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MARTIN  AMIS'S

London Fields

Martin Amis is well known on both sides of the Atlantic asthe author ofLondon Fields, Einstein's Monsters, Money,Other People, Success, Dead Babies,andThe Rachel Papers. Hehas contributed to such periodicals asVanity Fair, TheObserver,andThe New Statesman. His latest novel will bepublished by Harmony Books in the fall of 1991. He lives inLondon.

 by the same author

THE RACHEL PAPERS DEAD BABIES

SUCCESS


OTHER PEOPLE: A MYSTERY STORYMONEY

einstein's monsters

journalism


INVASION OF THE SPACE INVADERS THE MORONIC INFERNO AND OTHER VISITS TO AMERICALONDONFIELDS


MARTINAMIS


Vintage International

Vintage Books

A Division of Random House, Inc.New YorkTo my father





First Vintage International Edition, April 1991Copyright © 1989 by Martin Amis


All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books,

a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Originally published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd. in 1989.

First published in the United States by Harmony Books,

a division of Crown Publishers, Inc., New York, in 1990.


Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data


Amis, Martin.London fields / Martin Amis.—1st Vintage international ed.

p.   cm.—(Vintage international)"Originally published in Great Britain

by Jonathan Cape, Ltd., in 1989.

First published in the United States

by Harmony Books.. .in 1989"—T.p. verso.

ISBN 0-679-73034-6

I. Title.

PR6051.M5L6  1991

823'.914—dc20              90-50471

CIP


Author photograph copyright © Jerry Bauer.

Manufactured in the United States of America10  9  8   7  6  5  4

 

Contents

 


Chapter 1: The Murderer


Chapter 2: The Murderee


Chapter 3: The Foil


Chapter 4: The Dead-End Street


Chapter 5: The Event Horizon'


Chapter 6: The Doors ofDeception


Chapter 7: Cheating


Chapter 8: Going Out With God


Chapter 9: Doing Real Good


Chapter 10: The Books inKeith Talent's Apartment


Chapter11 : The Concordance of Nicola Six's Kisses


Chapter 12: The ScriptFollowed by Guy Clinch


Chapter 13: Little Did They Know


Chapter 14: The Pinching Game


Chapter 15: Pure Instinct


Chapter16: The Third Party


Chapter 17: Cupid's College


Chapter 18: This Is Only a Test


Chapter 19: The Ladies and the Gents


Chapter 20: Playing Nervous


Chapter 21: At theSpeed of Love


Chapter 22: Horrorday


Chapter 23: You're GoingBack With Me


Chapter 24: The Deadline


Endpapers

 

 

Note


A word about the title. Several alternatives suggested themselves. Fora while I toyed withTime's Arrow. Then I thoughtMillenniumwould be wonderfully bold (a common belief:everything is calledMillenniumjust now). I even flirted, late at night, withThe Death ofLove.In the end the most serious contender wasThe Murderee, which seemed both sinister and deeply catchy. And I wavered andcompromised with things likeLondon Fields, or The Murderee:Final Version . . .


But as you see I kept ironic faith with my narrator, who wouldhave been pleased, no doubt, to remind me that there are two kinds of title - two grades, two orders. The first kind of title decides on aname for something that is already there. The second kind of title ispresent all along: it lives and breathes, or it tries, on every page. My suggestions (and they cost me sleep) are all the first kind of title.London Fieldsis the second kind of title. So let's call itLondonFields. This book is calledLondon Fields. London Fields . . .


M. A. London.


 


LONDON FIELDS


 


 


This is a true story but I can't believe it's really happening.


It's a murder story, too. I can't believe my luck.


And a love story (I think), of all strange things, so late in thecentury, so late in the goddamned day.


This is the story of a murder. It hasn't happened yet. But it will. (Ithad better.) I know the murderer, I know the murderee. I know the time, I know the place. I know the motive(her motive) and I know the means. I know who will be the foil, the fool, the poor foal, alsoutterly destroyed. And I couldn't stop them, I don't think, even if Iwanted to. The girl will die. It's what she always wanted. You can't stop people, once theystart. You can't stop people, once theystartcreating.


What a gift. This page is briefly stained by my tears of gratitude.Novelists don't usually have it so good, do they, when something real happens (something unified, dramatic and pretty saleable), and they just write it down?


I must remain calm. I'm on deadline too here, don't forget. Oh, thepregnant agitation. Someone is tickling my heart with delicatefingers. Death is much on people's minds.


Three days ago (is it?) I flew in on a red-eye from New York. Ipractically had the airplane to myself. I stretched out, callingpiteously and frequently to the stewardesses for codeine and coldwater. But the red-eye did what a red-eye does. Oh, my. Jesus, I looklike the Hound of the Baskervilles . . . Shaken awake to a sticky bunat 1.30 in the morning, my time, I moved to a window seat andwatched through the bright mists the fields forming their regiments,in full parade order, the sad shires, like an army the size of England.Then the city itself, London, as taut and meticulous as a cobweb. I had the airplane to myself because nobody in their right mind wantsto come to Europe, not just now, not for the time being; everybodywants to go the other way, as Heathrow confirmed.


It reeked of sleep. Somnopolis. It reeked of it, and of insomniacworry and disquiet, and thwarted escape. Because we are all poets or babies in the middle of the night, struggling with being. There werehardly any Arrivals, apart from me. The business of the airport wasall Departures. As I stood in some stalled passage and listened to thecanned instructions I looked down on the lots and runways through the layered insult of dawn rain: all the sharks with their fins erect,thrashers, baskers, great whites — killers. Killers every one.


As for the apartment — well, it takes my breath away. I mean it.When I come in the door I gotee-hee-hee. The place kills me. All this for a personal ad in theNew York Review of Books? I have certainly gotten the better of the deal. Yes, I have well and truly stiffed MarkAsprey. I tramp through the rooms and think with shame of my contorted little crib in Hell's Kitchen. He's a fellow writer, after all,and I would have felt happier, if not with exact equivalence, thenwith broad parity. Of course even I suspect that the decor is inregrettable taste. What does Mark Asprey write? Musicals? He writes charming notes. 'Dear Sam: Welcome!' his begins.


Not a thing in the place is content to be merely handy orconvenient. The toilet brush is a mustachioed sceptre. The kitchentaps squirm with gargoyles. Clearly, here is someone who heats his morning coffee on the torched wind of Circassian dancing girls. MrAsprey is a bachelor: no doubt about that. For instance there are agreat many signed photographs on the walls - models, actresses. In this respect his bedroom is like some joint called Two Guys fromItaly. But this guy's from London; and it isn't his pasta they'repraising. The effortful inscription and looped signature: self-injury,done to the tender, the legendary throat.


On top of all this I get to use his car, his A-to-B device, whichobediently awaits me on the ledge. In his note Mark Aspreyapologizes on its behalf, letting me know that he has a better one, amuch better one, moored to his country cottage, or country house, or country estate. Yesterday I staggered out and took a look at it. Of the latest design, the car strives toward a state of stone-grey invisibility.Even my scrutiny it found inordinate and embarrassing. Featuresinclude fool-the-eye dent-marks, a removable toupee of rust on thehood, and adhesive key-scratches all over the paintwork. An Englishstrategy: envy-preemption. Things have changed, things haveremained the same, over the past ten years. London's pub aura, that'scertainly intensified: the smoke and the builders' sand and dust, thetoilet tang, the streets like a terrible carpet. No doubt there'll besurprises when I start to look around, but I always felt I knew whereEngland was heading. America was the one you wanted to watch . . . I climbed in and took a spin. I sayspin to help account for the ten-minute dizzy spell that hit me when I came back into the apartment. Iwas impressed by its force. Giddiness and a new nausea, a moralnausea, coming from the gut, where all morality comes from (likewaking up after a disgraceful dream and looking with dread for theblood on your hands). On the front passenger seat, under the elegantrag of a white silk scarf, lies a heavy car-tool. Mark Asprey must beafraid of something. He must be afraid of London's poor.


Three days in and I am ready - I am ready to write. Hear myknuckles crack. Real life is coming along so fast that I can no longerdelay. It's unbelievable. Two decades of fastidious torment, two decades of non-starting, and suddenly I'm ready. Well, this wasalways destined to be the year of behaving strangely. Let me say withdue modesty and caution that I have the makings of a really snappylittle thriller. Original, too, in its way. Not a whodunit. More awhydoit. I feel sickly and enraptured. I feel bright green. I think I amless a novelist than a queasy cleric, taking down the minutes of real life. Technically speaking, I am also, I suppose, an accessory beforethe fact, but to hell with all that for now. I woke up today andthought: If London is a spider's web, then where do I fit in? MaybeI'm the fly. I'm the fly.


Hurry. I always assumed I'd start with the murderee, with her, with Nicola Six. But no, that wouldn't feel quite right. Let's startwith the bad guy. Yeah. Keith. Let's start withthe murderer.


Chapter 1: The Murderer

eith talent wasa bad guy. Keith Talent was a very bad guy.You might even say that he was the worst guy. But nottheworst, not the very worst ever. Therewere worse guys. Where? Therein the hot light of CostCheck for example, with car keys, beigesinglet, and a six-pack of Peculiar Brews, the scuffle at the door, thefoul threat and the elbow in the black neck of the wailing lady, thenthe car with its rust and its waiting blonde, and off to do the nextthing, whatever, whatever necessary. The mouths on these worstguys - the eyes on them. Within those eyes a tiny unsmiling universe.No. Keith wasn'tthat bad. He had saving graces. He didn't hatepeople for ready-made reasons. He was at leastmultiracial inoutlook - thoughtlessly, helplessly so. Intimate encounters withstrange-hued women had sweetened him somewhat. His savinggraces all had names. What with the Fetnabs and Fatimas he hadknown, the Nketchis and Iqbalas, the Michikos and Boguslawas, theRamsarwatees and Rajashwaris - Keith was, in this sense, a man ofthe world. These were the chinks in his coal-black armour: God blessthem all.


Although he liked nearly everything else about himself, Keithhated his redeeming features. In his view they constituted his onlymajor shortcoming - his one tragic flaw. When the moment arrived,in the office by the loading bay at the plant off the M4 near Bristol, with his great face crammed into the prickling nylon, and the proudwoman shaking her trembling head at him, and Chick Purchase andDean Pleat both screaming Doit. Do it (he still remembered theirmeshed mouths writhing), Keith had definitely failed to realize hisfull potential. He had proved incapable of clubbing the Asianwoman to her knees, and of going on clubbing until the man in the uniform opened the safe. Why had he failed? Why, Keith, why? Intruth he had felt far from well: half the night up some lane in a car fullof the feet-heat of burping criminals; no breakfast, no bowelmovement; and now, to top it all off, everywhere he looked he saw green grass, fresh trees, rolling hills. Chick Purchase, furthermore,had already crippled the second guard, and Dean Pleat soon vaulted back over the counter and self-righteously laid into the woman with his rifle butt. So Keith's qualms had changed nothing — except hiscareer prospects in armed robbery. (It's tough at the top, and it'stough at the bottom, too; Keith's name was muck thereafter.) If hecould have done it, he would have done it, joyfully. He just didn'thave...he just didn't have the talent.


After that Keith turned his back on armed robbery once and forall. He took up racketeering. In London, broadly speaking, rack­eteering meant fighting about drugs; in the part of West London thatKeith called home, racketeering meant fighting about drugs withblack people - and black people are better at fighting than white people, because, among other reasons, theyall do it (there aren't anycivilians). Racketeering works through escalation, and escalationdominance: success goes to the men who can manage the exponen­ tial jump, to the men who can regularlyastonish with their violence. It took Keith several crunchy beatings, and the first signs of a likingfor hospital food, before he concluded that he wasn't cut out for racketeering. During one of his convalescences, when he spent a lotof time in the streetcafйsof Golborne Road, Keith grew preoccupiedby a certain enigma. The enigma was this. How come you often sawblack guys with white girls (always blondes, always, presumably for maximum contrast-gain), and never saw white guys with black girls? Did the black guys beat up the white guys who went out with blackgirls? No, or not much; you had to be discreet, though, and in his experience lasting relationships were seldom formed. Then how was it done? It came to him in a flash of inspiration. The black guys beatup the blackgirls who went out with white guys! Of course. So muchsimpler. He pondered the wisdom of this and drew a lesson from it, a lesson which, in his heart, he had long understood. If you're going tobe violent, stick to women. Stick to the weak. Keith gave upracketeering. He turned over a new leaf. Having renounced violent crime, Keith prospered, and rose steadily towards the very crest of his new profession: non-violent crime.


Keith worked as acheat. There he stands on the street corner, withthree or four colleagues, with three or four fellowcheats; they laughand cough (they're always coughing) and flap their arms for warmth; they look like terrible birds . .. On good days he rose early and put inlong hours, going out into the world, into society, with the intentionof cheating it. Keith cheated people with his limousine service atairports and train stations; he cheated people with his fake scentsand colognes at the pavement stalls of Oxford Street and Bishopsgate(his two main lines were Scandal and Outrage); he cheated peoplewith non-pornographic pornography in the back rooms of short-lease stores; and he cheated people on the street everywhere with theupturned cardboard box or milk crate and the three warped playingcards: Find the Lady! Here, often, and occasionally elsewhere, the boundaries between violent crime and its non-violent little brotherwere hard to descry. Keith earned three times as much as the PrimeMinister and never had any money, losing heavily every day atMecca, the turf accountants on the Portobello Road. He never won.Sometimes he would ponder this, on alternate Thursday lunchtimes,in sheepskin overcoat, his head bent over the racing page, as hequeued for his unemployment benefit, and then drove to the turfaccountants on the Portobello Road. So Keith's life might haveelapsed over the years. He never had what it took to be a murderer,not on his own. He needed his murderee. The foreigners, the checkedand dog-toothed Americans, the leering lens-faced Japanese, stand­ing stiff over the cardboard box or the milk crate — they never foundthe lady. ButKeith did. Keith found her.


Of course, he already had a lady, little Kath, who had recentlypresented him with a child. By and large Keith had welcomed thepregnancy: it was, he liked to joke, quite a handy new way of puttinghis wife in hospital. He had decided that the baby, when it came,would be called Keith - Keith Jr. Kath, remarkably, had other ideas.Yet Keith was inflexible, wavering only once, when he briefly entertained the idea of calling the baby Clive, after his dog, a large,elderly and unpredictable Alsatian. He changed his mind once more;Keith it was to be, then . . . Swaddled in blue, the baby came home, with mother. Keith personally helped them from the ambulance. AsKath started on the dishes, Keith sat by the stolen fire and frowned atthe new arrival. There was something wrong with the baby,something seriously wrong. The trouble with the baby was that itwas a girl. Keith looked deep into himself, and rallied. 'Keithette,'Kath heard him murmur, as her knees settled on the cold lino.'Keithene. Keitha. Keithinia.'


'No, Keith,' she said.


'Keithnab,' said Keith, with an air of slow discovery. 'Nkeithi.'


'No, Keith.'


'. . . Why's it so fucking yellow?'


After a few days, whenever Kath cautiously addressed the baby as'Kim', Keith no longer swore at his wife or slammed her up againstthe wall with any conviction. 'Kim', after all, was the name of one ofKeith's heroes, one of Keith's gods. And Keith was cheating hard thatweek, cheating on everyone, it seemed, and especially his wife. So Kim Talent it was - Kim Talent, little Kim.


The man had ambition. It was his dream to go all the way; he wasn'tjust messing. Keith had no intention, or no desire, to be acheat for the rest of his life. Even he found the work demoralizing. And merecheating would never get him the things he wanted, the goods and services he wanted, not while a series of decisive wins at the turfaccountants continued to elude him. He sensed that Keith Talent had been put here for something a little bit special. To be fair, it must besaid that murder was not in his mind, not yet, except perhaps in someghostlypotentia that precedes all thought and action . . . Characteris destiny. Keith had often been told, by various magistrates, girlfriends and probation officers, that he had a 'poor character', and he had always fondly owned up to the fact. But did that mean he had a poor destiny?. . . Waking early, perhaps, as Kath clumsily dragged herself from the bed to attend to little Kim, or wedged in one of thetraffic jams that routinely enchained his day, Keith would mentallypursue an alternative vision, one of wealth, fame and a kind ofspangled superlegitimacy - the chrome spokes of a possible future inWorld Darts.


A casual darter or arrowman all his life, right back to the baldboard on the kitchen door, Keith had recently got serious. He'dalways thrown for his pub, of course, and followed the sport: youcould almost hear angels singing when, on those special nights (threeor four times a week), Keith laid out the cigarettes on the arm of thecouch and prepared to watch darts on television. But now he haddesigns on the other side of the screen. To his own elaboratelyconcealed astonishment, Keith found himself in the Last Sixteen ofthe Sparrow Masters, an annual interpub competition which he hadnonchalantly entered some months ago, on the advice of various friends and admirers. At the end of that road there basked thecontingency of a televised final, a Ј5,000 cheque, and a play-off, alsotelevised, 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 wasfull of all the people he did not know and could never be. Televisionwas the great shopfront, lightly electrified, up against which Keithcrushed his nose. And now among the squirming motes, theimpossible prizes, he saw a doorway, or an arrow, or a beckoninghand (with a dart in it), and everything said - Darts. Pro-Darts.World Darts. He's down there in his garage, putting in the hours, hiseyes still stinging from the ineffable, the heartbreaking beauty of abrand-new dartboard, stolen that very day.


Magnificent anachronism. The lights and mores of the moderncriminal Keith held in disdain. He had no time for the gym, the fancyrestaurant, the buxom bestseller, the foreign holiday. He had nevertaken any exercise (unless you counted burgling, running away, andgetting beaten up); he had never knowingly drunk a glass of wine (oronly when he was well past caring); he had never read a book (we here excludeDarts: 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 youngcheat, also a darts-man, also called Keith: Keith Double. The plane was overbookedand the two Keiths were seated twenty rows apart. They stilledtheir terror with murderous drinking, courtesy of stewardess andduty-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 hebegan to stagger out to the stairwell for his smokes, he encounteredKeith Double. 'Cheers, Keith!' The mandatory health insuranceturned out to cover alcohol poisoning, so everyone was happy, andbecame even happier when the two Keiths recovered in time to maketheir return flight. Keith Double was in advertising now, and hadfrequently returned to America. Keith hadn't; he was still cheatingon the streets of London.


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


Keith didn't look like a murderer. He looked like a murderer'sdog. (No disrespect to Keith's dog Clive, who had signed on wellbefore the fact, and whom Keith didn't in the least resembleanyway.) Keith looked like a murderer's dog, eager familiar of ripperor bodysnatcher or gravestalker. His eyes held a strange radiance -for a moment it reminded you of health, health hidden or sleeping orotherwise mysteriously absent. Though frequently bloodshot, theeyes 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 dryas 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 PanWard), or like a criminal's cream Rolls-Royce, parked at duskbetween a tube station and a flower stall, the eyes of Keith Talentshone with tremendous accommodations made to money. And murder? The eyes - was there enough blood in them forthat? Notnow, 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.


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


For reasons not yet altogether clear, I seem to have adopted ajovial and lordly tone. It seems antique, corrupt: like Keith. Re­member, though: Keith is modern, modern, modern. Anyway, Iexpect 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 theseyears, to sit down and actually start writing fiction. But let's not getany big ideas. This is actually happening.


How do I know, for instance, that Keith works as acheat? Be­cause he tried to cheatme, on the way in from Heathrow. I'd beenstanding under the sign sayingtaxis for about a half-hour whenthe 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 nota limoeither. 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 themetre said Ј54.50.


'Slough!'


His eyes were burning at me warily in the rearview mirror. 'Wait asecond, wait a second,' I began. One thing about my illness orcondition. I've never been braver. It empowers me - I can feel it. Likelooking 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 twentyquids and Trafaljar Square andBarnet. Slough? Comeon. If this is akidnap 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. Ithought: "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, inbrutal dismissal, toward the clock, which was of curious design andpossibly home manufacture and now said Ј63.80. 'Don't mind, doyou, pal?' He pointed to a line of pebbledash semis — we were, I nowsaw, 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 savagebackground of taunts and screams.


'Darts,' he said, and switched it off. 'I'd ask you in but — me oldmum. 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 currentprotector, who worked nights, slept with his legendary soundness inthe 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 wayto go). On the back was a colour photograph of the Queen and acrudely superimposed perfume bottle: '"Outrage" — byAmbrosio.’


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 forAmbrosioof Milan, Perfumes and Furs


There followed some more information about the perfumes, 'Scan­dal', 'Outrage', and minor lines called Mirage, Disguise, Duplicityand Sting, and beneath, in double quotes, accompanied by anaddress and telephone number, with misplaced apostrophes: Keith'sthe 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 Ј143.10 on the blatting clock when the car pulled upand I awoke again. Slowly 1 climbed from the car's slept-in, trailersmell, as if from a second aircraft, and unbent myself in front of thehouse — 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 aflinch 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 anengraved panel high up in the masonry. Anno Domini. 1876.


'1876!' he said. 'So somevicar had all this.'


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


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


We entered through a second front door and climbed a broad flightof stairs. I think we were about equally impressed by the opulence andelaboration of the apartment. This is some joint, I have to admit. Aftera few weeks here even the great Presley would have started to pine forthe elegance and simplicity of Graceland. Keith cast his bright glancearound the place with a looter's cruel yet professional eye. For thesecond time that morning I nonchalantly reviewed the possibility thatI was about to be murdered. Keith would be out of here ten minuteslater, 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 fortheatre 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 Ihave to say it touched me, this chastened look. Of course (he wasthinking), TV people all know each other and fly to and from the greatcities and borrow each other's flats. Common sense. Yes, behind allthe surface activity of Keith's eyes there formed the vision of aheavenly elite, cross-hatching the troposphere like satellite TV - above it, above it all.


'Yeah well I'm due toappear on TV myself. Hopefully. In a monthor two. Darts.'


'Darts?'


'Darts.'


And then it began. He stayed for three and a half hours. People areamazing, 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 thatstage I was perfectly disinterested; I had no idea what was happening,what was forming right in front of me. Within fifteen minutes I wasbeing 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. AndNew York. True, I gave him a fair amount to drink: beer, or lager,plentifully heaped like bombs on their racks in Mark Asprey'srefrigerator. In the end he charged me Ј25 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, everylunchtime and every evening, in a pub called the Black Cross on thePortobello 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 sayin the matter. Twenty-two hours later I opened my eyes again and wasgreeted by an unwelcome and distressing sight. Myself, on the ceilingmirror. There's a mirror on the headboard too, and one on the facingwall. It's a chamber of mirrors in there, a hell of mirrors . . .Hooked—Ilooked not well. I seemed to be pleading, pleading with me, myself. DrSlizard 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 severaltremulous sorties. The first thing I noticed in the street (I almoststepped in it) struck me as quintessentially English: a soaked loaf ofwhite bread, like the brains of an animal much stupider than anysheep. 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, andwhat's been happening? Ten years of Relative Decline.


If London's a pub and you want the whole story, then where do yougo ? You go to a London pub. And that single instant in the Black Crossset the whole story in motion. Keith's in the bag. Keith's cool. And I amnow cultivating our third party, the foil, the foal, Guy Clinch, who, tomy horror, seems to be a genuinely delightful human being. I find I have a vast talent for ingratiation. But none of this would ever havegotten started without the girl. It didn't have a hope in hell without thegirl. Nicola Six was the miracle, the absolutedonnйe.She'sperfect forme. 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 issuperatmospheric and therefore, in a sense, supermeteorological (canyou really call itweather??. 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 itseems to bring me close to hysteria, as indeed does everything now.


Chapter 2: The Murderee


he black cabwill move away, unrecallably and for ever, itsdriver paid, and handsomely tipped, by the murderee. She willwalk down the dead-end street. The heavy car will be waiting; itslights will come on as it lumbers towards her. It will stop, and idle, asthe 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 theword's ending, it tends towards the feminine: a feminine ending),whatis 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. Rightfrom the start, from the moment that her thoughts began to be consecutive, Nicola knew two strange things. The second strangething was that she must never tell anyone about the first strangething. The first strange thing was this: she always knew what wasgoing to happen next. Not all the time (the gift was not obsessively consulted), and not every little detail; but she always knew what wasgoing to happen next. Right from the start she had a friend - Enola, Enola Gay. Enola wasn't real. Enola came from inside the head ofNicola Six. Nicola was an only child and knew she always would be.You can imagine how things might work out. Nicola is seven yearsold, for instance, and her parents are taking her on a picnic, withanother family: why, pretty Dominique will be there, a friend,perhaps, a living friend for the only child. But little Nicola, immersedin romantic thoughts and perfectly happy with Enola, doesn't wantto come along (watch how she screams and grips!). She doesn't wantto come along because she knows that the afternoon will end indisaster, in blood and iodine and tears. And so it proves. A hundredyards from the grown-ups (so impenetrably arrayed round thesquare sheet in the sunshine), Nicola stands on the crest of a slopewith her new friend, pretty Dominique. And of course Nicola knowswhat is going to happen next: the girl will hesitate or stumble: reaching out to steady her, Nicola will accidentally propel herplaymate downwards, down into the rocks and the briars. She willthen have to run and shout, and drive in silence somewhere, and siton 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.


When Nicola was good she was very very good. But when she was bad . . . About her parents she had no feelings one way or the other:this was her silent, inner secret. They both died, anyway, together, as she had always known they would. So why hate them? So why love them? After she got the call she drove reflexively to the airport. Thecar itself was like a tunnel of cold wind. An airline official showed her into the VIP Lounge: it contained a bar, and forty or fifty people in varying degrees of distress. She drank the brandy pressed on her by the steward. 'Free,' he confirmed. A television was wheeled in. Andthen, incredibly (even Nicola was consternated), they showed livefilm of the scattered wreckage, and the bodybags lined up on fields of France. In the VIP Lounge there were scenes of protest and violentrejection. One old man kept distractedly offering money to auniformed PR officer. Coldly Nicola drank more brandy, wondering


how death could take people so unprepared. That night she had


acrobatic sex with some unforgivable pilot. She was nineteen by thistime, and had Jong left home. Potently, magically, uncontrollably attractive, Nicola was not yet beautiful. But already she was an illwind, blowing no good.


Considered more generally - when you looked at the humanwreckage she left in her slipstream, the nervous collapses, the shattered careers, the suicide bids, the blighted marriages (androttener divorces) - Nicola's knack of reading the future left her with one or two firm assurances: that no one would ever love her enough,and those that did were not worth being loved enough by. Thetypical Nicola romance would end, near the doorway of her attic flat,with the man of the moment sprinting down the passage, his trousersround his knees, a ripped jacket thrown over his ripped shirt, and hotly followed by Nicola herself (now in a nightdress, now inunderwear, now naked beneath a half-furled towel), either to speed him on his way with a blood libel and a skilfully hurled ashtray, orelse to win back his love, by apologies, by caresses, or by main force. In any event the man of the moment invariably kept going. Often she would fly right out into the street. On several occasions she had taken a brick to the waiting car. On several more she had lain down in front of it. All this changed nothing, of course. The car would always leaveat the highest speed of which it was mechanically capable, though sometimes, admittedly, in reverse. Nicola's men, and their escape velocities . . . Back in the flat, staunching her wrists, perhaps, orpressing an ice-cube to her lip (or a lump of meat to her eye), Nicolawould look at herself in the mirror, would look at what remainedand think how strange — how strange, that she had been right allalong. She knew it would end like this. And so it proved. The diary she kept was therefore just the chronicle of a death foretold . . .


One of those people who should never drink anything at all,Nicola drank a very great deal. But it depended. A couple ofmornings a month, stiff with pride, deafened with aspirin (and reckless with Bloody Marys), Nicola would adumbrate seriousreform: for example, only two colossal cocktails before dinner, abroad maximum of half a bottle of wine with her meal, and then just the one whisky ordigestнfbeforebedtime. She would frequently stickto the new regime right up to and certainly including the whisky ordigestifbefore bedtime the following day. By then, bedtime looked a long way off. There was always a lot of shouting and fistfighting todo before bedtime. And what aboutafter bedtime, or after thefirst bedtime, with several bouts of one thing or the other still to go? Soshe always failed. She could see herself failing (there she was, clearlyfailing), and so she failed. Did Nicola Six drink alone? Yes, she drank alone. You bet. And why did she drink alone? Because she wasalone.And she was alone, now, at night, more than formerly. What could never be endured, it turned out, was the last swathe of time beforesleep came, the path from larger day to huger night, a little deathwhen the mind was still alive and fluttering. Thus the glass banged down on the round table; the supposedly odourless ashtray gave itslast weak swirl; and then the babywalk, the smudged trend to the loathed bedding. That was how it had to end.


The other ending, the real death, the last thing that already existedin the future was now growing in size as she moved forward toconfront or greet it. Where would she see the murderer, where wouldshe find him — in the park, the library, in the sadcafй,or walking pasther in the street half-naked with a plank over his shoulder? The murder had a place, and a date, even a time: some minutes aftermidnight, on her thirty-fifth birthday. Nicola would click throughthe darkness of the dead-end street. Then the car, the grunt of itsbrakes, the door swinging open and the murderer (his face inshadow, the car-tool on his lap, one hand extended to seize her hair) saying,Get in. Get in... And in she climbed.


It was fixed. It was written. The murderer was not yet a murderer.But the murderee had always been a murderee.


Where would she find him, how would she dream him, when wouldshe summon him? On the important morning she awoke wet withthe usual nightmares. She went straight to her bath and lay there for along time, round-eyed, with her hair pinned up. On important days she always felt herself to be the object of scrutiny, lewd and furiousscrutiny. Her head now looked small or telescoped, set against the squirming refractions of the giantess beneath the water. She rose with dramatic suddenness from the bath and paused before reachingfor the towel. Then she stood naked in the middle of the warm room.Her mouth was full, and unusually wide. Her mother had alwayssaid it was a whore's mouth. It seemed to have an extra half-inch at either wing, like the mouth of the clowngirl in pornography. But thecheeks of the pornographic clowngirl would be painted white,whiter than the teeth. Nicola's face was always dark, and her teethhad a shadowy lustre, slanting inwards, as if to balance the breadthof the lips, or just through the suction of the devouring soul. Her eyeschanged colour readily, eagerly, in different lights, but their firmstate was a vehement green. She had this idea about the death oflove. . .


The funeral, the cremation she was due to attend that day was nota significant one. Nicola Six, who hardly knew or remembered thedead woman, had been obliged to put in a tedious half an hour on thetelephone before she managed to get herself asked along. The deadwoman had briefly employed Nicola in her antique shop, years ago.For a month or two the murderee had sat smoking cigarettes in the zestless grotto off Fulham Broadway. Then she had stopped doingthat. This was always the way with Nicola's more recent jobs, ofwhich there had, for a while, been a fair number. She did the job, andthen, after an escalating and finally overlapping series of latemornings, four-hour lunches, and early departures, she was consid­ered to havelet everyone down (she wasn't there ever), and stoppedgoing in. Nicola always knew when this moment had come, and chose that day to stop going in. The fact that Nicola knew thingswould end that way lent great tension to each job she took, right from the first week, the first day, the first morning ... In the more distant past she had worked as a publisher's reader, a cocktailwaitress, a telephonist, a croupier, a tourist operative, a model, alibrarian, a kissogram girl, an archivist, and an actress. An actress —she had gone quite far with that. In her early twenties she had donerep, Royal Shakespeare, panto, a few television plays. She still had atrunk full of outfits and some videotapes (poor little rich girl, sprynewlywed, naked houri maddeningly glimpsed through fogsmoke and veils). Acting was therapeutic, though dramatic roles confusedher further. She was happiest with comedy, farce, custard-pie. Thesteadiest time of her adult life had been the year in Brighton, takingthe leadin Jack and the Beanstalk. Playing a man seemed to help. Shedid Jack in short blazer and black tights, and with her hair up. Amillion mothers wondered why their sons came home so green and feverish, and crept burdened to bed without their suppers. But then the acting bit of her lost its moorings and drifted out into real life.


With a towel round her belly she sat before the mirror, itself atheatrical memento, with its proscenium of brutal bulbs. Again shefelt unfriendly eyes playing on her back. She went at her face like anartist, funeral colours, black, beige, blood red. Rising, she turned tothe bed and reviewed her burial clothes and their unqualified sable.Even her elaborate underwear was black; even the clips on her garterbelt were black, black. She opened her wardrobe, releasing the full-length mirror, and stood sideways with a hand flat on her stomach,feeling everything that a woman would hope to feel at such amoment. As she sat on the bed and tipped herself for the first blackstocking, mind-body memories took her back to earlier ablutions, self-inspections, intimate preparations. A weekend out of town withsome new man of the moment. Sitting in the car on the Friday afternoon, after the heavy lunch, as they dragged through SwissCottage to the motorway, or through the curling systems ofClapham and Brixton and beyond (where London seems unwilling ever to relinquish the land, wants to squat on those fields right up to the rocks and the cliffs and the water), Nicola would feel a pressurein those best panties of hers, as it were the opposite of sex, like thestirring of a new hymen being pinkly formed. By the time theyreached Totteridge or Tooting, Nicola was a virgin again. With whatperplexity would she turn to the voluble disappointment, thebabbling mistake, at her side with his hands on the wheel. After aglimpse of the trees in the dusk, a church, a dumbfounded sheep,Nicola would drink little at the hotel or the borrowed cottage andwould sleep inviolate with her hands crossed over her heart like a saint. Sulky in slumber, the man of the moment would neverthelessawake to find that practically half his entire torso was inside Nicola'smouth; and Saturday lunchtime was always a debauch on everyfront. She hardly ever made it to Sunday. The weekend would endthat evening: a stunned and wordless return down the motorway, asingle-passenger minicab drive of ghostly length and costliness, orNicola Six standing alone on a sodden railway platform, erect and unblinking, with a suitcase full of shoes.


But let us be clear about this: she had great powers — great powers.All women whose faces and bodies more or less neatly fill thecontemporary mould have some notion of these privileges andmagics. During their pomp and optimum, however brief andrelative, they occupy the erotic centre. Some feel lost, somesurrounded or crowded, but there they are, in a China-sizedwoodland of teak-hard worship. And with Nicola Six the genderyearning was translated, was fantastically heightened: it came ather in the form of human love. She had the power of inspiring love,almost anywhere. Forget about making strong men weep. Seven-stone pacifists shouldered their way through street riots to be homein case she called. Family men abandoned sick children to wait in therain outside her flat. Semi-literate builders and bankers sent her sonnet sequences. She pauperized gigolos, she spayed studs, she hospitalized heartbreakers. They were never the same again, they lost their heads. And the thing with her (whatwas it with her?), thething with her was that she had to receive this love and send it back inopposite form, not just cancelled but murdered. Character is destiny;and Nicola knew where her destiny lay.


Fifteen minutes later, dressed for death, she called her black cab anddrank two cups of black coffee and tasted with hunger the blacktobacco of a French cigarette.


In Golders Green she dismissed the taxi, and it pulled away forever. She knew she'd get a lift back: you always did, from funerals.The sky above the redbrick lodge she entered was certainly dullenough for a person to take leave of it with equanimity. As usual she was quite late, but the volley of pale glances did not pierce her. Withno attempt at self-muffling she walked evenly to the back and slippedinto an empty aisle, of which there was no shortage. The deadwoman was not being populously farewelled. So this was all you got:the zooty sideburns and masturbator's pallor of an old Ted in a blacksuit, and the secular obsequies. Nicola longed equally for a cigaretteand the lines you sometimes heard: a short time to live, full of misery. She was always especially stirred — this was why she came — by thespectacle of the bereaved elderly, particularly the women. The poorsheep, the dumbfounded sheep (even mere nature dumbfounds them), as reliable as professional mourners but too good at it really,too passionate, with hair like feather dusters, and frailly convulsed with brute grief, the selfish terrors . . . Nicola yawned. Everythingaround her said school, the busts and plaques, and all the panels withtheir use of wood to quell and dampen. She hardly noticed thediscreet trundling of the coffin, knowing it was empty and the body already vaporized by fire.


Afterwards, in the Dispersal Area (a heavy blackbird was flyinglow and at an angle over the sopping grass), Nicola Six, looking andsounding very very good, explained to various interested parties who she was and what she was doing there. It solaced the old to see suchpiety in the relatively young. She reviewed the company with eyes ofpremonitory inquiry, and with small inner shrugs of disappoint­ment. In the carpark she was offered several lifts; she accepted one more or less at random.


The driver, who was the dead woman's brother's brother-in-law,dropped her off on the Portobello Road, as instructed. PrettilyNicola said her goodbyes to him and his family, extending a glovedhand and receiving their thanks and praise for her attendance. Shecould hear them long after the car had pulled away, as she stood onthe street readjusting her veil. Such a nice girl. So good of her to come. That skin! What hair! All the way back Nicola had beenthinking how good a cigarette would look, white and round betweenher black fingers. But she was out of cigarettes, having almost gassedherself with tobacco on the way to Golders Green. She nowprogressed along the Portobello Road, and saw a pub whose nameshe took a liking to.'tv and darts' was the further recommenda­tion of a painted sign on its door, to which a piece of cardboard hadbeen affixed, saying,'and pimball'. All the skies of Londonseemed to be gathering directly overhead, with thunder ready todrop its plunger . . .


She entered the Black Cross. She entered the pub and its murk. Shefelt the place skip a beat as the door closed behind her, but she hadbeen expecting that. Indeed, it would be a bad day (and that daywould never come) when she entered a men's room, a teeming toilet such as this and turned no heads, caused no groans or whispers. Shewalked straight to the bar, lifted her veil with both hands, like abride, surveyed the main actors of the scene, and immediately sheknew, with pain, with gravid arrest, with intense recognition, thatshe had found him, her murderer.


When at last she returned to the flat Nicola laid out her diaries on theround table. She made an entry, unusually crisp and detailed: the final entry. The notebooks she used were Italian, their coversembellished with Latin script. . . Now they had served their purposeand she wondered how to dispose of them. The story wasn't over,but the life was. She stacked the books and reached for a ribbon .. .Tvefound him. On the Portobello Road, in a place called the BlackCross, I found him.’


I think it was Montherlant who said that happiness writes white: itdoesn't show up on the page. We all know this. The letter with theforeign postmark that tells of good weather, pleasant food andcomfortable accommodation isn't nearly as much fun to read, or towrite, as the letter that tells of rotting chalets, dysentery anddrizzle. Who else but Tolstoy has made happiness really swing on the page?When I take on Chapter 3, when I take on Guy Clinch, I'll have to do,well, not happiness, but goodness, anyway. It's going to be rough.


The moment that Keith Talent saw Nicola Six — he dropped histhird dart. And swore. The 32-gram tungsten trebler had pierced hisbig toe...I thought I might be able to make a nice play on wordshere. Cupid's dart, or something like that. Arrows of desire? But it wasn't desire that Nicola Six aroused in Keith Talent. Not primarily.I would say that greed and fear came first. Going for broke at the pinball table, Guy Clinch froze in mid-flail: you could hear the ball scuttling into the gutter. Then silence.


While the scene developed I melted, as they say, into thebackground. Of course I had no idea what was taking shape in front of me. No idea? Well, an inkling, maybe. This moment in the publichouse, this pub moment, I'm going to have to keep on coming backto it. Edging down the bar, I was intrigued only in the civilian sense -but powerfully intrigued. Every pub has its superstar, its hero, its pub athlete, and Keith was the Knight of the Black Cross: hehad to stepforward to deal with the royal tourist. He had to do it for the guys:for Wayne, Dean, Duane, for Norvis, Shakespeare, Big Dread, for Godfrey the barman, for Fucker Burke, for Basim and Manjeet, for Bogdan, Maciek, Zbigniew.


Keith acted in the name of masculinity. He acted also, of course, inthe name ofclass. Class! Yes, it's still here. Terrific staying power, and against all the historical odds. What is it with that old,old crap?The class system just doesn't know when to call it a day. Even a nuclear holocaust, I think, would fail to make that much of a dent init. Crawling through the iodized shithouse that used to be England,people would still be brooding about accents and cocked pinkies,about maiden names andsettee orsofa, about the proper way to eat aroach in society. Come on. Do you take the head off first, or start with the legs? Class never bothered Keith; he never thought about it'as such'; part of a bygone era, whatever that was, class neverworried him. It would surprise Keith a lot if you told him it wasclassthat poisoned his every waking moment. At any rate, subliminally orotherwise, it was class that made Keith enlist a third actor in his dealings with Nicola Six. It was class that made Keith enlist GuyClinch. Or maybe the murderee did it. Maybe she needed him. Maybe they both needed him, as a kind of fuel.


Do / need him? Yes. Evidently. Guy pressed himself on me, sameas the other two.


I left the Black Cross around four. It was my third visit. 1 neededthe company, hair-raising though much of it was, and I was doing allright there, under Keith's tutelage. He introduced me to the Polacksand the brothers, or paraded me in front of them. He gave me a game of pool. He showed me how to cheat the fruit machine. I bought a lot of drinks, and endured a lot of savage cajolery for my orange juices, my sodas, my cokes. Taking my life in my hands, I ate a pork pie.Only one real fight so far. An incredible flurry of fists and nuttings; it ended with Keith carefully kicking selected areas of a fallen figurewedged into the doorway to the Gents; Keith then returned to thebar, took a pull of beer, and returned to kick some more. It transpired that the culprit had been messing with Dean's darts. Afterthe ambulance came and went Keith calmed down. 'Not with aman's darts,' Keith kept saying almost tearfully, shaking his head.People were bringing him brandies. 'You don't... not with hisdarts.’


I left the Black Cross around four. I went back to the apartment. Isat at the desk in Mark Asprey's bay-windowed office or study or library. Actually it's more like a trophy room. Actually the wholedamned place is a trophy room. Walking from living-room tobedroom — and I'm thinking of the signed photographs, the erotic prints - you wonder why he didn't just nail a galaxy of G-strings to the walls. In here it's different. Here you're surrounded by cups and sashes, Tonis and Guggies, by framed presentations, commenda­tions. Cherished and valued alike by the critical establishment, themedia, and the world of academe, Mark Asprey has honorarydegrees, pasteboard hats, three separate gowns from Oxford, Cambridge, Trinity College Dublin. I must look at his books, ofwhich there are a great many, in a great many editions, in a great many languages. Hungarian. Japanese.


I left the Black Cross around four. I went back to the apartment. I sat there wondering why I just can't do it, why I just can't write, whyI just can'tmake anything up. Then I saw her.


Across the way from Mark Asprey's bay-windowed library there is a lot-sized square of green, with two thin beds of flowers (low-ranking flowers,nupe flowers) and a wooden bench where old-timers sometimes sit and seem to flicker in the wind. On this green patch, rather regrettably, rather disappointingly (how come Aspreystands for it?), there is also a garbage tip: nothing outrageous, no compost or bathtubs or abandoned pantechnicons, just selectedrefuse, magazines, old toys, a running shoe, a kettle. This is a Londontheme; the attempt at greenery would itself appear to attract the trash. The cylinders of wire-netting they put up to protect youngtrees sufficiently resemble a container of some kind, so people cramthem with beercans, used tissues, yesterday's newspapers. In times of mass disorientation and anxiety . . . But we can get back to that. Onwith the story. The girl was there: Nicola, the murderee.


I was sitting at Mark Asprey's vast desk - I think I might even havebeen wringing my hands. Oh Lord, these chains! Something I havesuffered for twenty years, the steady disappointment ofnot writing—perhaps exacerbated (I admit to the possibility) by Mark Asprey'sgraphic and plentiful successes in the sphere. It shocked my heart tosee her: a soft blow to the heart, from within. Still wearing her funeral robes, the hat, the veil. In her black-gloved hands she heldsomething solid, ribboned in red, the load settled on her hip andclutched close as if for comfort, like a child. Then she raised the veiland showed her face. She looked so...dramatic. She looked like thevamp in the ad, just before the asshole in the helicopter or thesubmarine shows up with the bathcubes or the chocolates. Could shesee me, with that low sun behind her? I couldn't tell, but I thought: Nicola would know. She would know all about how light works onwindows. She would know what you could get away with in the curtainless room, what adulteries, what fantastic betrayals . . .


Nicola turned, wavered, and steadied herself. She dropped herburden into the trash and, embracing her shoulders with crossedhands, moved off in a hurrying walk.


For perhaps five minutes of stretched time I waited. Then down Iwent and picked up my gift. Not knowing what I had, I sat on thebench and pulled the ribbon's knot. An adorably fat and femininehand, chaos, a menacing intelligence. It made me blush with porno­graphic guilt. When I looked up I saw half of Nicola Six, thirty feetaway, split by a young tree-trunk, not hiding but staring. Her starecontained - only clarity, great clarity. I gestured, as if to return what 1 held in my hands. But after a pulse of time she was walking off fastunder the wrung hands of the trees.


I wish to Christ I could do Keith's voice. Thet's are viciouslystressed. A brief guttural pop, like the first nanosecond of a cough ora hawk, accompanies the hardk. When he sayschaotic, and he says itfrequently, it sounds like a death rattle. 'Month' comes out asmumf.He sometimes says, 'Im feory . . .' when he speaks theoretically.'There' sounds likedare orlair. You could often run away with the impression that Keith Talent is eighteen months old.


In fact I've had to watch it with my characters' ages. I thought GuyClinch was about twenty-seven. He is thirty-five. I thought KeithTalent was about forty-two. He is twenty-nine. I thought NicolaSix . . . No, I always knew what she was. Nicola Six is thirty-four. I fear for them, my youngers.


And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of makingeveryone look and feel like shit. You got that? And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look, and feel,like shit.


Chapter 3: The Foil


uy clinch wasa good guy — or a nice one, anyway. Hewanted for nothing and lacked everything. He had a tremend­ous amount of money, excellent health, handsomeness, height, acapriciously original mind; and he was lifeless. He was wide open.Guy possessed, in Hope Clinch, a wife who was intelligent, efficient(the house was a masterpiece), brightly American (and rich); andthen there was the indubitable vigour of the child . . . But when hewoke up in the morning there was - there was no life. There was onlylifelessness.


The happiest time of Guy's fifteen-year marriage had come duringHope's pregnancy, a relatively recent interlude. She had taken her fifty per cent cut in IQ with good grace, and for a while Guy hadfound himself dealing with an intellectual equal. Suddenly the talkwas of home improvement, of babies' names, nursery conversions,girlish pinks, boyish blues — the tender materialism, all with a point.Never entirely free of builders, the house now thronged with them,shouting, swearing, staggering. Guy and Hope lived to hormonetime. The curtain hormone, the carpet hormone. Her nausea passed.She craved mashed potato. Then the nesting hormone: an abruptpassion for patching, for needle and thread. Seeing the size of her, thebarrow boys of Portobello Road (and perhaps Keith Talent had beenamong them) would summon her to their stalls, saying sternly,masterfully, 'Over here, my love. I got the stuff you want.' And Hopewould rootle to the base of damp cardboard boxes — rags of velvet,scraps of satin. In the eighth month, when the furniture had begun itsdance round the house, and Hope sat with regal fullness in front of the television, darning and patching (and sometimes saying, 'What am Idoing?'), Guy consulted his senses, scratched his head, andwhispered to himself (and he didn't mean the baby),It's coming . . .It's on its way.


Oh, how he had longed for a little girl! In the sparse gloom of theprivate clinic, the most expensive they could find (Hope distrustedany medical care that failed to stretch searchingly into the four figures: she liked the scrolled invoices, with every paper tissue andsoldier of toast unsmilingly itemized; she had no time for thebargain basements and the Crazy Eddies of the National Health), Guy did his share of pacing and napping and fretting, while titledspecialists looked in from dinner parties or popped by on their way to rounds of golf. A girl, a girl, just an ordinary little girl - Mary,Anna, Jane. 'It's a girl,' he could hear himself saying on the telephone (to whom, he didn't know), 'Five pounds twelve ounces. Yes, a girl.A little under six pounds.' He wanted to be with his wife throughout,but Hope had banned him from labour and delivery wards alike — forreasons, soberly but unanswerably stated, of sexual pride.


The baby showed up thirty-six hours later, at four in the morning.He weighed nearly a stone. Guy was allowed a brief visit to Hope's suite. Looking back at it now, he had an image of mother and son mopping themselves down with gloating expressions on their faces,as if recovering from some enjoyably injudicious frolic: a pizza fight, by the look of it. Two extra specialists were present. One was peeringbetween Hope's legs, saying, 'Yes, well it's rather hard to tell whatgoes where.' The other was incredulously measuring the baby'shead. Oh, the little boy was perfect in every way. And he was a monster.


Guy Clinch had everything. In fact he had two of everything. Twocars, two houses, two uniformed nannies, two silk-and-cashmeredinner jackets, two graphite-cooled tennis rackets, and so on and soforth. But he had only one child and only one woman. After Marmaduke's birth, things changed. For fresh inspiration he rereadThe Egoist, and Wollheim on Ingres and the Melting Father. The baby books had prepared him for change; and so had literature, upto a point. But nothing had prepared him or anybody else for


Marmaduke... World-famous paediatricians marvelled at his


hyperactivity, and knelt like magi to his genius for colic. Every halfan hour he noisily drained his mother's sore breasts; often hewould take a brief nap around midnight; the rest of the time hespent screaming. Only parents and torturers and the janitors ofholocausts are asked to stand the sound of so much human grief.When things improved, which they did, though only temporarily(for Marmaduke, already softly snarling with asthma, would soonbe emblazoned with eczema), Hope still spent much of her time in bed, with or without Marmaduke, but never with Guy. All night helay dressed for disaster in one of the two visitors' rooms, wonderingwhy his life had suddenly turned into a very interesting and high-toned horror film (one with a Regency setting, perhaps). Hishabitual mode of locomotion around the house became the tiptoe.When Hope called his name - 'Guy?' -and he repliedYes? therewas nevei any answer, because his name meantCome here. Heappeared, and performed the necessary errand, and disappearedagain. Now, with Hope's requests, the first time of asking soundedlike the second time of asking, and the second time of askingsounded like the ninth. Less and less often Guy would try to hoist the baby into his arms (under the doubtful gaze of nanny or night-nurse, or some other of Marmaduke's highly-paid admirers),saying, rather self-consciously, 'Hello, man-cub.' Marmadukewould pause, reviewing his options; and Guy's bashfully inquiring face would somehow always invite a powerful eye-poke or a jet of vomit, a savage rake of the nails, or at the very least an explosivesneeze. Guy shocked himself by suspecting that Hope kept the infant's nails undipped the better to repel him. Certainly his facewas heavily scored; he sometimes looked like a resolute but talent­less rapist. He felt supererogotary. The meeting, the rendezvous, itjust hadn't happened.


So two of everything, except lips, breasts, the walls of intimacy,enfolding arms, enfolding legs. But that wasn't really it. What hadmeant to come closer had simply moved further away. Life, there­fore, could loom up on him at any moment. He was wide open.


Guy and Hope had been away twice since the birth, on doctor's advice: their doctor's, not Marmaduke's. They left him in the care of five nannies, plus an even more costly platoon of medicalcommandos. It had been strange, leaving him behind; Guy fullyparticipated in Hope's dread as the cab made its way to Heathrow.Fear was gradually eased by time, and by half-hourly telephonecalls. The inner ear was tunedto infant grief. If you listened closely,everything sounded like a baby crying.


First, Venice, in February, the mist, the cold troubled water - andmiraculously earless. Guy had never in his life felt closer to the sun; itwas like living in a cloud, up in a cloudy sea. But many of themornings were sombre in mood and sky (dank, failed), and seemedbest expressed by the tortured and touristless air of the JewishQuarter, or by the weak dappling on the underside of a bridge (where the pale flames pinged like static, briefly betrayed by a darkerbackground) — or when you were lost among the Chinese boxes, the congestion of beauties, and you could have likened yourselves toShakespearean lovers until there came the sound of a wretchedsneeze from an office window near by, then the nose greedily voidedinto the hanky, and the resumption of the dull ticking of a typewriteror an adding machine.


On the fifth day the sun burst through again inexorably. Theywere walking arm in arm along the Zattere towards thecafйwherethey had taken to having their mid-morning snack. The light was getting to work on the water, with the sun torpedoing in on everypair of human eyes. Guy looked up: to him the sky spoke ofRevelation, Venetian style. He said,


'I've just had a rather delightful thought. You'd have to set it asverse.' He cleared his throat. 'Like this:


The sun, the sun, the . . . daubing sun:The clouds areputti in its hands!'


They walked on. Hope's oval face looked resolute. The juices in her jaw were already addressing the toasted cheese-and-ham sand­wich she would presently enjoy; then the notebook, the little Amex guide, the creamy coffee. 'Dreadful pun, I suppose,' Guy murmured.'Oh, God.' A press of sightseers confronted them. As they forged through, with Hope taking the lead, their arms were sundered. Guyhurried to catch up.


'Thetourists,' he said.


'Don't complain. That's idiotic. What do you thinkyou are?'


'Yes but-'


'Yes but nothing.'


Guy faltered. He had turned to face the water and was craning his neck in obscure distress. Hope closed her eyes longsufferingly, andwaited.


'Wait, Hope,' he said. 'Please look. If I move my head, then the sunmoves on the water. My eyes have as much say in it as the sun.'


'. . .Capiscol


'But that means—for everyone here the sun is different on the water.No two people are seeing the same thing.'


'I want my sandwich.'


She moved on. Guy lingered, clutching his hands, and saying, 'Butthen it's hopeless. Don't you think? It's . . . quite hopeless.'


And he whispered the same words at night in the hotel, and went onwhispering them, even after their return to London, lying in sleep'scaboose, seconds before Marmaduke woke him with a clout. 'But thenit's hopeless . . . Utterly hopeless.'


