London Fields (36 page)

'Don't stop,' he whispered.

She gave him Anybody's, the Toothcount, Lady Macbeth, the Grand-A-Night Hooker, the Readied Pussy, the . . .

'Please,' he said, his eyes still closed but starting to struggle. 'Please. No.'

Here we go: he's coming . . .
now.
Keith struggled into position. To make things 'look good', Keith had obtained, at Nicola's suggestion, a workmanlike prop: a stolen leather bag full of stolen tools — spirit-level, light hammer, chisel, tyre-iron. Doesn't see me. They can do that: look right through you.

Guy was coming back down the garden path, and moving awkwardly, half doubled-up, and listing. He looked round in fear with the ghost's eyes of the deceiver. Always this problem of re-entry. How the strands of duplicity tightened, like the veins on the surface of a sclerotic soul.
Why did you come to the house?
he had asked her. To
establish something. Your wife doesn't love you. Poor Guy . . .
Guy couldn't bear to believe this, Dink or no Dink. But in any case the duplicity was now all doubleknotted: one would have to go at it with fingernails, with tweezers. He paused (winded, battered); he felt as if he had been flying for twenty-two hours in economy class, and that the dead-end street, with its unstirring trees dust-feathered in the low sun, might just as well be Australia. Guy scanned the scene, not for faces, not yet, but for figures with their inimitable weight and outline, as Giacometti might: Phoenix, Richard, Terry, Lizzyboo — Hope!

'Yo!'

Guy gave a stark yelp.

'Prestigious,' said Keith, shuffling stockily across the road with his bag. 'Eurobank. Motorway contraflow. Intercool.'

'Keith.'

'Oi!'

'What?'

'Whew. That's a bit tasty.' Keith's scowl of concern now widened into a friendly sneer. 'You come on a bit rough, did you? Forced to defend her honour, was she?'

'No, I tripped on my way up the stairs.'

'Course you did. Listen.'

Keith reached up and put an arm round Guy's shoulder. Guy flinched but then quickly fell in with Keith's confidential amble. Was it okay, asked Keith, if he
took his place.
He'd nip in where Guy'd just been.

'I wait for you to go and then slot in after you. I'll ease in there. No sweat.'

Guy looked down at the upturned rhomboid of Keith's nose, its scored bridge, its tunnel-of-love nostrils.

'Because they fucking clamp you round here.'

'Do they? Yes of course, Keith.'

'Bollinger. Veuve Clicquot. Oh uh. Tomorrow night.'

Tomorrow night? What fresh hell was this? Guy opened his eyes as wide as they would go.

Keith's cigarette-bearing hand suddenly froze on its way to his lips. 'You forgotten,' he said with full menace.

'No no. I'll be there.' Where? Judging by the energy that Keith continued to trap in his stunned visage, Guy felt that the date must be of high significance, like a visit to the dogs or to the shrine of some sainted bookie.

'Onna darts,' said Keith at last.

The VW Estate was wedged tight into its bay, with perhaps three inches spare at front and rear; it took Guy a long time to work the car out into the street, and Keith was always there, directing matters like a policeman, beckoning, fending off, beckoning again, and finally raising the great bent thumb.

Be no good at fighting, decided Keith as he climbed the stairs. A total banana. When a man was called on to look to his fists — and his feet, and his knees, and his teeth, and his chisel and his tyre-iron and his beer bottle — Guy'd crap it. Hopeless! Keith saw the likes of Guy all the time (on TV): jeered from the bedroom, snivelling in their tweed suits. Aboard the
Titanic
he'd be one of the blokes that dressed up as birds, whereas Keith would meet his fate like a man. What though the cocktail bar be at forty-five degrees, Keith would be down there propping it up, and murdering the Scotch. On the second-floor landing he paused to catch his breath. He lit a cigarette and slumped back against the window sill. By the time he had stopped coughing the cigarette was down to its filter. So he lit another one. He had nothing to blow his nose on but found an old tit magazine in his stolen bag and did what he could with that. Plus there was the curtain. Then he staggered on up the third flight, wondering what Lady Muck had in store.

'We all have a dirty little secret, don't we, Keith?'

'Yeah?' said Keith, with slow hauteur, as if he didn't have a dirty little secret. In fact, of course, Keith had lots of dirty little secrets. He had dirty little secrets galore. To make no more than a brisk selection, to name but a few: Trish Shirt and his father and his darting doubts and the crate of ripped knicker brochures in the garage and his failure in the eyes of Chick Purchase and Debbee Kensit's birth certificate framed on her bedroom wall and an unshakable conviction of worthlessness and Kath-and-the-flat.

