Guy Clinch was heading towards London at twice the speed of sound, one of half a dozen passengers on the hurled dart of the Concorde. He had missed the earlier flight by ten minutes and had spent three hours trying to sleep, in a kind of capsule hotel at Kennedy, before taking off, smoothly but dramatically, in the still centre of Hurricane Lulu. Now he was in another capsule, his eyes rinsed by the coldly beautiful blue of the troposphere. Through his porthole Guy could also see both sun and moon, the former discreetly filtered by the treated plastic. Because of the elevation and velocity of this particular observer, the two bodies seemed to be moving towards each other with uncelestial haste. Below, the turning planet fell through its curve of spacetime, innocent (though much traduced) in its blond fur coat. Beyond, inanely vast, the inanity of space.
Two glamorous, multilingual stewardesses exhaustively pampered him; he had recently relished a plateful of scrambled eggs and smoked salmon; and he was reading Love. Even so, Guy happened to be in dramatic discomfort. Bending to refill his cup with the excellent coffee (a mixed roast, he would guess), one of his stewardesses had noticed the odd tilt of the meal tray: she had given it a careful nudge and then, suddenly, leaned on it quite hard with the full weight of her shoulder. When Guy reopened his eyes, probably about ninety seconds later, he was confronted by the frown of the cabin steward, solicitously crouched in the aisle. The stewardess was hanging back with the knuckle of her forefinger pressed against her teeth. Guy apologized to them and eventually they went away. But the pain went nowhere.
The last chapter of Love was called 'Concerning Fiascos': ' "The whole realm of love is full of tragic stories," said Madame de Sévigné, relating her son's misfortunes with the celebrated Champ-meslé. Montaigne handles so scabrous a subject with great aplomb.' Guy finished the chapter, wonderingly, and then flipped through the copious appendices. It would be a relief to be done with Love: this famished sampling of erotic thought would never ease his hunger pains. Concerning Courts of Love. Guy smiled modestly as he thought of that last telephone call and the delightful carnality he seemed to have awakened in her. 'The plea of marriage is not a legitimate defence against love.' No doubt she would meet him halfway up the stairs, with all that colour in her face. 'A lover shall, on the death of the other lover, remain unattached for two years.' As they kissed, he would place both palms on the back of her thighs, beneath what might well be that black cashmere dress with the buttons, and almost lift her whole body on to him. 'Success too easily won soon strips love of its charm; obstacles enhance its value. Every lover grows pale at the sight of the beloved.' As they moved through the sitting-room her breath would be sweet and hot (and hers: everything would be hers); teardrops, too, perhaps, rather delici-ously. 'Suspicion and the jealousy which derives from it aggravate the condition called love.' It didn't matter what happened in the bedroom and in a way one feared for the loss of individuality (in the blinding rapture and so on); yet how strange her face would look from that angle, when, as she had laughingly promised, she knelt to remove his trousers and undershorts. 'A person in love is unremittingly and uninterruptedly occupied with the image of the beloved.' So brown, so close together. 'Nothing forbids a woman to be loved by two men . . .'
Guy put Love aside and took up the second book, The Light of Many Suns. For a moment he vaguely wondered what Keith was up to; but then his eyes fell on Nicola's inscription, over which he had already done some puzzling:
Thou art the grave where buried love doth live, Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone, Who all their parts of me to thee did give, That due of many now is thine alone: Their images I loved I view in thee, And thou - all they — hast all the all of me.
One of the Sonnets, of course (and Guy knew the Sonnets tolerably well); a complete sestet. How did it. .. ? Ah yes: Thy bosom .. . Thy bosom is endeared with all the hearts . . . Rather a knotty one, this. Addressed by the man to the woman. The past lovers aren't just 'gone': they're dead. But people died earlier in those days. Wish I had a copy. And there reigns Love, and all Love's loving parts. Absolutely fascinating.
'That leaves four hundred', said Mrs Ovens, 'for the nose.' 'Nose? What nose? There weren't no nose.’
'Same incident, Keith.'
'That was an earhole.'
'You can't fracture an ear, Keith. And we're coming to that. The torn ear.'
'Bitten,' said Keith firmly. 'Bitten.'