In excellent fettle, in the pink or the blue of boyish good health duringtheir absence, Marmaduke sickened dramatically within a few hoursof their return. Evenhandedly he dabbled with every virus, everyhatching, afforded by that early spring. Recovering from mumps, hereacted catastrophically to his final whooping-cough shot. Superflufollowed superflu in efficient relay. Doctors now visited him, unaskedand unpaid, out of sheer professional curiosity. At this point, and for no clear reason (Sir Oliver asked if he might write a paper about it),Marmaduke's health radically improved. Indeed, he seemed to shedhis sickly self as if it were a dead skin or a useless appendage: from the feverish grub of the old Marmaduke sprang a musclebound wunder-kind, clear-eyed, pink-tongued, and (it transpired) infallibly vicious.The change was all very sudden.Guy and Hope went out one day,leaving the usual gastroenteritic nightmare slobbering on the kitchenfloor; they returned after lunch to find Marmaduke strolling round thedrawing-room with his hands in his pockets, watched by several speechless nannies. He had never crawled. Instead, he appeared tohave worked it out that he could cause much more trouble, and havemuch more fun, in a state of peak fitness. His first move was to dispensewith that midnight nap. The Clinches hired more help, or they tried. An ailing baby was one thing; a strappingly malevolent toddler wasquite another. Up until now, Guy and Hope's relationship, to the childand to each other, had been largely paramedical. After Marmaduke's renaissance, it became, well — you wouldn't say paramilitary. You'dsay military. The only people they could get who stayed longer than an hour or two were male nurses sacked from lunatic asylums, Aroundthe house, these days there was a kind ofswat team of burly orderlies,as well as a few scarred nannies and au pairs. Dazedly yet without bit­terness, Guy calculated that Marmaduke, now in his ninth month, hadalready cost him a quarter of a million pounds. They went away again.


This time they flew first-class to Madrid, stayed at the Ritz for threenights, and then hired a car and headed south. The car seemedpowerful and luxurious enough; it was, without question, resound­ingly expensive. (Hope whaled on the insurance. Guy studied thegold-rimmed document: they would airlift you out on almost anypretext.) But as they cruised, as they cruised and glistened one eveningthrough the thin forests near the southernmost shore of the peninsula,a great upheaval or trauma seemed almost to dismantle the engine at astroke - the manifold, the big end? In any event the car was clearlyhistory. Around midnight Guy could push it no longer. They saw somelights: not many, and not bright.


The Clinches found accommodation in a rudeventa.What with thebare coil of the bulb, the lavatorial damp, the flummoxed bed, Hope had burst into tears before theseсorawas out of the room. All night Guy lay beside his drugged wife, listening. At about five, after aninterval reminiscent of one of Marmaduke's naps, the weekendroistering in the bar, the counterpoints of jukebox andImpactomachine, exhaustedly gave way to the shrieking gossip of the yard -with a cluck-cluck here and a whoof-whoof there, here a cheep, there amoo, everywhere an oink-oink. Worst or nearest was a moronicbugler of a cock, playing tenor to the neighbours' alto, with his room-rattling reveille. 'Cock-a-doodle-do', Guy decided, was one of the world's great euphemisms. At seven, after an especially unbearabletenor solo (as if the cock were finally heralding the entrance of someimperial superrooster), Hope jerked upright, swore fluently andfoully, applied valium and eyemask, and bunched herself down againwith her face pressed to her knees. Guy smiled weakly. There was atime when he could read love in the shape of his sleeping wife; even inthe contours of the blankets he used to be able to read it...


He went outside, into the yard. The cock, the grotesquegallo,stood in its coop — yes, inches from their pillows — and stared at him withunchallengeable pomp. Guy stared back, shaking his head slowly.Hens were in attendance, quietly and unquestioningly supportive,among all the dust and rubbish. As for the two pigs, they were yahooseven by the standards of the yard. A dark half-grown Alsatiandozed in the hollow of an old oildrum. Sensing a presence, thedog jerked upright, waking sudden and crumpled, with sand driedinto the long trap of the jaw, and moved towards him with compulsivefriendliness. It's a girl, he thought: tethered, too. As he went to pet theanimal they became entangled, entangled, it seemed, by the veryamiability of the dog, by its bouncing, twisting amiability.


In pastel daubings the new prosperity lay to east and west but thisplace was kept poor by wind. Wind bled and beggared it. Like thecock, the wind just did its wind thing, not caring wherefore. Hot airrises, cool air fills the space: hence, somehow, the tearing and tugging, the frenzied unzippings of this sandpaper shore. In his tennis shortsGuy stepped off the porch and walked past the car (the car avoided hisgaze) on to the tattered croisette. A motorbike, an anguished donkey shackled to its cart — nothing else. The sky also was empty, blownclean, an unblinking Africa of blue. Down on the beach the wind wentfor his calves like an industrial cleanser; Guy gained the hardenedrump of damp sand and contemplated the wrinkly sea. It openedinhospitably to him. Feeling neither vigour nor its opposite, feeling nocloser 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 hebarged his way down the incline, breathed deep, and pitched himselfforward in the swimmer's embrace of the sea . . . Twenty minuteslater, as he strode back up the beach, the wind threw everything it hadat him, and with fierce joy the sand sought his eyes and teeth, thehairless 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 awakeningventa.The daughters of theestablishment were mopping up; two men boldly conversed across thelength of the dark room. Guy stood straight, barefoot, his skin andhair minutely spangled by the sand. An interested woman, had shebeen monitoring him with half an eye, might have found Guy Clinchwell made, classical, above all healthy; but there was somethingpointless or needless in his good looks; they seemed wasted on him.Guy knew this. Stocky mat-shouldered Antonio, leaning against thepillar by the door, one hand limp on his round belly - and thinkingwith complacence of his own blood-red loincloth, with the goodshoelace-and-tassel effect down there on the crotch — registered Guynot 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 breadmoistened with olive oil, out on the banging porch. He then took atray into Hope, who ripped off her mask but lay there with her eyesclosed.


'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 tothem. He wasn't given to pornographic thoughts). The thought wasthis: Hope splayed and naked, being roughly used by an intent Antonio . . . Guy had then taken his last piece of bread into the yardand offered it to the tinned dog. (He also took another incredulouslook at the cock, the stupidgallo.)The dog was whimperingrhythmically, but showed no appetite. Dirty and gentle-faced, thebitch just wanted to play, to romp, to fraternize, and just kepttripping on her tether. The length offнlthyrope — six feet of it —saddened Guy in a way that Spanish cruelty or carelessness had neversaddened him before. Down in the yard here, on a wind-frazzledstretch of empty shore, when the only thing that came free andplentiful was space and distance — the dog was given none of it. Sopoor, and then poor again, doubly, triply, exponentially poor.I'vefound it,thought Guy (though the word wouldn't come, not yet).Itis . . . 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 firstsection of grilled bread. She paused. 'I can't bear it. You aren't goingdreamyon me, are you Guy? Listen, we're out of here. We aregone.'


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


Thereafter it was all quite easy: not clear and not purposeful, but notdifficult. Guy Clinch looked round his life for a dimension throughwhich some new force might propagate. And his life, he found, wassewn-up, was wall-to-wall. It was closed. To the subtle and silentmodulations of Hope's disgust, he started to open it. Guy had a job. Heworked for the family business. This meant sitting about in a bijouflatlet in Cheapside, trying to keep tabs on the proliferating, the pullulating hydra of Clinch money. (It, too, was like Marmaduke:whatwould it get up to next?) Increasingly, Guy stopped going in andjust walked the streets instead.


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


tv and darts,said the sign.and pimball. The first time Guyentered the Black Cross he was a man pushing through the black doorof 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 whitewine 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 whisper­ingwho'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 himbitterly, 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 finallysilenced 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 eachtime he returned. But going there at night was another entry.


Keith was the key: Keith, and his pub charisma. Keith was the pubchamp. 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 — adarts force in the Black Cross . . . Now plainly Keith had to dosomething about Guy, who was far too anomalous to be let alone, with his pub anticharisma. Keith had to ban him, befriend him, beathim 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 tonguebetween his teeth: and bought Guy a drink. The hip pocket, the furledtenners. Keith's house had many mansions. The whole pub shookwith silent applause.


Cheers, Keith! After that, Guy belonged. He sailed in there almost with a swagger and summoned the barmen by name: God, orPongo.After that, he stopped having to buy drinks for the black girls, andstopped having to buy drugs from the black boys. The heroin, the cutcoke, 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'tdrop 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 wasjustgrass . . .Now Guy could sit in a damp pocket of pub warmth, andwatch. Really the thing about life here was its incredible rapidity, withpeople growing up and getting old in the space of a single week. Likethe planet in the twentieth century, with its fantasticcoup de vieux.Here, in the Black Cross, time was a tube train with the driver slumpedheavy over the lever, flashing through station after station. Guy always thought it was life he was looking for. But it must have beendeath — 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 andstood 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 withgravity and efficiently plunged towards the centre of the earth. What halted its progress was Keith's left foot, which was protected only bythe frayed webbing of a cheap running-shoe: you could see the littlebullseye of blood. But there was another arrowman or darter in theBlack Cross that day; perhaps this smilingp«ffo lurked in the artworkof the pinball table, among its sinbads and sirens, its goblins andgenies. Eye of the Tiger! When he saw her green eyes, and the breadthof 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, whococked 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 werealready run. Keith gave the instructions, the mangled fiver, then turned assessingly. Death wasn't new in the Black Cross, it waseveryday, 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'sSix."


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


Now Guy moved into her force field. Intensely he confirmed the lineof dark down above her mouth. You saw women like this, sometimes,at the bars of theatres and concert halls, in certain restaurants, inaeroplanes. You didn't see them in the Black Cross. She too looked asthough she might faint at any moment. 'How do you do?' he said (inhis peripheral vision Keith was slowly nodding), extending a hand towards the black glove. 'Guy Clinch.' His fingers hoped for theamperes of recognition but all he felt was a slick softness, a sense ofmoisture 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. Thehand 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 justsome old boiler. Comes to us all as such.'


They talked on. With a violent jerk of self-reproof, Guy boughtmore drinks. Keith leaned forward murmuring with cupped hands tolight 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 hishand (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 afuneral.'


Keith looked him up and down. 'Life goes on innit,' he said, withmost of his usual buoyancy. He straightened his windcheater and gavea 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 amoment, a pub moment, and then followed him.


That night in Lansdowne Crescent, at 8.45, his twelve-hour trystwith Marmaduke now only minutes away, Guy sat on the second sofain the second drawing-room with a rare second drink and thought:How will I ever know anything in the middle of all this warmth andspace, all this supershelter ? I want to feel like the trampolinist when hefalls 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 intwo days, even with all the fieldwork I have to go out and do. Everythird day, now, I do more fieldwork, and wince and gloat into mynotebook. I write. I'm a writer . . . Perhaps to offset the looming bulkof Mark Asprey's corpus, I have laid out my two previouspublications on the desk here.Memoirs of a Listener. On theGrapevine.By Samson Young. Me. Yes, you. A valued stylist, in mynative America. My memoirs, my journalism, praised for their honesty, their truthfulness. I'm not one of those excitable types whoget 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 anice guy, originally. Anyway at the moment reality is behavingunimprovably, 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 HornigUltrason. There are others I could approach. Publishers regularlyinquire about my first novel. Publishers dream nights about my firstnovel. Sodo I. I'm getting old, and at a peculiar rate. Missy Harter, ofcourse, has always been the most persistent. Maybe I'll call her. Ineed the encouragement. I need the stimulation. I need the money.


Keith came over this morning. I suppose hehas to be teeing me upfor 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 littlebit 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 Ј189.99.


It was calledWhen Scandinavian Bodies Go Mouth Crazy. Thetitle proved to be accurate — even felicitous. I sat with Keith for awhile and watched five middle-aged men seated around a tabletalking in Danish or Swedish or Norwegian without subtitles. Youcould make out a word now and then.Radiotherapy. Handikap-toilet.'Where's the remote?' Keith asked grimly. He had need of theFast Forward, the Picture Search. We found the remote but it didn'tseem to be working. Keith had to sit through the whole thing: aneducational short, I assume, about hospital administration. I slippedinto 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 andsaid, 'Bastard.'


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


I too have need of the Fast Forward. But I must let things happen atthe speed she picks. I can eke out Chapter 4 with Keith's sexualconfessions (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 elderlywidow — also fine material), I staked out the Black Cross hoping Guywould show. For the first time I noticed a joke sign behind the bar:no fucking swearing.And what's with thiscarpet? What do you want acarpet for in a place like this? I ordered an orange juice. Oneof 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'sovercoat, the plastic shoes, the never-washed dreadlocks. He's thelocal shaman: he has a religious mission. His hair looks like an onionbhaji. 'You trying to cut down, man?' he slowly asked me. Actually Ihad to make him say it about five times before I understood. Hisresined face showed no impatience. 'I don't drink,' I told him. Hewas nonplussed. Of course, non-drinking, while big in America, wasnever much more than a fad over here. 'Honest,' I said. 'I'mJewish.'. . . Quite a kick, saying that to a barful of blacks. Imaginesaying it in Chicago, or Pittsburgh. Imagine saying it in Detroit. 'Wedon't, much.' Gradually, as if controlled by a dial, pleasure filledShakespeare's eyes - which, it seemed to me, were at least as malarialand sanguinary as my own. One of the embarrassments of my condition: although it encourages, or enforces, a quiet life andsensible habits, it makes me look like Caligula after a very heavyyear. What with all the grape and the slavegirls and everything, andall those fancy punishments and neat tortures I've been dolingout. . . 'It's all in the eyes, man,' said Shakespeare. 'All in the eyes.'


In he came - Guy - with a flourish of fair hair and long-riderraincoat. I watched him secure a drink and settle over the pinballtable. Smugly I marvelled at his transparency, his flickering, flinching transparency. Then I sidled up, placed my coin on the glass (this is thepinball etiquette), and said, 'Let's play pairs.' In his face: a routine thrill of dread, then openness; then pleasure. I impressed him withmy pinball lore: silent five, two-flip, shoulder-check, and so on. Wewere practically pals anyway, having both basked in the sun ofKeith's patronage. And, besides, he was completely desperate, asmany of us are these days. In a modern city, if you have nothing to do(and if you're not broke, and on the street), it's tough to find peopleto do nothing with. We wandered out together and did thePortobello Road for a while, and then — don't you love the English — he asked me home for tea.


Once inside his colossal house I saw further avenues of invasion. Isaw beachheads and bridgeheads. His frightening wife Hope I soonneutralized; I may have looked like a piece of shit Guy'd broughtback from the pub (on the sole of his shoe) but a little media talk andManhattan networking soon schmoozed her into shape. I met herkid sister, Lizzyboo, and looked her over for possible promotion. Butmaybe the currentau pair is more my speed: a ducklike creature, notyoung, with a promisingly vacuous expression. As for the maid,Auxiliadora, Ididn't mess around, instantly hiring her for theapartment. . .


I kind of hate to say it, but Mark Asprey was the key. Everyonewas frankly electrified when I let slip my connexion to the great man.Hope and Lizzyboo had seen his latest West End hit,The Goblet,which Asprey is even now escorting to Broadway. Dully asked by meif she'd liked it, Lizzyboo said, 'I cried, actually. Actually I cried twice.' Guy didn't know Asprey's stuff but said, as if to himself, inamazement, 'To be awriter like that. Just to sit there and do whatyou do.' I fought down an urge to mention my own two books(neither of which found an English publisher. Run a damage-check on that. Yes, it still hurts. It still exquisitely burns).


So one dud writer can usually spot another. When we were alonetogether in the kitchen Guy asked me what I did and I told him,stressing my links with various literary magazines and completelyinventing a fiction consultancy with Hornig Ultrason. I can invent: Ican lie. So how come I can'tinvent? Guy said, 'Really? How interesting.' I sent a sort of pressure wave at him; in fact I wasrubbing my thumb and forefinger together beneath the table when hesaid, 'I've written a couple of things . . .' 'No kidding.' 'A couple of stories. Expanded travel notes, really.' 'I'd certainly be happy to takea look at them, Guy.' 'They aren't any good or anything.' 'Let me bethe judge.' They're rather autobiographical, I'm afraid.' 'Oh,' I said.'That's okay. Don't worry aboutthat.


The other day,' I went on. 'Did Keith follow that girl?'


'Yes he did,' said Guy instantly. Instantly, because Nicola wasalready present in his thoughts. And because love travels at the speedof light. 'Nothing happened. He just talked to her.'


I said, That's not what Keith told me.'


'What did he say?'


'It doesn't matter what he said. Keith's a liar, Guy . . . What happened?'


Later, I got a look at the kid. Jesus.


I'm like a vampire. I can't enter unless I'm asked in over the threshold. Once there, though, I stick around.


And come back whenever I like.


Now here's a pleasing symmetry. All three characters have givenme something they've written. Keith's brochure, Nicola's diaries,Guy's fiction. Things written for different reasons: self-aggrandize-ment, self-communion, self-expression. One offered freely, oneabandoned to chance, one coaxingly procured.


Documentary evidence. Is that what I'm writing? A documentary? As for artistic talent, as for the imaginative patterning of life, Nicola wins. She outwrites us all.


I must get into their houses. Keith will be tricky here, as in everyother area. Probably, and probably rightly, he is ashamed of wherehe lives. He will have a rule about it - Keith, with his tenacities, hisberk protocols, his criminal codes, his fierce and tearful brand- loyalties. Keith will naturally be tricky.


With the murderee I have a bold idea. It would be a truthful move, and Imust have the truth. Guy is reasonably trustworthy; I can allow for his dreamy overvaluations, his selective blindnesses. But Keith is a liar, and I'll have to doublecheck, or triangulate, everything he tellsme. I must have the truth. There just isn't time to settle for anythingless than the truth.


I must get inside their houses. I must get inside their heads. I mustgo deeper - oh, deeper.


We have all known days of sun and storm that make us feel what itis to live on a planet. But the recent convulsions have taken thisfurther. They make us feel what it is to live in a solar system, a galaxy.They make us feel — and I'm on the edge of nausea as I write thesewords — what it is to live in a universe.


Particularly the winds. They tear through the city, they tearthrough the island, as if softening it up for an exponentially greaterviolence. In the last week the winds have killed nineteen people, andthirty-three million trees.


And now, at dusk, outside my window, the trees shake their heads like disco dancers in the strobe lights of nightlife long ago.


Chapter 4: The Dead-End Street


 Dreaming of it.Begging for it. Praying for it.'


Keith pushed his way out of the Black Cross and girdedhimself there on the stone step, beneath the sign.tv and darts. He looked right, he looked left; he grunted. There she was. There wasNicola Six. She stood out clearly like a rivulet of black ink against therummagings and barter pastels of the market street. Past the stallsshe moved wanderingly, erring, erring. If it had occurred to Keiththat Nicola was waiting for him or leading him on, that he was included in any design of hers, he would have dismissed the idea. Butthere was pressing invitation in the idleness with which she wandered, the slow shifts of weight in the tight black skirt. For a briefpassage of time Keith had the odd idea that Nicola was watchinghim; and that couldn't be right, because Keith was watching Nicola,and Nicola hadn't turned. Something tugged him. She's leading meon, he thought, and started following her.Beauty, extreme yetambiguously available:this, very roughly, was what Nicola'sentrance into the Black Cross had said to Keith. But he didn't knowthe nature - he didn't know the brand - of the availability. Keithburped hotly. He was going to find out.


Now Nicola paused in profile, and bent to inspect the cheap chinaof a covered barrow. Raising her face she had words with thebarrow's owner, acheat Keith knew well. She raised her veil. . .When she'd raised her veil in the pub Keith had looked at her withsharp interest, certainly, but not with desire. No, not exactly desire;the point of the dart in his foot precluded desire, hurt too much fordesire. Nicola was tall - taller than Keith in her heels - and, it would seem, delicately made, the curve of the ankle answering to the curveof the throat. She looked like a model, but not the kind of modelKeith generally preferred. She looked like a fashion model, and Keithgenerally preferred the other kind, the glamour kind. The demean­our of the glamour model proclaimed that you could do what youliked with her. The demeanour of the fashion model proclaimed that she could do what she liked with you. Besides, and more basically,Keith generally preferred short girls with thick short legs and bigbreasts (no theoretical limit) and fat bums - girls in the mould ofTrish Shirt and Peggy Obbs, of Debbee Kensit (who was special) andAnaliese Furnish. The legs appeared to be particularly important. Keith couldn't help noticing that the legs he most often forced open,the legs he most often found dangling over his shoulders, tended to be exceptionally thick in the ankle, tended, in fact, to be ankleless,and exceptionally thick in the calf. He had concluded that fat legs were what he must generally prefer. The discovery pleased Keith at first, then perplexed and even worried him, because he had neverthought of himself as being fussy. Nicola's ankles: you weresurprised they could bear all that height and body. Perhaps she justwasn't his type. Oh, but she was. Something told him that shedefinitely, she deeplywas.


Nicola moved on. Keith followed. Other possibilities aside, sheinterested Keith in the same way that Guy Clinch or old LadyBarnaby interested him. She was in the A. i. bracket. Keith wasn't thesort of bloke who disapproved of people who had a lot of money. Heliked there to be people who had a lot of money, so that he couldcheat them out of it. Keith was sorry, but he wouldn't want to live inthe kind of society where nobody was worth burgling. No way.Thus, as he trailed Nicola through the trash of the harrowed street, thinking that her backside might well be fatter than it looked andanyway the thinner bird often made it up to you in the crib, severalconsiderations obtained.


He waited until she approached the flower stall and stood thereremoving her gloves. Then he went in. Giving the nod and the pointedfinger to old Nigel (who owed Keith and had good reason to be wary ofhim), and moving with his usual confident clumsiness, he wrenched ahandful of brown paper from the nail and edged along the barrowpicking the soaked bunches from their plastic tubs and saying,'Discover the language of flowers. And let their soothingwords..."He paused, trying to recapture the full jingle. 'Soothe away all your cares like.' No wedding ring, he thought. Could tellthat, even under the glove in the Cross. 'Daffodils. Glads. Some ofthem. Some of them. The lot. A time like this.' He held forth thethrottled posy. 'Why be retiring? On me.' Bites her nails but thehands are lazy. Dead lazy. 'You heading on down this way? Or I gotthe Cavalier round the corner.' Without quite touching her, hishands merely delineating the shape of her shoulders, Keith urgedNicola forward along the street. Expensive suit. Not cheap. 'I see agirl like you. Bit of a beauty. Head in the clouds as such. You said yougot your own place.' She nodded and smiled. 'Now.' The mouth on her. That veil'd be useful too. 'Me? I'm Handy Andy. Mr Fixit innit.You know, the fuse's gone. The boiler's creating or the bell don'twork. You need somebody with a few connexions.' The shoes: half a grand. Got to be. 'Because I know. I know it's hard, Nicky, to engageany real services these days. To be honest with you,' he said, and hiseyes closed with stung pride, 'I don't know what the fuckingcountry's coming to. I don't.' She slowed her pace; briskly she removed her hat and the black clip that secured her chignon. With aroll of her throat she shook out her hair, Jesus: highpriced. Theywalked on. TV. 'All I'm saying is I'm a man can get things done. Any little prob like. Cry out for Keith. This it?'


They had approached the entrance to the dead-end street.


'I live down there,' she said. 'Thank you for these.'


As she slowed, and half turned, and walked on, and slowed again,Nicola fanned herself with the flap of a glove. Her colour was high. Sheeven hooked a thumb into the V of her black jacket and tugged. She'shung, too, he thought. The bitch. Remarkably, this final bonus beganto have a dispiriting effect on Keith Talent. Because perfection wouldbe no good to him. Rather wistfully, he imagined she might have a bigscar somewhere, or another blemish that he, for one, might willinglyoverlook. Failing that, in her mental instability he would repose hishopes. The condition of her nails was some comfort to him. Cold comfort only, though. By Keith's standards, they weren't that bad. They were bitten; but they weren't bitten off. That left her accent,which was definitely foreign (Europe, thought Keith: somewhere inthe middle), and they might do things funny where she came from.Well, there was no harm in trying, he decided, although there'd been alot of harm in trying as hard ashe had, once or twice in the past.


She said, 'It's very muggy, don't you find?'


Torrid,' said Keith.


'Goodness.'


'As close as can be.' His smile was playfully abject as he pitched hisvoice low and thick and added, 'Anything you want, darling.Anything at all.'


'Well as a matter of fact,' she said, in a tone so clear and ordinary that Keith found himself briefly standing to attention, 'there are oneor two things that certainly need looking at. Like the vacuum cleaner. It's very good of you.'


'What's your phone number, Nick,' said Keith sternly.


She hesitated; then she seemed to give a sudden nod to herself.'Have you got a pen?'


'No need,' said Keith, re-emboldened. 'Got this head for figures.'And with that he let his mouth drop open, and rested a large tongue on the lower teeth as his bright eyes travelled downwards over her body.


Her voice gave him the seven digits with a shiver.


'Sweet,' said Keith.


Thoughtfully Keith retraced his steps to the Black Cross. He had inmind a few drinks, to loosen the throwing arm; and then someserious darts. In the Portobello Road he encountered Guy Clinch,apparently browsing over a stall of stolen books. Keith never failedto be amazed that books fetched money. 'Yo,' he said, and paused fora few words. He considered. His circle of acquaintances wasdefinitely expanding. It was through Guy, basically, that Keith had been introduced to Lady Barnaby. That's how it's done: the old-boynetwork . . . Keith had, of course, been friendly with people like Guybefore: in prison. They were in for fraud, mostly, or drugs, oralimony default. White collar. They were okay (Guy was okay); they were human; they showed you respect, not wishing to get beaten upall day. But Guy wasn't in prison. He was in a huge house in Lansdowne Crescent. According to Keith, people like Guy admiredand even envied the working man, such as himself. For some reason.Maybe because the working man lived that bit harder, in both workand play. When Guy now gamely asked him, 'Any luck?' — meaningNicola - Keith waved him away, with a groan of hard-livinglaughter, saying he had too many birds on as it was.They parted. Keith's plans changed. He looked in at Mecca, histurf accountants, for an expensive few minutes, then hurried off to do some work.


Keith used the heavy knocker. Slowly the door opened, and apleading face blinked out at him. Filled, at first, with extremecaution, the pale blue eyes now seemed to rinse themselves in delight.


'Why, Harry! Good afternoon to you.'


'Afternoon, Lady B.,' said Keith, striding past her into the house.


Lady Barnaby was seventy-seven. She wasn't one of Keith's birds.No way.


In his bachelor days Keith had been a regularromeo.He had been areal ladykiller. In truth, he had been quite a one. Even Keith's dogClive, in his dog heyday, had been no keener or less choosy or moreincapable of letting a female scent go by without streaking after itwith his nose on the ground and his tongue thrown over his shoulder like a scarf. Then came change, and responsibilities: Kath, his wife,and their baby girl, little Kim. And now it was all different. These days Keith kept a leash on his restless nature, restricting himself tothe kind of evanescent romance that might come the way of anymodern young businessman on his travels (the wife or sister or daughter or mother of somecheat in the East End, perhaps, whereKeith went to get the perfume), plus the occasional indiscretionrather closer to home (Iqbala, the single parent in the next flat along), plus the odd chance encounter made possible when fortune smiles onyoung lovers (closing time, pub toilet), plus three regular andlongstanding girlfriends, Trish Shirt, Debbee Kensit, who was special, and Analiese Furnish. And that was it.


Most interesting, in her way, most representative, most modern,was sinuous Analiese. Naughty, haughty, dreamy and unreliable,given to panic attacks, swoons, hysterical blindness, Analiese, inKeith's view, was mental. She read books and wrote poems. She sent letters to celebrities in all walks of life. She hung around outside TVstudios, concert halls, the Institute of Contemporary Arts. In theletters she sent to people whose faces she had seen on the televisionand in the newspapers Analiese Furnish often enclosed a photo­graph; as a result, she often got replies. Not that these photographs were lewd or revealing or fleshy. Oh no. Snapped by one or other ofher male protectors (abject, tongue-tied types, platonic attendants:


she thought, absolutely wrongly and with characteristic lack of


imagination, that they loved her for her mind), these photographsshowed Analiese in pensive poses, gazing out of windows, or insylvan settings, bending in her frock, perhaps, to relish the touch of a flower. Yet the replies came in, guarded, cajoling, exploratory. Why?What did the photographs say? The wideness of the eyes told of a heavy dream life; the brow was the brow of someone who could belied to, and successfully; and the wide mouth and tropical henna ofthe hair suggested that when Analiese gave herself to you, she wouldgive herself utterly, and probably wouldn't ring the house. In this lastparticular alone, appearances were deceptive.Analiese was decep­tive, but not predictably. Also, she had a figure of full womanly power and beauty, except for her legs (which were fat and always hidden up to the last moment. These legs were the bane of her life).What you did with famous people just wasn't your fault. Different rules applied. You were swept away. And when it was over (and itwas usually over quickly), well, you were wryly left with youralbums and scrapbooks, your poems, your train-tickets, yourmemories, your dreams, your telephone calls to his wife andchildren, your letters to the editors of all the tabloids.


Keith had met Analiese on the street. She came up to him andasked, in her husky and theatrical voice, if he was television's RickPurist - Rick Purist, of TV quiz-show fame. Keith hesitated. So might some medieval hermit have hesitated when the supplicant poor staggered through the dripping forest to his hovel, and asked ifhe was the Emperor Frederick or Baldwin IX, Count of Flanders,risen from the dead and come to redeem them, to give succour, to free from sorrow. Well now, the hermit must have wondered in his rags:am I or aren't I? It might be fun for a while. On the other hand . . . Keith peered at Analiese's heaving chest, and trusted to instinct. Headmitted it to be so: hewas television's Rick Purist. Thus the opening, tone-setting phoneme of their relationship — his slurred 'yeah' - was an outright lie. He accepted an invitation to join her fortea in her West Hampstead bedsitter. Keith drank the sherry whileshe showed him her memorabilia of the great and talked about theprimacy of the human soul. Twenty-five minutes later, as Keithleadenly climbed into his trousers and headed for the door, he glanced back at the sofabed in the confident hope that he would seeAnaliese no more. But one night, a month or two later, he grew fondand wistful, and called her at three o'clock in the morning from the


Black Cross. She read out a poem she'd written him. Keith went


round there anyway. A month after that he opened his tabloid andsaw a piece entitledstolen hours with tv's rick. There was apicture of Analiese, in her frock, savouring the scent of a municipalbloom. There was another picture of Analiese, without the flower,and without the frock (and cut off at the knee). There was also apicture of a puzzled Rick Purist: he did indeed look a bit like Keith.Here in cold print Keith learned that he was 'very romantic' and 'afantastic lover' who was, moreover, 'built for love'. Rick Puristdenied it all. Rick's wife Traci was standing by him. Words could notdescribe the elation Keith felt. He bought thirty copies of thenewspaper and was about to shower the Black Cross with them. But just in time he realized that this would be an inappropriate response to a really singular slice of luck. Powerfully eroticized all the same,Keith called in on Analiese that very week. She knew by now, to hercost and embarrassment (or to the cost and embarrassment of the tabloid's editors), that Keith was not Rick Purist. But she forgot andforgave, and invented new fictions for him: Keith as fly-by-night, as man with no name, a crossword of aliases, a Proteus and Pimpernel.Keith didn't get it; but he certainly liked it. Never before had his unreliability and heartless neglect been seized on and celebrated as the core of his appeal.


Obviously there were little complications: obviously. Sometimes,when he stumbled into her bedsit in the small hours, Analiese was not alone. An adoring baldy or four-eyes - some wally, wimp, nerdor narna — might be sleeping on the chair, or on the floor, like a dog, in which case Keith would speed them into the night with a taunt and(whoops!) a kick in the arse, pick himself up off the floor and joinAnaliese in the sofabed with her warmth and her breasts and herlaughter. On other occasions he surprised her in bed with famous people. This didn't happen very often (Keith didn't go round there very often), and the famous people were no longer very famous; but it did happen. A classical musician, some terrified poet: these werethe kind of celebrities, and non-tabloid readers, to whom Analiesewas now reduced. No hard feelings. Fair was fair. Keith would take afew swigs of whatever was available, crack a few jokes, and be on hisway, usually to Trish Shirt's. Once he surprised her in bed with Rick Purist. Analiese was making amends (she later explained) for the disruption she had brought to Rick's marriage. On came the bedsidelamp: Keith and Rick looked quite alike. Keith stared. He'd seen


Rick on the telly! It was one of the strangest moments in Keith's


strange life. He soon hopped it...That night seemed to sum it allup, really. She lived out in Slough now, did Analiese; and Keith was abusy man.


And Debbee? Little Debbee? Well, Debbee wasspecial. Dark,rounded, pouting, everything circular, ovoid, Debbee was 'special'. Debbee was special because Keith had been sleeping with her sinceshe was twelve years old. On the other hand, so had several otherpeople. All completely kosher and Bristol-fashion because she'd hadher tubes done and you just gave cash gifts of seventy-five quid to hermum, who wasn't bad either. Keith was very straight with DebbeeKensit. Respect. Consideration. Nothing dirty. Natural love. You got a ghostly feeling as you separated from her, on the small bed, inthe small room, its walls fadedly rendering the lost sprites and dwarfs and maidens of childhood; and the white smell of very young flesh.Plump and prim (and fat-legged) on the man-made lower sheet lay little Debbee. And shockingly naked: untasselled, ungimmicked,unschool-uniformed. Such extras were to be found, plentifully enough, in her top drawer; but Debbee was always naked for herKeith, as nature intended. She wouldn't suggest wearing those things— no, not with Keith. And Keith was always too embarrassed to ask.Last autumn, Debbee had celebrated her fifteenth birthday. In thepast Keith had gone round there as often as he could afford (or moreoften: he had sometimes knowingly bounced cheques on Mrs K.).Since November, though, he was less frequently to be seen there. ButDebbee would always be special to Keith. She would always be special. At least until she was eighteen. Or sixteen.


And finally, invariably finally, there was Trish Shirt, blonde andpale and getting on a bit now, thinnish Trish (but sturdy-legged),who couldn't remember how old she was or what kind of blonde herhair had been when she started out, so many years ago. She livedunder a supermarket on Ladbroke Grove, which was convenient, and even necessary, because she hated going out. Trish neededseveral tumblers of vodka before she could face the strip lighting andthe caged goods. Keith brought Trish her dole, sparing her thefortnightly mortification, with money subtracted for her drink, thussparing her a much more frequent ordeal. This figured strongly in thesteady increase of his powers. Keith was like a god to Trish. 'I'd do anything for you, Keith. Anything,' she said. And Keith took her upon it. But every time he strode out of CostCheck clutching the keys to the heavy Cavalier, or silently got dressed (or rezipped himself) while staring at her pale body, Keith vowed that this visit would be his last.


Every time he pushed open the plywood door, every time Trish cameto welcome him on her knees, Keith was that little bit angrier. Forthis he would give Trish payment. God save us, what was hedoing tohimself? Why was he here, with her, with that, when he hadfunloving little Debbee, and sinuous Analiese (and Peggy and Iqbala and Petronella and Fran) ? Well, it was true that Trish had somethingto be said for her. Trish had a certain quality. She was nearest.


How to account for Keith's way with women, such as it was? Howto account for Keith's talent? He had a knack. Keith could tellwomen what they were thinking. No doubt this has never been easy.But it's quite an accomplishment, with these women, in these days.


On the other hand, how much of a way with women did Keithreally need? One was drunk, one was nuts, and one was fifteen. The ladykiller. These, then, were Keith's birds.


The nearest he had ever come to love, funnily enough, was withChick Purchase. For years Chick had invaded and usurped histhoughts: Keithhated him, with a passion. And Keith could have loved the guy...It all went back to that business disagreement, atthe plant off the M4 near Bristol. But there were also rumours,legends, about an incident at a party, an incident involving Keith andChick's sister, Charlotte Purchase. Some spoke of improper sugges­tions; others, of attempted rape. Whatever the truth of the matter,Keith, fresh out of hospital after a daring raid on a rival's drugs pub,had been promptly rehospitalized by Chick. Looking back on it now,with mature hindsight, Keith said that it was all crap about theattempted rape (which, he claimed, had been an unqualified success),and that a darker tale lay behind the enmity, something of which a man might not easily speak. At the bar of the Black Cross it wasgenerally agreed, in fearful whispers, that the two men had fallen outover a disputed darts score. Well, there was no coming back from that. And Keith could have loved the guy.


'And how are you, Harry?' asked good Lady Barnaby.


'Good,' said Keith. 'I'm good, Lady B. Everything shipshape?'Keith made a perfunctory tour of the house, checking therefurbished boiler, the patched and sanded kitchen floorboards, theshifted furniture, the new window pane . . . The old window panehad been personally smashed by Keith Talent a few days ago, as ameans of speeding his introduction to Lady Barnaby. It was GuyClinch who had first drawn Keith's attention to the old woman,pointing out a stooped figure on Ladbroke Grove: 'Knew herhusband . . . the house is far too big for her now.' Keith did what heusually did when he wanted to get to know a member of the oppositesex. He followed her home. Then the brick in the soiled handker­chief. 'Excuse me, missis,' Keith had panted when Lady Barnabyeventually came to the door (and peered through the letterbox), 'some black kids just put a brick through your downstairs window. I chased them but the little - but they got away.' It took a while beforeshe let Keith inside. The old dear was all aflutter; she had been humming over a flower arrangement a few feet from the exploding glass. She wept on his shoulder. They drank half a bottle of cognac.Keith calmed her with tales of his unpleasant experiences with our coloured brethren . . . Ever since that day Keith was always lookingin on Lady B., to do odd jobs, or rather to supervise them. He had noidea about any of that, merely leasing out the work to variouscowboys he knew in White City. Lady Barnaby was fiercely grateful to Keith. She often said that it did her old heart good that people like him still existed.


'Well, Harry? What do you think?' asked Lady Barnaby uneasily.


Uneasily Keith slapped the boiler and pronounced it a fine piece ofwork. In fact even he could tell that something very serious indeedwas about to go wrong with it. He felt nervous being in the sameroom — or on the same floor — as this labouring gravity-bomb in itspadded vest.


'Real craftsmanship,' he said.


'Listen to it, though, Harry. That terrible clanging. And thosespitting noises.'


'That's just the vents, adjusting to the new, to the increased flow, Lady B. The - thecladding. It's the cladding as such.'


'Wait for me!'


In the kitchen Keith said,


'You're going to have a smashing time in Yugoslavia, Lady B. What? Are you sure! / saw your mouth water when you took a look at that brochure. Your own suite, private pool, five-star dining. It'sgoing to be heaven out there, love. Oh, heaven.' Briefly Keith thoughtof the holiday package he had concocted with his mate in thebucket-shop off Harrow Road: the hotel half-built and half-rotting;the shadow of the abandoned factory; the blighted shore. 'You neverknow,' he said, 'you might meet someone nice.'


'Harry!’


'No, come on. Because you're a pretty old lady, Lady B. You are.Not like my mum. Tell you what: I'll run you out to the airport on Friday morning. Shut up. Nothing simpler. I'll see you then then.And if you have any probs, Lady B., you know what to do. Any littlething, cry out for Keith. I mean Harry.'


Keith had a late lunch at the Amritsar and then returned to theBlack Cross and played darts for eleven hours.


Expedient to a fault in most things, Keith was a confessed romanticwhen it came to his darts . . . The deal went something like this. A house in Twickenham or thereabouts: in the environs of Twick­enham. An aviary. Park the wife and kid. Keep greyhounds. A household name. Figure in the England manager's plans: throw yourheart out in an England shirt. An ambassador for the sport, a credit to the game. Give every barmaid in Britain one: no female pubgoeron earth can resist a celebrity darter, a personality. Tours ofScandinavia, Australia, Canada, the States. Build up a personal library of every victory on video. Be on television, a face known bymillions. On TV innit. TV. TV...


Earlier in the summer, while completing (with infinite pain anddifficulty) his entry form for the Duoshare Sparrow Masters, theknockout interpub darts competition in which he was doing so wellnow, Keith pondered and agonized for several days before filling inthe section markedhobbies. He wanted to putdarts and leave it at that. But darts was work. It would be like saying that his hobbieswerecheating, burgling andreceiving. Besides, he had in the pastwon two self-sufficiency awards from the British Darts Organization— darts bursaries, darts scholarships, as it were, to help him in his bidto go pro. He wasn't too clear on all this (and the cash grants had kept Keith self-sufficient for about fifteen minutes each in the turfaccountants), but a struggler in the world of small businesseswouldn't tell you that his 'hobby' wasexpanding a timber-yard orrunning a fag shop,now would he? What, then,were Keith's hobbies? He couldn't putbirds. It might get back to Kath. Hecouldn't puthorses orwalking Clive orgoing to the pub. Pool andfruit machines had, if little else, the stamp of authenticity...He toyed with certain fictions:potholing, rallying, growing vegetables.But his pride rebelled against the imposture. Growing vegetables?You must be...In the end he searched his soul for the last time,white-knuckled his grip on the biro, and put TV.


It was no less than the truth. He watched a very great deal of TV, always had done, years and years of it, aeons of TV. Boy, did Keithburn that tube. And that tube burnt him, nuked him, its cathodescrackling like cancer. 'TV,' he thought, or 'Modern reality' or Theworld'. It was the world of TV that told him what the world was. How does all the TV time work on a modern person, a person likeKeith? The fact that he would have passed up a visit to the Louvre or thePradoin favour of ten minutes alone with a knicker catalogue —this, perhaps, was a personal quirk. But TV came at Keith like itcame at everybody else; and he had nothing whatever to keep it out.He couldn't grade or filter it. So he thought TV was real...Ofcourse, some of itwas real. Riots in Kazakhstan were real, stuffabout antiques was real (Keith watched these shows in a spirit of professional dedication), mass suicides in Sun City were real, darts was real. But so, to Keith, wasSyndicate andEdwin Drood: TheMusicalandBow Bells andThe Dorm That Dripped Blood. Not an active reality, like, say, darts, on which the camera obligingly spiedand eavesdropped. No, an exemplary reality, all beautifully and gracefully interconnected, where nothing hurt much and nobody got old. It was a high trapeze, the artists all sequin and tutu (look at thatbird!), enacted far above the sawdust, the peanut shells and poodledroppings, up there, beyond a taut and twanging safety-net calledmoney.


In the days after their first meeting, the image of Nicola Six began to work on Keith's mind. It worked like television. He thought of heroften — while inspecting a shop window in Oxford Street, whilebaring after his scattered urges in the last moments before sleep,while finishing himself off with Trish Shirt. Although many of thesethoughts were frankly pornographic (but class porn, you know? Notlike the rubbish you get here), by no means all of them were. He saw himself in lace-up swimming-trunks, on a lounger, frowning over a balance-sheet by a personal plunge-pool, and Nicola walking past inbikini and high heels, bringing him a drink and tenderly tousling hishair. 'LA innit,' he whispered. Or Keith in a tuxedo, on a patio,outside Palermo: glass table and candles, and her in a flowing gown.An international entrepreneur with wide business interests. Re­deemed, and freed from sorrow. On the other side. Where darts might yet take him. Where he belonged.


He left it for a bit, then called her.


His exit from the Black Cross that afternoon was marked for its airof studious and purposeful calm. Outside, the day was still; the flaresof Keith's trousers billowed gracefully as he walked to the heavyCavalier. With lips compressed and sternly pushed forward, hepicked his way through the doubled traffic.


In fact, Keith was displeased. He hadn't much cared for the soundof her, on the phone. That small voice might be doing no more than wasting his valuable time. Or playing it cool. But that was okay. Nowoman could play it cooler than Keith — Keith, with his prodigies ofthoughtlessness. Like being late. Keith was always late for his dates,especially for the first one. And if he had a standby he seldom showed up at all.


'I'll be right over,' Keith had said. He now doubleparked outsidethe Indian Mutiny on Cathcart Road. Seated at his usual table, Keithate poppadams and bombay duck while the staff fondly prepared hismutton vindaloo. 'The napalm sauce, sir?' asked Rashid. Keith was resolved, in this as in all things. 'Yeah. The napalm sauce.' In thekitchen they were busy responding to Keith's imperial challenge: to make a curry so hot that he couldn't eat it. The meal arrived. Lively but silent faces stared through the serving-hatch. The first spoonfulswiped a mustache of sweat on to Keith's upper lip, and drew excited murmurs from the kitchen. 'Bit mild,' said Keith when he could talkagain. That day, the Indian Mutiny had no other customers. Keithchewed steadily. His lion's hair looked silver in the shadows. Tears inched their way over his dry cheeks. 'Bland, Rashid,' said Keith, later, as he paid and undertipped. 'What you looking at? It's five percent. Bland. Dead bland.'


'Nicky? Keith,' said Keith, after the long push on the buzzer.


A second buzz, and the door succumbed to his touch. He turned and looked out at the dead-end street.


Keith contemplated the stairs. The mutton vindaloo rippedanother stunning burp out of him. Lingering only to inspect a lockand to hold a brown envelope up to the light, and to lean against thewall for five minutes with his brow on his wrist, Keith began theheavy climb.


He came to the top, and found a door. He opened it. 'Jesus,' hesaid. More stairs.


Nicola stood on the brink of this final storey, wearing a softwoollen dress the colour of a Siamese cat, three of its nine buttons, itsnine lives, already unfastened, and emerald earrings like tiger's eyesin the pockets of her black hair, and the silver collar, and every finger ofher clenched hands barbed with rings.


'Come on up.'


'Champagne,' said Keith. 'Cheers,' he added. 'Jesus.'


He followed her down the passage and into the sitting-room,wiggling a finger some millimetres from her backside. Then, with aserious sniff, he confronted the room and its mental arithmetic. Nicolaturned to face him, and Keith's calculations continued. The sum gotbigger. Including jewellery. Outlay. TV, he thought. When she raiseda hand to her throat Keith fumbled and crashed round his mind,looking for a pun onchoker. He didn't find one.


He said, 'Prestigious.'


'. . . Do you want a drink or something?'


'Work before pleasure, my love,' said Keith, who was quite drunkalready. On the whole he wished he wasn't, because hangovers played havoc with a man's darts. But he had seemed to need those seven pints of lager (you got to, with that stuff) and the chain of brandies withwhich he had rounded off his meal. Keith wondered why. It was out ofcharacter, so early in the day. Not that it mattered, because Keithcould hold his drink. No one knew the difference. He thought with all modesty of the times he had burst through Trish Shirt's plywood doorand walked straight into the wall, and she never said a word. Keith justcarried it off.


'You're quite drunk already, aren't you, Keith,' said Nicola.


'Little celebration,' said Keith smoothly. But—you don't do that, hewas thinking. You don't say it. No, you don't. That's what youneverdo . . .Keith looked at his feet, wrong-footed, and felt her eyes move strictly over his pub hair. Nicola's legs, he saw, were set combatively apart, and the last button of her dress was unfastened. Nicola's dress: Keith had been intending, at an early stage in their encounter, to ramhis hand up it. But not now, he thought. No way.


She looked at her watch and said, 'I suppose we might as well getstarted.' And Keith was being led into the kitchen. Grimly and without profit he fingered the faulty vacuum cleaner, peered into the block-prone waste disposer, manhandled the hingeless ironing-board.


'This is hopeless,' said Nicola.


I'm a busy man, thought Keith. I can't just drop everything. I comeup here...'I come up here,' he said. 'I'm a busy man. I can't just dropeverything.'


There's the coffee-grinder.’


The coffee-grinder was produced. They both stared at it. It lookedokay to Keith.


'Do you think it's the fuse?' she asked confidentially.


'Could be.' Grinder, he thought. Here we go. Grind her. A good -


She offered him a screwdriver and looked on with interest. 'I can'tdo it. The screw's too tight.'


Screw, thought Keith. Too tight. Yeah. He was surprised, again, tofind no joke, no icebreaking salacity, on his slowly smiling lips. Hangabout: it's coming. Too tight. Screw. If it's . . . you can't have a...


He applied the tool with will. The blade ground into the scratchedhead - and skidded off into the mons of Keith's thumb.


'Fuck,'he said, and dropped everything.


Now I had no choice but to end that chapterright there. I too hadto drop everything. Maybe I can go back later and soften thetransition, if there's time.


Keith's version just couldn't be trusted for a second longer. Sheloves him up in the bathroom? She makes him a cash offer? No. No. I had to make my move (no rest for the wicked). I had to get out there.


Up to that point the Talent narrative was of such mortifyingsqualor — it had to be no less than pedantic truth, in my opinion. Itwas relayed not to me alone but also to Dean, Thelonius, Fucker and Bogdan, in the Black Cross. Everyone tacitly agreed that Keith was emerging well from the tale.


How is this? Remember: modern, modern. Because it was all atribute to Keith's indifference. To Keith not caring about anything.This would pave the way for still greater triumph in the sexual arena,where, of course (in Keith's version), an impenetrable mendacity took hold.


A real shock this morning. A cockroach — in Mark Asprey'sapartment. It dashed the length of the kitchen, from beneath one labour-saving facility to another. It looked like a little coach-and-four, with a tiny driver, wielding a tinier whip.


Now I knew they'd reached here, these big fat black ones, andcolonized the place. But in Mark Asprey's apartment! The Clinchesevidently have them too. I expected and hoped that the first roachwave would respect the local traditions. I thought they'd all hang outat Keith's. But try explaining class to a cockroach. Cockroachesdon't understand the English, like I do. I understand the English. I'm ashamed to say I pride myself on it.


Iwant to hang out at Keith's. I long to be asked over. Dartslessons, which turn out to be incredibly horrible, only get you intoKeith's garage. The lone tower block at the end of GolborneRoad: I can see it from my bedroom window. I'm working on it.


Auxiliadorawill start coming in this week. I am beset byinvitations from Lansdowne Crescent. I see myself standing outsidethe master bedroom, naked, with my clothes in a little bundle,knocking on the door.


So I tethered the diaries in their original ribbon and went aroundto Nicola's apartment. That's the thing: 1 justdid it. Unlike GuyClinch, 1 have Nicola's address and phone number. 1 have all her pastaddresses and phone numbers too. They're all there, on page one: hernomad progress through the city. Chelsea, Blackfriars, Regent'sPark, Bloomsbury, Hampstead, and so on. And now the dead-endstreet. She's never been so far west before. Nicola Six has livedcare ofan awful lot of people. But they didn't take enough care, and shesoon moved on.


'6: six,' said the tab. 'Yes, hello?' The voice was guilty and defiant.No one likes to be surprised, at home, on late afternoons. No onelikes to be surprised. And I could have been Keith. I said, 'My name isSamson Young. Hello. We met in the pub, remember, the Black Cross? And later that day we saw each other on the street? I havesomething of yours I would like to return to you.''.. . I don't wantit.' 'Yes you do.' 'No I don't.' 'Okay. Then I'll try the police.'


'Christ,' she said. 'Another literalist. Look. Come back in anhour.'


I played a mild hunch. That's what writing is, a hundred hunches,a hundred affronts to your confidence, a hundred decisions, every page. I said, 'There's no need for you to dress up for me. I'm not acontender in all this. I'm - disinterested. I won't stay long and I don'tcare how you look. I won't dissuade you .. .' There was a silence.Then she hung up. There was another silence. Then the buzzer sounded and I pressed my way through.


It took me at least as long as it took Keith to get to the top. I passedthe usual stuff: lurking bikes, the loathed mail of tan envelopes,mirrors, potted plants. On the last flight, past the inner door - youcould feel it, well before she actually appeared on the stairs. Now I'mno chaser, and I failed in love, but I've felt these powerful feminineauras, these feminine shockwaves. Nothing like this, though, suchintensity poised and cocked, and ready to go either way. Oh, entirelyready. And when she appeared at the top of the stairs - the white dressing-gown, the hair aslant over the unpainted face - I fielded the brutal thought that she'd just had fifteen lovers all at once, or fifteenperiods. I followed her into the low room.


'It's characteristic,' I said. 'Pleasantly anarchical.' Meaning the room. I couldn't get her to look up at me. Her demeanour appearedto express great reluctance, or even physical fear. But it's hard to know what's really happening, on a first date.


'Do you want a drink or something?'


'You have one.' A half-empty bottle of red wine stood on the table by the window. On another table Keith's flowers stood dying in theirbowl. Nicola left the room; I heard the surge of the faucet; then shereturned with the rinsed glass. The cork came off silently. Set againstthe clear light of the panes, the glass bore two faint smears of red,wine at the base, lipstick at the rim. Today's wine, yesterday's lipstick. She wore no lipstick now. Nor had her dressing-gown beenrecently washed. There was a certain pride in this. Her body hadafter all been recklessly adored, every inch of it. Even her secretions,even her waste (she perhaps felt), even her dust was adorable. Shesmelled of tragic sleep and tobacco. Not cigarette smoke but tobacco- moistly dark.


Two wicker chairs faced each other, by the small table and itslamp. She sat in one chair and rested her feet on the other. The phonewas at arm's length. So this was her telephone posture. I felt hope: she would communicate. I was looking at her but she wouldn't lookat me. Everywhere else, but not at me.


'Siddown,' she said wearily, indicating the couch. I placed thediaries on the floor at my feet. 'So you read them.' 'It wasn't difficult,'I said. 'I couldn't put them down.' She smiled to herself, secretively, so I added, 'You have a way with language, and with much else. Infact I'm envious.' 'Everything? You read everything.' 'Yup.' Sheblushed — to her fierce annoyance. It was quite a light-show for a while, the olive skin thickening with violet. Yes, some tints of rose were present in her darkness, She arranged the hem of her dressing-gown and said,'So you know all about my sexual. . .'


'Your sexual . . . weakness? Predilection? Bugbear?'


'Perversion.'


'Oh. It's quite common.'


'Is it?'


She looked at me now all right. Her lower lip hung in consideredhostility. I'd better get this one right, I thought. Or it could be all over. And if I wanted the truth from her, then I had to give the truthtoo. And Imust have the truth.


'Are you going "to go to the police" about it?' she asked.


'We are most of us', I said, 'in some kind of agony. I'm not here tojudge you.'


'Thanks. Whatare you here for?'


I was close to full confession, but I said, 'I'm just an observer. Or alistener.'


'What's in it for me? For me you're just an unwelcome complica­tion.'


'Maybe not. Maybe I'll help simplify. I'm intrigued by what you say about the death of love . . . Nicola, let me be your diary.'


At this point she must have made her decision. I found out why shemade it, just before I left. We started with Keith's visit and talked forabout forty-five minutes. She answered all my questions, even the most impudent, with considered clarity, and intense recall. I had toresist the temptation to take notes. And she threw in a tour of the apartment: through the inner passage, into the bedroom, and outagain.


'I'm going to keep my promise and slip away,' I said. 'Can I callyou tomorrow? Oh - you're a Scorpio, right? When is yourbirthday?' This was vicious. What's the matter with me? Who do I think I am? But she didn't seem to mind. 'Isn't that Guy Fawkes'Night?'


'Yes. Bonfire Night.'


'You know it's also the day of the full eclipse?'


'Yes I know. It's good, isn't it?'


