London Fields

  I paced the room. I paced the room on my new shtetl legs — my twanging pool-cue legs. I tore at my hair. What hair? I phoned the Handicraft Press. Oh, the fearsome blast I would give Steve Stultifer. No answer. It was three a.m. over there. 'A poignant charm', Asprey goes on,

  is afforded by the helpless contortions of your prose. But why do you think anyone wants to hear about a lot of decrepit old Jews? Still, I admire your nerve. An autobiography is, by definition, a success story. But when some pipsqueak takes up his pen as the evenings lengthen - well, full marks for gall! And the remainder shops do deserve our full support.

  Of course, I knew that sales of my book were modest. But this is a savage blow. And the reviews were good. Both of them. And they printed so few -I mean, they can't have sold any at all.

  You should turn to fiction and the joys of the unfettered fancy. I had rather a hectic time in London, seeing friends old and new and clinching that book deal you might have read about. I gather you spent the entire week at Heathrow. Why didn't we link up? You could have treated me to 'a wad and char'. Or I could have smuggled you into the Concorde Lounge!

  Yours ever,

  Mark

  P.S. Oh, yes. Always thinking of ways to amuse you, I have left a favourite of mine on the bedside table - Marius Appleby's Crossbone Waters. Now that's non-fiction.

  There goes my confidence. I could feel it leaving. I could even hear it: it rushed out the door and whistled through the street. Until this morning I was, as they say, up and down about this project of mine. Half the time I mentally polished my Pulitzer acceptance speech. The other half I planned incendiary suicide with The Murderee in my arms.

  Let me soberly state that I don't think my book is really prizewinning material. Though the panel might feel differently about it if they knew it was true.

  Christ, it's only just occurred to me: people are going to imagine that I actually sat down and made all this stuff up.

  For now I devote myself to the small concerns. I go where even I feel huge and godlike.

  My new project: teaching Kim Talent to crawl. I am her crawling coach. Kim and I are really working on her crawling. Crawl, crawl, crawl. And it isn't easy, in Keith's joke pad. I wait until Kath is asleep or out pacing the walkways with the alcoholic housewives, the tranqued mums, the bingoid single parents. I shove at the squat armchair until most of it is wedged into the hallway. Then I lay out a towel on the floor and plonk Kim down in the middle of it. I scatter rattles and squeaky toys at an inviting distance from her nose. In training shoes, in tracksuit bottoms (with my stopwatch and my steroids), I cheer her on from the touchline. Come on, Kim. You can do it, baby. Get out there and crawl.

  With tiny grunts and pants, with sublime patience and resolve, she squirms and edges and inches. The expression she wears is one of demure audacity. Do you really want to see something? Well watch this! Watch that! I'll show you . . . On she shoves and shoulders. She licks her lips. On she inches and edges. And what happens? She just goes backward. And not very far. How like life. How like writing. All that effort, and the result is just a small minus. She starts to frown and wince. She starts to see that it's a poor deal (and no one gave her fair warning). She starts to cry.

  After some comfort, some juice, some deep breaths, she is ready to go again. She nods her head: she is ready. I cheer her on from the margin of the towel, as her frowning face recedes from the rattles, the squeaky toys. As her face recedes from me. Next door, the mother rests. Teaching Kim to crawl.

  Kath doesn't let me change her any more. I wonder why. Some Irish imperative, as the child's first birthday approaches? I keep thinking 1 see bruises, welts, in the shadowy cracks of her Babygro.

  Yesterday I arrived on the walkway, and stood there fidgeting with the key, wondering if I'd need it. 1 peered in through the window. Keith at the table, humped over his tabloid. Kath at the sink. And Kim on the floor, in her bouncer chair. But she wasn't bouncing. And she wasn't sleeping. Her shiny head was bowed; the shape of the shoulders ... I thought of that terrible phrase. And I thought: Kim has what Kath has, what Keith has. It is called failure to thrive.

  1 hope I'm just imagining this. I'm waiting for the pain and it hasn't come. Slizard is amazed it hasn't come.

  I'm wired for pain. My eyes are wired for pain.

  Vladimir Nabokov, encouragingly, was a champion insomniac. He believed that this was the best way to divide people: those who slept; those who didn't. The great line in Transparent Things, one of the saddest novels in English: 'Night is always a giant but this one was especially terrible.'

  Fee fie fo fum, goes the giant. How did VN ever slay the thing? I wander. 1 write. I wring my hands. Insomnia has something to be said for it, in my case. It beats dreaming.

