London Fields (45 page)

'You know something?' said Keith to Kath. 'You scared the fucking life out of me then. Thought the TV was down.' He wagged his head at the screen. 'That's all right. Look. Look! It's back on again now. Where's my meal?'

As Keith contemplated, with relish, his Mexican Chilli and Four Apricot Madeleines, Kath said,

'I went to the library. There's no newspapers.'

He took the tabloid from his armpit. 'What's this then. You gone blind or summing.'

'But they —'

Keith was now staring at his empty teacup. Kath stood, childishly erect, and went next door to put the baby down. She came back and reached across him for the shrouded pot.

'That's not a newspaper.'

His eyes swelled at her warningly.

'There's nothing in it. About the Crisis.'

'Fuck off,' said Keith conversationally. 'They, there's always something about it.' Over the past month Keith had kept himself abreast of the Crisis by sometimes reading the filler that his tabloid sometimes ran at the foot of page fourteen. The little headline varied. YANKS: &@*! or RED NYET or GRRSKI! Or, once, in unusually small type:
TOWELHEAD DEADLOCK.
Keith now turned to page fourteen with a flourish. There was an article by the Slimming Editor on the health of the President's wife. But no filler.

'Nah well. Can't be anything happening then.'

'You think not.'

Keith fell silent. He was immersed in an item about the movie star Burton Else. Burton's aides utterly refuted the rumour that Burton was bisexual. Since the mysterious death of his young wife, Burton had been entirely occupied in his attempts to make contact with Liana beyond the grave. By way of illustration there were two photographs, one of Burton, one of Liana, both topless.

'They say they'll —'

Keith dashed his knife and fork on to the tabletop and got to his feet. 'Look mind your own fuckin business okay? Jesus, you call yourself a wife I got a fuckin semi-final tomorrow night and you're giving me this crap? Sticking your fuckin oar in. Come on Clive, no point staying in here. Get to work. Come on Clive. Come on me old mate.
Jesus
.'

The baby was awake. But she wasn't crying. Her eyes glittered.

At nine o'clock in the Black Cross, Keith downed his darts and downed his drink and went out the back to the phone. It took ages for Manjeet to get Trish to come to the stockroom.

'Been cancelled,' said Keith perfunctorily.

'Why?'

'Question-mark over me fitness innit.'

'What?'

'Sidelined with a finger injury innit.'

'What happened? She cross her legs?'

'Shut it.'

'I'm coming anyway.'

'Free country innit,' said Keith, more or less truthfully for once.

'You coming round later?'

Keith hung up without saying maybe. Back in the bar he saw Guy.

'Cheers, Keith.'

'Hello, mate.'

Keith felt something he didn't feel often: embarrassment. Or rather he would have felt it
—
embarrassment
—
if he'd had the leisure. In truth Keith was seldom bothered by embarrassment: a book called
Keith and Embarrassment
would be a short book, trailing off after two or three pages . . . He looked up. Guy was gazing at him with an expression of pitying fondness.

'Demands,' said Keith. 'You got commitments. All these demands. On your time . . .'

Guy was nodding.

The big occasion,' said Keith, flexing his darting finger. 'You dig deep.'

Guy kept on nodding. He seemed ready to accede to any proposition Keith might put forward.

The big occasion.
That's
what I respond to. You coming tomorrow night? Course you are. Yeah well could you do me a favour, mate?'

'Sure.'

'See: I can't. Bring Nicky.'

'Sure.'

'Nicola. See: I can't.' They leaned back for a moment with their elbows on the bar, like equals. Then Keith said absently, 'I'm up to here in minge.'

The bent copper, John Dark, came over. John Dark — the iffy filth. Keith bought the drinks: he owed Dark some money for settling the Thelonius business. More nonsense. Thelonius's name had popped out of the DNA computer smartly enough. But then, so had Keith's. Careless work: saliva on the pork pie crumbs. Keith would do a lot for pork pies, Keith would do a lot in the name of pork pies; but going to prison for them, he reckoned, was well beyond the call . . . The three men spent half an hour calking about the difficulties Rangers were having in asserting themselves up front and translating their aerial superiority into goals. Then the conversation moved on to the depressing attendance figures for the early months of the season. Dark said, with his permanent cheerfulness,

'It breaks your heart. And it could get worse. This morning, what comes up on the screens? Contingency plans. Partial evacuation of Central London.'

