Amis, Martin - London Fields (v1.0)

by jwilde

  A casual darter or arrowman all his life, right back to the bald board on the kitchen door, Keith had recently got serious. He'd always thrown for his pub, of course, and followed the sport: you could almost hear angels singing when, on those special nights (three or four times a week), Keith laid out the cigarettes on the arm of the couch and prepared to watch darts on television. But now he had designs on the other side of the screen. To his own elaborately concealed astonishment, Keith found himself in the Last Sixteen of the Sparrow Masters, an annual interpub competition which he had nonchalantly entered some months ago, on the advice of various friends and admirers. At the end of that road there basked the contingency of a televised final, a £5,000 cheque, and a play-off, also televised, with his hero and darting model, the world number one, Kim Twemlow. After that, well, after that, the rest was television.

  And television was all about everything he did not have and was full of all the people he did not know and could never be. Television was the great shopfront, lightly electrified, up against which Keith crushed his nose. And now among the squirming motes, the impossible prizes, he saw a doorway, or an arrow, or a beckoning hand (with a dart in it), and everything said - Darts. Pro-Darts. World Darts. He's down there in his garage, putting in the hours, his eyes still stinging from the ineffable, the heartbreaking beauty of a brand-new dartboard, stolen that very day.

  Magnificent anachronism. The lights and mores of the modern criminal Keith held in disdain. He had no time for the gym, the fancy restaurant, the buxom bestseller, the foreign holiday. He had never taken any exercise (unless you counted burgling, running away, and getting beaten up); he had never knowingly drunk a glass of wine (or only when he was well past caring); he had never read a book (we here exclude Darts: Master the Discipline); and he had never been out of London. Except once. When he went to America . . .

  He journeyed there with a friend, also a young cheat, also a darts-man, also called Keith: Keith Double. The plane was overbooked and the two Keiths were seated twenty rows apart. They stilled their terror with murderous drinking, courtesy of stewardess and duty-free bag, and by shouting out, every ten seconds or so, 'Cheers, Keith!' We can imagine the amusement of their fellow passengers, who logged over a thousand of these shouts during the seven-hour flight. After disembarking at New York, Keith Talent was admitted to the public hospital in Long Island City. Three days later, when he began to stagger out to the stairwell for his smokes, he encountered Keith Double. 'Cheers, Keith!' The mandatory health insurance turned out to cover alcohol poisoning, so everyone was happy, and became even happier when the two Keiths recovered in time to make their return flight. Keith Double was in advertising now, and had frequently returned to America. Keith hadn't; he was still cheating on the streets of London.

  And the world, and history, could not be reordered in a way that would make sense to him. Some distance up the beach in Plymouth, Massachusetts, there once lay a large boulder, reputedly the first chunk of America to be touched by the Pilgrims' feet. Identified in the eighteenth century, this opening sample of US real estate had to be moved closer to the shore, in order to satisfy expectations of how history ought to happen. To satisfy Keith, to get anywhere with Keith, you'd need to fix the entire planet - great sceneshiftings, colossal rearrangements at the back of his mind. And then the tabloid face would have to crease and pucker.

  Keith didn't look like a murderer. He looked like a murderer's dog. (No disrespect to Keith's dog Clive, who had signed on well before the fact, and whom Keith didn't in the least resemble anyway.) Keith looked like a murderer's dog, eager familiar of ripper or bodysnatcher or gravestalker. His eyes held a strange radiance -for a moment it reminded you of health, health hidden or sleeping or otherwise mysteriously absent. Though frequently bloodshot, the eyes seemed to pierce. In fact the light sprang off them. And it wasn't at all pleasant or encouraging, this one-way splendour. His eyes were television. The face itself was leonine, puffy with hungers, and as dry as soft fur. Keith's crowning glory, his hair, was thick and full-bodied; but it always had the look of being recently washed, imperfectly rinsed, and then, still slick with cheap shampoo, slow-dried in a huddled pub — the thermals of the booze, the sallowing fagsmoke. Those eyes, and their urban severity . .. Like the desolat­ing gaiety of a fundless paediatric hospital (Welcome to the Peter Pan Ward), or like a criminal's cream Rolls-Royce, parked at dusk between a tube station and a flower stall, the eyes of Keith Talent shone with tremendous accommodations made to money. And murder? The eyes - was there enough blood in them for that? Not now, not yet. He had the talent, somewhere, but he would need the murderee to bring it out. Soon, he would find the lady.

