London Fields (23 page)

Keith looked up. 1415! he thought. 'Heritage,' he murmured richly. How many times, how many, many times had he chalked for his father, at the chalkboards of the dartboards of the pubs of London, where he was raised. Dad would be playing, usually, with Jonathan Friend, or with Mr Purchase: Chick's dad. And if little Keith made a mistake with the sums . . . Standing in the garage, Keith raised a palm to his cheek and felt it burning, still burning, always burning . . .

But we mustn't go too far back, must we, we mustn't go too far back in anybody's life. Particularly when they're poor. Because if we do, if we go too far back — and this would be a journey made in a terrible bus, with terrible smells and terrible noises, with terrible waits and terrible jolts, a journey made in terrible weather for terrible reasons and for terrible purposes, in terrible cold or terrible heat, with terrible stops for terrible snacks, down terrible roads to a terrible room — then nobody is to blame for anything, and nothing matters, and everything is allowed.

Ashley Royle, Lee Crook and Kirk Stockist had told Keith that if he didn't give them all the money they wanted by Friday, then they would, among other things, break the middle finger of his right hand. This, of course, was Keith's courting finger: even more centrally, it was his darting finger. He finished his vodka, straightened his flares, put on his windcheater (even the wind Keith cheated) and went off to try to find Thelonius, to talk to him about semi-violent crime.

Keith has started asking me for money. I knew this would happen.

Late last night we had a stand-up snack at Conchita's. Keith had words with Conchita's daughter. He wanted the
chili rilienos.
In due course a plate of devilled plutonium was set before him. It bubbled audibly, and gave off thick plumes of ebony and silver. I was reminded of the splattings and belchings of Sulphur Springs, in St Lucia (land of Thelonius's fathers). Keith took a matter-of-fact first mouthful and stood there with smoke coming out of his nose and asked me to give him money.

I want to give him money. I really don't need this Thelonius business. Thelonius is a joke criminal anyway, riding a farcical lucky streak. What if it all goes wrong, which it will? Keith canned: Keith out of the action. I can't bear to see them hunkered down together in the Black Cross, saying things like 'Payday' and 'Bingo'. They've even got a crappy little map. On the other hand I don't want Keith's darting finger broken either, that precious, multi-functioned digit, on which he further depends for his Americanized obscene gestures.

No, I want to give Keith money. (I want to give Thelonius money too.) But the trouble is I don't have any. And Keith needs so much, so soon, and will presently need more. Why no call, no deal, no rapturous jackpot from Missy Harter? Why? Why?

Mindful of Heisenberg's principle that an observed system inevitably interacts with its observer — and aware too that the decent anthropologist never meddles with his tribe
—
I decided not to tell Nicola about Keith and semi-violent crime. Then I told Nicola about Keith and semi-violent crime. I told her to get moving and give Keith money. It's okay, she says. She just 'knows' that the crime of semi-violence will take place, and it'll be okay. How I wish I could share in her hope
—
the awakened, lips parted, the new ships . . .

Well, I told Keith no. He stared my way in what I took to be anti-Semitic silence for about fifteen seconds, and then went taciturn on me. At least I think he went taciturn on me. I don't know what that
chili rilienos
was doing to his insides (it even
means
'red-ass'), but his tongue looked like a reefer knot. 'That's more like it, Conchita,' he eventually croaked.

I felt bad. I do owe him something. After all, where would I be without Keith?

The snack was cheap and I handled it.

Death seems to have solved my posture problem
—
and improved my muscle tone. What jogging and swimming and careful eating never quite managed, death is pulling off with no trouble at all. I recline with burger and fries, while death completes its own stay-fit programme. And with none of that sweating and grunting which some of us consider so unattractive.