Keith looked sideways. Guy looked downwards.

'Where would Rangers be then, eh?' Dark laughed. 'This lot? Shift this little lot? They must be fucking
dreaming.
'

Shakespeare put his head through the door and gestured. Keith made his excuses. Outside, Big Dread was standing under the lamppost, with Truth. They all huddled round as he unfolded a section of newspaper and bore its contents to the light.

'That them?' said Keith.

'That them all right,' said Truth.

'They the right kind?'

'From the gym,' said Big Dread. 'Anabolic innit.'

'It won't give me tits or nothing?'

'Never,' said Truth. 'Enhance your darts innit.'

'How much each?'

It was, of course, his darts he had in mind. But Keith took one steroid there and then (saving the other two for the following morning, on Truth's non-committal instructions), and went off to try it out on Trish Shirt.

Just before noon the next day Guy left Lizzyboo in the kitchen, where she was wordlessly eating corn on the cob, and wandered up the stairs and into the hall, nodding, now and then to a half-familiar nanny or au-pair. In the second drawing-room he went and stared without avidity at the whisky and brandy in their crystal tantalus. Next door, in the first drawing-room, so broad, so under-used, he tried music, something unstrenuous, something he knew well (the Concerti Grossi), and decided, after a few minutes, and to his amazement, that the piece no longer interested him. On his way up the stairs he saw another new nanny, dark-skinned, exotic, serenely slovenly. There had been a tacit relaxation of the rule about pretty nannies. Indeed, when the heat was up and the low sun filled the windows, the place had an air of luxurious ill fame: languid, antebellum. These nannies had come on the market suddenly over the last two or three weeks, and Hope had snapped them all up. At a time like this, Guy thought (but there had never been a time like this), young girls might feel an atavistic urge to get inside a big house. Inside a big cave.

Hope was in the bedroom, at the dressing-table, brushing her hair. Every time he encountered her now he saw their past life together flash by, as if their marriage were a person fatally drowning. He managed to take a little low comfort in the spectacle of her tennis gear. Dink had not been as much around as one might have liked.

'You're playing?' he said. 'With Dink?'

'No courts until six. What's the matter with everyone? Why aren't they working?'

'No one's working. Have you noticed? Building sites and everything . . . Is Lizzyboo pregnant?'

She turned to him: an intelligent oval in which indignation and coldness were equally represented.

'I only wondered. Not just her size but the way she eats. Cravings. She's eating corn on the cob down there. She had about nine in three minutes. I was put in mind of an electric typewriter.'

'It's just her way of dealing with it. Eating's okay, you know. You should try it.'

Guy was leaning against the doorpost with his hands in his pockets. He looked down the corridor. 'Did he have a nap last night ? Anyway. He's stirring,' said Guy, unnecessarily, because you could hear Marmaduke's unfaltering roar and the ever-surprising violence of his rocking cot. 'Has he been out today? I thought I might stroll him.'

'The girls will take him out back.'

'I'd like to. What? No, I would.' This was of course a grotesque untruth. But Guy had need of a telephone. Not to call Nicola, whom he was seeing that night (he would squire her to the darts). No: to call Richard at the office. He had spoken to Richard at length and with urgency three times already that day and didn't want to alarm the household further. That was another thing about deception: your black lies made your white lies darker. Your stars were all dimming in heaven.

'Do you think it's really safe out there?'

'Oh, it's all right.'

He was now faced with the task of equipping Marmaduke for the outside world — of dressing him entirely, from soup to nuts, with the child throwing all he had at him every inch of the way. In the nursery Guy took off Marmaduke's nappy and despairingly wedged him into the potty. 'Are you going to make a present for daddy?' he asked, again quite hopelessly. Twenty minutes later, following Marmaduke's reliable failure to make a present for daddy, Guy wrestled him into nappy-liner, nappy, nappy pants, vest, shirt, trousers, socks, shoes, jumper and, downstairs, anorak, gloves, face mask, bobble hat, scarf. As he was dragging him towards the front door and reaching out to free the double lock, Marmaduke 'went supervoid', in the local phrase (the phenomenon usually marked the end of Marmaduke's experiments in week-long, white-lipped constipation). The child, in other words, had swamped himself in ordure. When Guy unravelled Marmaduke's scarf he saw that some of it was even peeping over the collar of his shirt. In the nursery again Guy wrestled him out of bobble hat, face mask, gloves, anorak, jumper, shoes, socks, trousers, shirt, vest, nappy pants, nappy and nappy-liner, waved away the game but gagging nannies, hosed Marmaduke down in the master bathroom, and wrestled him back into nappy-liner, nappy, nappy pants, vest, shirt, trousers, socks, shoes, jumper, anorak, gloves, face mask, bobble hat and scarf. During these struggles, Marmaduke's lifelong enthusiasm for hurting his father
—
and, within that, his specialization in hurting his father's genitals — was given play only twice. A flying headbutt to the testicles, and an unrestrained blow with a blunt instrument (a toy grenade-launcher) to the sensitive tip. The new pains joined and reinforced and starred in all the ensemble pains that were there already. This time, he actually got the front door open before Marmaduke was noisily and copiously sick.

