'Hello, Keith. How are you?'
'Give herself utterly. The consummation of their bliss. One up the Khyber.'
'How are things?'
'Mutual body pleasure. The importance of sufficient foreplay. A full but firm figure. Consenting adults.'
When he was with her, Guy's trust was absolute and entire. Although Nicola's kisses sometimes shocked him - with their liquidity, their penetration, their hunger — her inhibition was unassailable, without blindspots, and impressively intransigent. How her whole body seemed to lock or jam whenever his hand entered the force field surrounding her breasts, her thighs, her heartbreaking belly. Elaborately conditioned by her sensitivity (and by the two powerful blows he had recently sustained), Guy was almost as tentative, as virginally hairtriggered, as Nicola herself. It was a relief for them both to be elsewhere, in all the places where nothing could happen. Sometimes, in the afternoons, they visited obscure museums or earnest cinemas. They went for walks, making the most of the clear weather: Guy relished a good tramp, and Nicola said she liked it too. The further out the better, Guy in his big wet shoes, Nicola in her dark-green wellies, her patched blue jeans: they held hands, and walked with their joined arms swinging. Just north of Barnet they found a wood they both adored. The muffled rustling, the way the trees husbanded moisture. Of course, there were little tricks and japes. She would knock his hat off into a puddle, then run and hide. Guy would scamper after her. She once wrote I Love You with a stick in the phlegmy mud of a dried stream. There were many delicious kisses under the branches of the tinkling trees. Birds stirred and damply flapped but they saw no animals, no small woodland creatures, not even a squirrel or a rabbit: only the animal fawns of the light cast by the low sun. Nicola said that these moments were especially precious, away from the city and its sense of approaching catastrophe.
When they got back to her flat Nicola would serve tea, on a tray, usually with biscuits. And for a while they would carefully neck on the sitting-room sofa. Yet when the time came for him to leave, and the kisses at the top of the stairs became kisses of farewell they also became wanton, and she would now squirm with vivid appetite in his arms. Smaller than him, and shoeless by this stage, Nicola would seem to be climbing up his body with the aid of various points of suction. Now, as he went on his way, his chest bore the fudgy imprints of her breasts, his belly was embossed by her culverts and contours. Further down, all was muscle memory: the tilt and camber of her excruciating pith. And she would soon be braver, she said. 'Soon I'll be braver,' she whispered hotly into his humming ear.
Still, Guy counted himself pretty lucky if he managed to get in and out of there without bumping into Keith. As Guy staggered down the stairs, bent, breathless, coated with electricity, Keith would be staggering up them. Alternatively, when Guy rang the buzzer on the porch, it would be Keith who personally yanked open the front door, looking glazed, lordly, propitiated. Something like this happened slightly more often than not. And once it happened twice: on the way in and on the way out — as if Keith was just politely and briefly vacating the eminence that was rightfully his. There were also other visits, Guy knew. Sometimes, when he was passing by or at any rate in the general neighbourhood, or when he had nothing better to do (a surprisingly capacious timeframe), Guy would haunt her dead-end street. On one occasion he saw Keith pull up and stolidly hoist satchel and toolbag from the boot of the heavy Cavalier. On another - and this was more or less pure accident - Guy's Volkswagen was involved in a minor delay, close to the significant junction; the delay was caused by Keith, who at some risk to himself and others was backing out into the main road; a few minutes later Keith drove past, sneering volubly into his new earphone.
In the early mornings Guy would lie in bed next to the shape of his sleeping wife (so distorted, now, in all his feelings about her, by the weight of what she didn't know) and stare at disgusting tableaux vivants, coarse grey travesties of potting shed and parkie hut, of elderly nurseries, with Keith saying, 'The doctor told me I have to do it once a day. Just lie down there,' or, more coaxingly, 'You just put it in your mouth until - it's just a funny game really.' Stealthily Guy drained himself from the bed. Next door he sat on the edge of the bath and moaned and shouted into the towel's cumulus. Then he looked down at his own loins with amazement and humiliation: there was the farcical animal, the winking elf. Godlike and archaic, he rose and began to cover the wound. In the mirror a pale warrior, vizor-boned, bodkin-browed — the starved lips! The two corners of his jawline had grown sharp rivets. His hipbones stuck out like the handles of a cooking urn. An urn that contained? The stew of all his stewed love.
