London Fields

by Martin Amis

  'Look!' said Keith, and pointed babyishly, with bent forefinger. Immediately beneath them, in a half-shadowed roof-ridge, water had been able to gather and remain. Birds played in the pool. 'Like . ..' Keith grinned fondly. 'It's like birds playing in a pool.'

  'Like birds playing in a pool, Keith?'

  'You know. Girls. Playing in a swimming-pool.'

  'Ah yes.' Nicola thought of the kind of video Keith might occasionally get his hands on. The white villa, the baby blue of a Marbellan swimming-pool, the handful of topless English slags, 'playing': my, how they frolicked on diving-board and lilo! Then, as the music modulated, one or two or three of them would slip away, with or without Manolo the gardener, for the lucratively backbreak-ing siesta. 'Let's go down,' she said.

  They entered a world of blackness, and moved heavily through the heat from room to room. One by one they activated coffee-grinder, vacuum-cleaner, flat-iron. All worked — all were renewed. All would break down again, of course, as they both knew, within a few hours. For the backroom boys at GoodFicks were destiny artists, were reality tinkerers, also, in a way, bending the future to serve their own ends.

  Nicola asked Keith what she owed him, and Keith spread his hands, Hindu-style. Leaving him in the passage (and feeling the force of his blue eyes on her rump), she went to the bedroom, and closed the door behind her. She took a thick roll of fifty-pound notes from beneath the mattress. Then she slipped her feet into her tallest white high heels, which were there by the bed, waiting. Standing in front of the mirror she felt, in succession, like a chorus girl, like a horse, like a cartoon. Suddenly she was obliged to muffle a sneeze of laughter -wincing, horrified, but definitely laughter, laughter that showed signs of slipping off its ratchet and out of control. Was she just mad? Was that what it was? The same body, the same mirror, the same pair of eyes: tears and laughter within the space of forty-five minutes, all very dangerous, dangerous. Across the street was a dead house whose windows were corrugated metal. On its door was a white sign bearing red letters: dangerous structure. This was her body. This was her plan.

  Lightly Keith accepted the money and folded it into the pocket of his toreador pants. He took one step backwards down the stairs and then halted and looked her up and down with maximum insolence. 'Well,' he said slowly. 'Now I'm at it. Got you fixed up. Is there - is there anything else you like me to do for you?'

  'You mean sex?' said Nicola, glancing at her watch. 'We'll see, Keith. All in good time. First some questions. You're married.'

  'Not really. Put it like this. My wife thinks she is. But me I'm not so sure.'

  'Children?'

  'No. Well, yeah, I got a little girl. She's not even one yet.'

  At this point the intercom buzzer sounded, with timid brevity, like a snatch of Morse. Nicola ignored it and said, 'I expect you could use some money, couldn't you, Keith, particularly now?'

  'Yeah. Absolutely.'

  'Can you keep your mouth shut, Keith? Do you have to run and tell the boys about all your good times?'

  He coughed and said, 'No way. Never do that.'

  'All right,' she said sternly. 'Unimaginable treats await you, Keith. Forget about everything you've had before. This will be a different class. Sweetheart, don't look so worried! I'll expect certain things in return. You know what I mean. The qualities of patience and coolness, Keith, that I imagine you apply to your darts. Are you going to trust me? We're going to do this at my speed. All right?'

  'You're on.'

  'Take these.' She handed him a shower attachment and a book, a paperback. 'You don't have to do anything with them. They're props. They're just props.'

  'Who's that?' said Keith warily, for the buzzer had sounded again: the merest blip.

  'The first test of your discretion is on his way up the stairs,' she said, pressing her thumb down on the release. 'Remember: why should he have all the money? Watch.' With terrible intentness she placed the roll of money into the prow of her bikini bottoms, and patted it. 'Keith! It looks like - it looks like a . . .'

  'Yeah.'

  'It looks like a . . .' Five minutes ago she had been close to hysteria. But now the hysterical lilt in her voice, although hideous to her own ears, was entirely willed. 'It looks like a gun-barrel in a holster, doesn't it, Keith!'

  'Uh...yeah.'

  'Here.'

  In a slow glaze he reached out with the back of his hand. The trembling knuckles.

  'Don't touch,' she said, and stood her ground.