'It has always been a disappointment to me, a bitter disappointment, Keith, that literature — that art — has failed to own up to it. To the dirty little secret. Which is, of course . . .'

'That
ain't no secret. I'm at it all the —'

'Oh, there's Larkin's "Love again: wanking at ten past three" and a few bursts of confessionalism from the Americans. But surely this is the responsibility of the novelist, who works with the quotidian, who must become the whole of boredom, among the just be just, among the filthy filthy too, Keith.'

'Yeah,' said Keith absently. 'Same difference.’

'You'd think that the twentieth century, unfastidious enough in every other respect, would go ahead and grasp the nettle, wouldn't you, Keith? But no.'

'I seen a film', said Keith, 'where a girl did it. The other day.'

'Which film was this?'

Keith cleared his throat.
'
Miss Adventures in Megaboob Manor
,'
he said carefully.

'We'll get round to that in a minute, Keith.'

'Two hundred and seventy-five quid.'

'I suppose one of the great things about masturbation is that nobody wants to be seen doing it. Generally, they don't want the news to get around. Why should people be staring at the ceiling with
that
kind of expression on their faces? Let me freshen that for you, Keith.'

'Er, thanks, Nick. Ola.'

Keith watched her pass: the soft shake of her dress. Employing the darting finger, he made an up-and-under feint at her white-flounced rump. The friction of underthings: quite
noisy,
that dress. Like the bird inside it. Keith sucked hard on a section of his upper lip. He considered himself to be thoroughly at ease, and nicely holding up his end of the sexual lecture or exchange or foretalk. He thought of the ecstasy aunts in the magazines, and of their certain approval. Breaking new grounds in frankness. An adult exchange of views innit. Mutual pleasure. We all have our needs. But both his legs were dead they were that tightly crossed. And his palms felt siltily viscid. Jesus, hang around here all night. This rate the Cavalier'll get a ticket. Or clamped. Fucking bastards . . .

'Like so much else, Keith, it's all to do with time. How old are you?'

'Twenty-nine.' Said boldly, as if his age were one of his less arguable virtues or qualifications.

'A child. A baby. You're reaching the age when, according to literature, you'll soon be putting all that behind you. You won't of course. Ever. They won't stop you stropping it, will they, Keith. Oh no. I look at you, and I see a man', she said, her face flooding with roguish admiration, 'who'd be
proud
to die with his Johnson in his hand.'

'Yeah cheers.'

'Cheers! But don't worry. We won't be watching. It's okay until you're about the same age as Christ was at Calvary. Thereafter, no one wants to know. Because it just gets sadder. Sadder and sadder all the time.'

Keith shrugged. He could feel himself sinking into the privacy of his hangover — into the deep and settled privacy of how he felt. Here all the difficulties were undivulged. Oops. Oi. Hello. Oof. Jesus. Dear oh dear. But in silence. Whole'll . . . whole thing'll go up anyway. And Thelonius with his mangos and his weights. And Guy.

Now Nicola came and joined him on the sofa. The great layered spread of frock and petticoat. The legs folded seethingly underneath. Her face dipped but her eyes still sought his. 'You're clearly something of a connoisseur', she said softly, 'of pornography. What's your special taste? Be frank. I understand. As you know I — I'm quite "non-judgmental".'

Keith liked this word. To him it evoked a new dawn, a better world, one finally free of all juries and magistrates and QCs. He flexed his eyebrows and said, 'Same as the next man.' He knew — he even hoped — this was probably false (and felt the formation, across his upper lip, of a Zapata mustache of sweat). On average Keith spent between two and three hours a day in a largely fruitless quest for the sort of pornography he liked (i.e., pornography, whore-art, and not the sex-free sex films slipped his way by other
cheats
or the rubbish you get in the shops). But there was a time when pornography had played an altogether more central role in his life. When he was a bachelor, Keith had done pornography the way some people did heroin. Pornography pauperized Keith and made him fear for his sanity and his eyesight. Pornography was the main reason he had sought Kath's hand in marriage. Videos. From a towelhead — Abdelrazak — in Brixton. (Abdelrazak was nonjudgmental too. You could say that for him: 100 per cent nonjudgmental, was Abdelrazak.) Keith knew that he had no resistance to pornography. He had it on all the time, and even that wasn't enough for him. He wanted it on
when he was asleep.
He wanted it on
when he wasn't there . . .
'Just nude birds,' said Keith. 'Basically. Obviously.'

