London Fields

by Martin Amis

  Guy walked on down the dead-end street; he had called her from the airport, without success; he didn't expect her to be home. Nor was she. He let himself in at the front door and climbed the stairs. The second key opened up an olfactory world that Guy remembered from his schooldays: duckboards and lockers, the lavatory where the smokers went. He saw the dartboard, the pewter tankard engraved to him, to Keith. Next door, through the thin passage, he saw the ruin of the bed, the upended ashtray on the pillow and its droppings on the sheets. Scattered about the floor were shiny puddles of exotic underwear. He saw the three empty brandy bottles, the hookah pipe. On the chair, as if laid out ready for school, brocaded trousers and the red shirt saying, keith talent - the finisher.

  Next door again he found an envelope marked Guy, unpromin-ently displayed among the fashion and darts magazines on her crowded bureau. The note said: 'Gone to the darts.' There was a pass or ticket attached. The telephone rang. He waited before picking it up.

  'Where the fuck a you been?' said a voice Guy knew well.

  '. . . Guy here.'

  '. . . Oh, hello, mate. I uh, I had some stuff I was picking up. She there is she?'

  'No, she's not here.'

  'Know when she be back?'

  'No, I don't know.'

  'Minge,' said Keith indulgently. 'Never around when you want them. Always there when you don't. I couldn't, I couldn't pop — Nah. Yeah well cheers.'

  Guy waited.

  'Okay. See you later then, pal.' He added monotonously, 'Yeah well she said you'd want to be there. As my virtual sponsor. Helping with the funding like.'

  'No doubt.'

  'Onna darts.'

  No joy there then, thought Keith. He can't be feeling too brill neither. Either. But this is it, it, success in this life always going to the guy who . . . The dartboard in Keith's garage looked on as he finished his porno, removed his clothes, and, jogging lightly on the cold floor, washed himself, horribly, in the horrorsink. Keith's lifestyle. Scepti- cally he connected the electric kettle he had recently stolen. It hummed faultily for several seconds, and Keith's hopes soared. But then the machine gave a scorching fizz and pooped the blackened plug from its horrorrear. He shaved in lukewarm water before the mirror's acne. Next, with the jellied shampoo, colder still, his horrorhair. He donned his number-three darting shirt, so damp and creased. It said: keith talent - the pickoff king. He dried his hair with some old horrorrag.

  A sudden orange cockroach rushed past and Keith stamped on it, urbanely, out of grooved urban habit. But the glazed and tendrilled body of the cockroach, even as it collapsed inwards, sent Keith a reminder that his foot was unshod, unsocked. Just a horrorfoot. Keith yanked his whole leg up with a senile yodel of disgust. So he was still capable of disgust; and he didn't go all the way through with that skilful stomp of his. The look he gave the half-crushed roach might even have been mistaken for appalled concern. The vermin lay there, half-turned; its various appendages were all moving at different speeds - but none of them were human speeds. Me, myself, only hours ago, thought Keith, with intense lassitude . . . He put on his left shoe. After many unsatisfactory minutes with a scrubbing-brush, he put on his right shoe. Reckon I get there early, in good time. Soak up the atmosphere. He got to his feet. Blimey. You just decide you're going to enjoy every minute of it. Wouldn't miss it for the world. Never ask about... He zipped up his windcheater. Relax, few drinks. Take the opportunity of using the celebrity practice boards. And generally compose myself, Tony. It's fortunate, Ned, that I seem to respond to the big occasion. On his way out he took a last look at the hate-filled face of the flickering horrorroach.

  Guy had gone home.

  Or he had gone to Lansdowne Crescent. His housekeys were still in his pocket, but manners - and caution - demanded that he ring the bell. Through the half-glass door and its steel curlicues a redoubtable figure loomed. Guy thought it might be Doris — the one who couldn't climb stairs. Because of her knees. The one who feared and hated all stairs.

  The door opened. It was Lizzyboo. He couldn't help staring. And he couldn't help thinking of the helium blimp he had seen that day, effortfully hovering over Terminal Four.

  'Isn't it wonderful? Isn't it wonderful.’

  She said this joyfully. And as Guy listened he clearly saw the other Lizzyboo, the one he had loved for a month, the one he had kissed and touched among the trembling porcelain. The other Lizzyboo was still there all right, hiding within; and now it was safe to come out.

  'Everything's okay again.'