Yes, for the present I flatter myself that death is having a good effect on my appearance. I definitely look more intelligent. Is this why Lizzyboo digs me? I look almost messianic. The skin is tightening under my jaw and over my temples, and gaining in glow. In death I shine. In death I am — I am beautiful. As cosmeticist and shape-up coach, my condition is doing a fine job. It's a little painful, true
—
but all good things hurt. Apart from what it does to the eyes (red-tendrilled, and swelling, or growing), the death-effect really isn't too bad. Apart from the eyes and the death.

I accompany Lizzyboo and Hope and Guy and Dink Heckler to the tennis club in Castellain Road. I sit on an umpire's chair and watch. Mixed doubles: Guy paired with Lizzyboo, facing Hope and Dink, the South African number seven . . . I don't think Guy sees what's brewing between Dink and Hope. Poor Guy. He's like me, myself. We're here. But we're not here. When we look up our eyes find the same cloud, heavy and queasy and low-flying, the colour of an avocado, yes, and with a query of vinaigrette in its core.

Unsmiling, in supercasual sportswear, and as hairy as a tarantula, Dink is the one they all want to see, here at the club; the pale secretaries and treasurers, the ageing pros, the brilliant black kids come by to admire and envy Dink's power and touch, his rollover backhand, his snorting smashes. Wearing grey socks, grey shoes, khaki shorts and half a kaftan, Guy is easily the most rhythmless of the four, the least determined, and the worst adapted (his generous confirmations and disavowals, his compulsive apologies, almost as regular as the sound of bat on ball) . . . But it was the ladies I had come to see.

Equally tall and brown and resplendent they are also both equipped with bravura backhands and the special looping second serve. Optimum use has been made of the available material, with investment here and outlay there, at the tennis ranch and the tennis clinic. They swoop and swoon in their whites. Of course, Lizzyboo boasts even more sap and down than Hope, her older sister.
Yuck,
they both say, when the shot goes awry.

Hope plays with severity (she is as firm and strict as the pleats on her skirt), Lizzyboo with laughter and friendly ambition. Hope assumes a vexed expression when she plays her shots (fending off that big fuzzy bug). Get lost! her strokes seem to say. Lizzyboo 'persuades' or 'caresses' the ball.
Come here,
says her racket.
Come back.
But if the girls were playing singles, there would be nothing in it — they would be perfectly matched. Their throats shine as they grin and shriek. They must have a hundred teeth between them. When the balance and the skill and the timing were being handed out, the sisters were given the same amount of tennis talent. But Lizzyboo definitely got the tits.

The set went to six-six, to the tie-break. Withdrawn and indolent until now, Dink exploded with a horrible competence, lunging from tramline to tramline to poach his volleys, beetling backwards on tiptoe for the whorfing overheads. He came on all masterful with Hope: hand on shoulder for the jock-intimate huddles between each point, and the approving, the legitimizing pat of his rackethead on her rump. Also, to my fascination, he started thinking it would be good if he gunned for Guy at the net. Lizzyboo's short second serve would kick up in girlish invitation, and there would be Dink, wriggling into his ravenous wind-up, cocking every muscle to drill that yellow bullet into Guy's waiting mouth. And Guy never flinched. He fell over two or three times, and one ball scorched his hairline; but he didn't back off. He just got to his feet and apologized. At six-zero Dink aced Lizzyboo with shameless savagery, and then half-turned, his mouth white and tight and starkly crenellated, as he cuffed the spare ball toward my chair. Nobody takes a set off the South African number seven. Nobody. Unless of course he's the South African number six. That asshole. It didn't occur to him that Lizzyboo and Hope and Guy would be pretty good at tennis too, if they did
nothing else the whole time.

Lizzyboo came and stood beside me and laid a hot head on my shoulder. I commiserated. Hope sat with Dink. Guy sat alone. He sat alone staring straight ahead with a towel across his knees . . . Of course, Lizzyboo had a thing with Dink, some time ago. And there is this sexual plagiarism which operates between the two sisters. Lizzyboo had a thing with Dink. And it didn't work out.

