Amis, Martin - London Fields (v1.0)

by jwilde

  Well, Guy hardly bothered with that. A roll and a half of toilet paper later, and he was out on the street with the steaming child. Marmaduke was now lying face down on the pavement, entirely flaccid to the touch. Guy crouched, and coaxed, and flinched into the low sun.

  'There's a good boy.'

  'Nnno!. . . Ant mummy.'

  'Come on, darling,'

  'Ant cad jew.’

  'Oh all right.'

  During their walks, Marmaduke always insisted on being carried, because it made the business of hitting his father much easier. They started off towards Ladbroke Grove. The lofted child's fingers played playdough with Guy's face.

  Royal prisoners, Guy thought: that's their status. Babies are royal prisoners, imperial internees, little Napoleons, tiny Hirohitos. Ouch! Must clip his nails. Passive resistance — well, within certain conventions of acceptable struggle. They consume the gaoler's man-hours. They sap the enemy's war-effort. 'Not in the eyes,' he said. When they're falling down the stairs, you can see it in their faces: they're saying- this is your problem. And just as you think the old boy is coming along quietly for once — 'Not in the eyes' — there'll be some frazzled lurch for the door, some fumbled sabotage. Or a last, heroic self-fouling. Ow. Ouch. Right up the nose with that one. Whose war is it ? Aren't we their friends, their enemies' enemies ? Of course, you can never treat the royal prisoners cruelly or harshly, because they're royal and must be seen to be perfect when hostilities end. . . Before he was a father Guy didn't realize just how many babies and children there always were about the place. But now — he was entering Ladbroke Grove with its shops and pubs and bus-stops - Guy saw that the royal prisoners were naturally everywhere, as they always have been, all sizes (the woeful ones, the terrible twos, the threatening threes, the fearsome fours), and all doing what royal prisoners always do.

  The superior violence everywhere suggested by the flesh and mortar of the street had an emollient effect on Marmaduke, who was perhaps hoping to pick up some tips for use elsewhere. Presiding over the car horns and engine surges, and the turning wheels of ordinary commerce, small concerns, and the permanent smash and scuffle at the pubs' lantern jaws, came the dead notes of six or seven burglar alarms exasperatedly sounding. The post-office, whose floor stayed wet in any weather, was a skating rink of drunks and supplicants and long-lost temper—and self-injury, Guy thought, noticinghow nobody noticed the woman in the corner rhythmically beating her head against the join in the wall. He queued for a callbox, or milled for a callbox, the queuing idea, like the zebra-crossing idea, like the women-and-children-first idea, like the leave-the-bathroom-as-you-would-expect-to-find-it idea, having relinquished its hold in good time for the millennium. Even Marmaduke Seemed somewhat daunted by the swirl. Guy was thinking of trying his luck at Conchita's or Hosni's or possibly the Black Cross when a booth became clear and no one serious interposed. He called Richard, who forthrightly confirmed what they had both suspected: all American money was leaving the City.

  After the conversation was over Guy went on standing there, the telephone to one ear while Marmaduke patiently mangled the other. He never panicked; and he didn't panic now; he cleaved, as always, to what he felt was inevitable. The American retreat was in any case far less significant than the rollover it might entrain. And his own holding position was probably sound. But he suddenly felt a universal steepening. Guy held the child, but wants and needs now flailed out from him, basic, cheap, ordinary, the stuff we have to have. It occurred to him that he was perfectly free to call Nicola, and this he did. Sleepily she revealed that she was lying on her bed, after a bath, and that he was much in her thoughts. For some reason Guy laughed, and with childish gratitude or relief. He felt a new pain somewhere but didn't notice how his trousers rose a couple of inches from his shoes.

