In he came - Guy - with a flourish of fair hair and long-rider raincoat. I watched him secure a drink and settle over the pinball table. Smugly I marvelled at his transparency, his flickering, flinching transparency. Then I sidled up, placed my coin on the glass (this is the pinball etiquette), and said, 'Let's play pairs.' In his face: a routine thrill of dread, then openness; then pleasure. I impressed him with my pinball lore: silent five, two-flip, shoulder-check, and so on. We were practically pals anyway, having both basked in the sun of Keith's patronage. And, besides, he was completely desperate, as many of us are these days. In a modern city, if you have nothing to do (and if you're not broke, and on the street), it's tough to find people to do nothing with. We wandered out together and did the Portobello Road for a while, and then — don't you love the English — he asked me home for tea.
Once inside his colossal house I saw further avenues of invasion. I saw beachheads and bridgeheads. His frightening wife Hope I soon neutralized; I may have looked like a piece of shit Guy'd brought back from the pub (on the sole of his shoe) but a little media talk and Manhattan networking soon schmoozed her into shape. I met her kid sister, Lizzyboo, and looked her over for possible promotion. But maybe the current au pair is more my speed: a ducklike creature, not young, with a promisingly vacuous expression. As for the maid, Auxiliadora, I didn't mess around, instantly hiring her for the apartment. . .
I kind of hate to say it, but Mark Asprey was the key. Everyone was frankly electrified when I let slip my connexion to the great man. Hope and Lizzyboo had seen his latest West End hit, The Goblet, which Asprey is even now escorting to Broadway. Dully asked by me if she'd liked it, Lizzyboo said, 'I cried, actually. Actually I cried twice.' Guy didn't know Asprey's stuff but said, as if to himself, in amazement, 'To be a writer like that. Just to sit there and do what you do.' I fought down an urge to mention my own two books (neither of which found an English publisher. Run a damage-check on that. Yes, it still hurts. It still exquisitely burns).
So one dud writer can usually spot another. When we were alone together in the kitchen Guy asked me what I did and I told him, stressing my links with various literary magazines and completely inventing a fiction consultancy with Hornig Ultrason. I can invent: I can lie. So how come I can't invent? Guy said, 'Really? How interesting.' I sent a sort of pressure wave at him; in fact I was rubbing my thumb and forefinger together beneath the table when he said, 'I've written a couple of things . . .' 'No kidding.' 'A couple of stories. Expanded travel notes, really.' 'I'd certainly be happy to take a look at them, Guy.' 'They aren't any good or anything.' 'Let me be the judge.' They're rather autobiographical, I'm afraid.' 'Oh,' I said. 'That's okay. Don't worry about that.
The other day,' I went on. 'Did Keith follow that girl?'
'Yes he did,' said Guy instantly. Instantly, because Nicola was already present in his thoughts. And because love travels at the speed of light. 'Nothing happened. He just talked to her.'
I said, That's not what Keith told me.'
'What did he say?'
'It doesn't matter what he said. Keith's a liar, Guy . . . What happened?'
Later, I got a look at the kid. Jesus.
I'm like a vampire. I can't enter unless I'm asked in over the threshold. Once there, though, I stick around.
And come back whenever I like.
Now here's a pleasing symmetry. All three characters have given me something they've written. Keith's brochure, Nicola's diaries, Guy's fiction. Things written for different reasons: self-aggrandize- ment, self-communion, self-expression. One offered freely, one abandoned to chance, one coaxingly procured.
Documentary evidence. Is that what I'm writing? A documentary? As for artistic talent, as for the imaginative patterning of life, Nicola wins. She outwrites us all.
I must get into their houses. Keith will be tricky here, as in every other area. Probably, and probably rightly, he is ashamed of where he lives. He will have a rule about it - Keith, with his tenacities, his berk protocols, his criminal codes, his fierce and tearful brand-loyalties. Keith will naturally be tricky.
With the murderee I have a bold idea. It would be a truthful move, and I must have the truth. Guy is reasonably trustworthy; I can allow for his dreamy overvaluations, his selective blindnesses. But Keith is a liar, and I'll have to doublecheck, or triangulate, everything he tells me. I must have the truth. There just isn't time to settle for anything less than the truth.
