London Fields

by Martin Amis

  In pastel daubings the new prosperity lay to east and west but this place was kept poor by wind. Wind bled and beggared it. Like the cock, the wind just did its wind thing, not caring wherefore. Hot air rises, cool air fills the space: hence, somehow, the tearing and tugging, the frenzied unzippings of this sandpaper shore. In his tennis shorts Guy stepped off the porch and walked past the car (the car avoided his gaze) on to the tattered croisette. A motorbike, an anguished donkey shackled to its cart — nothing else. The sky also was empty, blown clean, an unblinking Africa of blue. Down on the beach the wind went for his calves like an industrial cleanser; Guy gained the hardened rump of damp sand and contemplated the wrinkly sea. It opened inhospitably to him. Feeling neither vigour nor its opposite, feeling no closer to life than to death, feeling thirty-five, Guy pressed on, hardly blinking as he crossed the scrotum barrier; and it was the water that seemed to cringe and start back, repelled by this human touch, as he barged his way down the incline, breathed deep, and pitched himself forward in the swimmer's embrace of the sea . . . Twenty minutes later, as he strode back up the beach, the wind threw everything it had at him, and with fierce joy the sand sought his eyes and teeth, the hairless tray of his chest. A hundred yards from the road Guy paused, and imagined surrendering to it (I may be gone some time), dropping to his knees and folding sideways under the icy buckshot of the air.

  He queued for coffee in the awakening venta. The daughters of the establishment were mopping up; two men boldly conversed across the length of the dark room. Guy stood straight, barefoot, his skin and hair minutely spangled by the sand. An interested woman, had she been monitoring him with half an eye, might have found Guy Clinch well made, classical, above all healthy; but there was something pointless or needless in his good looks; they seemed wasted on him. Guy knew this. Stocky mat-shouldered Antonio, leaning against the pillar by the door, one hand limp on his round belly - and thinking with complacence of his own blood-red loincloth, with the good shoelace-and-tassel effect down there on the crotch — registered Guy not at all, not at all. And the poling daughters had thoughts only for Antonio, careless, drunken, donkey-flogging Antonio and his crim-son bullybag . . . Guy drank the excellent coffee, and ate bread moistened with olive oil, out on the banging porch. He then took a tray into Hope, who ripped off her mask but lay there with her eyes closed.

  'Have you achieved anything yet?'

  'I've been swimming,' he said. 'It's my birthday.'

  '. . . Many happy returns.'

  'Young Antonio here is apparently pretty handy with a spanner.'

  'Oh yes? The car's dead, Guy.'

  Moments earlier, out on the banging porch, a ridiculous thing had happened. Hearing a rhythmical whimpering in the middle distance, Guy had raised his hands to his temples, as if to freeze-frame the thought that was winding through his head (and he wasn't given to them. He wasn't given to pornographic thoughts). The thought was this: Hope splayed and naked, being roughly used by an intent Antonio . . . Guy had then taken his last piece of bread into the yard and offered it to the tinned dog. (He also took another incredulous look at the cock, the stupid gallo.) The dog was whimpering rhythmically, but showed no appetite. Dirty and gentle-faced, the bitch just wanted to play, to romp, to fraternize, and just kept tripping on her tether. The length of fílthy rope — six feet of it — saddened Guy in a way that Spanish cruelty or carelessness had never saddened him before. Down in the yard here, on a wind-frazzled stretch of empty shore, when the only thing that came free and plentiful was space and distance — the dog was given none of it. So poor, and then poor again, doubly, triply, exponentially poor. I've found it, thought Guy (though the word wouldn't come, not yet). It is . . . I've found it and it's . . . It is —

  'So?'

  'Why don't we stay here? For a few days? The sea's nice,' he said, 'once you're in. Until we get the car fixed. It's interesting.'

  Hope's impressive bite-radius now readied itself over the first section of grilled bread. She paused. 'I can't bear it. You aren't going dreamy on me, are you Guy? Listen, we're out of here. We are gone.'

  And so it became the kind of day where you call airlines and consulates and car-hire people in a dreary dream of bad connexions and bad Spanish: that evening, on the helipad at Algeciras, Hope favoured Guy with her first smile in twenty-four hours. Actually nearly all of this was achieved (between meals and drinks and swims) from the control tower of a six-star hotel further down the coast, a place full of rich old Germans, whose heavy playfulness and charm- less appearance (Guy had to admit) powerfully reminded him of Marmaduke.

