London Fields (10 page)

Never in her life, not ever, had Nicola decisively discarded any item of clothing. The flat's large second bedroom had become a supercloset – it was like a boutique in there, the suits, the party dresses, the theatrical costumes and disguises, the belts, the scarves, the hats. Imelda Marcos herself might have wondered at the acreage of Nicola's shoes . . . If Keith Talent were dressing her now, if Keith were designing her (she speculated), how would he want things to go? What did he want, at the top of the stairs? Nicola in thigh-high pink boots, rayon mini-skirt and bursting blouse. Yes, either that or Nicola in low-corsaged opal balldress and elbow-length ivory gloves, with a sable-trimmed brick-quilted dolman, a comb of brilliants and a panache of osprey in her hair. Queen of Diamonds, Queen of Hearts. But of course you couldn't do it quite like that.

'Come on up,' she said.

As Keith followed her heavily into the apartment, Nicola did something right out of character: she cursed her fate. Then she swivelled and inspected him, from arid crown to Cuban heels, as he cast his scavenging blue eyes around the room: Keith, stripped of all charisma from pub and street. It wasn't the posture, the scrawniness of the shanks and backside, the unpleasant body scent (he smelled as if he had just eaten a mustard-coated camel), the drunken scoop of his gaze – unappealing though these features certainly were. Just that Nicola saw at once with a shock (I knew it all along, she said to herself) that the capacity for love was extinct in him. It was never there. Keith wouldn't kill for love. He wouldn't cross the road, he wouldn't swerve the car for love. Nicola raised her eyes to heaven at the thought of what this would involve her in sexually. And in earnest truth she had always felt that love in some form would be present at her death.

'Well let's get started,' she said, directing Keith towards the kitchen and its dead machines. Once there, Nicola folded her arms and watched, increasingly astonished by how things evidently stood between Keith and the inanimate world. Such flexed and trembling helplessness, such temper-loss and equipment-abuse. She was inept in the kitchen herself; she had never, for instance, produced anything even remotely edible from the electric cooker, now long disused. But this frenzy of domestic quackery . . . Keith went at the ironing-board like the man in the deckchair joke. The tube of the hoover became a maddened python in his grasp. After his final misadventure with the coffee-grinder plug and the screwdriver Nicola handed him a paper tissue for his gouged thumb and said in a puzzled voice,

'But you're completely hopeless. Or is it just being drunk?'

'It's all right, it's all right,' said Keith rapidly. 'See, I don't normally do none of this myself. I got a team in White City. Real craftsmen. Here we go.'

With difficulty – there were blood and sweat and tears on the bakelite by now – Keith at last wrenched off the cap. Together they stared down at the pastel tricolour of the plug's innards. Their faces were close; Nicola could hear the soft baffled panting through Keith's open mouth.

'Looks okay,' he volunteered.

'It could be the fuse.'

'Yeah. Could be.'

'Change it,' she suggested, offering him a new fuse from the paper bag.

Chipping a yellow fingernail, swearing, dropping screws, confusing fuses, Keith accomplished this deed. He then slapped the plug into the wall, pressed the switch, and briskly actuated the coffee-grinder. Nothing happened.

'Well,' said Keith after a while. 'It's not the fuse.'

Then could you take a look at the lavatory seat at least.'

The bathroom was unexpectedly spacious – carpeted, and full of unnecessary air; there seemed to be a great distance between the fat bathtub and the red chaise-longue. Here was a room, here was a set that had experienced a lot of nakedness, a lot of secretions and ablutions and reflections. Through the round window above the bath the sun cast its spotlight. Keith's face flickered or rippled as Nicola closed the door behind them.

'The toilet,' he announced with savage clarity. He approached the commode and raised the wooden lid. Nicola tingled suddenly – her armpits tingled. She knew what Keith was looking at: the small faecal stain on the cold white slope. On seeing it there earlier, Nicola had resolved to clean the bowl. She knew, however, that if she didn't do it at once, then she wouldn't do it. She hadn't done it at once. So she hadn't done it.

The seat wobbles,' she said. 'And it slips.'

As Keith knelt and toyed doubtfully with the lid, Nicola sat herself down on the red sofa. She assumed a thinker's pose, chin on fist. Keith glanced her way and saw what was there to see: the light-grey cashmere, the white stockings, the brown underflesh of her crossed left leg.

'Wobbly toilet,' Keith said to her in a gurgling voice. 'Can't have that. Might do yourself an injury. Might ruin your married life.'

Nicola stared at him. There was perhaps an infinitesimal swelling in the orbits of her eyes. Several replies offered themselves to her with urgency, like schoolboys raising their hands to please the pretty teacher. One was 'Get out of here, you unbelievable lout'; another, remarkably (and this would be delivered in a dull monotone), was 'Do you like dirty sex, Keith?' But she stayed silent. Who cared? There wasn't going to
be
any married life. She stood up.

