London Fields (22 page)

Time waits . . . Time don't wait. It just don't wait. Just marches on. At the double.
Take me,
thought Keith (and it was like a line of poetry twanging in his head, like a cord, drawing him in),
take me
—
take me where rich women want to fuck me.

'Poor you. You're hungover. All that celebrating, I should think, from your darts. Well you deserve it. Now take off your coat and sit down at the table and read your paper. I'll make you a nice spicy Bullshot. Believe me, it's the best thing.'

Keith did what he was told, pausing, as he sat, to wipe a tear from his eye, a tear of gratitude perhaps. On the other hand, the weather had turned again, and everyone's eyes were smarting in the dry mineral wind, a wind speckled with dust and spore, with invisible lamentation. A log fire, Keith noted, burned confidently in the hearth. Coming up the stairs Keith had been uneasily aware that he had nothing in his hands, no prop, no marker; his fingers missed the feel of the shower attachment, the coffee-grinder, the heavy iron. He had no burden. Only the folded tabloid, which was with him all day, under the armpit like Nelson's telescope . . . This he now carefully unfurled and flattened out on the table among the books and fashion magazines.
Elle. Women in Love.
He looked up coolly every now and then, in the gaps between jokes, horoscope, cartomancy column, agony aunt, kiss and tell. He could see her in the kitchen, efficiently, elegantly and as it were fondly preparing his drink. Nicola was wearing a shirt and tie, and a pinstripe suit of playfully generous cut. She might have been the illustration to an article about the woman who had everything. Everything except children. Nicola Six: nobody's babymamma.

'Seychelles,' said Keith half-absently as she placed the interesting drink near his bunched right hand. Then he raised his head. But she had moved past his back and was now standing in quarter-profile by the desk, calmly going through a diary, and humming to herself. 'Bali,' Keith added.

'Them that's got shall get,' sang Nicola, 'them that's not shall lose. So the
Bible
said . . .'

Lovely moment really, he thought. I ought to savour it. She has a way of slowing everything down. She doesn't just plonk herself on a chair, like some. Yack yack yack. She lets you get your bearings. Why don't more birds do that? So fucking important to a man. Look at her hair. Beautiful cut. Christ, they must do it strand by strand. None of this ten minutes under the blaster at Madame Pom-Pom's. I bet she goes to Bond Street or somewhere . . . and Keith's mind slid off down a gleaming arcade of rich mirrors, black velvet, ticking heels, stockinged ankles. The funny thing is, the really funny thing is: soon, one of these days (okay: her own speed), the woman over there is going to be sitting on the couch over
there,
by the TV, sitting on my lap, well fucked, and watching the darts.

'I've been watching the darts', she said,'– on television. Tell me something, Keith. Why do all the players drink lager? Only lager?'

'Intelligent question. Good talking point. It's like this. Your top darter is travelling the land, from pub to pub. Now beers vary. Some of them local brews, couple pints and you're well pissed. But lager . . .'

'Yes?'

'But lager's
kegged.
It's
kegged.
Standard. You know what you're getting. Now the darter has to drink. Has to. To loosen the throwing arm. Part of his job. But within reason. You know like you set yourself a limit. Like ten pints. Pacing it out over an evening.'

'I see.'

'Kegged. You know what you're getting.'

As a talking point, the part played by lager in the working life of a top darter seemed to be close to exhaustion. But then the telephone rang. Nicola looked at her watch and said,

'Excuse me for a moment, Keith. I'll need silence . . . Guy? Wait. This isn't me. It's a tape. I apologize, but I didn't trust myself to talk to you unmediated. I didn't trust my resolve. You see — dear Guy, thank you for all the sentiments you have awoken in me. It was wonderful to . . .'

Tape? thought Keith. Keith wasn't altogether comfortable. Among other things, he was trying to suppress a cough, and his watery gaze strained over the clamp of his hand. Goes on a bit. And I don't like the sound of this Lawrence she'll be looking at with new eyes. Brush-off innit, he thought, with sadness, with puzzlement, even with anger. Jesus, might as well be off out of here and get to work. Hark at her.

'. . . how absolutely and unconditionally I mean that, I'll never forget you. Think of me sometimes. Goodbye.’

Nicola turned to Keith and slowly kissed the vertical forefinger she had raised to her lips.

He held silence until the receiver went down. Then he coughed long and heavingly. When Keith's vision cleared Nicola was standing there with her open and expectant face.

Lost for words, Keith said, 'Shame. So it didn't work out.' He coughed again, rather less searchingly, and added, 'All over, is it?'

'To tell you the truth, Keith, it hasn't really begun. For him the idea is the thing. Guy's a romantic, Keith.'

'Yeah? Yeah, he does dress funny. He said, he told me he was "tracing" someone.'