  Thereafter it was all quite easy: not clear and not purposeful, but not difficult. Guy Clinch looked round his life for a dimension through which some new force might propagate. And his life, he found, was sewn-up, was wall-to-wall. It was closed. To the subtle and silent modulations of Hope's disgust, he started to open it. Guy had a job. He worked for the family business. This meant sitting about in a bijou flatlet in Cheapside, trying to keep tabs on the proliferating, the pullulating hydra of Clinch money. (It, too, was like Marmaduke: what would it get up to next?) Increasingly, Guy stopped going in and just walked the streets instead.

  Fear was his guide. Like all the others on the crescent Guy's house stood aloof from the road, which was all very well, which was all very fine and large; but fear had him go where the shops and flats jostled fascinatedly over the street like a crowd round a bearpit, with slot-game parlours, disastrous beaneries, soup queues, army hostels, with life set out on barrows, on pingpong tables, on decapitated Portakabins — the voodoo and the hunger, the dreadlocks and dreadnoughts, the Keiths and Kaths of the Portobello Road. Naturally Guy had been here before, in search of a corn-fed chicken or a bag of Nicaraguan coffee. But now he was looking for the thing itself.

  tv and darts, said the sign. and pimball. The first time Guy entered the Black Cross he was a man pushing through the black door of his fear ... He survived. He lived. The place was ruined and innocuous in its northern light: a clutch of dudes and Rastas playing pool over the damp swipe of the baize, the pewtery sickliness of the whites (they looked like war footage), the twittering fruit-machines, the fuming pie-warmer. Guy asked for a drink in the only voice he had: he didn't tousle his hair or his accent; he carried no tabloid under his arm, open on the racing page. With a glass of medium-sweet white wine he moved to the pinball table, an old Gottlieb, with Arabian-Nights artwork (temptress, devil, hero, maiden) - Eye of the Tiger. Eye of the Tiger . . .A decrepit Irish youth stood inches away whisper­ing who's the boss who's the boss into Guy's ear for as long as he seemed to need to do that. Whenever Guy looked up a dreadful vet­eran of the pub, his face twanging in the canned rock, stared at him bitterly, like the old man you stop for at the zebra who crosses slowly, with undiminished suspicion: no forgiveness there, not ever. The in- prehensible accusations of a sweat-soaked black girl were finally silenced by a five-pound note. Guy stayed for half an hour, and got out. He took so much fear away with him that there had to be less of it each time he returned. But going there at night was another entry.

  Keith was the key: Keith, and his pub charisma. Keith was the pub champ. The loudest, the most booming in his shouts for more drink, the most violent in his abuse of the fruit machine, the best at darts — a darts force in the Black Cross . . . Now plainly Keith had to do something about Guy, who was far too anomalous to be let alone, with his pub anticharisma. Keith had to ban him, befriend him, beat him up. Kill him. So he pouched his darts one day and walked the length of the bar (regulars were wondering when it would happen), leaned over the pinball table with an eyebrow raised and his tongue between his teeth: and bought Guy a drink. The hip pocket, the furled tenners. Keith's house had many mansions. The whole pub shook with silent applause.

  Cheers, Keith! After that, Guy belonged. He sailed in there almost with a swagger and summoned the barmen by name: God, or Pongo. After that, he stopped having to buy drinks for the black girls, and stopped having to buy drugs from th
e black boys. The heroin, the cut coke, the Temazepam, the dihydrocodeine he had always refused, fobbing them off with small purchases of dope. He used to take the hash and grass home and flush it down the waste-disposer; he didn't drop it in the gutter for fear that a child or a dog might get hold of it, a needless precaution, because the hash wasn't hash and the grass was justgrass . . .Now Guy could sit in a damp pocket of pub warmth, and watch. Really the thing about life here was its incredible rapidity, with people growing up and getting old in the space of a single week. Like the planet in the twentieth century, with its fantastic coup de vieux. Here, in the Black Cross, time was a tube train with the driver slumped heavy over the lever, flashing through station after station. Guy always thought it was life he was looking for. But it must have been death — or death awareness. Death candour. I've found it, he thought. It is mean, it is serious, it is beautiful, it is poor; it fully earns every compliment, every adjective, you care to name.

  So when Nicola Six came into the Black Cross on a day of thunder and stood at the bar and raised her veil—Guy was ready. He was wide open.

