London Fields

  Paul Go waited. Then he smiled.

  'And now you're showing those teeth that nobody understands.'

  The last words were said into a surprising silence, as some fresh disposition established itself in the hall beyond. The man with the frilly shirt had reappeared; and there were other onlookers. Losing no time now, Nicola clicked back across the floor, opening her handbag. She gave Keith a kiss, the Wounded Bird, and carefully wiped his mouth with a paper tissue. Standing back, she considered the whole man, with eyes of love.

  'Keith, your shirt! It must have got a little creased in the car!'

  She bent to straighten the ridged rayon. She bent lower.

  '. . . On your knees, girl,' said Keith calmly.

  So that was the necessary: the diaphanous stockings, meeting the other shine on the toilet floor. Nicola knelt. She tugged downwards on the shirt's hem, and wetted a finger to collect some fluff from the vertical stripe of the trousers. She said,

  'Win, Keith. Dispose of the challenge of the — the hibakusha. Come to me tomorrow. I'll have more money for you . . . You're my god.'

  'On your feet, girl.'

  Paul Go moved past them. Even the old milkman levered himself free of the urinal and set his course for the door. Keith stayed for a while and looked at her, nodding his head. But she was the last to leave.

  Guy patrolled the Marquis of Edenderry, his questing nose out front, the indeterminate mouth with its wince-smile and flinch-grin. The pub, the entire cavern of leather and glass, had been tipped sideways, its contents toppling towards the street, towards the raised dart-board, the trampled oché. All you could see up there was a man in a purple dinner jacket, above the crowd; his voice might not have been the worst voice of all time, but it was certainly, the worst voice yet (a nightmare of fruity pomp); with this voice he was saying, 'So I'd like to thank you for kindly thanking us for bringing you this contest here tonight. . .'Guy could see Debbee and-was it?-Petronella standing together on a table, a few feet from the swaying rampart of heads and shoulders. He was afraid he had been rather a dub with Keith's harem; most awkward; they had seemed to look right through him, to look right through his well-enunciated questions about where they lived and what they did; though he did manage to exchange some words with Analiese about the theatre. He craned and flinched and felt the need for Nicola: a childish need, like being lost on some market street, and desperate for one of the bustling mannequins to slow and soften into the kind shape of the loved one. She must be still in the Ladies, Guy thought, as he went to use the Gents.

  He couldn't imagine that Nicola would want to watch the whole thing, or even any part of it, so he returned to their table to wait for her there. Others, too, were sitting it out, busy drinking or petting or fighting. He emptied his glass and blinked at the crowd. Then he felt a light touch on his shoulder, and with a forgiving smile he turned to face the authentic ruin of Trish Shirt.

  'Whoops! Are you all right?'

  She stared into nothing, as he helped her sit; she stared into nothing —or she stared, perhaps, at her own thoughts, at her own insides. Here was a blonde to whom everything that could happen to a blonde had gone ahead and happened. As the darts crowd, the arrowshower, steadily grew in its growling, Trish Shirt said, with infinite difficulty,

  'I don't know ... I don't know what the world's . . . going to.'

  This remark seemed to Guy about as shocking as any he had ever heard. He watched her carefully. To attempt so little in the way of speech, of response, of expression: and then to fuck that up.

  'In the toilet,' she said.

  Guy waited.

  'He comes round my owce. Eel bring me... booze and that. To my owce. And use me like a toilet.'

  'Oh I'm sure not,' said Guy, reflecting that even the word owce was an exalted epithet for where Trish lived, if of course Keith's unsympathetic descriptions of the place were to be trusted.

  'Keep meself got up like a titmag. In my owce. Case he wants to come round and lam the yell out of me. In me oh nous. Where's the respect? Where's the appreciation. Does he ... does he talk about me?'

  'Keith?'

  'Keith.’

  She had asked the question with such total abjectness that Guy was at a loss for the right reply. He thought of straw: was this the kind you clutched at, or the kind that broke your back? Keith did in fact talk about Trish frequently, even routinely, as a way of advertizing his movements around town; and he backed up these mentions with as much violent detail as he had inclination or time to transmit. Guy said,

  'He talks about you often, and fondly.'

  'Keith?'

