London Fields

She was mortified. 'How long has it been there?' she said tightly into her compact.

  'Since way back. Since you had the eclair.'

  'Why didn't you tell me?'

  'I don't know. I'm sorry.'

  Because to have done so earlier would have involved an admission of intimacy. Because it suits me if she looks ridiculous. Because I didn't know she had stopped looking in mirrors.

  They both turn heads, these girls I squire. Lizzyboo by day. Nicola by night. They both embody whatever it is that means men have to look.

  And what is it? One of the many messages that pulses off Lizzyboo has something to do with babies. It says: Big me. I'm big already but make me bigger. Let the SSCs get to work. Give these breasts a job. I lay it all before you, if you're the one. If you're the one, then I lay it all before you.

  Interestingly, Nicola's appearance makes no mention of babies. All she has to say on that subject is Watertight Contraception. I'm not going to lose my figure and get up in the middle of the night. I won't be time-processed, medianized — not by you. It would have to be something special, something unique, something immaculate.

  Like the Virgin Mary: Nobodaddy's Babymamma.

  It doesn't particularly matter that I'm going blind because I can't read anyway. Five minutes with Macbeth on my lap and I'm in a senile panic of self-consciousness. Mark Asprey's many bookshelves are shelved with books but there's nothing much to read. It's all stuff like Good Bad Taste or Bad Good Taste or Things You Love to Hate or Hate to Love or why it's Frivolous To Be Important or The Other Way Around.

  I get stuff from Nicola but who am I kidding. There are things I'm not seeing, or not understanding. The only writer who gives me any unfeigned pleasure is P. G. Wodehouse. And even him I find a bit heavy. He takes a lot out of me. Scratching my hair, with soft whistles, with lips aquiver, I frown over Sunset at Blandings.

  Pretty soon I'll be obliged to ask Nicola to show me what she looks like in the nude. I find I'm looking forward to it. I can't imagine she will deny me this simple request. She knows how seriously I take my work.

  Chapter 15: Pure Instinct

  All right then,' said Nicola. 'Shall we start?' 'Yes,' said Guy. 'Let's.'

  She gazed at him with an expression of sensitive expectancy.

  He shifted position in his chair and said with a quavering voice, 'I really do find it quite extraordinary.'

  'What?'

  'Someone as beautiful as you. And never been kissed with passion.'

  'I suppose it is in a way. But 1 know you'll be terribly patient and gentle with me.'

  'I'll do my best. Oh by the way. Before we start. What did you do to Marmaduke? He was absolutely angelic until tea-time.'

  'A silly thing. The Pinching Game.' She explained, with the briskness of impatience or even vexation (children: a delicate sub­ject hereabouts). 'A little lesson in adult injustice. Or arbitrariness. They give you a soft pinch and expect a soft pinch back. Not a hard pinch.'

  Literalmindedly, Nicola was wearing white. A full white party frock with many a flounce and purfle. The dress was certainly not meant to be provocative. Far from it: there was something forbidd­ingly juvenile in the way her arms emerged plumply from the puffed sleevelets and a special awkwardness conferred by the waist-thickening sash. She had also applied her makeup with excitable prodigality, as a twelve-year-old might prepare for her first big ball.

  Nevertheless, Guy gazed at her dress, with its fringe of petticoat, and imagined the history of underwear being enacted within.

  He said hoarsely, 'No attempts? Not even at parties or anything? Quite extraordinary.'

  'Yes, my sexual life . . . just never happened. Perhaps it had to do with my parents dying when they did. An only child. Thirteen. My nature turning on its hinges. And I had seen what happened to Enola.'

  'Oh yes.'

  'I was curious, of course. I had longings.'

  'You must have felt their interest. Men must have been intensely interested.'

  'Do you know what I felt?'

  'No?'

  'I felt that my emotional — or sexual — being was like a little sister. A very spirited little sister. An inner sister. Whom I must always protect. I had to keep her in. Even though she yearned to come out and play.'

  'It's almost tragic.'

  'Though I've always suspected that my nature is in fact highly sensual. The way I respond to art tells me this. To poetry. To paintings.'

  Guy had long been aware of a faint pulsing action in the middle of his lap. Now he noticed that with each passing second his teacup and saucer had begun to click. He recrossed his legs and said uneasily. 'I wonder what happens to all that - all that sap.'

