London Fields (29 page)

Well I'm back.

I'm back.

Six days I've been gone. I didn't write a word. The way I feel now I might never write another. But there's another. And another.

I lost. I failed. I lost everything.

Unlucky thirteen.

Jesus Christ if I could make it into bed and get my eyes shut without seeing a mirror.

Please don't anyone look at me. I really took a tumble — I really took a tumble out there. Oh, man, I'm in bits.

Apart from the fact that on account of the political situation they and their loved ones might all disappear at any moment (this sentence needs recasting but it's too late now), my protagonists are in good shape and reasonable spirits. They still form their black cross.

They look a bit different. But not as different as I look, catapulted into my seventies and still recovering from the fall.

I go into the Black Cross and nobody recognizes me. I'm a stranger. And it all has to begin again.

Perhaps because of their addiction to form, writers always lag behind the contemporary formlessness. They write about an old reality, in a language that's even older. It's not the words: it's the rhythms of thought. In this sense all novels are historical novels. Not really a writer, maybe I see it clearer. But I do it too. An example: I still go on as if people felt well.

I look to the kids, who change quick too. Marmaduke, so far as I can tell, is exactly the same except in one particular. He has stopped saying 'milt'. He now says — and he says it often and loudly — 'mewk' or 'mowk' or 'mulk' or, more simply, 'mlk'.

All right, if we are going to go on with this thing there'll have to be some changes around here. Apart from anything else I think I'm going blind:
so
let the colours run. Actually Nicola herself, with her recent outrages, has already forced this on me. Who says these people need so much air and space? We're all in it together now.

Kim has stopped saying 'Enlah'! She cries normally, humanly, complicatedly. No longer does she pay homage to the sudden, the savage god of babies: Enlah!

We're all in it together now. As is the case with the world situation, something will have to give, and give soon. It will all get a lot woollier, messier. Everything is winding down, me, this, mother earth. More: the universe, though apparently roomy enough, is heading for heat death. I hope there are parallel universes. I hope alternatives exist. Who stitched us up with all these design flaws? Entropy, time's arrow — ravenous disorder. The designer universe: but it was meant to give out all along, like something you pick up at GoodFicks. So maybe the universe is a dog, a pup, a dud, slipped our way by the
Cheat.

'Milt' I reckon I can live without. But 'Enlah'? Already I miss it. And I'll never hear it again. Nobody will, not from her lips. How did it sound? How well can I remember it? Where has it gone? Oh, Christ, no, the hell of time. I never guessed that you lost things coming this way too. Time
takes
from you, with both hands. Things just disappear into it.

Keith is under the impression that he has come through a stern examination of his character and emerged with flying colours. There he stands, with one hand under his nose, with courting finger resting in the cusp between barrel and shaft, with pinkie raised — Keith's integers! And Guy's okay, considering. The fall guy: fool, foal, foil. I went to see him in hospital. There he lies, in white nightie, palely smiling. He really had us worried for a time. But they're both on course.

I'm not getting something and what I'm not getting has to do with the truth and it so happens that I'm well placed to take a crack at it — the truth, I mean — because this story is
true.

The form itself is my enemy. All this damned romance. In fiction (rightly so called), people become coherent and intelligible — and they aren't like that. We all know they aren't. We all know it from personal experience. We've been there.

People? People are chaotic quiddities living in one cave each. They pass the hours in amorous grudge and playback and thought-experiment. At the camp fire they put the usual fraction on exhibit, and listen to their own silent gibber about how they're feeling and how they're going down. We've been there.

Death helps. Death gives us something to do. Because it's a full-time job looking the other way.

A highly civilized note from Mark Asprey, rounded, well turned, like the man himself, and left in the study, propped against my stacked typescript:

No mention (except between those brackets?) of my novel, which I'm sure he has looked at
—
though the pages, it's true, aren't even infinitesimally misaligned.

I wonder if MA met with the murderee while he was here. I wonder if MA slept with the murderee while he was here. Just now, none of that seems to matter. Wait, though: I can feel something gathering around me once again. Ambition, obsession. It had better be obsession. Nothing else is likely to keep me out of bed. All about, the study shelves are ranked with Asprey's piss . . .

In-depth updatings and debriefings have been necessary, and she has been awfully sweet and patient with me. This much is certain: I'm going to miss her.

The weather has a new number, or better say a new
angle.
And I don't mean dead clouds. Apparently it will stay like this for quite a while: for the duration, in any event. It's not a good one. It will just make everything worse. It's not a wise one. The weather really shouldn't be doing this.