Well, Guy hardly bothered with that. A roll and a half of toilet paper later, and he was out on the street with the steaming child. Marmaduke was now lying face down on the pavement, entirely flaccid to the touch. Guy crouched, and coaxed, and flinched into the low sun.

'There's a good boy.'

'Nnno!. . . Ant mummy.'

'Come on, darling,'

'Ant cad jew.’

'Oh all right.'

During their walks, Marmaduke always insisted on being carried, because it made the business of hitting his father much easier. They started off towards Ladbroke Grove. The lofted child's fingers played playdough with Guy's face.

Royal prisoners, Guy thought:
that's
their status. Babies are royal prisoners, imperial internees, little Napoleons, tiny Hirohitos. Ouch! Must clip his nails. Passive resistance — well, within certain conventions of acceptable struggle. They consume the gaoler's man-hours. They sap the enemy's war-effort. 'Not in the eyes,' he said. When they're falling down the stairs, you can see it in their faces: they're saying
—
this is
your
problem. And just as you think the old boy is coming along quietly for once — 'Not in the eyes' — there'll be some frazzled lurch for the door, some fumbled sabotage. Or a last, heroic self-fouling. Ow. Ouch. Right up the nose with that one. Whose war is it ? Aren't we their friends, their enemies' enemies ? Of course, you can never treat the royal prisoners cruelly or harshly, because they're royal and must be seen to be perfect when hostilities end . . . Before he was a father Guy didn't realize just how many babies and children there always were about the place. But now — he was entering Ladbroke Grove with its shops and pubs and bus-stops
—
Guy saw that the royal prisoners were naturally everywhere, as they always have been, all sizes (the woeful ones, the terrible twos, the threatening threes, the fearsome fours), and all doing what royal prisoners always do.

The superior violence everywhere suggested by the flesh and mortar of the street had an emollient effect on Marmaduke, who was perhaps hoping to pick up some tips for use elsewhere. Presiding over the car horns and engine surges, and the turning wheels of ordinary commerce, small concerns, and the permanent smash and scuffle at the pubs' lantern jaws, came the dead notes of six or seven burglar alarms exasperatedly sounding. The post-office, whose floor stayed wet in any weather, was a skating rink of drunks and supplicants and long-lost temper — and self-injury, Guy thought, noticing how nobody noticed the woman in the corner rhythmically beating her head against the join in the wall. He queued for a callbox, or milled for a callbox, the queuing idea, like the zebra-crossing idea, like the women-and-children-first idea, like the leave-the-bathroom-as-you-would-expect-to-find-it idea, having relinquished its hold in good time for the millennium. Even Marmaduke seemed somewhat daunted by the swirl. Guy was thinking of trying his luck at Conchita's or Hosni's or possibly the Black Cross when a booth became clear and no one serious interposed. He called Richard, who forthrightly confirmed what they had both suspected: all American money was leaving the City.

After the conversation was over Guy went on standing there, the telephone to one ear while Marmaduke patiently mangled the other. He never panicked; and he didn't panic now; he cleaved, as always, to what he felt was inevitable. The American retreat was in any case far less significant than the rollover it might entrain. And his own holding position was probably sound. But he suddenly felt a universal steepening. Guy held the child, but wants and needs now flailed out from him, basic, cheap, ordinary, the stuff we have to have. It occurred to him that he was perfectly free to call Nicola, and this he did. Sleepily she revealed that she was lying on her bed, after a bath, and that he was much in her thoughts. For some reason Guy laughed, and with childish gratitude or relief. He felt a new pain somewhere but didn't notice how his trousers rose a couple of inches from his shoes.