  Nicola straightened. She turned her face to one side. 'Does it curdle, do you mean?'

  'I'm sorry.'

  'No no. It's quite all right. Does the moisture . . . does the juice . . . ? It never felt like that. Perhaps it just wastes its sweetness on the desert air.'

  'Yes, born to blush unseen. Yes I've always thought', Guy enthused (and she smiled so bravely!), 'that Empson was quite right about that. The situation is stated as pathetic but it doesn't exactly encourage you to change it. A jewel doesn't mind being in a cave, and a flower prefers not to be picked. If anything. You could —'

  'There was a boy', said Nicola, 'with oil-black hair and the muscles of a panther. Pinto, the Corsican gardener's son. This was in Aix-en-Provence. Every night we would meet in the warm garden behind the abandoned villa. He caressed me so thoroughly with his tongue and his rough fingertips that I kept thinking I would unravel completely or fold myself inside out.'

  '. . . When was this?'

  'I was twelve.'

  Twelve?'

  Nicola gave Guy time to complete the following train of thought-that of driving out to the airport with his foot on the floor, taking the first plane to Marseille and running the wily Pinto to ground in some flyblown shadowland . . .

  And give the blacktoothed brute the thrashing of his life. Guy tried to imagine Nicola at twelve and saw a brown belly, a collection of clefts and flexed sinews, and the same face he faced now. She was smiling, and patting the cushion at her side.

  'Come on then,' she said. 'We're not going to do much with you sitting all the way over there . . . Are you comfy? You're walking in a funny way. Okay then. Shall we start?'

  'Yes. Let's.'

  'What with?'

  'With kissing, I suppose.'

  'Right. Go on then.'

  Twenty minutes later Guy whispered, 'This is heavenly. But do you think you could open your mouth a little bit?'

  'I'm terribly sorry.'

  'No it's all right. Or at least,' he said, 'at least don't shut it quite so tightly.'

  Down in the street below Keith sat slumped in the Cavalier listening to a darts tape on the stolen Blankpunkt. They're taking their fucking time about it, he thought. He looked longsufferingly across the road at Guy's VW: on a meter. Still, he imagined there would be no great breach of decorum (he reviewed his instructions) if the Cavalier were to occupy the slot when Guy went on his way. Leave it here'll the car get a ticket. Or clamped. Fucking bastards . . .

  What a difference a day makes. It was hard, in some ways, to credit the change that had come over Keith in a scant twenty-four hours. He sat back. The low sun warmed him. Blinking through the windscreen, whose fuzz and splat now subtly harmonized with the pond-mantle and the bobbing tadpoles of his tarnished vision, Keith recalled that recent self, that self of rage and terror, coming up her stairs with murder in its soul — or at least with murder in its brow. I might have taught her a lesson. Straight: I'd have swung for her yesterday. Happily hungover, Keith snorted (and coughed), and shook his head with a thickskinned smile. He comes into her lounge and it was all dark. Like a Danish sex club. No, not Danish. Er, Arab. With candles, and screens. She was wearing a black gown that was so — beautiful. No way here'll that not be an exquisite garment. Not cheap neither. Either. As for the woman it encased: you had to be g
iving her all kinds of credit for the nick she'd kept herself in. And all the money on the table like, like TV as such.

  'You shouldn't have fucking done it Nick!'

  'Keith, I understand. You didn't want me to know, did you, that you lived like a —'

  His eyes opened, and flickered. He rubbed them, with his knuckles, like a child. And then, after that, after something so - after saying something so well out of order, she goes and changes my life, just like that. Magic. Because she understands me. She understands me. She's the only one that really understands me. About my darts . . . Keith sniffed and stirred, and wiped the tears from his eyes with a mahogany thumbnail. Not ashamed to admit it... A whole new life now. Keith's mind slid sideways: the last dart flying home (had to be a bull finish: had to be), and Keith turning to embrace the sporting shrug of his adversary; and then a pastel arcade of goods and services. And pastel women. The night before, after the quart of porno with Guy, a visit to Debbee Kensit, and a final call paid on Trish Shirt, Keith had gone home and caught up with some of his viewing: American football, and the frame-by-frame analysis of the cheerleaders in their flickety white skirts. You had to hand it to the Yanks: they got the sport groupies all there, and in uniform.