  'Keith.'

  'Oh I love him dearly with all my heart,' she said. 'Truly I do.' Her face softened further: a mother watching over a sleeping child. A mother who had been away some time, in an institution. A cracked mother. A mother — alas! — that you wouldn't want your child near, with her wrong type of love. 'Go on. What's he say?'

  'He says,' said Guy, helplessly but rightly concluding that Trish would believe anything, 'he says that his feeling for you is based on deep affection. And trust.'

  'Why then? Why, Keith, why? Why's he rub my nose in it? With her. In the toilet.'

  'What, here? . . . Yes, well, he does behave impulsively at times.'

  'On her knees.'

  Guy looked up. What he saw made his shins shiver, like the anticipation and recoil he felt at the instant of Marmaduke's half-hourly injuries. Nicola was standing alone on the bar, her arms folded, her shoes held in her right hand, her blond fur coat like a low sun, and supervizing the contest with an expression of inexplicable coldness.

  Trish was crying now and Guy took her hand.

  'Everything,' she said through her tears, and again with infinite difficulty, 'everything's coming ... to the dogs.'

  And while Trish stared - stared, as it now seemed, into her own eyes — Guy held her hand and watched the crowd: how it bled colour from the enormous room and drew all energy towards itself, forming one triumphal being; how it trembled, then burst or came or died, releasing individuality; and how the champion was borne along on its subsidence, his back slapped, his hair tousled, mimed by female hands and laughing, like the god of mobs.

  'So: the fairytale continues,' said Royal Oak's Keith Talent, draining his glass and wiping his mouth with his sleeve. 'Basically the complexion of the match changed in the second leg of the third set.

  Recovering from his wayward start, when nothing would go right for the fast-throwing oriental, the little guy from the east was permitted three clear darts at the double 16, the board's prime double. The bigger man could only stand and watch. But his fears proved fleeting, for the young Jap crapped it. Relishing the home fixture, the North Kensington chucker went from strength to strength, stepping in to punish the smaller man, who never recovered from the blow. Yes, the slip cost him dear. After that, no way could he stave off defeat.'

  So saying, Keith closed his eyes and yawned. Secretly he was amazed by his voice. Instead of not working at all, which would have been fair enough, his voice was working phenomenally well (though even he was shocked by how deep it had become since the last few drinks). But what authority, what rolling fluency! Keith yawned again: the inhalation, the ragged wail. It was so late now that the Marquis of Edenderry had in fact been shut for almost half an hour; but the party lingered on behind bolted doors, their glasses proudly rebrimmed by the manager, Mike Frame. Keith yawned again. Perhaps he was catching these yawns from his companions (who had had nearly five hours of his post-match analysis). They moaned suddenly and unanimously as Keith said,

  'Going for a considerable finish in the nailbiting fourth set, the . . .'

  Keith stopped, or paused. He noticed that Trish was asleep, or at any rate not conscious. The women all had their heads bowed, in fatigue, or in the piety of love. Keith felt so happy and proud that his mouth dropped open and these words emerged, as his right hand (with erect darting finger) counted from girl to girl: Debbee, Analiese, Trish, Ni
cky, Sutra, Petronella, Iqbala . . .

  'Eeny meeny miney —'

  Nicola sat upright. And Guy stirred. And in the general flurry of missed clues, ungot jokes, Trish Shirt came to with a shout. She left her chair but she didn't straighten: she stood there cocked in a haggard crouch and pointing with her whole arm at Nicola Six.

  'You! It's you! Ooh, I saw you. In the Gents. She was down on her fuckin knees in the Gents! For Keith. She was down on her knees in the Gents sucking his -'

  Keith stepped masterfully forward and hit Trish once on the cheekbone with his closed fist. He stood above her, panting, but the body didn't move. In the near background Mike Frame waited indulgently, jinking his keys.

  'A chapter', said Nicola in the car, 'of epic squalor.'

  'Yes. Surprisingly dreadful.'

  'When I get home I shall have a scalding shower.'

  'Hideous business. I'm sorry. We should have left straight after the match and let them get on with it.'

  'You know, when Keith hit the madwoman, that was his idea of being gallant. To me. Like laying his jacket over a puddle.'