  And he didn't touch. He just touched the material, and the money.

  When she arranged this meeting with Guy, over the telephone, Nicola stressed the need for commando or bank-caper synchrony ('Unpunctuality throws me utterly. It's tiresome, I know. The orphanage, perhaps . . .'); but this didn't stop her keeping him waiting for a good fifteen minutes ('Please sit down!' she called from the bedroom. 'I do apologize'). She needed fifteen minutes. One to envelope her bikini in a plain white cotton dress. Another to give the bedclothes a fantastic worrying. What was the delightful phrase in Lolita: the guilty disarray of hotel linen suggesting an ex-convict's saturnalia with a couple of fat old whores? The rest of the time Nicola needed for makeup. Out came the actress palette; on went the actress bulbs. A profound and turbulent postcoital flush was the effect she was after. She even cobbled together the imprint of a punch or a hefty slap on her right cheekbone. (This was surely going too far; but then that was the idea, wasn't it, to go too far?) Her hair she vigorously tousled. It was ironic, sweetly ironic: because in fifteen minutes she could have straightened hair and bedding, had they needed straightening, and powderpuffed away the very plumes and blotches with which she now lewdly and firily daubed her facet But that's art. Always the simulacrum, never the real thing. That's art.

  Nicola emerged from the bedroom in a subtle hobble, patting her hair with one hand and limply fanning herself with the other . . .Guy stood sideways-on at the bookcase. He was holding a slim volume up to his face, arms half-folded, in a posture of clerical perusal. He turned, and looked at her reproachfully.

  'I see you have a weakness', he said, 'for D. H. Lawrence. Well I have too. Of course he can be a complete embarrassment. But the expressiveness is the thing. In fact,' he went on, looking around brightly, 'I can see many, many shared enthusiasms here. Your fiction shelves are the mirror image of mine. Apart from the Americans. And the astronomy, the popular physics. And you're interested in chess!'

  'Fairly interested,' said Nicola.

  He turned to her again. She edged forward, extending a lower lip to blow the hair from her brow. Behind her the bedroom door was open and a large movable mirror had been specially positioned, reflecting the bed and its satyr's heaven of throttled sheets and twisted pillows.

  'Do you play? Or is it just theory?'

  'What?' With bandy-legged gait she came on into the room. Negotiating the round table, she winced twice - deeply private twinges, as if a ghost had gently goosed her. Guy's gaze of polite inquiry did not falter. With low indignation she said, 'Did you meet Keith on the stairs?'

  He seemed to need to concentrate for a second before agreeing that he had.

  'Keith was just picking up some stuff for me,' she said, and gave her hair a defiant tremor.

  Guy's face now showed concern. 'He had a book with him,' he murmured to himself. He heard her exhale, and added, 'I'm sorry. You're tired. And my news isn't terribly encouraging. Would you rather I came back another time?'

  Waving a hand at him she flopped on to the sofa. She didn't listen at all as Guy, taking a seat opposite, began chronicling his efforts to locate her friends. It was no surprise to her that the trail had proved cold ... In truth (though it didn't strike her like this - the truth never struck her like this), she was thoroughly galled. What would she have to do to arouse suspicion in this man? If he'd come in and found her lying naked on the sofa with one leg hooked over the back of it, satedly mumbling to herself and relishing a languorous cigarette - he would have assumed she was suffering from
the heat. Even if she got pregnant she could spin him the line about immaculate conception. God did it. It was God's: the oldest trick in the book . . . Nicola had been looking forward to the series of good expressions with which she would have greeted his jealous bafflement: dawning comprehen­sion, incredulous disgust, definitive dismissal. The time had come, she reckoned, in the interests of variety and elbow-room (and in the interests of interest), to show him something of her temper. But here he was, in his blissful blandness. Perhaps the earlier act had worked too well. Sex with Keith: such morbid perversity was beyond his experience, and was now beyond his imagination. Mind you, it was beyond her experience too: men of the people, men of the British people anyway, had never been her cup of tea. But nothing was beyond Nicola's imagination. Nothing.