  God knows why but I've started Crossbone Waters. Travel. Borneo. Handsome Marius Appleby and the glamorous photo- grapher who's been assigned to him, Cornelia Constandne. It's an awful little piece of shit. But there's the adventure, and the love interest, and I have to admit I'm hooked.

  Now wait a minute. How did Asprey know about me holing up at Heathrow? I don't think I said anything to Incarnacion (with whom he is in constant and sinister touch). I don't think I've ever said anything to Incarnacion, except 'Really?' and 'You don't say?'

  So who does that leave? Perhaps, in a sense, I'm being wise after the event —though 'wise'might be putting it a bit high. Just now I was sitting at his desk next door. I noticed, on the expanse of green leather, some new displays of trinketry, the altered disposition of the mailstacks. I imagined Asprey pottering here, with his plumed pen and his calculator. Idly I reached out and tried the locked drawer. It opened smoothly to my jerk.

  Notes, letters, cards. Photographs.

  Well, there's no longer any very pressing need for me to ask Nicola to show me what she looks like in the nude. But I think I'll ask her anyway.

  'It's too adorable,' said Nicola. 'And did you both have little animal nicknames?'

  'You have to realize', I said, 'that I was a tremendous sweetie before all this started.'

  'Let me guess. You were Daddy Bear, and she was your little cublet.' 'I'm not saying.' 'Little meals on trays. Warmed slippers.' 'Me correcting proofs. Her reading manuscripts. Happiness.' 'And she always did what Daddy Bear said?' 'Not at all. In fact she was on the bossy side. I used to call them the Hitler Sisters. Her and Page. Another tomboy. They were always pouring with blood from some fight they'd just had. Like you and MA.' 'I'm getting the picture. You were Goody Two-Shoes. And she was little Miss Bossy Boots. What did she look like? It's too adorable.'

  I got to my feet and went and stood over her. I produced the wallet photograph, Missy eight years ago, brightly lit: the tidal drifts of down from temple to jawbone.

  'Mmm,' she said. 'Still. You must have hardly dared to pinch each other, in case you woke up. To the twentieth century.'

  I couldn't resist it. I produced the second photograph and held it up to my face. 'What kind of camera did Mark Asprey use? One with a time delay? Or did you employ some sniggering third party?'

  Nicola took a time delay before she said, Time delay.' And she said it softly.

  I said, 'No dreaming here. Plenty of pinches. Fully awake.'

  She flinched as I tossed it on to her lap. She straightened, and said, 'I suppose you and Missy never went in for any of that.'

  'Actually we did try spanking once. It hurt. My hand, I mean. I even said, "Ow."'

  'I can see it does look rather ugly,' she said, and her long fingers began to tear. 'It was what he liked. And one will do things for . . .'

  'Yes. Well you did say you were "stupid" for him.'

  'For a genuine artist.'

  'Come on. It's shit. Oh come ok.'

  'I absolutely don't agree. There's a purity in his work that reminds one of Tolstoy.'

  'Tolstoy?' I just couldn't take this. It was like the world. It was like fundamentalism. The planet was insane. The truth didn't matter. As 1 picked up my coat I said, 'Did you see
him? When he was here.'

  She made no reply.

  'It's over between you two. Isn't it?'

  'Some things are never over.'

  There is a woman who stands in the middle of the Tavistock Road, for an hour every evening, just after dusk, with her head up and her arms outstretched: cruciform.

  Not old, not shabby, not stupid-looking, she stands right there in the middle of the street. She smiles fixedly at the oncoming cars, which slow down as they pass, and the drivers stare — but few shout out. Actually, it is terrible, this smile of hers: martyred, trusting, admonitory. Why doesn't somebody come and drag her off some­where? One drunk is all it would take. When you drive by, and especially if you approach her from the rear, you always think of car metal meeting female flesh and blood, the forced and instant rearrangements of collision, with flesh and blood going where it suddenly has to go. She's perfect for the book, but I can't think of any good way of getting her in.

  She's out there now. I can see her from the window. Why don't they come and take her away? Oh, why don't they come?

  Chapter 16: The Third Party

  t

  he next time Guy saw Keith he looked utterly transformed. The Black Cross, at noon; down the length of Lancaster Road and in through the pub doors the low sun burned unpreventably .. .

  'Cink paint,' said Keith. 'Rear final drive.'