'Which reminds me: the tooth'll be twelve-fifty.'
'Twelve-fifty! Blimey . .. Gone up again, has it?'
'The seven-fifty's for a molar. This is an incisor. Canines are seventeen-twenty-five.'
'Jesus. I mean, I'm just a working man.'
'It's what the law considers fair, Keith.'
'Capitalism innit,' said Keith. 'Just bloodsuckers as such.' He sighed longsufferingly.
'And then there's the split tongue.'
Keith now raised a dissenting forefinger. 'When there was all this,' he said carefully, 'I, I was hospitalized on thirteen occasions. Sustaining permanent injury to me chest. We don't hear nothing about that. No danger.'
'Yes, but what were you doing at the time, Keith?'
Trying, in my own way, to establish a small business. Escape the poverty trap. That's it. Go on. Laugh.'
'The split tongue, Keith.'
'Jesus.'
In the end Keith agreed to up his weekly payment from £5 to £6.50. On top of that, to show good will, he committed himself to forty-eight hours of community service. Consisting as it did of stealing odds and ends from very old people, community service was nowhere near as bad as it sounded. Community service, in Keith's judgment, had been much maligned. But on a day such as this a man's thoughts should surely be with his darts. Not haggling here with some old hippie about the price of horrornose, of horrortooth, of horrortongue.
Keith drove to the garage in Rifle Lane. Fortunately Fucker was on shift.
'Who did this fucker?' asked Fucker. 'It'll be a rough job. But you'll have security.'
Gratefully Keith relaxed on a winded carseat in the back room. He read the ripped mags: nude skirt. Peace at last. Beside him in a large cardboard box an even larger cat lay dying. Cruelly cramped, it struggled and sneezed and sighed. It began weeping rhythmically.
Keith was used to noise, incessant and unwelcome noise. Most of his life was played out to a soundtrack of sadistic decibelage. Noise, noise — noise on the brink of bearability. He was used to unwelcome nearnesses, also, to stinging proximities; but did the bald cat's sneezes really have to bubble and dampen the very thigh of his trouserleg? It wept in rhythm. Sounds almost like . . . The nude birds in the book. Nothing on Nick. She'd show them. He closed his eyes and saw himself naked and twanging back and forth with incomprehensible violence and speed, as if in controlled preparation for spaceflight. There she was, just a G-spot in a G-string. And there was Keith in his G-suit, ready to take on gravity ... A new noise, a new nearness, a new order of alarm: Keith was staring at the horrorcat.
'Gone, has she? It's a rough job,' said Fucker.
They stood there inspecting the Cavalier's warped windowframe, the mauled glass, smothered in fingerprints.
'But you've got security.'
'Appreciate it.'
And Keith bent into his pocket and parted with the money: endlessly, horrornote after horrornote.
With the low sun like a prickly sweater gently pressed into his unshaven face, Keith drove to the Black Cross, for his breakfast. The backslaps and the fagsmoke, the lagers and the Scotch eggs, did not combine well. A pork pie, Keith decided, was what he really fancied. Then you feel twice the price. Shakespeare staggered over and fiercely tousled Keith's hair for at least a minute. When he had stopped doing that, Keith looked down at the bar: a new soft-fallen mask of dandruff now salted his food, and melted into the lager's horrorhead. At that moment his teeth lanced a spectacular impurity among the knotted gristle inside his mouth. Keith, who took his chances and ate a great many pork pies, was no stranger to impurity; but he
had never encountered anything so throatfloodingly gangrenous as this. Without interrupting the conversation he was having with somebody else, Pongo handed him the bottle of green mouth-wash kept under the bar, and Keith loped off to the Gents. Half an hour later, when the tortured gagging had subsided, to the relief of everyone in the building, Keith returned and drank the complimentary Scotches and dabbed at his eyes with a piece of newspaper tenderly torn by Pongo from his own tabloid. Keith nodded as he studied the pork-pie wrapping: the eat-by-date was placed well into the next millennium. He had a few more Scotches and was cheering up enough to make a start on telling the lads about his night with Nick. His stomach still bubbled and spat, still noisily rueing that horrorpie.
When everything began to go dark.
'Look!'