We both stood up. Then we did something that people hardly everdo in real life. We looked at each other - for twenty seconds, thirty,forty. It was especially tough for me, with my eyes and everything. In the flinch that at one point she gave I noticed that her teeth, stronglyslanted, wore the faintest signs of neglect. The discoloration(vertical, resinous) was itself fatalistic. Well, why bother? Thosestains gave me my first and only erotic pang of the afternoon, not thewarm outlines of the breasts, nor the conviction of nakednessbeneath the cotton, sweetly soiled. No one had looked at me thatway for quite a time; and I was moved. When she shaped herself for aquestion or statement, I could see what was coming, and I knew itwas fully earned.


'You're-'


'Don't say it!' I said (I astonished myself), and clasped my hands over my ears. 'Please. Not yet. Please don't say it.'


And now she raised a hand, to stifle or cover a smile she knew to bewicked. 'My God,' she said. 'You reallyare.'


On the way back two swearing children offered me a handful ofsweets: Jimmies, or Smarties. I considered, as I listened to thesqueaked, the squandered obscenities of the seven-year-olds.


I really ought to think about what I'm doing, accepting candy fromstrange children.


Before I left, Nicola gave me back her diaries and told me to throwthem on a skip somewhere. I tried to look casual about it. I couldn'ttell her that I'd spent half the day Xeroxing them in their entirety. Mark Asprey has a Xerox, a beautiful little thing. It seems to work like a toaster, when it works, which it doesn't, not right now. I wentto the Bangladeshi stationer's in Queensway. It was a real drag and cost just enough to tip me into a money panic. I cracked at once andrang Missy Harter at Hornig Ultrason. Naturally I didn't talk to herdirect, but I had words with her assistant, Janit. Not quite true. I hadwords with Missy Harter's assistant's assistant, Barbro: Janit'sassistant. Missy Harter will apparently return my call.


Of course it's far too early to start thinking about an advance. Or itwas then, a couple of hours ago. But I don't see how I can be stopped,now I've found common cause with the murderee.


I'm ridiculously pleased, in Chapter 4, with that bit about theEmperor Frederick and Baldwin IX, Count of Flanders. WhenAnaliese comes up to him in the street, and he wonders whether to gowith the Rick Purist ticket, or stick to Keith. I stole it fromThePursuit of the Millenniumby Norman Cohn. Like everybody else I'mfinding it harder and harder to pick up a book, but I can still managebrief engagements with Cohn, with his fascinated, his fully grippedintelligence. Also I'm nearly halfway through Hugh Brogan's one-volume history of America. Soon I'll have to rely on Mark Asprey'sshelves (or Mark Asprey's writings), which don't look promising.


These pseudo-Baldwins and pseudo-Fredericks, medieval hermits(medieval bums, often) deified by desperate populations, by theinspired hordes of the poor. They had a good run, some of them.They led uprisings; they marched on capitals and squatted in palaces.They screwed around, they partied like there was no tomorrow - fora time. But they all paid the price — on the stake. And when theydid, pseudo-pseudo-Fredericks and pseudo-pseudo-Baldwins sprangup to replace them, quickly risen from the dead. Then they gottorched too.


Even the Old Testament expected the Apocalypse 'shortly'. Intimes of mass disorientation and anxiety . . . But I am trying toignore the world situation. I am hoping it will go away. Not the world. The situation. I want time to get on with this little piece ofharmless escapism. I want time to go to London Fields.


Sometimes I wonder whether I can keep the world situation out ofthe novel: the crisis, now sometimes called the Crisis (they can't beserious).Maybe it's like the weather. Maybe you can't keep it out.


 


Will it reach the conclusion it appears to crave - will the Crisisreach the Conclusion? Is it just the nature of the beast? We'll see. Icertainly hope not. I would lose many potential readers, and all my work would have been in vain. And that would be areal bitch.


 


 


Chapter 5: The Event Horizon'


 


Like the flowerson a grave bearing the mother of asentimental hoodlum, Keith's bouquet leaned and loitered in its bowl on the round table. Nicola always beheld these flowerswith disbelief. The colours spoke to her of custard, of blancmange— a leaden meat tea served on pastel plates, the desiccation of aproletarian wake for some tyrant grandad, or some pub parrot ofa granny, mad these thirty years.


She found that, far from brightening the place up, as Keith had predicted they would, the flowers rendered her flat more or lessuninhabitable. In India (where Nicola had once been) certain coloursare associated with the colours of certain castes. These were low-caste flowers, casteless flowers, untouchable flowers. But Nicoladidn't throw them away. She didn't touch them (you wouldn't want to touch them). Keith Talent was expected, and the flowers wouldremain. Nicola didn't yet know that Keith's blue eyes werecompletely flower-blind or flower-proof. He wouldn't see the flowers, and he wouldn't see their absence. Just as a vampire(another class of creature that cannot cross your threshold unin­vited) gives no reflection in glass or mirrors, so flowers, except in thecommon-noun sense (he knew birds liked them, as did bees), sent no message to Keith's blue eyes.


He telephoned on time, the day the flowers died. Even as shepicked up the receiver she felt — she felt how you feel when thedoorbell goes off like an alarm in the middle of the night. Anunpleasant mistake, or really bad news. She steadied herself. Afterthe repeated pips, themselves punctuated by Keith's ragged obsceni­ties, she could hear the squawkings and garrottings of the BlackCross at a quarter past three. Even though pubs were now open moreor less round the clock (there was one near the entrance to the dead­end street), they still exploded at the old closing times: codedmemories deep in the genes of pubs . . . Keith's tone was mawkishlypally, seeming to offer the commiserations due to a shared burden (faulty household appliances; shoddy workmanship; life, life), as ifthey had known each other for years — which, in a sense, she thought,they almost had.


'Tell you what then darling,' he said with that lugubrious lilt,'yeah, I'll be right over.'


'Sweet,' he added when Nicola said yes.


She arranged herself for Keith's visit with considerable care.


When Nicola was just a little girl she had a little friend called EnolaGay. Enola shared in all Nicola's schemes and feints, her tantrumsand hunger-strikes, in all her domestic terrorism. She too had theknack or gift of always knowing how things would unfold. Enoladidn't exist. Nicola invented her. When adolescence came Enolawent and did a terrible thing. Thereafter she kept a terrible secret.Enola had borne a terrible child, a little boy called Little Boy.


'Enola,' Nicola would whisper in the dark. 'What have you done, you wicked girl? Enola!Enola Gay . . .'


Terrible though the child was, Enola shone through Little Boy with the light of many suns. Nicola knew that she would nevergenerate such light herself. She was vivid; she was divinely bright;when she walked the streets she seemed to be lit by her personalcinematographer. But it wasn't the light that burned in Enola Gayfrom Little Boy. That light came from the elemental feminine power:propagation. If Nicola had had that light her power might haveapproached the infinite. But she didn't have it, and never would haveit.


With her, light went the other way. . . The black hole, so longpredicted in theory, was now, to Nicola's glee, established astrono­mical fact: Cygnus X-1. It was a binary system; the black hole wasorbiting a star thirty times the mass of our sun. The black holeweighed in at ten solar masses, but was no wider than London, It wasnothing; it was just a hole; it had dropped out of space and time; ithad collapsed into its own universe. Its very nature prevented anyonefrom knowing what it was: unapproachable, unilluminable. No­thing is fast enough to escape from it. For mother earth the escapevelocity is seven miles per second, for Jupiter thirty-seven miles persecond, for the sun 383 miles per second. For Sirius B, the first whitedwarf they found, the escape velocity is 4,900 miles per second. Butfor Cygnus X-1, the black swan, there is no escape velocity. Evenlight, which propagates at 186,287 miles per second, cannot escape from it.That's what I am, she used to whisper to herself after sex.Ablack hole. Nothing can escape from me.


Sodomy pained Nicola, but not literally; it was its local preval­ence, as it were, that pained her so greatly. It was the only thing aboutherself that she couldn't understand and wouldn't forgive. Howgenerally prevalent was it (and an unwonted humiliation, this, toseek safety in numbers) ? It wasn't like masturbation, which everyonesecretly knew everyone secretly did, apart from the odd fanatic orostrich or liar. Masturbation was an open secret until you werethirty. Then it was a closed secret. Even modern literature shut upabout it at that point, pretty much. Nicola held this silence partly responsible for the industrial dimensions of contemporary porno­graphy - pornography, a form in which masturbation was theonlysubject. Everybody masturbated all their lives. On the whole,literature declined the responsibility of this truth. So pornographyhad to cope with it. Not elegantly or reassuringly. As best it could.


When you came to sodomy . . . Instinct declared that nowherenear everybody did it, but one could harbour one's suspicions heretoo. Nicola remembered reading, with a blush of pleasure, that fullyseventy-five per cent of female v. male divorce suits featured sodomyunder one subhead or another, anything fromphysical cruelty tounreasonable demands.How unreasonable was it? How cruel?What did it mean when a woman wanted it? The tempting location, so close to its better sister . . . But wherever it was (in the armpit,behind the kneecap), it would have its attractions. Be literal, andlook at the human mouth. The mouth was a good distance away.And the mouth got it too.


Literaturedid go on about sodomy, and increasingly. This hugelysolaced Nicola Six. Now, if she could consider it as a twentieth-century theme . . . Just as Keith Talent would be proud to representhis country in an England shirt, so Nicola, in garter-belt andstockings and ankle-bracelet, would be perfectly prepared to repre-sent her century. It started, she supposed, with Joyce, who was clearlyinterested in it: a murkynostalgic. Lawrence was interested in it: earth, blood,will (yes, and enforced degradation). Beckett wasinterested in it: a callowly uncomplicated yearning (Nicola decided) to cause distress and preferably damage, trauma, to the female parts.As for the Americans, theyall seemed to be interested in it: with JohnUpdike, it was mainly just another thing humans could do, andeverything human interested Updike; of Norman Mailer one didn'tneed to inquire too deeply (a mere timekiller, before greater violence);Philip Roth, with what must be farcical irony, bedroom-farcicalirony, refers to it as 'anal love'. V. S. Naipaul, on the other hand, who was very interested in it, speaks of 'a sexual black mass'. Well,black,anyway. And a black hole was mass, pure mass, infinite mass.


No, not everybody did it. But Nicola did it. At a certain point (and she always vowed she wouldn't, and always knew she would) Nicolatended to redirect her lover's thrusts, down there in the binarysystem . . . She had a thing of readying herself with the third finger ofthe left hand. The marriage finger. It was appalling, the crassness withwhich the symbolism suggested itself: the marriage finger, seeking adifferent ring, in the place whence no babies came. It was the only timeshe ever lost control. Not during (certainly not), but after, later, with silent tears of dismay. How much had she cried about it? How muchtearfall? How many inches a year?


What saddened and incensed her was the abdication of power, socraven, the surrender so close to home. And power was what she wasin it for. Nicola had lived deliciously; but she was promiscuousonprinciple,as a sign of emancipation, of spiritual freedom, freedomfrom men. She was, she believed, without appetite, and prided herselfon her passionless brilliance in bed. But then, the subtle rearrange­ment, and the abject whisper . . . And it poisoned everything,somehow. Again, not literally. Although Nicola liked doing whatnobody else did, although she liked danger, she didn't likethat kind ofdanger, vandal danger, with no form to it. She was promiscuous, buther lovers weren't (they usually had wives instead); and her gynaecologist assured her, one night, when she still had time to care about such distant matters, that it was safe enough if youdid it last. Well, when else would you do it - would you do the last thing? The thing itself was the last thing. It always seeded the end of the affair. And Nicola took some comfort from that fact: maybe it was just her strategy for sending love back the other way.


The only other compensation was an artistic one. At least it wascongruous with her larger tribulation; at least sodomy added up. Most types have their opposite numbers. Groups have groupies.There are molls for all men, and vice versa. The professional has hisperkie; scowlers get scowlies; so smuggles, loudies, cruellies. So thefailed suicide must find a murderer. So the murderer must find a murderee.


After about fifteen minutes Nicola was sure that Keith was going tobe late - significantly late. She changed her plan. She adopted Plan B.Herlife had a Plan B, or it had had: to live on. But intimations of early middle age had settled that. With these intimations, otherintimations: the second half of life; and natural death. Theseintimations were very informative, they were packed with news -and no thanks! You got old quick, like the planet. Like the planet,you could only prostrate yourself before the wonders of modern medicine, modern can-do. But can-do was nothing, when comparedto already-done. You had to trust in cosmic luck. The heavenlyoperation, facelift, transplant. Divine rain.


She changed her immediate plans. Had Keith been prompt, hewould have 'surprised' Nicola in tennis shorts, T-shirt and reversedbaseball cap, the outfit she wore when, in an ecstasy of vexation, shedid her weekly dusting. But he was late. So she took off her shortsand put her jeans back on and coolly went to the shops with thecanvas bag.


When Nicola walked the streets she was lit by her personalcinematographer, nothing too arty either, a single spotlight trainedfrom the gods. She had a blue nimbus, the blue of sex or sadness. Anyeyes that were available on the dead-end street would find their way to her: builders in the gutted houses, a frazzled rep in a cheap car, aman alone at home pressing his face against the window pane with asnarl. There were three shops at the junction: tobacconist's (andsub-post-office); Asian grocery (and off-licence); and, incongru­ously, a travel agent's, a shop that sold travel. At the first Nicolabought fuses, and picked up her French cigarettes. The tiny old creature behind the counter (impossible to entertain the idea that shehad ever been a woman) ordered the cigarettes especially; and Nicola felt the ghost of an obligation to give warning to stop: I can tell herI've quit, she thought. At the grocer's she bought lemons, tonic, tomato juice and what she confidently hoped would be her last-everplastic bottle of toilet cleanser. The tobacconist overcharged her, thegrocer gave short measure . . . Passing the travel agent's, with itsgreat lists of destinations (and prices, hysterically reduced, in normaltimes, but now brutally upped: even Amsterdam cost the earth),Nicola abruptly realized that she would never go away again. Wouldshe, ever? Not even a few days with Guy in Aix-en-Provence or aweekend with Keith in Ilfracombe or Jersey or some other paradise of duty free? No. There just wouldn't be time.


On the way back, near the entrance to the dead-end street, she wasstared at by two builders who sat half-naked eating Scotch eggs anddrinking beer on the porch steps of a corner house they weresupposedly or at any rate cursorily renovating. Nicola had noticedthem before, this exemplary pair. One was sixteen or seventeen, leanand suntanned and wholly delighted by the onset of his powers; theother, the senior man, puffy, thirty, with long hair and few teeth, andquite ruined, as if he got a year older every couple of months. The boyclimbed to his feet as Nicola approached.


'Miss World!' he said in a quavering voice. He wore an expressionof ironic entreaty. 'Give us a smile.Please. Ah, come on — light up. Itmight never happen!'


Nicola smiled. Nicola turned to him as she passed and smiledbeautifully.


She arranged herself for Keith's visit with considerable care, despitethe fact that she knew how things would go anyway, more or less. Ofcourse, she was in a funny situation with reality (though this neveroccurred to her with any weight), coaxing it into a shape she knew italready had — somewhere, in phantompotentia . . . Simply doing the next thing that came naturally, Nicola had what she called a whore'sbath, standing naked on a towel before the basin and the mirror. Asshe washed, she mentally developed an erotic design. It would behumiliating, and quite unnecessary, to think too specifically on thematter; but one had to be prepared. Taking an example at random, the pretty divots of her armpits, so aromatic and erogenous, so oftenpraised and slobbered over, clearly such excellent value — these mighthave to go. He might want them shorn. Not yet. It would depend.


Her underwear she selected without a flicker of hesitation:suspender-belt, stockings, brassiere - but all white this time, allwhite. She sat on the bed, tipping backwards, then stood up with herhead bent sharply, making the right adjustments. Nicola was amazed— Nicola was consternated — by how few women reallyunderstoodabout underwear. Itwas a scandal. If the effortless enslavement of men was the idea, or one of the ideas (and who had a better idea?), why halve your chances by something as trivial as a poor shoppingdecision? In her travels Nicola had often sat in shared bedrooms andcabins and boudoirs and powder parlours, and watched debutantes,predatory divorcees, young hostesses, even reasonably successfulgood-time girls shimmying out of their cocktail dresses andballgowns to reveal some bunched nightmare of bloomers, tights, long Johns, Y-fronts. A prosperous hooker whom she had hung outwith for a while in Milan invariably wore panties that reminded Nicola, in both texture and hue, of a bunion pad. To ephemeralflatmates and sexual wallflowers at houseparties and to otherunder-equipped rivals Nicola had sometimes carelessly slipped theunderwear knowledge. It took about ten seconds. Six months laterthe ones that got it right would be living in their own mews houses in Pimlico and looking fifteen years younger. But they mostly got it wrong. Over-elaboration or lack of self-love, or sheer lack of talent;plus minor vagaries, like the persistent and profitless fallacy ofblackunderwear, which showed the right brothelly instinct, and beat boxer shorts and training-bra, but missed the point. Perhaps women couldn't believe how simple men really were - how it could all bedecided in five minutes at the hosiery store. At this particular end ofthis particular century, they wanted tight bright white underwear, white underwear. They wanted the female form shaped and framed,packaged and gift-wrapped, stylized, cartoonified, and looking, for amoment at least, illusorily pure. They wanted the white lie ofvirginity. Men were sosimple. But what did that do to the thoughts of women, to the thoughts of women like Nicola Six?


Never in her life, not ever, had Nicola decisively discarded any item of clothing. The flat's large second bedroom had become asupercloset - it was like a boutique in there, the suits, the partydresses, the theatrical costumes and disguises, the belts, the scarves, the hats. Imelda Marcos herself might have wondered at the acreageof Nicola's shoes...If Keith Talent were dressing her now, if Keithwere designing her (she speculated), how would he want things to go? What did he want, at the top of the stairs? Nicola in thigh-high pink boots, rayon mini-skirt and bursting blouse. Yes, either that orNicola in low-corsaged opal balldress and elbow-length ivorygloves, with a sable-trimmed brick-quilted dolman, a comb ofbrilliants and a panache of osprey in her hair. Queen of Diamonds,Queen of Hearts. But of course you couldn't do it quite like that.


'Come on up,' she said.


As Keith followed her heavily into the apartment, Nicola didsomething right out of character: she cursed her fate. Then sheswivelled and inspected him, from arid crown to Cuban heels, as hecast his scavenging blue eyes around the room: Keith, stripped of all charisma from pub and street. It wasn't the posture, the scrawninessof the shanks and backside, the unpleasant body scent (he smelled asif he had just eaten a mustard-coated camel), the drunken scoop ofhis gaze - unappealing though these features certainly were. Just thatNicola saw at once with a shock (I knew it all along, she said toherself) that the capacity for love was extinct in him. It was neverthere. Keith wouldn't kill for love. He wouldn't cross the road, he wouldn't swerve the car for love. Nicola raised her eyes to heaven atthe thought of what this would involve her in sexually. And inearnest truth she had always felt that love in some form would be present at her death.


'Well let's get started,' she said, directing Keith towards thekitchen and its dead machines. Once there, Nicola folded her armsand watched, increasingly astonished by how things evidently stood between Keith and the inanimate world. Such flexed and trembling helplessness, such temper-loss and equipment-abuse. She was ineptin the kitchen herself; she had never, for instance, produced anything even remotely edible from the electric cooker, now long disused. But this frenzy of domestic quackery . . . Keith went at the ironing-board like the man in the deckchair joke. The tube of the hoover became a maddened python in his grasp. After his final misadventure with thecoffee-grinder plug and the screwdriver Nicola handed him a paper tissue for his gouged thumb and said in a puzzled voice,


'But you're completely hopeless. Or is it just being drunk?'


'It's all right, it's all right,' said Keith rapidly. 'See, I don't normallydo none of this myself. I got a team in White City. Real craftsmen.Here we go.'


With difficulty - there were blood and sweat and tears on thebakelite by now - Keith at last wrenched off the cap. Together they stared down at the pastel tricolour of the plug's innards. Their faceswere close; Nicola could hear the soft baffled panting throughKeith's open mouth.


'Looks okay,' he volunteered.


'It could be the fuse.'


'Yeah. Could be.'


'Change it,' she suggested, offering him a new fuse from the paperbag.


Chipping a yellow fingernail, swearing, dropping screws, confus­ing fuses, Keith accomplished this deed. He then slapped the plug into the wall, pressed the switch, and briskly actuated the coffee-grinder. Nothing happened.


'Well,' said Keith after a while. 'It's not the fuse.'


Then could you take a look at the lavatory seat at least.'


The bathroom was unexpectedly spacious — carpeted, and full ofunnecessary air; there seemed to be a great distance between the fatbathtub and the red chaise-longue. Here was a room, here was a setthat had experienced a lot of nakedness, a lot of secretions andablutions and reflections. Through the round window above thebath the sun cast its spotlight. Keith's face flickered or rippled as Nicola closed the door behind them.


The toilet,' he announced with savage clarity. He approached thecommode and raised the wooden lid. Nicola tingled suddenly — herarmpits tingled. She knew what Keith was looking at: the smallfaecal stain on the cold white slope. On seeing it there earlier, Nicola had resolved to clean the bowl. She knew, however, that if she didn'tdo it at once, then she wouldn't do it. She hadn't done it at once. Soshe hadn't done it.


The seat wobbles,' she said. 'And it slips.'


As Keith knelt and toyed doubtfully with the lid, Nicola sat herselfdown on the red sofa. She assumed a thinker's pose, chin on fist.Keith glanced her way and saw what was there to see: the light-grey cashmere, the white stockings, the brown underflesh of her crossedleft leg.


'Wobbly toilet,' Keith said to her in a gurgling voice. 'Can't havethat. Might do yourself an injury. Might ruin your married life.'


Nicola stared at him. There was perhaps an infinitesimal swellingin the orbits of her eyes. Several replies offered themselves to her withurgency, like schoolboys raising their hands to please the prettyteacher. One was 'Get out of here, you unbelievable lout'; another, remarkably (and this would be delivered in a dull monotone), was'Do you like dirty sex, Keith?' But she stayed silent. Who cared?There wasn't going tobe any married life. She stood up.


'You're dripping blood. Here.' She fetched a tin from the shelf. Thelight changed as she moved towards him.


Now she applied plaster to the meat of Keith's gently quivering thumb. Seen close up, flesh looks genital: minutely hair-lanced,minutely pocked. If his hands looked genital, what would his genitalslook like, close up? The physiological effects of this thought told herall over again that he was the one. Their hands dropped. In differentdizzinesses they saw, against the cold bowl, his bright bloodmeandering through the dark of her waste. This is disgusting, shethought. But it's too late now.


'Through here,' she said.


Five seconds later Keith was standing in the passage as Nicola zestfully loaded him up with ironing-board, iron, hoover, coffee-grinder. While she did this she talked to him as if he were subhuman, ormerely representative. Would you very kindly. A great help. If youcould also. Be most grateful. . .She loomed above him. Keith's Cubanheels began to edge backwards down the stairs. He peered up at her, sovery hampered. He looked like a busker. He looked like a one-manband.


She said, 'I'd better give you a deposit,' and reached for somethingon the side table. She came closer. 'The man in the Black Cross. Guy.'


'Yeah. Guy,' said Keith.


'He's someone - he's someone of importance, isn't he, Keith.'


'Definitely.'


'Oh really?' Nicola had expected Keith to balk at any favourablemention of Guy Clinch. But his tone was respectful, even admiring. Atthis moment he seemed to need all the support and associationalglamour he could get.


'Definitely. He works in the City. He's titled. I seen it on hischequebook. The Honourable, innit,' said Keith shrewdly.


Nicola stepped forward. With her fingers she was rolling two fifty-pound notes together. Keith twisted himself, in preparation. 'Wait,'she said. 'You'll drop everything.' He was wearing a black fishnet shirtwith a patched chest pocket. But his darts were in that. So she rolled themoney tight and placed it in his mouth. 'Is he rich?' she asked.


Keith worked the tubed notes sideways, as if his lips were used tohaving money between them. 'Definitely.'


'Good. There's a thing you and I might do together. A money thing.Have him call me. Will you do that? Soon?'


He twisted again, and nodded.


There's just one other thing.' And what was it, this one other thing?She had a sudden, antic desire to lift her dress to the waist, to pivot, andbend - like a terrible little girl, with a terrible little daddy. She saiderectly.


'My name is Nicola. Not Nicky or' - her lips closed in a flat smile -'"Nick".'


'Right.'


'Say it.'


He said it.


Her eyes returned to the black fishnet shirt. She placed a finger onone of its wide central squares. 'This sort of stuff, she said thought­fully, '— it should be on my legs. Not on your chest. Goodbye, Keith.'


'Yeah cheers.'


Nicola returned to the sitting-room and lit a cigarette. She heardhim crash down the stairs — Keith, with the money in his mouth. Fora minute or so she smoked intently, with dipped head, then moved tothe tall window in the passage. She saw him, across the street,toppling in graphic difficulty over the open boot of his car. It was theright car: the murderer's car. With a boyish flinch Keith looked upinto the evening sky, whose pale pink, as usual, managed to suggest the opposite of health, like the face of a pale drinker. Their eyes met slowly through the glass. Keith was about to essay some kind ofacknowledgment, but instantly ducked into a fit of sneezing. Thereports of these sneezes — quacked and splatty — travelled towards Nicola at the speed of sound: Keith's cur's sneezes. With his hand flatover his mouth he worked his way round the car and climbed in, and moved off softly down the dead-end street.


'Sneezes like a cur,' said Nicola to herself.


It was six o'clock. She yawned greedily, and went to the kitchen for champagne. Lying on the sofa, she sketched out the next fewmoves, or she turned up the dial, revealing the contours that werealready there. Guy would call the day after next. She would arrangeto meet him in the park. She would choose a cold day, so that shecould wear her blond fur coat. Beneath that, at least, she would be able to keep some entertaining secrets. Her shoulders shook as shelaughed, quietly. When she laughed, her whole body shook. Herwhole body laughed.


In the popular books, when they tried to get you to imagine a blackhole, they usually conjured a sample photon of light wandering nearby, or (more popularly, and more phallically) an astronaut in aspaceship: a man in a rocket. Approaching the black hole, thetraveller would encounter theaccretion disc, circling matter bled from the neighbour star (and containing, perhaps, the wreckage ofother men, other rockets); then, notionally, theSchwarzschildradius,marking the point at which the escape velocity equalled thevelocity of light. This would be theevent horizon, where spacetime collapsed, the turnstile to oblivion beyond which there was only one future, only one possible future. Now there can be no escape: duringthe instantaneous descent, all of eternity has passed on the outside. Caught in the imploding geometry, the man and his rocket enter theblack hole.


Or look at it the other way. Nicola Six, considerably inconveni­enced, is up there in her flying saucer, approaching the event horizon.She hasn't crossed it yet. But it's awfully close. She would need all herreverse thrust, every ounce, to throw her clear . . .


No, it doesn't work out. It doesn't work out because she's alreadythere on the other side. All her life she's lived on the other side of theevent horizon, treading gravity in slowing time. She's it. She's the naked singularity. She's beyond the black hole.


Every fifteen minutes the telephone rings. It's Ella from LA, it'sRhea from Rio, it's Merouka from Morocco. I have to break in overtheir hot cooings to tell them an unappetizing truth: I am not Mark Asprey. He's in New York. I give them my number. They hang up instantly, as if I'm some kind of breather.


Scented letters with lipstick imprints pile up on the mat. The girls,they come around the whole time: they practically picket the place.When I tell these pictures and visions, little duchesses, dazzlers andponies de luxe that Mark Asprey isn't around — they're devastated. Ihave to reach out to steady them. The other morning an adorablyflustered-looking creature calledAnastasiawas there on the stoop,hoping for a few minutes with Mark. When I broke it to her, Ithought I might have to call an ambulance. No, not so good for a guy not so lucky in love, or in art, as I stand in the passage scratching myhair in thought, and look up to see the framed dream-queens and theinscriptions scribbled wildly across their throats. Tomy Apollo. Nobody does it quite like you. Oh I'm so completely yours . . .


Anastasiacouldn't have been sweeter (I gave her a good hug andshe stumbled off mouthing apologies, her face a mask of tears). Butsome of the other ones, some of the snazzier ones, look at me withincredulous distaste. Can I blame them, especially when I'm in mid-chapter, exhausted, exalted, quilted in guilt, and unshaven to thewhites of my eyes?Yesterday evening there was an unusual telephone call. It was forme.


When I heard the sound, the subtle crepitation, that 3,000 milesmakes, I thought it might be Missy Harter, or Janit, or at any rateBarbro. It was Slizard.


I like him personally and everything, but calls from Dr Slizard failto set my pulse racing. He wants me to go and see some people in aresearch institute south of the river.


'How's America?'


'Crazy like an X-ray laser,' he said.


Slizard admits that the visit isn't really necessary, but he wants me to go along. 'Send me the pills,' I said. But I also said I'd think aboutit.


'Tell me,Auxiliadora,'I began, 'how long have you worked for theClinches - for Hope and Guy?'


Auxiliadorawas great. She gave me, while she worked, at leastthree chapters' worth of stuff in about fifteen minutes. A goodcleaner Auxi may well have been, but she was certainly a sensationalgossip: look how she smears and bespatters. She read their lettersand eavesdropped on their telephone calls; she went throughtrashcan and laundry basket alike with the same forensic profession­alism. Interesting sidelights on Lizzyboo. Fine material on Marma-duke. I listened, seated boldly at Mark Asprey's desk — not hisworking desk in the study but his writing desk in the living-room(where, I imagined, he tackled his lovemail). I was recuperating fromChapter 5. Heavy stuff, some of it. I can already hear Missy Hartertelling me that America won't want to know all this (particularly ifwe're looking at a pub-date in say late spring, when the crisis, and theyear of behaving strangely, will both be over, one way or another). ButNicola is heavy stuff. Nicolais heavy. I guess I could tone itdown, if there's time. But tone it down to what? I guess I could 'makesomething up', as I believe the expression goes. Spanking orwhatever. Her on top. Lovebites. But I can't make anything up. It justisn't in me. Man, am I a reliable narrator... I was sitting at the desk,as, with equal flair, Auxi cleaned the flat and dished the dirt, and making notes with a casual doodling action (and warmly lookingforward to the domestic haven, the blameless hearth of Chapter 6),when there was a light rattle of keys, a slam of the door- and anotherwoman strode furiously into the room.


She was Spanish too. Her name was Incarnacion. And she was Mark Asprey's cleaning-lady. She told me this in English, and said something of the same toAuxiliadorain a volley of oath-crammedAndalucian. I quickly located Mark's welcome note: sure enoughthere was a P.S. about his Spanish 'treasure', who was holidaying inher native Granada but would shortly return.


It was all very embarrassing. In fact it was all very frightening. Ihaven't been so scared for weeks. I took Auxi to the door, andapologized and paid her off. Then I went and hid in the study. WhenIncarnacion flushed me out I moved back into the sitting-room tofind the large walnut table — previously bare but for a bowl of pot­pourri — infested with new gongs and cups and obelisks (dug up byIncarnacion from some bottomless trophy chest) and about a dozen photographs of Mark Asprey, making acceptance speeches, beingfawned over by starlets, or in frowning conversation with deferentialfellow bigbrains . . . He looks like Prince Andrew. Maybe heisPrince Andrew: the Prince as a bachelor, before he got so stout, onFergie's cooking. The grinning eyes squeezed by the fleshiness of the cheeks. The inordinate avidity of the teeth.


Dinner tonight at Lansdowne Crescent. Lizzyboo will be there.On the way over I'm due to stop in at the dead-end street: cocktailswith Nicola Six.


As against that, I'm close to despair about getting into Keith'splace. I have just this one idea, and it's a long shot: Kim, the kid. The little girl.


Keith's house is not a home. (And it's not a house either.) It'ssomewhere for the wife and child, and somewhere to flop, until Keithcomes good on the ponies or the darts. Though often lost in praise ofhis dog Clive, he never mentions his girl Kim, except when he'sespecially drunk. Then it's /think the world of that little girl andThat little girl means the world to me.But if prompted, or goaded, hewill deign to denounce Kath's idleness and lack of stamina, when it comes to the kid.


'I mean,' he said to me in the Black Cross, or it may have been the Golgotha, his drinking club (the Golgotha is open twenty-four hours


a day. But so is the Black Cross), 'what she expect? Moaning on.


Baby this. Baby that. Can't sleep. Babies is what skirtdoes’


'It can be very hard, Keith,' I cautioned. 'I've looked afterchildren - babies. They worship their mothers but they torturethem too. They torture them with the sleep weapon.'


He looked at me consideringly. You don't need much empathictalent to tell what Keith's thinking. He doesn't do that muchthinking in the first place. The very difficulty, the disuse of themuscles, writes headlines on his forehead. Keith, and his tabloidface. Shock. Horror. You just read his flickers and frowns. Now itwas something likeWhat would a blokelook after babies for? Hesaid, 'Yeah but it's not like real work as such. Half the time you justbung them in their -in thatpen thing. Why was you looking after kids?'


Two years ago I lost my brother.' This was true. Also unforgive-able. David. I'm sorry. I owe you one. It's thiswriting business. 'Ohyes. They had a two-year-old and another one just arrived. I was with them through all that.'


Keith's face said, Sad, that. Happens. Say no more.


But I did say more. I said, 'All Kath needs is a couple of hours aday with the baby off her hands. It would transform her. I'd be gladto do it. Guy employs male nurses,' I threw out. 'Take her to thepark. I love kids.'


Well he didn't much like the idea, clearly. (He started talking about darts.) No, I thought - you've lost this one. Babies, infants,little human beings: they're a skirt thing. The only blokes who lovebabies are transvestites, hormone-cases, sex-maniacs. For Keith this was all very turbulent ground. The child-molester — the nonce, theshort eyes — was the lowest of the low, and Keith had come acrossthat sort before. In prison. He talked freely about prison. In prisonKeith had gotten his chance to beat up child-molesters; and he had taken it. In prison as elsewhere, everyone needs someone to look down on, someone categoricallyworse. The serial grannyslayer got his go on the exercise bike, the copycat sniper had his extra sausageon Sunday mornings, but the short eyes . .. Suddenly Keith told me why: the hidden reason, beneath all the visible reasons. Keith didn'tsayit; yet it was written on his brow. The prisoner hated the child-molester, not just because he neededsomebody to look down on, not only out of base sentimentality either, but because it was theone place left for his parental feelings. So when you striped the short eyes with your smuggled razor you were just showing the ladswhat a good father you were.


I was grateful to Keith for the insight. That's right, I remembernow: we were in Hosni's, the Muslimcafйwhere Keith sometimesbriefly recuperates from the Golgotha and the Black Cross. Just then,one of the pub semi-regulars passed our table. He leaned over andsaid to me:


'Here. I know what you are. A four-wheel Sherman.'


An explanation was effortfully supplied. Four-wheel = four-wheel skid = yid. Sherman = Sherman tank = yank.


'Jesus,' said Keith. 'Jesus,' he added, with an iconoclast's weari­ness. 'I hate that crap. "Your almonds don't half pen." Jesus. Youever going to stop with that stuff? You ever going to stop?'


Most of Mark Asprey's apartment quite likes me. But some of ithates me. The lightbulbs hate me. They pop out every fifteenminutes. 1 fetch and carry. The mirrors hate me.


The bits of Mark Asprey's apartment that hate me most are thepipes. They groan and scream at me. Sometimes at night. I've evenconsidered the truly desperate recourse of having Keith come in and look at them. Or at least listen to them.


After its latest storm, after its latest fit or tantrum or mad-act, thesky is blameless and aloof, all sweetness and light, making themacadam dully shine. Sheets and pillows in the wide bed of the sky.


Still no word from Missy Harter.


Chapter 6: The Doors ofDeception


n his dreamGuy Clinch edged closer to the bare body of a softlyfaceless woman. For a moment of dream time she turned into athirteen-year-old baby, smiling, crooning, then once more became awoman without a face. Not even a baby face. This wasn't a sexdream. It was a love dream, a dream of love. He edged towards an oozingyes . . .


In actuality, in real life, Guy Clinch was edging towards a ratherdifferent proposition. Inches from his touch lay Hope inher dressing-gown, unblinkingly wakeful, and far from faceless:the healthy oval and its long brown eyes. Inches from his head, onthe innumerable pillows, crouched Marmaduke, his hands joinedand raised. As Guy entered the warmth-field of his wife'sbody, Marmaduke's twinned fists thumped down into his openface.


'Ow!' said Guy. The flesh fled in rivulets. He looked up in time tosee the blurred arrival of Marmaduke's next punch. 'Ow!' he said.Unplayfully he sat up and wrestled Marmaduke to the floor.


'Take him,' said Hope in a tranced voice.


'Was he very bad?'


'And quick with breakfast.'


'Come on, you little devil.' He picked up Marmaduke, whoembraced the opportunity to sink his teeth gum-deep into Guy'sneck. Guy gasped and began the business of trying to force openMarmaduke's jaws.


Hope said, 'He needs changing. He seems to have eaten most of hisnappy again.'


'Loaded or unloaded?'


'Unloaded. Hold his nose. He'll give up in a couple of minutes.'


Guy pinched the sticky nostrils. Marmaduke's teeth tightenedtheir grip. The seconds ticked by. Finally he released his mouthful,sideways, for greater tear, and sneezed twice into his father's face.Holding the screaming child out in front of him like a rugby ball or abag of plutonium, Guy hurried towards the adjoining bathroom.This left Marmaduke with only one option for the time being - thereverse kick to the groin - which he now duly attempted. Guy puthim face down on the far corner of the bathroom carpet. Hemanaged to shut and bolt the door and crouch on the lavatory seatbefore Marmaduke was up and at him again . . . There were two reasons why Guy favoured the seated position: first, because it helped accommodate the unenlargeable erection he always woke upwith; and secondly because Marmaduke, while feigning babyish absorption in the flush handle, had once smacked the seat down onhim with incredible suddenness and force, dealing Guy a glancing blow that had none the less empurpled his helmet for a month and ahalf. As Guy used lavatory paper to staunch the flow of blood fromhis neck, Marmaduke paced yelling round the room looking forgood things to smash.


'Milt,' said Marmaduke.Toce.Milt.Toce.Milt!Toce!Milt!Toce!Milt!Toce!'


'Coming!' sang Guy.


Milk toast, thought Guy. An American dish, served with honey orsyrup. Hope likes that, and so does Lizzyboo. Hello, something missing: the strainer.


Marmaduke paused and spitefully watched his weaving father, theman with two pairs of hands.Toce,'he said, in an altogether more menacing tone.Tocedaddy.Daddy.Tocedaddy. Daddytoce.'


'Yesyes.' He stood there, skilfully buttering toast as Marmadukeclawed at his bare legs. Then the moment came and Marmaduke sprang for the knife. After a fierce struggle beneath the table Guy disarmed him and climbed to his feet, holding his nose whereMarmaduke had bitten it. The knife again. He adored all knives. Acalling, but for which occupation ? Friends and relatives, on their rareand foreshortened visits, always said that Marmaduke, when hegrew up, would join the army. Not even Guy's ancient father, a brigadier in World War II, had seemed to draw much comfort from this prospect.


Now he crouched smiling and offered up a piece of toast toMarmaduke's drooling mouth.


'Good Lord,' he murmured.


Guy had often suggested that they get specialist advice about Marmaduke's eating. After all, they were getting specialist adviceabout everything else he did. The child had of course been to severalcelebrated dieticians, and had been placed on regimes designed toquench him of vigour. The most recent one, said the doctor in histeak-panelled consulting rooms, would have reduced an Olympicsprinter to helpless enervation within a matter of days. It hadn't worked on Marmaduke, whose natural taste, incidentally, was for chips and hamburgers and monosodium glutamate and any kind ofjunk . . . Guy had seen greedy infants before - but nothing like this.The famished desperation, the neck-ricking bolts and snaps, thecoruscating saliva. Halfway through his fifth brick of honey, butterand bronzed wholemeal Marmaduke released a dense mouthful andground it into the tiles with a booteed foot: a sign of temporarysatiation. Guy stuck a bottle in him and carried the child upstairs at arm's length. He locked him into the bedroom, then returned for thetray.


Hope lay back on her barge of pillows. This was more like howthings were supposed to be: the tea tray, the telephone, the wallet ofmail. The weekend skeleton staff had arrived and were amusingMarmaduke in the nursery above; only faintly could you hear hisscreams and theirs, and the occasional sickening impact. Guy lay onthe sofa, reading the papers. Hope ran her glance cruelly over one gold-trimmed invitation after another. She said,


'I saw Melissa Barnaby yesterday. Out back.'


'Oh yes?' said Guy. Lady Barnaby: good, sad Lady Barnaby, withher milky eyes. She babysat for Marmaduke in the old days, once ortwice. No. Once. The telephone call to the restaurant, just as the cocktails were arriving .. .


'She was looking rather well. She said she felt ten years younger.She's found this marvellous young man. He's fixed up the house. Andnow she's off to Yugoslavia for a week.'


'How nice.’


'We need one.'


'What? A holiday in Yugoslavia?'


'A marvellous young man.'


'It says here that tourists are advised not to visitcomeconcountries. Idiots. They're deploying QuietWall. Darling,' he asked,'how was it? Did you get any sleep at all?'


'Some, I think, between five and five-fifteen. Lizzy boo relieved me.He was terrible.'


Hope's sleep was a sacred subject in this house — more sacred,possibly, more hedged with wonder and concern, than the subject ofMarmaduke himself. Guy had recently come across a scientificdescription of the amount of sleep Hope got, or claimed to get, during her nights with Marmaduke. It arose in speculation about the very early universe, nanoseconds after the Big Bang.A Millionth of the time it takes the speed of light to cross a proton. Now that reallywasn't very long at all...On the alternate nights when Guy did Marmaduke, he usually got in a good three-quarters of an hour, and frequently dozed while the child wearily belaboured him or beat hisown head against the padded walls.


'Poor you.'


'Poor me. Guy,' said Hope. She held a waxed document in her hand. 'What', she asked, 'isthis shit?'


Guy went on reading, or at least his eyes remained fixed to thepage. In the last month he had given Ј15,000 to charity, and he wasfeeling terribly guilty.


'Fifteengrand?' said Hope. 'Save the Children, huh?' She herselfhad given a similar amount to charity in the last month, but togalleries and opera houses and orchestras and other repositories of social power. 'What aboutour child? Who's going to save him?'


'Marmaduke', said Guy, 'will have plenty of money.'


'You've seen how he gets through it? Eighteen months old andalready it burns a fucking hole in his jeans. In his Osh Kosh B'Gosh!You need therapy, Guy. When this whole thing started Ibegged youto have therapy.'


Guy shrugged. 'We're rich,' he said.


'Get out of here. You're giving me cancer.'


After a deft and speedy bowel movement Guy showered, thenshaved: the French soap, the cut-throat razor. He dressed in anassortment of profoundly expensive and durable odds and ends,hand-me-downs some of them, clothes worn by his father, bycousins, eccentric uncles. His closet was a City of business suits - buton most days now his clothes no longer needed tosay anything. Theouter man was losing his lineaments. Soon there would just be an inner one, palely smiling. A flowingly tailored tweed jacket, shape­less khaki trousers, a bright blue shirt, the thumping shoes (Guy'sfeet were enormous). As he came down the stairs he met with a raresight: Marmaduke calmly ensconced in his mother's arms. Hopeheld him protectively while denouncing a nanny, a brawny Scandin­ avian whom Guy had not seen before. In his left fist he clutched his bays: a posy of long blonde hair.


'And where do you think you're going?' said Hope, turning from one defendant to another.


'Out. Out.'


'Where to? What for?'


'See some life.'


'Oh. Life! Oh I get it.Life.1


Reflexively, but with all due caution (and a shrewd glance at Marmaduke's free hand), Guy bent trimly to kiss his wife goodbye.Then everything went black.


He was in Ladbroke Grove by the time his vision returned. Thesloped length of Lansdowne Crescent had reeled past him in thesun, popping and streaming in gorgeous haemorrhages; and onlynow at the main street, with its man-made noise and danger, did hefeel a real need for clear sight. The eye-fork again: the first andsecond finger of Marmaduke's right hand, searchingly poked into Guy's candid orbits. Wonderfully skilful, you had to admit: suchtiming. He shook his head with the respectful admiration one knows before a phenomenon, and thought of the six-foot nurse he had seenthe other week running down the front doorsteps, not even pausing to sue, with a bloody handkerchief pressed to her nose. Personal-injury suits were another way Marmaduke had found of costing Guymoney. None had so far proved serious, but there were now quite afew pending. Marmaduke, and his permanent tantrum; the onlything that silenced him was a parental tantrum, one that left the adultactors still shaking and weeping and staggering, long after Marma­duke's original tantrum had resumed . . . Guy came to a halt on the street and blinked twice with his whole forehead. He raised a hand.With two soft pops he freed his lower eyelids, and waited for the sluicing tears. He had begun to enter the world of duplicity. He waspassing through the doors of deception, with their chains of lies. Andall London swam.


What kind of man was this? How unusual? Guy gave money tocharity. For every other man in his circle, charity began at home. Andended there too. Or not quite: charity continued for a mile or so, into the next postal district, and arrived at a small flat with a woman in it.These men winced at their wives' touch; they jerked up too soon to kiss them hello or goodbye. And Guy wasn't like that.


The thing was, the thing was...he was straight arrow. Hisdesires described a perfect arc: they were not power-biased, theywere not perverse. He may have had at least two of everything, buthe had only one lady. Hope was it, his single woman. When theymet at Oxford — this was sixteen years ago — there was somethingabout Guy that Hope liked. She liked his curly-ended fair hair, hishouse in the country, his shyness about his height, his house inLansdowne Crescent, his habit of hooding his eyes against a lowsun, his title, his partiality to cherries (especially ripe ones), his largeprivate income. They lived together during the last academic year, and studied together at facing desks in the double sitting-room ('IsSamson Agonistesepic or tragedy?' 'What were the long-termeffects of Pearl Harbor, as opposed to those of Sarajevo andMunich?'), and slept together, vigorously, in the small double-bed.They had both been unhappy at home, had both felt underloved;now they became each other's family. So marriage, and London, and the City, and . . . Hope's social ambitions took Guy by sur­prise. The surprise wore off after a while (during the thousandthdinner party, perhaps), which was more than could be said for the social ambitions. They didn't wear off: they shone with a gathering brilliance. One of their effects was that Guy naturally came acrossmany beautiful and accomplished and dissatisfied women, at least adozen of whom propositioned him, in secluded corners, in crushbars, towards the end of masked balls. Nothing really happened.These advances were often sufficiently subtle to escape his noticealtogether. True, every few years he secretly 'fell in love'. Theredhaired wife of the Italian conductor. The seventeen-year-olddaughter of the computer heiress. It was like an illness that passed after a couple of weeks; the love virus, efficiently repelled by adetermined immune system. Most worrying and dramatic by farwas the case of Lizzyboo, Hope's big little sister. Hope knew something was up the minute she found Guy in the visitor's roomweeping over Lizzyboo's ballet pumps. Lizzyboo was sent away thattime: seven years ago. All forgotten now, or not even forgotten: ascandalous family joke. Hope herself normally retained severalmenfriends (a partygoing philosopher, a dandy architect, a powerfuljournalist), but she was so strict and impeccable that it never seriously occurred to Guy - no no, nothing of that kind. For himself,the world of other women shaped itself into a great gallery, like the Hermitage, crammed with embarrassments of radiance and genius, but so airless, so often traversed, so public — a gallery where Guysometimes sauntered for an hour, or where he sometimes hurried, looking straight ahead (squares of sublimity moving by like passingcars), or where he was sometimes to be found, though not often, standing before a blazing window and wringing his hands . ..


Marry young, and a melancholy comes over you at thirty, whichhas to do with thwarted possibilities. It was worse for Guy. Hope was a little older, and had had her fair share of guys at Oxford,earlier on, and at NYU, and for that matter in Norfolk, Virginia. Soa new adventure: they overcame their ecopolitical anxieties anddecided to go ahead and have a baby. Even then there weredifficulties - Guy's difficulties. A process that began with himequably switching from jockey pants to boxer shorts ended up withhim out cold and his legs in stirrups while a team of Japanesesurgeons and a particle-beam laser rewired his nethers. Thus, afterhalf a decade of 'trying': Marmaduke. For years they had worriedabout the kind of world they were bringing their child into. Nowthey worried about the kind of child they were bringing into theirworld. The gap or hollow that the baby had been meant to fill — well,Marmaduke filled it, and more; Marmaduke could fill the GrandCanyon with his screams. It appeared that from here on in a mixtureof fatigue, depression and incredulity would be obliged to keep themfaithful. Most of the psychiatrists and counsellors agreed thatHope's unreasonable fear of getting pregnant again might soon startto fade. Their last attempt at lovemaking had featured the pill, the coil, the cap, and three condoms, plus more or less immediatecoitus interruptus. That was July. This was September.


But he wasn't about to stray. He was straight arrow. Divagation, errancy - to Guy this spelt humiliation. It would be disastrous, andinexpiable. No second chances. She'd kill him. The girl in the Black Cross with the extraordinary mouth - he would never see her again.Good, good. The flu, the malaria she had given him would be gone ina week. The thought of his life with an absence where Hope nowstood (or wearily reclined) was enough to make him stop dead inthe street and shake his hair with his hands raised and clawlike. Hewalked on, steadily. He would never stray.


'I mean — that's life,' said the young man. 'You can't argue with it.It's just one of them things.' He paused, and without fully straight­ening his body leaned forward and spat through the open door intothe street. 'Okay,' he resumed. 'I got into a fight, I came out thewrong side of it, and that's life. No complaints. Fair enough. That'slife.'


Guy sipped his tomato juice and stole the odd glance over hisbroadsheet. Good God: sothat's life. The young man continued histale. The two girls he told it to listened in postures of mildsympathy.


'I was out of order. Got taught a lesson.' He shrugged. 'That's it.'


Conversationally, philosophically, and often pausing to hawkblood into the street, the young man explained how this very recentaltercation had cost him a broken nose and cheekbone and the lossof nearly all his top teeth. Guy folded his newspaper and stared atthe ceiling. The rapidity of change. Anyone in Guy's circle who sustained equivalent damage would have to go to Switzerland for ayear or two and get completely remade. And here was this wreck,back in the pub the very next morning, with his pint and histabloid, his ruined face, and the occasionalpbthook! through theopen doors. Already he had changed the subject and was talking about the weather, the price of beer. The two girls thought no lessof him for it, particularly the scarred brunette; if he was lucky, and assuming he had one, he might get to take her home. Life goes on. And thiswas life, it really was, uncared for, and taking no care ofitself.


Keith came in, causing the usual low pub murmur. He saw Guy and pointed a finger at him, then wagged his thumb backwards,indicating John Dark: John Dark, the corrupt policeman — the bentcopper, the tarnished badge, the iffy filth. Dark was short andwell-scrubbed, of that no-hair-but-good-teeth mould of man, and ahorrid-jumper expert. He was the only regular in the Black Crosswho looked at Guy with critical inquiry, as if he (Guy) really shouldknow better. Dark's own position was ambiguous. He had a certain standing; but nearly everyone treated him with theatrical contempt.


Especially Keith . . . Guy inferred that Keith would be with him in aminute. And sure enough, after a few words with Fucker about theCavalier (Fucker being the pub car-expert), Keith came over andleant forward seriously on Guy's table.


'You know that skirt who was in here? Nicola?'


'Yes, I know who you mean.'


'She wants you to . . .' Keith looked around unhappily. With impatience he acknowledged the salutes and greetings of Norvis, Dean, Thelonius, Curtly, Truth, Netharius, Shakespeare, Bogdan,Maciek, and the two Zbigs. 'We can't talk here,' he said, andsuggested they repair to the Golgotha, his drinking club, anddiscuss things over a quiet glass ofporno, the drink he alwaysdrank there (a Trinidadian liqueur). 'It's a matter of some delicacy.'


Guy hesitated. He had been to Keith's drinking club once before. The Golgotha, while no more private than the Black Cross, and noless noisy, was certainly darker. Then he found himself saying,'Why not come back to my place?'


Keith hesitated. It occurred to Guy that the offer might seemoffensive, since it was an invitation that Keith could never return. Aone-way offer, unreturnable. But Keith glanced at the pub clockand said cannily, 'Good one.'


They moved together through the activity of the PortobelloRoad, Guy tall and questing in the sun, Keith stockier, squarer, hishands bunched in his jacket pockets, his flared trousers tapered andthrottled by the low-flying wind, his rolled tabloid under his arm,like a telescope. Out on the street they couldn't talk about NicolaSix because that's what they were going back to Guy's place to talk about. As they turned into a quieter avenue their own silence grew louder. Guy chose a subject which had often helped him out in thepast.


'Are you going to the match?'


Both men supported Queens Park Rangers, the local team, andfor years had been shuffling off to Loftus Road on Saturdayafternoons. In fact they might have come across each other earlier,but this had never been likely: Guy stood in the terraces, with hispie and Bovril, whereas Keith was always to be found with his flask in the stands.


'They're away today,' said Keith through his cigarette. 'United,innit. I was therelast week.'


'West Ham. Any good?’


Some of the light went out in Keith's blue eyes as he said, 'Duringthe first half the Hammers probed down the left flank. Revelling in the space, the speed of Sylvester Drayon was always going to poseproblems for the home side's number two. With scant minutesremaining before the half-time whistle, the black winger cut in on the left back and delivered a searching cross, converted by Lee Fredge,the East London striker, with inch-perfect precision. After the interval Rangers' fortunes revived as they exploited their superiorityin the air. Bobby Bondavich's men offered stout resistance and the question remained: could the Blues translate the pressure they wereexerting into goals? In the seventy-fourth minute Keith Spareproduced a pass that split the visitors' defence, and Dustin Houselyrammed the equalizer home. A draw looked the most likely resultuntil a disputed penalty decision broke the deadlock five minutes from the final whistle. Keith Spare made no mistake from the spot. Thus the Shepherd's Bush team ran out surprise 2—1 winners over the . . . over the outfit whose theme tune is "I'm Forever BlowingBubbles".'


Keith's belated sigh of effort reminded Guy of the sound thatMarmaduke would occasionally emit, after a rare success with sometaxing formulation likemore chips orknife mine. Guy said, The new boy in midfield, Neil . . . ? Did he do all right?'


'Noel Frizzle. He justified his selection,' said Keith coldly.