I must get inside their houses. I must get inside their heads. I must go deeper - oh, deeper.
We have all known days of sun and storm that make us feel what it is to live on a planet. But the recent convulsions have taken this further. They make us feel what it is to live in a solar system, a galaxy. They make us feel — and I'm on the edge of nausea as I write these words — what it is to live in a universe.
Particularly the winds. They tear through the city, they tear through the island, as if softening it up for an exponentially greater violence. In the last week the winds have killed nineteen people, and thirty-three million trees.
And now, at dusk, outside my window, the trees shake their heads like disco dancers in the strobe lights of nightlife long ago.
Chapter 4: The Dead-End Street
Dreaming of it. Begging for it. Praying for it.'
Keith pushed his way out of the Black Cross and girded himself there on the stone step, beneath the sign. tv and darts. He looked right, he looked left; he grunted. There she was. There was Nicola Six. She stood out clearly like a rivulet of black ink against the rummagings and barter pastels of the market street. Past the stalls she moved wanderingly, erring, erring. If it had occurred to Keith that Nicola was waiting for him or leading him on, that he was included in any design of hers, he would have dismissed the idea. But there was pressing invitation in the idleness with which she wandered, the slow shifts of weight in the tight black skirt. For a brief passage of time Keith had the odd idea that Nicola was watching him; and that couldn't be right, because Keith was watching Nicola, and Nicola hadn't turned. Something tugged him. She's leading me on, he thought, and started following her. Beauty, extreme yet ambiguously available: this, very roughly, was what Nicola's entrance into the Black Cross had said to Keith. But he didn't know the nature - he didn't know the brand - of the availability. Keith burped hotly. He was going to find out.
Now Nicola paused in profile, and bent to inspect the cheap china of a covered barrow. Raising her face she had words with the barrow's owner, a cheat Keith knew well. She raised her veil. . . When she'd raised her veil in the pub Keith had looked at her with sharp interest, certainly, but not with desire. No, not exactly desire; the point of the dart in his foot precluded desire, hurt too much for desire. Nicola was tall - taller than Keith in her heels - and, it would seem, delicately made, the curve of the ankle answering to the curve of the throat. She looked like a model, but not the kind of model Keith generally preferred. She looked like a fashion model, and Keith generally preferred the other kind, the glamour kind. The demeanour of the glamour model proclaimed that you could do what you liked with her. The demeanour of the fashion model proclaimed that she could do what she liked with you. Besides, and more basically, Keith generally preferred short girls with thick short legs and big breasts (no theoretical limit) and fat bums - girls in the mould of Trish Shirt and Peggy Obbs, of Debbee Kensit (who was special) and Analiese Furnish. The legs appeared to be particularly important. Keith couldn't help noticing that the legs he most often forced open, the legs he most often found dangling over his shoulders, tended to be exceptionally thick in the ankle, tended, in fact, to be ankleless, and exceptionally thick in the calf. He had concluded that fat legs were what he must generally prefer. The discovery pleased Keith at first, then perplexed and even worried him, because he had never thought of himself as being fussy. Nicola's ankles: you were surprised they could bear all that height and body. Perhaps she just wasn't his type. Oh, but she was. Something told him that she definitely, she deeply
was.
Nicola moved on. Keith followed. Other possibilities aside, she interested Keith in the same way that Guy Clinch or old Lady Barnaby interested him. She was in the A. i. bracket. Keith wasn't the sort of bloke who disapproved of people who had a lot of money. He liked there to be people who had a lot of money, so that he could cheat them out of it. Keith was sorry, but he wouldn't want to live in the kind of society where nobody was worth burgling. No way. Thus, as he trailed Nicola through the trash of the harrowed street, thinking that her backside might well be fatter than it looked and anyway the thinner bird often made it up to you in the crib, several considerations obtained.
