London Fields (32 page)

I
F WE COULD pass through her force field (and we can't quite do this, force fields being strongest round the beautiful and the mad), we would know that her stomach wall hurt and weighed heavily, that she felt occasional drags and brakings of nausea, that all sorts of salmon were bouncing upwards against the stream. But here she comes, the character, Nicola Six on the street, on the Golborne Road, bringing a packet of light through all the random hesitation. Not that the street was without colour and definition on this day: it looked shorn in the low sun, plucked and smarting, with a bristle of golden dust. But Nicola brought light through it, human light, even dressed as she was, for simple authority: black cord skirt and tight black cashmere cardigan, white shirt with blue ribbon serving as bowtie, hair back (before the mirror, earlier, a daunting emphasis of eyebrow). She was getting all the right kinds of look. Women straightened their necks at her; men glanced, and dipped their heads. Only one discordant cry, from the back of a truck, and fading: 'Miss World! Miss World!' Everyone else seemed to be shifting sideways or diagonally but Nicola was travelling dead ahead.

The entrance to Windsor House immediately extinguished all her light. Nicola slowed for an instant, then kept going; she used a mental trick she had of pretending not to be there. The steeped concrete shone in the low sun, and even fumed slightly with the fierce tang of urine. It would have been a humiliation to approach them, so clearly were the lifts defunct — slaughtered, gone, dead these twenty years. She peered up the vortex of the stone stairwell and felt she was underneath a toilet weighing ten thousand tons.

'Want I mind your car?' said a passing four-year-old.

'I haven't got a car.'

'Die, bitch.'

She climbed up past scattered toilet-dwellers, non-schoolgoing schoolboys and schoolgirls, non-working men and women, past the numb stares of the youthful and the aged. She faced them all strongly; she knew she looked enough like the government. She felt no fear. Walking naked up these steps (she told herself), with her bare feet on the wet stone, Nicola would have felt no fear. That was part of it: no more fear. She paused on the tenth floor and smoked half a cigarette, watching an old toiletman tearfully trying to uncap a damaged can of Peculiar Brew.

Like everybody else, Nicola knew that council flats were small — controversially small. In a bold response to an earlier crisis, it was decided to double the number of council flats. They didn't build any new council flats. They just halved all the old council flats. As she walked along the ramp of the fifteenth storey, open to the search of the low sun, Nicola could hardly fail to notice that the front doors alternated in colour, elderly green interspliced by a more recent but even flakier dark orange. The front doors were also hilariously close together.

She halted. Faultily the bell sounded.

It was Nicola's view that she was performing very creditably, especially during the first two or three minutes, in that storm or panic of sense-impressions. To begin with there was the kaleidoscopic wheeling that her entry forced upon the kitchen, the chain of rearrangements made necessary by the admission of
one more person
into the room. Then vertigo relaxed into claustrophobia — armpit-torching, heat-death claustrophobia. Distractedly her parched eyes searched for a living thing. There was a plastic pot on the minifridge. In it, some kind of maimed gherkin was apparently prospering; it rose from the soil at an unforgivable angle. Then she had to confront the pallor and distress of the mother, and the surprising child on the floor (the intelligent valves of its watchful face), and the flummoxed dog. Christ, even the dog looked declassed. Even the dog was meant for better things. Next door to the left a man and a woman were quarrelling with infinite weariness. The room was split-levelled with cigarette smoke. Nicola pressed her thighs together to feel the good silk between her legs. She hadn't been anywhere this small since she was five years old.

Still hidden from sight, Keith hardly went unnoticed. As the olfactory nerve-centre of this particular stall or cubicle, Keith hardly went unnoticed. Although he remained at the far end of the flat, he was none the less only a few feet away. Keith was very close. Nicola could hear a beer can pop, a lighter worked and sworn at, the severe intakes of air and smoke. Then the inhuman hostility of his eructations . . . Time to flush him out. Time, because the place could not be borne — was astonishingly unbearable, even for an expert, like her. Feeling you were in Nigeria was one thing. In Nigeria, and trapped in Nigeria, and not at the scene of a drought or a famine but of an industrial catastrophe caused by greed. And there for your own advancement, to make what you could of the suffering. The talk was two-way torture. She said,

'Except you haven't got any
money,
have you. You just haven't got enough
money.
Do you abuse your daughter, Mrs Talent?'