And it won't work out with me either. Pretty soon she will start wondering what is wrong with her. She will become ashamed. Aren't people amazing? I guess I ought to come clean. But I can't. I don't want it to get around. I'll just have to tell her that I love another.

This feels terrible. She rests her head on my shoulder. I should be taking powerful drags of her toasty sweat, her life vapours. Instead, I avert my jaw. This feels terrible, like a mean parody of love. On the tennis court, I notice, Dink says
nothing
instead of
love.
Fifteen-nothing. Nothing-thirty. Even on the tennis court love has gone; even on the tennis court love has been replaced by nothing.

I've started reading books to little Kim. They're about the only books I can manage these days. She's interested, and seems to concentrate, particularly when she's lulled by her bottle.

When she drinks from her bottle she sounds like someone winding a watch. She's winding a watch, against her future time.

'How I wish — how I wish, Nicola, that I could share your confidence, your belief that all will yet be well.' 'Yes, it's nice to have such a rosy view of things.' 'I've got to run. Or go, anyway. Listen. This is somewhat embarrassing.' 'For you or for me?' There are two things I need from you — from the horse's mouth. First off, could you get Keith to unbutton a little. I need his P.O.V.' 'His what?' 'His point of view. I'm not sure he knows what "discretion" really means. He still sings, but it cramps his style. Lift the D-notice a little. Just tell him to shut up around Guy.' 'Okay. Consider it fixed.' 'Great.' 'That's not embarrassing. What's the other thing?'

I dropped my head. Then I raised it and said, 'Your kisses. It would help if I knew how you kissed.'

She laughed recklessly. Then she gathered herself up from the chair and came forward.

I held up a finger. 'This isn't a pitch or anything.'

'No no. My stuff doesn't work on you. Isn't that right?'

'That's right. Come on. You kissed Keith.'

'After a fashion.'

'And I figure you'll kiss Guy next time.'

'Absolutely. But wouldn't this be a dangerous precedent? I mean, where's it going to end?'

'So you'll be going further. With both of them. Of course. How far? All the way. Where else. Relax,' I said. 'Sexually I'm dead already. Sexually I'm Postman Pat. I just need a couple of pointers for the next chapter.'

'Can't you make
anything
up? All this literalism. You know, it's the death of love.'

'You needn't worry. You won't catch my fatal disease.'

'Why would
I
care?'

We were standing there with our force fields touching. I felt nothing in the heart but my face had begun to tremble. 'Go on,' I said. 'Give me a kiss.'

She placed her wrists on my shoulders. She shrugged and said, 'Which one?'

I get back late and the goddamned pipes are at full throttle. Such moronic bugling — I think of Guy's cock or rooster, Guy's
gallo,
so far away, so long ago. I walk at speed around the apartment with my hands pressed over my ears. Christ, is the whole
house
dying?

Oh, the pipes, and their brute pain. I hear you. I hear you, brother. Brother, I
hear
you.

I
N THE CONCORDANCE of Nicola Six's kisses there were many subheads and subsections, many genres and phyla — chapter and verse, cross-references, multiple citations. The lips were broad and malleably tremulous, the tongue was long and powerful and as sharp-pronged as a sting. That mouth was a deep source, a deep source of lies and kisses. Some of the kisses the mouth dispensed were evanescent, unrecallable, the waft or echo of a passing butterfly (or its ghost, hovering in the wrong dimension). Others were as searching and detailed as a periodontal review: you came out from under them entirely plaque-free. The Rosebud, the Dry Application, Anybody's, Clash of the Incisors, Repulsion, the Turning Diesel, Mouthwash, the Tonsillectomy, Lady Macbeth, the Readied Pussy, Youth, the Needer, the Gobbler, the Deliquescent Virgin. Named like a new line of cocktails or the transient brands of Keith's perfumes: Scandal, Outrage . . . Named like the dolls and toys — the rumour and voodoo — of an only child.

