London Fields

  Here they come again, the pains. Gather about me, my little ones.

  Exquisite tristesse on finishing Crossbone Waters. I can't think why. It's an awful little piece of shit.

  Marius returns from a crepuscular soul-ramble to find Kwango packing his meagre possessions. Ridiculous conversation. Kwango says he will be gone for three moons. Why, O Kwango? The woman is ready. She waits. How, O Kwango, do you know this? How do you know this, O great Kwango? The birds whisper it. I smell it in the waters.

  Nor does Kwango speak with forked tongue. Marius hastens to Cornelia's cabin, and gets the lot...

  Or you infer that he does. Marius goes all posh and manly at this juncture ('Towards morning, I took her again'), with much Kwan-goan rambling about water, femininity, ebbings, fluxes. I expected her to be manly. I expected her to really strap Marius on. But no: she's a simpering sonnet in the sack.

  At any rate the seventy-two-hour debauch concludes with Kwan-go's return and a brisk voyage back to Samarinda, where Cornelia's seaplane is already bobbing in the harbour. No promises. No regrets. Just one last kiss . . .

  I'm devastated. I really am falling apart. Why the sighs, why the tears, why the rich and wistful frowns ? It's an awful little piece of shit.

  My last act of love took place ninety days ago.

  I ambushed and ravished her. I was frictionless and inexorable. How could she possibly resist me? Burton Else couldn't have handled it better. Kwango himself would have wept with pride.

  It was a precision raid. Everything was sweet. On the appointed day I unsmilingly flew from La Guardia to Logan. Then the six-seater to the Cape: how aerodynamically carefree it was, how the baby plane was whisked up on the thermals, out over the boatless water. I looked back with a shrewd glance: Boston at dusk with the sun behind it -heaven's red-light district. We landed with extreme delicacy, as did the old open-prop stratocruiser that was coming down alongside, like a corpulent but thin-shanked lady, skirts raised to toe the moist tarmac. Onward.

  Sand spills had closed the thruway. In my hired jeep I ruggedly drove through battened Provincetown, then on past the sign that says Cape Cod Light, and into the woods. Many times I climbed out to untangle the drag of queer growths, the grasp of nameless vines made bitter by their own ugliness, taloned briars, sharp-knuckled twigs, all under a storm of blackfly. Then at last the camp, the unlocked screen door, and Missy Harter on the piano stool, clasping her coffee cup in both hands.

  She had come for remembrance, as she did every year: her father, whom she loved, whom I loved, Dan Harter, with his old-guy jeans, his Jim Beam and his Tom Paine. She was perfect for me.

  I cried. I laced her coffee with bourbon. I told her I was dying too. I went down on my knees.

  How could she possibly resist me?

  Last night, as I entered, Nicola gave me her most exalted and veridical smile and said,

  Tve reached a decision. God, it's all so clear now. I'm calling the whole thing off.'

  'You're what?'

  'I'll go away somewhere. Perhaps with Mark. It's simple. Plan B. I'll live.'

  'You'll what?'

  She laughed musically. 'The look on your face. Oh don't worry. I'm all talk. I'm just a big tease. It's still Plan A. Don't worry. I was just kidding. I was just playing nervous.'

  Last night was our last night, in a sense. We both felt it. The world was coming into everything. The room where we now talked, Nicola's habitat, would soon be altered, compromised, as would Keith's, as would Guy's. These places would never be the same again. I said,

  'I'm going to miss our talks.'

  'There's another thing I've been teasing you about. Of all my recent deceptions, this was the hardest. Technically. I mean keeping a straight face. Pretending to be a virgin is a breeze ¡n comparison. Mark Asprey.’

  'Oh yes?'

  'His work. His writing.'

  'It's . . ?'

  'It's shit,' she said.

  '.. . My heart soars like a hawk.'

  What was she wearing? I can't remember. No outfit or disguise of innocence or depravity. Just clothes. And she wasn't made-up either; and she wasn't drunk, and she wasn't mad. Very much herself, whatever that was, herself, fraying but shiny like worn velvet, ex­treme, aromatic, nervous, subtle.

  She said, 'How do you feel about me? The truth.'

  The truth?' I got to my feet saying, 'You're a bad dream, baby. I keep thinking I'm going to wake up' — here I snapped my fingers weakly - 'and you'll disappear. You're a nightmare.'