  So then: Plan B. Quite a significant fraction of her life was now tending to feel like Plan B, and not like Plan A. Guy looked well-aired, and annoyingly sweatless, in his plain blue shirt; whereas the wanton pancake seemed to be thickening in Nicola's pores, and between her legs she could sense the inadmissible cheapness of the white bikini. Well, the B-road would take her - more dully - to the same destination. Perhaps, too, a useful doubt had been subliminally established. Nicola folded her arms. With vengeful frumpishness she watched as Guy talked, the way his expression childishly mimicked his speech, with its soft frowns and hopeful glimmers. And suddenly she thought: maybe it isn't in him. Christ. She had always been sure (it was one of her predicates) that Guy contained a strong potenti­ality of love, which she needed, because the equation she was working on unquestionably needed love in it somewhere. And if it wasn't the real thing, if it was just a contemporary dilution or simulacrum - friendliness, helpfulness, goody two-shoes love . .. Perhaps love was dying, was already dead. One more catastrophe. The death of God was possibly survivable in the end. But if love was going the same way, if love was going out with God ...

  'I don't want to be a total wet blanket,' he was saying. 'The man I know at Index is trying to make contact with a clearing-house in Khorat. There are several avenues still untried.'

  The air grew still and silent. Tears had formed on her painted cheeks.

  'I'm sorry,' he whispered. 'I'm so sorry.'

  'I have a confession to make. Hear me out, and then go away for ever. Oh what a strange, strange life. I never thought it would change — my life. I thought it would just go on, like this. Or I would end it. I never thought I'd meet anyone good enough. And I don't mean beautiful enough or grand enough. I just mean good. Good enough. And now it's happened and . .. oh, Guy, I'm so completely thrown.'

  She waited (quite a time) until he said, 'Say it.' Then she made her eyes burn with all their green, and said,

  'I'm in love. With you. There's just one other thing. I warned you I was a ridiculous person.'

  He waited. He inclined his head. He asked, 'What is it?'

  She sighed and said with the exasperation of despair, 'I'm a virgin.'

  When God got mad he was a jealous God. He said that if she didn't come across at least one more time He'd wash his hands of the whole planet. He had other planets, thanks, and in better parts of the universe. He promised plague, famine, mile-high tides, sound-speed winds, and terror, ubiquitous and incessant terror, with blood flowing bridle deep. He threatened to make her old and keep her that way for ever.

  She told Him to fuck off.

  To my everything, He is nothing. What I am I wish to be, and what I wish to be I am. I am beyond God. I am the motionless Cause.

  Cross that firebreak, and then cross that one. Go too far in all directions. Extremity upon extremity, and then more extremity, and then more.

  The moment I set eyes on him I thought Keith Talent was an anachronistic kind of character. I thought that time and inflation and the new demographics would have mopped him up by now or sent him somewhere else: to the North, or at least to the suburbs. Not so. The streets are full of jokers, dodgers, jack-the-lads and willie-the-dips - whole crews of Keiths ... Of course, hardly any of them will make it, will win through to the Cavalier, the printed brochure, the dreams of darts. They will stay out there on the street until whenever, in dumb hats and seam-busted zootsuits, looking fantastically greedy and devious, and fooling no one.

  Fagin himself would have nothing to do with them. He'd be horrified. And these are the best and the brightest (and Keith is the best and the brightest of the best and the brightest). The others are yokels and village idiots, turnip-swaggers, ditch people - but this is London; and there are no fields. Only fields of operation and observation, only fields of electromagnetic attraction and repulsion, only fields of hatred and coercion.

  Only force fields.

  Keith is anachronistic, too, in this matter of his libido. He's not in the satyromaniac league (and the satyromaniacs, I guess, will always be with us). He's an obsessional tailchaser of the type that was meant to have died out years ago. He drools and slurps at everything remotely bim-like on the street; he regales the entire pub with the things he does to Analiese Furnish and Trish Shirt; he'll even give you fifteen minutes (no berk protocols here) on how it went with Kath the other night. On top of all this he makes no secret of his heroics id the handjob realm. And on his diet I'm amazed he even gets around.

  Is it just me, or does Keith's hormonal tumult have something to do with reduced life-expectancy? Never very extensive when looked at against an historical mean, Keith's life is now doubly compressed, condensed - and therefore speeded up. His life is on fast-forward, or picture-search. It's not just the animals who aren't living so long.