  Or she would find him.

  Chick Purchase. Chick. It's hugely unsuitable for such a celebrated bruiser and satyromaniac. A diminutive of Charles. In America it's Chuck. In England, apparently, it's Chick. Some name. Some country ... Of course, I write these words in the awed hush that follows my completion of the first chapter. I don't dare go through it yet. I wonder if I ever will.

  For reasons not yet altogether clear, I seem to have adopted a jovial and lordly tone. It seems antique, corrupt: like Keith. Re­member, though: Keith is modern, modern, modern. Anyway, I expect to get better at this. And soon I must face the murderee.

  It would be nice to expatiate on how good it feels, after all these years, to sit down and actually start writing fiction. But let's not get any big ideas. This is actually happening.

  How do I know, for instance, that Keith works as a cheat? Be­cause he tried to cheat me, on the way in from Heathrow. I'd been standing under the sign saying taxis for about a half-hour when the royal-blue Cavalier made its second circuit and pulled up at the bay. Out he climbed.

  Taxi, sir?' he said, and picked up my bag, matter-of-factly, in the line of professional routine.

  'That's not a taxi.'

  Then he said, 'No danger. You won't get a cab here, pal. No way.'

  I asked for a price and he gave me one: an outlandish sum.

  'Limo, innit,' he explained.

  'That's not a limo either. It's just a car.'

  'We'll go by what's on the clock, yeah?' he said; but I was already climbing into the back and was fast asleep before we pulled away.

  I awoke some time later. We were approaching Slough, and the metre said £54.50.

  'Slough!'

  His eyes were burning at me warily in the rearview mirror. 'Wait a second, wait a second,' I began. One thing about my illness or condition. I've never been braver. It empowers me - I can feel it. Like looking for the right words and finding them, finding the powers. 'Listen. I know my way around. I'm not over here to see Harrods, and Buckingham Palace, and Stratford-on-Avon. I don't say twenty quids and Trafaljar Square and Barnet. Slough? Come on. If this is a kidnap or a murder then we'll discuss it. If not, take me to London for the amount we agreed.'

  He pulled over unhurriedly. Oh, Christ, I thought: this really is a murder. He turned around and showed me a confiding sneer.

  'What it is is,' he said, 'what it is is — okay. I seen you was asleep. I thought: "He's asleep. Looks as though he could use it. I know. I'll pop in on me mum." Disregard that,' he said, jerking his head, in brutal dismissal, toward the clock, which was of curious design and possibly home manufacture and now said £63.80. 'Don't mind, do you, pal?' He pointed to a line of pebbledash semis — we were, I now saw, in some kind of dormitory estate, green-patched, shopless. 'She's sick like. Won't be five minutes. Okay?'

  'What's that?' I said. I referred to the sounds coming from the car stereo, solid thunks followed by shouted numbers against a savage background of taunts and screams.

  'Darts,' he said, and switched it off. 'I'd ask you in but — me old mum. Here. Read this.'

  So I sat in the back of the Cavalier while my driver went to see his mum. Actually he was doing nothing of the kind. What he was doing (as he would later proudly confide) was wheelbarrowing a lightly clad Analiese Furnish around the living-room while
her current protector, who worked nights, slept with his legendary soundness in the room above.

  I held in my hands a four-page brochure, pressed on me by the murderer (though of course he wasn't a murderer yet. He had a way to go). On the back was a colour photograph of the Queen and a crudely superimposed perfume bottle: '"Outrage" — by Ambrosio.’