One kiss was especially tricky (it resisted description — it resisted everything), featuring as it did two apparent opposites: passionate demurral and outright inexorability. You had to fix things so that your partner, or opponent, felt your desperate reluctance even as your lips homed in on his. Halfway between the Needer and the Deliquescent Virgin, it was particularly handy after fights, or when you wanted to turn a man around again within the space of a few seconds (out of decrepit satiation it snatched shocking renewal). This was the kiss she would bestow on Guy Clinch. Looming forward, he would enfold her with his height. She would blink up at him in adorable distress — a distress not altogether feigned, because she did pity him the torments that were destined to come his way. With this kiss, you didn't move your feet but it felt like tiptoe. A straining aspiration in the breast, while the mouth, if it could, seemed to want to turn and hide. But it couldn't. Now overseen by an invisible interaction, their lips would inch closer. The kiss was called the Wounded Bird.

Physically, it was among her mildest. At the other end of the escalation ladder — intense, athletic, hard core — was a kiss she seldom used: unforgivably, it was called the Jewish Princess. Nicola learned it from a pornographic film she had seen long ago in Barcelona, but its associations all lay elsewhere. Rich, vulgar, young, plump, effortlessly multiorgasmic and impossibly avid: a squanderer's kiss, the kiss of an impossible self-squanderer. Whereas, in the Wounded Bird, the tongue was conspicuous only by its shimmering absence (that butterfly again, caught in a screened chamber), the Jewish Princess was
all
tongue — and not its tip but its trunk, its meat: brute tongue. Here, the tongue did duty for every organ, male and female, the heart included. Such a kiss was more a weapon than a wand; a weapon of the exponential kind (one that called upon the speed of light), because it was almost unusably powerful. The Jewish Princess was
inordinate.
Applied at the right moment, it made a man kneel on the floor with his chequebook in his hands. Applied at the wrong moment (and Nicola could certainly pick these wrong moments), it could finish a love affair in half a minute: the man would be backing towards the door, and staring, one hand raised, and the sleeve pressed to his lips. 'I'm sorry — don't go,' she once said. 'I didn't mean it: it was an accident.' No use. To achieve the Jewish Princess you brought your tongue out to its full extent and let it rest on the lower lip
before the kiss began.
Thus the kiss, when it came, was from the second mouth.

The kiss was called the Jewish Princess — unforgivably. But then the kiss itself was unforgivable. The Jewish Princess was unforgivable.

And what about a kiss for Keith ? What about a smacker for the kisser of Keith Talent?

When he came in that time — tabloid wedged under armpit, winded jeans, wall-eyed hangover
—
Nicola couldn't help it. She made herself huge and bristled above him saying,

'You know the iron and the coffee-grinder and the vacuum-cleaner you had fixed?'

'. . .Yeah?'

'Well they've
all gone
wrong again.'

Keith stared back at her, the dry tongue waiting on the lower teeth.

Nicola waited, too, until the itch, the heat-flash, the eczema of detestation had passed through her and moved on somewhere else. Then she changed: she made herself small. She could be big and she could be small but mostly she was big and when things went wrong they went wrong on a big scale. Bath overflows, heavy tumbles, broken beds.

'Yeah well it's the way of the fucking world innit. Jesus. I come up here . . .'

She made herself small. She compressed her body into the gamesome folds of her pinstriped suit. She clasped her hands. She dropped her head — so that she could peer up at him as she gently said,

'Poor you. You're hungover. All that celebrating, I should think, from your darts. Well, you deserve it.' She reached out to help him off with his electric-blue windcheater, promising him a nice spicy Bullshot. 'Believe me,' she said, 'it's the best thing.'