'Oi!'

They waited.

And Keith loomed, loomed large in the Keith-sized kitchen. He wasn't that big; but he was gigantic in here. When their eyes met he paused heavily. Up from the depths of the brown dressing-gown came a sallow blush of shame or rage or both.

'I'm sorry,' said Nicola, with some haughtiness, 'but it seems to me that self-hatred is more or less forced on one in conditions like these. There'd be no way round it. Without self-hatred you wouldn't last five minutes.'

'Hey,' said Keith.
'Hey.
You.
Fuck
off out of it.'

Kath turned slowly to her husband, as if he were a wonderful doctor, as if he were a wonderful priest. She turned back to Nicola and said, 'Yes. Care? What kind of care do you get from an office? And from someone like you, doing your hobby or whatever it is you're doing. Get out.'

'Tell her, Kath,' said Keith calmly.

'Get out, you old witch. Get out. You vicious thing.'

'Well as I said before, 'said Nicola, gathering herself and looking up into Keith's considering sneer, inches from her eyes, 'it's nothing more nor less than a question of money.'

She swayed out on to the ramp. Violently yanked from inside, the door gave an agonized creak and then closed almost noiselessly. Nicola found that she was short of breath and taking great bites out of the air. Now to get back and prepare for Keith's coming. As she turned she heard the voices from the toy house.

'Vicious. Purely vicious.'

'They can't touch you, girl. You are who you are. Don't ever forget it. You are who you are, girl. You are who you are.'

So when he rang
her
bell, when he buzzed and blurted and came jinking up the last flight of stairs, Nicola was ready for this summit meeting, ready to turn all the new energies her way. She had done Keith violence, but she wanted no violence done to her, not yet. She wanted that violence violently stoppered. It was all right: she had the money. And any innocent or idiot could tell that a considerable sex-deflection would also be called for. Thinking this, Nicola had breathed in sharply and embraced herself, bristling — even her breasts had bristled. Love wouldn't do it. (Keith wasn't the type.) Sex wouldn't do it either, all by itself. Not even Nicola's sex, whose power had so often astonished even Nicola Six: the threats, the reckless bribes (money, marriage), the whimperings, the unmannings and unravellings, the bared teeth, the tendons of the neck so savagely stretched . . .

Keith entered. Nicola stood at the table in the darkened room, counting money under an angle lamp. She wore a black nightgown of candid vulgarity. With her hair freed and a third of each breast showing and no smile on her business face, she hoped to resemble a Monaco madame after a hard week in her first tax year of semiretirement, or something like that, as seen on TV. She removed her dark glasses and looked into the shadows for him. He looked back into the light. Silently, their force fields touched. And said:

Home was his secret. Nobody had ever been there before. Oh, there
had
been ingress: rentmen and census people, the police, and cheating electricians and would-be plumbers and so on as well as real social workers and probation officers — but nobody he knew. Not ever. Only the dog, and the woman, and the child: the insiders. They, too, were secrets. Home was his terrible secret. Home was his dirty little secret. And now the secret was out.

'Once upon a time,' said Nicola carefully, 'your wife must have been very lovely.'

'You shouldn't've fucking done it, Nick.'

'And the little girl is divine. What did you say your dog was called?’

'You shouldn't've fucking done it, Nick.'

'Such a noble beast. Keith, I
understand.
You didn't want me to know, did you, that you lived like a pig.'

'That's so . . . That's so out of
order.'

She had a bottle of whiskey and two long glasses ready. One of the glasses she filled with perhaps a quarter of a pint of neat spirit. She took two swallows, and came round the table towards him.

'Have some of this.'

And he took two swallows.

Nicola could be taller than Keith when she wanted to be. She was certainly taller than him now, in her four-inch high heels. Keeping her legs straight she leant back on the table and dropped her head, murmuring, 'I took some of your money and spent it on new stockings and things. I hope you don't mind.' She looked up and said, 'You do know why I'm doing this, don't you, Keith? You do know what this whole thing is really all about?' Nicola didn't feel like laughing. But she did think it was wonderfully funny.

'What?'

'It's your darts: listen.'