Through the stained glass they stared, or some of them did, as in perfect parallax the two white balls conjoined like something unanswerable under the microscope, and the moon began to burn like a little sun.
'It's eclipse . . . Eclipse! . . . What fucking clips? . . . Fucking power-cut. .. It's the fucking eclipse . . . Put the fucking lights on ... Eclipse, innit. . . It's the fucking eclipse ...'
Keith turned away, in horror. To his left a dartsman waited at the dimmed oché with his arrows, head dropped in a martyrdom of impatience. Someone pitched a coin on to the counter. It clattered on its rim, noisily, like a cold car just before it fires. And the coin went on wobbling, clattering, faster, tighter. That was him last night, himself, twirling to the very end of his band . . . Shivering Shakespeare stood ten feet away with his face between the double doors of the Black Cross. Today was the day when, in Shakespeare's scheme of things, he was due to lead his chosen people to the mountains of Eritrea: the promised land. As he looked round the Black Cross that morning, though, it didn't look terribly likely . . . Outside, he had sensed the cold, the eclipse wind, the silenced pigeons. Four hundred miles across, the point of a dark cone of shadow a quarter of a million miles long was heading towards him at two thousand miles per hour. Next came the presentiment of change, like the arrival of weather-front or thunderhead, with the light glimmering - but getting fierier. Then a shade being drawn across the sky. Totality. Shakespeare was crying. He knew that something awful had to happen, when horrorday was horrornight, when horrorsun was horrormoon.
Up above also (if anybody had been able to find her), and looking her very best in the sudden twilight, proudly shone Venus, daughter of Jupiter, wife of Vulcan, lover of Mars, and never brighter than when the darkness of totality played across the earth.
Where was Nicola Six?
Nobody knew.
The Light of Many Suns turned out to be a war memoir: rather remarkable in its way. Guy finished his faisan à la mode de champagne and shamefacedly went on drinking the claret, which he suspected would have a restaurant price of about three times the minimum weekly wage. Group Captain Leonard Cheshire, VC, OM, DSO, DFC, the author, a Catholic and obviously a good egg, was one of the two British observers of the atom-bombing of Hiroshima.
Guy looked out of the porthole. The 'second contact', or the first moment of full eclipse, had occurred twenty minutes earlier. The pilot of the Concorde, an eclipse-enthusiast and member of the Thousand Second Club, had announced his intention of staying within the eastward-moving umbra until he began his descent over Ireland. Thus totality was lasting far longer than its terrestrial three minutes. When it came, Guy had tensed, as if for an impact. Or he had tried to. But he realized then that he couldn't get any tenser than he was already. Just as his phallus couldn't get any harder. At the moment that the moon's shape fully covered the sun, then with fantastic simultaneity the solar corona bathed the circumference with unforgettable fire. Guy was amazed, harrowed, by the tightness of the fit. Surely only the divinely privileged observer would be blessed with this full-true billiards shot, straight, dead straight, for ninety million miles. Perhaps that was the necessary condition of planetary life: your sun must fit your moon. The umbra began to overtake the plane; the pilot came on again and with emotion commanded his few passengers to admire the 'diamond-ring' effect of the 'third contact', when the leading slice of the sun re-emerged. Yes, yes, yes: just like a sparkler on its band. Like a ring for her, perhaps. Heavenly engagement.
The descent began. Guy picked up The Light of Many Suns. On page forty-six he dropped the book to the floor. He reached for his paper bag and opened it in front of his mouth. He waited. Perhaps there was an explanation. Perhaps, after all, it was something quite innocent...
'Enola Gay' was the plane that flew the mission to Hiroshima. The pilot named the aircraft after his mother. He was once her little boy.
But Little Boy was the name of the atom bomb. It killed 50,000 people in 120 seconds.