He frowned. She laughed. He brightened. She pouted. He grinned. She flinched.
Come on: we don't
do
that. Except when we're pretending. Only babies frown and flinch. The rest of us just fake with our fake faces.

He grinned. No he didn't. If a guy grins at you for real these days, you'd better chop his head off before he chops off yours. Soon the sneeze and the yawn will be mostly for show. Even the twitch.

She laughed. No she didn't. We laugh about twice a year. Most of us have lost our laughs and now make do with false ones.

He smiled.

Not quite true.

All that no good to think, no good to say, no good to write. All that no good to write.

S
HAPED LIKE A topheavy and lopsided stingray, elderly, oil-streaked, semi-transparent, and trailing its coil of feathery brown vapour, a dead cloud dropped out of the haze and made its way, with every appearance of effort, into the dark stadium of the west. Guy Clinch had looked up. Now he looked down. To him, clouds had always been the summary of everything that could reasonably be hoped for from the planet; they moved him more than paintings, more than exciting seas. So dead clouds, when he saw them, brought a strong response also (it was much worse since fatherhood). Dead clouds made you hate your father. Dead clouds made love hard. They made you want and need it, though: love. They made you have to have it.

This was how things stood with Guy. Or this was how they swayed and wavered. On the night of the Wounded Bird — the kiss, when his lips had strained to meet or shun the lips of Nicola Six — Guy had checked into hospital a little after ten.

He felt fine himself. If anyone had asked him how he felt, he would have said that he 'felt fine'. Apart from an itchy left eye, a sore throat, his mild mono and controllable colic (all of which fell within the ever-roomier parameters of
feeling fine),
plus his more or less permanent height-related lower back pain and the numerous rumours of whatever else was in store for him mortally, Guy felt fine. Marmaduke's asthma attack, on the other hand (it developed suddenly that evening), had every appearance of severity. The doctor came, and admired from a distance the desperate inflations of Marmaduke's belly. It's not that they can't get air in; they can't get air out. Many telephone calls were made — lights sent probing into the nooks and crannies of the health system. Now of course Guy and Hope had a system too. If the best care available was private, then Hope went in with the child; if non-private, then Guy did. Such an arrangement, said Hope, answered to his egalitarian convictions, his interest in 'life', as she called it, with all due contempt. By eleven o'clock, at any rate, Guy had his pyjamas and toothbrush ready in a briefcase and was soon backing the car out into the street.

Guy went in the next night too, straight after he finished at the office, relieving Hope, who pulled aside the surgeon's mask she was wearing long enough to inform him that inch-high
eczema had
broken out across Marmaduke's chest and was heading, at a speed almost visible to the human eye, for his neck and face. With a gesture of quiet challenge she lifted the sheet. Guy stared down in wonder at the jewelled child.

Even more strangely and frighteningly, Marmaduke lay perfectly still, and was quite silent. During past hospitalizations, when Guy had arrived with his flowers, his bananas, his toys and cuddly animals, his overnight bag, Marmaduke had reliably climbed out of even the deepest troughs of weakness and disorientation to give his father a weary swipe. But today — not the smallest gob of spit. Not so much as a snarl! Marmaduke's red-smudged eyes stared up in bafflement and appeal. When the child suffered like this, it was as if Guy himself, or Guy's little ghost, were hawking and writhing, somewhere lost, in an alternate world. Looking down on him now, Guy felt the familiar equidistance between tears and nausea. The latter impulse he managed to resist. But then Hope wept. And then Guy wept. They embraced each other. And together, and very carefully, they embraced the child.

That night Guy thought about Nicola a good deal, but unwillingly, and without pleasure. And he cleaned his teeth with some violence, abolishing from his mouth the last memory of her lips. As he lay on the camp bed in the sweltering cubicle, and jerked to his feet every few minutes to review the red rubies which fantasticated the surface of Marmaduke's drugged sleep, her image flapped in on him in little coronaries of self-hatred and dismay. That stolen hour: Keith and his cigarettes: if Hope knew — her anger, rightful and limitless. The connexion between the illicit kiss and the child's sufferings was perhaps as tenuous as the smoke that issued from the crafty burn of Keith's brief vigil; but he felt it as a certainty. This is the girl that kissed the man that asked the friend that smoked the fag to mind the kid that lived in the house that Hope built . . . Better just to wash my hands of the whole thing. It will be bearable. It won't
kill
me. I'll give her the money and that'll be the end of it. This vow, repeatedly uttered, felt calming, ascetic and renunciatory. At four he smoothed Marmaduke's forehead for the last time and collapsed into sleep moments before the first nurse strode into the room.