  She stood and came toward me. The way her head was inclined made me say at once:

  'I can't.'

  'You must know that it has to happen.'

  'You've come across this. When men can't.'

  'Only by design. It's easy: you make yourself leaden. Don't worry. I'll fix it. I'll do it all. Don't even try and think about love. Think about - think about the other thing.'

  Later, she said, 'I'm sorry if you're angry with me. Or with yourself.' 'I'm not angry.' 'I suppose you've never done that before.' 'Yes, I did think I might get through life without it.' 'You may surprise yourself further. As Keith says, it's never over until —' 'Until the last dart strikes home.' 'Anyway,' she said, 'this will only happen once.' 'Anyway,' I said, 'I'm mostly grateful. It's made me ready to die.' 'That was my hope.' 'With Mark, what was the—?' 'Hush now . . .'

  We put our clothes back on and went out walking, in the dripping alleys, the dark chambers of the elaborately suffering city. We're the dead. Amazing that we can do this. More amazing that we want to. Hand in hand and arm in arm we totter, through communal fantasy and sorrow, through London fields. We're the dead. Above, the sky has a pink tinge to it, the cunning opposite of health, like something bad, something high. As if through a screen of stage smoke you can just make out God's morse or shorthand, the stars arranged in triangles, and saying therefore and because, therefore and because. We're the dead.

  Chapter 20: Playing Nervous

  a

  lthough for him personally the future looked bright, Keith was in chronic trouble, as cheats and suchlike always were, with his Compensations.

  His caseworker, a Mrs Ovens, was coming down on Keith hard. Increasingly riskily, he had skipped their last seven appointments; and the eighth, scheduled for the day after his historic victory at the Marquis of Edenderry, he had noisily slept through. Now, if he wasn't careful, he'd be looking at a court appearance and at least the threat of a mandatory prison term. Keith rang Mrs O. the next day on his carfone and ate shit in his poshest voice. For a consideration, John Dark, the iffy filth, would also vouch for Keith's good character. She gave him one last chance: on the morning of the Final of the Duoshare Sparrow Masters, if you please. And Keith hated this like a deformity because it was part of the failure he would soon be gone from: turbid queues, and the office breath of afternoons, and a press of difficulty, made of signs and symbols, that never began to go away.

  Keith's Compensations. They really were a torment. Oh, the things he went through, the suffering he endured. For some people, it seemed, a fiver a week (split sixteen or seventeen ways) just wasn't good enough . . . Keith's Compensations represented the money he paid, or owed, for the injuries he'd meted out during a career that spanned almost two decades. You'd think that being a child prodigy in the violence sphere would have its upside Compensationswise, since some of the people you damaged and hurt (and naturally you were always going to be concentrating on the elderly) would be dying off anyway. But oh no: now you had to pay their relatives, or even their mates, so only the lonely forgave their debts, some of them going back twenty years, a crushed nosebridge here, a mangled earhole there, every one of them linked to double-digit inflation and continued-distress upgrade and spiralling medical costs and no end of a fucking pain all round.

  'Is it your Compensations, Keith?' said Kath, as Keith replaced the carfone.

  'I'll give you a Compensation in a minute.'

  Thoroughly out of sorts, Keith was taking Kath to the hospi
tal for her tube trouble, the ambulance service having been discontinued in their area for the foreseeable future. It was the first time since their marriage that Kath had been in Keith's car.

  'What's that noise?' Kath asked, and looked more closely at the sleeping baby on her lap. 'Whimpering.'

  Keith wrenched his head round to check on Clive; but the great dog was silent.

  'And banging.'

  Now Keith remembered—and scolded himself for not remembering sooner. Quickly he thumped a darts tape into the stereo and turned it up loud. 'It's the next car,'he said. They were in a traffic jam, and there were certainly plenty of other cars near by, and no shortage of banging and whimpering. 'All this congestion,' said Keith.

  He dropped Kath and the baby at the gates of St Mary's. Then he drove round the first corner, pulled up, and got out. Preparing himself for yet more reproaches from the female end of things (even Trish would be ha ving a go at him later), Keith longsufferingly let Iqbala out of the boot of the car.