'Oh that,' she said boredly. 'That was just some crap I made up to get money out of him. It'll come.'

This bird, thought Keith, now hang on a minute: this bird is really seriously good news. She's a fucking miracle. Where she been all my life?

'Money for you, Keith. Why should he have it all?'

'Caviare. Uh, when?'

'I think you can afford to be patient. I must do this at my own speed. Not very long at all. And really quite a lot of money.'

'Beluga,' said Keith. He nodded sideways at the telephone and went on admiringly, 'You're quite a little actress, aren't you Nick?'

'Nicola. Oh, literally so, Keith. Come and sit here. There's something I want to show you.'

It was all electrifying, every second of it. Every frame of it. Keith watched the screen in a seizure of fascination. In fact he was almost sickened by this collision or swirl of vying realities: the woman on the couch whose hair he could smell, and the girl inside the television, the girl on the tape. It might have overloaded him entirely if the electric image hadn't clearly belonged to the past. So he could still say to himself that TV was somewhere else: in the past. Not that Nicola had aged, or aged in the sense he knew, become gruesomely witchified, like Pepsi, or just faded, nearly faded from sight, like Kath. The woman on the couch was more vivid (time-strengthened), richer in every sense than the girl on the screen, who none the less . . . Brooding, tousled, lip-biting Nicola, poor little rich girl, in a play; tanned, keen, wide-mouthed Nicola, in a series of adverts, for sunglasses; white-saronged, ringleted, pouring Nicola, not actually Cleopatra but one of her handmaidens, in Shakespeare. Then the finale: the pre-credits sequence of a feature film (her debut, her swansong), a striptease in the back room of a gentleman's club full of sweating young stockbrokers, and Nicola up on a table wearing a metal shower cap and, at first, the usual seven veils, dancing with minimal movements but with fierce address of eyes and mouth until, just before she vanished in the smoke and the shadow, you saw all her young body.

'That it?' said Keith with a jolt.

'I get killed later on. You don't see it. You just hear about it. Later.'

'Jesus, beautiful. You know,' he said, not because it was true but because he thought she would want to hear it, 'you haven't changed a bit.'

'Oh I'm
much
better now. Listen. You run into Guy pretty often, don't you?'

'Consistently,' said Keith, suddenly very pitiless.

'Good. Next time, but leave it a day or two — tell him this.'

Soon afterwards, as she was showing him out, Nicola added,

'Have you got all that? Are you sure? And for God's sake don't overdo it. Lay it on, but don't overdo it. And mention the globe.'

'Jack Daniels.'

'Well then. Be good. And come and see me again very soon.'

Keith turned. She was right. She
was
better. When you see photos and that of them young, you think they're going to be as good as they are now, only newer. But it wasn't like that, not with Nick. Only the eyes, only the pupils, looked as though they'd been around. What was it ? Class skirt — and some foreign skirt too — they needed time for the flesh to get interesting. They pour oil on themselves. Massage. TV. Idle rich innit . . . Class skirt, he thought: but she wasn't wearing a skirt. Them baggy trousers (not cheap), so puffy there you had no notion of the shape that was hiding within.

'Old Grandad,' said Keith, and coughed lightly. 'Come on, Nick. Your speed — okay. I respect that. I'll exercise restraint. But give me something. To keep me warm at night. Show me you care.'

'Nicola. Of course,' she said, and leant forward, and showed him she cared.

'. . . Yeah cheers.'

'Look! I've got one more thing to show you.'

She opened a closet, and there, pinned to the back of the door, was a poster from the long run at Brighton, Nicola full length in tunic and black tights with her hair up, hands on hips and looking over her shoulder, the wild smile graphically enhanced:
Jack and the Beanstalk.

She laughed and said, 'What do you think?'

'Jim Beam,' said Keith. 'Benedictine.
Porno.'

'. . .
What?
'
said Nicola.

The books in Keith Talent's apartment. There weren't many books in Keith Talent's apartment. There weren't many books in his garage, either. But there were some.

There were six: the
A – D,
the
E – K,
the L –
R,
the
S – Z
(the modern
cheat
being heavily and exasperatedly reliant on the telephone),
Darts: Master the Discipline,
and a red pad which had no title apart from
Students Note Book – Ref. 138 – Punched for filing
and which, perhaps, could be notionally christened
A Darter's Diary
or, more simply,
The Keith Talent Story.
Here it was that Keith logged his intimate thoughts, most (but not all) of them darts-related. For example:

Or:

Or:

Rereading this last gobbet, Keith made the
tsuh
sound. He reached for his dart-shaped biro and crossed out
fuckign.
Letting out a brief grunt of satisfaction, and dotting the
i
with a flourish, he wrote in
fucking.
Keith wiped a tear from his eye: he was in a strange mood.