They walked on. Guy had of course been friendly with people likeKeith before: in the City. But the people like Keith in the City wore Ј1 ,000 suits and platinum wrist-watches and sported uranium creditcards; at weekends they sailed yachts or donned red coats andmounted horses and went chasing after some rabbit or weasel; theycollected wines (at lunch they crooned over their Pomerols and Gevrey-Chambertains) and modern first editions (you often heard them talking about whatNew Year Letter orStamboul Train mightnowadays fetch). They weren't poor, like Keith. Keith had his fistfuls of fivers, his furled tenners and folded fifties; but Keith was poor. His whole person said it. And this was why Guy honoured him and pitiedhim and admired him and envied him (and, he sometimes thought, even vaguelyfancied him): because he was poor.


'Here we are,' said Guy.


He assumed his wife would be out or sleeping. She had been OUt, andwould soon be sleeping, but Hope was right there in the hall whenGuy showed Keith Talent into the house. It went quite well, considering, Guy thought. When he introduced them, Hope putconsiderable energy into dissimulating her astonishment and con­tempt. And Keith confined himself to an honest nod (and anot-so-honest smile); he didn't look at all uneasy until Hope saidthat Lady Barnaby was downstairs, saying goodbye to Marmadukebefore gallivanting off to Yugoslavia.


'If you got company..."said Keith, edging back towards the door.


From below came a harsh shout of childish triumph, followed byan unforced scream. Lady Barnaby sprinted up the stairs andappeared holding her forehead in one hand and her spectacles in theother. Urgently Guy moved forward, but Lady Barnaby seemed torecover very quickly.


'Perfectly all right. Perfectly all right,' she said.


'If you're sure? Oh, Melissa, I'd like you to meet Keith Talent. Afriend of mine.'


Keith did now appear to be quite overwhelmed by the occasion.Perhaps, it's the title, thought Guy. It's a good thing he doesn'tknow about mine.


Lady Barnaby blinked up gratefully, raised her glasses to hereyes, and slowly nodded towards the hatstand.


'Oh my God,' said Guy. 'This is awful. Did Marmaduke do that?How? You simply must let us pay for them. Not with his fingers,surely.'


A nanny now stood at the top of the stairs. Resignedly sheexplained what had happened. Lady Barnaby had come ill-advis-edly close to the highchair to feast her eyes on the boy. Marmaduke had cobwebbed both lenses with a skilful stab of the sugar-tongs.


'Have you got another pair?' asked Guy. 'Whoops! Darling, Ithink perhaps you ought to see Melissa home.'


In the drawing-room Keith asked for brandy, and was given one.He drank that, and asked for another. Guy, with whom alcohol didnot always agree, poured himself a derisoryTнo Pepe.They sat down facing each other on broad sofas. Guy felt that his instincthad been sound. Good to hear this in your own house: there couldbe little harm in it now.


'It's like this,' said Keith, and hunkered that little bit closer. 'Iwent round there, okay? See if I could help her out with anything. Ido that. It's like a sideline. Nice place she got. And I thought, inaddition . . .'Keith tailed off fondly.'Well, you know what I'm like.'


But Guy did not know what Keith was like. He waited.


'You know,' said Keith, 'I thought she might want seeing to.'


The flat?'


'No. Her.'


'How do you mean?'


'Christ.' Keith elucidated the point.


'And?' said Guy nauseously.


'Well it's hard to tell, you know, with some birds. She's funny. Anenigma innit — you know the type. Half the time she's coming on dead tasty. And I meansorely in need of it. And then, you know,suddenly it's Lady Muck.'


'So - nothing happened.'


Keith considered. At least one nice memory seemed to tickle hisnose. But he said, 'Nah. Fuck all, really. And, I'm taking my leave and, as I say, she asks about you. Wants you to phone her like. Saysshe requires your help.'


'What about?'


'Don't ask me, mate.' He looked around the room and back again.'Maybe she likes her own sort. I mean I'm nothing, am I. I'mjust acunt.'


It was hard to know how to react, because Keith was smiling.Throughout he had been smiling, when he wasn't coughing. 'Oh,come on, Keith!' said Guy palely.


The door opened. Hope stood there inexorably. 'I'm going to bed.Kenneth,' she said, 'would you put that cigarette out please? I took her back and she's calmer now. She's a little worried about going to Yugoslavia with only one set of glasses. Her boiler sounds terrible.It's lucky she's deaf. I was glad to get out of the house. If you use thekitchen I want everything cleared away. Without trace.'


'Birds,' said Keith when Hope had gone. He was taking a last few draws of his cigarette, one hand cupped under the long coal, as Guysearched for an ashtray. 'Can't live with them, can't live withoutthem. Tell you what. Your wife's a cracker. And that kid of yours ain't bad neither. Either,' said Keith.


Duplicity consumed time. Even deciding to have nothing to do withduplicity was time-consuming. After Keith left, to run a local errand,Guy spent an hour deciding not to call Nicola Six. The urge to callher felt innocent, but how could it be? He wasn't about to runupstairs and share the experience with his wife. A pity in a way, hemused, as he paced the room, since all he wanted was thegratification, the indulgence of curiosity. Sheer curiosity. But curiosity was still the stuff that killed the cat.


At four o'clock, leaving Hope asleep and Marmaduke safelycordoned by nannies, Guy popped out to make a telephone call. Heimagined it would take about ten minutes of his time, to find outwhether there was anything he could reasonably do for thisunfortunate girl - why, there was a telephone box at the veryjunction of Lansdowne Crescent and Ladbroke Grove . . . Therewas no one in the telephone box. But there was no telephone in iteither. There was no trace of a telephone in it. And there was no hint or vestige of a telephone in the next half-dozen he tried. These little glass ruins seemed only to serve as urinals, as shelters from the rain,and as job-centre clearing-houses for freelance prostitutes and theirclients. In widening circles Guy strayed, from one savagedpissoir toanother. He hadn't used a telephone box in years, if indeed he hadever used one. He didn't know what had happened to them and tovandalism - though a serious glance at the streetpeople who glanced at him so mirthfully, as he rummaged behind the dark glass or stoodthere shaking his head with his hands on his hips, might have told Guy that vandalism had left telephone boxes far behind. Vandalismhad moved on to the human form. People now treatedthemselves like telephone boxes, ripping out the innards and throwing themaway, and plastering their surfaces with sex-signs and graffiti. . .


By now feeling thoroughly foolish, Guy queued for the use of a telephone in the General Post Office in Queensway. On a floor that smelled and felt to the foot like a wet railway platform, Guy queuedwith the bitter petitioners of the city, all of whom seemed to be clutching rentbooks, summonses, orders of distraint. It was time forGuy's turn. His hands were shaking. That number: easy to remem­ber, impossible to forget. She answered, to his horror, and well knewwho he was - 'Ah, yes'. She thanked him for calling, with some formality, and asked if they could meet. When, following Keith'scourse (and Nicola's silence), he suggested her apartment, shemurmured demurringly about her 'reputation', which reassuredGuy, as did her accent, whose faint foreignness now seemed notFrench so much as something more East European andintellectual. . . Another silence ensued, one that deducted twenty pence from Guy's original investment of fifty. The park, tomorrow?Sunday, by the Serpentine. And she gave him instructions andthanks.


The telephone call had taken two and a half hours. Guy went out into the street and buttoned his jacket against the sudden cold. Theclouds, which were behaving so strangely these days, had gatheredthemselves into a single cylinder, east to west, like a god's rolledtowel, like the slipstream of a plane the size of America. He ran homeecstatically to relieve the nannies, get hollered at by Hope, and spendsixteen hours alone with Marmaduke.


At dawn on Monday morning Guy sat in the pale light of thekitchen. He had relieved Lizzyboo at about 3 a.m., and helpedbandage her, after remarkable scenes in the nursery. But then,around five, something like a miracle happened. Marmaduke fellasleep. Guy's first impulse was to call an ambulance; but he wascalmer now, content to monitor the child on the closed-circuit TVscreen with the volume turned up full and look in on him every fiveminutes or so and feel his forehead and his pulse. For the time being Guy just sat there whispering words of thanks and pinching himselfin the amazement of all this silence.


Quietly he approached the twin doors that led to the garden. Thegarden twinkled and simpered at him in its dew. Guy thought ofNicola Six and the continuous and inexplicable waves of suffering which the planet had somehow arranged for her - the lips, the eyes,averted in their pain. He blinked, and imagined he could see a dark-braided girl playing alone beneath the curtain of the willow tree.Perhaps it was Enola, perhaps it was Enola Gay. Enola, searching forLittle Boy.


Guy unlocked the doors to the garden.


'Guard, guard,'Marmaduke would have said (it had previouslybeen garner, garner),if he had been there to warn him. But Guy wentout through the doors.


On Sunday he had walked with Nicola Six in London fields . . .Kneeling, the children launched their boats into the cold agitation ofthe water; the smaller craft wobbled all the more eagerly, as if activity could redress their want of size; among them, a black-sailed unfamiliar . . . Her story came at him now like a series of paintings,ortableaux vivants - no, more like memories of another life: theorphanage and charity school; her years as governess, nurse,novitiate; her current life of good works and scholarly seclusion.


Impeccable, innocent and tragic in her blond fur coat. . . Guy raised his fingertips to his eyelids, then lifted his head and stared. On daysalone with Marmaduke, how he had tried to invest every minutewith wonder and discovery. Daddy's getting dressed! Shirt, trousers,shoes,yes,shoes. Look: bathroom. Tap, sponge, toy boat! Now-hoho ho — Daddy's making coffee. That's right: coffee. Not tea. Coffee!Oh, look out there. The garden,and flowers,and grass,and a littlebird - singing! And such lovely clouds . . . The oohs and aahs ofordinary life had made little impression on Marmaduke, who just shouldered his course through the day with the usual grim ambition.But something had now made wonder work for Guy. He woke upand he thought, Air! Light! Matter! Serious, poor, beautiful: everything you care to name.


Marmaduke was stirring. Marmaduke was waking. Marmadukewas screaming. He's alive. Thank God, thought Guy. I'll not touchher. No, I'll not touch her. Ever.


I'd say she really did a number on Guy Clinch. No half-measuresthere. It beats me how she keeps a straight face.


She really did a number on him. What was that number? It wasSix. Six. Six.


One thing about London: not so much dogshit everywhere. A lot still. Compared to New York, even old New York, it's the cloacamaxima. But nothing like it used to be, when the streets of London werepaved with dogshit.


Explanation. The English still love their dogs, for some reason. Butthe dogs aren't living as long as they used to. Nothing is. It's weird. Imean, one expects snow-leopards and cockatoos and tsessebes tobuy the farm eventually. Butdogs'? I have an image of fat Clive,sitting in a zoo.


How will we teach the children to speak when all the animals aregone? Because animals are what they want to talk about first. Yes,and buses and food and Mama andDada.But animals are what they break their silence for.


Keith's account of the football match. I've heard many suchsummaries from him - of boxing matches, snooker matches, and ofcourse darts matches. At first I thought he just memorized sections ofthe tabloid sports pages. Absolutely wrong.


Remember - he is modern, modern, despite the heels and theflares. When Keith goes to a football match, that misery of stringer'sclichйsis what he actually sees.


A pleasant enough evening at the Clinches' last week. Publisherand his wife, architect and his wife, director of the National PortraitGallery and his wife, sculptress and her husband. A lone tennisplayer called Heckler, the South African number seven. All the menwere extremely attentive to Hope, and the thought occurred to me that she may be sleeping with one of them, or will be soon, which would liven things up even further.


Me, I am developing Lizzyboo. A fulsomely pretty girl. She is alsovoluble, indiscreet and, I think, not too bright. She's perfect for me.






  Look at that. It's beautiful. Admittedly it took me all morning,what with the dummy-runs and everything, the ridiculous errors, all that shading. It was great, though. I felt about eleven. Bespectacled,hunched sideways over the desk with my tongue out the corner of mymouth, alone in the universe.


I took as my model the illustration in a booklet of Keith's,Darts:Master the Discipline.I also used the pen he gave me, the one shaped like a dart.


Look at that. It's beautiful. Oh, Keith - take me home!


I must avail myself of Mark Asprey's car, that dinky A-to-B deviceof his, which seems to shimmer to attention every time I walk past itand lour at me reproachfully on my return. The cab fares are killingme. It's curious. You seldom see a black London taxi any more. Youcan call them, and arrange a rendezvous within a mile of Marble Arch; but apparently they stick to the West End and the City. Black cabs are like the buggies on Central Park, a tourist thing, a nostalgia thing. And a money thing: they're blindingly expensive. The drivers wear modified beefeater outfits.


You can see how it happened. Envy-preemption. Or the simplest prudence. Black cabs are socially insensitive. Traffic jams can getugly, or uglier still; people get dragged out of these burnishedhearses. So nowadays cabs aren't even minicabs. They're just any oldheap with a removable sign up on the dash. You get in front. Then the driver removes the sign. Or sometimes he doesn't. He leaves itthere. It's okay. It's cool. It looks sufficiently shitty inside; no oneoutside can be bothered to mind.


The place in Clapham is a research institute. I sit and wait. It feels like school. It feels like London Fields.


The truth is I am stalled. You wouldn't call it writer's block. You might call it snooper's block. Tower block.


I can see Keith's tower block from the bedroom window. I scan itwith Mark Asprey's powerful binoculars. He's up there on theeleventh floor. I bet it's the one with all the ruined satellite equipment dangling from the little balcony.


Chapter 7 looms like Keith's tower block. A fortress. There's noway in.


When I entered the garage for my first darts lesson Keith turnedsuddenly and gripped my shoulders and stared me in the eye as hespoke. Some kind of darts huddle. 'I've forgotten more than you'llever know about darts,' says this darting poet and dreamer. 'I'mgiving to you some of my darts knowledge.' And I'm giving him fiftypounds an hour. 'Respect that, Sam. Respect it.'


Our noses were still almost touching as Keith talked of such thingsas theaddress of the board andgracing theochйand thesincerity ofthe dart.Oh yes, andclinicism. He then went on to tell me everythinghe knew about the game. It took fifteen seconds.


There's nothing to know. Ah, were I the kind of writer that wentabout improving on unkempt reality, I might have come up withsomething a little more complicated. But darts it is. Darts. Darts . . .Darts. In the modern game, or 'discipline', you start at 501 and scoreyour way down. You must 'finish', exactly, on a double: the outerband. The bullseye scores fifty and counts as a double, too, for somereason. The outer bull scores twenty-five, for some other reason. Andthat's it.


In an atmosphere of tingling solemnity I approached theochй,orthrowing line, 7ft 9 1/4 ins from the board, 'as decided', glossedKeith, 'by the World Darts Federation'. Weight on front foot; headstill; nice follow through. 'You're looking at that treble 2.0,'whispered Keith direly. 'Nothing else exists.Nothing.'


My first dart hit the double 3. 'Insincere dart,' said Keith.My second missed the board altogether, smacking into the wallcabinet. 'No clinicism,' said Keith. My third I never threw: on thebackswing the plastic flight jabbed me in the eye. After I'd recov­ered from that, my scores went 11, 2, 9; 4, 17, outer bullseye(25!); 7, 13, 5. Around now Keith stopped talking about thesincerity of the dart and started saying 'Throw itright for Christ'ssake' and 'Get the fucking thingin there'. On and on it went.Keith grew silent, grieving, priestly. At one point, having thrown two darts into the bare wall, I dropped the third and reeled back­ ward from theochй,saying — most recklessly — that darts was adumb game and I didn't care anyway. Keith calmly pocketed hisdarts, stepped forward, and slammed me against a heap of pack­ing cases. Our noses were almost touching again. 'You don't nevershow no disrespect for the darts, okay?' he said. 'You don't nevershow no disrespect for the darts . . . You don't never show no disrespect for the darts.'


The second lesson was a nightmare too. The third is tonight.


Warily I eye my pimpish darts pouch. Ј69.95, dartscompris,courtesy of Keith.


Guy came over just now, for tea, and I returned his short storieswith a few words of quiet discouragement. He was right: theyweren't any good or anything. He's a sweetheart, and he has somenice perceptions; but he writes like Philboyd Studge. I told him, withan inner titter, that the stories ran too close to life.


He just gathered them up shyly, nodding his head. See, he didn'tcare any more. He didn't care. Just smiled and gazed out of thewindow at the speeding clouds. All in all, debriefing him was quite asweat. I was reminded of the line inMore Die of Heartbreak, and Ichecked in the dictionary: the second definition ofinfatuation is'inspired with extravagant passion'; but the first definition is 'madefoolish'. Guy asked my advice about Nicola. I gave my advice (it wasbad advice), and with any luck he'll take it.


Then he left. I walked him downstairs and out into the street. Thepigeons waddled by, in their criminal balaclavas. Pigeons havedefinitely seen better days. Not so long ago they were drawing Venus's chariot. Venus, goddess of beauty and sensual love.


Somewhere else inMore Die of Heartbreak Bellow says thatAmerica is the only place to be, because it contains the 'real modern action'. Everywhere else is 'convulsed' in some earlier stage of de­velopment. That's true. But England feels like the forefront of some­thing, the elegiac side of it, perhaps. It makes me think of Yeats'slines (and here my memory still holds):


We have fallen in the dreams the ever-livingBreathe on the tarnished mirror of the world,And then smooth out with ivory hands and sigh.


Now I must go to Keith's garage. How I suffer for my art.


Midnight. I return in a state of rapture. I have an hysterical urge toburst right into Chapter 7, to write all night and beyond! Oh,something is tickling my heart with delicate fingers . . .


Easy now. Courage. What happened?


Keith and I were packing up after my darts lesson. I sat there on astolen case ofporno. The atmosphere was better tonight, becausetoward the end I threw a treble zo. That's right. I got a dart to go in thetreble 2.0, the flattened nose of the board's face — the treble 20, whatdarts is all about. Keith picked me up and whirled me around in the air.


Actually, it was bound to happen in the end. The darts went whereverthey liked, so why not into the treble zo? Similarly, the immortalbaboon, locked up with typewriter and amphetamines for a fewPoincarйtime-cycles, a number of aeons with more zeros than there are suns in the universe, might eventually type out the worddarts.


I was sitting there going on about how tired Kath must be and howgood I was with children. I also threw in some lies about the impossiblesqualor of my earlier years. So many times I've said all this—I'm almosttoppling over with boredom myself.


'Oh, sure,' I said. 'When I was your age I was still dodging the shit in the South Bronx. The rats were this big. You'd come out of the walkupand see the body of a child, like a broken -'


'You got the - ?'


I gave him theЈ 50. Intolerably he started talking about darts again-my darts, or rather mymechanical security. We began to leave. Igrimly assumed that we would be looking in at the Black Cross for anightcap and a few dozen games of darts. But as we went out throughthe little door Keith paused and looked at me unhappily.


'We going indoors,' he said. 'First.'


For the 300-yard journey we relied on the heavy Cavalier. We parked under the shadow of the craning block — which sparked andflickered like ten thousand TV sets stacked up into the night. Keithhurried. He summoned the elevator but to his silent agony the elevatorwas dead or elsewhere. We climbed the eleven floors, passing a litter ofsick junkies sprawled out on the stairs in grumbling sleep. Withreferred rage Keith denounced them through his wheezes: a mixture ofpersonal oaths and campaign slogans from the last election. We walked the walkway. Avoiding my eyes he leaned on the bell. And when the door opened I...I understand. I understand how Guy felt,as the veil went up (like a curtain or a skirt) to reveal the woman in theBlack Cross. It comes in leaps and bounds. Sometimes it comes, not asthunder, but as lightning. Sometimes love comes at the speed of light.There's just no getting out of the way.


Faded, patient, Kath Talent stood in the kitchen colours, in the palemargin of the kitchen. She had Kim in her arms. And the child... the child was anangel.


Chapter 7: Cheating


GOOD MORNING, LADY B.'


'Good morning to you, Harry.'


'So,' he said as he swept through the door. 'Today's the big one.'


'I —I've been watching the news.'


Keith strode into the sitting-room and switched off the television, pausing briefly to wonder how much it would fetch.


'The weather there,' said Lady Barnaby. 'And Yugoslavia is listed asone of the —'


'All stuff and nonsense, Lady B. All stuff and nonsense. This the lot?Then we're off. Oh yeah. Lady B., we got a little prob. The motor's onthe blink. Never mind: we'll take yours. The holiday of a lifetime.What, are you sure!'


Listening to Lady Barnaby's decidedly hysterical laughter, andcalmly aware of the set of housekeys and documents she always kept inthe glove compartment, Keith barrelled up the motorway, giving her'It's a Long Way to Tipperary' and a lightly bowdlerized version of'Roll Me Over in the Clover'. They drove through veil upon veil ofscalding heatmist. The sky pulsed blue, blue, blue. Whereas thecyclones and ball lightning in Yugoslavia and Northern Italy had evenmade it on to the pages of Keith's tabloid.


'It seems silly to be going away in this weather.'


'Greenhouse,' said Keith dismissively.'El Niсo innit. Tomorrowjust be pissing down.'


The remark carried little conviction. But Lady Barnaby seemed totake a surpising amount of comfort from it. Her bones knew the old English weather; whereas Keith was accustomed to a more versatilesky. Just piss down is what it just didn't do in England, not regularly,not any longer. It did that now in places like California and Morocco.


'Look at thecongestion,' said Keith.


After a half-hour delay in the rotting exhaust-pipe of the accesstunnel, and a rather longer wait at the short-stay carpark, Keithguided Lady Barnaby to the check-in stall at Terminal 2. Here the computer pronounced Lady Barnaby's ticket near-worthless. Keithtook the news with cold resignation: thecheat at the bucket-shop hadcheated him. What he didn't yet know was that thecheat who hadcheated him had been cheated by thecheat who supplied the bucket-shop. As a result, Lady Barnaby was flying to a non-holiday, and flyingone-way. Keith managed to panic her about missing her flight - and about losing her luggage, which they had luckily relinquished at thedoor. He stood there smoking and whistling and coughing andswearing as Lady Barnaby countersigned all but three of her traveller's cheques. She entered Departures in a ragged dash.


Vowing vengeance on her behalf, Keith picked up some bent dutyfrees from his contact at Freight, drove smartly to Slough for a breakneck get-together with Analiese Furnish, and then, back inLondon, rounded off a busy morning by selling Lady Barnaby's car.


'Enlah,' said the baby. 'Enlah,' said Kim. 'Enlah.'


Keith glanced up longsufferingly from his tabloid and his lunch. Hislunch consisted of Chicken Pilaff and four Bramley Apple Pies. Histabloid consisted of kiss and tell, and then more kiss and tell, and thenmore kiss and more tell. Aliens Stole My Boobs. Marilyn Monroe AndJack Kennedy Still Share Nights of Passion: In Atlantis. My Love Muscles Tightened From Beyond The Grave. All his life Keith had been a reader of the most vulgar and sensational of the mass-market dailies. But two years ago he had made a decision, and gone down­market: to the smaller-circulationMorning Lark. He was stilladjusting to the wrench. TheMorning Lark, in Keith's view, made upfor what it lacked in coverage with a more positive and funlovingapproach to life. There was no chance of tragedy or disaster drivingBeverli or Frizzbi off page three, or page two, or page one. Andalthough the girls in theMorning Lark weren't as pretty as the girls in the mass-market daily, they were certainly more numerous. Ah, the lovely smile on her - cheers you up for the rest of the day.


But now Keith was soberly rereading the filler about the death toll inYugoslavia. He pointed at the pram with a finger. Kath slipped slowlyforwards from her chair.


'Enlah,' said the baby.


The pram dominated the hallway. The pramwas the hallway, andmore. Its handles stuck into the kitchen, its fluted bonnet took up half the lounge. Again Keith glanced up longsufferingly as Kath returned,or pivoted, with the baby in her arms. The baby, who was neither tirednor wet nor hungry, established position on her mother's lap,demurely.


Kath gave a quick nod and said, 'I'm very worried, Keith.'


Keith drank tea with a mouthwash action. 'Yeah?' he said.


'War,' said the baby.


Kath said, 'It's the news.'


'Oh that,' he said with relief.


The verification,' said Kath.


'Lie,' said the baby.


Keith said, 'Nothing in it. Whatreason?'


'I don't know. You look at the . . .'


'Oil,' said the baby.


Kath said, 'A flare-up. A flashpoint somewhere.'


'Eh?'


'Wall,' said the baby.


Keith said, 'Jesus. It'll blow over, okay?'


'Or,' said the baby.


'They've been cheating,' said Kath. 'Both sides. They've beencheating for fifteen years.'


'Who says?' said Keith. There was nothing about it in Keith'stabloid. 'TV?'


'I been down the library,' said Kath lightly. 'The proper papers.'


This touched a nerve in Keith (for he was very loyal to his tabloid,regarding its readers as one big family); but it also touched a chord. Itwas through the library that Kath had won Keith's heart. She hadtaught him how to read and write—easily the most intimate episode ofhis life. Oh, easily. The thought of it made tears gather behind his eyes,tears of shame and pride, tears of difficulty, of intimacy.


'Fuck off,' said Keith equably - his usual way of registering casualdisagreement. 'So who's cheating who?'


'They both started cheating as a hedge against the other side doingso,' said Kath with the Irish fluidity that Keith had always silentlyadmired, and now silently hated. 'They're accusing one another ofnon-compliance and inaccurate denial.'


Keith started on his first Bramley Apple Pie. He knew all aboutinaccurate denial. Keith used it a lot, this technique. He was foreverinaccurately denying things. Quite recently he had had to do somevery concerted inaccurate denial - with regard to his wife, instead of inaccurately (and routinely) denying to someone or other that this orthat was stolen or worthless or broken or ruined, Keith had beenobliged inaccurately to deny that he had given Kath non-specific urethritis. it was the sternest test this tactic had ever faced . . . Keithhad been cheating on Kath with a girl who had been cheating on Keith. Her name was Peggy Obbs. First, Keith went round to the clinic; next, he offered a cash gift to Petronella Jones and a bottle of pills to Trish Shirt; then he hastened across town and started beatingup Peggy Obbs. While he was beating up Peggy, Peggy's brotherMicky came home and started beating up Keith. When Keith explained why he was beating up Peggy, Micky stopped beating upKeith and started beating up Peggy, with Keith's help. After that wasover, things got a little unpleasant: he came home to find Kath cryingby the cooker, and saw the doctor's slip and the chemist's bag. But Keith was ready. He denied it. He denied it hotly, indignantly, and inaccurately. He seized her shoulders and told her to put her coat onthat minute.They were going straight round to the doctor and havehimdo some denying. He was kneeing her out of the door by the timeshe shook free and went to comfort the weeping baby. As Keithstarted off to the Black Cross he told Kath not todare blame him for her woman's troubles ever again. For a couple of weeks he gave herhell about it, then let the matter drop, exhausted (apart fromeverything else) by all this inaccurate denial, which was admittedly effective but, he found, uniquely tiring. And, by the way, this non­specific urethritis wasn't the old kind of non-specific urethritis,which everybody in Keith's circle already had. It was the new kind ofnon-specific urethritis, implying widespread inflammation of thelumbar regions, heavy and repeated doses of antibiotics, and (in anideal world) at least a couple of months in bed. But who couldmanage these months in bed? Who had time for them? The planetneeded a couple of months in bed. But it wouldn't get them — itwouldn't ever get them.


Keith finished his fourth Bramley Apple Pie and said, 'Shut it.'A soft female cough came through the kitchen wall from theneighbouring flat. Then they heard a contented swallow, and thesound a paper tissue makes when run across a smooth upper lip.


'Iqbala,' said Keith. 'She got a cold.'


'She got a new boyfriend too.'


'Shenever.'


'Yodelling her head off again she was this morning. Like a pighaving an operation.'


'. . . The dirty little bitch.'


'Hark at him so indignant. You never said anything about the otherboyfriend.'


Keith fell silent. This was true. He never said anything about theother boyfriend. He never said anything about the other boyfriendbecausehe was the other boyfriend. Many times he had slipped nextdoor, one finger raised to his lips. Being indignant about the otherboyfriend had proved to be quite beyond his powers. He just told Kath(and Iqbala) to turn the telly up loud.


Kath said, 'Look at that now.'


Little Kim was asleep, seated more or less upright on her mother's lap. The baby's powerful face, fully formed but in miniature, with its collection of glassy roundnesses, its crescents and half-moons, lolledforward on the white trim of her jumpsuit. The cheeks broadened atthe base, pushing out the lower lip, as brightly succulent as a slice of sushi, the likes of which neither Keith nor Kath had ever seen.


'Good as gold,' he said. 'Get her down, girl.'


To free the passage they backed the pram into the kitchen. Toaccommodate the pram, the table had to be shoved still tighter to the walls; Keith then faced the draining task of pushing Clive in under itwith his feet. When two adults were active in the kitchen theyperformed closely, as in a dance, almost a smooch. But Keith wasn't feeling affectionate. His mode changed. He thought of Guy's houseand found himself in the rare state of total cluelessness; he had no clueto that kind of space and what it might mean. Keith grew up in a low-rent basement flat in Chesterton Road (about six streets further down the Grove from Lansdowne Crescent), where, so far as he knew, hismother lived on speechlessly. Two rooms, kitchen and bathroom. Allhis youth he had sat in this flat and wondered how he was going to getout of it. Conversely, a great deal of his adulthood had been spentwondering how he was going to get back into it. A while ago he learnedthat on his mother's death the flat would revert to the council, andthat, in Keith's estimation, was the end of that. It was certainly the end of his mother. He confronted the image, the bright astronomy, of whatGuy had and Keith's stream of consciousness simply stopped flowing.It dried up. TV, he thought. It was the best he could do.


Kath edged back into the room. Keith dogged her with his eyes,revising his catalogue of her physical deficiencies. Everything hecherished, everything he looked for in a woman, Kath didn't have. Shewas no Analiese Furnish or Debbee Kensit, no stocky little brabursterwith pumpkin bum and milkbottle legs. (Maybe short legs wereshortcuts . . .Yeah. They didn't mess about. Short legs were shortcutsto the biz.) When he met her five years ago she looked like the girl in theadvert for double cream: the eyebrows rurally pale, the hair and its innocent russet. Now she looked to Keith like a figure glimpsed atdawn through a rainy windscreen.


'Look at the state of you,' said Keith, and watched her shoulders tighten over the sink.


She paused in her work. 'I'm tired,' she said to the window. 'I'm sotired.'


You don't say, thought Keith. Oh really. He couldn't express letalone feel any sympathy for someone so proclaimedly in need of anambulance. And when you considered the simple heroism with whichKeith endured his bad chest, his curry-torn digestive system, theitchings and burnings of his sedimentary venereal complaints, hisdarts elbow, his wall-eyed hangovers . ..


He stood up, saying, 'I happen to be under considerable pressure atthe minute. I work my guts out.' He made an expansive gesture. 'Whodo you think's paying for all this?' In the kitchen, or indeed anywhereelse in the flat, making an expansive gesture was not necessarily a goodidea. One of Keith's outflung hands banged into the door, the other into the fridge. 'Get your head down now, for Christ's sake.'


'I think I will.'


'What. After you made my tea?'


'Yes,' said Kath. 'After.'


An hour later Keith sat catching up on his viewing, his knees inchesfrom the screen (not that he had much say in where his knees went).


'Enlah,' said the baby. 'Enlah, Enlah, Enlah, Enlah.Enlah. EnlahEnlah Enlah Enlah Enlah Enlah Enlah Enlah . . .'


With a sigh and some slow nodding Keith extinguished his mostrecent cigarette, switched off the shootout he was watching, andclimbed to his feet. He looked down at Kim, whose moses-basket was wedged between the TV and the inactive two-bar fire. He stretched,barking his right elbow nastily against the wall, and flexed his back,yawning, until his head bumped into the door. . . Outside, thebalcony was strewn with satellite receivers, all stolen, all broken. Nospace out there. No space where Clive could furiously swivel.


Keith shook Kath awake and then took the dog for his evening walk- Keith always did this, religiously, when he wasn't up to no good elsewhere. All you had to do was step into the street and you were •surrounded by royalty. The Prince Albert, the Duke of Clarence, the Earl of Warwick. Maharajah Wines. In the yellow light of the shops,while Clive sniffed at some or other excrescence, Keith looked again ata certain brunette in theMorning Lark. She was pretty. Her name wasPritti, too — or Pritti, at any rate, was what she called herself, withgrinning literalism. A bit like Nicola, thought Keith. Or Nikki. ButNicky wasn't pretty exactly, like Pritti. I blew that one. Or go roundthere and teach her a lesson . . . The arguable connexions betweenpin-ups and pornography and sex and violence: just to clearthem up,while Keith is at hand. With people like Keith, a pin-up was enough toget him going, going in that general direction. But almost anythingwas enough to get people like Keith going. Five minutes in a populatedregion of Saudi Arabia would get Keith going. And you can't yashmakfemale reality, with its legs, its breasts, its hair, its eyes...A shameabout Petronella getting married like that, even though she was talland skinny, but still quite keen by the sound of her. Thus Keith wouldpay another farewell visit to Trish Shirt. Later. He walked the full 300 yards and let Clive precede him into the Black Cross, not wanting tomiss Guy.


Keith wasn't disappointed. Six hours after his own arrival, Guy Clinchstepped over Clive's ash-strewn body and stood there swathed in the smoke and the spores. Eleven o'clock and the Black Cross was loudand crowded, and cocked tight, hairtrigger: one false move and it could all explode. The smoke was hot, the air was hot (hot Clive laylike a doorstop), even the wind outside was as hot as the late-nightbreath of Keith's TV...


Jesus. Keith shouted into a wall of sound. Earlier in the eveningsomeone had gone and put a brick through the jukebox; but God thebarman had started playing Irish folksongs over the PA system, atbalding, teeth-loosening volume. Apart from making God cry, the main effect of these folksongs (which promised a fresh dawn for aproud and drunken nation) was to make everybody shout all the time:their third and unforeseeable effect was to make Keith even angrier


with his wife, with Trish, with darts and debts, with all the pressures


on the moderncheat. He shouted and shouldered his way through toGuy, who lingered with his usual site-tenacity by the pinball machine,inoperative, because a girl was sleeping on it, or lying on it anyway. Also near by were Shakespeare, Dean, Thelonius, Bogdan and ZbigTwo.


'Did you call her?' Keith shouted.


Guy flinched. 'Yes,' he shouted back.


'Did you see her?'


Guy nodded and mimed an affirmative.


Then Keith shouted, 'Did you fuck her?'


Guy staggered back from him. He shook his head and his hand intime.'You don't understand,'he shouted.'She doesn't. . .she's not-'


'Her?' shouted Keith. 'Her?' he shouted even louder. Keith tookGuy's arm and pulled him through the open doors into the street,suddenly pausing, on the way, to stroke Clive's back with his foot. Then he turned.


'What are you after then?'


'Nothing. She's not like that.'


'They're all the fucking same. Did you try her?'


Guy smiled palely and said, 'Of course not. You know me, Keith.'


But Keith did not know Guy. All he knew about Guy he got fromTV. He said, 'Listen. I want something? I go for it. Me? I'm in there. Boof.'


'You're barking up the wrong tree, Keith.'


'I'm like a dog,' said Keith. 'You kick me? I don't run and hide. I'mback. I'm in there.'


Keith didn't look as pleased by this simile as he thought he was goingto be. In fact his sweating face spoke of general disappointment and confusion.


'Keith, you're upset.'


'You're all the fucking same,' he said, and turned back through thedoors, with an exemplary briskness. He knew Guy wouldn't be manenough to follow.


Two hours later, as Keith lurched with Clive down Lancaster Road,to pay his last call on Trish Shirt, he reviewed something Nicky hadsaidtohimthattime('Isherich? . . .There's a thingyou and I might dotogether. A money thing'), and furiously wondered if there was anyway he couldsell her to Guy Clinch.


'I've hit form just when I needed it,' said Keith. 'Come good at the righttime. As long as I maintain my composure I don't fear no one, Tony,not throwing like I am. No way will I crap or bottle it on the night. I'd just like to thank you and the viewers for the superb support. The fansis what darts is all about.'


You 're known foryour big finishes, Keith,said the voice, which was- which was what? Which was TV, dream life, private culture,learning how to read and write, worldly goods. /believe they call youMr Checkout, or the Finisher.


That's right, William,' said Keith. 'But I've worked on my power.It's an improved Keith Talent you're looking at tonight. A more com­plete darter. Still, you know what they say. Trebles for show, doubles for dough. You can get all themбximumsand ton-forties in the worldbut if you can't kill them off, if you can't stick it in at the death -'


Keith coughed for a few minutes. He wasn't on TV or anything. Far from it: the garage, the dusty morning light. He was sitting slumped ona cardboard box, in a posture of weary meditation. Just now on thephone Dean had given him some chastening news. Guess who was inthe other half of the draw for the Sparrow Masters. Chick Purchase, whom Keith hated. Chick, whose very name tasted in Keith's mouthlike hospital food. To tell the truth, Keith was looking and feelingdistinctly seedy. In fact he had a wall-eyed hangover . . .Not that he'dtarried overlong at Trish Shirt's. Clive was still sniffing about the stockroom, looking for a good place to lie down, when Keith reeledback out of there. But then he had stopped by at the Golgotha for a pensive glass ofporno. And later, around five, he had gone back toTrish Shirt's. On the other hand - as against that - you wouldn't catch him goingthere again. No way.


Seedily he peered round the garage, feeling its dust in his throat. Helit another cigarette. The bottles of drink on the workbench he nowviewed with contempt. He generally found a vodka or two quiterefreshing at this hour (it was ten in the morning), but he wouldn't betouching a drop, not now. No danger. It would be Lucozade untilFriday. He had his darts match coming up — an away fixture at theFoaming Quart in Brixton, at Brixton's Foaming Quart — and he found, as he got older (and like the planet he was getting older at apeculiar rate), that darts was a stern mistress. Take this morning.Throw a dart? He couldn't even hold one. He couldn't evenlift one. And Dean Pleat was expected with the van at ten-thirty.


As they peered seedily about, Keith's eyes registered certain itemsscattered among the debris and the contraband. They lay where he had


first hurled them; vacuum-cleaner, coffee-grinder, ironing-board,


iron. What were his plans for these appliances? When feeling at hismost rancorous he thought that on a Wednesday or a Saturday, if hehappened to be passing, he might dump them for ten quid on the tinkerin Golborne Road. Now he reconsidered. Maybe that was just moreshort-end money, just more small thought. That time in her flat, when he gashed his thumb, with that screwdriver. She dressed his wound,while he stared into the brown sluice between her breasts. TV, Keithspeculated. Brings them closer together innit. Like a bond. Heremembered the taste of her money in his mouth and the way she put itthere. A nauseous gust ruffled his head and seemed to clear it; he bent forward and whispered, with certainty, 'She . . . she has need of me.'Yes she did. In a way that went beyond his known parameters, she —she had need of him.


Keith stood up, and began to pace the floor, his hands claspedbehind his back. In this matter of posh birds Keith was, after all, by nomeans inexperienced. There had been the odd housewife in his window-cleaning and petty-theft period (Keith with ladder, bucket,and unreliable smile), the odd daughter too when he was on stake-outsfor the local firm, appearing at the front door with some choiceplausibility or other. Keith knew that some of these rich ladies liked abit of rough; but they didn'tall like it, not by any means. A lot of peoplehad difficulty with this point. Try drumming some sense into Norvisand Thelonius. They thought thatall white women liked black men;they thought that the only ones who didn't, or pretended not to, wereracist. Misguided, sadly misguided, thought Keith sadly. Some women didn't like otherness; they didn't like the other, when it cameto the other. Hope Clinch, now: there was a perfect example of a richlady who didn't like a bit of rough. They looked right through you and out the other side; for them you were nothing, not even animal — you were nothing. And Keith knew very well that hewas a bit of rough, relatively speaking, at least for the time being.


On the whole he found posh skirt shockingly arrogant in bed,always wanting to get on top and other rubbish, and often drawing the line, if you please, at some of Keith's most favoured stunts. There was,for instance, that mad bitch in South Ken. Miranda. She was at least forty, and a wild one. Single in those days, Keith had spent many anight in her mews bedroom being oiled and teased and clawed. It wenton all summer and Keith nursed high hopes of the relationship: a car,maybe, a cash gift or at least a loan. But he went off her, right off her, after she got the police round that time, when Keith paid a call on herone night, with some pals. All right, it was late (he rememberedswitching the car lights off on the way there), and - okay - thingsweretaken (namely goods, drink and liberties) and it looked bad for aminute there when they formed that queue behind him. But to screamso loud the neighbours called the filth in: that wis betrayal. Soon afterthat she changed her phone number and went away for a while. Keithwas still in a state of high indignation when he showed up with the vanand the boys (the same boys) and started bitterly stripping the house.


Keith sighed. Tomorrow he would take Nicola's stuff to GoodFicksin Cathcart Road. They would, of course, cheat Keith, and, having brought it all home, he would have to take it all back again. Theoriginal faults would perhaps be corrected, but new ones would alsobe introduced. You had to do everything, and pay for everything, atleast twice; that was the way it was. Raising a yellow finger to his lowerlip, Keith pondered the whole future of cheating. Cheating was his life. Cheating was all he knew. Few people had that much money any morebut it was quite clear that they had never been stupider. The old desire for a bargain had survived into a world where there weren't any; thereweren't any bargains. Unquestionably you could still earn a decentliving at it, at cheating. Yet no one seemed to have thought through the implications of a world in whicheveryone cheated. The other morning Keith had bought five hundred vanity sachets of Outrage, his stapleperfume. At lunchtime he discovered that they all contained water, asubstance not much less expensive than Outrage, but harder to sell.Keith was relieved that he had already unloaded half the consignmentonDamiбnNoble in the Portobello Road. Then he held Damian'stenners up to the light: they were crude forgeries. He passed on thenotes without much trouble, in return for twenty-four bottles ofvodka which, it turned out, contained a misty, faintly scented liquid. Outrage! The incident struck Keith as a sign of the times. Everyonewas cheating. Everyone was cheating — because everyone was cheat­ing. Poor Keith, and the tragedy of the commons...In such times thethoughtful man looked elsewhere: to his darts. Meanwhile, andalways accepting that he might taste defeat on theochй(that was dartsafter all, making the game what it was), the cheating situation calledfor readjustment, for daring, for vision. Keith would have to cheatmore, cheat sooner and cheat harder than the next guy, and generallyexpandthe whole concept of cheating.


He picked up the darts and threw. Hah! a 20, a 5 and a I: 26 - thejoke throw. As he plucked the darts from the board Keith rehearsed hissneer of incredulous amusement and acknowledged the jeers of thecrowd: even Keith was human. That was the only thing wrong withdarts. That was the only thing wrong with cheating. You couldn'tcheat at darts. No way.


There was the sound of a van outside. He recognized the faultysilencer.


'Keith!' yelled Dean.


'Dean!' yelled Keith. 'Okay. Let's go toworkl'


The days passed. Though making himself no stranger to pub or club Keith drank nothing and worked hard because of the life that was inhim. He sensed the pulse and body of the street-trade and heard the cars lowing in the furrows. Like new corn the young Swedes andDanes formed lines at his stall, and were reaped. He walked dog andburped baby and drew the keening of wife after his will. The hotmacadam pulled on his shoes, like desire, and he had the surety a man knows when there is a sickly Saudi granny in the back of the Cavalier.He harkened to the chirrup of fruit-machine and the tolling of pinballtable, humped the dodgy goods and defrayed life's pleasures withsweat of brow and groin and armpit, knew also the firm clasp of Analiese's ankles around his neck, the coarse reassurance of TrishShirt's hair in his fist. And ever dazed from staring at the sun, thesource of all generation. Heaven and earth was teeming around him. And how should this cease?


Keith drove up the dead-end street and braked with needless violence.He didn't park, although a space was available. He doubleparked.Then he emerged — in flared toreador pants, halfsmock shortsleeveddarts shirt, oxblood cowboy boots.


The door buzzed open for him. Keith lugged the stuff up the stairs. Despite the heat, the journey seemed a lot shorter than it had the timebefore. Just goes to show: peak fitness. He climbed the final flight,dropped his cargo in the hall, and moved through . . . and movedthrough the intoxicating emptiness of the four large rooms. Itreminded him of something. What? Oh yeah. Burgling. He called her name — the trisyllable this time. Then he returned to the hall and sawthe stepladder, the tipped skylight. He ascended slowly into thebrilliant photosphere. As the colours dripped from his vision, he saw a brown elbow, and a brown shoulder, and the rest of her, lying there inwhite underwear.


'Hello,' said Nicola Six.


Hello, thought Keith Talent.


Incarnacion is melting to me, but very slowly, on some glacial timescale. I am appreciably less frightened of her now. It's funny who hasthe power to frighten, and who has not.


Tall, broad, handsome, queenly, Incarnacion wears black at alltimes. Some of her outfits have been recently purchased; others are silvery-grey with use. There is probably enough steady death in thehills of her nativeAndalucнato keep Incarnacion in black for the restof her life. How old are these Spanish ladies, when they make the bigswitch to black?


She is coming round to me. The hiring ofAuxiliadora- thatdisgraceful solecism — we have started to put behind us. I amdeferential. I spring-clean the apartment before she gets here. I giveface. Christ, as if I need to spend more time kissing ass than I do already.


Incarnacion gives the odd smile now. She isn't exactly communi­cative yet; but on occasion she can be induced to discuss, orhaughtily enumerate, the achievements of Mark Asprey.


Like Kath Talent, who is a worried woman, I have been consultingtheproper papers. A great deal of comment (most of it stodgilyPharisaical), some analysis (jovial stuff about the verificationprocedures) — and no news, not of a geopolitical nature anyway. TheGulf, Israel of course, Germany of course, Hungary, Cambodia and so on. But nonews. I'll have to go to Queensway for aTrib.


The television is even worse. Those glamorous ladies read out thebulletins as if they're frontingBlue Peter orJackanory. The brightsmile of kindergarten kindnesses. Endless human-interest piecesabout the weather. Soap and sitcom. Oh, and a quite incredibleamount of darts. There's practically a whole channel of it, a wholenetwork of darts.


The weather is certainly playing along and doing its bit. Yester­day I went for a walk with Guy in the park. Above, the clouds weremoving with preternatural speed; you felt as if larger units ofweather were passing overhead like meteorological discs on a chart — months, entire seasons sweeping by in less than thirty seconds. And great heat. The clouds sped, and not just laterally either. They seemed to bounce and romp and tumble. Yes, there was definitely something puppyish, something almost faggy, going on up there,when like plays with like.


At one point as I walked under a tree I felt the warm kiss of avoluptuous dewdrop on my crown. Gratefully I ran a hand through my hair - and what do I find? Birdshit. Pigeonshit. I'm feeling okay for once, I'm feeling medium cool, and a London pigeon goes andtakes a dump on my head. It had this effect on me: despair. I swore and stumbled around, bedraggled, helpless, the diet of a Londonpigeon being something that really doesn't bear thinking about. Imean, what the digestive system of a London pigeon considers aswaste . . .Guy laughed briefly, then fell silent and produced a skyblue handkerchief (used but clean: in bold contradistinction to aLondon pigeon, Guy's wastes would be clean). From his height he dabbed at the quick-drying matter. He did this unsqueamishly, andwith delicacy. 'Hold still,' he told me. I tried. I put an arm around his waist to steady myself. But the top of my head doesn't reallybear thinking about either, what with the writing I now find on my pillow at dawn, and the daddylonglegs that come and gather in my brush.


Later we sat at a sidewalk table and drank coffee. Around usyoung Arab husbands grumbled while their wives shopped. Thatmustache grumbled at this mustache. This mustache grumbled atthat mustache.


'Written anything recently?' I asked him.


Guy paused and smiled and flinched. 'Yes, I have actually, Sam,Poetry,' he said.


'Sorry. I don't handle poetry,' I said daringly (and who does thesedays?). But I offered to take a look at it anyway. I know what hispoetry will be about. What poetry is always about. The cruelty of thepoet's mistress.


I myself attempt a call to Missy Harter at Hornig Ultrason. BarbroMcCambridge's secretary Olivia eventually puts me through toBarbro. Next, Janit Slotnick's secretary Rosalind puts me through toJanit. At this point I am a mere secretary away from Missy herself; but that's as far as it goes.


I negotiate with Janit and her infuriating voice. She wants asample. I offer to Fed-Ex - or even Thrufax - the first three chaptersto her. Janit says okay, but she also wants a treatment. I try toconceal the difficulties this would involve me in. I suggest a'projection'. We compromise on anoutline.


Icould stall, but for how long? Money anxieties are starting to smirk and gibber at me - and an artist shouldn't have to work underthat kind of pressure. I want patronage. True, I get some free meals atthe Clinches', and Lizzyboo, I hope, will insist on going Dutch when Itake her to the movies. But Keith's darts lessons, rounds of drinks atthe Black Cross, little presents for Kim — I have overheads.


I guess I could just wing it. But all I know for sure is the very lastscene. The car, the car-tool, the murderer waiting in his car, themurderee, ticking towards him on her heels. I don't know how to getto the dead-end street. I close my eyes, trying to see a way — how dowritersdare do what they do? — and there's just chaos. It seems to methat writing brings trouble with it, moral trouble, unexamined trouble. Even to the best.


I know. I'll ask Nicola. She already has an outline.She can damnwell do it.


No news, but plenty of rumour. Where do they come from, all therumours? A kind of inverse scepticism takes over, when there's nonews.


An Apollo object, ripped loose from the asteroid belt, is heading toward us at ten miles per second. It's so big that when its leadingedge hits, if it hits, its trailing edge will be up there where theaeroplanes fly.


A unique configuration of earth, moon and sun will cause hemispherical flooding. There will be sunquakes, and superboltlightning.


A nearby supernova will presently drench the planet in cosmicrays, causing another Great Extinction.


Oh, and nuclear weapons:those dinosaurs.


The supernova stuff strikes me as a puredefinition of rumour.How do we know about the supernova until we can see it?Nothing, no information, can reach us faster than cosmic light.There's a speed limit up there. The universe is full of signs, circled inred, saying 186,287.


And let's not forget the Second Coming, also awaited, in quietconfidence. Or not so quiet. On the street the poor rock and sway,like burying parties. All their eyes are ice.


'Call it off, Nicola,' I said (I felt 1 had to say it some time). 'So far,there's absolutely nothing inevitable about what you've entrained.Forget it. Do something else. Live.'


'It's funny, isn't it,' she said, 'that there's nothing more boring, inany kind of narrative, than someone vacillating over something youknow they're going to do. I keep noticing it in the trash I watch andread. Will the spy come out of retirement for one last big mission. Will the gangster heed his wife's warnings or go for the clinchingbank job. It's a nightmare sitting through that stuff. It's dead,dead.'


'Is it necessarily such a drag?' I said, sparing a protective thoughtfor my paragraph about Guy and the telephone call. 'Sexualvacillation is okay, surely.'


'Oh yes. Will the priest succumb to the Jezebel? Will the gypsyseduce the virgin? These are questions that deserve question marks. Theyare the story. With the other stuff there's no story until they'reout of the way.'


I said uneasily, 'But you're not in a story. This isn't some hiredvideo, Nicola.'


She shrugged. 'It's always felt like a story,' she said.


Nicola was sitting opposite me, by the table and the telephone, inher white dressing-gown. The dressing-gown had been washed recently, and now it was the elderly wicker chair that looked usedand intimate and Nicola-steeped. She folded her legs up beneathher. She had sat curled that way for many, many hours of her lifehere: introspections, piercing boredoms, incensed outwaitings. Butwith me she can let her hair down.


'Has Guy been here yet?"


'No. Soon. It's the next but one thing. I'm going to speed things up.Massive escalation.'


'Do you really need Guy? Couldn't you just edit him out?' I felt Ihad to say this too. For a moment I also felt real alarm that she might accede. If she did, I was looking at a very grim novella. Besides, I'd already Fed-Exed the first three chapters to Janit Slotnick.


'I agree it's a drag in a way but I do need him. Keith can't go it alone. There's not enough in him. Of course it could be managed.Easy. A bungled rape, strangulation. I could have managed that onthe first date. The time he followed me home I could have managedthat. But what do you think I'm after? A "senseless killing" ? Anywayevents are moving now. I just let the next thing happen.'


'Oh yeah. Nicola the determinist. "The next thing." Well how's itgoing to go? Could you — could you outline it for me?'


She exhaled, in weariness and irritation. I felt the same with Janit.She said, 'Clearly things will progress along two broad fronts.There'll be some intermeshing. I don't like . . . Why am I telling youall this?'


'I'll tell you why you're telling me all this. It's because,' I went on archly, 'it's because I'm a civilian. I'm immune. I salute your beautyand your originality and so on. And your power to shape reality. Butfor me it doesn't work. None of it. The bedroom voodoo, the FreeSpirit nihilistic heroine bit, the sex-actress bit — it just doesn't get tome.'


She did a fish mouth, and her eyes lengthened. 'Get you. Aren'tyouthe one.'


I raised a hand.


That isn't why,' she said. Til tell you why.' She looked around theroom and back again. 'Are you ready? Can I say it now?'


I looked around the room and back again. I nodded.


'You're dying, aren't you.'


'We all are,' I said.


Well, yes, we all are, in a way. But in different lanes, at different speeds in different cars.


Nicola's streamlined A-to-Z device is travelling at a hundred milesan hour and will not swerve or brake when it hits the wall of death.


Keith's personal Cavalier needs decoking, and pinks on cheap fuel,and has far too many miles on the clock (no use fiddling the speedoon this highway), with bad trouble brewing in big end and manifold.


Guy might drive for ever at a prudent thirty-five, with tons of gas —but here comes the fog and the pile-up dead ahead.


Me I'm in a rattletrap lurching much too fast over bumpy ground.I have left the road. I am out of control. The hood flies up. There goesa wheel. Only one outcome.


Bury my bones in London Fields. Where I was raised. That's whereI bought the farm. Yes I bought the farm out there in London Fields.


I must do something for the child.


Chapter 8: Going Out With God

nough of herchildhood had been spent in church to giveNicola an interest in religion. She was interested in religion, in away. (And it's a rare goodtime girl who waives all hope of Sugar-daddy.) Nicola was certainly mighty keen on blasphemy. And so sheoften found herself imagining that she was going out with God.