  First, and most obviously and graphically, the clothes. Keith wore a brown shirt of moire silk with raised stripes (its texture reminded Guy of pork crackling), hipster cream flares, and a new pair of coarse-furred ferret-like loafers (with a hint of the scaramouch or the harem-creeper in their curled tips).

  'Intake manifold,' said Keith. 'Central differential.'

  The cream flares had a striking arrangement at the fly. Boot­strap or bodice effects Guy was familiar with (Antonio, the rude venta, so long ago), but he had never seen anything quite like Keith's crotch.

  'Underbody sealant,' said Keith. 'Wheel housing liners. Flange design.'

  Individual loops, each tied in a bow, and tasselled with fringe and pom-pom; and the trousers were so dramatically, so disconcertingly low on the hip that there was only room for two or three of them. The trousers held Keith's substantial rump as reverently as a Grecian urn holds its essence. Guy, who found the outfit ridiculous and even alarming, none the less envied Keith that pert rear-end, having often thought that his own life had been quite poisoned by his want of real buttock. Their occupant seemed well pleased with the new trousers, and especially the fly, whose bows and bobbles he would occasion­ally run a hand over.

  'Joint trapezium arm rear axle,' said Keith. 'Cataphoretic dip priming. Galvannealed zincrometal.'

  Keith was, today, in particularly baronial mood, his manner suggesting an unpierceable detachment from the froward concerns of pub life. The reason for this was not hard to fathom, was indeed well known and still being talked about: at the oché of the George Washington, in England Lane, on Thursday night, Keith had tasted victory. He thus took his place in the semi-finals of the Duoshare Sparrow Masters.

  'A shame you uh . . . let us down Thursday,' said Keith. He was now cleaning his fingernails with a dart. Guy looked again: Keith had been manicured! Gone were the frayed cuticles, the scabs of kippered nicotine. 'There was ... it caused considerable disappoint­ment.'

  'No I feel very bad about that,' said Guy. 'But the boy was sick again. And at the moment we haven't got any — any choice. I was up all night with him.'

  Keith looked puzzled. 'Your wife okay is she?'

  'Sorry?'

  'Still walking is she?'

  'I'm sorry?'

  Keith no longer looked puzzled. He just looked mildly surprised, and mildly displeased. Turning an inch or two, he jerked his eyebrows at Pongo, who smartly refilled his tankard. Then Keith pointed his darting finger at Guy until Guy said,

  'Oh I'll have the same.'

  Now Keith looked away. He seemed to be unhurriedly probing his teeth with his tongue. He began to whistle — just three casual notes on a rising scale. He ran a hand through his hair, which had been recently cut, and moussed, and extravagantly blow-dried.

  'I'm sorry I missed it,' said Guy. 'Anyway well done, Keith.' He reached out a hand towards Keith's shoulder, towards his streaming brown shirt, but then thought better of it. 'I hear you really —'

  'Keith? Carphone!'

  'Er, excuse me for a minute, would you, Guy?'

  Guy stood there tensely with his drink, every now and then reaching to scratch the back of his neck. Time passed. He turned and looked (the angle of his head feeling vaguely craven) as Keith stepped back in from the radiance of the street and paused by the door to have words with Fucker and Zbig One. 'Jesus,' Keith was saying in his deepest voice. These birds. No peace. Relax. Few drinks.' Guy looked away again.

  Now with full gravity and silent promise of discretion Keith drew Guy to the fruit-machine, into which he began to insert a series of one-pound coins, and along with whose repertoire of electronic ditties and jingles he would confidently sing.

  'I'm glad you're seeing Nicky again,' said Keith. 'Derdle erdle oom pom. Unrecognizable.'

  'Sorry?'

  'No comparison innit. Derdle erdle oom pom. Meemawmeemaw-meemaw. None of this moping around, what's the point, no point. What's the point. She's transformed.'

  'Ah yes, you went round there to . . .'

  The boiler.'

  'Ah yes.'

  To look at the boiler. Puckapuckapuckapucka. Bah bar dee birdie dee bom: ploomp! A, an exceptional woman, that. Not overly versed, though, in the, in the ways of the world. You agree?'

  '- Yeah,' said Guy.

  Keith shook his head and smiled with affectionate self-reproach. 'First time I went round there I thought she was one of them -Derdle erdle ooom pom. One of them birds that's really, well, you know.'

  Guy nodded suddenly.

