London Fields

by Martin Amis

'Whatever would Keith want with my underwear?'

  'These questions will seem quite pointless to you. But has he ever got you in the airing-cupboard.'

  Nicola did a slow frown and said, 'It's funny you should mention the airing-cupboard.'

  Guy sat back. He stretched his neck and looked along his nose at her.

  The other day there was some sort of problem to do with the airing-cupboard. Some . . . pipe thing. Well it's awfully cramped and

  stuffy in there, And I was wearing my short blue thing 1 do my

  exercises in.’

  'Go on,' said Guy regally.

  'Well he told me to read the nipple gadget on the stopcock. Are you sure you want to — it's all rather shaming. I had to strain upwards to see the dial. I had one foot on the chair. And one on the towel rack. Rather an undignified sight. And very uncomfortable, with my legs stretched apart like that. And then . . .' She gave a secretive smile.

  'What?'

  'You'll never guess.'

  'I think I can. Keith did something. Didn't he.'

  'No no. Keith was in there, in the bathroom, testing the temperature level in the bidet. No. The towel rack slipped and I tumbled to the floor with all the sheets and everything coming down on top of me!'

  Guy smiled palely.

  'Fortunately I was able to collect myself completely by the time he hurried along to help. No, the real reason I need him here so much — and you're not to be cross or tease me. The real reason ... is the little one.'

  'I'm sorry?'

  'Oh. If at the other end of a great chain of ifs and buts, and far in the future and everything, if there is a future, and only when you want to, we do decide to have a baby daughter, then there are all sorts of things I might as well get done now. And if we're going to make any progress this evening then do please come and sit over here. I'm dying to do some kissing.'

  Guy left about an hour later, soon after midnight. And something happened, just before he left, something dramatic, something painful — though Guy would later derive much complicated comfort from the incident. First he had paid a stooped visit to the bathroom, where, gasping and wincing, he had rearranged himself with the aid of his belt and the vibrant elastic of his boxer shorts. In the hall he joined Nicola, who stood in profile with her arms folded. This', she said, 'is the famous airing-cupboard.' In they peered. 'Come on,' she said, and stepped inside. Sober Guy suddenly felt rather drunk: the pine racks of bedding, the polythene puff of the heater, the narrow space where a man and a woman might very well contend with certain harassing proximities. 'You can just imagine me up there,' she said, as she turned to him, 'with one leg here and one leg there. Careful.'... As had been the case before, their farewell kisses, being emblems of their own termination, were by far the most liquid and distended of the evening; and the heat in there was so furtive, so feminine . . .Not that their bodies were actually touching or anything like that; but Guy could feel the ghosts of various contours, of promising pendencies, or perhaps just the electric field, the cashmere nimbus, of her dress. To further this delicious calibration he slightly bent and parted his legs, urging himself forward half a famished millimetre. At one point, as she breathed thickly into his ear, his hand moved from her shoulderblade to the surprising bounty of her armpit, and then hovered and fell (he thought he heard a moan of assent) on her waiting breast.

  Later, Guy could never finally decide whether he had in fact lost consciousness, though Nicola would always regretfully assert that he had. When the world's lineaments returned, in any event, he was lying in the foetal position with his head on thepassage carpet and with both hands cupped and trembling over his groin. The colour of his face (Nicola would remark) had some interesting affinities with the colour of his healing black eye: grey on a background of pale green. She was calling his name as if through rain and from a considerable distance.

  'Guy? Guy? Guy! Guy ... I can't bear it. I did it again. Just pure instinct. Terrifying how dramatic it was. You went down like a ton of bricks. Have you been ill? Ooh. Does ithurt dreadfully? Come on . . . oof. I suppose we can look on the encouraging side. My breasts were bursting and when you touched me there was this great convulsion right through my body. Can you drive? Can you walk? Can you speak? Say something. Guy? Guy? Ah I can't bear this. Why is it that I always seem to be causing you pain?'

  After Guy left, Keith called. Nicola stared at the seething booze in her glass as she heard the pips of the payphone, the bearpit clamour of sawdust and bloodlust. ..

  Now this was a little bit naughty of Keith to call so late like this. But he wanted to see another one of those videos, being incorrigible as he was. And, quite frankly, after the kind of evening she'd had (that play! that meal!), well, where was the harm in a little bit of fun?