  Now they're briefer still, but animals have always lived brief lives. What we take from animals, what we take from our pets (without trying, and without asking), is a lesson about death: an overview of the shorter span. After two cats and nine hamsters, the adolescent is a bit better equipped for the awful call to his grandmother's bedroom.

  We're all keeping step, just about. At eight years of age, Clive is already an old, old dog.

  To the movies with Lizzyboo Broadener. Lizzyboo: Hope's big little sister, taller, blonder, rounder faced, fuller figured. Lizzyboo's breasts are a family joke. Ah, those family jokes. Ah, those secondary sexual characteristics — those SSCs! This is the big question about Lizzyboo's breasts: where did they come from? No other Broadener, past or present, has got Lizzyboo's breasts. Hope hasn't got Lizzyboo's breasts. She makes do with Hope's instead, which are a whole lot smaller. It was felt (the family joke continues) that Marmaduke might give Hope Lizzyboo's breasts, or at least make Hope's bigger. But there's Marmaduke for you - disobliging to the last. When Marmaduke was done with Hope's breasts, they were mauled and drained and chewed and tugged all right, but no bigger. A lot sorer - but no bigger. And there's childless Lizzyboo (thirty-one, and just starting to worry) with her beautiful twins. It's very hot still, and she wears just a sleeveless T-shirt on the way to the flick. The clear lineaments of her embarrassing perfection spread agony on the street. The guys can't take it. She makes Keiths of us all — or everyone except me, everyone except the man at her side, who doesn't dare look. The SSCs on her. Will you look at those SSCs.

  It was an old horror film, from the Seventies, a piece of shit called The Dorm That Dripped Blood. Various coeds got sliced up in their underwear. Chainsaw, hunting-knife, straight razor. The slicer was some species of ghoul, demon or zombie - definitely a dead guy at any rate - with a grudge against the Dean. He looked like a normal fat janitor most of the time, until he neared naked or lightly-clad female flesh: then the inner mutant burst out, rippling with worms and maggots and the usual appurtenances of the grave. I identified. Especially when, during a supposedly scary bit, Lizzyboo took my hand in hers. Hers is a warm hand, a light hand. I would have been more grateful for it, if I hadn't been dying. Her hand stayed where it was, well after The Dorm That Dripped Blood had stopped being scary, well after the ghoul had been torched and staked. The lights came up and she turned to me with her whole body and took her hand back with slow care.
Her mouth was open. God, the wonder of female teeth.

  'What did you think?' she asked, really wanting to know.

  She likes me. She digs me. Why? I have one or two ideas on this. Mainly she likes me because Hope does too. I detect considerable sexual influence, or sexual plagiarism, between these sisters. Lizzy-boo may be the kind of girl who isn't quite sure who she likes until prompted by a larger approval. I felt this approval, even as we walked to the movie, the image of Guy and Hope looming in the air behind us (smiling encouragingly, her hand resting on his shoulder), like parents. Secondly, of course, I am generally retiring with the ladies, and this has a lulling effect, especially on very pretty blondes with big SSCs, accustomed as they are to living in a garrison of hard-on and hairtrigger. I have never screwed around (why not, God damn it?) and I have never minded not screwing around (until now), and I think it shows. I'm certainly unlikely to have any of those unpleasant diseases. Thirdly - or maybe this is just point 2(b) - I'm not interested. Which is always a come-on. Genuine lack of interest is bound to work in your favour. And when you're dying (I find), you really have no problem playing it cool.

  After our kiddie movie we enjoyed milkshakes in a café on Kensington Park Road. It's all very difficult. She likes me. She puts a hand on my forearm for emphasis. She practically wets herself at all my jokes. She brandishes those SSCs. Lizzyboo digs me, which is just as well, because if she wants to find the way to my heart she's going to need a fucking shovel. She's going to need to dig up London Fields. Lizzyboo is so pretty and keen and affectionate and straightforward that I'll have to come up with a really world-class excuse.

  Got some good stuff about Guy's crush on her. Then I said I had to go home and work on my novel.

  No word yet from Missy Harter, or from Janit Slotnick, or indeed from Barbro McCambridge. The minute after I Fed-Exed the first three chapters off to Hornig Ultrason (at trouncing expense) I sat there by the phone waiting for it to ring - to ring, to bounce about on its cradle, like in a cartoon. But three days now and nothing.