  'Bitch,' said Keith, as he dropped his third dart.

  Being a dart, a little missile of plastic and tungsten, it combined with gravity and efficiently plunged towards the centre of the earth. What halted its progress was Keith's left foot, which was protected only by the frayed webbing of a cheap running-shoe: you could see the little bullseye of blood. But there was another arrowman or darter in the Black Cross that day; perhaps this smilingp«ffo lurked in the artwork of the pinball table, among its sinbads and sirens, its goblins and genies. Eye of the Tiger! When he saw her green eyes, and the breadth of her mouth, Guy gripped the flanks of the machine for comfort or support. The ball scuttled into the gutter. Then silence.

  She cleared her throat and inquired of Godfrey the barman, who cocked his head doubtfully.

  As she turned to go Keith stepped in, or he limped in, anyway, moving down the bar with his unreliable smile. Guy watched in wonder. Keith said,

  'No danger. They don't sell French fags here, darling. No way. Here? No danger. Carlyle!'

  A black boy appeared, panting, triumphant, as if his errand were already run. Keith gave the instructions, the mangled fiver, then turned assessingly. Death wasn't new in the Black Cross, it was everyday, it was ten-a-penny; but tailored mourning wear, hats, veils? Keith searched his mind, seemed to search his mouth, for something appropriate to say. In the end he said, 'Bereavement innit. God? Get her a brandy. She could use it. Nobody close I presume?'

  'No. Nobody close.'

  'What's your name, sweetheart?'

  She told him. Keith couldn't believe his luck.

  'Sex!'

  'S-i-x. Actually it's Six."

  'Seeks! Relax, Nicky. We get all sorts in here. Hey, cock. Guy . . .'

  Now Guy moved into her force field. Intensely he confirmed the line of dark down above her mouth. You saw women like this, sometimes, at the bars of theatres and concert halls, in certain restaurants, in aeroplanes. You didn't see them in the Black Cross. She too looked as though she might faint at any moment. 'How do you do?' he said (in his peripheral vision Keith was slowly nodding), extending a hand towards the black glove. 'Guy Clinch.' His fingers hoped for the amperes of recognition but all he felt was a slick softness, a sense of moisture that perhaps someone else had readied. Little Carlyle exploded through the pub doors.

  'You must let me pay for these,' she said, removing a glove. The hand that now attacked the cellophane was bitten at the five tips.

  'My treat,' said Keith.

  'I suppose,' Guy said, 'I suppose this is by way of being a wake.'

  'Weren't family?' said Keith.

  'Just a woman I used to work for.'

  'Young?'

  'No no.'

  'Still. Does you credit,'Keith went on.'Show respect. Even if it's just some old boiler. Comes to us all as such.'

  They talked on. With a violent jerk of self-reproof, Guy bought more drinks. Keith leaned forward murmuring with cupped hands to light Nicola's second cigarette. But this was soon finished or aborted, and she was lowering her veil and saying,

  'Thank you. You've been very kind. Goodbye.'

  Guy watched her go, as did Keith: the delicate twist of the ankles, the strength and frankness of the hips; and that concavity of the tight black skirt, in the telling underspace.

  'Extraordinary,' said Guy.

  'Yeah, she'll do,' said Keith, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand (for he was leaving also).

  'You're not-'

  Keith turned, in warning. His gaze fell to the hand, Guy's hand (their first touch), which lightly held his forearm. The hand now slackened and dropped.

  'Come on, Keith,' said Guy with a pale laugh. 'She's just been to a funeral.'

  Keith looked him up and down. 'Life goes on innit,' he said, with most of his usual buoyancy. He straightened his windcheater and gave a manful sniff. 'Dreaming of it,' he said, as if to the street outside. 'Begging for it. Praying for it.'

  Keith shoved his way through the black doors. Guy hesitated for a moment, a pub moment, and then followed him.

  That night in Lansdowne Crescent, at 8.45, his twelve-hour tryst with Marmaduke now only minutes away, Guy sat on the second sofa in the second drawing-room with a rare second drink and thought: How will I ever know anything in the middle of all this warmth and space, all this supershelter ? I want to feel like the trampolinist when he falls back to earth and to gravity. To touch the earth with heaviness -just to touch it. God expose us, take away our padding and our room.

  I watched them go.