'You're dripping blood. Here.' She fetched a tin from the shelf. The light changed as she moved towards him.

Now she applied plaster to the meat of Keith's gently quivering thumb. Seen close up, flesh looks genital: minutely hair-lanced, minutely pocked. If his hands looked genital, what would his genitals look like, close up? The physiological effects of this thought told her all over again that he was the one. Their hands dropped. In different dizzinesses they saw, against the cold bowl, his bright blood meandering through the dark of her waste. This is disgusting, she thought. But it's too late now.

'Through here,' she said.

Five seconds later Keith was standing in the passage as Nicola zestfully loaded him up with ironing-board, iron, hoover, coffee-grinder. While she did this she talked to him as if he were subhuman, or merely representative. Would you very kindly. A great help. If you could also. Be most grateful . . . She loomed above him. Keith's Cuban heels began to edge backwards down the stairs. He peered up at her, so very hampered. He looked like a busker. He looked like a one-man band.

She said, 'I'd better give you a deposit,' and reached for something on the side table. She came closer. 'The man in the Black Cross. Guy.'

'Yeah. Guy,' said Keith.

'He's someone – he's someone of importance, isn't he, Keith.'

'Definitely.'

'Oh really?' Nicola had expected Keith to balk at any favourable mention of Guy Clinch. But his tone was respectful, even admiring. At this moment he seemed to need all the support and associational glamour he could get.

'Definitely. He works in the City. He's titled. I seen it on his chequebook. The Honourable, innit,' said Keith shrewdly.

Nicola stepped forward. With her fingers she was rolling two fifty-pound notes together. Keith twisted himself, in preparation. 'Wait,' she said. 'You'll drop everything.' He was wearing a black fishnet shirt with a patched chest pocket. But his darts were in that. So she rolled the money tight and placed it in his mouth. 'Is he rich?' she asked.

Keith worked the tubed notes sideways, as if his lips were used to having money between them. 'Definitely.'

'Good. There's a thing you and I might do together. A money thing. Have him call me. Will you do that? Soon?'

He twisted again, and nodded.

'There's just one other thing.' And what was it, this one other thing? She had a sudden, antic desire to lift her dress to the waist, to pivot, and bend – like a terrible little girl, with a terrible little daddy. She said erectly.

'My name is Nicola. Not Nicky or' – her lips closed in a flat smile – '"Nick".'

'Right.'

'Say it.'

He said it.

Her eyes returned to the black fishnet shirt. She placed a finger on one of its wide central squares. 'This sort of stuff,' she said thoughtfully, '– it should be on my legs. Not on your chest. Goodbye, Keith.'

'Yeah cheers.'

Nicola returned to the sitting-room and lit a cigarette. She heard him crash down the stairs – Keith, with the money in his mouth. For a minute or so she smoked intently, with dipped head, then moved to the tall window in the passage. She saw him, across the street, toppling in graphic difficulty over the open boot of his car. It was the right car: the murderer's car. With a boyish flinch Keith looked up into the evening sky, whose pale pink, as usual, managed to suggest the opposite of health, like the face of a pale drinker. Their eyes met slowly through the glass. Keith was about to essay some kind of acknowledgment, but instantly ducked into a fit of sneezing. The reports of these sneezes – quacked and splatty – travelled towards Nicola at the speed of sound: Keith's cur's sneezes. With his hand flat over his mouth he worked his way round the car and climbed in, and moved off softly down the dead-end street.

'Sneezes like a cur,' said Nicola to herself.

It was six o'clock. She yawned greedily, and went to the kitchen for champagne. Lying on the sofa, she sketched out the next few moves, or she turned up the dial, revealing the contours that were already there. Guy would call the day after next. She would arrange to meet him in the park. She would choose a cold day, so that she could wear her blond fur coat. Beneath that, at least, she would be able to keep some entertaining secrets. Her shoulders shook as she laughed, quietly. When she laughed, her whole body shook. Her whole body laughed.

In the popular books, when they tried to get you to imagine a black hole, they usually conjured a sample photon of light wandering nearby, or (more popularly, and more phallically) an astronaut in a spaceship: a man in a rocket. Approaching the black hole, the traveller would encounter the
accretion disc,
circling matter bled from the neighbour star (and containing, perhaps, the wreckage of other men, other rockets); then, notionally, the
Schwarzschild radius,
marking the point at which the escape velocity equalled the velocity of light. This would be the
event horizon,
where spacetime collapsed, the turnstile to oblivion beyond which there was only one future, only one possible future. Now there can be no escape: during the instantaneous descent, all of eternity has passed on the outside. Caught in the imploding geometry, the man and his rocket enter the black hole.