The conversation with Guy Clinch, completed earlier that day in the Black Cross, had developed naturally enough. Keith could at least say this for himself: he had been good, and done as he was told.

'Whew, mate,' he'd remarked as Guy joined him at the bar. 'You don't look too clever.'

'Yes I know.’

Keith peered closer with a wary sneer. 'No. You definitely do
not
look overly brill.'

'I think I must have a bug or something.'

Not that Guy ever looked as radiant as Keith believed he ought to. Personally, and having seen Guy's house, Keith wondered why Guy wasn't rubbing his hands together and grinning his head off all the hours there were. But oh no: not him. Keith was habitually impatient with Guy's habitual expression, one of temporary and precarious serenity, the face raised and slightly tilted, and the eyes wanly blinking. Today, though, his head was down and he seemed to have lost his colour and his money glow. Like every other male Caucasian in the pub, Guy was being shot in black and white. He was war footage, like everybody else.

'It must be going round,' said Keith. 'I tell you who else ain't in the best of health: that Nicola.'

Guy's head dropped another inch.

'Yeah. I went round there. You know I got all that stuff mended for her? Well they all went wrong again, you know, like they do.' This was true enough; but when Keith quietly offered to go another mile with GoodFicks, Nicola just shrugged and said it wasn't worth it. 'Anyway she's definitely under the weather. Know what it looked like to me? Apaphy. Apaphy. Staring out of the window. Playing with that globe thing. Sad little smile on its face.'

Guy's head dropped another inch.

'Like –' Keith coughed and went on, 'like she was pining. Pining. Pining its little heart out. . . Jesus Christ, look at the state of that Pepsi Hoolihan. I can't get over it. I haven't seen her for a few weeks, that's what it is. She looked bad enough in the summer but look at her now. She looks like fucking Nosferatu. Cheer up, pal. Here. I got one for you.'

And then, after Guy had crept off and Keith was standing there thinking how nice and simple life could be sometimes, God and Pongo took him aside and told him, in accents of grim apology, about the visit to the Black Cross of Kirk Stockist, Lee Crook and Ashley Royle . . .

This news shouldn't have surprised Keith, and it didn't surprise him. It merely frightened him a very great deal. Ah, money, always the money. As noted earlier, Keith was not in the healthiest shape, financially. His position as regards rent, rates, utilities, police fines and Compensations, hire purchase, and so on and so forth, was an inch from disaster. But it was always an inch from disaster . . . In the
garage
there Keith's dusty face hardened as he spat on to the floor and reached for the bottle of stolen vodka. This was the thing: he had been borrowing money on the street, more particularly on Paradine Street, in the East End. He had been borrowing money from a loan shark called Kirk Stockist. Unable to repay Kirk Stockist, he needed money for the heavy interest — the vig, the vig, the vertiginous vigesimal. To pay the vig, he had been borrowing money from another loan shark called Lee Crook. It seemed like a neat arrangement at the time, but Keith knew it to be fraught with danger, especially when he started borrowing money from Ashley Royle to pay the vig on the loan from Lee Crook. Through it all Keith had hoped and expected everything to come good at Mecca. And it hadn't. And nothing else had either. His own business interests had recently unravelled in a chaos of no-shows on the part of other
cheats
— catastrophic welshings and skankings that caused low whistles even among Keith's acquaintance, among poolroom hoodlums, touchy car thieves, embittered granny-jumpers. Now Keith thought venomously of his betrayal at the hands of that fucking old fraud Lady Barnaby, and gave a shudder as he recalled the price that her jewellery had fetched. Driving down Blenheim Crescent the other day, Keith had clenched his fist and said
'Yesss'
when he saw that Lady B's psychopathic boiler had eventually blown its top; the roof of the house looked like Reactor No. 4 at Chernobyl — or Reactor No. 6, at Thierry. Oh, how Keith longed to forget his cares and throw himself into his darts! Darts it was that had caused him to neglect his cheating: the hours of practice, and also the days of celebration, when that practice bore fruit at the oché. And there was Nicola: time-consuming too in her way, and promising uncertain rewards. Old Nick: does it at her own speed like. Keith's jaw dropped open affectionately as he thought of their session in front of the TV, how he had begged for the Freeze Frame and the normal Play, and how she had whisked them on brutally with the Fast Forward from highlight to highlight . . .

The telephone rang and Keith did something he hadn't done in a while: he answered it. 'Ashley!' he said. Keith didn't say much after that. He just periodically said 'Yeah' — perhaps half a dozen times. Then he said, 'Right. Right. Yeah cheers, lads.'

Solemnly Keith picked up
Darts: Master The Discipline and
turned to one of its most stirring passages. He read: