London Fields (44 page)

K
EITH FROWNED, AND sipped on his cigarette, and read these words:

' AD' 61! thought Keith.

Pensively Keith removed his darts from their purple pouch. Then, with the aid of this same pouch, he dabbed away his tears. A cigarette later, he sat with his pad, his darting diary, on his lap and a biro in his hand. The biro-holding hand waved in the air for a while like a sketcher's. Then he wrote:

A cigarette later, he added:

He resumed his practice session, his darting workout at the oché. The darts thunked into the board. He retrieved them. He threw again. He retrieved them. He threw again. He retrieved them. He threw again . . . Eight cigarettes later, he sat down and wrote:

The darts were thrown, retrieved, thrown again (they thunked into the board), retrieved, and thrown again, and again. The six cigarettes were torched, consumed, ground out on the crackling floor. He threw 26 four times running. A wave of self-pity went through him. No one outside the sport realized just how tragically
hard
it was to throw a dart 5ft 9¼ ins, with clinicism. He paused, and sat, and wrote:

'Good morning to you, Keith.'

Scheme, thought Keith. TV had not prepared him for anything like this. Or scam. 'Good morning ah . . . Miss Six,' said Keith. Load of nonsense.

'Nicola, please! Now just sit in your normal place and I'll be with you in a minute. Coffee?'

Basically, Michael, I'm just the sort of guy who just likes to meet up with his mates down the pisser. Down the drinker. Down the pub. Basically I just drink to relax. To relax? To
relax
?
thought Keith, and saw himself (last night, 3 a.m.) on his knees in the garage with a bottle
of porno
in either hand. Gracelessly Keith sat himself down on the sofa (he was thoroughly out of sorts). Earlier instructed by Nicola not to look at the camera, he looked at it anyway, through his low lids: on the little bookcase there, its twin red lights unkindly glowing. Keith rocked with the pulse of a contained cough or burp or retch, then lit a cigarette. Here she comes. Nicola wore a checked grey suit, squarely cut, and flat black shoes; her hair was swept up from her lightly painted face, the bun rich and grained and gordian. Looks the part all right, you could say (there was even an apple on the table). Schoolmarm outfit innit.

'Why don't we begin', she said, 'with Keats's "Bright Star"?'

'Yeah cheers.'

'Page eighty-six. It is five lumps, isn't it, Keith.’

86, thought Keith. Treble 18, double 16. Or you could go bull, double 18. Darts.

'Now.' Nicola settled herself erectly at his side. Humming somewhere just beneath their hearing threshold, the video camera was positioned to Nicola's rear, over her shoulder, catching Keith in profile as he turned towards her grimly. She didn't really look like a schoolmarm. At that moment Nicola crossed her legs with a lift of the skirt and briefly shivered her rump into the cushion. On TV more like a Mother Superior who gets up to things. Or the dog in the office in the touching romantic comedy: take her glasses off and she's a goer. The skirt had a slit in it, or a fold, like a kilt.

'Keith? Why don't you take us through it.'

'You what?'

'Read it out loud. Use mine. Come a little closer.'

'Bright,' said Keith, 'bright — star!' He jolted, apparently rather taken aback by the exclamation mark. 'Would . . . I would I were
—
'

'Would I were steadfast,' whispered Nicola.

'As . . .'

'Thou.'

'Art.' Keith wiped his toiling brow. 'Not in lone, not in lone splendour.' He coughed: a single bark from the dog within. 'Pardon. Splendour hung aloft the night — and watching, with, with
eternal
lids, apart, like —'

'You seem to be reading one word at a time. As if you're lassoing it with your tongue. When was it you learned to read?'

Keith's open mouth went square. 'Yonks,' he said.

'Go on.'

'Er, like nature's . . . patient, sleepless . . .'

'Eremite. Hermit. Recluse. And 'patient' has the sense of
devout,
Keith.'

'The moving. Jesus. At their . . .'

'At their priestlike task of pure ablution round earth's human shores,' said Nicola; and as she read on she opened up her skirt to the waist (and Keith could see the sheer of the stockings, the interesting brown flesh, the white silken prow):

. . . Well, Keith?'

'Yeah?'

'So what does it mean? Take your time.'

Keith read the poem again. Two vertical worms of concentration formed in the centre of his forehead. The letters on the page seemed as unanswerable, as crammed with silent quiddity, as the impurities in his own eyes. Keith moved through an awful dream of missed connexions, sudden disappearances, horrendous voids. He wondered if he had ever suffered so. Three or four minutes later, when he thought he might actually be about to lose consciousness, Keith felt words fighting their way to the surface and the air.

'There's this star,' Keith began.

'Yes?'

'And', Keith concluded, 'he's with this bird.'

'Well that's more or less the size of it. But what is the poet trying to say?'

And Keith might have put an end to everything, right then and there. But now Nicola turned the page: Keith's eyes were presented with an index card with writing on it — her corpulent, generous, feminine hand.

'Now I may not be an educated man,' read Keith, with only a little difficulty. It sounded halting, honest. It sounded good. 'But it seems to me to go against common sense to ask what the poet is "trying to say". The poem isn't a code for something easily understood. The
poem
is what he is trying to say.'

'Bravo, Keith.'

'The lover looks to the star as an image of, of constancy. What Keith — what Keats is expressing here is a yearning to be outside time. Suspended with his fair love. But I think the uh, movement of the poem gives a little twist to that reading. The star is identified with purity. The clean waters. The newly fallen snow. Yet the lover must be bold. He must come down from the heavens, and enter time.'

'Exactly, Keith. The lover knows he cannot escape the human sphere, with all its ecstasy and risk, "Swoon to death": for the Romantics, Keith, death and orgasm are equivalent.’

'Yeah, well, same difference.'

'The first eight lines really are quite beautiful, but I can't help feeling that the sestet is terrible tosh. What now? The Odes? I think not. Let's look at "Lamia" again. It's one of your favourites, isn't it, Keith.' She placed the book on her lap; she talked and read; she turned the pages with long fingers which then trailed across her bare thighs in negligent indication or caress. 'Some demon's mistress, or the demon's self. . . Real are the dreams of Gods . . . Cupid's college . . . Subtle fluid . . . Weird syrups . . . Dear me: all this melting and blushing and fainting and swooning. That purple-lined palace of sweet sin.' Here they encountered another index card, and she smiled at him encouragingly.

'It would seem that Keats,' said Keith, more confidently, 'for all his celebrations of the physical, is not a little coy and uh, evasive, even in the safety of his enchanted forest.'

'A little fearful too. His maiden is a snake in disguise.'

'Exactly,' Keith improvised.

For a while Nicola talked of the life, the
Letters
,
the neglect, the early death. Keith started to enjoy his weighty contributions, his voice becoming deeper, richer, with the imagined power of suddenly talking like this, feeling like this, thinking like this. He even began folding his arms in an authoritative way, and scratching his temple with what remained of the fingernail on his right pinkie.

The story ends in Rome, in 1820.'

1820! thought Keith.

'He was twenty-six.'

Double 13, thought Keith. Not nice. You got three darts better go 10, double 8.

'The son of a rude stablehand, he died in a bitterer obscurity. "Here lies one whose name was writ in water" were the words he wanted engraved on his tomb.'

'It's tragic to reflect,' read Keith huskily, 'that Keats will never know how he lived on in the hearts of his many admirers. Admirers from such different walks of life. Now someone like Guy', Keith went on with a thick and sudden frown, 'clearly has something of the, of the poetic spirit in him. And I honour it. But I myself, in my, in my unschooled way, have also found my life enriched . . .' The index card here said, simply, 'by John Keats'. But Keith felt at this stage that he could do a little better than that. 'Enriched', he said, 'by the plucky little . . . by the . . . talented Romantic whose . . . whose untimely —’

'By John Keats,' said Nicola. The skirt was straightened, the book snapped shut — and, with it, Keith's wordhoard. 'I think that's enough for today, don't you? One final quote, Keith:

Who alive can say,
"Thou art no poet; may'st not tell thy dreams"?
Since every man whose soul is not a clod
Hath visions, and would speak, if he had loved
And been well nurtured in his mother tongue.

And I think you've shown again today, Keith, the truth of those lines.'

Keith took a breath, and longed to soar and sing. But all was silence in his huddled mind. He nodded soberly, and said, 'Yeah cheers.'

She saw him out. On her return she walked through the sitting-room, across the narrow passage and into the bedroom. Guy was sitting primly on the bed, the broad hands palm upwards on his lap. Nicola kissed him on the mouth and held him at arm's length.

'
Now
are you satisfied?'

Guy smiled wanly at the television screen, which showed the sofa's back, the empty room. 'Revelation,' he said. 'I'm sorry. Feeling rather ridiculous and ashamed. I did say it wasn't really necessary. Quite amazing, though. I could hardly believe it. The judgment. The natural critical sense.'

'I told you he was keen.'

'You are good, Nicola.'

Yeah cheers, she almost said, as she took off her coat. 'One has to do what one can.' Tipping her head, she started to unbutton her blouse. 'A funny reason to enter a lady's bedroom for the first time. I don't think I'm quite ready, yet, to swoon to death. But as for your fair love's ripening breast . . . Ripening, indeed. Feel for ever its soft fall and swell. Ooh. I hope your hands are nice and warm.'

'These warm scribes, my hands. Just one thing. I thought you were terribly cruel', he said in a clogged voice, and smiling, 'to poor old Keats.'

John Keith, thought Keith, as he drove away. Top wordsmith, and big in pharmaceuticals. Books: one way to make a fast quid. Breakfast by the pool. Wife in good nick. 'Really, dahling, I got to stop writing them Hollywood scripts and get down to serious writing.' Fucking great study full of leather. Snooker! Jesus. Lady Muck with the schoolmarm skirt round her waist. Wasn't bad. No. In the end I thoroughly enjoyed it. Showed Guy. But an awful old load of old balls. Keith wondered, parenthetically, if Keats had ever played a form of darts.

He moved out into the main road. As he did so he felt a withered agitation in his gut, like the last wing-flickers of a damaged bird. Oi. He felt it in his throat and lungs too — waste, consumption. During one of several long delays Keith picked up the Vodafone and called Petronella. Line disconnected? Hard to tell: he couldn't even hear himself swear for the mind-ripping clamour of a nearby skip-remover. He felt again the coppery friction in his abdomen. It occurred to Keith that he ought to be under the doctor. This wasn't the welcome satyromania of old. It was like a panic attack. And although the spirit was willing — was ravenous, was desperate — the flesh was inexplicably weak. It was taking him ages, every time. He felt sore and ticklish: he thought with a wince of the snails he had killed with salt as a child.

This doubleparking! Keith queued and edged and weaved his way to Ladbroke Grove, and doubleparked in Oxford Gardens. He strolled into CostCheck, nodding to Manjeet. Past dairy products, past toiletries, past videos he whistled his way: an affecting ballad, Spanish, called 'Los Sentimentados'. He stepped aside as a fight got going between an attendant and some kid by the Alkool display, hopping backwards in a practised veronica when a bottle broke, fearful for his flares. Down in the storeroom Keith looked through the split in the hardwood door. Trish Shirt was lying on the ground with one leg hooked up on the cot: the exact-same position in which Keith had left her ten hours ago. Keith's teeth contrived a censorious squeak as saliva moved from lips to tongue. It would take half an hour to slap any sense into her, easy. Another consideration obtained: much earlier that day, as he wrenched off her crammed panties, Keith had been influentially reminded of his dartboard down in the garage, the bit near the treble 20 where there was a big fringed lump due to darting overuse. The modern dartboard, however, whilst known as the bristle board, is not made from animal hair but from vegetable matter; sisal, prepared from the spiny leaves of the agave plant, is imported from Africa, compressed into the requisite shape, backed by chipboard, and finished by screen-colouring and wiring. Innit. The resemblance had excited Keith at the time, but not for long enough; soon, thoughts of power scoring — the ton-forties, the unanswerable maximums - had wrecked his concentration. Now Keith looked at his watch. He went back upstairs, bought a sixpack of Peculiar Brews, and climbed into the Cavalier for the ninety-minute mile to White City and Analiese Furnish, in no mood for any nonsense from Basil.

Keith returned to Windsor House just after six. He stood in the kitchen, as frazzled as London traffic. Invaluable hours of priceless practice had been lost — so many thunks, so many precious retrievals. You couldn't blame Basil: he had absented himself smartly enough, after Keith had taken him aside, man to man, and given him a clip round the ear. It wasn't Analiese's fault either: she had given of her best, and hadn't complained, and Keith had seen for himself the tortured tendons of her jaw. Nah: murder getting home, with the streets full of personnel and Shepherds Bush cordoned off again . . . Kath appeared, holding the baby like a magic shield against him. Keith looked at her expressionlessly, at her tired light. Tomorrow: the Semis. And a considerable dilemma. The match itself Keith regarded, or thought he regarded, with titanic equanimity. What worried him was his choice of guest. In the normal course of things, no problem: Debbee Kensit or Analiese Furnish, showing a cleavage you could park your bike in. But this was a high-profile fixture, prestigious as such. Trish Shirt had got wind of it. And Nicky said she wanted to be there. And even Kath had mumbled something about it if you please.

'Where's my meal.'

'Would you come and look at this, Keith?'

'Jesus. What?'

'It's the TV.'

Keith pushed past her and stopped dead on the brink of the lounge.

'It's the same on every channel.'

Keith peered forwards with his lips moving. The screen said:

This is only a test of the Emergency Broadcast System.
If this had been a Real Emergency,
this would show you which channel to turn to
for the Latest Information.