Or not going out with Him — not any more. He had slept with heronce, and once only: she did that to show Him what he would bemissing for ever and ever. In bed Nicola had made Him do the act ofdoubledarkness: the doublebeast with only one back. Then neveragain. God cried in the street outside her apartment. He telephoned and telepathized. He followed her everywhere, His gaze impartingthat fancy blue nimbus. God got Shakespeare and Dante working as ateam to write her poems. He hired Parthenope, Ligeia and Leucosia tosing her lullabies and romantic ballads. Appearing in various forms,He tempted her with His charisma: he came as King David, Valentino, Byron, John Dillinger, Genghis Khan, Courbet, Muhammad AH,Napoleon, Hemingway, the great Schwarzenegger, Burton Else. Preposterous flowers materialized on the stairs. Exhaustedly sheflushed the innumerable diamonds down the toilet. God knew that shehad always wanted her breasts to be very slightly larger andinfinitesimally further apart: he offered to arrange it. He wanted tomarry her and have her come and live at His place: in heaven. All thiscould be achieved at the speed of light. God said He would fix it so shelived for ever.


Nicola told Him to get lost.


Of course, there was another man in her life. His name was theDevil. Nicola didn't see nearly as much of the Devi! as - in a perfectworld - she would have liked. Sometimes, when the mood took him, he called her late and got her round to his soul club after hours, andabused her on stage while his friends looked on and laughed. Her thing for the Devil — it wasn't love. No, she could take or leave theDevil in the end. Nicola only did it because it was good fun and itmade God mad.


Guy Clinch in the park had been quite an experience.


You know how it is when two souls meet in a burst of ecstaticvolubility, with hearts tickling to hear and to tell, to knoweverything, to reveal everything, the shared reverence for the other'sotherness, a feeling of solitude radiantly snapped by fullcontact - allthat? Well, such interactions of energy are tiring enough when you'rein love, or think you are. But let Nicola trumpet the assurance thatthey're much more tiring when you're not: when you're justpretending.


Guy Clinch in the park had been murder.


'Let's talk about you. That's enough about me . . .'


'I'm sorry, am I rambling on terribly . . . ?'


'It's funny, but I don't think I've ever talked about this before..."


'That's enough about me. Let's talk about you . . .'


While, with an expression of dreamy self-pity, she frailly huggedher fur coat to her body (the day was helpfully cold) and spoke abouther spiritual struggles at the convent, it was only the thought of the spangled garter-belt and cathouse panties, the riot of underwear shewore beneath, that prevented Nicola from flopping back on thebench with her feet apart and saying, 'Oh, I can't bear this stuff. I'mlying. Nevermind.' She had to maintain an actress's discipline: it was like the fifteenth rehearsal with some dud leading man who kept onflubbing his lines. Time and again Nicola nearly corpsed. Yes: it'll beall right on the night. She played for time (taking little rests) bystaring in saintly silence at the water: the toy galleon with black sails,in whose wake . .. And when Guy was in full voice - on the ThirdWorld, on his writing, on the material inequities he found he just couldn't accept — Nicola stayed conscious by wondering how she would have processed Guy Clinch a few years ago, or a few monthsago. She would have seduced him that afternoon and sent him backto his wife with a graphic lovebite on either buttock. Suddenly he wastalking about the subsidizing of thermal underwear for the elderly inwinter; and Nicola suddenly felt she had done enough. As theyparted on the Bayswater Road it took all she had to make that second fake-impulsive swivel and give that second vague wave goodbye.


When she got home she slipped out of her coat and twirled intobed still wearing her high heels. When she awoke around midnight she bathed and then compulsively cooked herself a bushel of pastaand sat eating it and watching television and drinking nearly twobottles of Barolo.


He called the day after the day after, which was just as well. As it was,Nicola listened patiently enough to the furtive, the terrified, the pantwetting pips of the public telephone.


'I've been thinking where it might be nice to meet tomorrowlunch time,' he said, 'if you still can and want to?...The WallaceCollection - do you know it? Off Baker Street. It's always soothing, Ifind. Or the Soane Museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields. Extraordinarylittle place, rather melancholy, but in a pleasant kind of way. Or wecould meet in the V & A.'


'Yes,' said Nicola. 'Or in a restaurant.'


'. . . Yes. What kind of restaurants do you like?'


'Expensive ones' was the answer. But Nicola didn't say that. Shesimply named a restaurant of world-historical costliness in StJames's and said she would see him there at one.


Guy was early. He came rearing up out of the banquette when she walked through the door. The boyish brightness of his rough silk tiespoke to Nicola of an insufficiently examined self, or an insufficientlycritical one.


'This was a mistake,' she said timidly as she removed her gloves and lay them on the tablecloth. 'I mean the restaurant. I didn't know it would be so pretentious. I've hardly ever been to restaurants. Thename just popped out.' Speaking sideways Nicola ordered aTanqueray gin martini straight up with three olives. 'I'm sorry.'


'Nothing for me, thank you. Oh don't worry.'


She lit a cigarette and regarded him with respectful amusement.'Are you shocked by my dependencies?' she asked.'/ am. As you'vegathered I'm rather a nervous person - rather a ridiculous person,I'm afraid. It's not very often I go out into the world.'


'Actually I find it touching.’


'You're very generous. Well this is - good fun. And I did so enjoyour talk in the park.'


'I think I went on a bit.'


'No. No. In the modern world it's not often . . . But today I mustbe sensible. I do have something I want to ask of you.'


She was dressed for business. This was the story.


During her early years in the orphanage (that peeling warren ofmunicipal mortification) Nicola had befriended a little Cambodiangirl - beautiful, abandoned, with hurt four-lidded eyes. Like partnersin a concentration camp where the enemy wasn't cold or hunger or outright torture but lovelessness, lovelessness, they kept each othergoing - indeed, the tiny pals exalted themselves with the intensity of their secret and their bond. When she was twelve Nicola went on tothe charity school (cum blacking factory) while her soulmate was'adopted' or farmed out to a pitiless Iraqi. The man abused her.There was violence. She - she fell. Did Guy understand?


Guy nodded grimly.


Little Nicola, turning away from her rotting textbook or theheadmaster's switch, would weep over her friend's long letters. She had the child: a son. She was then repatriated, never to return.


'Cambodia? She's still there? My God.'


'The Proxy War,' said Nicola coldly.


Occasionally a blood-smudged dispatch written on toilet paper orElastoplast found its way through to her. Mother and child were variously sighted in a refugee camp in Thailand, a resettlementfacility in Burma, a prison in Laos.


'It's hopeless there,' said Guy. The whole area.'


'You know, in a way it's ruined my life as well as hers. I feel sodesperately incomplete without her. I think that's why I never . . .but that's another story. I must bring them back. I'll never feel wholeuntil I bring them back. You have connexions, don't you, Guy? Is there perhaps something you could do? Inquire?'


'Yes. I could certainly try.'


'Could you? Their names are here. I'd be eternally in your debt.'She smiled fondly. 'Little Boy was always known simply as LittleBoy, though he's almost a man now.Her name is En Lah Gai. I calledher Enola. Enola Gay.'


She checked Guy's face. Nothing. And a little knowledge mighthave helped him here. A little knowledge might even have savedhim . . . With a crisp fingertip Nicola directed the waiter to replenishher glass with the Chardonnay she had picked. She watched Guy'suplifted face as it filled with purpose. Then she squeezed lemon on toher eleventh oyster, and waited before adding the Tabasco. Itflinched reassuringly. After all, you eat them alive.


'I take it you're married,' she said abruptly.


'Yes. Yes. And I too have a little boy.'


Nicola inclined her head and smiled without opening her mouth.


'My wife Hope and I have been married for fifteen years.'


'Nuclear,' said Nicola. 'That's not so common any more. Howromantic. Well done.'


'I wonder if there's any more black pepper,' said Guy.


Later, on the street, they were getting ready to part. Feeling theneed of contrast, badly feeling the need to mix things up, Nicolawalked away from him, stretching her arms as if they were wings forflight. Her dark-grey business suit was, she knew, none the lessflatteringly cut, making much of her hips, making little of her waist.The city heat, re-established, and used and trapped for some daysnow, prompted her to unbutton and remove her jacket. She slung itover her white-shirted shoulder and turned to him with a shake of thehair and a hand on her hip, giving herself a thought instruction thatwent like this: You're something very negligent on a catwalk somewhere with a lot of old men watching and wondering how hardand how expensive you'd be to fuck.


'Are you all right? I must say...I must say you're looking terriblywell.'


'Am I?' She shrugged. 'Perhaps I am. But what for?'


Additional wine, and two glasses of Calvados, had got her througha deadly hour during which Guy, in innocent and meandering style, had sought to convey certain information about his heart: that it wasa good one; that it was in the right place; that it would seem to belongto another; and that it was true. The alcohol and the conversationcombined to assist Nicola in her next project, which was to startcrying. Years ago, when she studied the Method, her instructor told her that sadness - misery, tragedy - wasn't always the way. You had to think about the things that made you cry in real life. Whereas her classmates all got by with images of lost puppies, vanished fathers,Romeo and Juliet, starving Namibians, and so on, Nicola found thather one sure path to tears lay through memories of irritation andabove all boredom. So as she picked out the orange beak of a black cab in the cyclotron of one-way West End traffic and then turned toGuy distractedly, her head was full of missing buttons, passportqueues, utility bills, wrong numbers, picking up broken glass.


'You're crying,' he said joyfully.


'Help me. I'm so terribly alone. Please help me.'


As her taxi edged up St James's to Piccadilly, Nicola turned in herseat. Through the dark glass she watched Guy swaying - swim­ming, drowning — in the heavy air. And he was quite nice in a way,the fool, the poor foal. Guy: the fall guy. On paper, at least, he certainly didn't deserve the humiliation and havoc she planned tovisit on him. But this was how it was, when (among other consider­ations) you had reallygot to the end of men.


Paradoxically, or at any rate surprisingly, Nicola Six disapprovedof bikinis. She execrated bikinis. For twenty years and all over theworld she had been ricking necks on fashionable beaches: the double doubletake. A modern beuty in a racing one-piece? Themen stared, and so did the women. The girl's belly, though enviablycontoured, for some reason had no interest in being seen. Ditto thebreasts (for toplessness, too, she held in contempt). Women some­times thoughtfully covered themselves for a while after Nicolastrode by. Here was a person who didn't want her body familiar­ized. Looking down at their own torsos, bared alike to sun andeyes, the women resentfully sensed this prideful gamble. And themen: they knew that if they ever magicked themselves into the hotelroom, the quiet villa, the cabin, the changing-hut, they would seesomething that the beach had not seen, that the sun and the waves and the eyes had not seen.


Nicola loathed bikinis; the bikini she regarded as the acme ofvulgarity (and how the lines demarcated the godlike thorax,making polyps of the breasts); nevertheless, a bikini was what shewas wearing when Keith Talent jacked himself out on to the roofthat day, and stood there blinking in the blaze . . . She had bought itthat morning; and it was exceptionally vulgar, Nicola's bikini,cutely skimpy with cutaway thighs, and bright white against herPersian flesh. At first, Keith clearly thought — as he was meant to —that she was sunbathing in her underwear: he looked away for amoment, alarmed at having surprised her in this disquieting impro­visation. But then he made out the silk-aping waterproof of the curved white.


'Hello,' she said.


Keith coughed a few times. 'She wore an itsy-witsy teeny-weeny,'he then volunteered. 'Yeah cheers.'


'Do you know the etymology ofbikini, Keith?'


'Who?'


'Yes, you're right. Origin is more like it.From is more like it.From Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, Keith, the site of the US weaponstests in 1946 and 1954. First, atomic bombs. Then, in the Fifties, theSuper: the hydrogen bomb.' She laughed ruefully, and continued: 'I still don't see how this inevitably leads to a "scanty two-piece beachgarment worn by women". I looked it up in Brewer before you came,Keith. He chummily suggests a comparison between the devastating effects of the explosion and the devastating effects of the costume.'


As she spoke Nicola was looking, not at Keith, but at her bikiniand what it framed. She rightly imagined that he was doing likewise.The interproximate breasts, concavities of throat and belly, whitepyramid, the racing legs. Keith did not know, could not haveguessed, would never have believed, that half an hour ago this body had stood naked before the bathroom mirror while its mistress wept - drenching the feet of the god of gravity. Beauty is in the eye of thebeholder. Which is fun for the beholder; but what about the owner,the tenant? Nicola wondered whether she'd ever had a minute'spleasure from it. Even at sixteen, when you're excitedly realizingwhat you've got (and imagining it will last for ever), you're stillnoticing what you haven't got, and will never get. Beauty's hand is ever at its lips, bidding adieu. Yes, but bidding adieuin the mirror.


'Bang!'said Keith.


'What American men did there - one of the greatest crimes inhuman history. If you got the world's most talented shits and crueltyexperts together, they couldn't come up with anything worse thanBikini. And how do we commemorate the crime, Keith?' Sheindicated the two small pieces of her two-piece. 'Certain women goabout wearing this trash. It's very twentieth-century, don't youthink?'


'Yeah. Diabolical.'


'You know those coral lagoons will be contaminated for hundredsof years?'


Keith shrugged. 'Chronic, innit.'


' . . . You're looking very pleased with yourself, Keith,' saidNicola - affectionately, as it might be. 'And that's quite an outfit.'


'Yeah well I'm on a roll,' he said. 'I'm playing tonight.' His headdropped in a bashful reflex, and then he looked up again, smiling.'Onna darts.'


'Darts, Keith?'


He nodded. 'Darts. Yeah. My confidence is high. I'm oozingconfidence.'


Keith went on to rehearse some of his darting hopes and dreams,and told how he planned, shortly, to burst into the arena of World Darts itself. Nicola questioned him keenly; and Keith respondedwith a certain rough eloquence.


'I know the knockers take the piss, but there's considerableprestige in the sport these days. Considerable. The final's televised. IfI taste victory there I go on to play Kim Twemlow, the world numberone, before the cameras. Kim Twemlow—the man's like a god to me.'


'I see. Well I'm sure you'll prosper, Keith. And I wish you luck.'


'I — I got all your stuff fixed, uh, Nicola. It come out a bit dear in theend.' He took the invoice - or the piece of paper with figures writtenon it — from within his darts pouch. 'But forget it. This one's on me.'


'Oh nonsense.'


And she stood up. Keith turned away. She approached. With theirshoulders almost touching they looked out over the steamy roof- scape, life's top floor, its attic or maid's room, with washing, flowerboxes, skylights and groundsheets, huts and tents and sleeping-bags, and then the lone steeple of the tower block, like the severed leg of atitanic robot.


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


'Likebirds playing in a pool, Keith?'


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


'Ah yes.' Nicola thought of the kind of video Keith mightoccasionally get his hands on. The white villa, the baby blue of aMarbellan swimming-pool, the handful of topless English slags, 'playing': my, how they frolicked on diving-board and lilo! Then, asthe music modulated, one or two or three of them would slip away, with or withoutManolothe gardener, for the lucratively backbreak-ing siesta. 'Let's go down,' she said.


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


Nicola asked Keith what she owed him, and Keith spread hishands, Hindu-style. Leaving him in the passage (and feeling the forceof his blue eyes on her rump), she went to the bedroom, and closedthe door behind her. She took a thick roll of fifty-pound notes from beneath the mattress. Then she slipped her feet into her tallest whitehigh 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 acartoon. Suddenly she was obliged to muffle a sneeze of laughter -wincing, horrified, but definitely laughter, laughter that showedsigns 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 pairof eyes: tears and laughter within the space of forty-five minutes, allvery dangerous, dangerous. Across the street was a dead housewhose windows were corrugated metal. On its door was a white signbearing red letters:dangerous structure. This was her body.This was her plan.


Lightly Keith accepted the money and folded it into the pocket ofhis 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 - isthere 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 sosure.'


'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, likea snatch of Morse. Nicola ignored it and said, 'I expect you could usesome money, couldn't you, Keith, particularly now?'


'Yeah. Absolutely.'


'Can you keep your mouth shut, Keith? Do you have to run andtell 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 differentclass.Sweetheart, don't look so worried! I'll expect certain things inreturn. You know what I mean. The qualities of patience andcoolness, Keith, that I imagine you apply to your darts. Are yougoing 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, apaperback. 'You don't have to do anything with them. They'reprops. They're just props.'


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


'The first test of your discretion is on his way up the stairs,' shesaid, pressing her thumb down on the release. 'Remember: why shouldhe have all the money? Watch.' With terrible intentness sheplaced the roll of money into the prow of her bikini bottoms, andpatted 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 ownears, 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. Thetrembling 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. Theorphanage, perhaps . . .'); but this didn't stop her keeping himwaiting for a good fifteen minutes ('Please sit down!' she called fromthe bedroom. 'I do apologize'). She needed fifteen minutes. One toenvelope her bikini in a plain white cotton dress. Another to give thebedclothes a fantastic worrying. What was the delightful phrase inLolita:the guilty disarray of hotel linen suggesting an ex-convict'ssaturnalia with a couple of fat old whores? The rest of the timeNicola needed for makeup. Out came the actress palette; on went theactress bulbs. A profound and turbulent postcoital flush was theeffect she was after. She even cobbled together the imprint of a punchor 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 shevigorously tousled. It was ironic, sweetly ironic: because in fifteenminutes she could have straightened hair and bedding, had theyneeded straightening, and powderpuffed away the very plumes and blotches with which she now lewdly and firily daubed her facet Butthat's art. Always the simulacrum, never the real thing. That's art.


Nicola emerged from the bedroom in a subtle hobble, patting herhair with one hand and limply fanning herself with the other . . .Guystood sideways-on at the bookcase. He was holding a slim volume upto 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 Ihave too. Of course he can be a complete embarrassment. But theexpressiveness is the thing. In fact,' he went on, looking aroundbrightly, 'I can see many, many shared enthusiasms here. Your fiction shelves are the mirror image of mine. Apart from theAmericans. 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 lipto blow the hair from her brow. Behind her the bedroom door wasopen and a large movable mirror had been specially positioned,reflecting the bed and its satyr's heaven of throttled sheets andtwisted 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 privatetwinges, as if a ghost had gently goosed her. Guy's gaze of politeinquiry 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 thathe 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 listenat all as Guy, taking a seat opposite, began chronicling his efforts tolocate 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 neverstruck her like this), she was thoroughly galled. What would she have todo to arouse suspicion in this man? If he'd come in and found herlying naked on the sofa with one leg hooked over the back of it,satedly mumbling to herself and relishing a languorous cigarette - hewould have assumed she was suffering from the heat. Even if she gotpregnantshe 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 whichshe 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 theinterests of interest), to show him something of her temper. But here he was, in his blissful blandness. Perhaps the earlier act had workedtoo 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 Britishpeople 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 thewanton pancake seemed to be thickening in Nicola's pores, andbetween her legs she could sense the inadmissible cheapness of thewhite bikini. Well, the B-road would take her - more dully - to thesame destination. Perhaps, too, a useful doubt had been subliminally established. Nicola folded her arms. With vengeful frumpishness shewatched as Guy talked, the way his expression childishly mimickedhis 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 wasworking on unquestionably needed love in it somewhere. And if itwasn't the real thing, if it was just a contemporary dilution orsimulacrum - friendliness, helpfulness, goody two-shoes love . ..Perhaps lovewas dying, was already dead. One more catastrophe.The death of God was possibly survivable in the end. But if love wasgoing 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 Iknow at Index is trying to make contact with a clearing-house inKhorat. There are several avenues still untried.'


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


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


'I have a confession to make. Hear me out, and then go away forever. 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. Inever thought I'd meet anyone good enough. And I don't meanbeautiful enough or grand enough. I just meangood. 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 hereyes burn with all their green, and said,


'I'm in love. With you. There's just one other thing. I warned you Iwas 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'tcome across at least one more time He'd wash his hands of the wholeplanet. He had other planets, thanks, and in better parts of theuniverse. He promised plague, famine, mile-high tides, sound-speedwinds, and terror, ubiquitous and incessant terror, with bloodflowing 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 isnothing. What I am I wish to be, and whatI 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 alldirections. Extremity upon extremity, and then more extremity, andthen more.


The moment I set eyes on him I thought Keith Talent was ananachronistic kind of character. I thought that time and inflation andthe new demographics would have mopped him up by now or senthim 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 willmake it, will win through to the Cavalier, the printed brochure, thedreams of darts. They will stay out there on the street until whenever,in dumb hats and seam-busted zootsuits, looking fantasticallygreedy and devious, and fooling no one.


Fagin himself would have nothing to do with them. He'd behorrified. And these are the best and the brightest (and Keith is the best and the brightest of the best and the brightest). The others areyokels and village idiots, turnip-swaggers, ditch people - but this isLondon; and there are no fields. Only fields of operation andobservation, 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 inthe satyromaniac league (and the satyromaniacs, I guess, will always be with us). He's an obsessional tailchaser of the type that was meantto have died out years ago. He drools and slurps at everythingremotely bim-like on the street; he regales the entire pub with thethings he does to Analiese Furnish and Trish Shirt; he'll even give youfifteen minutes (noberk protocols here) on how it went with Kath the other night. On top of all this he makes no secret of his heroics id thehandjob realm. And on his diet I'm amazed he even gets around.


Is it just me, or does Keith's hormonal tumult have something todo 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, orpicture-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 (withouttrying, and without asking), is a lesson about death: an overview ofthe shorter span. After two cats and nine hamsters, the adolescent is abit 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 biglittle sister, taller, blonder, rounder faced, fuller figured. Lizzyboo'sbreasts are a family joke. Ah, those family jokes. Ah, those secondary sexual characteristics — those SSCs! This is the big question aboutLizzyboo's breasts: where did they come from? No other Broadener,past or present, has got Lizzyboo's breasts. Hope hasn't gotLizzyboo's breasts. She makes do with Hope's instead, which are awhole 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 thelast. 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 onthe street. The guys can't take it. She makes Keiths of us all — oreveryone except me, everyone except the man at her side, whodoesn'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 calledThe Dorm That Dripped Blood.Various coeds got sliced up in theirunderwear. Chainsaw, hunting-knife, straight razor. The slicer was some species of ghoul, demon or zombie - definitely a dead guy atany rate - with a grudge against the Dean. He looked like a normalfat 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 beenmore grateful for it, if I hadn't been dying. Her hand stayed where itwas, well afterThe Dorm That Dripped Blood had stopped beingscary, well after the ghoul had been torched and staked. The lightscame 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 offemale 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-boomay be the kind of girl who isn't quite sure who she likes untilprompted by a larger approval. I felt this approval, even as we walked to the movie, the image of Guy and Hope looming in the airbehind us (smiling encouragingly, her hand resting on his shoulder),like parents. Secondly, of course, I am generally retiring with theladies, and this has a lulling effect, especially on very pretty blondeswith big SSCs, accustomed as they are to living in a garrison ofhard-on and hairtrigger. I have never screwed around (whynot, 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 thoseunpleasant diseases. Thirdly - or maybe this is just point 2(b) - I'mnot interested. Which is always a come-on. Genuine lack of interest isbound 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 ina cafйonKensington Park Road. It's all very difficult. She likes me. She puts ahand on my forearm for emphasis. She practically wets herself at allmy jokes. She brandishes those SSCs. Lizzyboo digs me, which is justas well, because if she wants to find the way to my heart she's going toneed 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 togo home and work on my novel.


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


A terrifying night in Brixton, watching Keith's darts match at the Foaming Quart. I lay down my life or what's left of it for this lousynovel and do I get any thanks?


Pretty well every day now, at noon, I walk or drive to the tower block of Keith Talent, to take Kim off Kath's hands for an hour or two, to look after Kim - to protect and to cherish little Kim. Talenthimself is rarely at home when I call. He is out cheating. He is at theBlack Cross. He is in his garage, in his cave of darts. When I do runinto him on these occasions he wears a hostile leer. Kath blinks up atme when I enter. She is sitting at the table with her head in her hands.I hope she will feel some benefit soon. But misery seems to have a wayof making you forget what the other stuff is like, which is probablyjust as well, from misery's point of view, or you wouldn't put up withit. Sometimes you're down, and sometimes you're down. The rough with the rough. For worse and for worse.


'Hi,' I said as I squeezed into the kitchen (Keith having passed mewordlessly at the door).


'Oh, Sam.' She stood up — she paused. The aftermath of Keith'sheavy breakfast still crowded the small table (which in turn filled the small kitchen): fat mug of cold tea, grease-furrowed plate, V-sign ofcigarette butts in the dollop of brown sauce. Crazily Kath surveyedall this.


'Why don't I take Kim out.'


'Yes. That's best.'


The child raises her arms to me as I lean to take her. She got used tome very quickly. I smoothtalked her into it. She came across. I havethis way with chicks. Of course I don't want anything from her.Though the tales she could tell . . .


I carry her to the Memorial Park — to the park, with its punks anddrunks. I'm not really worried. The adult-and-infant combination is a relatively safe one; you don't get bothered, or not much anyway. Baby-related muggings have fallen off. The guy bending over the pram whispering threats with a broken beer bottle in his fist - nowthis is not a popular kind of guy. In slum-and-plutocrat GreatBritain, so close to the millennium, he isn't popular, he is doublyunpopular; no one's behind him. Sentences reflect this. It's not worthit, for what the average mum has in her purse. So it doesn't happen.Or not much anyway.


What impresses and stays with me is the power of the baby's face—the power.It is knit tight, like a tautly prominent navel, chockful of possibilities, tumescent with potentiae, as if the million things thatcould happen to her, the essences of the million Kims there might oneday be out there, are concentrated in this powerful face . . . But Iwonder. Nicola's face is powerful too. The very thinness of the skin that coats her closed eyes is powerful. Perhaps with her the effect isreversed or diametrical. Because Nicola's face, Nicola's life, containsonly one future, fully shaped, fully designed, toward which she nowmoves at steadily climbing speed.


So the municipal gardens, theharijan flowers, the pastel totems ofthe playground (how do we interpret them?), the untouchableyouths in their spikes, the meteorology of the sky, the casteless oldwedged into benches, and the baby with her sweet breath and facetedroundnesses, as tender as an eyeball. You wouldn't want to touchher. You wouldn't want anything to touch her.


Chapter 9: Doing Real Good

earing housecoat andslippers, and carrying her mail inher armpit, Hope Clinch strode out on to the terrace,mechanically pausing to chuck a potted plant under the chin. The plant was an amaryllis, and had cost considerably more than theaverage weekly wage; but it wasn't thriving. It wasn't working. Soonit would have to be returned — byMelbaor Phoenix, or by Lizzyboo.perhaps - to the dishonest florist for replacement or repair.


She sat at the table and opened her first letter. Looking down, shesaid, 'I just talked withMelba.About Lady Barnaby. Disaster.'


Guy had looked up from his crossword. He was still wearing hiswhite cotton nightie. Guy often slept in a nightie. Hope had foundthis endearing for a while, fifteen years ago. 'Oh yes? Tell,' he said.


Beyond their garden lay the communal green, moistly overgrassedin every season — but not in this season. Guy knew what femaledogpee did to lawns; and it seemed to him that a bitch the size of abehemoth might have caused those swathes of brown. But dogs werenot allowed in the communal garden. It was just the September sun that was doing it. The sun! Guy shut his eyes and wondered howsomething ninety million miles away could turn his lids into aHockney swimming-pool awash with fresh blood . . . Out on thelawn, like milkmaids at work, small children played among the fatguards and fatter nannies, who lowed about them, urging caution.Marmaduke was not to be seen there. He was in his nursery, tryingout a new au pair. They listened to his hearty ululations - Tarzan, asit might be, showing Jane how it went on the lianas — flinching everyfew seconds to the sound of some egregious collision. Guy smiledpromptingly at his wife's bowed head. The marriage was there (breakfast being its chief sacrament), like the crockery on theawkward table, waiting to be invaded.


The Yugoslavia trip,' said Hope, opening another letter andreading it. 'She arrived in the middle of the night. For some reason the plane went via Oslo. The next morning she was cleaned out bythe cabbie who drove her to the hotel. Only it wasn't a hotel. Youexpect a toilet but this was ridiculous: some kind of barracks full ofmad thugs.' Hope opened another letter and started reading it. 'Atthis point she completely flipped. No one knows quite whathappened next but she was found a couple of days later wanderingaround Zagreb airport without any bags and without herglasses,which I feel kind of badly about.'


'Marmaduke.'


'Marmaduke. Someone at the consulate shipped her back. She gothome and the house had been stripped bare.Melbasays there's nothing there except floorboards and paint. Then she apparentlypassed out. But luckily she came to on the stairs just before the boilerexploded. It's still under a ton of water over there.'


'How frightful. Is there anything we can do? Where is she now?'


'In hospital.'


'Insurance?' asked Guy doubtfully.


Hope shook her head. 'She's wiped out.'


'My God. So her marvellous young man —'


'Wasn't so marvellous.'


'. . . You can't trust anyone these days,' said Guy.


'You never could,' said Hope.


Now here came Marmaduke. Defeatedly watched by the stunnedau pair (her presence diluted to a mere reflection in the glass), thelittle boy erupted through the double doors. Although Guy andHope responded with grooved swiftness, Marmaduke was not to bedenied. Surmounting Guy's challenge he harpooned himself face firstinto the table leg before Hope had a chance to lift the tray. Then the world rocked: broken glasses, chipped china, childblood, spilt milk,spilt milk.


Saddened as he was by Lady Barnaby's recent reverses, Guy easilysucceeded in keeping a sense of proportion. After all, when it came totalesof extremity in strange lands — disorientation, shelterlessness, blinded decampment — he couldn't help but feel he was playing in ahigher league. Well, not playing, just watching: a pale spectatoramong tens of thousands, high up in the bleachers.


All week he had been driving into Cheapside, quite early, andcloseting himself in his office with his coffee and his four telephones.He dialled. His voice knew the circularizing tones of charity, thequiet cajolery of good works. Bad works are all about money. So aregood works. But of bad works he was ignorant: and he knew it. Ofcourse, you said the word Indochina and at once you caught thesound of breath escaping through telephone teeth — right through thereceiver's helix and into your own inner ear. 'Forget about every­where else,' said his contact at Index, with a brio to which Guy wasnot yet attuned. 'Forget about West Africa and Turkmenistan. Thisis the shitstorm.' He'd had no idea. Nobody had any idea. It seemed that there was noidea. Faced with this, and confusedly feeling the need of some bold and reckless act, Guy went out and bought some cigarettes, and sat there awkwardly smoking as he dialled.


Why was he doing this? Like everybody else, Guy had littleappetite for the big bad news. Like everybody else, he had supped fullof horrors, over breakfast, day after day, until he was numb with it,stupid with it, and his daily paper went unread. The expansion of mind, the communications revolution: -well, there had been acontraction, and a counter-revolution. And nobody wanted toknow. . . Why am I doing this? he wondered. Because it's good?Thought — consecutive thought — ended there. In his head Guy hadrescreened his lunch with Nicola so many times that the film wasworn thin, and pocked with the crud and curds and queries thattarnish tired eyes. He could see her throat, her moving lips. On thesoundtrack her voice remained virginally clear, with itsforйignness,its meticulous difficulty. She said she had Jewish blood in her. WhenGuy tried to pinpoint the attraction he thought not of her breasts, notof her heart, but of her blood, and her blood's rhythmic tug on him.What could you do with someone's blood? Smell, it, taste it, bathe init? Make love to it.Share it. Perhaps you could put this down toprotectiveness, which always contains something fierce, something animal. Was that what he was after? Was he after her blood?


Though planetary and twentieth-century, and entirely typical ofboth, the events in Indochina demanded to be thought of astronomi­cally. To begin with, they were obscure, distant, they were deepestblack. The Proxy War had put a curve on things when both sidesagreed, or when 'both sides agreed', to play their game in the dark.This condition they quickly brought about by a declared policy,much publicized in the press and on television, of killing alljournalists. No longer could the foreign correspondents hop fromfoxhole to foxhole with theirmedia tags in their hatbands and thentelex their stories over cocktails from the garden rooftops ofscorched Hiltons. In response, rogue camera crews chartered jeeps and choppers; malarial war-freaks climbed out of opium bunks andfirmed up their stringerships; one-legged photographers with lumpsof Ho's shrapnel still lodged in their brainpans stood on border roads with their thumbs in the air. They went in, but they didn't come out.Guy smoked and flinched and rubbed his eyes, and wonderedwhether anyone could really bear to watch.


What came out came out slowly or wrongly or weakly, like tiredlight. On the one hand the monosyllabic affirmatives or distractedgiggling of survivors thrown clear by the crash or the blast; on theother, the unsleeping testimony of the satellites, triumphantlyaffectless, seeming to exclude everything human from their diagrams of the dead - corpse fields, skull honeycombs. This was a new kind ofconflict;spasm war andunfettered war and, unavoidably,superwarwere among the buzzwords;proxy war because the world powers seeded it and tested weapons systems in it and kept each other busywith it; but the money was coming from Germany and Japan (andChina?), and other brokers of the balance of power. 'If you want to get an idea of what's happening there,' said his informant at the RedCross, 'read an account of what the Khmer Rouge did in theSeventies and multiply everything by ten. Body count. Area involved.No. Square it. Cube it.' Guy did just that. And here was theastronomical. Because if millions were circling in the vortex of war,then other millions needed to know whether they were living or dead, and if there were millions who cared for the millions whocared, then pretty soon . . . pretty soon . . .


He had never felt more alive.


He had never felt happier - this was the ugly truth. Or not for many, many years. He came home in the evening to his wife'ssurprised approval (he suddenly had value after his day at the office -novelty value, as well as the usual kind) and to Marmaduke'sderisory atrocities. He fixed Hope's drink and took it to her at thedressing-table and kissed her neck, his mind on other things, othernecks. It was drunk-making stuff all right, an excitation thatsparkled the way her tonic did when it hit the ice. She patted his officecheek and smoothed his calculator brow, confident that he was outthere making money. And what was he really doing? Guy had needof the great chaos he had tuned into. Feel the tug of mass misery and you want more - more misery, more mass. You have to get addicted. No wonder everybody on the sidelines had the urge to paint it black.


'Tough day?'


'Not really.'


'Poor you.'


Poor them. But good, good! His motives didn't bear inspection,not for an instant. He thought (when he thought) that he waslearning something about life, which always meant death. Hethought he had a chance to do real good. His motives didn't bearinspection. Nor did they get any. Love, of all things, saw to that —modern love, in some wild new outfit. I've got enough now, surely toGod. Call her tomorrow then, he thought, as he zipped Hope up.


Guy was coming along nicely. He was doing real good.


Lost, then, in his new mood of exalted melancholy, Guy climbed thestairs to Nicola Six's door — past the prams and bikes, the brownenvelopes, the pasted dos-and-don'ts of parenthood, citizenship,community. He paused halfway up, not for rest but for thought. Youknow of course that it's a myth or half-truth about the inexorableprosperity of the Asian subculture in the United States. The first waveof mostly middle-class Vietnamese - they did well, right enough. Butthe next lot, the Cambodians: just imagine. The last time you sawyour house it was a hundred feet off the ground and in flames, withyour mother and your father and your six children inside it. You'd need time to recover from that. After that, you'd want a rest beforetaking on America. And presumably the next batch, if it ever comes, the next batch will be even more...As Guy went on up he heardsomebody coming down: a sniffling, shuffling figure, with heavyboots. Guy stood to one side on what he assumed to be thepenultimate landing, his chin abstractedly upraised. And all this was on top of the crisis, or ratherbeneath the crisis, under its wing. This idea of the delegation of cruelty . . .


'Hello, mate.'


'-Keith ... Sorry, I'm half-asleep.'


'1 know the feeling.’


But Keith did look different. And it wasn't just the liontamer getupand the freshly blowdried hair. Actually these extras seemed to goagainst the new slant of his presence, which was one of furtiveness orhumility. He stood on restless legs with his head bowed, clutching some sort of bathroom attachment to his chest — and a book, apaperback. Neither was Guy empty-handed. He couldn't deliver twograteful refugees, but he had a present with him, a present for NicolaSix. He had thought long and fervently about this present. Whatcould he buy her? A Titian, a yacht, a diamond as big as the Ritz. Guyhad wanted to buy her the earth, but he had bought her a globe. Not the old kind: the new kind. A literal globe, the planet as seen fromspace, heavy, mysterious, baby-blue in its shawls. He held it, likeHamlet.


Suddenly Keith shrugged and wagged his chin sideways and said,'I just been — helping out.'


'Yes of course. That's what I'm here for too.'


'Same difference.'


'I'm trying to help her trace someone. Without much luck, as ithappens.'


'Still. You do what you can.'


'Exactly.' Guy looked at Keith now with pitying fondness. PoorKeith . . .


'Oh yeah. You coming tonight?'


'I'm sorry?' said Guy.


Keith stared at him with full hostility. 'To the darts.'


'The darts, yes. Of course. Absolutely.'


'BMW. Mercedes 190E. 2.5—16. Uh, it's up there, mate.'


And Keith shuffled and sniffed and hurried off down the stairs -with thatbook under his arm . . .


Guy called her name in the passage, and advanced with respectfulevenness of tread. The sitting-room was empty. It was also much ashe had imagined: interesting disarray beneath a lowish ceiling (tall Guy warily sensed a certain pressure on his crown), a teacup here, aforeign magazine there, past-their-best tulips collapsing over the sides of a glass bowl (as if seasick), a certain indolence in the furnishings, the usual pistol-grips and worn webbing of too much video equipment (his own house was a Pinewood of these inexpen­sive toys), the tobacco tang of thoughtful bohemianism. On the tablebeneath the window, by the wicker chair, an unfinished letter. . .'Nicola?' he said again, with a light shake of the head. Her voice,somewhat muffled, responded from the neighbour room witha patent untruth: she said she wouldn't be a second. He glanceduncensoriously at his watch, and stood to attention with his handsbehind his back. After a while he moved to the window and lookedbackwards over his shoulder and then sideways at the writing pad.'Dear Professor Barnes,' he read. 'Thank you for sending meProfessor Noble's paper, which I'm obliged to say I found misleadingand shoddily argued. I take his word for it that artists often have sexual relations with their subjects. One is amply persuaded thatsuch things happen. But his anecdotes can have no useful bearing onthe representational argument. I was on pins, wondering when hewas going to say that Rembrandt's portraits of Saskia — or, perhaps,Bonnard's ofMarte- were "suffused" with sexual knowledge, orreflect on the painter's yearning to "get inside" his sitter, or recliner.Such coarse speculation is where this line always leads. To lend a personal note,' read Guy, completing the page. His hand reached out to turn it. But then he desisted with a soft shudder. She knows aboutart, he thought bracingly. And a beautiful hand: not as strictlyelegant as Hope's, rounder, more expressive, with something of Lizzyboo's feminine corpulence. It abruptly occurred to Guy that hehad never done anything like this before. He had never been alone with a woman of his own age in the place where she lived, and in secret, without Hope knowing. Nicola's sitting-room was 'much as he had imagined'. What, exactly,had he imagined? He could claim,perhaps, that his reveries were chaste. But his dreams went their own way. Well, he thought, we can't help dreaming what we dream. Guyswept his gaze round to the bookcase and approached it with briskrelief. He took outThe Rainbow and looked at its opening page.What was it Keith had with him? Ridiculous. Slipped my mind.Villette? The Professor? Shirley? No, much more obvious but notJane Eyre . . .


I see. She's obviously been crying, Guy said to himself as Nicolastepped out of the bedroom. Her colourful face addressed himdeclaratively - saying what, he didn't know. It didn't strike Guy that her erectness at such a moment was unusual, because Hope was likethat too: she always addressed you with her tears, or their aftermath;she would never cringe or hide. Looking past Nicola for an instant Guy saw in the mirror the sorry anarchy of neglected linen. Yes: thehabitat of deep, deep depression. My God, look! - the poor creature can hardly walk. Such disorientation in the tread. And the sufferingface, seeming to flex from inner pain. Mm. Nasty welt or spot on thecheekbone there. Of course these days even the most radiant complexions . . . She'll bump into that table if she's not careful. Whoops. It's the same thing I always have with her, the urge, theneed to reach out and steady her, if I dared.


'It's sohot,' she said, as if in accusation.


'Yes I know,' he said apologetically.


For a while Guy attempted some praise of her bookshelves, and there were other marginalia (chess, Keith, the heat again); but itseemed heartless to tug on these tenterhooks. As gently as he could,he began. And her presence, her force field, went quite dead as itwithstood the first volley of the disappointments he had brought her.With her hands clasped on her lap she sat bent forward on the sofa,the bare knees together, the ankles apart but the toes almosttouching, like a child in the headmaster's study. Nicola's full facenever flickered - except once, maybe, when he mentioned the man atGreenpeace, in whom the name Enola Gay had briefly rung a bell,another lead that led nowhere. It was almost a deliverance when griefcame and those slow tears, astonishingly bright, began to map hercheeks.


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


A minute passed and then she said, 'I have a confession to make.'


As she made it, as he heard it, a series of soft explosions, of intimate rearrangements, seemed to take place in the back of hisskull. Delicious and multiform, a great heaviness exerted itself onhim — the force of gravity, reminding you of all the power you needjust to lug this blood around.


'One other thing. I warned you I was a ridiculous person . . .'


It was thrown out, with baffled impatience. Guy smiled to himself.Palely, inwardly, Guy smiled, and said, 'I guessed as much.'


'Youwhat? I'm sorry I...I didn't know people could tell.'


'Oh yes,' he said calmly. 'In fact it's quite obvious.'


'Obvious?'


He had long guessed it, he now felt, the pinkness and purity ofNicola Six. And after all it wasn't such a rare strategy, not in thesecautious times, these times of self-solicitude. It made sense, he thought - it rang true. Because if you took Hope away then Nicolaand I are the same. Virgin territory. Guy was now feeling the novelluxury of sexual experience. He had never knowingly met anyoneless experienced than himself; even Lizzyboo, with her four or fiveunhappy affairs, struck him as an amatory exotic (love-weathered),like Anais Nin. And this might even mean that I will be able to lovesafely.. . But where did the contrary impulse come from? What alternate message from what alternate world was telling him to wrench open that chaste white dress, to take that brown body andturn it inside out?


'Only that you have this dark glow to you. Something contained.Untouchable.'


In pathetic confusion she stood with her hands still clasped and moved towards the window. Guy groaned, and got to his feet, andcrept up behind her.


'Is this for me?' she asked. The globe stood there on her desk. Sheturned to him and raised both hands to her cheeks. 'It's still quitepretty, isn't it?'


'My dear, you're —'


'No, not me. The earth,' she said. 'Please go now.'


'. . . May I call you tomorrow?'


'Call me?' she said through her tears. 'This is love. You don'tunderstand. Call me? You can do what you like to me. You can kill me if you like.'


He raised a hand towards her face.


'Don't. That might just do it. I might just die if you touch me.'


Over breakfast the next morning Hope informed Guy that the car had been done again and he'd have to take it in. Guy nodded and went on with his cereal (the car got done about once a week). Hewatched his wife as she flowed up and down the kitchen in herdressing-gown. Previously, if she had knowneverything, she mighthave called a psychiatrist. But now, after yesterday, she might feeljustified in calling a lawyer, a policeman...As he got up to go Guy felt the need to say something to her.


'What are those pills you're taking? Oh. Yeast.'


'What?'


'Yeast.'


'What about it?'


'Nothing.'


'What are you talking about?'


'Sorry.'


'Christ.'


The car got done about once a week. In the street Guy opened thedoor of the VW (it was never locked) and covered the broken glasson the driver's seat with the sign that saidstereo already gone.He drove to the garage in St John's Wood. Before he climbed out heremoved the service book from the frazzled wound in the dash wherethe stereo used to be (years ago). The usual shrugs and nods. As Guywaited for the usual unreliable promise he might have reflected onhow easy the Other Woman had it: she didn't make you take the car in ever, and she swallowed her yeast in private.


Guy walked down Maida Vale. Having lost their leaves too early,the trees sunbathed, wrinkled and topless and ashamed. Londonbirds croaked in pity or defiance. The sun was doing what it did andalways had done, day and night, for fifteen billion years, which isburn. Why didn't more people worship the sun? The sun had somuch going for it. It created life; it was profoundly mysterious; it wasso powerful that no one on earth dared to look its way. Yet humansworshipped the human, the anthropomorphic. They worshippedpromiscuously: anybody. An Indian keep-fit fanatic, an Ethiopianmass-murderer, a nineteenth-century American angel calledMoroni-Guy's own Catholic God or Nobodaddy. Almost humorous insome lights, the down on her upper lip. The sun was a unit away: anastronomical unit. But today you felt that the sun was no higher than Everest. Not good to be out in it, really. Giver of all life, the sun wasnow taking life away, the lifetaker, the carcinogenic sun. A trick ofperception, or is there a certain spacing in the join of her hips andlegs, a curved triangle of free air between the thighs, just at the top?Guy walked on, down Elgin Avenue. He felt happy — in obedience,perhaps, to the weather (and if this sun were rendered in a children's book it would surely be smiling); happy anticipations, happymemories, an embarrassment of happiness. He remembered one morning over a year ago. Yes, he had just burped Marmaduke; in fact the child had been sick on his shoulder (the drycleaning mancomes and scratches the corduroy with a doubtful fingernail and yousay 'Baby sick', and everyone smiles, forgivingly, everyone under­stands). I was sitting on the bed with the baby, while she changed orbathed next door. I felt cold suddenly — his sick was cooling on myshoulder - and there was the baby's head, the hair slicked flat withwomb-gloss, biospherical, like a world. Or a heavenly body. I felt itsheat, the warmth of the baby's head, and I thought (oh these punsand their shameful mediocrity - but I meant it, I really meant it): I'vegot, I now have...I now have a little sun.


And God - look out! — the Portobello Road, the whole trenchscuffed and frayed, falling apart, and full of rats. Guy could feel thestreet frisking him - to see what he had and what he might give up. Aqueue of tramps had formed at the gates of the Salvation ArmyHostel, waiting for soup or whatever was offered, the troops of the poor, conscripts, pressed men, hard pressed. Tall, and with cleanhair, clean teeth, Guy moved past them painfully, the tramps and their tickling eyes. All he saw was a montage of preposterousfootwear, open at the toes like the mouths of horses, showing horse's teeth . . . Once upon a time, the entrance to the Black Cross was theentrance to a world of fear. Nowadays things had changed places, and fear was behind him, at his back, and the black door was morelike an exit.


Eleven-thirty, and the moment they'd all been waiting for:heralded by his dog, a plume of cigarette smoke and a volley ofcoughing, Keith Talent was so good as to step into the Black Cross.Keith's status, his pub twang, always robust, was now, of course,immeasurably enhanced, after the events of the previous night. An interested general murmur slowly coalesced into light applause and then slowly dissipated in fierce, scattered cries of goading triumph. Relief barmanPongowas the most eloquent, perhaps, when, havingreadied Keith's pint, he extended a plump white hand and simplysaid: 'Darts.'


'Yeah well cheers, lads,' said Keith, who had a wall-eyedhangover.


'You did it, man,' said Thelonius. 'You did it.'


Keith rinsed his mouth with lager and said thickly, 'Yeah well hecrapped it, didn't he. No disrespect, mate, but there's always going to be a question mark over the temperament of the black thrower. Firstleg of the second set I was way back and he goes ton-forty and hasthree darts at double 16? When he shitted that I knew then thatvictory was there for the taking. In the third leg of the vital second set1 punished his sixties and then - the 153 kill. Treble zo, treble 19,double18. Champagne darts. Exhibition. That was probably thehighlight of the evening. You can't argue with finishing of that quality. No way.'


'It was a stern test,' said Thelonius deliberately, 'of your dartingcharacter.'


Bogdan said, 'You responded to the - to the big-match atmos­phere.’


'The choice of venue could have posed problems to a lesser player,'said Dean. 'You fended off the . . .'


'You disposed of the . . .'


'Challenge of the . . .'


'Brixton left-hander,' said Thelonius with a sigh.


Keith turned to Guy Clinch, who was leaning on the pintable andwatching them with a diffident smile. 'Andyou,' said Keith, coming towards him. 'Andyou,' he said, with prodding finger. 'You handledyourself superb. Handled himself excellent last night. Handled himself excellent.'


Guy gazed gratefully enough into Keith's eyes — which didindeed (he thought) look most peculiar this morning. Keith's eyescontained a bright array of impurities and implosions, togetherwith a vertical meniscus of unshed tears; but the strangest thingabout them was their location. The mortified pupils seemed to betrying to put distance between either socket — they were practi­cally in his temples. My God, thought Guy: he looks like a whale.A killer whale? No. Some benignly wheezing old basker. A blue whale. A sperm whale. Yes and with the incredible pallor . . . Guy sipped his drink and listened to Keith's praise, and to the praise of Bogdan, of Norvis, of Dean and Pat and Lance. He inspected their faces for evidence of irony. But all he found was approval, andwelcome.


'I never knew,' said Keith, 'I never knew you was so tasty.'


Had there, after all, been that much to it? After his meeting withNicola, Guy returned home and spent teatime with Marmaduke.Hope was playing tennis with Dink Heckler. He then had a longshower (can be difficult, sometimes, getting all that custard and treacle out of one's hair), changed, and, at about seven, made hisentry into the Black Cross. And into a delirium of darts. Banners andhats bearing the legendkeith, and shouts of 'Darts, Keith!' and'Keith!', and Keith himself, highly charged, hoarsely yelling'Dartsl'Outside, two vans revved tormentedly. In they all piled, with thenatural exception of Keith, who was relying on alternative transport.'I'm taking him,' Fucker had said, 'inthat fucker,' and pointedthrough the doors at a gunmetal Jaguar. Then Guy got forty minutes in the back of the van, where the whites and the Asians smoked andlaughed and coughed all the way, and the blacks silent with unreadable hungers, and half-bottles of Scotch grimly and unquesti-oningly passed from hand to hand.


'On the way in they was obviously going to start something,' saidDean.


'Really?' said Guy, who hadn't noticed anything untoward, except for the jostling and the raillery, and a great presence, a great heat ofbare black muscle. 'How could you tell?'


'They stabbed Zbig One,' said Zbig Two.


'Nothing serious,' said Keith. 'Zbig One? He's all right. Out next week some time.'


The darts contest took place, not in the Foaming Quart proper(with its stained glass and heavy drapes and crepuscular funk), but inan adjoining hall, such was the intensity of the local interest. As Keithsaid, the fixture had captured the imagination of all Brixton.Standing ankle-deep in sawdust, Guy guessed that the hall had beenused recently, and no doubt regularly, as a discotheque and also as a church; less recently, it had served as a school. He just sensed this.There were no especially pointed reminders of the establishments hehad attended (their thousand-acre parklands, Olympic swimming- pools, computer studios, and so on); but the low stage, the damagedskylights, the Roman numerals of the clock, the quelling wood — alltold Guyschool. A boys' school, too. He looked around (thisdidworry him) and there were no women anywhere . . . Benches had been set out as in an assembly room, many of them tipped over inoutbreaks of horseplay, and eventually everyone sat down. But when the match began, with no ceremony, everyone stood up. If everyone had sat down you could have watched from your seat. But everyone stood up. So everyone stood up.


Not that there was a great deal to see, in the way of darts. Keith's opponent was very young and very black, and strikingly combinedthe qualities of violence and solemnity, the face perfect and polished, and the shaved head holding a tint of violet, like an impeccable penis,impeccably erect. With many hesitations and corrections, two oldblack men refereed and kept score with chalk and mike. Loping and sidling in electromagnetic shirt and toreador flares, Keith was easilythe most coarse and slovenly figure on the stage; but he looked by farthe best adapted.


'You wound them up beautiful,' said Dean.


'The hostility of the crowd', Keith agreed, 'put me under pressure. What they didn't know is — Keith Talentthrives on pressure.'


'You wound them up beautiful,' said Dean.


'Showmanship innit,' said Keith. 'Sheer showmanship.’


The hostility of the crowd, Guy had noticed, was certainlymarked. Early on it assumed the form of screaming and coin-throwing and foot-stomping, together with at least three quiteserious attempts on Keith's life. Later, though, as Keith's darts told,as the crowd's dream was pricked into nightmare .. . there wasmuch weeping and keening and beseeching (had the women got inhere at last?), and Guy watched a man holding a slice of beerbottle to his own neck, muttering fast with his lids half-shut and flickering. Onstage, Keith responded - with showmanship. This showmanshipconsisted of a wide variety of obscene gestures, a series of feinted kicks aimed at the heads of the groundlings, and a habit (especiallyincensing) of appearing to free, or of actually freeing, his underpants from between his buttocks just as he turned and prepared to throw.


Anyway, after half an hour in the howling bodyheat, with Guycontributing to both the heat and the howl, shouting 'Darts!' and'Keith!' and 'Darts, Keith!' with more and more licence, it seemed to be generally agreed that the match was over and that Keith had wonit. In a flourish of forgiveness Keith turned to his opponent, who advanced on him suddenly with one dart raised like a knife.


'Stabbed himself. In the hand. With his own dart.'


'Passions were running high,' said Norvis.


'Yeah,' said Keith. 'Beyond a doubt he was rueing that costly missin the second set.'


'Had to be,' said Dean. 'Had to be.'


It was in the carpark that Guy was unanimously held to have distinguished himself. He thought back: the ground's scooped andrutted surface exposed by the line of headlights under the familiarblackness of a London night, and the blackness of the human line infront of the two vans and Fucker's Jag, torches, eyes and teeth, the jink of chains, the smell of petrol or kerosene. At this point Keithhimself had fallen silent and hung back, a part of the company enfolding him, their champion or thoroughbred.


'I'd have gone in there myself,' said Keith.


'Nah.'


'Didn't want to give them the satisfaction.'


True, Dean, true,' said Keith. 'Conserving my energies. Already pondering the quarter finals as such.'


But Guy had gone in there. He made his way forward, with rectilinearity, with giraffe straightness of posture; and the lack ofhesitation, the unanswerably clear ring of his voice as he simply said'Excuse me', and, when the black boy ran at him, 'Don't be a tit', and went on through; and then, once the line had been broken to let himin, how everything just fell away . . . Guy sipped on drink and praise, and wondered. His father had been brave. In the war he had risen tobrigadier, but he made his name as a teenage lieutenant in theguerrilla action in Crete, coming down from those hills coated in blood and medals. The night before, Guy had sensed no personaldanger. He felt the black crew had something else in mind,something inscrutable. And anyway the carpark and its actors had seemed to occupy no more than ten per cent of his reality. At any moment, with mighty bounds, he could be free. Free, on the mightybounds, the quantum leaps of love.


'No,' said Keith, peering at him earnestly with his soaking eyes.'No. You did real good.'


If I'm brave, thought Guy, or brave for now, then what do I feel inthe street (the way the air just shakes you down, thatGuernica ofhoboes toes!), and still feel? Not fear, then. Shame and pity. But nofear.