  Of course this was neither here nor there to Guy, because she only meant the planet. 'How's Hope? How's the boy?'

  'You'd better go on up.'

  He went on up. As he turned the corner of the stairs he was disquieted by the sight of a silhouette in the passage, near the bedroom door. Something about the waiting shape was admonitory, ritualized, ecclesiastical. As he approached he saw that it was a little boy, in full armour.

  'Who is it?' came a voice. 'Darling?'

  Guy was about to frame a grateful reply. But the little boy answered sooner. 'A man,' he said.

  'Whatman?'

  '. . . Daddy.'

  Marmaduke stepped aside, with some formality, and Guy entered the room. The little boy followed, and then moved quietly past his father to the side of the bed, where Hope lay, on her barge of pillows.

  'Where is everyone?' said Guy, for the house was eerily stairless.

  'All gone. There's no need. He's different now.'

  'What happened?'

  'It was quite sudden. The day after.'

  As they spoke, Marmaduke was undressing, or unbuckling himself. He laid down sword, dagger, pike and shield, neatly, on the chair. He freed his breastplate. Finger by finger he loosened his gauntlets.

  'And you?' said Guy.

  Her face expressed, in terms of time and distance, the kind of journey he would have to undertake if he were ever to return. It was a long journey. Perhaps even the earth wasn't big enough to contain it... One by one Marmaduke removed his shin-guards, then the little chainmail slippers. Next, his authentic-looking tights were meticulously unpeeled.

  'No nappy!' said Guy.

  Marmaduke stood there in his underpants. These too he stepped out of. He climbed into bed. 'Mummy?’

  'Yes, darling?'

  'Mummy? Don't love Daddy.'

  'I won't. I certainly won't.'

  'Good.'

  '. . . Byebye, Daddy.'

  Guy came out into the fading afternoon. He looked at the pass or ticket she had left for him and wondered how he would ever kill all that time. Bent with his bag, he stood by the garden gate. He looked up. Already the sky was dotted with firebursts, rocket-trails: its proxy war. Soon, all over London, a thousand, a million guys would be burning, burning.

  It's weird: you pull the sunguard down and it don't - the sun's still there, like Hawaii. Keith motored to the studio, which was very convenient, being amongst the refurbished warehouses down by the old canal. Once there, he availed himself, as instructed, of the private carpark. A janitor came hurdling out from behind the dustbins and told Keith, in no uncertain terms, to park elsewhere. On Keith producing ID, the janitor huddled over his faulty walkie-talkie. Keith listened to denial, to horrorfizz and horrorsquawk, and endless denial. When the clearance eventually came through Keith sniffed and realigned his jacket, and decisively shoved the car door shut with the flat of his hand. The window on the passenger side exploded outwards. Firmly the janitor brought him dustpan and horrorbrush. Celebrity practice boards? What fucking celebrity practice boards? He was taken through the canteen and into a stockroom that happened to have a dartboard in it. Incredibly the sun sought him out even here. What was the sun made of? Coal? Oxyacetylene? Glo-logs? What was the matter with it? Why didn't it go away? Why didn't it go out? No: it went on funnelling its heat into his exhaustedly hooded eyes. He blinked into the numbered orb of the board, itself like a low sun, the vortex of all his hopes and dreams. His head bowed in its horrorglare
. With the purple pouch in his hand (how very worn and soiled it looked) Keith paced out the distance, turned, sniffed, coughed and straightened himself. The sun vanished. The first dart was flying through the horrornight.

  I return from my latest mission to find a note from Mark Asprey on the mat. Hand-delivered. Out of the Connaught. Now wait a minute. . .

  Dear Sam: So glad you toiled your way to the crux of the Cornelia Constantine business. She was telling the truth when she said that Crossbone Waters was 'all lies'. There was no cerise lagoon, no rabid dog, no tears by the campfire beneath the throbbing stars. There was, above all, no marathon seduction. In fact, in truth, I had the idiot in hysterics on the very first day, after lunch, at the hotel — a location from which, during the entire fortnight, we seldom strayed.

  No doubt you're wondering about those 'magnificent breasts' of hers. Those also I created with two deft dabs of my facile fancy: they had no more reality, alas, than the courtly Kwango. You know the type — great fat arse but racing tits. And so stupid. With a peculiar habit of-

  There follow three or four hundred words of the grossest pornography. The letter concludes:

  You don't understand, do you, my talentless friend? Even as you die and rot with envy. It doesn't matter what anyone writes any more. The time for it mattering has passed. The truth doesn't matter any more and is not wanted.

