London Fields (26 page)

G
UY SAT AT the kitchen table and gazed, with steady incomprehension, at his veal: its pallor, its puddled beach of juice. He had cooked the dinner himself, as usual, expressionlessly busying himself with meat-pounder, pasta-shredder, vegetable-slicer. The kitchen was a spotless laboratory of time-saving devices. Time was constantly being saved. But for what? Guy used to enjoy cooking, in the relatively old days, when you did some of it yourself. He liked to cook in an apron, not in a lab-coat. Really, Guy could have made the grade as a proletarian female. He was obedient, industrious and uncomplaining. He had what it took. Now he gazed at his veal and briefly felt the allure of vegetarianism (that friendly black boy in the Black Cross) until his eye fell on the smug pellets of the broad beans, the endlessness of the pasta. The wine, a powerful Burgundy, seemed, at least, non-alien, definitely terrestrial: forgetfulness, the warm south, it said to the juices of his jaw. These schooled juices searched also for another presentiment. For the flavour of reconciliation, perhaps ? No. Of forgiveness. Guy looked up carefully at his wife, who sat across the table consuming her meal in vigorous silence.

A little while later he said,

'I'm sorry?'

'I didn't say anything,' said Hope.

'I'm sorry.'

'Why don't you go to the doctor?'

'No need. Really. I'll be all right.’

'I didn't just mean for your sake . . . So how much more of this do we get?'

'More of what?'

'Of the famished mute. You don't eat anything. And you look like death.'

It was certainly the case that he wasn't eating anything. A literalist (and a rather literary literalist), Guy had eaten awfully little since his last conversation with Nicola Six; in fact his appetite had begun to decline the very day they met, and since their parting (yes: for good — for the best) it had disappeared altogether, just as the woman had disappeared. When he did eat — and the activity wasn't distasteful so much as madly irrelevant — he had to hurry off after a minute with his hand held high. You could then hear him vomiting efficiently in the basement lavatory. What kept him going were his breakfasts — his hearty bowls of MegaBran. He could digest his MegaBran because (or so he often thought) the thick, dark, all-fibre cereal was precisely one stage away from human shit in the first place. MegaBran was on a chemical knife-edge between cereal and human shit. Guy wondered whether MegaBran shouldn't rename itself HumanShit: the lettering could be done wavily and mistily, to suggest an imminently dawning reality. One drop of saliva was all MegaBran needed. Marmaduke, who adored spitting on people's food, had once successfully spat into a full packet of MegaBran. The results had been spectacular
—
though it ought to be said that Marmaduke's saliva had often shown itself to possess surprising and maleficent properties . . . Not so long ago Guy would have thoughtlessly chopped a banana into his morning bowl of MegaBran; but now he was overwhelmed by the reek of the potassium enhancement. Everyone hated MegaBran. Everyone ate it. Hope couldn't bear cooking or even being in the kitchen but she was intensely strict and vigilant about everything everyone ate.

Guy poured more wine and said in a puzzled voice, 'Can't bear that noise.'

'I know. How does he do it?'

'Can't we turn him down a bit?'

'No. I'm listening for the phlegm.'

They were alone tonight. But they were not alone. Marmaduke was present, in electronic form: the twin screens of the closed-circuit TV system shook and fizzed to his rage. There were twin screens in most rooms, on every floor. Sometimes the house felt like an aquarium of Marmadukes. Guy thought of all the video equipment in Nicola's apartment (what use did she have for it?) and then thought of his own, of how he and his wife had gamely wrestled with the webbing and the pistol-grips in the months after Marmaduke was born, gathering footage of Marmaduke screaming his head off in the playpen, Marmaduke screaming his head off in the park, Marmaduke screaming his head off in the swimming-pool. They soon stopped bothering. After all, there was so little difference between the home movie and the closed-circuit monitor, which gave them Marmaduke screaming his head off twenty-three hours a day as it was. And when the twin screens weren't giving it to them (two different angles of Marmaduke screaming his head off), Marmaduke was giving it to them: live.

Now, against the background of the child's obscure agonies, a tremendously long silence gathered. This silence was shaped like a tunnel. It seemed to Guy that there was no way out of it, none at all — except full confession. Or this:

'We could have another child,' he said, staring seriously at his wife.