A little later, at Keith's suggestion, they repaired to the Golgothafor a discreet glass ofporno. The bar was three drinkers deep, andas they waited Keith cocked a tenner and turned sideways to Guy, saying, 'You uh, see that Nicky then?'


Guy considered. He often had trouble with Keith's tenses. 'Yes, Isaw her - that time . . .'


'Helping her out.'


That's right.'


That's right.'


It couldn't be said that asilence fell between them, for there wereno silences in the Golgotha. But by the time they reached the bar (where they would remain as long as possible, like everybody else,out of brute territoriality), a hiatus had arrived and now made itself comfortable, getting fatter and fatter and shoving out its elbows.


Guy said, 'I was . . . Sorry?'


'No. You was saying?'


'No. Go ahead. Please.'


'No I was just saying — I can't be doing with all these birds. Saps aman's darts.' Keith coughed for a while and then said tearfully: 'Irespect my body. I got to take care of myself. Now. Onna darts. It'stough, with all this spare minge around but you got to draw the line somewhere. You got to.’


Edged out from the bar, they stood by a pillar with their drinks,right in the teeth of the snapping steel band.


'You wouldn't believe,' Keith shouted, 'you wouldn't believe whatI'm turning down. Take yesterday.'


And as Keith launched into a squalid decameron of recent gallopsand tumbles, instant liaisons, valiant cuckoldries, eagerly requitedgrabbings and gropings, quickies and workouts and hip-twangersand knee-tremblers, Guy reflected - and reflected wryly - on theutter artlessness of the standard male strategies. Class strategies too,he allowed. It would take a stretch of cosmic time before Keith wouldacknowledge the cosmic distance that separated himself from awoman like Nicola Six. You had to be quite near to see and to feel.After all, if you looked out from the virusless morgue of Pluto (Guywas thinking of the latestJourneyer photographs), the sun was no more than an exceptionally bright star, admonitory and cruciform, a bright star — a cold, bright star, like the brandished sword of God,long before you felt its heat.


When he telephoned her early that afternoon (from a Mexicansnackbar in Westbourne Park Road), Nicola's voice was every­thing he had hoped it would be: direct, uncomplicatedly friendly, low with charged warmth — and sane. Yes, he had hoped for thefirm clasp of her sanity, because he often feared for that delicateequilibrium. If not too good for this world, she was, in his view,far too good for this time; it was the way he saw her, as ananachronism: a museum piece, time-orphaned . . . She was justdashing off toa lecture (and here Guy screened an image of dedi­cated hurry, of books crushed to the breast and a length of scarfheld up by the breeze), but she did so terribly want to talk to him. Could he very sweetly ring her later this evening, at six o'clock, atsix o'clock precisely?


'Of course. What's your lecture?'


'Mm? Um - "Milton and Sex".'


'Well that won't last long,' said Guy, whose humour always camefrom the overflow of happiness, never from the undertow of irony. In any case, he mildly regretted the remark.


'Actually I think they mean gender.'


'Oh yes. He for God. She for God in him. That kind of thing.'


'Yes. That kind of thing. Must run.'


Guy had the Mexican lady make him up a kind of omelette hero(he hoped to use her telephone many more times) which she put in abag and which he guiltily secreted in an empty rubbish basket onLadbroke Grove.


'Well what did you think?' said Hope.


'Thank you,' said Guy. He said it, not to Hope, but to the manwhose job it was to monitor — or stand fairly near to — the automaticcheckout of the underground garage beneath Cavendish Square. Hehad seen Guy many times now and knew his face. Not that heappeared to be much bucked by this familiarity, or by anything elsethat happened to him down there.


Guy retrieved his credit card and steered them up into the light. Thetraffic,' he said.


'Jesus, how many times? Listen: You Are The Traffic.'


'. . . I thought he made a lot of sense.'


'Three hundredguineas of sense?'


'On the fresh-air question.'


'I knew you'd say that.'


'If not on the hostility-to-me question.'


'I knew you'd say that.'


The Harley Street doctor they had just consulted was an expert oninfant hypermania. He had seen Marmaduke at his surgery and hadalso paid a stunned visit to the house, where, as promised,Marmaduke was able to relax and be his normal self. Absolutelyimpossible at the surgery, Marmaduke had been absolutely unbel­ievable at home. Even today, nearly three weeks later, the doctor was still wearing a patch of gauze over his right eye. All parties agreedthat the legal matter need not affect their professional relationship.Recently, Guy had taken out insurance on Marmaduke-relatedpersonal-injury suits, on what seemed to be highly advantageousterms. More recently, he had taken out insurance on the insurance.


'On the hostility-to you question,' said Hope, 'I thought he made achange from Freud.'


'So did I. But I prefer Freud. I'd rather Marmaduke didn't like me for Freudian reasons. I don't like him not liking me because he justdoesn'tlike me. Why shouldn't he like me? I'm incredibly nice to himall the time.'


Guy turned his head. Hope was staring out expressionlessly at thecar-crammed street. With some caution he patted her twice on theknee. Their last real embrace had, in fact, been staged for that verydoctor's benefit — a paramedical embrace, as part of a demonstra-tion. At home, in the kitchen, Guy had embraced his wife while thedoctor looked on. As predicted, Marmaduke dashed the length of the room and sank his teeth into Guy's calf. Requested to tolerate it, Guytolerated it, and maintained the embrace up to the point where Marmaduke started head-butting the cooker.


'To return to the fresh-air question,' said Guy. 'Or to the half-hour question.' This referred to one of Hope's most controversial rulings:Marmaduke was not allowed outside for more than half an hour a day. 'He seemed to think that an hour was safe.'


'No he didn't. He said it could be regarded as tolerable.'


'It's the confinement. Children like to whirl around. How aboutforty-five minutes? He needs some fresh air.'


'We all do. But there isn't any.'


There wasn't any. And hard to explain that one away, hard tojustify it - to the young (Guy meant), to those who would come after. How would you begin? Well, we suspected that sacrifices might haveto be made, later, for all the wonderful times we had with our spraycans and junk-food packaging. We knew there'd be a price.Admittedly, to you, the destruction of the ozone layer looks a bitsteep. But don't forget how good it was for us: our tangy armpits, ourpiping hamburgers. Though maybe wecould have got by with justroll-ons and styrofoam .. .


'Lookl'they both cried, in childish unison. They were drivingdown the Bayswater Road and a sick squirrel stood trembling by thepark railings.


Guy and Hope laughed — at each other, at themselves. 'Look!' theyhad cried — to please Marmaduke. There was the squirrel, leaning ona tree stump, and retching apologetically. But Marmaduke was notin the car. And Marmaduke wouldn't have been pleased anyway,since he showed no interest in animals except as new things to injureor get injured by.


On the stroke of seven Guy called Nicola from a booth in the lobbyof a hotel for the homeless in Ilchester Gardens. The Mexicansnackbar was closed; but spotting usable telephones had becomesomething of a hobby for Guy Clinch. In this way Nicola keptshowing him more life. He stood there poised with his coins. Behindhis back filed whole families bearing plates with little suppers on them. Clearly the kitchen was in the basement and everyone ate intheir rooms. Guy exhaled in exquisite pity. One and ahalffishfingers? For a growing boy? And then probably the mothers haveto-


He fumbled. 'Hello?' he said. 'Hello? . . . Nicola?'


'Guy? Wait,' said the voice. 'This isn't me.'


'Hello?'


'It's a tape. I apologize, but I didn't trust myself to talk to youunmediated. I didn't trust my resolve. You see... Dear Guy, thank you for all the sentiments you have awoken in me. It was wonderfulto learn that Icould have these feelings. My reading, in future, will be much vivified. I shall look at Lawrence with new eyes. My love, ifyou . . . But I suspect there is something deeply frivolous aboutpursuing a course that holds so little prospect of good. And that'swhat we want, isn't it? The good? I'll never forget you. I shall just have to - but no matter. Never make any attempt to contact me everagain. If you had any tenderness for me — and I think you did — thenyou'll know how absolutely and unconditionally I mean that. If you get news of my friends, well, perhaps a note. I'll never forget you.


'Think of me sometimes.


'Goodbye.'


'Goodbye,' he whispered, after a while.


Nine hours later, at four in the morning, Guy turned the page andsaid:


The north wind doth blow, And we shall have snow, And whatwill poor Robin do then, poor thing?'


Marmaduke looked up from a modern edition ofGoodnight,Moon,which he was patiently, almost studiously, tearing to pieces.You could read to Marmaduke - it soothed him, or kept him happyor at least busy. But he had to be allowed to tear up the book directlyafterwards. Soon he would be tearing upMother Goose's Treasuryof Children's Rhymes and Fables. And yet for the moment the childhesitated and his father read on:


'He'll sit in a barn, And keep himself warm, And hide his head under his wing, poor thing!'


Marmaduke watched with his mouth open. The scragged copy ofGoodnight, Moonfell from his grasp. He got to his feet with a sighand approached the low chair where Guy sat. He grinned suddenly and reached out a round hand that trembled with approving interest to touch the tears on his father's cheek.


Of course, I keep trying to tone Marmadukedown. I thought hewas funny at first - but really that kid is no joke. He devastates hisparents twenty times a day. I censor him. I bowdlerize him too.There's some stuff you just can't put in books.


Turn your back for ten seconds and he's in the fire or out the windowor over in the corner, fucking a light socket (he's the right height forthat, with a little bend of the knees). His chaos is strongly sexual, no question. If you enter his nursery you'll usually find him with bothhands down the front of his diaper, or behind the reinforced bars of hisplaypen leering over a swimsuit ad in one of the magazines that somenanny has thrown in to him. He goes at that bottle like a top-dollar Vegas call-girl, like a grand-an-hour sex diva. Yeah, that's it. Marmaduke looks as though he is already contemplating a career inchild pornography: he knows it's out there, and he can tell that there'sa quick buck in it. Naturally he's hell with the help and any otherwoman who strays within range. He's always got a hand up the nurse'ssmock or a seigneurial tongue in the au pair's ear.


I wouldn't have thought Lizzyboo was his type but he goes for her in a big way.


Incarnacion and I are the best of friends. There's absolutely noproblem, any more, about her talking to me.


'Living alone, you know,' she said today, 'it's all right-it's good,'Queenly Incarnacion lives alone. Her husband is dead. Her twochildren are grown up. They live in Canada. She came here. They went there. 'You have advantages. When you living alone, you dothings when you want. Not when they want. When you want.'


True, Incarnacion.'


'You want a bath. You have a bath. You want to eat. You eat. Youdon't need them to say so. It suit you. You sleepy, you want to go to bed. You go to bed. Don't ask. You want watch the TV. Okay! Youwatch the TV. Up to you. You want a cup of coffee. — Coffee. Youwant clean the kitchen. You clean the kitchen. You want maybelisten to the radio. You listen the radio.'


Yes, and the same goes for any solitary activity you care to name.But after twenty minutes on the upside of living alone, we get twentyminutes on the downside of living alone, like there never beinganyone else around and things like that.


A letter from Mark Asprey.


He mentions a restless desire to pop back to London for a fewdays, next month sometime. He adduces the wonderful convenienceof the Concorde. He allows that it would also be convenient, andpleasingly symmetrical, if I could be prevailed upon to return to NewYork for those same few days and reoccupy my apartment —which, he adds, he doesn't use much anyway. He drops hints about a certainrather celebrated lady whom it is imprudent to entertain in his suite at the Plaza.


By now an habituated snooper, I have gone through all Mark Asprey's desk drawers. More trophies, but not for public viewing.Under-the-counter stuff. Pornographic love letters, locks of hair (head and nether), arty photographs. The deep central drawer isfirmly locked. Maybe it's got a whole girl in it.


I have even looked at some of his plays. They are terrible.Frictionless romances, down through the ages.The Goblet has an Arthurian setting. It's all pretty-pretty; but not very pretty. I don'tunderstand. He's one of these guys who hits an awful note and then isuncontrollably rewarded, like Barry Manilow.


Now here's an intolerable thought. I was looking again at Nicola'sdiaries. She uses initials for her menfriends. The docile GR, the well-fleeced CH. NV, with his suicide bids. HB, who cracked up after his divorce. TD and AP both hit the bottle. IJ, who fled to New Zealand.BK, who apparently went and joined the Foreign Legion. Poor PS,who bought the farm.


The only one she kept going back to, the only one who was half amatch for her, 'the only one I've ever beenstupid for', thehandsomest, the cruellest, the best in bed (by far): he's called MA. Aresident of West London. Connected to the theatre.


I burn no torch for Nicola Six. So why does this thoughtkill me?


It's happened. A call from Missy Harter, or, to be more accurate, acall from Janit Slotnick.


'This is Janit Slotnick? Miss Harter's assistint?' 'Yes yes.' 'Well,sir, there's certainly a lot of excitemint here today at HornigUltrason.' 'There is?' 'We know we're paying megamoney for it.''You are?' 'Mm-hm. The new book on the death of John Lennin!'


I won't transcribe all the crap she talked about the death of JohnLennon.How the KGB did it, and so on.


'Miss Harter wanted to have me call you — about your treatmint.''Well it's hardly a treatment, Miss Slotnick. More of an outline. What's the feeling on it?' 'Disappointmint, sir.'


At this point the receiver shot out of my hand like a bar of wetsoap.


'. . . agrees that the opening is strong. So is the denouemint.' 'What? The ending?' 'It's the middle we're disturbed about. Whathappins?' 'How should I know? I mean, I can't tell until I've writtenit. A novel is a journey, Miss Slotnick. What was the feeling on thefirst three chapters?' 'We feel they're a considerable achievemint. Butwe're disturbed, sir. It's a little literary.''Literary? Jesus, you must. . . I'm sorry. I beg your pardon. "Sir."I need an advance, MissSlotnick.' 'I'm not sure we're ready yet to make that kind ofcommitmint. On this point Miss Harter and myself are in totalagreemint.'


I abased myself with promises of cuts, rewrites, tone-downs andspruce-ups until Janit very coolly consented to take a look atchapters four to six.


'And we're unhappy about the names, sir.'


'No problem,' I said. 'I was going to change them anyway.'


Usually it's late at night, now, when I get the call from Nicola Six.One, two. Even three. It's then that she wants to proceed with ourdebate or battle-plan or script conference. She summons me. I alwaysshow.


I'm up to it, apparently. Not so long ago I was sleeping like anewborn: I couldn't keep my eyes open for more than five minutesrunning. Then for a while I slept like a baby: I woke twice an hour infloods of tears. But now I'm really getting on top of my game. Soon I'll be like some coppery old ascetic in the caves of Ladakh, or likeMarmaduke: sleep will be something that I can take or I can leave.So, not without difficulty, with night fear, with the heaviness of fatigue indefinitely postponed, I get out there. It's my job.


Three nights ago, or three dawns ago, as I was girding myself for Chapter 9, I got the call around two-thirty and went straight over inthe car. She took my coat and hat with a humorous expression on herface. She was dressed up — black velvet — and drinking champagne.One of her private parties. I sat down and ran a hand over my face.She asked me how I was and I told her I was good.


'What are you dying of anyway?'


'A synergism.' See our interdependence? We don't, we can't talk toanybody else like we can to each other. I can look into her eyes andsay it.


'Communicable? No. Direct or indirect? Indirect.'


'Non-communicable,' I said. 'But possibly direct. Radiogenic, naturally. They don't know. It's quite an unusual case. You want tohear the story? Takes about ten minutes.'


'Oh yes please. I'm interested.'


'London Fields,' I began.


She knew about the clusters — though of course she didn't knowthat I was in the centre of the bunch. And she is interested. She isfamiliarwith it all. At one point she said, 'Hang on. So your father was working forher.' 'Her? Pardon me?' 'HER. High ExplosivesResearch. That's what they called it.' 'Right.' Or again she'd comeout with something like 'And plutonium metallurgy. That wasanother area the British were behind on.' She smoked intently,narrowing her eyes each time she exhaled. One thing about that face:it is always beautifully lit.


'You've really gone up in my estimation,' she said when I wasthrough. 'So in a way you're at the heart of all this. In a way, you arethe Crisis.'


'Oh no,' I said modestly. 'I don't think so. I'm not the Crisis. I'mmore like the Situation.'


'So you know about Enola Gay.'


'Oh yes. And Little Boy.’


Later, she showed me the 'letter' she'd placed on the table for Guy toread. 'Professors Barnes and Noble,' I said. That's a cheap shot, Nicola.'


'It gets cheaper,' she said. 'Read on.'


'". . . Rembrandt's portraits of Saskia - or, perhaps, Bonnard's ofMarte- were 'suffused' with sexual knowledge, or reflect on thepainter's yearning to 'get inside' his sitter, or recliner. Such coarse speculation is where this line always leads. To lend a personalnote...'"


'Turn the page.'


'". . . I've sat for perhaps a dozen painters in my life, and slept withmost of them, and it never made any difference to anything, not to me,not to them, and not to that thing on the canvas."'


I looked up. She shrugged one shoulder. I said,


'I wish you wouldn't take these unnecessary risks. Very imprudent,what with you being a virgin and all. Still, I take my hat off to yourconfidence. You justknew Guy wouldn't turn the page?'


'Come on. You know, with him,passive prying is all right. Youdon't avoid what's there to see, but it's an indignity to move any closer,to listen any harder. Actually I'm surprised he dared to read a word.'


'Hubris, Nicola. Hubris. Guy is quite capable of surprises,especially where you're concerned. You should have seen him at the darts. Like a lion. I was half-dead with fear. Though I didn't read itright, I now think. There wasn't any real danger, not for us. Thoseguys, they weren't going to hurt us. They were going to hurt themselves. You're yawning. It's late. But don't you be snooty aboutthe darts. They matter in all this.'


She yawned again, more greedily, showing me her plump backteeth. 'That's why I iced Guy. To concentrate on Keith. God help me.'


I held up the letter. 'Do you mind if I take this?' She shook her head.'Nicola, what do you thinkI'm up to?'


'I don't know, I suppose you're writing something.'


'And you don't mind?'


'At this stage? No. In fact I approve. Let me tell you something. Letme tell you what women want. They all want to bein it. Whatever it is.Among themselves they all want to be bigger-breasted, browner,better in bed — all that. But they want a piece of everything. They wantin.They all want to be in it. They all want to be the bitch in the book.'


Boy, am I a reliable narrator.


I finally limped to Queensway for aTrib.


Two main stories. The first is all about Faith, the First Lady: aremarkably full account, in fact, of her recent activities. I wasbaffled; but then I remembered the speculation earlier in the summerabout Faith's health. Presumably all this stuff about hospice work,White House redecorations and anti-pornography crusading isoffered in courteous rebuttal. And as reassurance. Everybody knowshow totally the President loves his wife. He campaigned on the issue.


The second main story is puzzling also. Something about theSoviet economy. Lots of human-interest snippets: how it's goingdown with Yuri in Kiev; what Viktor thinks in Minsk. I had to readthe thing twice before I realized what the story was. The Soviet Unionis working a seven-day week.


Op-ed pieces about solar disturbances, university prayer, Israel,Mustique and summer-home winterization. Leaders about graintariffs and Medicare.


In Queensway I encounter the same bag-lady I used to see there tenyears ago. Still around! Christ, herstrength. Still arguing with herself (the same argument). Still arguing with her own breast. She takes herbreast out and argues with it.


That lady has an unreliable narrator. Many people in the streets have unreliable narrators.


Watching the children in the park when I go there with Kim - it occurs to me, as I try to account for childish gaiety, that they findtheir own littleness essentially comic. They love to be chased, hilariously aware that the bigger thing cannot but capture them intime.


I know how they feel, though of course with me it isn't funny, the bigger thing loping along in my wake, and easily gaining.


Chapter 10: The Books inKeith Talent's Apartment


eith pressed thePause button and removed from his jacketpocket the book that Nicola had given him. He weighed it inhis hand and assessed it from several angles. He read in a deep whisper:'he was born a gypsy — and lived and loved like a lord.she was the daughter of fashion - and he drove her to her grave.' Keith coughed, and continued: 'The story of Heathcliff's un . . .guvnor. . . ungovernable passion for the sister he never had.' Heread on for a while, with much flexing of mouth and brow. Then helooked up and thought: Keithcliff!...Of humble origin, successwas soon his. Wed to Kathleen, all the birds were on his case.Enjoying plenty on the side, there was one that stood out. Rich andwell-born, Keithcliff she craved. And then the day came to pass when she took him to her bed. With ungovernable passion... Helooked at the front cover; he stood up, and placed Nicola's gift inamong his other library books:Darts; The World of Antiques;Darts Yearbook; Dogs Yearbook; On the Double: The Kim Twem-low Storyby Kim Twemlow (with Dirk Smoker); and a brief his­tory - wrapped in polythene and never opened - of the regimentthat Keith's father had cooked for, and later deserted from, duringWorld War II. Costume drama, thought Keith. Awful old load ofold balls. The class system innit.


TV, thought Keith. VCR. Dynacord. Memorex. JVC. Keithpressed the Pause button and went on watching TV, or 'watching'TV — watching TV in his own way. It was a habit. Every evening hetaped six hours of TV and then screened them on his return from the Black Cross, the Golgotha, Trish Shirt's or wherever. At 3 a.m. therewould still be live transmissions, some old film, say (in fact Keith wasmissing a quite salacious and sanguinarypolicier); but he could no longer bear to watch television at the normal speed, unmediated bythe remote and by the tyranny of his own fag-browned thumb.Pause. SloMo. Picture Search. What he was after were images of sex, violence and sometimes money. Keith watched his six hours' worthat high speed. Often it was all over in twenty minutes. Had to keepyour wits about you. He could spot a pinup on a garage wall inSuperfastforward. Then Rewind, SloMo, Freeze Frame. A young dancer slowly disrobing before a mirror; an old cop getting it in thechest with both barrels; an American house. Best were the scenes thatcombined all three motifs. An oil baron roughing up a callgirl in a prestige hotel, for instance, or the repeated coshing of a pretty bankteller. He also watched major adaptations of works by Lawrence, Dreiser, Dostoevsky, Conrad — and anything else that sparkedcontroversy in the pull-out TV section of his tabloid. For skirt, you often did better with something likeThe Plumed Serpent than youdid with something likeVegas Hooker. He didn't like all thosepetticoats, though. No way. Keith's screenings were usually overquickly, but some items, he found, repaid days or even weeks ofstudy. Anything about lady wrestlers. Or women's prisons. The female body got chopped up by Keith twenty times a night: whatastronomies of breast and belly, of shank and haunch . . . Now thegreat thumb moved from Fast Forward to Rewind to Play, and Keithsat back to savour the pre- credits sequence of a serial-murder movie.Bird running through park at night. Psycho hot on her heels.


'Enlah . . . Enlah . . .Enlah.'


Keith sighed heavily (his lips flapped) as the baby came to life; herassertions, her throaty provisos could be made out in the intersticesof shirtrip and headbang. The spooky exiguity of the flat, thestartling slenderness of its partitions, often gave grounds fordepression. But there was an upside. Keith shouted for Kath andthumped on the wall with his free fist until he heard Kath fall out ofbed. These shouts and thumps entrained a relay of counterthumps and countershouts from their nearest neighbours. Keith shouted andthumped some more, reserving a special vehemence, perhaps, forIqbala's new boyfriend. Kath appeared. She was tired, but Keith wastireder, or so he reckoned. He'd been out until three doing carstereos. Dispiriting work: when you stove in the window bearing theinevitable stickerstereo already gone -on a windy night, withglass everywhere — to find the stereo already gone. Fifteen of themrunning and you wanted a nice meal when you got in: Sweet and SourPork and Six Milford Flapjacks.


'Jesus,' he said.


Five minutes later and Keith was seven or eight murders into hisserial-murder movie. He came to a good bit: a very good bit. Herewound and went to SloMo. The redhead climbed from the bath and reached for the—Oi! Hint of pube there. Amazing what gets through, even these days. All you need's a bit of patience. Bit of application.Though when they're just naked though, it's not enough. You wantsomething to — to frame it with. A garter-belt'll do. Anything. Keith'sthoughts turned to Analiese Furnish, who, in his judgment, tended toerr in the other direction. A bra with two holes in it: looks stupid. Not to mention them pants. All them frills and fringes. Zlike going to bedwith a sack of dusters. Now the redhead slipped into a light gownwhile behind her a shadow straightened. Even that's better thannothing. She still wet so you can see the outline. Here comes the nutterwith the mallet. Watch out darling! Boof.


'Keith?'


'. ..Yeah?'


'Would you burp her for me? Just for a second?'


'Can't. Watching TV innit.'


'She's got the hiccups and I've come over dizzy.'


It had to be admitted that Kath never bothered Keith with the babyexcept in the most drastic emergencies. He turned slightly in his chairand reached over his shoulder to open the lounge door. To give Kathher due, she did seem to be on the verge of authentic collapse: down onone knee and leaning backwards against the wall with the babyawkwardly crooked in her grasp.


Keith thought about it. 'Give her here then,' he said. 'Jesus, what'sthematter with you?'


He sat there watching TV with Kim on his lap. Then he even got tohis feet and jogged about a bit, the better to soothe the pulsing child.After at least three minutes of that he started shouting Kath's nameas loud as he could until she reappeared with a warmed bottle - and finally Keith got a bit of peace. He rescreened the redhead's murder


half a dozen times, and had a proper look at her, with the FreezeFrame. It being Friday, the night when Keith did his chores andgenerally helped out in the home, he then switched off the TV, puthis coffee mug in the sink, aired the dog (or, to be more specific, stoodthere impatiently while Clive shat all over the walkway), had a quickwash, took off his clothes (leaving them in a neat stack, or at any ratea single pile, on the floor of the lounge), and woke up the wife andgave her one. It took quite a while to wake her up but it didn't takelong to give her one, the wet-gowned redhead, Trish Shirt on her knees, Nicola Six and the fat moneygun in her clean white pants.


Keith turned over and lay there furiously wanting services andgoods.


When Nicola asked Keith about his romantic discretion, about hisability to keep his mouth shut on the subject of women and sex, Keithcoughed and answered in the following terms: 'Never do that. Noway.' This was untrue. It was by no means the case. Healways didthat. When it came to kissing and telling, Keith was a one-man oraltradition.


He knew it to be a fault. Ah, he knew! He could tell it was a faultbecause it kept getting him into trouble. And here was another complicating factor: being the sort of bloke who couldn't get bywithout a regular bird, even before marriage: someone indoors,taking care of things, and being cheated on. Keith had tried gettingby without a regular bird, and his subsequent disintegrations wereinvariably dramatic. All the more reason to keep your mouth shut, if you could, silence being golden, as they said.


Many times, fresh from a session, and out of sheer habit, he wouldfind himself boasting to the boyfriend or the husband of the woman he was cheating with; alternatively, he would find himself boasting to thefather or the brother of the woman he was cheatingon. Dear oh dear.In the early days of their marriage, he had come to the brink of regalingKath with hot news of an uncovenanted encounter. Also, and far moreseriously (how he suffered for it: the recriminations, the self-hatred),he kept hurrying and botching and underdoing his conquests, suchwas his eagerness to get back to the pub and give all the details to hismates. He wanted to stop people in the street and tell them about it. Hewanted to take out announcements in the tabloids. He wanted it onThe Ten O'Clock News,Boing. Unemployment: encouraging figures.Boing. Keith Talent fucks another woman: more later. Boing. He wanted to tell everyone everything about women and sex.


Keith loved to kiss and tell. But what could he tell about Nicola?Not even a kiss. In normal circumstances, lies would have done, andKeith had a paragraph ready in his head (beginning, 'Posh foreignbirds are the worst'). But these were not normal circumstances. Theconversation Keith wanted and needed would be with God thebarman or with Shakespeare, both of whom, like Keith, had a peculiar difficulty with girls. Shakespeare for preference, Shakespe­are being more passive and sympathetic a listener, and Shakespearebeing more discreet (Shakespeare being, in fact, routinely speechless on drugs or drink). The conversation would go like this - and this ishow it went in Keith's head:


'Shakespeare? Listen. I nearly did it. I nearly did it, mate.' 'Bad?''Yeah. That close.' 'She aggravate?' 'Yeah. In a bikini innit.' 'Youusingon that, man.' 'Yeah. But you should have seen her. Praying for it.' That the single worse thing you can think.' 'Yeah yeah.' 'But youcontrol you aggression.' 'Yeah.' 'You show Restraint and Respect.''Yeah. And Regard. Talked myself down.' 'You did good, man.''Yeah cheers.'


The peculiar difficulty with girls experienced by God, Shakespeareand Keith was this difficulty: they raped them. Or they used to. They had all been on the same rehab courses and buddy programmes; theyhad mastered some jargon and tinkertoy psychology; and they didn'tdo it any longer. They could control their aggression. But the mainreason they didn't do it any longer was that rape, in judicial terms(and in Keith's words), was no fucking joke: you just couldn't evercome out a winner, not with this DNA nonsense. The great dayswere gone. Shakespeare and God had both spent a long time in prison for it, and Keith nearly had. Of his two court appearances onrape charges, the first had been more or less okay ('Why, Jacqui,why?' Keith had hollered woundedly from the dock). But the second case wasvery frightening. In the end the girl dropped charges, thankheaven, after Keith sold his motor and gave three and a half thousandquid to her dad. Of course, Keith's rapes were to be viewed quitedistinctly from those numerous occasions when, in his youth, he hadbeen obliged to slap into line various cockteasers and icebergs (andlesbians and godbotherers). Rape was different. Rape was much more like all the other occasions (not so numerous, if you kept Kathout of it) when he had candidly used main force to achieveintercourse and the woman, for one reason or another, hadn'treported him.


Rape was different. And rape capability was what he felt when sheloomed above him on the stairs, her legs planted apart and laughinglike a madwoman, and he reached out his knuckles and touched. Hiswhole body felt like a human throat, his own, full of hot caffeine, fullof tannic, pleading and sobbing for its first cigarette. 'We'll do this atmy speed,' she said. No. No,not your speed.My speed. With the FastForward and the Freeze Frame and a bit of the old SloMo near the end. At a man's speed, with none of the brakes women use if you letthem.Rape, he thought, with abstract terror. Rape is different. It is maximum, like fighting, massively preemptive, with all time gamb­led or cashed, and nothing mattering. One two three four five sixseven eight nine ten. Regard, Respect, Restraint. Lucky there was someone coming up the stairs (who was it? Guy. Guy!). Lucky IrishShirt lived so near. Lucky for Keith. Unlucky for Trish.


Keith was glad he hadn't. Keith was glad he hadn't rapedNicola. Definitely. He was thrilled about the whole thing. Thedoublefight of rape, with all it asked of you, the colossal invest­ment of politico-sexual prestige, and the painful regrets (andminor injuries) it often left you feeling, was no kind of preparationfor a long game of darts - especially a stern test of your character,such as Keith had faced at the Foaming Quart. Besides, raping Nicola would have been quite unnecessary, as his next visit, thenext day, had made — in Keith's view — abundantly clear. Rape, when it happened, was always deeply necessary; and then deeplyunnecessary, half a second later.


Finally, there was no money in rape. Show Keith a rich rapist. Goon: just point one out. There was no money in rape. But there wasmoney, it seemed, in Nicola Six.


Financially, this was not a good time for Keith. Few times were,financially. Even during his best periods, his purple patches of epiphanic swiping and stiffing, of fiddling and gypping and dupingand diddling, when money was coming in hard from all directions,Keith never had a good time, financially. Always, at some point in the day, a bitter destiny lay in wait for him: pennilessness, at Mecca.Always he lost everything, without fail. Well, sometimes he won; but he always persevered until he had lost everything. Kath, who didn'tknow the tenth of it, used to ask where all the money went: where didthey actuallygo, those tenner-crammed brown envelopes, thosetoilet-rolls of twenties? For the day usually began and ended with Keith upending her handbag over the kitchen table or banging at theelectricity meter with his fists. Where did it all go? Kath had askedthis question gently, patiently, and not recently. For it made Keithmad. How could he get anywhere, how could he progress, tied downto a wife with such limited horizons — who thought so small? 'Christ.Investments like,' he told her. 'Currency speculation. Futures.' Infact, Keith did not understand that money could be accumulated, except, perhaps, on an Accumulator, at the betting-shop. On theother hand, to give him credit, Keith didn'tlike it in the betting-shop.It was not a human option tolike it in the betting-shop. Keith didn't mind the banked TV screens, the earache voiceover, the food scrapsand dog-ends: it was more the atmosphere of longshot desperation,as guys in dead shoes and fifty-pence suits stood around trying to predict the future, with nothing to help them but theEvening News.


Now Keith stood at the bar of the Black Cross, having words withThelonius. You couldn't hear them in the noonday surf. Keith worebomber jacket, flared white slacks, white chisels; he drank lager thirstily. Thelonius was immersed in a bristling full-length fur coat, and only rarely consulted his glass of orange juice. Both their faceswere lit by amusement as Thelonius enumerated something on raised ringed fingers. Thelonius laughed with his salmon-coloured tongue.Two blondes stood just outside their force field: Juniper and Pepsi.Lightly bronzed, and with a silvery Scandinavian sheen to her,Juniper was younger, and was Thelonius's. Pepsi was older, and wasanybody's, and had been anybody's for an awful long time. If thestray listener moved closer, he would soon discover that Keith andThelonius were discussing semi-violent crime.


'Calm,man. That's the whole thing:calm,' concluded Thelonius.'A golden opportunity. Think about it, man. Give it your considera­tion. All I ask.'


'Nah,' said Keith. He shook his head. 'Nah. I appreciate it, pal.Don't think I don't. I wish you all the luck in the world. In allsincerity. I'm not like some. I like seeing my mates making decentbread. It's, it's just -'


'It's your darts. Say no more, man. It's your darts.'


'Yeah.' Keith nodded. He was greatly moved. He sniffed and said,'I can't do it, mate. No way can I imperil my darts, not now. Noway. As I move into the public eye.'


'I hear you,' said Thelonius, also moved.


'Yeah cheers, Thelonius.'


Thelonius gripped Keith's shoulder. 'But if you reconsider . . . ?’


'Yeah.'


'Yeah.'


'Yeah.'


Thelonius studied the heavy ingot of his watch and wiggled a fingerfor his blonde. Juniper came forward. Pepsi remained, and lookedmeaningly at Keith, who stared hard at her as he headed for the door.


Keith and Clive made their way down the Portobello Road. As theypassed Mecca, Keith slowed to a halt. Then he straightened hisshoulders, and walked on. He wasn't going in there. No way. Hewasn't going in there because he didn't have any money - because he hadalready been in there. A honk sounded: Thelonius flashing past,the girl's blonde hair scrabbling at the half-open side window. Keithwaved, feeling the asceticism of him who strives along a quieter road,to a far greater prize. The spade lifestyle, though, he thought, as heturned down Elgin Crescent — it made a lot of good sense. Especially the way they dealt with their birds. When they took out their walletsand showed you their photos: after the blondes, after all the PointerSisters and Marvellettes and Supremes, there'd be one black bird withbuck teeth and young eyes. And you'd say, 'That your cousin or something then, Wes?' And they'd shake their heads (they took yourpoint) and say: 'Babymamma.' You see, that was the bird they hadbabies with, or at least gave babies to. Thelonius has four or five kids in a basement in Leamington Road Villas. Only go round there once afortnight, on Giro day. Then you're back in the pub with the blondeand the child benefit. Now even the flashest white bloke didn't seem tobe able to swing that. If Keith had been inclined to think in Darwinianterms, he might have said to himself that the additional blondes werepure gravy for the brothers, because they kept the black bird-poolhigh. Nevertheless, he understood, and nodded slowly. Ideal arrange­ment. Brilliant, really. And that way you got the enjoyment of havingchildren (that lovely warm glow of pride) without them ever beingaround. Stay well clear, until they're older: football. No more nappies.Whenwas that ? At two ? At nine ? The spades had their own traditions.Others, others of us chose to accept and duly shoulder ourresponsibilities. White man's burden. Civilization as such. His moodsteeply worsening, Keith shoved himself through the CostCheckdoors, gave the nod to Basim, leaned through the cage and borrowed ahalf of vodka from Harun, tethered Clive to the stockroom doorknob,and furiously trudged down the stairs to pay his last call on Trish Shirt.


And it was definitely going to happen with Nicola Six - financially,too. Of this Keith was now supremely confident. The only worry waswhen.With the rape moment successfully endured and mastered, he could probably wait for the sex. But could he wait for the money?


It was all abouttime. Time was everywhere present, was massivelyoperational, in the life Keith moved through. He saw how it strafedpeople (look at Pepsi!), how it blew them away, how it wasted them.He saw the darts players on TV: every year there was always a freshnew face - and after half a season it looked like an old one. Incommon with Leo Tolstoy, Keith Talent thought of time as movingpast him while he just stayed the same. In the mirror every morning:same old Keith. None the wiser. But in his soul he could tell whattime was doing. Keith, who had gone through his midlife crisis at theage of nineteen, didn't expect time to leave him alone, no, not for a moment.


Look at Pepsi. It used to do Keith's heart good watching little PepsiHoolihan as she flitted like a butterfly from pub to pub along thePortobello Road. And this, it seemed, was only the other day!Popular girl — a breath of fresh air. Everybody loved little Pepsi.Some nights, when she'd had more Peculiar Brews than were strictly speaking good for her, why, Keith himself would take her round theback and they'd have a bit of fun. All it cost you was a Peculiar Brew.Riding high, was Pepsi: had the world — in the form of a few pubs along the Portobello Road - at her feet innit. It was hard to credit thisnow. Keith hated to see her these days. And so did everybody else.Alas. It was fair enough and a sound career move for a bird to changetack when she was getting on in years. You go where you'reappreciated, and black blokes did love blondes. For a while, anyway.And then they got old even faster. A shocking sight, today, PepsiHoolihan in the Black Cross, whining for drinks from the dudesround the pool table with whiskers coming out of her ears. I mean, attwenty-four...Of course, Trish Shirt was much older: twenty-seven. If Keith dumped her, which he intended to do, and do soon,like today at the latest, Trish wouldn't have many options, even supposing she was mobile. He couldn't see her enjoying a long second wind, a year, six months, poncing vodkas off the brothers inreturn for God knows what. They've their own way of doing things and you got to respect that, but they didn't half treat birds horrible. Then, looking at it realistically (I'm a realist, thought Keith - alwayshave been), if she had a bit of sense and looked after herself, shemight make babymamma for some old Rasta. Like Shakespeare.Shakespeare's babymamma. Jesus. Keith exhaled through tubed lips.Time waits . . . Time don't wait. It just don't wait. Just marcheson. At the double.Take me, thought Keith (and it was like a line of poetry twanging in his head, like a cord, drawing him in),take me -take me where rich women want to fuck me.


'Poor you. You're hungover. All that celebrating, I should think,from your darts. Well you deserve it. Now take off your coat and sitdown at the table and read your paper. I'll make you a nice spicyBullshot. Believe me, it's the best thing.'


Keith did what he was told, pausing, as he sat, to wipe a tear fromhis eye, a tear of gratitude perhaps. On the other hand, the weatherhad turned again, and everyone's eyes were smarting in the drymineral wind, a wind speckled with dust and spore, with invisiblelamentation. A log fire, Keith noted, burned confidently in thehearth. Coming up the stairs Keith had been uneasily aware that he had nothing in his hands, no prop, no marker; his fingers missed thefeel of the shower attachment, the coffee-grinder, the heavy iron. He had no burden. Only the folded tabloid, which was with him all day,under the armpit like Nelson's telescope . . . This he now carefully unfurled and flattened out on the table among the books and fashionmagazines.Elle.Women in Love.He looked up coolly every nowand then, in the gaps between jokes, horoscope, cartomancy column, agony aunt, kiss and tell. He could see her in the kitchen, efficiently,elegantly and as it were fondly preparing his drink. Nicola waswearing a shirt and tie, and a pinstripe suit of playfully generous cut.She might have been the illustration to an article about the woman who had everything. Everything except children. Nicola Six: no­body's babymamma.


'Seychelles,' said Keith half-absently as she placed the interestingdrink near his bunched right hand. Then he raised his head. But shehad moved past his back and was now standing in quarter-profile bythe desk, calmly going through a diary, and humming to herself.'Bali,' Keith added.


'Them that's got shall get,' sang Nicola, 'them that's not shall lose.So theBible said .. .'


Lovely moment really, he thought. I ought to savour it. She has away of slowing everything down. She doesn't just plonk herself on achair, like some.Yack yack yack.She lets you get your bearings. Whydon't more birds do that? So fucking important to a man. Look ather hair. Beautiful cut. Christ, they must do it strand by strand.None of this ten minutes under the blaster at Madame Pom-Pom's.I bet she goes to Bond Street or somewhere . . . and Keith's mindslid off down a gleaming arcade of rich mirrors, black velvet,ticking heels, stockinged ankles. The funny thing is, the really funnything is: soon, one of these days (okay: her own speed), the womanover there is going to be sitting on the couch overthere, by the TV,sitting on my lap, well fucked, and watching the darts.


'I've been watching the darts', she said,'— on television. Tell mesomething, Keith. Why do all the players drink lager? Only lager?'


'Intelligent question. Good talking point. It's like this. Your topdarter is travelling the land, from pub to pub. Now beers vary.Some of them local brews, couple pints and you're well pissed. Butlager . . .'


'Yes?'


'But lager'skegged. It'skegged. Standard. You know what you'regetting. Now the darter has to drink. Has to. To loosen thethrowing arm. Part of his job. But within reason. You know likeyou set yourself a limit. Like ten pints. Pacing it out over anevening.'


'I see.'


'Kegged. You know what you're getting.'


As a talking point, the part played by lager in the working life ofa top darter seemed to be close to exhaustion. But then thetelephone rang. Nicola looked at her watch and said,


'Excuse me for a moment, Keith. I'll need silence . . . Guy? Wait. This isn't me. It's a tape. I apologize, but I didn't trust myself to talkto you unmediated. I didn't trust my resolve. You see — dear Guy,thank you for all the sentiments you have awoken in me. It was wonderful to . . .'


Tape? thought Keith. Keith wasn't altogether comfortable.Among other things, he was trying to suppress a cough, and hiswatery gaze strained over the clamp of his hand. Goes on a bit. AndI don't like the sound of this Lawrence she'll be looking at with neweyes. Brush-off innit, he thought, with sadness, with puzzlement,even with anger. Jesus, might as well be off out of here and get towork. Hark at her.


'... how absolutely and unconditionally I mean that, I'll neverforget you. Think of me sometimes. Goodbye.’


Nicola turned to Keith and slowly kissed the vertical forefinger shehad raised to her lips.


He held silence until the receiver went down. Then he coughedlong and heavingly. When Keith's vision cleared Nicola was standingthere with her open and expectant face.


Lost for words, Keith said, 'Shame. So it didn't work out.' Hecoughed again, rather less searchingly, and added, 'All over, is it?'


'To tell you the truth, Keith, it hasn't really begun. For him the ideais the thing. Guy's a romantic, Keith.'


'Yeah? Yeah, he does dress funny. He said, he told me he was"tracing" someone.'


'Oh that,' she said boredly. 'That was just some crap I made up to get money out of him. It'll come.'


This bird, thought Keith, now hang on a minute: this bird is reallyseriously good news. She's a fucking miracle. Where she been all mylife?


'Money for you, Keith. Why should he have it all?'


'Caviare. Uh, when?'


'I think you can afford to be patient. I must do this at my ownspeed. Not very long at all. And really quite a lot of money.'


'Beluga,' said Keith. He nodded sideways at the telephone andwent on admiringly, 'You're quite a little actress, aren't youNick?'


'Nicola. Oh, literally so, Keith. Come and sit here. There'ssomething I want to show you.'


It was all electrifying, every second of it. Every frame of it. Keithwatched the screen in a seizure of fascination. In fact he was almost sickened by this collision or swirl of vying realities: the woman onthe couch whose hair he could smell, and the girl inside the television,the girl on the tape. It might have overloaded him entirely if theelectric image hadn't clearly belonged to the past. So he could still say to himself that TV was somewhere else: in the past. Not that Nicolahad aged, or aged in the sense he knew, become gruesomelywitchified, like Pepsi, or just faded, nearly faded from sight, likeKath. The woman on the couch was more vivid (time-strengthened),richer in every sense than the girl on the screen, who none the less .. .Brooding, tousled, lip-biting Nicola, poor little rich girl, in a play;tanned, keen, wide-mouthed Nicola, in a series of adverts, for sunglasses; white-saronged, ringleted, pouring Nicola, not actuallyCleopatra but one of her handmaidens, in Shakespeare. Then thefinale: the pre-credits sequence of a feature film (her debut, herswansong), a striptease in the back room of a gentleman's club full ofsweating young stockbrokers, and Nicola up on a table wearing ametal showercap and, at first, the usual seven veils, dancing withminimal movements but with fierce address of eyes and mouth until,just before she vanished in the smoke and the shadow, you saw allher young body.


That it?' said Keith with a jolt.


'I get killed later on. You don't see it. You just hear about it. Later.'


'Jesus, beautiful. You know,' he said, not because it was true butbecause he thought she would want to hear it, 'you haven't changed abit.'


'Oh I'mmuch better now. Listen. You run into Guy pretty often,don't you?'


'Consistently,' said Keith, suddenly very pitiless.


'Good. Next time, but leave it a day or two - tell him this.'


Soon afterwards, as she was showing him out, Nicola added,


'Have you got all that? Are you sure? And for God's sake don'toverdo it. Lay it on, but don't overdo it. And mention the globe.'


'Jack Daniels.'


'Well then. Be good. And come and see me again very soon.'-


Keith turned. She was right. Shewas better. When you see photosand that of them young, you think they're going to be as good as theyare now, only newer. But it wasn't like that, not with Nick. Only theeyes, only the pupils, looked as though they'd been around. Whatwas it ? Class skirt — and some foreign skirt too — they needed time forthe flesh to get interesting. They pour oil on themselves. Massage.TV. Idle rich innit. . . Class skirt, he thought: but she wasn'twearing a skirt. Them baggy trousers (not cheap), so puffy there youhad no notion of the shape that was hiding within.


'Old Grandad,' said Keith, and coughed lightly. 'Come on, Nick.Your speed - okay. I respect that. I'll exercise restraint. But give mesomething. To keep me warm at night. Show me you care.'


'Nicola. Of course,' she said, and leant forward, and showed himshe cared.


'. . . Yeah cheers.'


'Look! I've got one more thing to show you.'


She opened a closet, and there, pinned to the back of the door, wasa poster from the long run at Brighton, Nicola full length in tunic andblack tights with her hair up, hands on hips and looking over hershoulder, the wild smile graphically enhanced:Jack and the Bean­stalk.


She laughed and said, 'What do you think?'


'Jim Beam,' said Keith. 'Benedictine.Porno.'


'. . .What?' said Nicola.


The books in Keith Talent's apartment. There weren't many booksin Keith Talent's apartment. There weren't many books in hisgarage, either. But there were some.


There were six: theA - D, theE- K,the L -R, theS - Z (the moderncheat being heavily and exasperatedly reliant on thetelephone),Darts: Master the Discipline, and a red pad which had notitle apart fromStudents Note Book - Ref. 138 - Punched for filingand which, perhaps, could be notionally christenedA Darter's Diaryor, more simply,The Keith Talent Story. Here it was that Keithlogged his intimate thoughts, most (but not all) of them darts-related. For example:


You cuold have a house so big you could have sevral dart board areas in it, not just won. With a little light on top.


Or:


Got to practice the finishing, got to. Go round the baordreligiously. You can have all the power in the world but its nogood if you can not finish.


Or:


Tedn Tendnen  Keep drifting to the left on the third dart, allthem fuckign treble fives.


Rereading this last gobbet, Keith made thetsuh sound. He reached for his dart-shaped biro and crossed outfuckign. Letting out a briefgrunt of satisfaction, and dotting thei with a flourish, he wrote infucking.Keith wiped a tear from his eye: he was in a strange mood.


The conversation with Guy Clinch, completed earlier that day inthe Black Cross, had developed naturally enough. Keith could atleast say this for himself: he had been good, and done as he was told.


'Whew, mate,' he'd remarked as Guy joined him at the bar. 'Youdon't look too clever.'


'Yes I know.’


Keith peered closer with a wary sneer. 'No. You definitely donotlook overly brill.'


'I think I must have a bug or something.'


Not that Guy ever looked as radiant as Keith believed he ought to.Personally, and having seen Guy's house, Keith wondered why Guywasn't rubbing his hands together and grinning his head off all thehours there were. But oh no: not him. Keith was habitually impatientwith Guy's habitual expression, one of temporary and precariousserenity, the face raised and slightly tilted, and the eyes wanly blinking. Today, though, his head was down and he seemed to havelost his colour and his money glow. Like every other male Caucasianin the pub, Guy was being shot in black and white. He was warfootage, like everybody else.


'It must be going round,' said Keith. 'I tell you who else ain't in thebest of health: that Nicola.'


Guy's head dropped another inch.


'Yeah. I went round there. You know I got all that stuff mendedfor her? Well they all went wrong again, you know, like they do.'This was true enough; but when Keith quietly offered to go anothermile with GoodFicks, Nicola just shrugged and said it wasn't worth it. 'Anyway she's definitely under the weather. Know what it lookedlike to me? Apaphy. Apaphy. Staring out of the window. Playing with that globe thing. Sad little smile on its face.'


Guy's head dropped another inch.


'Like —' Keith coughed and went on, 'like she was pining. Pining.Pining its little heart out. . . Jesus Christ, look at the state of thatPepsi Hoolihan. I can't get over it. I haven't seen her for a few weeks,that's what it is. She looked bad enough in the summer but look ather now. She looks like fucking Nosferatu. Cheer up, pal. Here. I gotone for you.'


And then, after Guy had crept off and Keith was standing therethinking how nice and simple life could be sometimes, God andPongotook him aside and told him, in accents of grim apology,about the visit to the Black Cross of Kirk Stockist, Lee Crook andAshley Royle . . .


This news shouldn't have surprised Keith, and it didn't surprisehim. It merely frightened him a very great deal. Ah, money, alwaysthe money. As noted earlier, Keith was not in the healthiest shape, financially. His position as regards rent, rates, utilities, police finesand Compensations, hire purchase, and so on and so forth, was aninch from disaster. But it was always an inch from disaster... In thegaragethere Keith's dusty face hardened as he spat on to the floorand reached for the bottle of stolen vodka. This was the thing: he hadbeen borrowing money on the street, more particularly on ParadineStreet, in the East End. He had been borrowing money from aloanshark called Kirk Stockist. Unable to repay Kirk Stockist, heneeded money for the heavy interest—the vig, the vig, the vertiginousvigesimal. To pay the vig, he had been borrowing money fromanother loanshark called Lee Crook. It seemed like a neat arrange­ment at the time, but Keith knew it to be fraught with danger,especially when he started borrowing money from Ashley Royle topay the vig on the loan from Lee Crook. Through it all Keith had hoped and expected everything to come good at Mecca. And ithadn't. And nothing else had either. His own business interests hadrecently unravelled in a chaos of no-shows on the part of othercheats-catastrophic welshings and skankings that caused low whistleseven among Keith's acquaintance, among poolroom hoodlums,touchy car thieves, embittered granny-jumpers. Now Keith thoughtvenomously of his betrayal at the hands of that fucking old fraudLady Barnaby, and gave a shudder as he recalled the price that her jewellery had fetched. Driving down Blenheim Crescent the other day, Keith had clenched his fist and said'Yesss' when he saw thatLady B's psychopathic boiler had eventually blown its top; the roofof the house looked like Reactor No. 4 at Chernobyl - or ReactorNo. 6, at Thierry. Oh, how Keith longed to forget his cares andthrow himself into his darts! Darts it was that had caused him toneglect his cheating: the hours of practice, and also the days of celebration, when that practice bore fruit at theochй.And there wasNicola: time-consuming too in her way, and promising uncertainrewards. Old Nick: does it at her own speed like. Keith's jawdropped open affectionately as he thought of their session in front ofthe TV, how he had begged for the Freeze Frame and the normal Play, and how she had whisked them on brutally with the Fast Forward from highlight to highlight. . .


The telephone rang and Keith did something he hadn't done in awhile: he answered it. 'Ashley!' he said. Keith didn't say much after that. He just periodically said 'Yeah' - perhaps half a dozen times. Then he said, 'Right. Right. Yeah cheers, lads.'


Solemnly Keith picked upDarts: Master The Discipline andturned to one of its most stirring passages. He read:Whilst darts is basically a twentieth-century sport, darts go wayback into the English folk Heritage. Those famed English archersare said to have played a form of darts prior to defeating theFrench at the proverbial Battle of Agincourt in 1415.


Keith looked up. 1415! he thought. 'Heritage,' he murmuredrichly.


How many times, how many, many times had he chalked for hisfather, at the chalkboards of the dartboards of the pubs of London,where he was raised. Dad would be playing, usually, with Jonathan Friend, or with Mr Purchase: Chick's dad. And if little Keith made amistake with the sums .. . Standing in the garage, Keith raised apalm to his cheek and felt it burning, still burning, alwaysburning. ..


But we mustn't go too far back, must we, we mustn't go too farback in anybody's life. Particularly when they're poor. Because if wedo, if we go too far back — and this would be a journey made in aterrible bus, with terrible smells and terrible noises, with terriblewaits and terrible jolts, a journey made in terrible weather forterrible reasons and for terrible purposes, in terrible cold or terrible heat, with terrible stops for terrible snacks, down terrible roads to aterrible room - then nobody is to blame for anything, and nothingmatters, and everything is allowed.


Ashley Royle, Lee Crook and Kirk Stockist had told Keith that ifhe didn't give them all the money they wanted by Friday, then theywould, among other things, break the middle finger of his right hand. This, of course, was Keith's courting finger: even more centrally, itwas his darting finger. He finished his vodka, straightened his flares,put on his windcheater (even the wind Keith cheated) and went off to try to find Thelonius, to talk to him about semi-violent crime.


Keith has started asking me for money. I knew this would happen.


Late last night we had a stand-up snack at Conchita's. Keith hadwords with Conchita's daughter. He wanted thechili rilienos. In duecourse a plate of devilled plutonium was set before him. It bubbledaudibly, and gave off thick plumes of ebony and silver. I wasreminded of the splattings and belchings of Sulphur Springs, in St Lucia (land of Thelonius's fathers). Keith took a matter-of-fact firstmouthful and stood there with smoke coming out of his nose andasked me to give him money.