  'Lady Barnaby,' said Hope. 'Oh that's awful.'

  'What?'

  'She's dead.'

  'How did you -?' said Guy, lengthening his neck towards her.

  'There's an invite here to her funeral or whatever.'

  'How frightful,' said Guy.

  They were having a late breakfast in the kitchen. Also present were Melba, Phoenix, Maria, Hjordis, Auxiliadora, Dominique and Marie-Claire. Also Lizzyboo, bent over her muffins. Also Marma- duke: having spent a lot of time noisily daubing his breakfast all over the table, he was now quietly eating his paint set.

  'Oh I suppose we can get out of it,' said Hope.

  'I think we ought to go.'

  'What for? We don't care about her friends and relatives, supposing she has any. We never cared about her, much, and now she's dead.'

  'Show respect.' Guy finished his bowl of Humanfhit and said, 'I thought I might go in.' He meant the office, the City. Or that's what he would have meant if he hadn't been lying.

  'Trading has resumed?'

  'Not yet,' he said. 'But Richard says it looks hopeful.' This was also untrue. On the contrary, Richard had said that it didn't look hopeful at all . . .Guy felt that he had just about reached the end of his capacity to inquire into contemporary history, into What Was Going On. He kept postponing that call to his contact at Index, somehow, to ask what the chances were that this time next week he would be folding his only child into a binliner. People were avoiding, avoiding. He cast an eye over Hope's mail: the goodbye to Lady Barnaby was all that was being offered in the way of social life, on which there seemed to be a merciful moratorium. But Richard, unmarried, childless - he loved nobody—was a mine of unspeakable information. That at the moment of full eclipse on November 5, as the Chancellor made his speech in Bonn, two very big and very dirty nuclear weapons would be detonated, one over the Palace of Culture in Warsaw, one over Marble Arch. That until the cease of the flow of fissionable materials from Baghdad, the Israelis would be targeting Kiev. That the President's wife was already dead. That the confluence of perihelion and syzygy would levitate the oceans. That the sky was falling —

  Guy got up to go. As he drained his coffee cup he allowed himself a disbelieving stare at Lizzyboo, who was now addressing herself to the remains of Marmaduke's porridge. The bent head, and the motionless bulk of the shoulders beneath the dark blue smock, sent out a contradictory message: the self within was shrinking, even as the body billowed. And not long ago, only the other day, in her tennis wear . . .

  Hope said, 'Before you go would you do the garbage and bring the wood in, and do the water-softener, and check the tank. And bring the wine down. And call the glazier. And the garage.'

  The telephone rang. Guy crossed the room and picked it up. A brutish silence, followed by a brutish phoneme-some exotic greeting or Christian name, perhaps. Then the dialling tone.

  'Wrong number.'

  'All these wrong numbers,' said Hope. 'I've never known there be so many wrong numbers. From all over the world. We live in a time', she said, 'of wrong numbers.'

  Nicola, who loved nobody, who was always alone, stared at the washing-up thatlay there formlessly, awaiting resuscitation, awaiting form; dead and dirty now, the cups and saucers and glasses needed clean water, green liquid, brush, rag, and her gloved fingers, and then their pretty redeployment on the dresser's shelves. Excitingly, it was getting to the point where a teacup, say, could be used and put aside, unwashed (or thrown away, or shattered) — used for the very last time. Items of clothing could be similarly discarded. No more shampoo need be purchased now, no more soap, no more tampons. Of course she had plenty of money for luxuries and non-essentials; she had plenty of disposable income. And, in these last days, she would certainly give her credit cards a fearful ratcheting. The week before, her dentist and gynaecologist, or their secretaries, had coincidentally called, to confirm routine appointments, for scaling, smearing. She had fixed the dates but made no move for her diary . . . Now Nicola rolled up her sleeves and did the dishes for the last rime.

  Soon afterwards, as she was changing, the telephone rang. Nicola had had several such calls: a loan company, wanting to help her with her lease, which had just expired. She didn't care because she had a month's grace; and a month's grace was more grace than she would ever need. She heard the man out. Her lease could be renewed, with their help, he said, for up to a thousand years.