  He went outside with the child and the sun was right there at the end of the street like a nuclear detonation. And Guy knew that the sun shouldn't be doing this. No, the sun really shouldn't be doing this. The sun shouldn't be coming in low at us like this, filling windows and windscreens with rosy wreaths of dust, setting the horizon on fire like this, burning so aslant like this, at this terrible angle, making everything worse. You want it out of your sight. Look round a corner-and there's nothing, the street is gone, it's just fire and blood. Then the eyes themselves burn through and you can see the wet asphalt sizzling in its pan. The sun turns slums into crystal battlements. But the sun shouldn't be doing this, it really shouldn't be doing this, branding our minds with this idea, this secret (special burning, special fire), arrowing in low at us all the time like this.

  As they turned into Lansdowne Crescent a free dog bounded past, as if escaping from the scene of a crime. Guy sat Marmaduke down on a garden wall and tried to embrace him. Into the eager flurry of small fists he bent his face, his searching lips. He had just seen himself in the future: he was with Marmaduke, at the zoo in Regent's Park — the zooworld of annulment, dissolution, visiting rights, half-orphan­hood. The cafés, the concourses were sparsely scattered with other divorced fathers, other sundered children. But the cages were empty,

  except for trails of smoke and the ghosts of animals, There weren't any animals. No animals any more. Not even a dog.

  For some time now I have thought it possible to believe that America was going insane. In her own way. And why not?

  Countries go insane like people go insane; and all over the world countries reclined on couches or sat in darkened rooms chewing dihydrocodeine and Temazepam or lay in boiling baths or twisted in straitjackets or stood there banging their heads against the padded walls. Some had been insane all their lives, and some had gone insane and then gotten better again and then gone insane again. America: America had had her neuroses before, like when she tried giving up drink, like when she started finding enemies within, like when she thought she could rule the world; but she had always gotten better again. But now she was going insane, and that was the necessary condition.

  In a way she was never like anywhere else. Most places just are something, but America had to mean something too, hence her vulnerability - to make-believe, to false memory, false destiny. And finally it looked as though the riveting struggle with illusion was over, and America had lost.

  I sit by the side of Lizzyboo's hammock-like bed, patting her hand and talking about all the rewards of the cloistered life. How very different from the sleeping arrangements and general atmosphere aboard Aphrodite, where Marius swelters in the port cabin, listening to Cornelia's insomnias of stoppered longing in her Starboard bunk . . .

  There was a time when I thought I could read the streets of London. 1 thought I could peer into the ramps and passages, into the smoky dispositions, and make some sense of things. But now I don't think I can. Either I'm losing it, or the streets are getting harder to read. Or both. I can't read books, which are meant to be easy, easy to read. No wonder, then, that I can't read streets, which we all know to be hard - metal-lined, reinforced, massively concrete. And getting harder, tougher. Illiterate themselves, the streets are illegible. You just cannot read them any more.

  'So you loved him,' I said.

  'So you loved her,' said Nicola.

  I didn't answer either. What happens? We endlessly circle everyone else, everyone else we can get in range, looking for the other, who is circling and waiting and, we hope, looking for us. Then, if you dare to, if you possibly can, you just think: not a doubt.

  For some time now it seemed that the dreamlife of America might become too strong and troubled. What's that line in early Updike -in innocent, amorous Rabbitland? America is beyond power: she acts as in a dream, as a face of God. America thought she was awake, brightly awake, but in reality she was sleeping, and deep-dreaming; and she was all by herself. She wanted to be good, to be better — special. We all do. When you go insane, what happens? Wanting to be good and right: can this do it? Can love do it? Too much love, and all of the wrong kind. Love unreturned, tantrum love, collapsing into hurt feelings. Feel
ings ripped and torn. Inconsolable America, cruelly stung, breathing deeply, and not coming out to play. Marriageably she slept, and dreamt, and thought she was awake.

  It makes it so no one can say how frightened they're feeling. Four months ago Missy Harter was whispering in my ear. Now she talks like Time magazine.

  I call her everywhere and nothing happens.

  Keith asked me if he could bring Analiese Furnish to the apartment. As he filed this request, and sensed some of my unease, he gave me the look of the star-crossed lover. In Keith's version of it, in Keith's spin-off of it, the star-crossed lover looks like an old chancer whose steed has fallen ten yards from the post. Just this once, I said.