I want to give him money. I really don't need this Theloniusbusiness. Thelonius is a joke criminal anyway, riding a farcical luckystreak. What if it all goes wrong, which it will? Keith canned: Keithout of the action. I can't bear to see them hunkered down together inthe Black Cross, saying things like 'Payday' and 'Bingo'. They'veeven got a crappy little map. On the other hand I don't want Keith'sdarting finger broken either, that precious, multi-functioned digit,on which he further depends for his Americanized obscene gestures.


No, I want to give Keith money. (I want to give Thelonius moneytoo.) But the trouble is I don't have any. And Keith needs so much, sosoon, and will presently need more. Why no call, no deal, norapturous jackpot from Missy Harter? Why? Why?


Mindful of Heisenberg's principle that an observed systeminevitably interacts with its observer — and aware too that the decentanthropologist never meddles with his tribe - I decided not to tellNicola about Keith and semi-violent crime. Then I told Nicola aboutKeith and semi-violent crime. I told her to get moving and give Keithmoney. It's okay, she says. She just 'knows' that the crime of semi-violence will take place, and it'll be okay. How I wish I could share inher hope - the awakened, lips parted, the new ships . . .


Well, I told Keith no. He stared my way in what I took to beanti-Semitic silence for about fifteen seconds, and then went taciturnon me. At least 1 think he went taciturn on me. I don't know whatthatchili rilienos was doing to his insides (it evenmeans 'red-ass'),but his tongue looked like a reefer knot. 'That's more like it,Conchita,'he eventually croaked.


I felt bad. I do owe him something. After all, where would I be without Keith?


The snack was cheap and I handled it.


Death seems to have solved my posture problem - and improvedmy muscle tone. What jogging and swimming and careful eatingnever quite managed, death is pulling off with no trouble at all. I recline with burger and fries, while death completes its own stay-fitprogramme. And with none of that sweating and grunting which some of us consider so unattractive.


Yes, for the present I flatter myself that death is having a good effect on my appearance. I definitely look more intelligent. Is thiswhy Lizzy boo digs me? I look almost messianic. The skin istightening under my jaw and over my temples, and gaining in glow.In death I shine. In death I am — I am beautiful. As cosmeticist andshape-up coach, my condition is doing a fine job. It's a little painful,true - but all good things hurt. Apart from what it does to the eyes (red-tendrilled, and swelling, or growing), the death-effect reallyisn't too bad. Apart from the eyes and the death.


I accompany Lizzyboo and Hope and Guy and Dink Heckler to the tennis club in Castellain Road. I sit on an umpire's chair andwatch. Mixed doubles: Guy paired with Lizzyboo, facing Hope andDink, the South African number seven...I don't think Guy sees what's brewing between Dink and Hope. Poor Guy. He's like me, myself. We're here. But we're not here. When we look up our eyesfind the same cloud, heavy and queasy and low-flying, the colour of an avocado, yes, and with a query of vinaigrette in its core.


Unsmiling, in supercasual sportswear, and as hairy as a tarantula,Dink is the one they all want to see, here at the club; the palesecretaries and treasurers, the ageing pros, the brilliant black kids come by to admire and envy Dink's power and touch, his rollover backhand, his snorting smashes. Wearing grey socks, grey shoes, khaki shorts and half a kaftan, Guy is easily the most rhythmless ofthe four, the least determined, and the worst adapted (his generous confirmations and disavowals, his compulsive apologies, almost asregular as the sound of bat on ball) . . . But it was the ladies I hadcome to see.


Equally tall and brown and resplendent they are also bothequipped with bravura backhands and the special looping secondserve. Optimum use has been made of the available material, withinvestment here and outlay there, at the tennis ranch and the tennis clinic. They swoop and swoon in their whites. Of course, Lizzybooboasts even more sap and down than Hope, her older sister.Yuck, they both say, when the shot goes awry.


Hope plays with severity (she is as firm and strict as the pleats onher skirt), Lizzyboo with laughter and friendly ambition. Hopeassumes a vexed expression when she plays her shots (fending off that big fuzzy bug). Get lost! her strokes seem to say. Lizzyboo'persuades' or 'caresses' the ball.Come here, says her racket.Comeback.But if the girls were playing singles, there would be nothing in it— they would be perfectly matched. Their throats shine as they grinand shriek. They must have a hundred teeth between them. When thebalance and the skill and the timing were being handed out, the sisters were given the same amount of tennis talent. But Lizzyboodefinitely got the tits.


The set went to six-six, to the tie-break. Withdrawn and indolentuntil now, Dink exploded with a horrible competence, lunging fromtramline to tramline to poach his volleys, beetling backwards ontiptoe for the whorfing overheads. He came on all masterful with Hope: hand on shoulder for the jock-intimate huddles between eachpoint, and the approving, the legitimizing pat of his rackethead on her rump. Also, to my fascination, he started thinking it would be good if he gunned for Guy at the net. Lizzyboo's short second servewould kick up in girlish invitation, and there would be Dink, wriggling into his ravenous wind-up, cocking every muscle to drillthat yellow bullet into Guy's waiting mouth. And Guy neverflinched. He fell over two or three times, and one ball scorched hishairline; but he didn't back off. He just got to his feet and apologized.At six-zero Dink aced Lizzyboo with shameless savagery, and then half-turned, his mouth white and tight and starkly crenellated, as hecuffed the spare ball toward my chair. Nobody takes a set off theSouth African number seven. Nobody. Unless of course he's the South African number six. That asshole. It didn't occur to him thatLizzyboo and Hope and Guy would be pretty good at tennis too, if they didnothing else the whole time.


Lizzyboo came and stood beside me and laid a hot head on myshoulder. I commiserated. Hope sat with Dink. Guy sat alone. He satalone staring straight ahead with a towel across his knees...Ofcourse, Lizzyboo had a thing with Dink, some time ago. And there isthis sexual plagiarism which operates between the two sisters.Lizzyboo had a thing with Dink. And it didn't work out.


And it won't work out with me either. Pretty soon she will startwondering what is wrong with her. She will become ashamed. Aren'tpeople amazing? I guess I ought to come clean. But I can't. I don't want it to get around. I'll just have to tell her that I love another.


This feels terrible. She rests her head on my shoulder. I should be taking powerful drags of her toasty sweat, her life vapours. Instead, Iavert my jaw. This feels terrible, like a mean parody of love. On the tennis court, I notice, Dink saysnothing instead oflove. Fifteen-nothing. Nothing-thirty. Even on the tennis court love has gone;even on the tennis court love has been replaced by nothing.


I've started reading books to little Kim. They're about the onlybooks I can manage these days. She's interested, and seems to concentrate, particularly when she's lulled by her bottle.


When she drinks from her bottle she sounds like someone windinga watch. She's winding a watch, against her future time.


'How I wish — how I wish, Nicola, that I could share yourconfidence, your belief that all will yet be well.' 'Yes, it's nice to havesuch a rosy view of things.' 'I've got to run. Or go, anyway. Listen. This is somewhat embarrassing.' 'For you or for me?' There are twothings I need from you — from the horse's mouth. First off, could youget Keith to unbutton a little. I need his P.O.V.' 'His what?' 'Hispoint of view. I'm not sure he knows what "discretion" really means.He still sings, but it cramps his style. Lift the D-notice a little. Just tellhim to shut up around Guy.' 'Okay. Consider it fixed.' 'Great.''That's not embarrassing. What's the other thing?'


I dropped my head. Then I raised it and said, 'Your kisses. It wouldhelp if I knew how you kissed.'


She laughed recklessly. Then she gathered herself up from the chair and came forward.


I held up a finger. 'This isn't a pitch or anything.'


'No no. My stuff doesn't work on you. Isn't that right?'


That's right. Come on. You kissed Keith.'


'After a fashion.'


'And I figure you'll kiss Guy next time.'


'Absolutely. But wouldn't this be a dangerous precedent? I mean,where's it going to end?'


'So you'll be going further. With both of them. Of course. Howfar? All the way. Where else. Relax,' I said. 'Sexually I'm deadalready. Sexually I'm Postman Pat. I just need a couple of pointers forthe next chapter.'


'Can't you makeanything up? All this literalism. You know, it's the death of love.'


'You needn't worry. You won't catch my fatal disease.'


'Why wouldI care?'


We were standing there with our force fields touching. I felt nothing in the heart but my face had begun to tremble. 'Go on,' Isaid. 'Give me a kiss.'


She placed her wrists on my shoulders. She shrugged and said,'Which one?'


I get back late and the goddamned pipes are at full throttle. Suchmoronic bugling — I think of Guy's cock or rooster, Guy'sgallo,so far away, so long ago. I walk at speed around the apartment with myhands pressed over my ears. Christ, is the wholehouse dying?


Oh, the pipes, and their brute pain. I hear you. I hear you, brother. Brother, Ihear you.


Chapter11: The Concordance of Nicola Six's Kisses


n the concordanceof Nicola Six's kisses there were manysubheads and subsections, many genres and phyla - chapter andverse, cross-references, multiple citations. The lips were broad andmalleably tremulous, the tongue was long and powerful and assharp-pronged as a sting. That mouth was a deep source, a deepsource of lies and kisses. Some of the kisses the mouth dispensed wereevanescent, unrecallable, the waft or echo of a passing butterfly (orits ghost, hovering in the wrong dimension). Others were assearching and detailed as a periodontal review: you came out fromunder them entirely plaque-free. The Rosebud, the Dry Application,Anybody's, Clash of the Incisors, Repulsion, the Turning Diesel,Mouthwash, the Tonsillectomy, Lady Macbeth, the Readied Pussy,Youth, the Needer, the Gobbler, the Deliquescent Virgin. Namedlike a new line of cocktails or the transient brands of Keith'sperfumes: Scandal, Outrage . . . Named like the dolls and toys - the rumour and voodoo - of an only child.


One kiss was especially tricky (it resisted description - it resistedeverything), featuring as it did two apparent opposites: passionatedemurral and outright inexorability. You had to fix things so thatyour partner, or opponent, felt your desperate reluctance even asyour lips homed in on his. Halfway between the Needer and theDeliquescent Virgin, it was particularly handy after fights, or whenyou wanted to turn a man around again within the space of a fewseconds (out of decrepit satiation it snatched shocking renewal). Thiswas the kiss she would bestow on Guy Clinch. Looming forward, hewould enfold her with his height. She would blink up at him inadorable distress - a distress not altogether feigned, because she did pity him the torments that were destined to come his way. With thiskiss, you didn't move your feet but it felt like tiptoe. A strainingaspiration in the breast, while the mouth, if it could, seemed to want toturn and hide. But it couldn't. Now overseen by an invisibleinteraction, their lips would inch closer. The kiss was called the Wounded Bird.


Physically, it was among her mildest. At the other end of theescalation ladder—intense, athletic, hard core—was a kiss she seldom used: unforgivably, it was called the Jewish Princess. Nicola learned itfrom a pornographic film she had seen long ago in Barcelona, but itsassociations all lay elsewhere. Rich, vulgar, young, plump, effortlesslymultiorgasmic and impossibly avid: a squanderer's kiss, the kiss of animpossible self-squanderer. Whereas, in the Wounded Bird, thetongue was conspicuous only by its shimmering absence (thatbutterfly again, caught in a screened chamber), the Jewish Princesswasall tongue — and not its tip but its trunk, its meat: brute tongue.Here, the tongue did duty for every organ, male and female, the heartincluded. Such a kiss was more a weapon than a wand; a weapon of theexponential kind (one that called upon the speed of light), because itwas almost unusably powerful. The Jewish Princess wasinordinate.Applied at the right moment, it made a man kneel on the floor with his chequebook in his hands. Applied at the wrong moment (and Nicolacould certainly pick these wrong moments), it could finish a love affairin half a minute: the man would be backing towards the door, andstaring, one hand raised, and the sleeve pressed to his lips. 'I'm sorry—don't go,' she once said. 'I didn't mean it: it was an accident.' No use.To achieve the Jewish Princess you brought your tongue out to its full extent and let it rest on the lower lipbefore the kiss began. Thus thekiss, when it came, was from the second mouth.


The kiss was called the Jewish Princess — unforgivably. But then thekiss itself was unforgivable. The Jewish Princess was unforgivable.


And what about a kiss for Keith ? What about a smacker for the kisserof Keith Talent?


When he came in that time — tabloid wedged under armpit, windedjeans, wall-eyed hangover- Nicola couldn't help it. She made herselfhuge and bristled above him saying,'You know the iron and the coffee-grinder and the vacuum-cleaneryou had fixed?'


'...Yeah?'


'Well they'veall gone wrong again.'


Keith stared back at her, the dry tongue waiting on the lower teeth.


Nicola waited, too, until the itch, the heat-flash, the eczema of detestation had passed through her and moved on somewhere else.Then she changed: she made herself small. She could be big and shecould be small but mostly she was big and when things went wrongthey went wrong on a big scale. Bath overflows, heavy tumbles, broken beds.


'Yeah well it's the way of the fucking world innit. Jesus. I come uphere . . .'


She made herself small. She compressed her body into thegamesome folds of her pinstriped suit. She clasped her hands. Shedropped her head - so that she could peer up at him as she gently said,


'Poor you. You're hungover. All that celebrating, I should think,from your darts. Well, you deserve it.' She reached out to help him offwith his electric-blue windcheater, promising him a nice spicyBullshot. 'Believe me,' she said, 'it's the best thing.'


Nicola halved the .lemon, opened the can ofconsommй,ground thepepper, poured the vodka. Every now and then she looked at him as she worked, shaking her head and whispering to herself. Her projecthad been to get through men — to get to the end of men. And what didthat leave her with ? There he sat at the table, fiercely frowning over his paper, as if it were a route-map, guiding him to buried treasure. Theround and hairless forearms lay flat on either margin. You could endthe thing now: by going over and whisking it out from under his gaze. Keith would kill for his tabloid. Any day.


'Seychelles,' he said, impermissibly, as she placed the glass sixinches from his fat right hand. Unable to do more for the moment,Nicola effaced herself, standing at the corner table and looking downblindly at her diary. Heat scattered through her. 'Bali,' he added . . .She had a question ready: to do with darts. In a silent trauma ofcontempt, broken only by the occasional incredulous cackle, Nicolahad been watching the darts on television. A twenty-stone man threw a twenty-gram nail at a lump of cork, while the crowd screamed forblood. Tiddlywinks in a bearpit. This was some destiny.


Anyway she asked the question, and he answered it; then she movedup behind him and looked over his shoulder. The centre pages ofKeith's tabloid were devoted to tabloid-sized photographs of themovie-star Burton Else and his bride Liana. Big Liana wore a smallbikini. Burton Else wore some kind of thong or opaque condom. Hishead, no larger than an avocado, blazed out above an invertedpyramid of organ meat. The accompanying text concerned itself with the Elses' marriage agreement: damage-limitation for Burton, in theevent of a divorce.


'Burton Else, innit,' said Keith, with what seemed to be a touch ofpride. 'And Liana.'


'They come and they go,' said Nicola. 'Every few years the worldfeels the need for another male literalist.'


'Pardon?'


'I wonder how many million she gets a year,' Nicola continued, 'forgoing along with the notion that he isn't a faggot.'


Could anything surprise Nicola? Was she surprisable? Onewonders. Keith now half-turned to her slowly, all patience lost, gone,as if she'd been bugging him for hours andthis was it.


'Him?' he said loudly. 'Burton Else? Fuck off.'


She took a step backwards, away from this. Then she folded herarms and said, 'An obvious and well-known faggot. A celebratedfaggot.'


Keith's eyes closed longsufferingly (give him strength).


She said, 'Come on. I mean, who cares, but look at his face. On topof that body? She deserves the money. It must be a full-time joblooking the other way.'


'Not Burton Else. Not Burton.'


Nicola wondered how far she ought to go with this. It was, in fact,common knowledge about Burton Else. Anyone who followed themovies knew about Burton Else (and Nicola followed them closely). Itwas even clear from the trades: constant static between certainpressure groups and the studio lawyers. Yes, it was common know­ledge about Burton: but not as common as theother knowledge abouthim, the big-screen and video knowledge, which said how much heloved his country and his women and his machine-guns. Burton had anew wife in every film (before she got slain by samurai or Red Indiansor Guatemalans, or some other band of intellectuals): how theseblondes adored their Burton, how they oiled and ogled him, andencouraged him with his bodybuilding! Christ, thought Nicola,hasn't everyone caught on by now? (She was intrigued by thehomosexual world, but finally disapproved of it, because she wasexcluded from it.) The workout king, the erection lookalike: however fearless and patriotic you made him, however many wives and Biblesand three-foot Bowie knives you gave him, he still belonged to lockerrooms, cuboid buttocks, testosterone hotels.


'Burton Else's a happily married man,' said Keith. 'He loves his wife. Loves the woman. Do anything for her.'


Nicola waited, thinking about love, and watching the dullinvitation to violence subside in Keith's eyes.


'Camera don't lie like. That last film he was always giving her one.She wasn't complaining, no way. She said nobody did it quite likeBurton.'


'Yeah,' said Nicola, and leant forward with her hands on the tablelike a teacher, 'and he probably had to stagger into his trailer or hisbungalow to throw up between takes. He's a fruit, Keith. And as I said,who cares ? Don't worry. It does your masculinity credit that you can't see it. It takes one to know one. And you aren't one, are you Keith.'


'No danger,' he said automatically. Then for a few seconds he blinked steadily on a heartbeat rhythm. And his face creased in childish unhappiness. 'But if...but then . . . but he . . .'


Film, Keith,she could have said.Film. All that not real. Not real.


It was six o'clock precisely, though, and the telephone rang, right onthe button, and Nicola smiled ('This is a tape'), and did her thing withGuy.


Later, after her own film show, as she escorted a hugely, an almost speechlessly gratified Keith to the stairs, as she prepared to usher himout into the wind and the rain, Nicola said reflectively, strollingly (herhands in the trouser pockets of the pluming suit),


'He's a romantic, remember. So work on that. Tell him I'm pale anddrawn. Tell him I sit by the window, sighing. Tell him I finger thebeautiful globe, and ruefully smile, and turn away. You know the sort of stuff. In your own style, Keith, of course.'


'Jack Daniels.'


It seemed now that she would finally have to kiss him. Well, he askedfor it. Nicola felt a noise, a soft rearrangement, go off inside her,something like a moan - one of those tragic little whimpers, perhaps,that thwarted lovers are said to emit. She breathed deep and leaneddown and offered Keith the Rosebud: fish mouth, the eyes thankfullyclosed. 'Mah,' she said when it was over (and it lasted half a second).


'Patience, Keith. You'll find with me,' she said, 'that when it rains, it


pours. Look!’


Jack and the Beanstalk.How the young legs sped up into the purpletunic. And the impetuous, the life-loving smile!


'Jim Beam. Benedictine.Porno.'


'What?'


'Porno.It's this drink. You get it down the Golgotha. Or by the case from the bloke at BestSave. Dead cheap, cause it's been nickedtwice.'


'. . . Run along, Keith.'


'Yeah cheers.'


She came back into the sitting-room and, seeing a patch of brief andsudden sunlight on the sofa, flopped herself down in it, her limbsoutstretched, like a dark star. Nicola's round tummy pushed upwardsthree or four times as she laughed —in helpless exasperation. Yes, allright. Porno: porno. Yes of course. If you must. Surprisingly, Nicoladisliked pornography, or she disliked its incursion into her ownlovelife. Because it was so limited, because there was no emotion in it(it spoke straight to the mental quirk), and because it stank of money.But she could do pornography. It was easy.


A performing artist, a bullshit artist, something of a piss artist, and aconsiderable sack artist, she was also anartist; and although she knewexactly where she wanted to go, she didn't always know exactly howshe was going to get there. You could never admit this, however, evento yourself. You had to make the mind shoot like a puck over all that creaky ice. You trusted your instinct, or you were dead. She laughedagain, with a brisk snort that had her stretching for the paper tissues(now who planned that—who planned that burst bubble of humorousmucus ?), as she remembered the killer line she had laid on Guy Clinch.'There's just one other thing: I'm a virgin.' Avirgin. Oh,yeah. Nicolahad never said those words before, even when she had the chance:twenty years ago, in that little gap between finding out what it meantand ceasing to be one. She had never said it when it was true (especiallynot then. And would it have made much odds to the drunken Corsicanin his mag-strewn boiler room, beneath the hotel at Aix-en- Provence?). 'I'm a virgin.' But there was a first time for everything.


The joke was, the real joke was . . . she had come close - she hadcomethat close — to muffing her big line. She almost said somethingthat would have wrecked the whole performance. Really, the actresstraining was a liability in real life: if you're the dramatic type anyway,thendon't go to Drama School. Because the associations of themoment, the tears, the indignation, the extremity, had prompted another line, another lie, one she had delivered pretty well routinelythroughout her teens and twenties, in ultimatum form, on the crest ofvarious rages, various dissolutions. She almost said: 'There's just oneother thing: I'm pregnant.' Whoops! Now that would have been quitebad. No coming back from there. 'I'm pregnant.'Those words, atleast, had fairly often consorted with the truth. She didn't go on about it or anything, internally or otherwise, but she acknowledged the scartissue of her seven abortions.


Nicola blew her nose noisily and lay there clutching the rolledtissue. Two broad fronts: the cloudy trophies of Guy's archaicheart; Keith Talent, and his reptile modernity. She was an artist,in reasonable control, and knew everything that was going to happen, more or less. But she never knew this. She never knewthis about her final project. She never knew it was going to besuch hardwork.


The black cab pulled away, thanked and tipped by the, by the...Disgustingly attired (howcould she?), and making her way into thepregnant blackout of the dead-end street. The car waited; now it nosed forward, with sidelights burning. The door opened.Get in, hesaid. And she had been so very very bad . . .You. Always you, she said.And in she climbed.


Nicola awoke, and heard the rain, and went back to sleep again, orshe tried. The rain sounded like industrial gas escaping from therooftops — tons of gas, enough to fill the storage vat that overlookedthe Park (corseted and flat-topped, the snare in God's drum set).Mauling and worrying thepillows, she squirmed and bounced aroundthe bed. She persevered for perhaps an hour while ten thousandsensations ran through her like a metropolitan marathon. She sat upsuddenly and drank most of the pint of water that had colourlesslymonitored her sleep. There came the sound of thunder, thepremonitory basses and kettles of God's new drum solo. She hung herhead. This morning, at any rate, Nicola Six could look forward to awhole day off.


She micturated angrily, as if trying to drill a hole through the hardmarble. Having wiped herself she stepped on to the scales in her heavywhite nightdress—her decidedly non-vamp nightdress, what she worein bed when all she wanted was comfort, frump-warmth and comfort.The dial shivered and settled. Eh! But the nightdress was heavy, thesleepy in her eyes was heavy, her hair (she made a mustache of one of itslocks) was heavy and smelled of cigarettes: the tobacco, not thesmoke. With a silent snarl she cleaned her teeth for the taste of thetoothpaste, and spat.


Back in the bedroom she drew the curtains and released the blind.She opened the window to the wet air: three inches, a distance that corresponded in her mind to a single raised notch on the passage thermostat. Normally, on a working day, she would have aired thebed—but she planned to return there very soon. Ten o'clock, and it wasdark outside. Against such darkness the rain might be expected to takeon the glow of silver or mercury. Not today. Even the rain was dark. She listened to it again. What was the point? What could the rain saybut rain, rain, rain?


In ritual vexation she ran a tap for her morning tea. The tapwater,she knew, had passed at least twice through every granny in London. Previously she had relied on bottled water from France, more costlythan petrol, until it was revealed that EaudesDeux Monts had passedat least twice through every granny in Lyon. You had to run the tap forat least ten minutes before it stopped tasting like tepid soy sauce. Justhow much of people's lives was spent waiting for hot water to run hot, for cold water to run cold, standing there with a finger, pointing, in thefalling column. She went and switched on the television: thesoundless, telex-like news channel. Sternly she reviewed the interna­tional weather reports.madrid 12rain.magnitogorsk9rain.mahabad14rain. managua12.rain. Therain in the right-handcolumn formed a pillar ofdrizzle. That's right: it was raining all overthe world. The biosphere wasraining.


With the tap still poling into the sink Nicola put on her dressing-gown and flew barefoot down the stairs for her mail. The men wholived beneath her . .. The men who lived beneath her got less and less keen on Nicola the nearer to the top they got. Speechlessly revered bythe man in the basement, openly acclaimed and fancied at street level,she was heartily endorsed by the man on the first floor, who tended to pooh-pooh the suspicion of the man on the second, who none the lessassociated himself with the settled hostility of the man on the third.The man on the fourth floor didn't like her one bit. In fact, on almostany reckoning, she was ruining his life. She kept him up at night withher banging and pacing; his days she poisoned with her music, herfrantic scene shifting, her vampire and vigilante videos; odds and endstossed from her windows littered his balcony; three of his inner wallsreeked of wet-rot from her leaking pipes, her overflowing baths . . .


In bed again, leaning on a rampart of pillows, with her teatray andher mail. . . And there was a time, five years ago, three years ago,when her mail weighed in at half a stone, and smelled of toilet water and pot-pourri: well-turned tributes, groveilings, poems, invitations,and a lot of free airline tickets. Now? Cathode script fromcomputerized mailing lists. 'Richard Pinkley has completed the preparation of his Autumn Exhibition and is pleased to invite you tothe Preview.''Idon'tcare,' said Nicola. 'Lucky you! Your name hasbeen selected for a chance to win the holiday of a lifetime with VistaInternational!' 'Idon'tcare,' said Nicola. 'We understand that thelease on your property will shortly expire and we would be delightedto help you with your relocation in any way we can.' 'Idon'tcare,' saidNicola. Her lease was due to expire at the end of December. Short lease. None of this millennial stuff: nine hundred and ninety-nineyears. Just thirty months was all she had wanted. The lease wasrunning out; and so was her money.


Now the real toilet—beginning with the toilet. The toilet: rightly socalled. Interesting word, toilet. 'Toilet.'Toilet. 'Arranging thehair . . .(make one'stoilet) . . . an elaborate toilet; a toilet of whitesatin . . .(room containing lavatory) . . . (Med.) cleansing of partafter an operation or at time of childbirth . . .The reception of visitorsby a lady during the concluding stages of her toilet; very fashionable inthe18th C . . . Preparation for execution (in Fr. formtoilette).' Toiletwas right. She had known girls who went to the toilet in fleetingthoughtlessness: it was something that got done between doing otherthings. Nicola wasn't like that. Nicola was heavy weather. Sherealized, with regret (but what can you do?), that she was mannishwhen it came to the toilet. Not ridiculously mannish: she didn't need apack of cigarettes andWar and Peace and a section of horse-brass tochew on; she didn't need to hold up traffic beforehand, and clear thestreet with a bullhorn. Yet the whiteness of the bowl was tinged withdifficulty, with onerousness. She flipped up her non-vamp nightdressand sat there making unreadable faces. It shouldn't really happen to aheroine—or only behind closed doors. But the reception of visitors by alady during the opening stages of her toilet was very fashionable in the twentieth century. And now the twentieth century was coming to anend.


Naked, she weighed herself a second time, while the bath thundered- while it slobbered and rumoured. Then, in an abrupt about-turn, the full-length mirror . . . Yes! Good, still good, all very very good. But time was getting ready to finger it, to make its grab; time was dryingthat belly with the heat of its breath. She looked at the pots and tubs onthe bath's rim; cleansers, conditioners, moisturizers. She looked at thenail varnish, the hair dryer, the fairground lights of the dressing table—the mirror hours, the looking-glass war! No one could seriously standthere and expect anybody to be forever having to do with allthis shit.


Something about the indomitability of the human spirit (and felt deathin its full creative force): back into battle she came the next day,pressing forward under the spiked dome of her black umbrella. Freshair - or fairly fresh anyway, relativelyfree-range and corn-fed: outerair, not inner air, not just personal gas. In bygone times of averagelassitude she had been capable of spending a week and a halfwondering whether to post a letter or return a li brary book or paint her toenails. But these days (the last days) her need for activity was clearlydesperate. She swayed in the rain as she re-experienced the killing etiolation of the previous day, all its pale delinquency. Sitting therebeside the bookcase, trying to read, in a growing panic of self-consciousness. Why? Because reading presupposed a future. It had todo with fortification. Because reading went the other way. She sent thebook flying through the air with its petticoats flapping.Women inLove!She wanted a drink, a pill, a drug (she wanted a Greenland ofheroin), but she didn't want it. She wanted the concentrated, theconsuming, the undivided male attention known as sexual intercourse(imagine the atomic cloud as an inverted phallus, and Nicola's loins asground zero), but she didn't want it. Formerly the telephone wouldhave led her off into altered states. And now the telephone's tendrilsled nowhere. All you could do was heavily move from room to room to room... So it was good to get out and busy oneself with somethingreally useful.


The rain made toadstools of the people on the street. They had atoadstool smell, too (a sodden softness), she noticed, as the wet soulsconverged at the entrance to the underground, faceless stalks, inmackintoshes, beneath the black flowers of their umbrellas. ButNicola's personal cinematographer (the cause, perhaps, of all hertrouble) was still hard at work, and lit her like a chasuble. It was hot,and the rain was hot, but Nicola would be cool. She wore a plain dressof silvery linen. The rain would ruin it, the scuff and the shuffle and thetyre squirt would certainly ruin it (her shoes werealready ruined).That didn 't matter. Because she was killing off her clothes, one by one.In the damp-dog airlessness of the train (a taxi would have taken allmorning), Nicola suffered a sense of deafness from the sleeping pillsshe had eventually taken the night before. And she also feared anincriminating pallor. Yesterday had devolved into an epic of largelypleasureless - and entirely solitary - excitation: the terrible teenager'scloggedcafarб.And yet the adolescent (she now formulated it toherself), no matter how terrible, no matter how torpid and gracelessand hormone-slowed, always had the prospect of love. Nicola did nothave the prospect of love—love, which distinguishes this place from allothers in the universe. Or it tries. Indeed, her flexings and squeezings,her compulsive caresses of the self, were further haunted by the thought that nothing significantly better was taking place anywhereon earth: no act of love that was undesperate, unmediated, unsneeringly observed. She was wrong about that, wrong also about the way she looked, though in the Spanish burnish of her face therewas maybe half a dab of hoar, the hoar of smoke or cloud or milk. Now Nicola stared at a schoolboy until he vacated his seat for her, like asomnambulist. Proudly she sat, and looked straight ahead.


An hour and a half among the warm dust and the microphoto-graphy of the Public Records Office in Marylebone High Street gaveher everything she needed to know about Walker Clinch. She knew theevidence would be there and of course it was, superabundantly.Thence to the nearby Wallace Collection, where she made a twenty-pence purchase: a single postcard. On the front was a suit of sombrearmour, the tin soul of a robowarrior slain long ago. On the back, this:


Dear Guy - Why do I come here ? This is just to say that I am well. Itdoesn't matter, because by now one has grown so used to this devastating solitude. I am not without employment. And I canalways sit and watch the rain - and watch the poor birds gettingiller and iller. No tears!


NicolaPleasedon't reply.


She had written these words in a state of simulated self-pity and indignation, but as she read them now, why, Nicola fairly beamed.Oh the very land where they grew the trees that yielded the paper forwriting love-letters on - its soil was dying, neutered with chemicals,overworked, worked to dust. She had this idea about the death oflove . . .


Which began with the planet and its fantasticcoup de vieux. Imag­ine the terrestrial timespan as an outstretched arm: a single swipe of anemery-board, across the nail of the third finger, erases human history.We haven't been around for very long. And we've turned the earth'shair white. She seemed to have eternal youth but now she's ageingawful fast, like anaddict, like a waxless candle.Jesus, have you seen her recently'? We used to live and die without any sense of the planetgetting older, of mother earth getting older, living and dying. We usedto live outside history. But now we're all coterminous. We're inside history now all right, on its leading edge, with the wind ripping pastour ears. Hard to love, when you're bracing yourself for impact. And maybe love can't bear it either, and flees all planets when they reach this condition, when they get to the end of their twentieth centuries.


Nicola found a chair and placed the card in the thick envelope shehad brought along for it. She addressed it to Guy's office (andimagined his face reflected in a visual display unit, and branded by thegreen figures). In her manly wallet Nicola's fingers finally found onelast creased stamp. As she licked, a queue formed ahead of her in hermind, edging towards the turbaned shadow in its caged stall at thesubsidiary post-office. But then she nodded, realizing that this letter was the last she would ever send, this stamp the last she would everlick. Good, good. Stamp queues (in fact queues of any kind) putNicola into a daylong fury. You bought thousands and then thefollowing week the price of mail went up again. No more of that. Good: one more of life's duties, one more of life's pieces of shit, discharged for the very last time.


With the promise of a little danger money Nicola secured a black cab and sailed up, high on Westway to keep her date for lunch.


'I once slept', she said experimentally, 'with the Shah of Iran.'


Nicola paused. Keith blinked and nodded. She gave him time towork out the dates: Nicola would have been fourteen at the time of theShah's death. But of course he didn't work it out.


'I was twenty-one at the time. The Shah of Iran, Keith.'


The towelhead,' Keith said firmly.


She looked at him with her head at an angle.


'But they're religious,' he went on.


'Nono. This was before the revolution. The Shah . . . the Shah wasthe king, Keith. An extremely profligate one, too. Have you neverheard tell, Keith, of the Peacock Throne? Anyway he scoured theplanet for the very best and hottest young women, and paid them lotsof money to go to bed with him. It was quite an experience.’


The dark-suited waiter approached, rubbing his hands togetherand saying, 'Is everything all right, sir?'


'Uh,' said Keith, 'give us some fucking privacy here, Akhbar, okay ?'


Keith was waiting for her when she arrived, stolidly established inthe very hearth of the dark restaurant. Offered a treat lunch anywherehe liked, Keith had unhesitatingly opted for the Retreat from Kabul, describing it, after some encouragement, as providing a whiff of theOrient at a competitive price. 'Afghani innit,' he had added. 'And youcan't beat a good hot curry. No way.'


The murderer remained seated as she approached his table. Nicolawondered whether it was the light, or the food he was already eating,or some routine proletarian ailment he had come down with — butKeith's face was quite yellow. The kind of yellow you saw in a healing black eye. 'Don't be shy, darling,' he said, and tensely opened a hand atthe opposite chair. He had the pint of lager and the cigarette and thetabloid and the half-finished sandwich of poppadam and pickle. 'Akhbar! A menu for my uh, for my uh - give her a menu, and don'tgimme no meat. What, in here? Three hard-boiled eggs and bung myspecial sauce on it. Not a germ on earth'll live through that. Nodanger.' Nicola returned the menu unopened and ordered her first ginand tonic, pleading a diet. For ten minutes or so Keith poured scorn ondiets, arguing that you had to keep your strength up and that menpreferred fat women. Then his meal arrived. Three additional waitersand two smocked cooks stood and watched, murmuring eagerlyamong themselves. The murmuring ceased, on the instant, as the firstspoonful of sauce entered Keith's mouth, and then you could hearthrough the hatch an explosion of adolescent laughter—from the boysin hell's kitchen . . . He chewed, then stopped chewing, then chewedagain,exploratively, like a puppy testing a hard chocolate. He closedhis eyes and fanned his hand placatingly. When, at last, he started tospeak, there was so much smoke coming out of his mouth Nicolathought for a moment that he must have quietly lit another cigarette. Keith asked Akhbar to correct him if he was wrong but didn't he askfor the hot one?


'1 was having breakfast alone at the Pierre in New York,' Nicolalater resumed, 'as was my habit in those days. Two men approached me. Swarthy, and mean of forehead, but perfectly polite and very expensively dressed. Compliments were paid, and an envelope was produced. A promissory note for $50,000 and undated first-class airticket, return, to Teheran. One night with the Peacock. I later learnedthat the Shah had many teams of such people at work in all the greatcapitals, recruiting hefty starlets from Los Angeles, the palest blondesfrom Stockholm and Copenhagen, fantasy sex-scholars from thegeisha houses of Tokyo and Osaka, hysterical goers from Copaca-bana Beach in Rio de Janeiro, Keith. Quite a thought! The wide worldwas his brothel. Now that's imperialism. I mean, you have to think:how did hedare?


At this point Keith extended a dissenting forefinger. His sym­pathies, clearly, were as yet very much with the Shah. He sat hunched forward over his meal, the spoon limply dangling as he finished a longmouthful. Smoke was coming out of his nose now, too, as he said, 'Ah.But for him-no way would that be out of order for a towelhead Royal.Ancient privilege as such. A right exercised from way back. Timeimmemorial.'


'Time immemorial? Time immemorial?No, Keith,' she said, withsoothing urgency. 'The Shah's father was just some corporal in thearmy before he made hiscoup. The purest scum, Keith. The Peacockwas born a pauper. You see what I'm saying? It's all will and accident.Anyone can burst out. You can burst out.'


Slowly Keith looked down and to the right, frowning. Nicola lip-read his thoughts. TV. Robes. Hot out there. Yul Brynner. Keith in equivalent finery. The Shah of Acton. Keith of Iran. He savoured afresh spoonful. Smoke was now coming out of his ears.


'Well I said yes, of course. $50,000 was quite a lot of money in thosedays, and I was intrigued. And unattached. You remember those TV ads for sunglasses I showed you?'


'How could I ever -?'


That's what I looked like. The CD pimps gave me a couple of fancypresents — jewellery, Keith — and said I would be hearing from them.Nothing happened for a while. Then the telephone call, the limousine,more presents, Kennedy Airport.'


'New York? Love the place. Love it.' He chewed on. Was it Nicola'sfancy, or was smoke now coming out of hiseyes?


'At the other end they took me off to some resort in the south. First, asearching medical. Then I sunbathed for a week: if you were brownalready, the Shah liked you browner. The Scandinavian blondes andthe pale colleens, I imagine, were kept in a cupboard under the stairs.Plus several hours a day of massage, and workouts with the Shah'sdirty-minded physios. Exercises designed to enhance one's twang andtwist and give. People do want value for money, don't they, Keith.’


'Definitely,' said Keith seriously. He had stopped eating. Anobscure agitation began to play over his lumpy brow.


'I was told it was going to happen in the Summer Palace at Qom. Butthere was a hitch. I was driven to Teheran. The Sharina was abroadsomewhere, frenziedly shopping. You can imagine the scene, Keith,I'm sure: the salutations, the gifts, the pre-war champagne, theflaming dinner on the dusky terrace. There was some kind ofdemonstration in the square outside which soon developed into a riot.But there we were, with the Smalltalk and the servants . . . I was led off.Humming maidens prepared me. Then a middle-aged Frenchmadame with big tits and rockinghorse eyes came in, practicallyarmoured in bracelets and necklets and armlets, and spent about forty-five minutes listing all the treats that the Shah would beexpecting of me. Final ablutions, perfumes, oils, unguents, Keith. Twolines of the choicest cocaine. And the most miraculous underwear.The panties, I would guess, were worth about a thousand times their weight in gold.'


Keith lit a cigarette. His fingers flickered like the flame. He stared ather with ponderous illegibility. Most of the time Keith's lips were easyto read — his forehead was easy to read. But not now.


'The thing was they didn't weighanything. I'm very interestedindeed in underwear, Keith, as you will soon cheerfully discover, butI've never in my life come across anything like those panties. Elitesilkworms, no doubt, specially bred and trained. Cool-pants silk­worms. It was quite a sensation, pulling them up tight, as instructed.Quite insubstantial but palpably there, like wetness.'


A pulse passed, and he nodded at her to proceed.


'When the Shah eventually removed this shrunken wisp he threw itwith gusto high towards the domed ceiling. The panties hovered,Keith, in the warm thermals of the air, and began to fall, like anautumn leaf. When he was finished, they were still falling. And His Excellency took his time. I couldn't sleep because of the gunfire. Atnoon the next day another pimp appeared and drove me to theairport.'


'Djyou.' Keith cleared his throat and said, 'Did you see him again?'


'The CD pimp?'


'Yeah. No, the . . . His Excellency.'


'The Shah never slept with the same whore twice. And I think I musthave been one of his last flings. Six weeks later there was therevolution. And the Shah was dead within a year. But he did look in thenext morning and used me rather brutally on the way to a meeting withhis American advisers and his Chiefs of Staff. I begged him for those panties — Ibegged him, Keith — but they were already beingmicrotweezered and blowdried for the next slice of...Are you allright?'


'Nicola?'


She felt a light shock at the sound of the three syllables. This wasKeith's high style.


'Nick, I'm desperate.' He clenched a crackling fist just under hisnose. 'I'm fucking desperate. I got to have itnow. Now. Not soon. Notnext week.' At this point, even more surprisingly, he straightened asallow middle finger. 'Or I just kiss goodbye to this. See ? I got to have itlike now.'


'What?'


'The money!'


'Oh for Christ's sake.'


Keith leaned back and imposingly drew in breath through his nose.She saw that the yellow in his face wasn't the colour of need or fever; itwas the colour of fear, open pored, like a grapefruit.


'You don't know the kind of pus I'm dealing with here. Okay, callme a cunt, I took double money on the street. Plans of mine did notreach fruition. Now I made the list and come Friday I get a kicking and they break my fucking darting finger and all.' Again the sallow digit was held up for admiration or review. 'That's how low they'll stoop.See, it brooks no delay. This happens, I'mout of it. I'm history. I'm afucking dinosaur.'


'All right. See Guy tomorrow. Tell him this. Call me when it's done.'


With a genuine performance ahead of her- albeit a matinee or a dressrehearsal — Nicola the love actress felt better, felt much better: she felttwice the price. You see how thin, how poor it would all be, without Guy? The next morning, stern-faced and motionless in the scarcely bearable heat of her bath, with one steaming shank hooked over theside, she gave herself up to the disciplined play of thought. The tale ofAliBabaand the Magic Panties had not gone down as well, or asenlighteningly, as she had hoped. It hadn't been much fun to tell, either (Plan A: have fun telling the story; Plan B: don't have much fun telling it), under the glare of Keith's rancid inscrutability, his wide eyes tippedatanangle, as if he was trying to identify something—the number of abus slowly surging through the rain, a racing result on the back page ofan evening paper. Was he unmoved ? Could it be that Keith was cold tothe notions of enthusiastic whoredom, foot-deep luxury, tyrant sex,and gravity-defying underwear ? A Shakespearean lament would be inorder (the world was out of joint) if Keith didn't like underwear,invaluable underwear, underwear worth all his tribe. Perhaps,however (and here her fringe fluttered, as she gasped upwards to coolher brow), Keith just likedcheap underwear. One thing, anyway: hebelieved her story. He fully credited her Arabian Night. A reliabletaxonomy of Keith's mind, his soul, his retractile heart - it couldn't be done. None of it parsed, none of it scanned. His libido would be alltabloid and factoid. Such a contemporary condition was pretty well recognized, if imperfectly understood. It had to be said that Nicolaliked the idea of trying to get to the bottom of it. Synthetic modernity(man-made), qualified by something ancient and ignoble andreptilian. Like darts: a brontosaurus in nurene loons. All the morereason, then, to wipe the money fear of f his face, to see what was in him(his dreams and dreads, the graphs and spools of his nocturnalerections) and find out what would move him to murder.


Wearing a T-shirt only and sitting on a towel, in the kitchen, withthe spread newspaper, the pot and the wooden spoon, Nicoladepilated her legs for the last but one time; she unpeeled the sections ofsimmering beeswax, like industrial elastoplasts, from her smarting calves; she sang while she worked . . . Nicola didn't know this (andknowing it wouldn't have made any difference), but she was emerging from the kind of mid-project doldrums that all artists experience, inthe windless solitude halfway between outset and completion. Thething is there now, and you know you can get to the end of it. It is moreor less what you wanted (or what you felt you'd finish up with); butyou start to wish that the powers that be, the talent powers, hadthrown you a little further or higher. How to keep that spring in the stride, that jounce in the rump, as black-stockinged Jack mounts thebeanstalk for the hundredth time? The tricks she was going to play onKeith and Guy weregood tricks; but they were low and cruel and almost unrelievedly dirty. If she could do it all sitting upright, fullyclothed (indeed, beautifully turned-out), pressing buttons withimpeccable fingertips, and not a hair out of place! But it wasn't goingto be like that. She would have to get all hot and sweaty, and roll up her sleeves and her skirts, and put in a lot of time down there on the kitchenfloor.


Nicola Six was a performing artist, nothing more, a guest Stardirected by the patterning of spacetime, and there it was. It waswritten.


Keith called at three.


She said,'Hello? . . .Good . . .What exactly did you say? . . .Andhow did it go down?...— No no. That's what I expected. That'sby the book, Keith. With luck we'll sort it all out in time.'


Nicola listened, or at least stood there with the telephone pressed toher ear, while Keith discoursed with husky briskness on his upcomingdarts clash - the quarter-finals of the Duoshare Sparrow Masters.Keith had done as he was told, and told Guy what Nicola had told himto tell. That meant that Guy would come very soon, within fifteenminutes, twenty at the outside. Already in her mind she could hear the terrifiedpeep of the buzzer, his pale hello?, his colossal bounds up thestairs. But now she obeyed a long-incubated impulse and said to Keith,


'Tell me something . . .What happens if you win this game? . . .Allright-this"match". . .Andwhat,and what if you win the semi too?'


Keith talked boldly of the final: the venue, the format, the purse, theTV coverage, the chance to face world number one Kim Twemlow(also before the cameras), the lively promise of a career in professionaldarts with its highflying lifestyle, the very real possibility of some dayrepresenting his country in an England shirt.


Yes, she thought, or in an England tent.


'Wait,'she said.'The final. Is there a date set for it? . . .When wouldthis be?'


As he told her, she gave a soft shout, and dropped her head, and feltwithin herself a warm flood of vindication, a movement and a pang,something like peeing in a cold sea. For a moment she feared theuntimely onset of her penultimate period. But that was five days away; and in this area, if in no other, she was as regular as time itself. Women are clocks, after all. They are timekeepers - keepers of the time.


'Listen,' she said. 'I have to go. Whatever happens, you're going toreach the final, Keith, don't worry. I know it. I feel it. With me behind you. You're going to get to the final. You're going all the way. Call metonight. I must get ready.'


Actually she was pretty well ready as it was. In her multipurposeblack cashmere dress, with its dozen black buttons down the middle,she was dressed for anything, she was ready for anything. Nicola hadneed of only one last prop. Seating herself before the bulb-ridged mirror, she reached for the bottle of glycerine and its little plunger.


Glycerine: a quintessentially modern substance — a viscous liquidformed by the chemical conversion of fats and used as an ointment, adrug component, a sexual lubricant, an element in high explosives.Used also for false tears, by actors and actresses. That's where Nicolafound this bottle of tears: in her box of tricks, the box of tricks of the actress.


As the first crocodile tear began to smear her vision, Nicola gazedinto the fingerprint contours and saw — and saw crocodiles. She sawthe reptile house in Keith Talent's brain. What iguanas andanacondas, what snoozing geckos languished there, presided over,perhaps, by a heraldic basilisk, a rampant cockatrice! All the reptileswere waiting, waiting. And when reptiles wait when there is foodaround, they are waiting for the food to get weaker, deader, rottener.Not a jungle, not a swamp (for this was a modern brain): asmalltown zoo, an underfunded game reserve, a half-abandonedtheme park. Deeply, unimprovably stupid, the creatures are none theless aware that they are being watched. Keith's face appeared beforeher: the bashful salacity of his alligator smile. It wouldn't be her whoromped and basked with Keith and rolled with him in the mud. It would be Enola, Enola Gay. In the theme park, in cold blood, theblindworms and salamanders gave a sudden twitch — a shrug of ooze.Then silence. Reptile vigil . . .


Nicola's head snapped back to the frightenedpeep of the buzzer.She went to listen to Guy's pale hello? Of course she had adoreddinosaurs as a little girl. She knew all their names by heart, and lovedto toll them through her mind. Dinosaur: terrible reptile. Brontosau-rus: thunderlizard. (Now she could hear him scale the stairs withmighty bounds.) A planetary society, built from bones. Would thesame thing happen when the human beings were gone? Would we be exhumed (thecheat, the foil, the murderee), would we be reconstruc­ted and remembered by the rat, the roach, the triumphal virus?


She took up position at the top of the stairs.


Ankylosaurus. Coelophysis. Compsognatus.


Crookedlizard. Hollowform. Pretty jaw.


Ornitholestes. Maiasaura. Oviraptor.


Birdrobber. Childguarder. Eggstealer.


I've been poring over her diaries again - the stuff about 'MA'. My,how those two went at it. Hammer and tongs. Like Kilkenny cats.


Nicola and MA? Nicola and Mark Asprey? I have to know.


So I in my turn have laid a trap for Nicola Six. Very simple: I justasked her over.


'What's the address?' she said on the phone.


I told her: no audible response. 'You know. Near where youdumped your diaries.'


She'll come clean. Or I'll tell by the look on her face.


'It's terrible,' said Incarnacion in the kitchen this morning, as she removed her mack and the zippered groundsheet she wears on herhead, and as she slurped out of her galoshes and gestured toward thewindow and the terrible rain: 'the terrible rain!' She's right, ofcourse. The rain is terrible. It wouldn't look so bad in a jungle orsomewhere, coming down like this, but in a northern city, suspendedfrom soiled clouds. It's all so desperate when you try to washsomething unclean in unclean water.


'Is terrible, you know?' proceeded Incarnacion, as she set aboutthe vague preparations for her first pot of tea. 'It brings you so low.When the sun shines? You happy. Feel good. Cheerful, you know?Full of the get up and go. But when is raining like this. Rain, rain,rain. When is raining? You sad. Is miserable, you know? You get depress. You wake up? Rain. Go out? Rain. Inna nights? Rain. Rain,rain, rain.How you going to cheer up and feel good and happy and cheerful when is all this rain? How? Rain! Just rain, rain, rain.'


Ten minutes of that and 1 picked up my hat and coat and went out and stood in it. Standing in the rain isn't a whole lot better than beingtalked to about it by Incarnacion, but it's got the edge. The streetcorners are swagbellied with rain. They all have these spare tyres of rain. These guts of rain.


At last. Oh happy day.


The call from Missy Harter. In mid-afternoon, under another tonof rain.


First, though, I am screened, not by Missy's assistant Janit, nor yetby Janit's assistant, Barbro, but by a male interrogator with anarmpit-igniting way with him, whose name, if he has one, is notrevealed. Even when they call you, it takes for ever to get to the top. Isuspect they might even run your voice through the computer, in caseyou're trying to give someone senior a disease over the telephone.


'At last. Missy. How are you?' 'Good. Here's the deal.' 'The deal?''The deal. I have my doubts but it's been with Marketing and theyproject it'll go.' 'Marketing!' I said. (Marketing: I was very moved.)'Marketing,' she said: 'Here it is: we tight-option volume rights at twenty per cent.' 'Explain, Missy.'


Missy explained. Or she went on talking. So far as I could follow, Igot some money now against a renegotiable advance; the latter sumwould dramatically decrease if I attempted to place the bookelsewhere, but they reserved the right to match any offer from a rival publisher, whom they would immediately sue; if they didn't like thefinished book and someone else did, I repaid their money and they returned the typescript, or else they sat on the typescript and I suedHornig Ultrason; and if I accepted a better offer elsewhere, thenHornig Ultrason sued me.


'Well I suppose it sounds okay.'


'It's standard,' she said. 'You'll hear from the lawyers. I'm time-urgent. The reason: I have a meeting. Goodbye there.'


'Oh Missy ? Before you run. Is there anything you can tell me aboutthe - the international situation? Over here it's -'


'Next question.'


1 had an image of Missy Harter, scandalized in a skyscraper,looking as prim as her name. But of course the conversation wouldbe taped at her end. And then she added relentingly, 'It's serious. Butwe feel we're in good hands. Much depends on Faith's health. Forty-five seconds. Next question.'


Faith's health. They talk about Faith as if the First Lady were theonly lady. Or the Last Lady. 'You said you had your doubts about my — about the work. Would you care to elaborate on that?'


'It ran counter to expectation. It's so unlike you. Where did it comefrom?'


'I really need the money, Missy. I'm time-urgent too, you know.'


'I know you are. And I'll try.'


But the money will not come through in time.


The coincidence of Keith's darts final and her own birthday (or appointed deathnight) has filled Nicola with fresh hope. She is rejuvenated. Oh, it's encouraging, I agree. Yes. I guess the future looks bright.


Except Keith has to reach that final. And he won't reach the dartsfinal without his darting finger. In such cases, they don't just bend the darting finger until it breaks. No. The darting finger is placed in the crack of a doorway, and the door is then kicked shut. End of dartingfinger. Farewell,Odarting finger. Nor will Keith reach the darts finalif he is locked up in prison at the time. And prison is where Keith willsurely languish (picking his nose, perhaps, with a speculative dartingfinger) if he does this heist with Thelonius. Another thing stands inhis path, as he heads toward the darts final. It has at last dawned on me that Keith isn't very good at darts.


I am fond of Thelonius, of course.


He has many excellent qualities: gaiety, warmth, considerablebeauty. In him the human essences are rich: life flows from his faceand body in a silent roar. He takes care of himself, Thelonius,fanatically, adoringly, inside and out. Boxing at the air, he runs backwards to the gym to work out with the weights. He does yoga,and spends entire weekends standing on his head. As part of his questfor physical perfection Thelonius eats nothing but fruit: even a string-bean, even a radish, would gross him out. His teeth are asflawless as any dolphin's. The secondary smoking and drinking, thetertiary snacks — the drooling meat pies — of the Black Cross reachout for him but their spores can't make it through his purple haze. He always looked after himself. And now that he's in the money, well, no imperial infant ever had it so good. Of course, it has to beconcededthat Thelonius is not without faults. One is his habit ofbreaking the law the entire time. Another is bad taste.


Explosive, exponential bad taste, a kind of antitaste: there isnothing semi-violent about Thelonius's bad taste. I recently askedhim if in his younger days he had ever visited America (and perhaps spent a few years on Forty-Second Street or Hollywood Boulevard).When Thelonius was poor, he looked like an athlete; now that he's rich (and the transformation is a very recent one), he looks like apimp. The animal kingdom may be untroubled by Thelonius's diet,but it has a lot to fear from his dress sense. His pimpsuits, pimphatsand pimpshoes are made out of bison and turtles, zebras andreindeer. Among the stolen goods in the pimpboot of his pimpcar aremore pimpclothes, swathed in pimppolythene. Every other day, as the pimpwhim takes him, his pimphair is either superfrizzed or expensively relaxed. His pimpfingers are dustered with pimprings. Boy, does Thelonius look like a pimp.