And the century so close to its ending. The thing was, the trouble was, what it came down to was . .. No. Guy never dared think it. Set free, the thought would have gone like this. You could imagine Nicola, someone like Nicola, someone in her position, someone so placed, so cloistered, at the end of the nineteenth century or at the end of the eighteenth century or any other century that had a number. But not the twentieth century, which must leave its mark on everyone. Not the twentieth century. Not looking like she looked.
Keith said, 'What do you do with Guy then?'
'What do you think I do?' said Nicola. 'I tease his fucking cock off.'
Keith nodded slowly at her, with genuine affection. Then he stretched. 'Yeah. You know ... he went to the university. Okay. But he done know fucking nothing.'
'It's a paradox, isn't it, Keith.'
'Nothing.'
'Whereas yourself, Keith, a student at the university of life . . . ?'
'Up the hard way. Street-smart as such. No, okay: he was born into a life of wealth and privilege like.' Keith lifted a finger. 'But he never lifted a finger for it. For me - for me, that's like unbelievable. Half the time he must think he's fucking dreaming.'
'Keith? May I demur? Happiness isn't relative, any more than suffering is. No one's going to feel grateful that his life isn't any worse. There's always enough pain, Keith. And the rich baby cries as lustily as the poor.'
'Yeah cheers.'
Keith was lying on Nicola's pretty bed, in his trousers and vest: thoroughly relaxed. His plump feet seemed to quiver lightly in their brown socks. Beside him rested the silver tray, the dregs of the devilish espresso, the saucer frilled with cigarette ends. Talentedly, Nicola was wearing a charcoal business suit and a white silk shirt fastened at the throat with an antique brooch of high formality. Her nails were varnished ovals; her linked bracelet stirred and settled with delicate distinctness. She sat on a straightbacked chair, in simple and streamlined authority. She corporate, he corporeal: the power breakfast.
Til leave you alone for a little while,' she said, standing and smoothing herself down. 'It's a rather glossy little piece I've prepared for you this morning.' She handed him the remote control, and reached for the tray. 'You'd never guess what these lady executives get up to in their offices. On a warm day, perhaps. After seeing some handsome window-cleaner going about his rough work. Oh, Keith: how discreet are you being these days?'
'Cross my heart and hope to die.'
'Yes yes. But how discreet are you being? It doesn't really matter. Of course, you don't say a word to Guy. But otherwise just do what comes naturally. He'll just think you're lying, anyway. Let me know when you're done.'
She drifted into the body of the flat, the sitting-room, the kitchen. She placed the silver tray on the wooden draining-board. She made another cup of coffee and smoked another cigarette and read Time magazine . . . This week's cover story was about the weather. As usual. It was hard to believe that the weather had until quite recently been a synonym for small talk. Because nowadays the weather was big talk. The weather made headlines all over the world. Every day. On TV a full reversal had taken place: the handsomest newscasters and the brainiest pundits were all weathermen now; and the whimsical tweed-suited eunuchs, who used to point rulers at charts and apologize about the rain, came on at the end to give the other news, or what was left of it. Meteorologists were the new war-c
orrespondents: after John on hurricanes, and Don on glaciers, you got Ron on tropospherics. Rhythmically flicking the nails of her thumb and forefinger, Nicola read about the low sun, and the latest explanations. The change of angle was apparently caused by an unprecedented combination of three familiar effects: perihelion (when the earth is at its shortest distance from the sun), perigee (when the moon is at its shortest distance from the earth) and syzygy (when the earth, sun, and moon are anyway most closely aligned). The confluence made gravity put on weight, slowing the planet's spin and also slowing time, so that earth days and nights were now fractionally but measurably longer. 'Yeah cheers,' murmured Nicola, who had only twenty days and nights on earth to go. She tossed Time over her shoulder and arrived at her own explanation. Love made the world go round. And the world was slowing up. The world wasn't going round.
Still, the earth's new tilt meant that London would get the full eclipse. London would witness 'totality' on November 5. And already there were boys on the street with their guys, begging. 'Penny for the guy?' The guys themselves were insultingly perfunctory: so little thought had gone into them, so little care, so little love. They weren't worth a penny. And a penny was worth nothing.