Nicola halved the lemon, opened the can of consommé, ground the pepper, poured the vodka. Every now and then she looked at him as she worked, shaking her head and whispering to herself. Her project had been to get through men — to get to the end of men. And what did that leave her with? There he sat at the table, fiercely frowning over his paper, as if it were a route-map, guiding him to buried treasure. The round and hairless forearms lay flat on either margin. You could end the thing now: by going over and whisking it out from under his gaze. Keith would kill for his tabloid. Any day.

'Seychelles,' he said, impermissibly, as she placed the glass six inches from his fat right hand. Unable to do more for the moment, Nicola effaced herself, standing at the corner table and looking down blindly at her diary. Heat scattered through her. 'Bali,' he added . . . She had a question ready: to do with darts. In a silent trauma of contempt, broken only by the occasional incredulous cackle, Nicola had been watching the darts on television. A twenty-stone man threw a twenty-gram nail at a lump of cork, while the crowd screamed for blood. Tiddlywinks in a bearpit. This was some destiny.

Anyway she asked the question, and he answered it; then she moved up behind him and looked over his shoulder. The centre pages of Keith's tabloid were devoted to tabloid-sized photographs of the movie-star Burton Else and his bride Liana. Big Liana wore a small bikini. Burton Else wore some kind of thong or opaque condom. His head, no larger than an avocado, blazed out above an inverted pyramid of organ meat. The accompanying text concerned itself with the Elses' marriage agreement: damage-limitation for Burton, in the event of a divorce.

'Burton Else, innit,' said Keith, with what seemed to be a touch of pride. 'And Liana.'

'They come and they go,' said Nicola. 'Every few years the world feels the need for another male literalist.'

'Pardon?'

'I wonder how many million she gets a year,' Nicola continued, 'for going along with the notion that he isn't a faggot.'

Could anything surprise Nicola? Was she surprisable? One wonders. Keith now half-turned to her slowly, all patience lost, gone, as if she'd been bugging him for hours and
this was it.

'Him?' he said loudly. 'Burton Else? Fuck off.'

She took a step backwards, away from this. Then she folded her arms and said, 'An obvious and well-known faggot. A celebrated faggot.'

Keith's eyes closed longsufferingly (give him strength).

She said, 'Come on. I mean, who cares, but look at his face. On top of that body? She deserves the money. It must be a full-time job looking the other way.'

'Not Burton Else. Not Burton.'

Nicola wondered how far she ought to go with this. It was, in fact, common knowledge about Burton Else. Anyone who followed the movies knew about Burton Else (and Nicola followed them closely). It was even clear from the trades: constant static between certain pressure groups and the studio lawyers. Yes, it was common knowledge about Burton: but not as common as the
other
knowledge about him, the big-screen and video knowledge, which said how much he loved his country and his women and his machine-guns. Burton had a new wife in every film (before she got slain by samurai or Red Indians or Guatemalans, or some other band of intellectuals): how these blondes adored their Burton, how they oiled and ogled him, and encouraged him with his bodybuilding! Christ, thought Nicola, hasn't everyone caught on by now? (She was intrigued by the homosexual world, but finally disapproved of it, because she was excluded from it.) The workout king, the erection lookalike: however fearless and patriotic you made him, however many wives and Bibles and three-foot Bowie knives you gave him, he still belonged to locker rooms, cuboid buttocks, testosterone hotels.

'Burton Else's a happily married man,' said Keith. 'He loves his wife. Loves the woman. Do anything for her.'

Nicola waited, thinking about love, and watching the dull invitation to violence subside in Keith's eyes.

'Camera don't lie like. That last film he was always giving her one. She wasn't complaining, no way. She said nobody did it quite like Burton.'

'Yeah,' said Nicola, and leant forward with her hands on the table like a teacher, 'and he probably had to stagger into his trailer or his bungalow to throw up between takes. He's a fruit, Keith. And as I said, who cares ? Don't worry. It does your masculinity credit that you can't see it. It takes one to know one. And you aren't one, are you Keith.'