'It's funny, isn't it. The dirty little secret may be neglected elsewhere. But here's a genre, starting as
samizdat
and ending up as a global industry, which is about
nothing else.
Women don't usually approve of pornography, do they, Keith. I shouldn't think, for instance, that your
wife
approves of it.'

Oi, thought Keith. What was the matter with all this? In his head, ideas wanted to be named, but remained nameless. Something to do with sinning singly, invisibly. You locked the door behind you. Only the porcelain saw, and the old towel. He felt the desire to speak and opened his mouth but there was nothing there.

'Women talk about the violence it does to them. But I don't know. Look at the most innocuous entertainment imaginable: a magic show. The assistant minces around in a bikini, and then lies down grinning her head off to get sawn in half. I think women don't like pornography because it excludes them. Women are there when pornography is made. Ruined sisters. But they're not there when pornography is used. That's men's work. They don't share their little secret with women. They share it with pornography.'

She stood up. Look: she had the remote in her hand. The TV gave its electric crackle. She laughed musically (crazily) and said, 'Really, the Englishman's taste! Nurses and schoolmarms and traffic wardens. It's so
sweet.
I
suppose it all comes from nannies and public schools and things. Though not in your case.'

'No danger,' said Keith (he was busy watching).

'Still, there
are
lots of randy plumbers and winking window-cleaners and so on.'

'Yeah cheers.'

'I'm going to have a bath. Would you unzip me, Keith? Thank you. I'll be in the tub, oh, for at least fifteen minutes. It's the little catch at the top. That's it. Thank you. There are some paper tissues on the table there. Let me know when you're done . . . It's all right, Keith. I understand.'

She welcomed and applauded the death of just about anything. It was company. It meant you weren't quite alone. A dead flower, the disobliging turbidity of dead water, slow to leave the jug. A dead car half-stripped at the side of the street, shot, busted, annulled, abashed. A dead cloud. The Death of the Novel. The Death of Animism, the Death of Naive Reality, the Death of the Argument from Design, and (especially) the Death of the Principle of Least Astonishment. The Death of the Planet. The Death of God. The death of love. It was company.

The death of physics, for example. Physics had died only the other day. Poor physics. Perhaps fifty people on earth understood it fully, but physics was over, just in time for the millennium. The rest was mopping up. The rest was funeral direction. They had found proton decay, at 10
³²
years, uniting the strong and the weak atomic forces, giving the strongelectroweak. Then all they needed, for the Grand Unified Theory, for the Theory of Everything, was gravity. And then they got it. They got gravity.

She had read the cautious popularizations in the news magazines; and everyone agreed that the Theory made beautiful sense. The maths were beautiful. The whole death was beautiful. As she understood it — well, it was very simple (it courted intuition) — the key to Everything was this: time was a force as well as a dimension. Time was a force; but then of
course
it was. Elementary. Six forces. And time was the sixth force, not just a measure but a motivator too. Time 'softened up' quanta for all the other interactions, saving a special intimacy for its workings with gravity; the tug didn't tug without the massage of time. Uranium felt time as a force easing its journey into lead. Yes. And human beings felt time that way too (how anthropomorphic the Theory was, how sentimental!), not just as a temporal arena, but as a
power.
Don't we feel time as a power, and doesn't it feel like gravity? When we rise from the bed to face another year. When we reach and bend, when we try to strain upwards. What is it that is always pulling us back down?

As for the death of love . . . Was it really coming? Was it already here? Naturally she had wondered, as all artists do, whether she was just arguing out from her own peculiarity. But now the news was abroad and everybody was talking about it. And how to explain her red-throated anger and bitterness (she felt violated, plagiarized) when she first saw the phrase in print? The diagnosis was in on love, the diagnosis was coming in; and love was as weak as a kitten, and pitifully confused, and not nearly strong enough to be brave or even understand. Dying, the human being can formulate a strategy for death, gentle or defiant; but then death moves in completely and decides to run the show, at some point, near the end. Near the death. (She wasn't having any of that.
She
would be running things right up to the very last second.) And now the twentieth century had come along and after several try-outs and test-drives it put together an astonishing new offer: death for everybody. Death for everybody, by hemlock or hardware. If you imagined
love
as a force, not established and not immutable, patched together by all best intentions, kindness, forgiveness — what does love do about death for everybody? It throws up its hands, and gets weaker, and sickens. It is crowded out by its opposite. Love has at least two opposites. One is hate. One is death.