London Fields

by Martin Amis

  I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed. I parried; but my hands were loath and cold. Let us sleep now ..."

  There is a third sense in which the poet was himself a strange collision. He was young; and the young aren't meant — the young aren't scheduled - to understand death. But he understood.

  Also I am haunted by the speech of surrender of the Indian Chief Joseph, leader of the Nez Percé: subjugated, and then defeated in battle (and then routinely dispossessed):

  I am tired of fighting ... I want to have time to look for my children and see how many I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead . . . From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.

  Even when we don't have any, we all want time to do this, time to look for our children and see how many we can find. With fingers all oily from being rubbed together, in ingratiation, vigil, glee, fear, nerves, I cling to certain hopes: hopes of you. I hope that you are with your mother and that you two are provided for. I hope your father is around somewhere - controllably. Your beginning has been hard. Your continuation, not so hard. I hope.

  Two years ago I saw something that nobody should ever see: I saw my little brother dead. I know from the look on his face that nothing can survive the death of the body. Nothing can survive a devastation so thorough. Children survive their parents. Works of art survive their makers. I failed, in art and love. Nevertheless, I ask you to survive me.

  Apparently it was all hopeless right from the start. I don't understand how it happened. There was a sense in which I used everybody, even you. And I still lost. . . Blissful, watery and vapid, the state of painlessness is upon me. I feel seamless and insubstantial, like a creation. As if someone made me up, for money. And I don't care.

  Dawn is coming. Today, I think, the sun will start to climb a little higher in the sky. After its incensed stare at the planet. Its fiery stare, which asked a fiery question. The clouds have their old colour back, their old English colour: the colour of a soft-boiled egg, shelled by city fingers.

  Of course you were far too young to remember. But who says? If love travels at the speed of light then it could have other powers just on the edge of the possible. And things create impressions on babies. It really is the case. Everything created impressions on you. The exact crenellations of a carpet on your thigh; the afterglow of my fingerprints on your shoulders; the faithful representation of the grip of your clothes. A bit of sock elastic could turn sections of your calves into Roman pillars. Not to mention hurts, like the bevel of some piece of furniture, clearly gauged on your responsive brow.

  In a way, too, you were a terrible little creature. If we were out together, on a blanket in the park — whenever you caught my eye you would give a brief quack of impending distress, just to keep me on alert. You were a terrible little creature. But we are all terrible little creatures, I'm afraid. We are all terrible little creatures. No more of that. Or of this.

  So if you ever felt something behind you, when you weren't even one, like welcome heat, like a bulb, like a sun, trying to shine right across the universe — it was me. Always me. It was me. It was me.