After a long limbo (neglect, oblivion), she knocked on the bedroom door. Normally he alerted her with a confidential cough. But Keith's urbane throat-clearings, once begun, could rage on for over an hour. 'Yeah?' he said thickly. The moment she entered she was angrily aware that Keith had not availed himself of his solitary treat. Quickly she followed his gaze to the television screen: herself, freeze-framed, at her desk next door (and with one leg up on it), the charcoal suit in fascinating disarray. Nicola looked at him again, and shut her eyes as part of the effort of not laughing. For Keith was in tears. Warmly they had flowed; their tracks were yellowish on his porous cheeks. How she had underestimated her Keith! Pornography awakened all his finer responses. It wasn't just the sex. He really did think it was beautiful.
'I expect,' said Nicola, with relief, with amusement, with generosity (though not all the anger had been purged from her voice), 'I expect that after you visit me, you go off and see some girl, don't you Keith. Some little cracker. You do, don't you, Keith.'
Keith kept his counsel.
That's good. I approve. Then you do to her all the things you want to do to me. All the things you will do to me, very soon. Ooh, I bet you do. You do, don't you, Keith.'
Keith kept his counsel.
'I just want you to do what feels right for you,' said Nicola. After the yob art, she thought she might as well throw in some yob love, on the off chance that it might make any difference to anything. 'Oh, I don't expect to hold you, Keith, not now or later, a man such as yourself. That's why I'm spinning things out like this. Especially not later. The girls will all be after you, and who can blame them? But I'll always be pushing for you, Keith, even when I'm just one of your memories. You won't have to let me know when the big one comes along: I'll be there for you, Keith. When you're throwing your darts for the Embassy, for the number-one spot, I'll be somewhere in the crowd, Keith, cheering you on.'
Keith sat up straight and put his feet on the floor. As he looked about for his shoes he said, 'Not for the Embassy. At the Embassy. Not for. At.'
She ducked into the bathroom, to change into her jeans and wellies for the next act. But first she threw on all the taps, pulled the lavatory flush, buried her face in a towel and almost killed herself laughing. It was a warm and timid little face that peeped through the crack in the door as Keith moodily took his leave.
'Guy,' said Keith, with his head down. 'What you tell him I come here for? Tell him I what? Fix the toilet? Lie on the kitchen floor with me tongue up a funnel?'
'. . . Something like that,' said Nicola.
Success has not changed me, thought Keith as he came down the stairs. Success, and recognition. Obviously it's nice to enjoy the fruits of stardom. Obviously. The money and the — the adulation like. The goods and services. I worked like a - like a dog for my crown. No danger I'll relinquish it in a hurry. But obviously basically I'll hopefully be the same Keith Talent I always was.'
Keith wiped the additional tears from his eyes and opened the front door. That sticklebrick of pallor, money, invented pain and good teeth - known as Guy Clinch - was feeding coins into a parking meter. His smile flickered up at Keith, who stood on the steps with his legs apart, shrugging into position the strap of his stolen toolbag.
'Good morning,' said Guy defeatedly.
But Keith moved past him with just a glazed wipe of the eyes and crossed the road for the heavy Cavalier.
Nicola was right. After he visited her, Keith went to see a ladyfriend. Moreover, Keith visited a ladyfriend before he visited her. Only certain unrepealable physical laws stopped him going to see a ladyfriend while he visited her. Nicola was right again. The girls were all after him, or at least they weren't getting out of his way. And Keith was really putting himself about, with an urgency, a cartwheeling canine frenzy he had never known before. Was someone putting something in his lager? It couldn't be healthy (even Keith was sure of this), and he genuinely feared for his darts, not to mention his sanity. Compulsive behaviour innit. But the birds were as bad. Indeed, over the great city, or in those flues and runnels where Keith scampered and paused, his whiskers working, a sewery fever seemed to be abroad, all wastepipes and floodgates and gargoyles, rat-borne. For Keith it was sharp and brackish, like the ever-present smell of urine in the streets. Of course, you had to be persistent, and having nothing to do all day unquestionably helped. After he'd fetched her milk for the ninth morning running, Iqbala consented, once again, to turn the telly up loud. Popping in on Petronella Jones with a series of high-octane gifts to celebrate her recent marriage to the oilrigger, Keith had found that one thing led to another. Since Thelonius's arrest, Keith had been doing the right thing, making regular and glad-handed visits to Lilette and the kids, and he could all too easily see himself developing an obligation there (Lilette okay for a baby-mamma, and not pregnant, or not very pregnant, just now: give the kids a tenner get lost for twenty minutes). It was getting so bad he hardly had time to hang around for hours on end relaxing over a few drinks with his colleagues in the Black Cross. While he performed -in bed, on the couch or the carpet, up against the radiator - while he jerked and stabbed and fought for breath, his thoughts, his desperate presentiments, were all of money, transformation, Nicola and, for the first time in his life, his own death. And here was one final proof that all was not well. He'd stumble in at Christ knows when, after doing Christ knows what to Christ knows who all day, followed by nine hours of darts and rounding it all off at Trish Shirt's - and find himself elbowing Kath awake at four in the morning! Now why would he go and do a thing like that? Kath. Kath, in whose body he had long lost all but a reflexive, Friday-night interest. It was like that time in the middle of the pregnancy, when Keith had been briefly stirred to find himself alongside this cool new fat chick with the big tits and the beer gut. I don't know what's got into me, he now thought, as he pressed her shaking shoulders down the bed. Really and truly I don't.