  'You think?'

  'Curious how madness and obscenity go together. Like madness and anti-Semitism. Shakespeare was right. Ophelia . . .'

  'Oh yes. A rather sorry Ophelia, I'm afraid.' Guy was still awash with adrenalin and anger, and with confusion about his own response to the Talent enormity. He had felt no fear, only paralysis, as if everything he believed in had been wiped out of existence. Now Guy added to himself, 'Hard to see what to do . . .'

  A little later she said, 'I love your tongue. All this kissing.'

  'You're frightfully good at it.'

  'Beginner's luck.'

  They were parked in her dead-end street. She now gave him a series of literary kisses, Maud, and Geraldine, and Eve in the Garden, and (a happy creation) Ophelia Before and After the Death of Polonius. Then she threw in the Grand-a-Night Hooker. She did enough, in any case, she confidently imagined, to rebrim his sobbing boner. Then she reached for her handbag with the last of many sighs.

  He said abruptly, 'Your stockings. The knees are both torn.'

  'I know. I can't see the point of stockings when they're this sheer. Of course, a pair of good hardy tights is what one really wants. Watch me to the door. Don't get out.'

  She climbed from the car and walked to the garden gate. But then she turned and walked back — walking as she would on another night, very soon, to another man in another car. She approached and bent before the driver's window, which Guy smartly lowered. Nicola put her head into the car and gave him the Jewish Princess.

  When it was over, Guy involuntarily raised a hand to his mouth. That-that was . . .'

  'Unforgivable?' said Nicola mysteriously. 'By the way. I'm going to stop teaching Keith.'

  'Really?' said Guy lovingly.

  'One tries to do what one can. But I've finally put my finger on what 1 can't bear about him.’

  Which is?' said Guy, even more lovingly. 'He's so working-class.'

  Working-class or not, Ken-Chel's Keith Talent was still abroad. The night was young. Though of humble extraction - the son of a simple criminal - Keith Talent was still very much at large.

  He had made, in the heavy Cavalier, a magisterial tour of Greater London: Plaistow for Petronella, Arnos Grove for Sutra, Slough for Analiese (Basil was behaving strangely), then to Ickenham, to get little Debbee home safe and sound. And for a while he sat in her semi, drinking instant coffee and passing the time with her perfectly fanciable mother, who had heard of Keith's victory on the TV (it came in the form of a newsflash, in the middle of a darts match she was already watching) and had stayed up to congratulate him and, of course, to ensure that her little Debbee didn't give Keith one on the house. In no way had Keith neglected his responsibilities to Trish Shirt, personally helping Mike Frame to shove her into the minicab and himself standing there with the cocked twenty, giving the driver full instructions. Nor had he forgotten Iqbala, whom he had left until last, her being a neighbour, and who was now fast asleep (he'd checked) in the boot of the car.

  The instant coffee was drunk, the cigarettes smoked, the time passed. A new Keith Talent. The taste of victory is sweet. In the old days Keith and Debs would have slipped away at some point for their little cuddle, Keith later settling with Mrs K. Or he might have waited in the Cavalier, smoking more cigarettes and listening to darts tapes, until Debbee threw a key down from her window, and he'd pop back in for a freebie. But tonight? Well, it was a new Keith Talent they were looking at. And Debbee was special. She cost £85. And he found that he wasn't really bothered one way or the other, now that she was sixteen, a good deal of the magic having gone out of it. No. He gave Mrs Kensit a kiss and a squeeze, and Debbee an even chaster goodnight on the doorstep, and was on his way. In the car he smacked a darts tape into the stereo (the Obbs-Twemlow final: evergreen) and drove to Trish Shirt's.

  Twenty minutes later he sat in his garage and smoked twenty cigarettes and drank a bottle of porno. Tsk, tsk: bloodstains on his collar. In long but regular intervals, tears of pride dropped on to his lap. Another bockle? Already bit tiggly. That bull finish: right in the miggle. No diggling, but give Debs a lickle cuggle. Quick piggle.