  Nicola poured more brandy. She giggled uglily: ugly giggling. She knew the giggling was ugly but that only made her giggle all the uglier. She went to her dressing-room, taking the glass, and the bottle.

  D'you knowsomething? She was really in the mood. She was. Keith, he did love her to wear her frillies. Said it made him feel dead fruity. Now this . . .is a lovely garment. Dirty great brute like him but they're all just little boys really when they see you in your scanties. (And they do like a spiky shoe.) All the pound notes Guy gave her she would spend on wondrous frillies and costliest scanties. For him! For Keith!

  She unbuttoned her dress and slipped out of it. She let her hair down. Ugly giggling.

  Guy parked the car in Lansdowne Crescent and sat waiting for the pain to go away. Seventy-five minutes later Guy was still there. But then so was the pain. With his lips as far apart as they had ever been asked to stretch he slid across the seat and out into the night.

  The great house swam towards him, darkly streaming. He searched its face: no dreaded yellows of emergency or vigil. Was it possible that his return might coincide with Marmaduke's tortured small-hour drowse? The front door admitted him. His bones creak­ed and split and popped into the hall. With reckless swiftness he tiptoed towards the kitchen stairs.

  Under surgical lights, surrounded by washers and driers and stacks of nappies, Guy inspected himself, unkindly, like an army doctor. His animal parts looked hard-done-by, traduced, but no more unprepossessing than usual. It was his face that seemed altered, shrunken, livid - his fool-for-love face, terrified by the bright mirror. Among Marmaduke's innumerable talcs and salves there was nothing for what ailed him.

  As he came out of the washroom adjusting his trousers, a bolt of fear traversed the kitchen: a spectral nightdress in a mouth of white light. Not Hope — Lizzyboo. Raiding the icebox.

  'Marmaduke quiet?' he asked.

  'Mm-hm. As of ten minutes.'

  He thought of their one embrace, the embrace Hope never knew about, in the bathroom, in Italy, the not-so-little little sister, flattered, foregrounded, breathlessly promoted. How big she was now. And how other. Poor Lizzyboo.

  'Goodnight.'

  She chewed and swallowed. 'Goodnight,' she said.

  Guy stole upstairs, falling quieter on every step, and undressed in the dark of the visitor's room. Naked, he stole across the passage on the balls of his feet. The furious physics of the door fought him every inch of the way: its croaks and twinges, its rasp against the carpet's nap. When you're trying to be quiet, you see that every- thing is dying to be noisy. And Guy twanging there with the physics of everyday h'fe. Hope lay in the darkness, curved like an ess or a zed, or a query.

  Wehn Kieth got back that. . . When Kieth . . . Wehn Keith got back that nite, okay. Eezy does it. Where's the lite? Okay. No way was them last pomos too cJever. Ditto going again to Shirt Trish again. But Nik siad OK to drink waht felt okay. Dim matter. Siad it dim matter. Man is the hunter . . .

  He sJammed the front door behind him. He stood at the sink and drank a Jot of warm water. Then he felt better. Then he fell over. Suddenly, and in no particular order, Keith burped the wife, took the baby outside for a pee, and fucked the dog.

  Kim Twemlow's lifestyl
e.' Still strolling about in his white shoes. Even up here on the ceiling there were lights of cars. The house, the circular drive, and selected guests for luncheon. Why, Cymphia. Amphea! Generally find a glass of chapmange quite refreshing at this hour. Smampha. Corimphia.'My dear Aramimpha?. . . Keith? You could have the Jot, mate. Yeah, you cuold. You colud do it son. You culod. Yeah you fucking cloud . . .

  What was it? Driving back like that - what was it? in the car, and Clive sleeping. The moon. And London like it used to be. Many moons of the street-lamps, many moons ago. TV. Jesus. Coming up on me now. Felt yung innit. Uh-oh. What goes down must - oop. Whoop. Yeah that was the phing. Yooph, mate, yooph.’

  I must go to London Fields, before it's too late.