He waited until she approached the flower stall and stood there removing her gloves. Then he went in. Giving the nod and the pointed finger to old Nigel (who owed Keith and had good reason to be wary of him), and moving with his usual confident clumsiness, he wrenched a handful of brown paper from the nail and edged along the barrow picking the soaked bunches from their plastic tubs and saying, 'Discover the language of flowers. And let their soothing words ..." He paused, trying to recapture the full jingle. 'Soothe away all your cares like.' No wedding ring, he thought. Could tell that, even under the glove in the Cross. 'Daffodils. Glads. Some of them. Some of them. The lot. A time like this.' He held forth the throttled posy. 'Why be retiring? On me.' Bites her nails but the hands are lazy. Dead lazy. 'You heading on down this way? Or I got the Cavalier round the corner.' Without quite touching her, his hands merely delineating the shape of her shoulders, Keith urged Nicola forward along the street. Expensive suit. Not cheap. 'I see a girl like you. Bit of a beauty. Head in the clouds as such. You said you got your own place.' She nodded and smiled. 'Now.' The mouth on her. That veil'd be useful too. 'Me? I'm Handy Andy. Mr Fixit innit. You know, the fuse's gone. The boiler's creating or the bell don't work. You need somebody with a few connexions.' The shoes: half a grand. Got to be. 'Because I know. I know it's hard, Nicky, to engage any real services these days. To be honest with you,' he said, and his eyes closed with stung pride, 'I don't know what the fucking country's coming to. I don't.' She slowed her pace; briskly she removed her hat and the black clip that secured her chignon. With a roll of her throat she shook out her hair, Jesus: high priced. They walked on. TV. 'All I'm saying is I'm a man can get things done. Any little prob like. Cry out for Keith. This it?'
They had approached the entrance to the dead-end street.
'I live down there,' she said. 'Thank you for these.'
As she slowed, and half turned, and walked on, and slowed again, Nicola fanned herself with the flap of a glove. Her colour was high. She even hooked a thumb into the V of her black jacket and tugged. She's hung, too, he thought. The bitch. Remarkably, this final bonus began to have a dispiriting effect on Keith Talent. Because perfection would be no good to him. Rather wistfully, he imagined she might have a big scar somewhere, or another blemish that he, for one, might willingly overlook. Failing that, in her mental instability he would repose his hopes. The condition of her nails was some comfort to him. Cold comfort only, though. By Keith's standards, they weren't that bad. They were bitten; but they weren't bitten off. That left her accent, which was definitely foreign (Europe, thought Keith: somewhere in the middle), and they might do things funny where she came from. Well, there was no harm in trying, he decided, although there'd been a lot of harm in trying as hard as he had, once or twice in the past.
She said, 'It's very muggy, don't you find?'
Torrid,' said Keith.
'Goodness.'
'As close as can be.' His smile was playfully abject as he pitched his voice low and thick and added, 'Anything you want, darling. Anything at all.'
'Well as a matter of fact,' she said, in a tone so clear and ordinary that Keith found himself briefly standing to attention, 'there are one or two things that certainly need looking at. Like the vacuum cleaner. It's very good of you.'
'What's your phone number, Nick,' said Keith sternly.
She hesitated; then she seemed to give a sudden nod to herself. 'Have you got a pen?'
'No need,' said Keith, re-emboldened. 'Got this head for figures.' And with that he let his mouth drop open, and rested a large tongue on the lower teeth as his bright eyes travelled downwards over her body.
Her voice gave him the seven digits with a shiver.
'Sweet,' said Keith.
Thoughtfully Keith retraced his steps to the Black Cross. He had in mind a few drinks, to loosen the throwing arm; and then some serious darts. In the Portobello Road he encountered Guy Clinch, apparently browsing over a stall of stolen books. Keith never failed to be amazed that books fetched money. 'Yo,' he said, and paused for a few words. He considered. His circle of acquaintances was definitely expanding. It was through Guy, basically, that Keith had been introduced to Lady Barnaby. That's how it's done: the old-boy network . . . Keith had, of course, been friendly with people like Guy before: in prison. They were in for fraud, mostly, or drugs, or alimony default. White collar. They were okay (Guy was okay); they were human; they showed you respect, not wishing to get beaten up all day. But Guy wasn't in prison. He was in a huge house in Lansdowne Crescent. According to Keith, people like Guy admired and even envied the working man, such as himself. For some reason. Maybe because the working man lived that bit harder, in both work and play. When Guy now gamely asked him, 'Any luck?' — meaning Nicola - Keith waved him away, with a groan of hard-living laughter, saying he had too many birds on as it was. They parted. Keith's plans changed. He looked in at Mecca, his turf accountants, for an expensive few minutes, then hurried off to do some work.