  A thousand years. The loan company was ready, was eager, to underwrite a millennium. Hitlerian hubris. From what she knew about events in the Middle East, from what she gathered from what remained of the independent press (contorted comment, specula­tion), it seemed possible to argue that Hitler was still running the century — Hitler, the great bereaver. Although they were entering November now, there was still time for him to reap exponential murder. Because what he had done you could do a thousandfold in the space of half an afternoon.

  Was she nervous? Without question it would be disagreeable, at this late date, to be upstaged by a holocaust. If history, if current affairs were to reach a climax on November 5 during the full eclipse, then her own little drama, scheduled for the early minutes of the following day, would have no bite, no content — and absolutely no form. And no audience. No undivided attention. On the other hand, you wouldn't want to miss that either, the big event. I identify with the planet, thought Nicola, with a nod, as she started getting dressed. I know just how it feels. They say that everything wants to persist in its being. You know: even sand wants to go on being sand. I don't believe that. Some things want to live, and some things don't.

  As she clothed them she consulted her breasts, which told her that the big event wouldn't happen, and that the little one would.

  'It is thought by some', read Keith,

  that the secret of Stonehenge lies in darts. The circular stone ruins are shaped in a circle, like a dartboard. This may explain a mystery that has puzzled historians for literally ages. For Stonehenge goes back to 1500BC.

  1500BC! thought Keith.

  What is a definite historical fact is that early English cavemen played a form of darts. This is definite from certain markings on the cave walls, thought to resemble a dartboard. Many top darters believe that darts skill goes back to cavemen times. The top caveman would be the guy who brought back the meat every time, employing his darts skills. So in a way, everything goes back to darts. If you think about it, the whole world is darts.

  No matter how many times he pondered it, this passage never failed to bring a tear to Keith's eye. It entirely vindicated him. And Keith's plump teardrop might have contained tenderness as well as pride. The whole world was darts: well, maybe. But the whole world—on certain screens, in certain contingency plans - was definitely a dartboard. Keith bent open his notebook and slowly wrote:

  Remember you are a machine. Delivring the dart the same way every time.

  While he was actually plagiarizing an earlier passage from Darts: Master the Discipline, Keith was also originating it in his in
imitable way.

  Clear ideas from your head. You do'nt want nothing in your fukcing head.

  Now he contemplated that last sentence with the stern eye of the true perfectionist. He crossed out fukcing and put in fucking. An observer might have wondered why Keith took the trouble to make these deletions and insertions. Why correct, O Keith, when the words are for your eyes only? But someone watches over us when we write. Mother. Teacher. Shakespeare. God.

  Oy! Ooh. That itch again. That abdominal vacuum. Chronic, innit. And suddenly, in one fell swoop, all his women had disappeared: just like that. Petronella had gone to Southend with her husband, Clint, on their honeymoon. Analiese was back in Slough (and the M4 traffic you just wouldn't believe). Debbee was sixteen. Iqbala, following her misadventure in the Cavalier, wasn't talking to Keith, or indeed to anybody else. And Sutra (Sutra!) had levered herself back into the world from which she had so surprisingly emerged: hurry, hunger, seen through window and windscreen — other women, more women, women found and unfound, and Keith up above, multiform, like a murder of crows, saying caw, caw, caw . . . Which left Trish. And he wasn 't going round there again, no danger, after this morning and the state she was in. About an hour ago, at noon, he had popped into Nick's for a video. But Nick's videos, Keith decided, were like Chinese meals. As for Nicola herself, on this side of the screen, Nicola in the flesh, the mysterious flesh, with dark-adapted eye and unaccustomed lips, and the way she filled her dresses, Keith was neither patient nor impatient: even sitting next to you with thighs touching she was both near and far, like TV.

  The telephone rang. As Keith crossed the garage to answer it, he was firmly of the opinion that success had not changed him.

  'Keith Talent? Hello there. Good afternoon there. Tony de Taunton, executive producer. Dartworld.'

  Oh yeah: Marquis of Edenderry . . . Dartworld? Dartworldl

  'Congratulations,' said Tony de Taunton. 'Sterling effort there the other night. Smashing effort. Tight thing.' With terrible candour he went on, 'You were all over the shop there for a while. And with Paul Go well out of form I thought, Hello. Dear oh dear. Blimey. It's going to be one of those nights. But you seemed to take heart there, with likkle Paulie throwing such crap. In the end, it was your character got you through.'