  Notes:

  Of course, I'd admired the topless tabloid photo of her that Keith carries around with him, and physically she measured up. All in all she seemed (i) a little less pretty (ii) quite a lot more crazy (iii) about five years older and (iv) about nine inches shorter than the image formed by my typewriter.

  I made ready to leave but they insisted I stuck around. Long silence from the bedroom. Then the sound of what I can only describe as intense mutual difficulty. Then a dozen furious cowboys finally hit Santa Fe.

  Later, during the aftermath, I was alone with her in the sitting-room. 'Tell me something,'I said. 'Out of interest. When Keith comes over, where does Basil go?"He goes', she said haughtily, 'to the park.'

  Air of flusteredness and falsity. Dumb hat. She reviewed the photographs on the walls like an art historian in a gallery. Hair and shoulders seemed to hum in minute response to my gaze. Even her club-like ankles, cringing under the floral print of her dress, seemed to know when I was looking at them. Christ: the expansion of mind, the communications revolution. All survivable, presumably; but Ana-liese just didn't make it. The mind doesn't expand. It stays the same. Other things fill it.

  In the book, she stood for something. In the flesh, she was pointless: a complete waste of time. Or not quite. In the flesh, she broke your heart, as all human beings do. I watched her, an older man, failed in art and love. Fat ankles. Dear flesh.

  And now in the same park but in different weather I stand with Basil side by side. Nothing divides us — just a screen of rain. You'd call us stuffed men but even the stuffing has been knocked out of us. We hug ourselves to hold what warmth remains and because no one we love will. Basil, the weeping violinist. And no good at that either. You and me, pal.

  One fails to see how Marius is going to make any progress on the macho front. Cornelia doesn't need it. He keeps trying to protect her and rescue her and so on — but she's never in any trouble. For instance, they encounter a wild dog near a trading shack on some windswept shore. Marius does the butch thing and steps forward to confront it. The dog stares up, yawning and drooling with rabies. Clad, as usual, in only a cartridge belt, Cornelia pushes him aside (her magnificent breasts are heaving) and blows its head off. She reminds me of someone. I know: Burton Else.

  And, like Burton Else, like everyone else, Cornelia has her softer side. Marius is definitely doing better on the campfire end of things, after old Kwango has retired. Here, under the tamarinds, under the throbbing stars, she tells him of her love for Bernardo, the doomed racing-driver - his flashing smile, his lustrous quiff. Here is a woman who will not give herself lightly to any man. But when she does, Marius figures, she gives herself utterly.

  Nevertheless the sands of time are running out: he only has about fifty pages. Go for it, Marius. The suspense is killing me. Death is killing me. Everything hurts, and I think I'm going blind.

  My eyes have become such pitiful instruments. In the vampire movie, when the cowgirl or barmaid comes too close with her white throat, and the Count thinks what the hell and really leans in there, and his eyes. .. that's what my eyes are like. Partly it's all this crying I do. I cry so much — I feel what femininity is. Crying is part of my repertoire, part of my day, my life. I wail and keen. I have sniffles. Oh, Lizzyboohoohoo. Sometimes, when I'm at a loose end, I have a refreshing little sob and feel much the better for it. I grizzle and blub. I weep it out. And still I must blow my nose and pipe my eyes and go out into the teargas of the unreadable streets. The chicanes, and the terrible cars.

  For some time now it's all been bad timing. Bad timing, and then more bad timing, and then more. The millennium, coming so soon, so hard upon, is bad timing. In the year 999, in the year 1499, in the year 1899 (and in all the years between: the millennium is a permanent millennium) — it didn't really matter what people felt or what they felt like saying. The end of the world just wasn't coming. Nobody had the hardware. The end of the world was staying right where it was. Unless . . , We've all had that funny experience, after taking a leak: pull the handle, and watch the bowl froth with sewage. It went out. And now it's coming in again. The human being is standing on tiptoe, head cracked back on his neck, with only nostrils, pouting lips and a lump of straining forehead visible above the rising tide. They did good to put the weather reports on late at night, after the children have supposedly gone to bed. X-rated weather reports, and the weathermen like jumpy undertakers. Imagine the planet as a human face - a man's face, because men did it. Can you see him through the smoke and heat-wobble? His scalp churns with boils and baldspots and surgeon's scars. What hair is left is worried white. The face beneath is saying: I know I shouldn't have tried that stuff. I know I shouldn't have messed with all that stuff. I really want to change and straighten out but I think I went and left it a little too late. I get an awful feeling that this is stuff you can't recover from. Look what it's done to me. Look what it's done to me ...