In the morning, Marmaduke looked unbelievable, and sounded as if . . . Well, if you'd shut your eyes, you would have quickly imagined two lumberjacks stooped over the handles of their doublesaw, and patiently felling some titan of the woodlands. And yet the child was widely pronounced to be stabilizing. The cutaneous vesicles, for instance, had already started to weep. Guy stared at the face on the bloodstained pillow and was unable to imagine that this was anything even a child could really recover from. But Marmaduke would recover from it. And Guy would recover from it. Actually he knew, to his shame, that recovery was near, because Nicola's face was back, and no longer half-averted; it was candid and aroused and voluptuously innocent. Being in a hospital anyway, Guy felt the urge to ask around, to find somebody who could get this face (this image, like the sun's imprint, but never fading) surgically removed. Of course, doctoring hadn't worked for the Macbeths; and it wouldn't work for him. When Hope arrived at half past ten with Phoenix and Melba and the odd au pair, Guy slipped away and called the office, and got Richard, who said he could go for the money at noon. He returned just as the doctor, the in-house asthma expert, was taking his leave.

Guy asked, 'What did he say?'

'Him?' said Hope. 'I don't know. Part allergenic, part reactive.'

'When he's better,' said Guy, who was thinking, Not too far: anyway she could meet me at the station, 'we'll move out of London.'

'Oh yeah? Where to, Guy? The moon? Haven't you heard? Everywhere's a toilet.'

'Well we'll see.'

'You can go now.'

But he stayed for a while, the good father, and watched the child. My God (Guy thought), he looks like Io. He looks like Io, Jupiter's molten moon, covered in frosty lava, from cold volcanoes. Io's volcanoes, caused by sulphur dioxide boiling at many degrees below zero in contact with sulphur . . . Just then, Hope unbuttoned her shirt and bared a breast, and offered it to the boy, for comfort. Of course, Io is connected to the mother planet by a kind of navel string. A 'flux tube' of electrical energy. Ten million amperes.

Later, as he bent to kiss Marmaduke's lips (the only part of his face unaffected by the popping swamp of the inflammation), the child flinched and gave a definite sneer. Pretty feeble by his standards; but Guy was heartened, and emboldened, to find his son capable of even such a spiritless grimace. He was wearing plastic handcuffs, to stop him scratching.

A mile to the west, Keith Talent lit a cigarette with the remains of its predecessor and then pressed the butt into an empty beer can. In this way did he scorn the ormolu ashtray and the onyx cigarette lighter, two recent acquisitions, which lay near by. He reached for a full beer can, tussling with the sixpack's elastic yoke. He swore. He coughed. He straightened up in bed. He burped astonishingly.

The noise that burp made was doubly disproportionate, disproportionate to his bulk, disproportionate to the podlike restriction of the room he lay in. Even Keith was slightly taken aback by it. A horror-film burp, a burp that cried out for at least two exorcists. Perhaps one of hell's top burp people was plying his trade in Keith's body. But Keith didn't care. He burped again, voluntarily, defiantly. From the kitchen the dog barked back. 'Keith,' called Kath. And even little Kim filed the possibility of protest. Keith gave them another.

Lying there among the knouts and nooses of cheap sheets and damp blankets, in his pink-tinged Y-fronts, with the beer can on his gut and the
fizzing
snout in his fingers, Keith had a fairly accurate idea of who and what he was. He could taste his own essence. The sourness of locker rooms, municipal duckboards, dormitories, prisons.

Things were bad. On the phone: 'Keith? It's Ashley. I'm going to have to hurt you, mate. All right? I'm going to
hurt
you.' Keith Talent, who had done a lot of hurting in his time, who knew about hurting from both points of view, Keith Talent understood. 'I understand.' It wasn't TV, hurting. It was real. It didn't come much realer: finger-cracking reality. Yeah, and kicked senseless and left upside down in a fucking dustbin somewhere.

Have the fucking bailiffs round here anyway in a minute. Characteristically you were sent two fat guys, with ginger beards, murmuring — money's janitors (they didn't want any trouble). Everything you owned got priced. Then you really found out how little you were worth. At this moment Keith himself felt like a coin
(he could taste it in his mouth), nicked and grimy, and of low denomination. In three nights' time he was meant to be throwing in the Duoshare. Quarterfinals. 'Nationwide sponsorship,' said Keith. He stared with his mouth open at the middle finger of his right hand. Prestigious endorsements. No help from that lying cow either. Was the darts dream about to end? Was the whole darts bubble about to burst?