Or look at it the other way. Nicola Six, considerably inconvenienced, is up there in her flying saucer, approaching the event horizon. She hasn't crossed it yet. But it's awfully close. She would need all her reverse thrust, every ounce, to throw her clear . . .

No, it doesn't work out. It doesn't work out because she's already there on the other side. All her life she's lived on the other side of the event horizon, treading gravity in slowing time. She's it. She's the naked singularity. She's beyond the black hole.

Every fifteen minutes the telephone rings. It's Ella from LA, it's Rhea from Rio, it's Merouka from Morocco. I have to break in over their hot cooings to tell them an unappetizing truth: I am not Mark Asprey. He's in New York. I give them my number. They hang up instantly, as if I'm some kind of breather.

Scented letters with lipstick imprints pile up on the mat. The girls, they come around the whole time: they practically picket the place. When I tell these pictures and visions, little duchesses, dazzlers and
ponies de luxe
that Mark Asprey isn't around – they're devastated. I have to reach out to steady them. The other morning an adorably flustered-looking creature called Anastasia was there on the stoop, hoping for a few minutes with Mark. When I broke it to her, I thought I might have to call an ambulance. No, not so good for a guy not so lucky in love, or in art, as I stand in the passage scratching my hair in thought, and look up to see the framed dream-queens and the inscriptions scribbled wildly across their throats. To
my Apollo. Nobody does it quite like you. Oh I'm so completely yours . . .

Anastasia couldn't have been sweeter (I gave her a good hug and she stumbled off mouthing apologies, her face a mask of tears). But some of the other ones, some of the snazzier ones, look at me with incredulous distaste. Can I blame them, especially when I'm in mid-chapter, exhausted, exalted, quilted in guilt, and unshaven to the whites of my eyes?

Yesterday evening there was an unusual telephone call. It was for me.

When I heard the sound, the subtle crepitation, that 3,000 miles makes, I thought it might be Missy Harter, or Janit, or at any rate Barbro. It was Slizard.

I like him personally and everything, but calls from Dr Slizard fail to set my pulse racing. He wants me to go and see some people in a research institute south of the river.

'How's America?'

'Crazy like an X-ray laser,' he said.

Slizard admits that the visit isn't really necessary, but he wants me to go along. 'Send me the pills,' I said. But I also said I'd think about it.

'Tell me, Auxiliadora,' I began, 'how long have you worked for the Clinches – for Hope and Guy?'

Auxiliadora was great. She gave me, while she worked, at least three chapters' worth of stuff in about fifteen minutes. A good cleaner Auxi may well have been, but she was certainly a sensational gossip: look how she smears and bespatters. She read their letters and eavesdropped on their telephone calls; she went through trashcan and laundry basket alike with the same forensic professionalism. Interesting sidelights on Lizzyboo. Fine material on Marmaduke. I listened, seated boldly at Mark Asprey's desk – not his working desk in the study but his writing desk in the living-room (where, I imagined, he tackled his lovemail). I was recuperating from Chapter 5. Heavy stuff, some of it. I can already hear Missy Harter telling me that America won't want to know all this (particularly if we're looking at a pub-date in say late spring, when the crisis, and the year of behaving strangely, will both be over, one way or another). But
Nicola
is heavy stuff. Nicola
is heavy.
I guess I could tone it down, if there's time. But tone it down to what? I guess I could 'make something up', as I believe the expression goes. Spanking or whatever. Her on top. Lovebites. But I can't make anything up. It just isn't in me. Man, am I a reliable narrator . . . I was sitting at the desk, as, with equal flair, Auxi cleaned the flat and dished the dirt, and making notes with a casual doodling action (and warmly looking forward to the domestic haven, the blameless hearth of Chapter 6), when there was a light rattle of keys, a slam of the door – and another woman strode furiously into the room.

She was Spanish too. Her name was Incarnacion. And she was Mark Asprey's cleaning-lady. She told me this in English, and said something of the same to Auxiliadora in a volley of oath-crammed Andalucian. I quickly located Mark's welcome note: sure enough there was a P.S. about his Spanish 'treasure', who was holidaying in her native Granada but would shortly return.

It was all very embarrassing. In fact it was all very frightening. I haven't been so scared for weeks. I took Auxi to the door, and apologized and paid her off. Then I went and hid in the study. When Incarnacion flushed me out I moved back into the sitting-room to find the large walnut table – previously bare but for a bowl of potpourri – infested with new gongs and cups and obelisks (dug up by Incarnacion from some bottomless trophy chest) and about a dozen photographs of Mark Asprey, making acceptance speeches, being fawned over by starlets, or in frowning conversation with deferential fellow big brains . . . He looks like Prince Andrew. Maybe he
is
Prince Andrew: the Prince as a bachelor, before he got so stout, on Fergie's cooking. The grinning eyes squeezed by the fleshiness of the cheeks. The inordinate avidity of the teeth.