  In a sinister reversal I am now established as Keith's darts coach. He doesn't coach me any more. I coach him. It's easy.

  I can't help him with the technique side of it (there isn't any), and I can't help him with the tactical side of it (there isn't any), but I can help him with the psychological side of it, and there's apparently plenty of that. Everything depends on the savagery of your desire to get that dart to go where you throw it. Afterward, eerily, the money still changes hands in the same direction. Keith looks elsewhere as he receives the notes.

  So I was standing there last night saying things like 'Be accurate, Keith' and 'Keep it tight' and occasionally, of course (the supreme accolade), 'Darts, Keith'. Every now and then we get into recondite stuff about muscle memory and the destiny of the shaft and so on, but mostly I just stand there saying things like 'Be accurate, Keith'. 'Be accurate, Keith': what kind of advice is that? What does it cost me to say it? I make an effort and say it through the pain. The pain I'm at home with by now; but not the effort. It is the effort that is so new, unprecedented—and so tiring, like all efforts. Effort is full of effort and all that tiring stuff. There is a tab. Light bleeds out of the other things.

  Last night, around eleven, something happened to Keith that should never happen to a cheat: he ran out of cigarettes. Flabbergas­ted, he searched the garage for his spare few dozen cartons — and couldn't find a single pack. That shows you just how long he has been neglecting his cheating.

  When he went to get some, at the Offie (where they have everything a modern family needs: drink, videos, nuked pizza), I settled down for a leisurely look at his notebook, his darting diary. And among the little homilies about the wayward third arrow, the illiterate fantasies of sudden wealth, the grimly transcribed gobbets about how Hannibal probably played a form of darts, I came across the following:

  Got to stop hurting K. No good just takeing it out on the Baby.

  Get him gone. Christ, how much longer before we come to the end ? Get him gone.

  Enough. Finish. Over.

  Chapter 19: The Ladies and the Gents

  s

  emi night! The five-set semi-final of the Duoshare Sparrow Masters was, for Keith Talent, a home fixture. No way, on the other hand, was such a quality contest being staged at the Black Cross. On this night Keith looked to a far more prestigious venue: Acton's the Marquis oí Edenderry. That was the drinker Keith
had always represented - the foaming tankard, the purple arrowpouch, the clinical finishing. No way would you catch Keith throwing for the Black Cross, whose drunken troupe of cosmopolitan stylists had never come close to Superleague, had never, in fact, been known to win a darts match. Your more cultured arrowman was always going to be turning elsewhere for his sport. Basically it was to a more dart-orientated boozer that Keith was obliged to gravitate, where you found the darting dedication. The Marquis of Edenderry: its terraces of brothelly red velvet and tinkling chandeliers, the barman in braces, striped shirts and porkchop side burns, the barmaids with their milkmaid outfits, wenchy cleavages and sound knowledge of darts averages and lore. Magnificent facilities, with eight boards all in a line, and then, for the big occasions, the raised oché complete with mimic target and digitalized scoring. Kath helped dress him: the burnished Cubans, the toreador flares, the black shirt short-sleeved for flowing throwing with its silver-scripted admonition: keith talent — the finisher. Then the bat-winged darting cape ... In the damp shadows of the Black Cross the figure Keith cut could occasionally seem taciturn and remote; but put him in a class pisser like the Marquis of Edenderry and, well, the guy just came alive. Keith loved the Marquis of Edenderry. He sometimes came over all funny about the Marquis of Edenderry, and would tearfully beat up anyone who spoke slightingly of the place.