  On the front was a black-and-white photograph of my driver, smiling unreliably. 'keith talent,' it said:

  *Chauffeur and courier services

  * Own limousine

  *Casino consultant

  *Luxury goods and Celebrity purchases

  *Darts lessons given

  *London operative for Ambrosio of Milan, Perfumes and Furs

  There followed some more information about the perfumes, 'Scan­dal', 'Outrage', and minor lines called Mirage, Disguise, Duplicity and Sting, and beneath, in double quotes, accompanied by an address and telephone number, with misplaced apostrophes: Keith's the Name, Scent's the Game. The two middle pages of the brochure were blank. I folded it into my middle pocket, quite idly; but it has since proved invaluable to me.

  With sloping gait and two casual corrections of the belt, Keith came down the garden path.

  There was £143.10 on the blatting clock when the car pulled up and I awoke again. Slowly 1 climbed from the car's slept-in, trailer smell, as if from a second aircraft, and unbent myself in front of the house — and the house massive, like an ancient terminal.

  The States? Love the place,' Keith was saying. 'New York? Love it. Madison Square. Park Central. Love the place.' He paused with a flinch as he lifted my bag from the trunk. 'It's a church . . .' he said wonderingly.

  'It used to be a rectory or vicarage or something.' I pointed to an engraved panel high up in the masonry. Anno Domini. 1876.

  '1876!' he said. 'So some vicar had all this.'

  It was clear from his face that Keith was now pondering the tragic decline in the demand for vicars. Well, people still wanted the goods, the stuff for which vicars of various kinds were the middlemen. But they didn't want vicars.

  Making no small display of the courtesy, Keith carried my bag in through the fenced front garden and stood there while I got my keys from the lady downstairs. Now, the speed of light doesn't come up very often in everyday life: only when lightning strikes. The speed of sound is more familiar: that man in the distance with a hammer. Anyway, a Mach-2. event is a sudden event, and that's what Keith and I were suddenly cowering from: the massed frequencies of three jetplanes rippingpast over the rooftops. 'Jesus,' said Keith. And I said it too. 'What's all that about?' I asked. Keith shrugged, with equanimity, with mild hauteur. 'Cloaked in secrecy innit. All veiled in secrecy as such.'

  We entered through a second front door and climbed a broad flight of stairs. I think we were about equally impressed by the opulence and elaboration of the apartment. This is some joint, I have to admit. After a few weeks here even the great Presley would have started to pine for the elegance and simplicity of Graceland. Keith cast his bright glance around the place with a looter's cruel yet professional eye. For the second time that morning I nonchalantly reviewed the possibility that I was about to be murdered. Keith would be out of here ten minutes later, my flightbag over his shoulder, lumpy with appurtenances. Instead he asked me who owned the place and what he did.

  I told him. Keith looked sceptical. This just wasn 't right. 'Mostly for theatre and television,' I said. Now all was clear. 'TV?' he said coolly. For some reason I added, 'I'm in TV too.'

  Keith nodded, much enlightened. Somewhat chastened also; and I have to say it touched me, this chastened look. Of course (he was thinking), TV people all know each other and fly to and from the great cities and borrow each other's flats. Common sense. Yes, behind all the surface activity of Keith's eyes there formed the vision of a heavenly elite, cross-hatching the troposphere like satellite TV -above it, above it all.

  'Yeah well I'm due to appear on TV myself. Hopefully. In a month or two. Darts.'

  'Darts?'

  'Darts.'

  And then it began. He stayed for three and a half hours. People are amazing, aren't they .'They'll tell you everythingif you give them time. And I have always been a good listener. I have always been a talented listener. I really do want to hear it-I don't know why. Of course at that stage I was perfectly disinterested; I had no idea what was happening, what was forming right in front of me. Within fifteen minutes I was being told, in shocking detail, about Analiese — and Iqbala, and Trish, and Debbee. Laconic but unabashed mentions of wife and daughter. And then all that stuff about violent crime and Chick Purchase. And New York. True, I gave him a fair amount to drink: beer, or lager, plentifully heaped like bombs on their racks in Mark Asprey's refrigerator. In the end he charged me £25 for the ride (special TV rate, perhaps) and gave me a ballpoint pen shaped like a dart, with which I now write these words. He also told me that he could be found, every lunchtime and every evening, in a pub called the Black Cross on the Portobello Road.