Dinner tonight at Lansdowne Crescent. Lizzyboo will be there.

On the way over I'm due to stop in at the dead-end street: cocktails with Nicola Six.

As against that, I'm close to despair about getting into Keith's place. I have just this one idea, and it's a long shot: Kim, the kid. The little girl.

Keith's house is not a home. (And it's not a house either.) It's somewhere for the wife and child, and somewhere to flop, until Keith comes good on the ponies or the darts. Though often lost in praise of his dog Clive, he never mentions his girl Kim, except when he's especially drunk. Then it's /
think the world of that little girl
and
That little girl means the world to me.
But if prompted, or goaded, he will deign to denounce Kath's idleness and lack of stamina, when it comes to the kid.

'I mean,' he said to me in the Black Cross, or it may have been the Golgotha, his drinking club (the Golgotha is open twenty-four hours a day. But so is the Black Cross), 'what she expect? Moaning on.
Baby this. Baby that. Can't sleep. Babies is what skirt
does’

'It can be very hard, Keith,' I cautioned. 'I've looked after children – babies. They worship their mothers but they torture them too. They torture them with the sleep weapon.'

He looked at me consideringly. You don't need much empathic talent to tell what Keith's thinking. He doesn't do that much thinking in the first place. The very difficulty, the disuse of the muscles, writes headlines on his forehead. Keith, and his tabloid face. Shock. Horror. You just read his flickers and frowns. Now it was something like
What would a
bloke
look after babies for?
He said, 'Yeah but it's not like real work as such. Half the time you just bung them in their – in that
pen
thing. Why was you looking after kids?'

Two years ago I lost my brother.' This was true. Also unforgiveable. David. I'm sorry. I owe you one. It's this
writing
business. 'Oh yes. They had a two-year-old and another one just arrived. I was with them through all that.'

Keith's face said, Sad, that. Happens. Say no more.

But I did say more. I said, 'All Kath needs is a couple of hours a day with the baby off her hands. It would transform her. I'd be glad to do it. Guy employs male nurses,' I threw out. 'Take her to the park. I love kids.'

Well he didn't much like the idea, clearly. (He started talking about darts.) No, I thought – you've lost this one. Babies, infants, little human beings: they're a skirt thing. The only blokes who love babies are transvestites, hormone-cases, sex-maniacs. For Keith this was all very turbulent ground. The child-molester – the nonce, the short eyes – was the lowest of the low, and Keith had come across that sort before. In prison. He talked freely about prison. In prison Keith had gotten his chance to beat up child-molesters; and he had taken it. In prison as elsewhere, everyone needs someone to look down on, someone categorically
worse.
The serial grannyslayer got his go on the exercise bike, the copycat sniper had his extra sausage on Sunday mornings, but the short eyes . . . Suddenly Keith told me why: the hidden reason, beneath all the visible reasons. Keith didn't
say
it; yet it was written on his brow. The prisoner hated the child-molester, not just because he needed
somebody
to look down on, not only out of base sentimentality either, but because it was the one place left for his parental feelings. So when you striped the short eyes with your smuggled razor you were just showing the lads what a good father you were.

I was grateful to Keith for the insight. That's right, I remember now: we were in Hosni's, the Muslim café where Keith sometimes briefly recuperates from the Golgotha and the Black Cross. Just then, one of the pub semi-regulars passed our table. He leaned over and said to me:

'Here. I know what you are. A four-wheel Sherman.'

An explanation was effortfully supplied. Four-wheel = four-wheel skid = yid. Sherman = Sherman tank = yank.

'Jesus,' said Keith. 'Jesus,' he added, with an iconoclast's weariness. 'I hate that crap. "Your almonds don't half pen." Jesus. You ever going to stop with that stuff? You ever going to stop?'

Most of Mark Asprey's apartment quite likes me. But some of it hates me. The lightbulbs hate me. They pop out every fifteen minutes. I fetch and carry. The mirrors hate me.

The bits of Mark Asprey's apartment that hate me most are the pipes. They groan and scream at me. Sometimes at night. I've even considered the truly desperate recourse of having Keith come in and look at them. Or at least listen to them.

After its latest storm, after its latest fit or tantrum or mad-act, the sky is blameless and aloof, all sweetness and light, making the macadam dully shine. Sheets and pillows in the wide bed of the sky.

Still no word from Missy Harter.