  From time to time he would stare up at the swimming beauty of the dartboard: the kaleidoscope of every hope and dream. She did it. Nicky did it. Old Nick. Then home, to the chores of love. He walked the wife, burped the dog, and . . . Semiconscious, then, also semi-literate and not even semiskilled, Double-U Eleven's Keith Talent rested his head against the semipermanent cork wall, and thought of semiprecious Nicola, beneath the cold black sky of seminight.

  And now under the low sun I go to Kim Talent with a lover's impatience, with a lover's tearing impatience, fearful that the world will die before I meet the searching blaze of her eyes. On the way in the quiet riot of Golborne Road I see three young women walking along together, licking and sucking their fingers. Why? What profane novelty .. . But yes of course. They've been eating french fries, eating chips from the open bag covered in vinegar and salt. And now licking their fingers. Long may they do so. Long may they have the freedom, the fingers, and the lips. With a lover's impatience I shall unbutton her Babygro. With a lover's impatience I shall tear at the sticky tabs of her diaper.

  Kim was sleeping. So was Keith, at three in the afternoon. He'd tried getting up; he'd tried the bracing stroll to the Black Cross. And he'd come right back again. His tortured snoring filled the flat. And Kim's sleep too was restless, pain-jabbed, caught up in the baby's passionate, eternal and largely obscure struggle not just to get through being a baby, an infant, a child, a young one, but to deal rawly with the knots and tricks of being. Even a baby knows that death isn't one idea: it is the complex symbol. Baby, what is your problem? Daddy, it's this: the mind-body problem. I asked Kath why she didn't take the chance to go to the shops. I said it forcefully or frantically. The resolute colourlessness of her face told me no, no; but then her eyes closed, and something was decided, something important was decided. And she left us.

  Got to stop hurting K. With a lover's impatience I woke her. No good fust takeing it out on the Baby. She cried in confusion and sadness as I unbuttoned her on the living-room floor. With a single wrench I pulled off her diaper . . .What kind of planet is it where you feel relief, where you feel surprise, that a nought-year-old girl is still a virgin? Then I turned her over.

  On the right buttock, a bruise, perfectly round and shockingly dark, and grainy, like an X-ray, shining black light on the internal world of cells. On the left buttock, three cigarette burns, in a triangle.

  I got up so suddenly that I banged into the standard lamp and if the room had been any bigger I would have fallen over backward right on to the deck. The wall held me up with a blow to the cranium. Showing effort and eagerness, Kim turned herself over, a new skill of hers, and looked up at me from the floor.

  'He's been hurting you, hasn't he?'

  '. . . Mm. Urs,' she said
.

  'It's daddy, isn't it.'

  '. . . Earse.'

  I went down on my knees and said through the sound of his window-rattling snore, 'I'll -I don't know what I'll do. But I'll protect you. Please don't worry. Please. My darling.'

  'Please,' I said. 'Do this one big last thing for me. Please.'

  Nicola pushed her face forward. 'Christ, I said okay.'

  'But what good is your guarantee? You're alone. On what can you swear? You don't love anything or anybody.'

  'Well you'll just have to take my word for it, won't you. I was going to do something like this anyway. What's the big deal?'

  'Just bear with me,' I said. I had toothache in my knee and legache in my mouth and earache in my ass. I nodded. 'Good. So. You'll have Keith move in. Or spend a lot of time here. And make him happy. Until the big night.'

  'I won't wake up with him. That's out of the question and is never going to happen. And you realize it'll mean sending Guy away for a while.'

  'There go my unities.'

  'I rather thought America.'

  'America ?' I sighed heavily. But we all have to make sacrifices. I took a breath and said, 'Outstanding work, by the way, at the Marquis of Edenderry. You got us out of a tricky situation.' I was there, of course, at the Marquis of Edenderry. I was there. But am I anywhere ? I look at my outstretched hand and expect it to disappear, to begin its slow wipe from the screen. I move in and out of things. I am an onlooker in my own dream. I am my own ghost, kissing its fingertips.

  Indulgently she said, 'Have you finished your letter to Mark?'

  'No. And it's about eight thousand words long.'

  'Don't finish it. Or don't post it. Here's a better idea. Post it to yourself. Do you know the Borges story, "The Aleph " ? It's very funny about literary envy.' She finished her drink and dashed the empty glass into the fireplace. Typical.

  'Is it now?'