'. . . Are you out of your mind?'

Guy's eyebrows lifted and he resettled himself like a moody pupil. It was true that they had been most gravely advised — on many different occasions, in many different clinics and consulting rooms, in Geneva, in Los Angeles, in Tokyo — to renounce the possibility of a second child, or to delay it indefinitely, or at any rate until Marmaduke was at least fourteen (by which time Hope, besides, would be fifty-one). The billionaire specialists and Nobel Laureate child-psychiatrists had always warned of the disturbing effect on Marmaduke if a little newcomer should succeed him. None had been heartless enough to suggest that the second child might be just like the first.

'What if it's just like Marmaduke?' said Hope.

'Don't
say
that. My God. What's he doing now?'

'He's trying to make himself sick.'

'But he's got his whole fist down there.'

'He won't manage it.'

Guy looked at Hope — surprised, heartened.

'He threw up his tea long ago. And his milk and cookies. His only hope now is with the phlegm.'

'He wasn't sick after lunch. Can't bear that noise. Or was he?'

'Yeah — he slimed Melba. Then he bit Phoenix on the tongue. Quite far back. I hope she wasn't letting him French-kiss her again.'

Guy uneasily reviewed Hope's policy about Marmaduke and kissing. Members of the staff were allowed to kiss Marmaduke. But only Hope was allowed to French-kiss him.

'I had to call Terry.'

'Terry!'

Even more uneasily Guy thought of Terry — his platform shoes, his brutal singlet. 'I hate Terry.'

'So do
I
. He's strictly last-resort. And even he looked pretty shaken.'

Guy looked down and gave a smile — not of affection but of wonder. He loved Marmaduke. He would joyfully die for Marmaduke. He would die for Marmaduke, not next week, not tomorrow, but now, right now. He loved Marmaduke despite the clear sense, constantly refreshed, that Marmaduke had no lovable qualities. Marmaduke gave no pleasure to anyone except when he was asleep. When he was asleep, you could gaze down at him and thank the Lord that he wasn't awake.

'Oh yes,' said Hope. 'Lady Barnaby. She's been struck dumb.'

'Literally?'

'Yup. Since she got back. Shock.'

'That's terrible.'

'You know what you look like?' said Hope. 'A hermit.'

Guy shrugged and looked away. He didn't seem to mind the comparison. But then he looked back again: Hope was staring at him with concentration. He feared this stare. He readied himself.

'Not a hermit who lives in a cottage,' she went on slowly. 'In the Orkneys or wherever. I mean the kind of hermit who lives in a hotel in Las Vegas. A sordid maniac with lots of money who never goes out. The kind of person who has a "shrine" in his bedroom for some fat dead moviequeen.'

He had kept up with the Cambodia thing — with the remote and groping search for Little Boy and En Lah Gai: the displaced persons. Making his calls each morning at the office (it was his only reason for going in), Guy was by now on first-name terms with various contacts — various telephonic entities — at the American Refugee Committee, the British Refugee Council and the UN Border Relief Operation. His limp fingers regularly sought his brow as he sat there and listened to the war stories. Guy had grown up in the age of mediated atrocity; like everyone else, he was exhaustively accustomed to the sad arrangements, the pathetic postures of the dead. But you couldn't see Cambodia, the torturee nation, whose redoubling sufferings took place behind a black curtain or a slammed door. This darkness seemed to have a pornographic effect on the concerned imagination. You just couldn't escape the excitement in the voices that told tales of Cambodia. Guy himself had been sent copies of the satellite photographs and seen the death silhouette: the diagrammatic honeycomb was evidently a landscape, a wide horizon of human skulls. He too felt the excitement, the rush of boyish manliness, which in his case soon subsided into a distant nausea. The satellite massacres: human death as a god might see it. Guy's faith, a feebly gleaming heirloom (a locket, perhaps, that once belonged to his dead mother), was much tarnished for a while by the clear impossibility of anything surviving such a thorough subtraction of the human body. Take life away, and all you have is the anatomical torment of a single skull. 'I was there all through the Eighties,' one of the telephone ghosts roared at him (he was an American from UNBRO), bringing him messages from the other side. 'I have an image for you. You all set?' The voice was eager, greedy. 'A child's prosthetic foot, in a flipflop, marching to war. That's Cambodia, pal.' Guy nodded quickly, in placation. 'And there's no way out.'