  If I shut my eyes or even if I keep them open I can see the parkland and the sloped bank of the railway line. The foliage is tropical and innocuous, the sky is crystalline and innocuous. In fact the entire vista has a kiddie-book feel. There in his van putts Postman Pat: Postman Pat and his black-and-white cat. It is all outside history. Vicars, spinsters, parkies, gardeners, widows so old, so long-widowed, that they have reverted to a state of virginity. The only hard evidence of sex is the children - and, in the distance (and not so hard), soft hills in the shape of breasts.

  There was a stream, fordable, jumpable, not dangerous, perfectly scaled for five-year-olds, for boys, for my brother and me. David! Sam! Oh boys, you are heartbreaking and mysterious. The way you cock your weak bodies — to essay something, to dare something. Your love of war. Look! Watch! Oh, boys, why do you have to do this?

  But boys have to do this.

  I must go back. I mustn't leave it too late.

  One can only assume that Missy has a thing for men and weapons — for arms and the man.

  Look at me: pre-nuked and dead-already.

  Look at Sheridan Sick. That time I met him. High up over Du Pont Circle, a party in the boardroom of Hornig Ultrason (Hornig Ultrason: a beacon for everything bad). I asked him to explain the new phenomenon of superbolt lightning. Missy stood at his side, at my side. I knew nothing.

  'Solar supergranulation,' said Sick. 'Sam? imagine soup boiling in a pan 20,000 miles across. Even when it gets here the flare wind is still travelling at 400 miles per second. Then it hits a ghost basin in the magnetosphere. Bingo. Superbolt.'

  Quite unenlightened, I said, 'You give the impression that you know a lot about these things.'

  'I'm learning, Sam. We're working more and more with the QuietWall community.'

  'Well, stop. And don't do it again.'

  'That's funny,' he said. With a really disgraceful smile. On his really disgraceful face.

  Sheridan Sick: a smart cookie. Yeah, a biscuit, with a haircut on top, powered by a certain je-ne-sais-quoi. It takes all kinds to make a world. It takes only one kind to unmake it. My father was of the latter school, though in an unrecognizably younger world, caught up in fresher historical forces. And not doing it for the money.

  Of all the forces, love is the strangest.

  Keith looks like love (though I'm sure he doesn't feel it. And given he's Keith). The spring in the step, like Johnny Head-in-Air.

  And Guy looks like death.

  Love can make a woman pick up a bus, or it can crush a man under the weight of a feather. Or it just lets everything go on as it was yesterday and will be tomorrow. That's the kind of force love is.

  God knows why I persist with Crossbone Waters. I guess it emboldens me: that stuff like this gets published. It's an awful little piece of shit.

  In his skiff or whatever, with his sweaty fatigues and his trusty guide Kwango, Marius Appleby retraces the old pirate routes of festering Borneo. Many long descriptions of celebrated pillagings and rapes. Especially rapes. Marius often seems to wish he were back there in the old days, and that the pirates were taking on new hands.

  But the good bits are all about the photographer assigned to him by the colour magazine, Cornelia Constantine: five feet twelve, twenty-seven, octaroon complexion. Her eyes are as black as ebony and she has flaming waist-length red hair. He meets her at the airport. She's one of those natural blue-bloods, disdainful, self-sufficient, dedicated to the art of taking photographs. But Marius is posh too (he lets it be known), and handsome, and no stranger to the love of women. Cornelia's previous boyfriends include a world-famous sculptor, an EEC Prime Minister and a dead racing-driver. When she alights from the jeep, even the bustling streets of Samarinda go into freeze frame, like on Keith's TV.

  They hire old Kwango and set off in the skiff, which is called Aphrodite. Invoking the deity, Marius vows to possess Cornelia. His chances don't look good, but you find yourself rooting for him somehow. As he awakes on the first morning he sees her standing naked in the cerise lagoon, her flaming hair perched on the crux of her muscular buttocks. On her way out, after her swim, she faces the travel writer boldly, without shame, as noble beauties will. And he raptly notes that her breasts are proud and her hair-colour natural.

  Oh yeah. A story of natural love. The whole thing is like this: a thesaurus of miserable clichés. It's an awful little piece of shit. But I guess I'll keep going. The thing is, I really want to know how Marius makes out with Cornelia.

  Like my heroine or villainness, like my murderee, Lizzyboo, too, has a strategy for getting to the end of men. Her strategy is this: Weigh Two Hundred Pounds.