  How did it go again ? Your home life, Keith, is stifling your darting talents, and throwing a pall over your darting future. It's a question of darting attitude — getting your darting head right for the big one. I see you, Keith, as a young boy in the street with your face crushed up against the glass. But it's not a shop window. It's a TV screen. We're talking TV stardom here, Keith. Behind the screen is where you've got to get to. That's where all the other stuff is — all the stuff you want. Let me take you there, Keith. Let me take you to the other side.

  'Yeaeaeah,' said Keith as the darts tape achieved its climax. He punched the buttons. Meteorologist Dennis Car: Hurricane Juanita. Phone-in: money matters. Geopolitics: another scan for the Presi- dent's wife. Local news: police had made an arrest in the case of the murdered five-year-old in South London's Camberwell. Keith looked indignant. You never heard anything like that on the news any more. Said it just encouraged it. Don't ask Keith why. Kill a kid, he thought. Get your name on the radio. Or TV.

  And then that video. Jesus. Keith had been — and still was -profoundly moved. The lighting, the production values, the sheer professionalism. Not overly explicit, but top-quality work within its own terms. In the past, Keith had done loads of videos with birds, and had taken it very seriously indeed. And to this day he felt puzzled by the monotonous squalor of his results. For with a video camera on his shoulder and a ladyfriend on the carpet or the couch - Keith was all aesthete. He tried to make it beautiful, and it came out ugly; and the birds looked mad. And mad in the wrong way. So when Nicola Six, alluringly reduced to two dimensions, had climbed out of the deep green dress and had gazed, in bra-and-panty set, so pensively out of the window, Keith had felt a tingle up his spine and a prickle of the hairs on the back of his neck. Had felt, in fact, that sense of pregnant arrest which accompanies the firm handclasp of art.

  Actress like. Real pro: knows what she's doing. The others: amateurs. Nor was this favourable impression in any way dispelled when she talked dirty to him on the stairs. The poetry of the cleavage. Nicola seemed mad too, then, for a minute. But mad in the right way. And you expected a bit of that — indeed you looked for it— in the sex-genius sphere. To follow Keith's thoughts where they wouldn't quite go (and anyway he was thinking with his blood): only imbalance would lead a woman to invest such a lot of herself in such an unreliable area. Take Analiese. 'Masturbate about me, Keith,' Nicola had said. And Keith had honoured her plea. 'All those things you wanted to do to girls . . . Do them to me. In your head.' Keith considered. There wasn't anything, by now, that he had wanted to do to girls and hadn't gone ahead and done — as Trish Shirt, among others, could defeatedly attest. And he'd never raped Trish Shirt: he'd never seen the need. No, Keith did everything he wanted to do — except, occasionally, sexual intercourse, which had a habit of slipping his mind (fifteen minutes later, in the street, he would stop dead and snap his fingers), so busy was he with all his other stunts . . . Oh yeah. There was one thing he had wanted to do to girls and had never gone ahead and done. He had wanted to do it quite badly and often, too (when they nagged and cried and that, or wouldn't let you do everything you wanted). He had never murdered any of them. He had never done that. And her kiss (Jesus), like falling into a swamp or quicksand . ..

  Keith put a fresh darts tape into the Blankpunkt and resettled himself in the hot Cavalier. That classic encounter at the Embassy between Kim Twemlow and Nigel House. Such darts immersion was, in Keith's view, the ideal preparation for his upcoming quarter-final at the George Washington on England Lane. He bent his head and looked up wincing at Nicola's high window. He thought: they're taking their fucking time about it.

  Guy felt a fiery crack on the side of his head. His neck jerked backwards into thin air, and gravity tugged him urgently to the floor.

  After a moment of white flurry Nicola was kneeling by his side.

  'On wo,' she said. 'Oh my darling, I'm so sorry.'

  Guy raised three fingertips to his temple. He closed his eyes, and then blinked mechanically.

  'Let's see. Ooh. That looks quite nasty. I'd better get you some meat for it. I must have caught you with my ring. Oh God. You should have warned me about your tongue.'

  Guy half sat up. He called after her, unable, for the moment, to keep the querulousness out of his voice, 'You said Pancho or whatever his name was used his tongue.'