'No danger,' he said automatically. Then for a few seconds he blinked steadily on a heartbeat rhythm. And his face creased in childish unhappiness. 'But if . . . but then . . . but he . . .'

Film, Keith,
she could have said.
Film. All that not real. Not real.

It was six o'clock precisely, though, and the telephone rang, right on the button, and Nicola smiled ('This is a tape'), and did her thing with Guy.

Later, after her own film show, as she escorted a hugely, an almost speechlessly gratified Keith to the stairs, as she prepared to usher him out into the wind and the rain, Nicola said reflectively, strollingly (her hands in the trouser pockets of the pluming suit),

'He's a romantic, remember. So work on that. Tell him I'm pale and drawn. Tell him I sit by the window, sighing. Tell him I finger the beautiful globe, and ruefully smile, and turn away. You know the sort of stuff. In your own style, Keith, of course.'

'Jack Daniels.'

It seemed now that she would finally have to kiss him. Well, he asked for it. Nicola felt a noise, a soft rearrangement, go off inside her, something like a moan — one of those tragic little whimpers, perhaps, that thwarted lovers are said to emit. She breathed deep and leaned down and offered Keith the Rosebud: fish mouth, the eyes thankfully closed. 'Mah,' she said when it was over (and it lasted half a second). 'Patience, Keith. You'll find with me,' she said, 'that when it rains, it
pours. Look!’

Jack and the Beanstalk.
How the young legs sped up into the purple tunic. And the impetuous, the life-loving smile!

'Jim Beam. Benedictine.
Porno.'

'What?
'

'Porno.
It's this drink. You get it down the Golgotha. Or by the case from the bloke at BestSave. Dead cheap, cause it's been nicked
twice
.'

'. . . Run along, Keith.'

'Yeah cheers.'

She came back into the sitting-room and, seeing a patch of brief and sudden sunlight on the sofa, flopped herself down in it, her limbs outstretched, like a dark star. Nicola's round tummy pushed upwards three or four times as she laughed — in helpless exasperation. Yes, all right. Porno: porno. Yes of course. If you must. Surprisingly, Nicola disliked pornography, or she disliked its incursion into her own lovelife. Because it was so limited, because there was no emotion in it (it spoke straight to the mental quirk), and because it stank of money. But she could do pornography. It was easy.

A performing artist, a bullshit artist, something of a piss artist, and a considerable sack artist, she was also an
artist
;
and although she knew exactly where she wanted to go, she didn't always know exactly how she was going to get there. You could never admit this, however, even to yourself. You had to make the mind shoot like a puck over all that creaky ice. You trusted your instinct, or you were dead. She laughed again, with a brisk snort that had her stretching for the paper tissues (now who planned that — who planned that burst bubble of humorous mucus?), as she remembered the killer line she had laid on Guy Clinch. 'There's just one other thing: I'm a virgin.' A
virgin.
Oh,
yeah.
Nicola had never said those words before, even when she had the chance: twenty years ago, in that little gap between finding out what it meant and ceasing to be one. She had never said it when it was true (especially not then. And would it have made much odds to the drunken Corsican in his mag-strewn boiler room, beneath the hotel at Aix-en-Provence?). 'I'm a virgin.' But there was a first time for everything.

The joke was, the real joke was . . . she had come close — she had come
that
close — to muffing her big line. She almost said something that would have wrecked the whole performance. Really, the actress training was a liability in real life: if you're the dramatic type anyway, then
don't
go to Drama School. Because the associations of the moment, the tears, the indignation, the extremity, had prompted another line, another lie, one she had delivered pretty well routinely throughout her teens and twenties, in ultimatum form, on the crest of various rages, various dissolutions. She almost said: 'There's just one other thing: I'm pregnant.' Whoops! Now that would have been quite bad. No coming back from there. 'I'm pregnant.'
Those
words, at least, had fairly often consorted with the truth. She didn't go on about it or anything, internally or otherwise, but she acknowledged the scar tissue of her seven abortions.