  'Meemawmeemawmeemaw. Oozing for it. You know. Dripping for it. Sliding all over the floor. You're in there five minutes, minding your own business, and suddenly — Bah bar dee birdie dee bom: ploomp!'

  'I know the sort.'

  'Not been in there five minutes and she's smacking your cods all over the park. Puckapuckapuckapucka. You come through the door, you take off your coat, you look down. She's got your gun in her gob. Derdleerdle oom pom. Bah bar dee birdie dee bom: ploomp! . . . Derdle erdle oom pom. Derdle erdle oom pom. Derdle -'

  'Yes,' said Guy.

  'Yeah well. Not a bit of it. Her? No way. Keeps herself to herself. The real article: a lady. Look at this fucking thing.’

  After several shoves and slaps Keith left the fruit-machine rocking steadily on its base and led Guy back to their drinks. Keith positioned himself comfortably, inclining backwards with his elbows on the bar.

  'Yes,' said Guy, who seemed somewhat calmer, 'she's quite naive in some ways.'

  'Doesn't surprise me.'

  'Almost otherworldly.'

  'Same difference.'

  'That's right.' Guy's face cleared further. He even began on a smile.

  'She's not. . .' The angle at which Keith was leaning afforded him a rare glimpse of his waist. He appeared to become absorbed by the tasselled loopings of his groin, weighing each bobble in turn with his clean fingers. For a moment a look of amusement or fond memory crossed his face. But then his solemnity returned. He raised his hand to his hair, and looked upwards at the ceiling. He said, 'She's not just some fucking old slag like some.'

  Out on the street Guy groped his way into a lamp-post and stood for a moment with his forehead pressed to the damp rust. He kept casting his mind back . . . No, his mind kept going there under its own power, with great sudden backward vaults through time. Guy kept thinking of his very first visit to her flat. Keith coming down the stairs — Hello, mate — and Nicola lingering (or recovering) in her bedroom; and then emerging (he glimpsed the tousled linen in the mirror), walking awkwardly, bowlegged and bent in the middle, with her lewd and feverish face - It's so hot - a
nd a welt or graze on her temple, as if, perhaps, in their rough passion . . . 'Oh my dear,' Guy found himself whispering (to whom?), with an incomprehens­ible smile on his lips. 'Such repulsive thought. Cannot be. Simply cannot be.' He moved off, but soon paused again, and paused again, and always with fingertips poised near his eyes.

  And so Guy headed home, into the low sun. Quite uncanny, the sun's new trajectory, and getting lower all the time. Seen from the rear, I must look exactly like I feel: a silhouette, staggering blind into the photosphere of an amber star . . . And just as the sun burns off mist from the warming land, so the cumulus and thunderheads gave way, as Guy walked, to cores of silver, and even spots of blue, in the sky of his mind. The only evidence: Keith's face. The face of Keith Talent, on the steps (with his toted toolbags). That unmistakable contortion of gross lechery, and of lechery in some way gratified. But look at it from another angle; and bear in mind that, for all his better points, and through no real fault of his own, Keith remained an unbelievable berk. He might have a spyhole somewhere and peep on her in the bedroom or the bathroom. Window-cleaner wiles, keyhole cunning. Perhaps he steals or at least inspects her underwear: quite easy to imagine Keith with his whole head in the laundry basket. Possibly he has contrived a way to exploit her innocence - some little procedure, insignificant to her, significant to him. Builders and plumbers are always manoeuvring women into close contact. Remember Hope complaining about it. Get you into the airing cupboard. He might ask her to bend down so that she can - she can look at a pipe or something. Even I couldn't avoid seeing her breasts when she leaned over that afternoon. So brown. So close together. Or he gets her to go up a ladder. As she strained to reach the skylight or whatever it was, her buttocks, in their white panties, would be locked together, and muscularly tensed, and sweetly unaware . . .

  By the time Guy approached his front garden the adolescent chaos of his thoughts had in fact disqualified him from returning home. He was unpresentable. And he didn't even notice until he reached for his key and found that he could hardly get his hand into his trouser pocket. Guy swivelled, and dropped his head, and walked away fastening all three buttons of his long tweed jacket. A brisk jog up the steep bit of Ladbroke Grove, and a five-minute reverie about Pepsi Hoolihan, proved to be of little help. In the end Guy fashioned a kind of splint with his belt and ducked fast through the front door straight into the lavatory beneath the stairs. He could hear women's voices downstairs until they were drowned by the rush of the cold tap.