Though of course, as always, there was a way out, it transpired — there
was
one way out . . . Guy had persuaded himself that he wasn't making a hobby of Cambodia. But this research of his remained in some sense a labour of love, a romantic duty, a means of thinking about Nicola in relative and arguable guiltlessness. No denying that a fantasy was being quietly and queasily unspooled. Guy would mount the stairs of her house (against a background of flags and bunting), coolly shepherding the two shy figures; Nicola would be ready on the top landing, her hands tightly clasped, with beautifully viscous tears on her cheeks. How the laughter of En Lah Gai would nervously sound as warming broth was prepared in the small kitchen! How the eyes of Little Boy would burn — would burn with unforgettable fire! And down there at hip height Nicola's fingers would entwine his own in fond conspiracy . . .

Even Guy could tell that there was something wrong with this motion picture, something awful, something aesthetically disastrous. The scene would have a livid colour, the music would roll along in its corrupt or sinister gaiety, the dialogue would feel dubbed, and the actors would simper like charmless children on the brink of being found out. Again the word pornography came to mind: to Guy's mind, where there wasn't anywhere there wasn't any pornography. None at all? No, not really. There had been those occasions (increasingly frequent, until his operation) when a nurse holding a test-tube like a glass condom had disgustedly ushered him into a curtained room equipped with 'books' — torn heaps of men's magazines. Guy had turned the strange pages (in the end he relied on his wallet photograph of Hope). And there was the sprinkling of stag films he had been obliged to watch half of during business trips to Hong Kong and other eastern Mammons. Always there came a terrible moment, in between the carnal sections, when the cast stood around pretending to be interesting with all their clothes on, just like proper actors and actresses, obeying a properly inventive director, in a proper film. The imposture seemed to be doubly shaming for everyone, including the viewer. Even Guy could tell that his interest in Nicola Six and his interest in Indochina did not sit well together (with a wag of the head he thought of a plump pinup he had once seen, fondling a piece of hardware in a weapons brochure). Love and war — love and historical forces — did not sit well together.

Besides, his musings were on the whole dreadfully tender and tentative. His dreams, which appeared to emanate from the pool of warm pressure in his chest, all followed adolescent storylines of surveillance, custodianship, brilliant rescue (rowing boats, a car's flat tyre magically repaired and replaced). He thought of her always, even at moments of sudden stress in the office or the nursery; her face was like a curlicue floating in his peripheral vision. Daily, cosynchronously, he dogged her through her day, her waking, her light breakfast, her idealized toilet — and so on. He thought of his thoughts as explorers, in virgin territory. Of course, he didn't know how much male thought had already gone into Nicola Six, those millions of man hours; he didn't know that every square inch of her had been
ransacked
by men's thoughts . . . Sometimes, to buy his weekly packet of cigarettes (or an extra daily paper), he went to the shop near where she lived. As if round a doorway he bent and peered up the dead-end street. Seen through eyes of love, how fiercely she would have illumined the ordinary prospect: the trees already leafless in September, two builders eating Scotch eggs on a stoop, a dead cloud collapsing into the fog of dark rain. This day Guy straightened his dirty mack with a smile of pain, and walked back and round to the Black Cross.

Keith was standing by the fruit machine, contentedly picking his teeth with a dart — or with the
point
of a dart, as Guy had learned to distinguish
(flight, shaft, barrel, point),
after a few of his early darting solecisms had been menacingly corrected, here in the Black Cross. Guy found that he was glad to see Keith, and took comfort also from the damp lineaments of the ruined pub. Conspicuous elsewhere, his own colourlessness easily merged with the circumambient grey. The white people in here were black-and-white people, monochrome, like World War II footage. Like World War I footage. Guy thought further of the stills that form the countdown to an elderly movie:
6
, +
,
5, *, blank, clapperboard; and the white areas of the screen grained with dust and nostril hairs, like the whites of soiled eyes. Keith always made Guy think of eyes.

'Fucking sickening. It disgusts me. No, it does.'

'Absolutely vile.'

'Wicked.'