Keith? What's the matter? The truth was that in addition to his usual woes Keith happened to be suffering from the after-effects of violent crime. You can almost hear him saying it, in moody explanation: 'I happen to be suffering from the after-effects of violent crime.' There
are
after-effects of violent crime, and they are onerous. We can be sure of that. Look: even Keith was capable of feeling the worse for them. The after-effects of violent crime
have
to be considerable, to get through to people like Keith who are always feeling lousy anyway. Now he burped again and the dog barked back and he burped back again — 'Keith,' called Kath — and it all felt as ragged as that, trying to outburp an old dog under a blanket of fagsmoke in the low sun.

By his participation in violent crime, Keith had worked a little gamble. In at least three or four senses, Keith had worked a little gamble with
time.
He had ploughed many days' worth of the stuff into the intensity of a scant forty-five minutes; and now those gambled hours were being subtracted from the present. A gambling man, Keith had gambled those hours; and he had lost them. He had lost. Not everything, because he reckoned he'd got away with it okay and wouldn't be doing the kind of time you measure in years. But he hadn't won. Those gambled hours, where had they gone?

The whole thing was a farce from the start. Never work with our coloured brethren, Keith said to himself. It should be pointed out that the injunction had little bigotry in it. It was like saying: Never drive down the Golborne Road on Friday or Saturday afternoons. Rubbish trucks innit. Occasioning pronounced congestion. You nip up Lancaster Road instead. Common sense. Keith wasn't prejudiced. No danger. Keith had lots of foreign mates, believing that it took all sorts to make a world. Look at horse-toothed Yaroslav, of Polish extraction. Look at Fucker Burke, pure bog-and-spud Irish. And Pongo was a Cornishman. No, Keith liked all sorts, all sorts of men, just as he liked all sorts of women, all colours, all creeds. Look at Balkish and Mango and Leeza and Iqbala. Look at Thelonius. In the end, though, he felt the wisdom of the traditional view: that when it came to
work,
your average bongo'll be as much use as an ashtray on a motorbike. Same difference with the black darter. All the sincerity in the world. But no clinicism.

Their plan was deceptively simple. Thelonius's babymamma Lilette worked as a cleaning-lady — but never for very long. As soon as any household felt the time was right to entrust her with a doorkey, Lilette felt the time was right to entrust it to Thelonius (who had it copied) and then quit the following day. The following night Thelonius would be stopping by in the small hours . . . Thelonius seemed offended by Keith's mild hint that the filth would soon put two and two together.

'Filth don't know shit,' he said. 'This is the big one. It have long bread, man.'

'Bingo,' said Keith.

As planned, Keith showed up at the Golgotha shortly after nine. Thelonius was there, as planned. Quite untypically, and not very encouragingly, Thelonius was drunk. 'Sdoveo,' said Thelonius. 'Svodeo.' He was trying to say 'Videos'. Another stretch of time passed while Thelonius tried to say 'Digital'. Well, in for a penny, thought Keith (prophetically enough). Outside, Thelonius opened a trembling palm in presentation of his new car — a souped-up, low-slung maroon Mini, with rallying lights, customized chrome fenders and celebrity windows. Not discreet, thought Keith, as he bent to climb into it.

'We won't be getting too many digital videos in here, mate,' said Keith, pleased, at least, to be sparing the Cavalier from such a mission. 'What happened to the BMW?'

'Had to let it go, man. Had to let it go.'

Keith nodded. That's how it went. Thelonius had committed every last fiver of his most recent windfall to the purchase of the BMW. He had bought the BMW off a
cheat. A
couple of days later he was without the means to buy the car a litre of petrol, let alone the repairs and spare parts (item: new engine) that the BMW cried out for. So he had sold it back to the
cheat
— at a heavy loss. And what does he do with such funds as remain? Gets this eye-catching minge-wagon, plus a new fur coat. The new fur coat would already be gathering oil in the Mini's boot, and Thelonius would be without the means to get it cleaned. That's how it went.

'Fifteen minutes,' Thelonius was saying sleepily, 'and we be back inna Black Cross, rich men. Sonofabitch!'

'What?'

The car contained no petrol.

And neither of them had any money.

So it was upon the Cavalier that they relied to take them to the dark corner off Tavistock Road. On the way Thelonius rehearsed his dreams of early retirement: the ticker-taped, blonde-flanked return to St Lucia, land of his fathers; the ranch-style villa, the private beach, the burnished helipad. No moon, no street-lamps, and a low ceiling of cloud. The lock gave slickly to Thelonius's key.