  With swollen eyes, and one hand clamped over her mouth, Nicola dropped to her haunches in front of the open refrigerator. Then her face cleared and straightened. 'In my ear,' she called back. 'Not in my mouth. He was just a dirty little gypsy or something.'

  'Well how was I supposed to know?'

  She returned. Guy noted her blush of contrition.

  'Christ! What's that?'

  'Pork liver. Anyway it's all I've got.'

  The purple organ was dangling hideously close to Guy's eyeball. 'I don't even know', he said, '— I don't even know what this whole business with meat is. Do you?'

  'I imagine it's meant to limit the swelling or something. I'm quite shocked at myself. It was pure instinct.'

  'Oh I'm all right.'

  'Mm. It certainly isn't working, this meat. It's coming up rather alarmingly. You've got such delicate skin. Like a child's. Oh dear. Whatever will you tell your wife?’

  'What, it's a proper black eye, is it?'

  'I fear so.'

  He held her gaze for a moment. 'Isn't there something Jude like this? She throws a pig bladder at him or something? I mean, it's not thought to be terribly friendly.'

  'It hasn't been a great success, has it. Our first session.'

  'No, but..." Guy placed a fist on his heart. 'In here.'

  This surprised her, and softened her, and made her partly relent. Nicola's eyes moved meaningly across his face. After all, it would do Keith good to wait. 'I'll tell you what,' she said. 'Let me lead. I'll just use my imagination. Close your eyes and I won't be so shy . .. Let me kiss it better. I'll just get rid of this disgusting meat.'

  Without will, he sat back against the base of the sofa. As she moved round him on the floor, all he felt were her lips, her fingertips, her breath on his face. He heard sighs and rustlings, and the sound of his own blood. At one point he felt a soft weight on his groin - the pressure, perhaps, of the gathered material of her dress or petticoat.» Anyway, it wasn't serious, because her next kiss had the shape of a smile.

  She gave him the Rosebud, the Pouter, Youth, Cousins Touching Tongues, the Deliquescent Virgin, the Needer.

  'Don't stop,' he whispered.

  She gave him Anybody's, the Toothcount, Lady Macbeth, the Grand-A-Night Hooker, the Readied Pussy, the . . .

  'Please,' he said, his eyes still closed but starting to struggle. 'Please. No.'

  Here we go: he's coming . . .
now. Keith struggled into position. To make things 'look good', Keith had obtained, at Nicola's suggestion, a workmanlike prop: a stolen leather bag full of stolen tools - spirit-level, light hammer, chisel, tyre-iron. Doesn't see me. They can do that: look right through you.

  Guy was coming back down the garden path, and moving awkwardly, half doubled-up, and listing. He looked round in fear with the ghost's eyes of the deceiver. Always this problem of re-entry. How the strands of duplicity tightened, like the veins on the surface of a sclerotic soul. Why did you come to the house? he had asked her. To establish something. Your wife doesn't love you. Poor Guy . . . Guy couldn't bear to believe this, Dink or no Dink. But in any case the duplicity was now all doubleknotted: one would have to go at it with fingernails, with tweezers. He paused (winded, battered); he felt as if he had been flying for twenty-two hours in economy class, and that the dead-end street, with its unstirring trees dust-feathered in the low sun, might just as well be Australia. Guy scanned the scene, not for faces, not yet, but for figures with their inimitable weight and outline, as Giacometti might: Phoenix, Richard, Terry, Li/zyboo — Hope!

  'Yo!'

  Guy gave a stark yelp.

  'Prestigious,' said Keith, shuffling stockily across the road with his bag. 'Eurobank. Motorway contraflow. Intercool.'

  'Keith.'

  'Oi!'

  'What?'

  'Whew. That's a bit tasty.' Keith's scowl of concern now widened into a friendly sneer. 'You come on a bit rough, did you? Forced to defend her honour, was she?'

  'No, I tripped on my way up the stairs.'

  'Course you did. Listen.'

  Keith reached up and put an arm round Guy's shoulder. Guy flinched but then quickly fell in with Keith's confidential amble. Was it okay, asked Keith, if he took his place. He'd nip in where Guy'd just been.

  'I wait for you to go and then slot in after you. I'll ease in there. No sweat.'

  Guy looked down at the upturned rhomboid of Keith's nose, its scored bridge, its tunnel-of-love nostrils.

  'Because they fucking clamp you round here.'