanied them, but something about the way they came to be there would live on gloriously in his mind. He wanted to do to someone else the thing that had been done to him. 'Nice,' he had whispered (as one might say 'nice' of a pretty girl in the street or of the straight drive on the cricket field: saluting skill, talent), before rolling over to twist himself into sleep, hoping to dream of the Pinching Game.

  The Pinching Game was good. It was nice.

  'Ow! I say, that's quite a pinch. Well, two can play at that, young man. It's called the Pinching Game.'

  Marmaduke waited.

  'Do you want to play?'

  Marmaduke waited.

  'Now first — you pinch me as hard as you like.'

  Marmaduke pinched her as hard as he liked - which was as hard as he could.

  'Good. And now I pinch you.'

  Marmaduke watched, with stoned interest. Then his vision seeped through tears of pain.

  'Now it's your turn again. You pinch me as hard as you like.'

  Marmaduke reached out quickly. But then he hesitated. First looking up for a moment with an uncertain smile, he carefully gave the tenderest tweak to the back of her hand.

  'Good. And now I pinch you.’

  Although I don't eat much now 1 think I still have a good appetite for love. But it doesn't work out.

  In all I spent six nights sleeping rough at Heathrow. Not much sleeping. But plenty of rough. And I despaired. The other people there were better at it than I was, stronger and quicker in the standby queue, with heftier bribes more heftily offered. I could see myself becoming, as the weeks unfolded, a kind of joke figure in the Departure Lounge. Then a tragic figure. Then a ghoulish one, staggering from news hatch to cafeteria with bits falling off me.

  I think I still have a good appetite for love. But there's nothing I can eat.

  Incarnacion relates that Mark Asprey was hardly to be seen here at the apartment. Her own eyes retreat and soften with a lover's indulgence as she talks of the kind of demand in which her employer constantly finds himself. This leads her on to explore one of life's enigmas: how some people are luckier than others, and richer, and handsomer, and so on.

  Of course I'm wondering whether he took a stroll down the dead­end street.

  In my new dreams I think I keep glimpsing Kim, and Missy, Missy, Kim. They're trying to be nice. But in my new dreams it just doesn't work out.

  I love Lizzyboo in my own way yet when I consider her socio-sexual training or grounding I have the impression that there are only about four or five things that could ever really happen between her and men.

  He Refuses To Make A Commitment. She Has A Problem Giving Him The Space He Needs. He Is Too Focused On His Career At This Time. They Think They Love Each Other But Given Their Tempera­mental Differences How Will They Ever Connect?

  She's much more importunate these days, or she is when she's not eating. The restraints are gone. It's as if she's falling. She's falling, and at the usual rate of acceleration, which is plenty fast: thirty-two feet per second per second. Luckily, at least, with this falling business, it doesn't make any difference how heavy you are ... I guess I could tell her I'm plain old fashioned. 'I guess I'm just a child of my time, Lizzyboo,' I can hear myself saying as I daintily remove her hand from my knee. Alternatively, there are any number of debilitating but non-fatal diseases I could bashfully adduce. Last night she took my hand on the stairs and said, 'You want to fool around?' Me? Fool around? Hasn't she heard that fooling around is on the decrease - though maybe it hasn't been, much, in her case, or not until recently. Dink Heckler, for example, has the look of a stern taskmaster in the sack. But she won't be getting any of that nonsense from me. I'm a child of my time.

  In the wild days of my hot youth no one wanted to risk it and neither did I. Remember how it used to go ... Are you free any night this week? I thought we might step out together - to the hospital. That nice place on Seventh Avenue. If it makes you feel more relaxed about it, bring your personal physician along. I'm bringing mine. I'll be around to get you about half past eight. In an ambulance. Aw honey, don't be late.

  It's not quite like that any more. Let's consider. The vaulting viruses, all those wowsers and doozies and lulus, are of course increasingly numerous but they seem to have simmered down a good deal. Purely out of self-interest, naturally. They're only parasites, after all, and the career guest and freebie-artist doesn't really want to tear the whole place apart (except when unusually drunk). So the wisdom of evolution prevailed; they adopted a stable strategy, with their own long-term interests held sensibly in view; and now they're just part of the dance. Besides, we all know we're not going to live for ever. We do know that. We forgot it for a while. For a while, the live-forever option looked to be worth trying. No longer. Even in California the workout parlours and singlet clinics are paint-parched and gathering dust. Three score and ten is a tall order, even for the very rich, even for someone like Sheridan Sick. We subliminally accept that life has been revised downward, and once again we start sleeping with strangers. Or some of us do. The act of love takes place in a community of death. But not very often. Just as you won't find much corridor-creeping in the modern hospice, despite all the superb facilities.

  I met her eleven years ago. We felt safe. More than that. We felt solved. We were solved.

  Now she won't talk to me. My name is muck at Hornig Ultrason. I'm not feeling very well, and I haven't got any money.

  I find myself indulging in vulgar reveries of a movie sale.

  There must be a dozen hot actresses who would kill for the part of Nicola Six. I can think of several bankable stalwarts who could handle Guy (the ones who do the Evelyn Waugh heroes: meek, puzzled, pointlessly handsome). As for Keith, you'd need a total-immersion expert, a dynamic literalist who'd live like a trog for two or three years as part of his preparation for the role.

  The only difficulty is Marmaduke. Typical Marmaduke. Maxi­mum difficulty. Always.

  Maybe you could dispense with an infant star and go with a little robot or even some kind of high-tech cartoon. It's amazing what they can do.

  Or, because age and time have gone so wrong now, why not a youthful dwarf, wearing diaper and baby mask?

  It's all gone wrong. The old are trying to be young, as they always
have, as we all do, youth being the model. But the young are now trying to be old, and what is this saying? Grey-locked, resolutely pallid, halt in step and gesture, with panto-hag makeup, crutches, neck-braces, orthopaedic supports.

  Then the next thing. You start fucking around with the way your babies look. First, you fuck around with the way you look (turn yourself into a bomb site or a protest poster), then, with that accomplished, you start to fuck around with the way your babies look. Dumb hairstyles - lacquered spikes, a kind of walnut-whisk effect. Magentas and maroons, wheat-and-swede combinations. I saw a toddler in the park wearing an earring (pierced), and another with a tattoo (bruised songbird). There are babies tricked out with wigs and eyeglasses and toy dentures. Wheeled in bathchairs.

  Now I know the British Empire isn't in the shape it once was. But you wonder: what will the babies' babies look like?

  Lizzyboo and I go to the new milkbar on Kensington Park Road. Her treat. She insists. The place is called Fatty's, which strikes me as unfortunate, and bad for business. On the way Lizzyboo will eat an ice-cream or a hot pretzel or a foot-long hotdog. Once there, once actually in Fatty's, she will start on the milkshakes, with perhaps a banana split or a fudge sundae. Over these dishes she will sketch in the prospect of lifelong spinsterhood.

  This afternoon, a blob of chocolate somehow attached itself to her nose. I kept assuming she would eventually notice it — would feel it, would see it. But she didn't. And I let too much time pass, too much nose time, too much chocolate time. It was a big relief when she excused herself and went to the bathroom. As she lifted herself from the chair I observed that the zipper on her skirt was warped with strain. At least five minutes later she returned, and the blob of chocolate was still in place.

  'Sweetheart,' I said, 'you have a blob of chocolate on your nose.'