  'Wait a minute,' I said. Nicola was coming out of the bathroom. I looked up at her. 'My God, you won't get fifty yards. It's grotesque.'

  She had noticed the letter, with her intelligent eyes. She said, 'Are you ready to hear the bad thing I did to him? It might perk you up. Come in here. I want to keep doing my hair. Actually it has certain affinities with your own case. He wrote this novel,' she said, as I followed her into the bedroom. 'He'd been trying to write it for years. He showed it to me. It was in longhand, in a big exercise book. And it had something. It wasn't the usual trex he writes. It was from the heart.'

  'And?'

  'I destroyed it. I locked him in the bedroom and fed it to the fire. Page by page. Taunting him a lot and everything.'

  'Hey, not bad.'

  She was watching the way my eyes moved. 'Don't worry. I haven't destroyed yours.'

  'Thanks. Why not? What came over you?'

  'No need.'

  'I don't understand you, Nicola.'

  'That's right. You look terrible. Aren't there any pills you can take?' She sighed and said, 'Tell me about the child.'

  Pain travels through diffuse interconnexions, through prolix networks of fibres, past trigger zones, along branches, through thickets . . .You want it to be over. Over! But fear is all about wanting it to be over. This might be its defining characteristic. The immediate physical symptoms are mild, and not distracting, as pain is.

  I felt the baby's fear when I entered. A sudden pall of mid-afternoon, and silence, and no Keith and no Kath: just Kim, the squirming bagel at my feet on the kitchen floor. She seemed unhurt, only soaked and crying — and afraid. And that was enough, too much, should never happen. Oh I know when the babies come how we patter and creep like mice through the dark tunnels, to tend them, anticipate them, to pick them up and give them comfort. But it must be like that. It must always be like that. Because when we're not there, their worlds begin to fall away. On every side the horizon climbs until it pushes out the sky. The. walls come in. Pain they can take, maybe. Pain is close and they know where it comes from. Not fear, though. Keep them from fear. Jesus, if they only knew what was out there. And that's why they must never be left alone like this.

  Or not quite alone. When I knelt down to take her I heard a warning growl - from Clive, sitting erect in the Clive-sized square between the four joke rooms. 'It's all right,' I said. 'I'm good. I love her. I'm not bad. Good dog.' You can apparently tell this to a dog: a dog will believe it. He came forward; with sigh and half-leap he had his front paws up on the sink, watching for Kath or Keith; from the rear he looked like a trained gunman, ready, knees bent, weapon up. When the child was calmer I noticed on the table a box of matches, and a single cigarette. This was Kath's note to me.

  Because I'd gotten everything wrong. And life is always forcing you into yet stranger positions. Got to stop hurting K, Keith had written. Just takeing it out on the Baby. But K wasn't Kim. K was Kath. But Keith couldn't stop. And Kath couldn't stop.

  I had only one idea. I dressed her. When I changed the diaper I saw without surprise that there were no new marks. Kath had resisted the force of her own powerlessness, this time. I left a note, and a number, and I might have written there and then that some people get others to perform their greatest cruelties. They get others to do it for them.

  And then this.

  With her bobbing, rolling face on my shoulder I carried the child through the streets - and through a sudden carnival: an outbreak of human vigour and relief, with balloons and steel bands, loudspeak­ers propped on window-sills, pubs turned inside out. We were caught up in the beat of it and jounced along through the swiftly gathering crowds. One of those moments when everybody wants to be black, lithe, hellraising; and against their dark brilliance, the white faces, shyly smiling, ashamed to go out in the light, to be seen at all. The streets were infantile and drunken. There the donnish indulgent stroll of the policemen. There a black lady dancing in a bobby's hat. There a child's rapt uplifted face.

  Life! Like the warm life in my arms. But then there can suddenly be too much of it, too much life, and different breathlessness, different danger... A tight intersection on the Portobello Road, and life pressing in from all four directions, more headcounts everywhere, like stacks of cannonballs, and the mysterious arrival of panic, with arms now windmilling as they fought their way to the edge. And there was no edge, only life, more life. I held Kim above my head, right up there among the screams. And the crowd, the large creature of which we formed a cell, started to topple centipedically, and (I thought) only one outcome, as you must fall or trample or do both.