  Keith followed Nicola out of the Black Cross. Guy followed Keith. I wish to Christ I'd followed Guy, but those were early days, before I was really on the case.

  A promising routine is forming around me. I can finish a chapter in two days, even with all the fieldwork I have to go out and do. Every third day, now, I do more fieldwork, and wince and gloat into my notebook. I write. I'm a writer . . . Perhaps to offset the looming bulk of Mark Asprey's corpus, I have laid out my two previous publications on the desk here. Memoirs of a Listener. On the Grapevine. By Samson Young. Me. Yes, you. A valued stylist, in my native America. My memoirs, my journalism, praised for their honesty, their truthfulness. I'm not one of those excitable types who get caught making things up. Who get caught improving on reality. I can embellish, I can take certain liberties. Yet to invent the bald facts of a life (for example) would be quite beyond my powers.

  Why? I think it might have something to do with me being such a nice guy, originally. Anyway at the moment reality is behaving unimprovably, and nobody will know.

  I'm so coiled up about the first three chapters, it's all I can do not to Fed-Ex — or even Thrufax — them off to Missy Harter, at Hornig Ultrason. There are others I could approach. Publishers regularly inquire about my first novel. Publishers dream nights about my first novel. So do I. I'm getting old, and at a peculiar rate. Missy Harter, of course, has always been the most persistent. Maybe I'll call her. I need the encouragement. I need the stimulation. I need the money.

  Keith came over this morning. I suppose he has to be teeing me up for a burglary, because the place is full of portable baubles.

  He wanted to use the VCR. Naturally he has a VCR of his own; he probably has several dozen, somewhere. But this, he said, was a little bit special. Then he produced a tape in its plastic wallet. The front cover showed a man's naked torso, its lower third obscured by two discrete cataracts of thick blonde hair. The sticker said £189.99.

  It was called When Scandinavian Bodies Go Mouth Crazy. The title proved to be accurate — even felicitous. I sat with Keith for a while and watched five middle-aged men seated around a table talking in Danish or Swedish or Norwegian without subtitles. You could make out a word now and then. Radiotherapy. Handikap-toilet. 'Where's the remote?' Keith asked grimly. He had need of the Fast Forward, the Picture Search. We found the remote but it didn't seem to be working. Keit
h had to sit through the whole thing: an educational short, I assume, about hospital administration. I slipped into the study. When I came back the five old guys were still talking. The thing ended, after a few credits. Keith looked at the floor and said, 'Bastard.'

  To cheer him up (among other motives) I applied to Keith for darts lessons. His rates are not low.

  I too have need of the Fast Forward. But I must let things happen at the speed she picks. I can eke out Chapter 4 with Keith's sexual confessions (vicious, detailed and unstoppable), which, at this stage, are the purest gold.

  Guy Clinch was no sweat to pull, to cultivate, to develop. It was a shame to take the money. Again, fatefully easy.

  Knowing that Keith would be elsewhere (busy cheating: an elderly widow — also fine material), I staked out the Black Cross hoping Guy would show. For the first time I noticed a joke sign behind the bar: no fucking swearing. And what's with this carpet? What do you want a carpet for in a place like this? I ordered an orange juice. One of the black guys - he called himself Shakespeare - was staring at me with either affection or contempt. Shakespeare is, by some distance, the least prosperous of the Black Cross brothers. The bum's overcoat, the plastic shoes, the never-washed dreadlocks. He's the local shaman: he has a religious mission. His hair looks like an onion bhaji. 'You trying to cut down, man?' he slowly asked me. Actually I had to make him say it about five times before I understood. His resined face showed no impatience. 'I don't drink,' I told him. He was nonplussed. Of course, non-drinking, while big in America, was never much more than a fad over here. 'Honest,' I said. 'I'm Jewish.'. . . Quite a kick, saying that to a barful of blacks. Imagine saying it in Chicago, or Pittsburgh. Imagine saying it in Detroit. 'We don't, much.' Gradually, as if controlled by a dial, pleasure filled Shakespeare's eyes - which, it seemed to me, were at least as malarial and sanguinary as my own. One of the embarrassments of my condition: although it encourages, or enforces, a quiet life and sensible habits, it makes me look like Caligula after a very heavy year. What with all the grape and the slavegirls and everything, and all those fancy punishments and neat tortures I've been doling out. . . 'It's all in the eyes, man,' said Shakespeare. 'All in the eyes.'