Keith stood on her stoop, fumbling weepily with his great ring of keys - Keith's keys, his gaoler's keys, keys for Debbee, Trish and Analiese, keys for flat, for car, for go-down and lock-up. But keys for Nicola? He rang the bell again; he tried all the keys again. Now Keith was close to panic, to cursing, rattling panic. He wanted to see her very badly, not for the act of love and hate, which, to his surprise, and so far as he could tell, he wanted never to perform again with anybody. No: he wanted her for her belief in him, because she was the other world, and if she said that Keith was real then the other world would say it too. But hang on. Suppose she's under a bus somewhere? His darts boots, his darts strides, his darts shirt, his very - ! Keith clapped a hand to his horrorchest. Then his knees gave with relief. All is not lost. His darts pouch remained in its rightful place, in the pocket closest to his heart. He buzzed the buzzer again; he tried all the keys again. Throughout he was aware of eyes on his back. Today, even the dead-end street was crowded, and sharply charged in voice and gesture: a sense of population shift. Keith turned. A lone policeman was watching him from the pavement, motionless against the plunging figures beyond. Just a kid. In a uniform. Fucking tithead. Keith was fairly confident that the policeman wouldn't try nothing here, or he'd get lynched. But now he was coming forward, his shoulders interestedly inclined, and — okay — maybe it didn't look too good, unkempt Keith crooked over his keys. So he did a great mime of casually patting his pockets, then swivelled, shaking his head. He sauntered down the path and, with a bit of the old insouciance (the Scotches and supplementary pornos were about their work), hopped into the heavy Cavalier. Keith started off with an unintended bound, just missing an unattended pram, and monitoring in his rearview mirror the shape of the tapering horrorfilth.
With the low sun playfully tickling the hairs in his nostrils, Keith drove to Windsor House. Nick'd show up later: call her from there. And, besides, he wanted to see how Clive was doing. The radio worked all right. As he drove home he listened irritatedly to the news, the dissolution of the Crisis, the improving condition of the President's wife, the delegations leaving simultaneously for Paris and Prague (not a summit: more like twin peaks), and wondered if this explained the pronounced congestion he encountered in Ladbroke Grove. He doubleparked outside Maharajah Wines. On the way to the lift his gait changed from its accustomed boxy shuffle to the sudden dance of a paddler entering a cold sea. His right foot, deep in horrorturd. Luckily, on the other hand, the lift was working, more or less. It came all the way down in answer to his punched summons.
But it didn't get very far up. Sitting on the floor, waiting the twenty minutes for the next power surge, Keith took a matchstick to the slender grids of his tarnished sole. One mercy: the dog responsible for such a dropping was by now almost certainly dead. His thoughts were all with horrordog and horrorcat as, after a sickening drop, he shuddered his way tormentedly upwards, wedged in the pungent horrorlift.
On the narrow walkstrip Keith attacked the lock, which was often recalcitrant. But today was horrorday. He stared down at the single gnarled key. On the outer mat were four horrorletters: two horrorbills, a horrorsummons, and a horrororder of distraint. Keith had had enough with all this locks and keys: he took a step back and
detonated himself against the door. Normally it would have given like a dunked biscuit. But the devices Keith himself had sometimes deployed were evidently in place: the bars and braces used by him to keep out bailiffs, bad-debt buyers, repo men, cheated horrorcheats.
'Kath,' he said in a low voice.
He flinched at the misted glass. A warning shape moved away, then reappeared, like a figure glimpsed in church.
'I saw you,' it whispered.
'Fuck off,' coaxed Keith. 'What? When? Come on, darling.'
'On the telly.'
'. . . That weren't nothing. Just for the telly like. Load of nonsense. For the telly.'
'You told the world,' she said. 'On the telly.'
And Keith had no answer.
Even the old Metrocab coming in from Heathrow had its own slant about forms of torture. For one thing, the vibration, the cauldron-bubble beneath the seat, appeared to whet the pain in Guy's groin, assuming that any kind of increase was possible down there. But it was stranger than that. The driver treated his cab as a peasant might treat his horse or ass, with numb and proprietorial cruelty. The bursts of acceleration were like long-toothed, lip-flapping exhalations; then came the looping whinny of the brakes. It was diversion of a kind to listen to the grades of neigh and whinny, of anger and submission, that the driver thrashed out of his livelihood, the black machine.
As he paid, a passing child tossed a jumping-jack in through the window, and paused to watch it raise hell in the back of a cab - its headbanging ecstasy of entrapment.
'Bombfire night,' said the driver, listlessly.