Keith used the heavy knocker. Slowly the door opened, and a pleading face blinked out at him. Filled, at first, with extreme caution, the pale blue eyes now seemed to rinse themselves in delight.
'Why, Harry! Good afternoon to you.'
'Afternoon, Lady B.,' said Keith, striding past her into the house.
Lady Barnaby was seventy-seven. She wasn't one of Keith's birds. No way.
In his bachelor days Keith had been a regular romeo. He had been a real ladykiller. In truth, he had been quite a one. Even Keith's dog Clive, in his dog heyday, had been no keener or less choosy or more incapable of letting a female scent go by without streaking after it with his nose on the ground and his tongue thrown over his shoulder like a scarf. Then came change, and responsibilities: Kath, his wife, and their baby girl, little Kim. And now it was all different. These days Keith kept a leash on his restless nature, restricting himself to the kind of evanescent romance that might come the way of any modern young businessman on his travels (the wife or sister or daughter or mother of some cheat in the East End, perhaps, where Keith went to get the perfume), plus the occasional indiscretion rather closer to home (Iqbala, the single parent in the next flat along), plus the odd chance encounter made possible when fortune smiles on young lovers (closing time, pub toilet), plus three regular and longstanding girlfriends, Trish Shirt, Debbee Kensit, who was special, and Analiese Furnish. And that was it.
Most interesting, in her way, most representative, most modern, was sinuous Analiese. Naughty, haughty, dreamy and unreliable, given to panic attacks, swoons, hysterical blindness, Analiese, in Keith's view, was mental. She read books and wrote poems. She sent letters to celebrities in all walks of life. She hung around outside TV studios, concert halls, the Institute of Contemporary Arts. In the letters she sent to people whose faces she had seen on the television and in the newspapers Analiese Furnish often enclosed a photograph; as a result, she often got replies. Not that these photographs were lewd or revealing or fleshy. Oh no. Snapped by one or other of her male protectors (abject, tongue-tied types, platonic attendants:
she thought, absolutely wrongly and with characteristic lack of
imagination, that they loved her for her mind), these photographs showed Analiese in pensive poses, gazing out of windows, or in sylvan settings, bending in her frock, perhaps, to relish the touch of a flower. Yet the replies came in, guarde
d, cajoling, exploratory. Why? What did the photographs say? The wideness of the eyes told of a heavy dream life; the brow was the brow of someone who could be lied to, and successfully; and the wide mouth and tropical henna of the hair suggested that when Analiese gave herself to you, she would give herself utterly, and probably wouldn't ring the house. In this last particular alone, appearances were deceptive. Analiese was deceptive, but not predictably. Also, she had a figure of full womanly power and beauty, except for her legs (which were fat and always hidden up to the last moment. These legs were the bane of her life). What you did with famous people just wasn't your fault. Different rules applied. You were swept away. And when it was over (and it was usually over quickly), well, you were wryly left with your albums and scrapbooks, your poems, your train-tickets, your memories, your dreams, your telephone calls to his wife and children, your letters to the editors of all the tabloids.
Keith had met Analiese on the street. She came up to him and asked, in her husky and theatrical voice, if he was television's Rick Purist - Rick Purist, of TV quiz-show fame. Keith hesitated. So might some medieval hermit have hesitated when the supplicant poor staggered through the dripping forest to his hovel, and asked if he was the Emperor Frederick or Baldwin IX, Count of Flanders, risen from the dead and come to redeem them, to give succour, to free from sorrow. Well now, the hermit must have wondered in his rags: am I or aren't I? It might be fun for a while. On the other hand . . . Keith peered at Analiese's heaving chest, and trusted to instinct. He admitted it to be so: he was television's Rick Purist. Thus the opening, tone-setting phoneme of their relationship — his slurred 'yeah' - was an outright lie. He accepted an invitation to join her for tea in her West Hampstead bedsitter. Keith drank the sherry while she showed him her memorabilia of the great and talked about the primacy of the human soul. Twenty-five minutes later, as Keith leadenly climbed into his trousers and headed for the door, he glanced back at the sofabed in the confident hope that he would see Analiese no more. But one night, a month or two later, he grew fond and wistful, and called her at three o'clock in the morning from the