  There is a major obstacle in her journey towards two hundred pounds: food poisoning. Common sense: if you eat more food, then you eat more poison. I think this works in my favour, all in all. She's in bed now, sick, too sick to eat much or to feel like getting fresh.

  Imagine the miraculous expansion of Missy Harter's girth. I keep getting the wild idea that if we could buy babies in stores or go look at them in zoos and theme parks, and they never grew up but stayed at fifteen months for say six or seven years, yes, we'd still be interested, some of us, we'd go look at them and maybe buy a couple and keep them under the ping-pong table in the basement and bring them out to show our friends.

  Every day the sun is getting lower in the sky.

  The pain hasn't come yet. Slizard is amazed. But I still have this strontium sting or plute ache in my ankles. I find the roads are getting longer, the hills steeper. I use the car.

  Now - the streets, the traffic. We know that traffic reflects the temperaments of the great capitals (and here in a farewell flourish I invoke my world citizenship): the unsmiling triumphalism of Paris, the fury and despair of old New York, the cat-and-mouse audacity of Rome, the ragged murder of Cairo, the showboat longevity of Los Angeles, the industrial durance of Bombay or Delhi, where, four times a day, the cars lash the city in immovable chains. But here, in London — I just don't get it.

  They adore doubleparking. They do. This is true love - a love whose month is ever May. They park in the middle of the goddam­ned street. I turned into the All Saints Road - and it wasn't a road any longer. It was a lot, a doubleparking lot. The traffic lights are barely more than decoration, like Christmas lights. You hit a red at the crossroads but you inch forward anyway, into the lock, into the headlock. You may even decide the time is ripe to get out and run an errand. Why? Why not? Everybody else does it. It seems clear to me, after five seconds' thought, that if everybody does it then nobody gets around, nobody gets anywhere. But everybody does it because everybody does it. And here's the other thing: hardly anyone seems to mind. At the crossroads the drunken youth drops out of his van and waddles into GoodFicks or Potato Love or the Butchers Arms, and the cars don't mind. They just nudge and shove each other, the old heaps, and not angrily, in this intimacy of metal and rust and not getting anywhere.

  That was more or less how it was ten years ago. That was more or less how it was ten days ago. Now, in the last little packet of time, it's all changed. We have moved from purgatory to full inferno. And suddenly everybody minds. Even the gentler sex. And if plump mums scream over the grizzle of their strapped kids, if old ladies in old Morrises parturate with venom and smack fr
eckled fists on the horn, then how are the men taking it? Four times in the last few days I have sat tight in the car, gridlocked under the low sun, with no way out, while jagged figures discover what the hard machine can do to the soft: what the hood of the car can do to the human nose and mouth, what the tyre-iron can do to the back of the human head. Traffic is a contest of human desire, a waiting gai.ie of human desire. You want to go there. I want to go here. And, just recently, something has gone wrong with traffic. Some­thing has gone wrong with human desire.

  I don't get it. No - I do! Suddenly I do, though there's no real reason (is there?) why anybody else should. In traffic, now, we are using up each other's time, each other's lives. We are using up each other's lives.

  Cornelia's morning swims have become a ritual. Marius will now stand on the deck with bronzed arms akimbo and openly admire her as she wades toward the shore. Her breasts, apparently, are -

  A package, delivered by uniformed courier. I was expecting, with very little enthusiasm, the medication promised by Slizard. This was from Hornig Ultrason, however.

  It contains the first chapters of my typescript. And the outline. And a check. Option-money. I don't know how she worked it. But this . . .

  I'm aware that art can be sweet, and love sweeter, the recognition and forgiveness in the eyes, the hand and its needed touch, the mind-body problem so sweetly solved. But this, this (the money quivers in my fingers), this is true felicity.

  The turbulence of my joy was such that I didn't notice, for a moment, that the pain had come.

  And now the pipes are starting up again. The pain - the inorganic agony.

  Jesus, the whole apartment is writhing and twisting with it.

  Is it ever going to stop? Is it ever going to stop with that stuff?

  Not now. But when? When's a good time for it — for pipes, for pain? It never is, it just never is, it just never is the time.

  Chapter 17: Cupid's College

  love juice. ungovernable passion. The earth moved innit.'