  Then it was over and we were on the other side. I used the basement door at Lansdowne Crescent. Lizzyboo could do it. She was all healed and clear. I said that Kath would call. I said I knew she would do what was right. I said she had all my trust.

  'It's all right for you. You just had a whole chapter off. I've been dicing with death out there.' 'Yes, so you claim.' 'I swear I was that close.' 'I too have been far from idle.' 'Putting your warpaint on.' 'Yes. And reading.'

  I waited, and watched her brow.

  'You made me ridiculous. How did you dare? I thought I was meant to be tragic. At least a bit. And all this stuff as if I wasn't in control. Every second.'

  'I'm sorry,' I said. 'I don't see you that way.'

  Then she said something I didn't quite catch. And didn't want her to repeat. I started getting ready to leave.

  'Do you think this dress is sufficiently disgusting?' she called out. 'I'd better tell you something I'm going to do on the way there.'

  She told me. 'Nicola.'

  'You'd be surprised how eloquent a bit of dirt can be. Carefully applied.'

  'I've just thought. I'll see you at the studio and everything- but this is goodbye.'

  'Take my flat key. Get there early and you'll have a good view.'

  I looked for challenge in her coldness. I said coldly, 'You're going to be gone from nine to twelve, right? I can't imagine how you're going to work it.'

  'The story of your life. Off you go. Kiss.'

  'Let's stop it. Let's abort. . . Oh, wear a coat, Nicola. It's not working. It's not working out. I'm losing it, Nicola. There are things I'm not seeing.'

  I'm going.

  I'm back.

  It seems for the time being that Nicola has confounded us all.

  Chapter 23: You're Going Back With Me

  t

  he black cab will move away, unrecallably and for ever, its driver paid, and handsomely tipped, by the murderee. Disgust­ingly attired (how could she?), she'll click on her heels down the dead-end street. The heavy
car will be waiting; its lights will come on as it lumbers towards her. It will stop, and idle, as the passenger door swings open.

  His face will be barred in darkness, but she will see cracked glass on the passenger window-frame and the car-tool ready on his lap.

  'Get in.'

  She will lean forward.' You,' she will say, with intense recognition. 'Always you.'

  'Get in.'

  And in she'll climb . . .

  Disgustingly attired: how could she? In white thinstrapped tanktop picodress, cauterized at the waist, promoting all the volume of the secondary sexual characteristics, and so tight below that the outlined panties give a nappy-puff to the rounded rear; and bare-legged, with scarlet satin shoes, the heels unforgivably long, heels that would look longer still (the suggestion was) when their shadows played on the backs of berks! Her hair was sprayed with glitter, and savagely tousled. As she made her way to the studio she selected a good brick wall, steeped in London smoke and moisture, and went and pressed her rump against it. The dress was man-made, drulon, trexcett, man-made in every sense, made by men with men in mind. She wanted to walk the whole way there, to test her nerve and tauten her breasts.

  She shimmied her rump against the moist brick wall. Of course, there was no mirror, and she couldn't really check; but the contact felt just right.

  Keith said, 'Where's the pub then?'

  'Pub? What pub?' Tony de Taunton looked at Keith curiously.

  'The venue. The —' Keith snapped his darting finger — 'the Chuckling Sparrow.'

  'There's no pub. Don't you think we have enough grief already, Keith. Without wheeling a couple of hundred pissers in and out of here four nights a week.' As he spoke, Tony de Taunton gave Keith a glass of low-ale and led him by the arm to the window. 'No no, friend. All those jolly butchers and smiling grannies - that's library stuff. We use cutaways and dub the pub later.'

  'Common sense,' said Keith. They were standing in a cavernous lot, full of hidden noise. Shifters and fixers moved stoically about with planks under their arms. All were expert noisemakers. Sheets of silver cardboard imparted the spectral light of watery dreams. On the wall was a sign bearing the saddest words Keith had ever read: no smoking. Also a mirror, in which he made out a funny-looking bloke in a wrinkled red shirt: TV's Keith. There was a bar, though, with four or five stools you could perch on. But none of that fog and gurgling clamour that he had come to think of as his darting lifeblood. Where the pub parrot, effing and blinding on its soiled hook? Where the pub dogs, whinnying in nightmare beneath the round tables?