The speech went on for five or six minutes. She then took him by the hand and guided his leaden body towards the sofa, saying, 'I've made a little tape for you, Keith, which in its curious way will help show you what I mean.'

. . . The black elbow-length gloves, the look of young wonder, the jealous dress, the blown kiss, the wiggling black finger, beckoning.

'Slow it,' moaned Keith, as the fade began. With a soft snarl he snatched at the remote. Then Nicola's quarter-clad brown body dashed backwards, and became a clockwork mannequin, then a living statue, as Keith froze the frame of choice.

'That,' said Keith, and sighed, not with yearning so much as with professional sincerity, 'that is the real thing.'

She gave him the money now, negligently tossing handful after handful into a trade-named shopping-bag, and then led him into the passage. Every now and again Keith tried to look shrewd and deserving, but his lips kept scrolling into an adolescent leer. Standing above him at the top of the stairs, she folded her arms and appeared to gaze downwards at herself. 'The eternal appeal of the cleavage, Keith. What is it, I wonder. The symmetry. The proximal tension.'

'Prestigious,' said Keith. 'Looks nice,'

'In the books, they say, rather wistfully, that men want to put their faces there. Return to mother, Keith. But I don't agree. I don't think men want to put their faces there.'

Keith nodded his head, and then shook it.

'
I
think they want to put their cocks there, Keith.
I
think they want to fuck the tits. Ooh, I bet they do.'

'Yeah cheers,' said Keith.

This wasn't the real thing. Just a mannequin, on the remote. 'Remember. Next time you see him: mention poetry. I don't care how. And meanwhile, masturbate about me, Keith. Beat off about me. As a form of training. A lot. All those things you wanted to do to girls and were too shy to. Or they wouldn't let you. Do them to me. In your head.'

Keith's eyes seemed to be seeping upwards beneath his lids. 'Give me a taste. Come on, doll. Give me a taste.'

She must touch him. With three long fingers she felt his hair: as dry as fire-hazard gorse. One spark and it would all go up. She took a grip near the snagged parting line and pulled back slowly. Then, leaning into his opened face — and already hearing the swill of mouthwash, the twanging floss (it isn't me doing this: it's Enola, Enola Gay) — she gave him the Jewish Princess.

The telephone was ringing. Nicola drank whiskey. She lifted the receiver, heard the panicking pips, paused, and dialled six. 'I'm afraid I'm not here,' she said. And she even meant it, in a way. 'If you'd like to leave a message, please speak after the tone.'

Of course, there was no tone, and they both waited. Christ, how many seconds?

'Hello? Hello, Nicola? . . . God, I'm completely soaked. It's so awkward, talking to a machine. Listen. I've been —'

She pressed down with a finger.

Carefully Guy ducked his head out of the telephone cubicle and turned to face the street-wide wall of rain. Music was playing — it came and went beneath the thunder-racetrack of the sky. The right music, too. Guy turned: an old black man in the corner with a sax and the fierce melancholy of Coleman Hawkins. What was it? Yes. 'Yesterdays'. Guy would certainly be giving him money.

He stood in the steeped emptiness of the underground station on Ladbroke Grove, barely half a mile from the house, where he had recently discovered a live telephone box — in a long rank of dead ones. Quite a find. Like seeing a pterodactyl, complacently perched on a telegraph wire among the sparrows and worn old crows. Forever intensifying, the rain was now coming down so hard that even the cars seemed to be wading off home. Just buses, like lit fortifications, stalled in the wet night. That song: such complication, such grievous entanglement. First you go through this, it was saying. Then you go through
this.
Then you go through
this.
Life, thought Guy. When at last the man was finished Guy went over and pressed a ten-pound note into his styrofoam cup. 'That was beautiful,' he said. No answer. Guy turned and walked. And then the man called out: 'Hey buddy. I
love
you.'

Five long strides got him under the bus-stop shelter. Already he was farcically drenched. Rather than go straight home, where Marmaduke was in any case well-attended despite the nanny shortage (two night nurses until he was better again), Guy dreamed up reasons for breaking the journey with a visit to the Black Cross: two hundred yards along Lancaster Road. He kept on waiting for the rain to slacken. But it didn't. It kept on doing the other thing. It was lashing down, just like they said, whipstroke after whipstroke, in climbing anger. Extremity upon extremity, and then more extremity, and then more.