Keith pulled off in the heavy Cavalier. Being a professional, he drove with some sedateness, keeping his concentration, and his temper, as you had to do. The thick fingers depressed the indicator, and flashed the lights, in warning, in sufferance. The meat of the hand came down on the horn in brute denial, or tapped it tw;ce, to say hito a cheat or make a woman swivel and show her face . . .Mind you, Keith wasn't complaining. Complain? Keith? Not the type. Got on with it. Just as he imagined the world being held together by blind and hidden forces, so everything generally rested easy in his reptile mind. And guess what: Analiese Furnish had moved back into town. Keith accelerated, then braked, then traumatized a Learner with shout of horn and glare of lights. What they doing on the roads. Analiese, with her poems, her crushed flowers, her newspaper clippings (our secret love), her Caramac hair, her bountiful summer dresses. Tired of Slough, tired of mildly s
candalizing the blighted dormitory estate, Analiese had dropped her Heathrow baggage-handler, packed her many suitcases, and dramatically appeared on the White City doorstep of the unemployed violinist in whose love she knew she could always trust. 'After you, darling,' said Keith. 'Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Jesus. COME ON.' Yeah. Picked up sticks and moved back into town. I don't know how he wears it. Ah, but Analiese unquestionably had a knack or a power when it came to love — to love of a certain kind. With her scrapbooks, her costume jewellery, and her fat legs, Analiese had always been able to find a certain kind of man (fuddled, failed in art and love, patient, tender, older), who would house her, listen to her, worship her, and vow to keep his hands off her. 'What's this? Jesus, look at that stupid bastard.' Move it. 'Move it.' Yeah. You heard: never lets him lay a finger on her. Before long Analiese was to be found in all her old haunts — the stage doors of the National Theatre, the carpark of the BBC, the van outside Ronnie Scott's—while Basil stopped home, scratching his beard, rereading her diary, and genuflecting in front of the laundry hamper. Basil's little flat in White City was dead convenient for Keith.
Now he wound down the window and stuck his head out of it. 'Don't fuckin say phankyou, whoah ya!' Christ, the manners of the road. Not that he was entirely happy with the situation. The postman always rings twice as such. For instance, Keith liked to show up on impulse, going at things freestyle like, in his own way. And every time he sauntered whistling down the basement, with a sixpack of Peculiar Brews in one hand and his belt buckle in the other — there he'd be, mister misery. Get back. 'Get back, you little bitch.' It cramped a man's style. Where was the spontaneity. Cheers, Baz, Keith would say menacingly, and plonk himself down for a wait. Analiese just stared at Basil through the silence. As often as not she'd have to tell him. Honour my privacy, Basil. Respect my space, Basil. All this. And then with a shudder he'd rear up, fling on a mack and, Keith assumed, slope off down the drinker. Not ideal. But what could Keith do? That's it: block the whole fucking road. He couldn't entertain her at the garage - his lair of darts: even Trish Shirt used to balk at that, the way the grit got worked into the back of her dress. And Dean's flat was a tip. And so was Dean's van. Maybe if he put it the right way to Lilette, or Petronella, or Iqbala. Or Kath. Take your time, pal. I'm only here for my health.'Cunt!' In theory, now that he had a couple of bob he could always take her to a nice little hotel. But there weren't any nice little hotels. There were only nasty little hotels. And the big ones frightened him. Anyway you don't want to lie around all day hearing her banging on about safe sex or religion. Got to be quick. Cavalier'll get a ticket. Or clamped. Fucking bastards. Is the Vodafone better than the Celmate, with improved specifications? Fucker'll know. '11 ask Fucker.