  I would find him there, right enough. And so would the lady.

  When Keith left I sacked out immediately. Not that I had much say in the matter. Twenty-two hours later I opened my eyes again and was greeted by an unwelcome and distressing sight. Myself, on the ceiling mirror. There's a mirror on the headboard too, and one on the facing wall. It's a chamber of mirrors in there, a hell of mirrors . . .Hooked—I looked not well. I seemed to be pleading, pleading with me, myself. Dr Slizard says I have about three months more of this to get through, and then everything will change.

  I have been out and about a bit since then; yes, I have made several tremulous sorties. The first thing I noticed in the street (I almost stepped in it) struck me as quintessentially English: a soaked loaf of white bread, like the brains of an animal much stupider than any sheep. So far, though, it doesn't seem as bad as some people like to say. At least it's intelligible, more or less. Ten years I've been gone, and what's been happening? Ten years of Relative Decline.

  If London's a pub and you want the whole story, then where do you go ? You go to a London pub. And that single instant in the Black Cross set the whole story in motion. Keith's in the bag. Keith's cool. And I am now cultivating our third party, the foil, the foal, Guy Clinch, who, to my horror, seems to be a genuinely delightful human being. I find I have a vast talent for ingratiation. But none of this would ever have gotten started without the girl. It didn't have a hope in hell without the girl. Nicola Six was the miracle, the absolute donnée. She's perfect for me. And now she'll be taking things into her own hands.

  The English, Lord love them, they talk about the weather. But so does everybody else on earth, these days. Right now, the weather is superatmospheric and therefore, in a sense, supermeteorological (can you really call it weather??. It will stay like this for the rest of the sum­mer, they say. I approve, with one qualification. It's picked the wrong year to happen in: the year of behaving strangely. I look out at it. The weather, if we can still call it that, is frequently very beautiful, but it seems to bring me close to hysteria, as indeed does everything now.

  Chapter 2: The Murderee

  t

  he black cab will move away, unrecallably and for ever, its driver paid, and handsomely tipped, by the murderee. She will walk 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 shattered glass on the passenger seat and the car-tool ready on his lap.

  'Get in.'

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

  'Get in.'

  And in she'll climb . . .

  What is this destiny or condition (and perhaps, like the look of the word's ending, it tends towards the feminine: a feminine ending), what is it, what does it mean, to be a murderee?

  In the case of Nicola Six, tall, dark, and thirty-four, it was bound up with
a delusion, lifelong, and not in itself unmanageable. Right from the start, from the moment that her thoughts began to be consecutive, Nicola knew two strange things. The second strange thing was that she must never tell anyone about the first strange thing. The first strange thing was this: she always knew what was going to happen next. Not all the time (the gift was not obsessively consulted), and not every little detail; but she always knew what was going to happen next. Right from the start she had a friend - Enola, Enola Gay. Enola wasn't real. Enola came from inside the head of Nicola Six. Nicola was an only child and knew she always would be. You can imagine how things might work out. Nicola is seven years old, for instance, and her parents are taking her on a picnic, with another family: why, pretty Dominique will be there, a friend, perhaps, a living friend for the only child. But little Nicola, immersed in romantic thoughts and perfectly happy with Enola, doesn't want to come along (watch how she screams and grips!). She doesn't want to come along because she knows that the afternoon will end in disaster, in blood and iodine and tears. And so it proves. A hundred yards from the grown-ups (so impenetrably arrayed round the square sheet in the sunshine), Nicola stands on the crest of a slope with her new friend, pretty Dominique. And of course Nicola knows what is going to happen next: the girl will hesitate or stumble: reaching out to steady her, Nicola will accidentally propel her playmate downwards, down into the rocks and the briars. She will then have to run and shout, and drive in silence somewhere, and sit on the hospital bench swinging her feet and listlessly asking for ice­cream. And so it proves. On television at the age of four she saw the warnings, and the circles of concentric devastation, with London like a bull's-eye in the centre of the board. She knew that would happen, too. It was just a matter of time.