He has a further blemish: an exaggerated view of his own skillsand merits. For instance, he is not a good criminal. He is a very luckycriminal, so far. He is heading towards prison at a hundred miles anhour, and taking Keith with him.


True to the logic of the moral fix I'm in, I find myself wishing thatThelonius had much more criminal talent than reality has in fact blessed him with. If I were running things, he would inviolablyprosper — he could do what the hell he liked. He could hurt the weak, he could steal and punch and lie and club as much as he wanted, and Iwould sleep all the sounder.


I don't know why I say Keith isn't good at darts. Keithis good atdarts. Very often, the darts go where he throws them. His dartsgenius shines, and brightly. But he is no better at darts thanpractically everyone else in England. This is a darts culture here:darts is what the Brits do best, in the afterglow of empire. And Keith certainly isn't as good at darts as the darters on TV. The dartsalwaysgo wherethey throw them.


Keith, I think, is not unaware of his possible shortcomings at theochйof today. 'In today's darts,' he will concede, 'standards are outstanding.' He is becoming more and more internally reliant onwhat he calls his 'gift for rising to the big occasion'. He gets himselfgoing with fiery oratory about the address of the board, gracing theochй,and the sincerity of the dart.


And what about the other Big Occasion? The other Final?


Yeah well cheers, Keith. I know he'll go out there and give me twohundred per cent. Keith a quitter? Keith Talent? You must be — Doyou want your - ? No danger will Keith bottle it when the cosh comes down. Pressure? He fuckingphrives on it. He'll do thenecessary. Keith'll do the biz. No way is he going to go out there andnot go all the way.


Is moral 'fix' really the word I want? Does fix really cover it? Keithand Guy will both survive, after a fashion. But I mean my positionwith the murderee.


She just came over. She's been and gone.


On her way up the stairs and into the apartment Nicola did a first-rate imitation of somebody who had never been here before. Inretrospect, I salute the actress talent. At the time, I was fooled. (And Iwas happy.) The way she looked around with caustic glances at theframed photographs - but only parenthetically, just giving the placethe edge of her attention, while we talked.


I was fooled. But then I left her in the sitting-room for a minute,and silently returned, framing a question in my head about Keith and the money. And there she was: bent over Mark Asprey's desk, tryingthe one locked drawer. With a hard look on her face.


Silently I retreated. I don't want her to know I know. Not yet.


All most painful. All mostpainful, painful. My only consolation isthat according to her diaries Nicola did something sensationallywicked to that MA of hers. Oh, she was very very bad...I can'tunderstand my own feelings. This nausea. I am implicated. I can'tunderstand the implication.


This is nofix. This is moral horror, no two ways about it.


The Black Cross. A good name, I always thought, sent my way by reality. The cross, darkly cruciform, the meeting place of Nicola and Keith and Guy.


A cross has three points. Depending on how you look at it, though,it might be said to have four.


And my love thing for Kim immediately involves me in new anxiety. There was no honeymoon period.


While Kath sleeps, with morbid abandon, in the bed-sizedbedroom, I play with Kim on the sitting-room floor. Kim bears smallbruises about her small person. You can see how it happens. Almostany movement in Keith's flat involves the movement of somethingelse. You get these little chain reactions. Always you're beetling overthe child. Turn around and your nose bangs into the door. Shift inyour seat and something else shifts. I worry.


Jewellery, precious minerals, intricate glasswork, and so on, deadbeauty: none of it does anything for me. But Kim's eyes make meunderstand. Jewellery, precious minerals, intricate glassware, deadbeauty, it's all fine: an attempt to summon the living galaxy of ababy's eyes. The baby's sparklers, the Milky Way of babies . . . Babies don't mind if you stare at them closely. Everyone else does. The dying do.


At some point in the afternoon Kim likes to take a nap. Often she is woken by bad dreams. It is strangely pleasurable to pick her up andcomfort her. All you do is just stand there and be the great shoulders,the godlike thorax.


Chapter 12: The ScriptFollowed by Guy Clinch


uy sat atthe kitchen table and gazed, with steady incompre­hension, at his veal: its pallor, its puddled beach of juice. He had cooked the dinner himself, as usual, expressionlessly busying himselfwith meat-pounder, pasta-shredder, vegetable-slicer. The kitchenwas a spotless laboratory of time-saving devices. Time was constantlybeing saved. But for what? Guy used to enjoy cooking, in the relativelyold days, when you did some of it yourself. He liked to cook in anapron, not in a lab-coat. Really, Guy could have made the grade as aproletarian female. He was obedient, industrious and uncomplaining.He had what it took. Now he gazed at his veal and briefly felt the allureof vegetarianism (that friendly black boy in the Black Cross) until his eye fell on the smug pellets of the broad beans, the endlessness of thepasta. The wine, a powerful Burgundy, seemed, at least, non-alien,definitely terrestrial: forgetfulness, the warm south, it said to the juicesof his jaw. These schooled juices searched also for another presenti­ment. For the flavour of reconciliation, perhaps ? No. Of forgiveness.Guy looked up carefully at his wife, who sat across the tableconsuming her meal in vigorous silence.


A little while later he said,


'I'm sorry?'


'I didn't say anything,' said Hope.


'I'm sorry.'


'Why don't you go to the doctor?'


'No need. Really. I'll be all right.’


'Ididn'tjustmeanforyoursake . . .So how much more of this do weget?'


'More of what?'


'Of the famished mute. You don't eat anything. And you look likedeath.'


It was certainly the case that he wasn't eating anything. A literalist (and a rather literary literalist), Guy had eaten awfully little since hislast conversation with Nicola Six; in fact his appetite had begun todecline the very day they met, and since their parting (yes: for good —for the best) it had disappeared altogether, just as the woman haddisappeared. When he did eat - and the activity wasn't distasteful somuch as madly irrelevant — he had to hurry off after a minute with hishand held high. You could then hear him vomiting efficiently in the basement lavatory. What kept him going were his breakfasts — hishearty bowls of MegaBran. He could digest his MegaBran because (orso he often thought) the thick, dark, all-fibre cereal was precisely onestage away from human shit in the first place. MegaBran was on a chemical knife-edge between cereal and human shit. Guy wondered whether MegaBran shouldn't rename itself HumanShit: the letteringcould be done wavily and mistily, to suggest an imminently dawningreality. One drop of saliva was all MegaBran needed. Marmaduke,who adored spitting on people's food, had once successfully spat into a full packet of MegaBran. The results had been spectacular-thoughit ought to be said that Marmaduke's saliva had often shown itself to possess surprising and maleficent properties . .. Not so long ago Guywould have thoughtlessly chopped a banana into his morning bowl ofMegaBran; but now he was overwhelmed by the reek of the potassiumenhancement. Everyone hated MegaBran. Everyone ate it. Hopecouldn't bear cooking or even being in the kitchen but she was intensely strict and vigilant about everything everyone ate.


Guy poured more wine and said in a puzzled voice, 'Can't bear thatnoise.'


'I know. How does he do it?'


'Can't we turn him down a bit?'


'No. I'm listening for the phlegm.'


They were alone tonight. But they were not alone. Marmaduke waspresent, in electronic form: the twin screens of the closed-circuit TVsystem shook and fizzed to his rage. There were twin screens in mostrooms, on every floor. Sometimes the house felt like an aquarium ofMarmadukes. Guy thought of all the video equipment in Nicola'sapartment (what use did she have for it?) and then thought of his own, of how he and his wife had gamely wrestled with the webbing and thepistol-grips in the months after Marmaduke was born, gatheringfootage of Marmaduke screaming his head off in the playpen,Marmaduke screaming his head off in the park, Marmadukescreaming his head off in the swimming-pool. They soon stoppedbothering. After all, there was so little difference between the home movie and the closed-circuit monitor, which gave them Marmadukescreaming his head off twenty-three hours a day as it was. And whenthe twin screens weren't giving it to them (two different angles of Marmaduke screaming his head off), Marmaduke was giving it tothem: live.


Now, against the background of the child's obscure agonies, atremendously long silence gathered. This silence was shaped like atunnel. It seemed to Guy that there was no way out of it, none at all - except full confession. Or this:


'We could have another child,' he said, staring seriously at his wife.


'. . . Are you out of your mind?'


Guy's eyebrows lifted and he resettled himself like a moody pupil. Itwas true that they had been most gravely advised - on many different occasions, in many different clinics and consulting rooms, in Geneva,in Los Angeles, in Tokyo - to renounce the possibility of a secondchild, or to delay it indefinitely, or at any rate until Marmaduke was atleast fourteen (by which time Hope, besides, would be fifty-one). Thebillionaire specialists and Nobel Laureate child-psychiatrists had always warned of the disturbing effect on Marmaduke if a littlenewcomer should succeed him. None had been heartless enough tosuggest that the second child might be just like the first.


'What if it's just like Marmaduke?' said Hope.


'Don'tsay that. My God. What's he doing now?'


'He's trying to make himself sick.'


'But he's got his whole fist down there.'


'He won't manage it.'


Guy looked at Hope — surprised, heartened.


'He threw up his tea long ago. And his milk and cookies. His onlyhope now is with the phlegm.'


'He wasn't sick after lunch. Can't bear that noise. Or was he?'


'Yeah - he slimedMelba.Then he bit Phoenix on the tongue. Quitefar back. I hope she wasn't letting him French-kiss her again.'


Guy uneasily reviewed Hope's policy about Marmaduke andkissing. Members of the staff were allowed to kiss Marmaduke. But only Hope was allowed to French-kiss him.


'I had to call Terry.'


Terry!'


Even more uneasily Guy thought of Terry - his platform shoes, hisbrutal singlet. 'I hate Terry.'


'So doI . He's strictly last-resort. And even he looked pretty shaken.'


Guy looked down and gave a smile—not of affection but of wonder.He loved Marmaduke. He would joyfully die for Marmaduke. He would die for Marmaduke, not next week, not tomorrow, but now,right now. He loved Marmaduke despite the clear sense, constantlyrefreshed, that Marmaduke had no lovable qualities. Marmadukegave no pleasure to anyone except when he was asleep. When he was asleep, you could gaze down at him and thank the Lord that he wasn'tawake.


'Oh yes,' said Hope. 'Lady Barnaby. She's been struck dumb.'


'Literally?'


'Yup. Since she got back. Shock.'


That's terrible.'


'You know what you look like?' said Hope. 'A hermit.'


Guy shrugged and looked away. He didn't seem to mind thecomparison. But then he looked back again: Hope was staring at himwith concentration. He feared this stare. He readied himself.


'Not a hermit who lives in a cottage,' she went on slowly. 'In theOrkneys or wherever. I mean the kind of hermit who lives in a hotel in Las Vegas. A sordid maniac with lots of money who never goes out. The kind of person who has a "shrine" in his bedroom for somefat dead moviequeen.'


He had kept up with the Cambodia thing — with the remote andgroping search for Little Boy and En Lah Gai: the displaced persons.Making his calls each morning at the office (it was his only reason forgoing in), Guy was by now on first-name terms with various contacts— various telephonic entities — at the American Refugee Committee,the British Refugee Council and the UN Border Relief Operation.His limp fingers regularly sought his brow as he sat there and listenedto the war stories. Guy had grown up in the age of mediated atrocity; like everyone else, he was exhaustively accustomed to the sadarrangements, the pathetic postures of the dead. But you couldn't seeCambodia, the torturee nation, whose redoubling sufferings tookplacebehind a black curtain or a slammed door. This darkness seemedto have a pornographic effect on the concerned imagination. You justcouldn't escape the excitement in the voices that told tales of Cambodia. Guy himself had been sent copies of the satellite photographs and seen the death silhouette: the diagrammatichoneycomb was evidently a landscape, a wide horizon of humanskulls. He too felt the excitement, the rush of boyish manliness, whichin his case soon subsided into a distant nausea. The satellite massacres:human death as a god might see it. Guy's faith, a feebly gleamingheirloom (a locket, perhaps, that once belonged to his dead mother),was much tarnished for a while by the clear impossibility of anythingsurviving such a thorough subtraction of the human body. Take life away, and all you have is the anatomical torment of a single skull. 'Iwas there all through the Eighties,' one of the telephone ghosts roared at him (he was an American from UNBRO), bringing him messagesfrom the other side. 'I have an image for you. You all set?' The voicewas eager, greedy. 'A child's prosthetic foot, in a flipflop, marching towar. That's Cambodia, pal.' Guy nodded quickly, in placation. 'Andthere's no way out.'


Though of course, as always, there was a way out, it transpired —therewas one way out. . . Guy had persuaded himself that he wasn'tmaking a hobby of Cambodia. But this research of his remained insome sense a labour of love, a romantic duty, a means of thinkingabout Nicola in relative and arguable guiltlessness. No denying that a fantasy was being quietly and queasily unspooled. Guy would mountthe stairs of her house (against a background of flags and bunting),coolly shepherding the two shy figures; Nicola would be ready on the top landing, her hands tightly clasped, with beautifully viscous tearson her cheeks. How the laughter of En Lah Gai would nervously soundas warming broth was prepared in the small kitchen! How the eyes ofLittle Boy would burn — would burn with unforgettable fire! Anddown there at hip height Nicola's fingers would entwine his own in fond conspiracy . . .


Even Guy could tell that there was something wrong with thismotion picture, something awful, something aesthetically disastrous.The scene would have a livid colour, the music would roll along in itscorrupt or sinister gaiety, the dialogue would feel dubbed, and theactors would simper like charmless children on the brink of beingfound out. Again the word pornography came to rnind: to Guy'smind, where there wasn't any-where there wasn't any pornography.


None at all? No, not really. There had been those occasions (increas­ingly frequent, until his operation) when a nurse holding a test-tubelike a glass condom had disgustedly ushered him into a curtainedroom equipped with 'books' — torn heaps of men's magazines. Guy had turned the strange pages (in the end he relied on his walletphotograph of Hope). And there was the sprinkling of stag films hehad been obliged to watch half of during business trips to Hong Kongand other eastern Mammons. Always there came a terrible moment,in between the carnal sections, when the cast stood around pretendingto be interesting with all their clothes on, just like proper actors andactresses, obeying a properly inventive director, in a proper film. Theimposture seemed to be doubly shaming for everyone, including theviewer. Even Guy could tell that his interest in Nicola Six and hisinterest in Indochina did not sit well together (with a wag of the head he thought of a plump pinup he had once seen, fondling a piece ofhardware in a weapons brochure). Love and war-love and historicalforces — did not sit well together.


Besides, his musings were on the whole dreadfully tender andtentative. His dreams, which appeared to emanate from the pool ofwarm pressure in his chest, all followed adolescent storylines ofsurveillance, custodianship, brilliant rescue (rowing boats, a car's flattyre magically repaired and replaced). He thought of her always, even at moments of sudden stress in the office or the nursery; her face waslike a curlicue floating in his peripheral vision. Daily, cosynchron-ously, he dogged her through her day, her waking, her light breakfast, her idealized toilet — and so on. He thought of his thoughts as explorers, in virgin territory. Of course, he didn't know how muchmale thought had already gone into Nicola Six, those millions of man hours; he didn't know that every square inch of her had beenran­sackedby men's thoughts . . . Sometimes, to buy his weekly packetof cigarettes (or an extra daily paper), he went to the shop near whereshe lived. As if round a doorway he bent and peered up the dead-endstreet. Seen through eyes of love, how fiercely she would have illu­mined the ordinary prospect: the trees already leafless in September,two builders eating Scotch eggs on a stoop, a dead cloud collapsing into the fog of dark rain. This day Guy straightened his dirty mackwith a smile of pain, and walked back and round to the Black Cross.


Keith was standing by the fruit machine, contentedly picking his teethwith a dart - or with thepoint of a dart, as Guy had learned todistinguish(flight, shaft, barrel, point), after a few of his early dartingsolecisms had been menacingly corrected, here in the Black Cross.Guy found that he was glad to see Keith, and took comfort also from the damp lineaments of the ruined pub. Conspicuous elsewhere, hisown colourlessness easily merged with the circumambient grey. Thewhite people in here were black-and-white people, monochrome, likeWorld War II footage. Like World War I footage. Guy thoughtfurther of the stills that form the countdown to an elderly movie:6, +,5, *, blank, clapperboard; and the white areas of the screen grainedwith dust and nostril hairs, like the whites of soiled eyes. Keith always made Guy think of eyes.


'Fucking sickening. It disgusts me. No, it does.'


'Absolutely vile.'


'Wicked.'


'It's filthy.'


'Persistent low atmospheric pressure innit.'


By moving his head a centimetre to the left, Keith indicated that Guymight join him. As Guy came forward he accidentally stepped on thesurprising solidity of Clive's tail. Clive lifted his chin from the carpetand snarled or swore at Guy wearily.


'Sorry. Well,' said Guy. 'Haven't seen you for a while.'


Keith nodded. This was true. And what of it? Keith took the troubleto point out that he was the sort of bloke who had places to go andpeople to see. He wasn't the sort of bloke who just sat around gettingpissed all day in the Black Cross on Portobello Road. No. Keith'srestless nature demanded variety. This week, for instance (itlaboriously emerged), he had been sitting around getting pissed all dayin the Skiddaw on Elgin Avenue. But in fact Keith did look pleasantlysurprised to be in the Black Cross. Why, Guy didn't know.


'Few drinks. Relax.' Keith suddenly refocused and said, 'Whew,mate, you don't look too clever. No. You definitely do«oнlook overlybrill. It must be going round. I tell you who else ain't in the best of elpheither. Neither.'


At the sound of her name (a duosyllable in this case: for a moment itsounded like a further grammatical adjustment) Guy felt something soft exploding in the transept of his chest. His head dropped and hereached out a hand for the bar. Nicola was suffering. This washeavenly news.


'Sad little smile on its face. Like - like she was pining. Pining. Piningits little heart out.’


Guy looked up. Keith seemed to be inspecting the saloon-bar ceiling— wondering, perhaps, how many Londons of cigarette smoke hadgone into its golden brown. With evident relief he now talked of othermatters, and Guy thought, with a mild seizure of affection: he knows. Keith knows. He has divined it. Nicola and I — in a sense we're wayabove his head. But he can see what binds us (the ropes of love); andwith due respect.


'Here. I got one for you.'


Guy tried to concentrate. Keith was about to tell a joke — he wasalready chuckling ruminatively to himself. In the past Guy hadstruggled rather with some of Keith's jokes. They were oftenreasonably mild, turning on a childish whimsicality, a lugubrious pun.Only rarely, or relatively rarely, did Keith lean forward bearing hisincisors and impart some tale about a rotten haddock and the knickersof an unfortunate lady. But that could happen to you anywhere. In thebilliards room at the club. In a starred restaurant in the City. And as he had just shown, despite his superficial roughness Keith had a lot morenatural delicacy than many of the —


'How can you tell when your sister's having her period?'


'Urn,' said Guy. He didn't have a sister. He shrugged. He said, 'Idon't know.'


'Dad's cock tastes funny!'


Guy stood and stared into the tempest of Keith's laughter. Thistempest, thistormenta,kept on coming for a very long time, until, after a series of lulls and false calms, orderly waters returned oncemore. Guy was smiling palely.


'Gah!' said Keith, lifting a fist to his streaming eyes. 'Dear oh dear.Well. It puts a smile on your face. And you got to keep laughing. Yougot to. In this life . . . Dear oh dear oh dear.'


Now Guy hung back as Keith took his new joke on a tour of the pub.Its punchline was soon ricocheting from group to group. In the damplight there was many a spray of Scotch-egg crumbs, many a dull flashof Soviet dentistry. The joke went down well in all quarters, thoughone or two of the older women (were they really old or only old-young?) confined themselves to a long glance of affectionate reproach.Drinking brandy, seated by the back door, and scratching his neck, Guy watched all this in his numb fever. Compliments that comesecond-hand are said to be the sweetest; and never in his life had GuyClinch been so flattered. He sat there pulsing with the flattery of love.Today's rushes, in the screening-room of his mind's eye, showednothing more than repeated scenes of reunion, breathless andunfettered reunion. Just a hug. Not even a kiss . .. Not even a hug.These rushes were like the last framesoнIncident at Owl Creek,withthe dead hero racing through the dark dreamfields, and under falseskymaps, racing towards her, and racing, and racing, and getting nonearer with each heartburning surge . . . God andPongotook Keithaside and then he left hurriedly. He tried to shovel Clive up with hisfoot and then leaned backwards forty-five degrees on the lead, like thelast man in a tug-of-war team. Twenty minutes later, as Guy wasleaving, three men filed into the saloon bar and asked for Keith; theyasked the pub for Keith - as if (Guy mused fleetingly) the black crosswere daubed on the door and not on the sign above, and they weretelling the pub to give Keith up or to bring him out. If Keith had beentrying to avoid this trio (the white-haired one sported half a dozenearrings per ear, and had the blue lips of a cold child), then Guy didn'tblame him: they did look extremely tiresome.


The ceiling of Marmaduke's nursery swarmed with strange shadows,Medusa heads, beckoning goblins . . . Children love their toys, don't they. It's so obvious. But why? Why do they?


'Pleasedon't do that, darling,' he said.


Guy was sitting on a low chair, surrounded, like Joan of Arc, by kindling - in his case the scattered planks of a wooden train-set,together with a few torn picture-books and eviscerated teddybears.Turning from the wrecked mobile, Marmaduke was now 'playing'with his toy castle. It was 5.45 in the morning.


Children love to touch their toys because their toys are the only things theycan touch: the only things they can touch freely. Man-made objects, blunted, detoxified, with pleasure possible and paincounterindicated. Or that was the idea. Marmaduke could findmortification almost anywhere. A fluffy birdling was cute enoughuntil a child engulfed his own larynx with it.


'Milt,' said Marmaduke, without turning round. 'Big it.'


Guy looked at his watch. He went and unlocked the crammedrefrigerator on the landing. He returned with a full bottle — and fourwholewheat biscuits, which the child now repulsively dispatched.


'My God,' said Guy.


'More big it,' said Marmaduke out of the corner of his mouth (its centre being occupied by the bottle). 'More big it.'


'No!’


'More big it.'


'Absolutely not!'


The teat slid from Marmaduke's lips. 'Big it. More big it. . .'Instead of raising his voice, Marmaduke lowered it: he sometimes got a far more chilling effect that way.'Big it, Daddy. More big it. . .Morebig it, Daddy . . .'


'Oh all right. Say please. Say please. Say please. Say please.'


'Police,' said Marmaduke grudgingly.


Toys were symbols - of real things. That toy monkey stood for a realmonkey, that toy train for a real train, and so on: in miniature. Butthere seemed to be a disturbing literalism abroad in Marmaduke'snursery. That toy baby elephant, for instance, pink and gauzy and fivefeet high, with its imperial tassels and convincing little howdah (thelaunchpad of many sickening falls): the baby elephant was about the size of a baby elephant. And the same sort of thing could be said forMarmaduke's howitzers and grenade-launchers and cartridge belts,not to mention all the plastic broadswords and cutlasses and scimitars —and his cudgels and knobsticks and battleaxes. Marmaduke's latest deployment (partof a permanent modernization programme), a DID, or Deep Interdiction Device, a pucklike boobytrap which could takeout three or four toy tanks at a time, was certainly far larger than the actual contrivance now fielded byNato. Nato.Assault Breaker. Howold it all was. Though Marmaduke himself would unquestionablyfavour First Use. Marmaduke was a definite First-Use artist. Fight likehell for three days and then blow up the world.


The door opened. Hope stood there, in her small-hour glow. Asentinel in a white nightdress. One arm was raised, as if to hold acandle. He became aware of the sound of rain on the streets androoftops.


'It's six.'


'He's being very good actually,' Guy whispered. The lines of hisbrow invited and encouraged Hope to contemplate her son, who wasplaying with his toy castle, methodically weakening each ridge of theouter rampart before snapping it off. Doing this caused him to gruntand gasp a good deal. Only the very old grunt and gasp so much asbabies. In between (Guy thought), we strain all right yet keep holdingsilence.


'Upstairs.'


Upstairs on the third floor there was a room known locally as thePadded Cell. It was furnitureless and covered in three thicknesses ofduvet, wall to wall, floor to ceiling. Its only irregularity was a chest-high ledge with an extra duvet and some pillows for attending adultsto climb up to and throw themselves down on. Thither they carried thescreaming child . . .


Outside, day was forming in terms of rain-deadened light; Guy nowjoined his wife between the sheets. Rolling his neck, he took one lastlook at the monitor: a ceiling-to-floor shot of Marmaduke silentlyscreaming his head off in the Padded Cell. As he screamed,Marmaduke bounced skilfully on his slippered feet, trying to generateenough height for a damaging dive. Guy sank back. His wife searchedhim for the reliable body warmth he knew she still needed him for.


'It's our cross to bear,' she said vaguely.


Guy bent his throbbing neck and kissed her mouth, which washalf-open and half-awake and tasted of dreams and fever. He lay therevigilantly, hoping and not hoping. The weak delirium of dawn, whenthe body is childishly tired and tender, with surprising tangs and hurtsand tastes: it had happened, during shared insomnias, after summerballs, and, much longer ago, at the end of nights of soldierly study. IsTroilus and Cressidaan anti-comedy? Explore the formation of theSpecial Relationship . . . He was in fact grotesquely erect: the skindown there was tugged tight as a drum. His auxiliary heart, refusing tobecome disused, or taken lightly. Just by pressing into the linen hereone could perhaps quite easily . . .


'I'll do it,' murmured Hope, sliding from the bed in quiet animalobedience - for Marmaduke's great cries were by now of the volumeand timbre that no mother could sleep through. It was morning.Today was another day.


He turned on to his back. He had this toy of Nicola in his head, oval,blue-backed, like a Victorian miniature. Symbol of the real thing. The real thing. Three brutal jolts would certainly finish it. But all kinds ofconsiderations — including squeamishness, another kind ofamourpropre,and the thought of all the mess it would leave - combined, asalways, to stay his hand.


You wouldn't want to play with it like that.


Two days later Guy did something ordinary. And then somethingstrange happened.


He helped a blind man cross the street. And then something strangehappened.


On Rifle Lane a very old blind man was standing at the zebracrossing. Rangy, propulsive, briskly strolling, Guy paused when hesaw him. It was perhaps not such a common sight, not any more. Onedoesn't often see the blind in the streets now. One doesn't often see thevery old. They stay inside. They don't come out much, not any more.Not this year.


Tall, thin, the blind man stood with blind erectness, backward-tending, as road and pavement users crisscrossed past. Somethingwavery in his stance suggested that he had been there for some time,though he showed no distress. In fact he was smiling. Guy strodeforward. He took the blind man's blind arm. 'Would you like a hand,sir?' he asked. 'Here we are,' he said, guiding, urging. On the far kerbGuy cheerfully offered to take the blind man further — home, anywhere. Sightless eyes stared at his voice in astonishment. Guyshrugged: offer the simplest courtesy these days and people looked atyou as if you were out of your mind. And then astonishment becamegeneral, for the blind man tapped his way to the nearest wall, anddipped his head, and used his eyes for something they were still goodat. Tears came from them readily enough.


Guy reapproached the blind man with embarrassment and somepanic.


'Leave him,' said an onlooker.


'Leave him alone, for fuck's sake,' advised another.


Guy wandered off into the rain. Hours later, at home, when his confusion and his heartbeat had started to steady, he thought of something he had read somewhere . . . about the traveller and thestarving tribe. How did it go? The sun-helmeted anthropologistrevisits a tribe which he had once celebrated for its gentleness. Butnow the tribe was starving; such food as there was went to thestrong; and the strong laughed at the weak, the flailing, fading weak;and the weak laughed too. The weak laughed too, sharing in thehilarity of vanished feeling. One time, an old woman stumbled on theedge of a drop. A passing strongman - a food expert, a swaggeringfood champ — helped her over the edge with a kick in the rump. Asshe lay there, laughing, the traveller hurried forward to give comfort. And the comfort was intolerable to her. Two strokes of the hair, softwords, a helping hand:this was what made the woman cry. Thepresent seemed perfectly bearable - indeed, hilarious - until you felt again what it was like when people were kind. Then the present was bearable no longer. So the old woman wept. So the blind man wept, They can take it, so long asno one is kind.


Guy was kind, or kind that day. It was all right for him. He hadNicola's postcard in his pocket. The suit of armour: the brave words. Any other time he might have walked right past. Love is blind; but it makes you see the blind man, teetering on the roadside; it makes you seek him out with eyes of love.


'Darling? Come and sit on my lap.'


'. . . Go way.'


'Come on. And read a book. Come and sit on Daddy's lap. There's agood boy.'


'Zap.'


'Lap. Very good!Good boy. Look. Food. You like food. What'sthat?'


'Bam.'


'Bam?. . . Spam. Sssspam. Very good. What's that?'


'Agh.'


'Egg, yes. Egg. What's that? . . . What's that? . . . We're in thegarden now. What's that? What's that, darling?'


'Dick.'


'Stick. Very good. Sssstick. Now here's a flower. Say "flower" . . .Those are the petals. And this bit down here is -'


'Dork.'


'Very good,darling. Excellent. Now what do you call this? Wherethe tree used to be. Like in our garden. Where they've chopped itdown.'


'Dump.'


'Marmaduke, you're a genius. What's that?...A tree. What'sthat? . . . Grass. Don't do that, darling.Ow. Wait, look! Animals. Animals. What's that?'


'Jeep.'


'Yes, sheep. Very good. What's that?'


'Zion.'


'Lion. Lllion. Lllion. Very good. And what's this squidgy thinghere?'


'Nail.'


'Snail. Excellent! Aha. Here's your favourite. Here's the best animal of them all. No wait, darling. Hey! One more. You like this one. Whatis it? What is it?'


' . . . Gunk!'


'Yes! And what does it do? What does it do that no other animal can? What does it do?’


'. . . Dink!'


'Verygood. You know, sometimes you can be the most adorableman-cub.'


As Guy bent forward to give a farewell kiss to the increasinglyrestless child — Marmaduke caught him with the reverse headbutt. Itwas probably at least semi-accidental, though Marmaduke did do a lot of laughing and pointing. In any event the combined movementresulted in a fairly serious impact. Anyone who has ever marched into a lamp-post, or into a fellow pedestrian, knows that 3 m.p.h. is quite dangerous enough for human beings, never mind 186,000 miles persecond. He was still spitting doubtfully into a paper tissue when, about fifteen minutes later, there was a knock and the door opened.


'Doris,' said Guy.


'Guy,' said Doris.


Guy flinched a little at the familiarity - or one of his genes did. Arecent recruit, Doris was a portly blonde of thirty or forty, with mutinous legs. She was already a martyr to the Clinches' stairs.


'There's someone at the door for you.'


'Oh? Who is it?'


'Don't know. Says it's urgent. It's aman.'


Guy wondered what to do. Hope was playing at the Vanderbilt withDink Heckler and wouldn't be back till just after seven. There wassomething of a nanny famine at present; even Terry had succumbed tothe pressure, gratefully accepting some post at a prison gymnasium. And he couldn't ask Doris, who would in any case certainly refuse.Alone with Doris, within range of Doris, Marmaduke spent everymoment trying to kick her swollen shins or jeeringly punching her breasts.


'Bring him up. Sorry, Doris. Show him up. Thank you.'


In due course Keith sailed into the room- in his sailor trousers withtheir spinnaker flares. His hair was flattened by the rain, and thesoaked tabloid hung from his armpit, like an extra limb of little utility.He gave a confidential nod and said,


'Audi.'


Guy thought for a moment and said, 'Howdy.'


'Saab Turbo,' Keith went on. 'Fuel injection. Listen, mate . . .'Keith glanced over his shoulder and then at Marmaduke, who peered up with interest from the remains of his toy castle. 'Listen. I poppedround there with some stuff and - Nicola. Between you and me, pal, itdon't look too shrewd.’


Guy stared at him with earnest incomprehension.


'I mean, you seen them marks on her wrist.'


'No?'


'The left wrist. Little white scars. You know. Tried it once. Mighttry it again.'


'Christ.'


'Says to me: "Don't fix that. Don't fix this. No point. What's thepoint. Why bother. What's the point. No point." All this. Face like a -she's really down. Emotionally withdrawn. Showing suicidal tenden­cies innit. I'm just worried she's gone do itself an injury.'


'You really think?'


With a craven expression on his face Keith said, 'Go round and seeher, mate. She's been very good to me, she has. You know: a really nicelady. And if she...I'd never . . .'


'Yes ofcourse.' Guy's pupils moved around in thought and then hesaid, 'Keith, I couldn't possibly ask you to watch the child for twentyminutes, could I?'


'Course you can. Glad to. Oh uh . . .'And again he peered up at Guyneedfully. 'Use your phone?'


'Yes of course. Down one floor and the second door on your left.'


'Kath might be preparing my evening meal.'


When Keith returned - after a long and taxing interval - Guyhimself went and burst into the master bedroom to pick up his keysand his money. Driving a hand through his hair, he noticed the heavyindentation of Keith's buttocks on his wife's side of the bed. He feltsomething had to be done about that. Hurriedly he pummelled theduvet with his fists.


One more visit to the nursery: Keith was down on his haunches, hishands raised, snorting and sniffing-softly sparring with Marmaduke,who looked well pleased with his new friend.


'Youare good, Keith,' said Guy.


'Yeah cheers,' said Keith.


Intense but more or less disinterested concern prevailed until he rangher doorbell: after he heard the sound of her voice (its soft moan ofassent or surrender or defeat), he felt nothing more than the simple tugof beauty. '6: six', said the oblong sticker next to her button. Suchprodigal symmetry. Even her telephone number was somehowminutely glamorous, with the curves of its eights and zeros, like an erotic cipher. With mighty bounds he scaled the stairs.


Guy expected — or wouldn't have been surprised — to find her on acreaking stool with a noose round her neck, or lying on the sofa with amother-of-pearl derringer in her ear...In reality he found herstanding over her desk, and leaning on it capably with her small fists,and for some reason staying that way for a couple of beats after he hadchased his chariot heart into the low sitting-room. (The sitting-roommeant nothing to him: it was just the place where certain things couldhappen.) Then she turned.


'You shouldn't have come,' she said warmly. 'But I must admit I'mterribly pleased to see you.'


Guy knew that he would never forget the varieties of light in herface, the prismy clarity of the eyes, the smile with all its revelatorywhiteness of tooth - and those teartracks, their solid shine, like solder,on her cheekbones. When women cry (what was that line inPygmalion?), the hayfever russet is part of the pathos and the wholesnotty helplessness, but with her, with her -


'Just an hour ago,' she said, and smiled down at her desk, 'I got themost wonderful news.'


'That's wonderful,' he said, quite unable to keep the disappoint­ment out of his voice. Don't tell me she's crying forjoy. Howwoodenly, now, those wonderfuls echoed in the low room.


An envelope was held up towards him. Airmail: the stripedred-and-blue trim.


Nicola said, They're alive. Enola is alive. And - and Little Boy. They're still in transit somewhere between Sisophon and Chantha-buri. But everything is clear now. Completely clear.'


Guy shrugged one shoulder and said, 'Fantastic.'


She came forward and bent over the table for her cigarette lighter.With mournful disquiet Guy saw her breasts through the open neck ofblack bodice. He looked away, and felt relief when she straightened upand the material tautened. So brown! So close together!


'I fly to Seoul tonight.'


It was fatherly, the whole thing was fatherly— even the way he tookher wrist like that was fatherly, fatherly. She was unwilling but after a while consented to sit beside him and hear what he had to say. He saidthat in his view she wasn't allowing herself to face the truth of whatwas really happening — in Cambodia. He was gentle, yet firm. Therewas, he felt confident, nothing lingering in the way he smoothed andpatted her hand: a reflex of protective suasion. Guy took sternpleasure in the doubts he saw gathering in her open face. Nicola wasnodding, and biting her lip, and leaning forwards at a penitent angle.The neck of her bodice was so disposed that he might have availedhimself of her inattention; but he became absorbed, rather, in thesolicitous caresses with which he now favoured her hair, her neck, herthroat. So brown. So close together. After a silence she said,


Then I'll have to do the other thing.'


He said quickly, 'The underground railway?'


She looked up at him with no expression on her face.'. . . Yes.'


'It's unreliable. A real gamble.'


'Oh. I know.'


'And a lot of money.'


'How much, do you think?' He named a sum and then Nicola addedgrimly, 'Yes, that's more or less the figure I've heard mentioned. By mycontact in . . .Tunisia.'She opened her eyes to their full extent, saying, 'Well it's perfectly simple. I'll sell my flat. The lease isn't all that longbut it will probably realize almost that amount. I'll find a roomsomewhere. And then there's one's jewellery and clothes and so on.That fridge is nearly brand-new.'


'Surely there's no need for all that. Surely.'


'You're right. It won't be enough. Still. There are things awoman . . .'She paused, and said with slow intentness,' A woman cando certain things.'


'Surely.I won't hear of it.'


Nicola smiled at him wisely. 'Oh no. I see your scheme. Guy, thatwould be completely out of the question.' She placed a consoling handon his thigh and turned to look towards the window. 'I'm sorry, mydear one. No no. I couldn't possibly let you lend me so much money.'


It was seven o'clock when Guy got back to the house of cards, wherelove sent him bounding up the stairs again.


Unbelievably, Marmaduke was sitting motionless on Keith's lap,his stocky form partly obscured by the upraised tabloid — and by ahip-high shelf of cigarette smoke. Guy hoped it didn't seem too pointed or censorious, the way he strode in there and hurled both windows open to the rain. Claiming that Marmaduke had been asgood as gold, Keith left promptly, and with a willing anonymity, a fewminutes before Hope returned with Dink. This gave Guy time to air the room (he waved a towel about while Marmaduke gnawed at his calves) and to rootle out the six or seven dog-ends which Keith hadcrushed in to an aperture of some mangled toy. Then the house of cardsreshuffled.


Hope came up and Guy went down, taking Marmaduke, at Hope'simpatient request. Lizzyboo was in the kitchen. And so was DinkHeckler. The South African number seven sat at the table in his fumingtenniswear; as usual, he was passing the time in calm inspection ofvarious portions of his arms and legs; perhaps (Guy speculated) it wastheir incredible hairiness that held his attention. As he warmed theyelling Marmaduke's half-hourly bottle Guy could hear more yellingupstairs, a reckless exchange of voices that rose to the abrupt climax ofthe slammed front door. Then Hope skipped down the stairs,resplendent from her tennis, and from her latest domestic achieve­ment: sacking Doris.


'She stole my earrings. They were right there on the dresser,' saidHope.


'Gumbag,' said Marmaduke.


'Can I get a shower?' said Dink.


'Which ones?' said Guy.


They're worthless. Or I'd have strip-searched her,' said Hope.


'Gumbag,' said Marmaduke.


'You hear that? That's Doris. She's been teaching him newswearwords,' said Hope.


'Auntie wants a hug.Ow,' said Lizzyboo.


'Could I get that shower?' said Dink.


'Isn't it amazing, the way he always gets you bang on the nipple? Imean, what's the point of anyone if they're so fat they can't evenwalk,'said Hope.


'Guzzball,' said Marmaduke.


'Listen to him. I mean his chest! I knew it: Doris has been smoking inthe nursery. He'll have to be nebulized,' said Hope.


'Intal orVentolнn?"said Guy.


'I'll help hold him down,' said Lizzyboo.


'No way,' said Marmaduke.


'Can I get that shower?' said Dink.


There was a big mirror in the kitchen, and a big kitchen in themirror, and Guy kept glancing secretively at himself, a singular figurein this busy world of glass. Figures swept to and fro on its surface; DinkHeckler, with his one hopelessly repeated question, was the room'sonly pocket of rest. Guy explored his lips with a slow tongue: he nowbarely noticed the swelling where Marmaduke had butted him. Thatnight, he decided, he would forbear to clean his teeth. The meeting ofmouths (I'm in it now), the way their faces seemed to stall and thenlock into the same force field. Some people think that just because oneworks in the City there are these huge chunks of money lying around.He had felt no reading on his personal tiltmeter and yet their mouthswere definitely homing. Of course, she's completely innocent, completely green, about money, as about everything else. Her eyeswere closing with the slightest of tremors. Bonds would be best: might take a day or three. And there was a flicker too in the lips somewhere.Talk to Richard in the morning. When it happened he could sense thetongue behind the teeth, stirring or cowering like a wounded bird.


Hope said suddenly, 'Look at the anorexic.'


Guy laughed. He found he was piling food into his mouth: a lump of cheese, a slice of ham, a halved tomato. 'I know. I've only just realized,'he said, and laughedagain, bending his knees to lick the gob of mayodangling from his little finger, 'that I'm absolutely starving.'


'Could I get that shower?' said Dink.


'It's blood,' said Lizzyboo.


'There's blood on his hair. Guy! There's blood on his hair!' said Hope.


'Don't worry,' said Guy. 'It's only mine.'


Outside, the rain stopped falling. Over the gardens and the mansion-block rooftops, over the window boxes and TV aerials, over Nicola'sskylight and Keith's dark tower (looming like a calipered leg droppedfrom heaven), the air gave an exhausted and chastened sigh. For a fewseconds every protuberance of sill and eave steadily shed water likedrooling teeth. There followed a chemical murmur from both street and soil as the ground added up the final millimetres of what it was being asked to absorb. Then a sodden hum of silence.


Two days ago I changed Marmaduke's diaper. It was right upthere with my very Worst Experiences. I'm still not over it.


I guess it had to happen. There are nanny-lulls, still centres in thehurricane of nannies. I am always hanging around over there. I amalways hanging around where people are hanging around, or goingwhere they're going, eager to waste time attheir speed. In the endLizzyboo helped me get him under the shower. Then we mopped the nursery wall. And the ceiling. I'm still not over it.


Marmaduke possesses his mother with a biblical totality, and he isalways goosingMelbaand frenching Phoenix (and watch himsplash his way through the au pairs); but Lizzyboo is his sexualobsession. He shimmies up against her shins and drools into hercleavage. He won't have a bath unless she's there to watch. He is forever ramming his hand - or his head - up her skirt.


Of course, and embarrassingly, Lizzyboo is becoming more andmore certain that she needn't fear any such nonsense from me. No, inmy condition I'm not about to get fresh. She sometimes gives me a puzzled but interrogatory look - the eyes seem to cringe - whileMarmaduke is scouring her ear with his tongue. Or trying to forceher hand down the front of his diaper. Being human, she is starting towonder what is wrong with her. I could tell her I'm gay or religious,or just frightened of catching some fatal disease. I suppose I reallyshouldn't continue to trifle with her affections. Especially now that Idon't need to.


I have Thrufaxed all twelve chapters off to Hornig Ultrason,where, it seems, my stock is already rising high. You can tell by theway everyone speaks to you. Unless I am mistaken, even the computerized voice of the reception bank betrays a secret liking forme. 'One momint. I have Missy Harter for you,' said Janit Slotnick,in the tone of somebody preparing a three-year-old for a particularly winsome treat. 'Oh, and have you heard the news that's causing such excitemint here?' I was already romping and tumbling in the zeros of a paperback or book-club deal when Janit said: 'She's pregnint!' ButI never did get through to Missy Harter.The computer screwed upand twenty minutes later Janit called and said that Missy would soonget back to me, which she hasn't.


On impulse I said, 'Janit? Say spearmint.' 'Spearmint.' 'Now saypeppermint.' 'Peppermint.' "Thank you, Janit.' 'Sir/


Incarnacion wraps up or abandons a long anecdote about heradventures in the supermarket (a story from which she emerges withobscure credit) to inform me that Mark Asprey has phoned while I've been out — while I've been out avoiding Incarnacion.


Mr Asprey, relates Incarnacion, is endearingly keen to pay a flyingvisit to London. Of course, at a single snap of his fingers, he can putup at a top hotel, or find a bed with any number of heartsick glamourqueens — but Mr Asprey would find it far more agreeable to stay righthere, in the place he calls home, and where, in addition, Incarnacioncan bring all her powers to bear on the promotion of his comfort. Sheis altogether sympathetic to this sentimental yearning of MarkAsprey's. In fact I get thirty-five minutes on the primacy of home, with its familiar surroundings and other pluses.


Incarnacion herself suggests that I could conveniently return to New York. For her, the symmetry of such an arrangement is not without its appeal.


I don't say anything. I don't even say anything about thedifficulties of non-supersonic East-West transatlantic air travel, incase I get an hour on, say, the inadvisability of central thermonuclearwar. I just nod and shrug, confident that in the very nature of things she must eventually shut up or go away.


Last night I attended a dinner party at Lansdowne Crescent. Alsopresent were Lizzyboo and Dink. The main guests were notdistinguished; they were just born rich. Three brothers, Jasper,Harry and Scargill, three joke representatives of the English gentry(down from Yorkshire, near Guy's dad's place, for an agribusiness conference), together with their speechless wives. The boys from Bingley - and theywere boys: time-fattened, time-coarsened, butboys, just boys - did a lot of shouting at first and then fell silent overtheir plates: devout and sweaty eaters. Dink kept looking at Hopewith a bored scowl in which some other message was impatiently enciphered; Guy hardly said a word. There wasn't any competitionor, for that matter, any choice: I was the life of the party. And I have so little to spare.


It broke up just after eleven, when Marmaduke's hollerings andthunderings could no longer be ignored or even talked through. I sawthe pummelled au pair trying to free his hands from the banisters.Guy and Hope looked as though they would be gone some time.


Exhaustedly I stood with Lizzyboo on the stoop and watched thefour cars steal off into the hot night. She turned to me with her armsfolded. I was afraid. She did that thing with the lowered head and the childishly questioning fingers on my shirtbuttons, giving her some­where to look while she asked me why I didn't like her. I was afraid. Iwas afraid of something like this. What was the nature of this fear ofmine? Like the weight of a million adulteries, complications,untruths, chances for betrayal. Also the inexplicable sense that I had already loved her or liked her or felt male pride in her, long ago, andkissed her breasts and held the pressure of her legs on my back already, many times, until what love there was all ran out, and Ididn't want to do it, ever again. I wished I had a little certificate orbadge I could produce, saying that I didn't have to do it, everagain. Iwas afraid of her body and its vigour, of her flesh, of her life. I wasafraid it might hurt me. I was afraid it might break me.


'I like you very much.' All I saw was the perfect evenness of herparting as she said,


'Do you? Do you want to come to my room for a little while?'


'I uh, believe not.'


'Why? Is there something wrong with me?"


Actually the nails on her big toes are beginning to lose symmetry,she has a steep-sided mole on the back of her neck, and generally herskin (when compared to someone like Kim Talent) is definitelyshowing signs of wear, of time, of death. But I said, 'You're beautiful,Lizzyboo. Give yourself the benefit of the doubt. The thing is, I'm inlove with someone else.’


Then I went over to Nicola's for an update. I'm not in love with Nicola. Something intertwines us, but it isn't love. With Nicola it'smore like the other thing.


Missy Harter comes through on the line to say that she has a checkon her desk - enough to front me for another few months: enough. Isaid. 'Thank God. You must have cut some corners. I take it this callis not being monitored?' 'Right. It's a virgin.' 'Good. Any othernews?' 'On what you call the world situation? Why yes. Next week:breakout.' 'Surely you mean breakdown.' 'Breakout. Frank renega-tion.' 'But that's terrible.' 'Not so. The reason: if we don't, they will. Goodbye now."Wait!. .Any other news?" Yes. I have news for you.I'm expecting a baby.'


'And I have news for you. It's mine.'


'Bullshit,'she said.


'I knew it. It is!'


'Bullshit.'


'That last time. On the Cape.'


'Please let's not do this. I was drunk.'


'Yeah, and I bet you were drunk in the morning too. That's when ithappened. In the morning. I felt a pop. I even heard it. A distinctpop.'


'Bullshit. I'llend this now. I'm ending this.'


'Don't hang up! I'm coming back. Now.'


'Back? To America?' She laughed sadly. 'Haven't you heard? There's no way in.'


It is with great, with ineffable — it is with the heaviest ambivalencethat I -


I don't want to go. I don't want to go. I'm not in good enoughshape to take on America. I'm not up to America. I want to stay here,and see how it all turns out, and write it down. I don't want to go. ButI'm going. Not even I could live with myself if I stayed. Besides, thereis a sky up there that looks like a beach and I mean with white sand and blue ocean and helixed volleyballs and cumulusputti exploding out of the surf. Good for flying. Maybe good for love.


So I'm sitting here now with my bag packed and waiting for a carthat doesn't show. I just called the minicab people again (their proudslogan:you drink, we drive). A taped message, followed bythree Engelbert Humperdinck numbers, followed by the slurredevasions of a guy who speaks no English. Hard to believe that in thishovel of stop-gap there yet abides a smouldering genius who knowsthe way to Heathrow Airport. Still, no doubt someone or other will make some kind of attempt to get here in the end.


The sky is telling me that I might just get away with it. Oh heynonny nonny, or however it goes. Having failed in art and love, having lost, I may win through with both, even now, so late in the goddamned day. My affairs are in order. My actors are on hold. But where's my cab?


I called Guy and told him not to do anything rash while I'm gone. Idon't want him to do anything rash until after I get back. With luck,he'll have a quiet time of it. Or a noisy time of it. I foresee arecurrence of Marmaduke's bronchial troubles. Left in sole charge of the child for over an hour, Keith Talent, I happen to know, did more than fulfil his normal quota of one cigarette every seven minutes. Ontop of teaching Marmaduke how to box and swear and gurgle overthe pinups in the tabloid, Keith taught Marmaduke how to smoke.


Keith himself of course I couldn't do anything about. All his lifepeople have been trying to do stuff about Keith, and they never gotanywhere. They've tried locking him up. I'd lock him up too, if Icould, just for a couple of weeks. Like me, like Clive, like the planet, Keith's debt is getting old; and Keith will do whatever Keith needs todo...Anyway I went over. I trudged up the concrete stairway,through the pinged obscenities. Christ, even ten years ago, in London, it was quite an achievement to get past two men talking inthe street without hearing the wordfuck or one of its cognates; butnow they're all doing it — nippers, vicars, grannies. I let myself in, Kath having wordlessly presented me, some days ago, with a single gnarled key. Mother and child were at home: no dog, nocheat. Kimwas pleased to see me — so pleased, in fact, that if I didn't have thislove-mission to blind and dizzy me, I might have to admit that something serious is seriously wrong at Windsor House. An hour ofKeith's parenting is enough to hospitalize Marmaduke Clinch: andso Kim Talent — and so Kim Talent. . . On the nature short the adult crocodile reaches for the baby with its jaws. You fear the worst: but that ridged croc mouth is delicate enough to handle new-born flesh,cat-and-kitty style. On the other hand reptiles don't normally tend their young. And when daddy gets mad, big jaws will stretch forother reasons, for other hungers . . . Kim cried when I said goodbye. She cried when I left the room. I think she must love me very much.


I've been loved before, but no one ever cried when I left the room.Incredibly, Missy used to cry when I left the apartment. And so did I. Before I went I wrote a note for Keith (plus Ј50 for the skipped dartslesson) and left it on the kitchen table, unmissably close to theOctoberDarts Monthly.


Jesus, I could drive to the airport myself. The bigger question is:could I drive back? And Mark Asprey will want the use of his car. 'Icouldn't ask you, could I, Nicola,' I said on the phone, 'to be prudent,and keep activity to the minimum while I'm gone?' She was eatingsomething. She said, 'What takes you there?' 'Love.' 'Ooh. What a shame. I'm planning some hot moves. You're going to miss all thesexy bits.' 'Nicola, don't do this.'


She swallowed. I could hear her inhaling masterfully. Then shesaid, 'You're in luck. In fact I just told Guy I'm going away for a fewdays. To myretreat.'


'Your what?'


'Don't you love it? A place with a couple of nuns and monks in it. Where I can think things over in a sylvan setting.'


'It's good. And I'm grateful. Why are you stalling?'


'No choice. So don't worry. You've got a few days' grace.'


'What is it?'


'Guess . . . Oh comeon. The thing I can't control.'


'I give up.'


She sighed and said, 'It's the fuckingcurse.'


A lordly Indian has just chewed me out for even expecting a cab to show up anywhere definite in the calculable future. He seemed to feelI was living in the past. Things, he told me, just aren'tlike that anymore. But he'll see what he can do. I'll take the notebook, of course.And leave the novel. Neatly stacked. Many pages. Do I want MarkAsprey to read it? I guess I do. I'll take the notebook: with all thewaiting around and everything — I envisage having a lot to say. WillAmerica have changed? No. America won't have come up with any new ideas, any new doubts, about herself. Not her. But maybe I cantake a new reading: a think piece, maybe, based on my ownexperiences, a substantial (and publishable?) meditation, extendingto some eight or ten thousand words, on the way America has startedto fulfil -


Oh, this is rich. Outside - what a pal - Keith has just pulled up inthe royal-blue Cavalier. I get to my feet. I sit down again: again, theheavy reluctance, in the haunches, in the loins, whence love should spring . . . Now how will the etiquette go on this? He's climbed outof the car and glanced warily down the street. I've waved. He hasraised his longbow thumb — his bent, his semicircular thumb. Keithsports a fishnet shirt and pastel hipsters but his chauffeur's capnestles ominously on the hood. He is polishing the chrome with a JCloth. If he opens the back door first then I'm out another fifty quid.Enough. I'm ready. Let's go to America.


  Well I'm back.


I'm back.


Six days I've been gone. I didn't write a word. The way I feel now Imight never write another. But there's another. And another.


I lost. I failed. I lost everything.


Unlucky thirteen.


Jesus Christ if I could make it into bed and get my eyes shutwithout seeing a mirror.


Please don't anyone look at me. I really took a tumble - I really took a tumble out there. Oh, man, I'm in bits.


Apart from the fact that on account of the political situation theyand their loved ones might all disappear at any moment (thissentence needs recasting but it's too late now), my protagonists are ingood shape and reasonable spirits. They still form their black cross.


They look a bit different. But not as different as I look, catapultedinto my seventies and still recovering from the fall.


I go into the Black Cross and nobody recognizes me. I'm astranger. And it all has to begin again.


Perhaps because of their addiction to form, writers always lagbehind the contemporary formlessness. They write about an oldreality, in a language that's even older. It's not the words: it's therhythms of thought. In this sense all novels are historical novels. Notreally a writer, maybe I see it clearer. But I do it too. An example: Istill go on as if people felt well.


I look to the kids, who change quick too. Marmaduke, so far as Ican tell, is exactly the same except in one particular. He has stoppedsaying 'milt'. He now says — and he says it often and loudly — 'mewk'or 'mowk' or 'mulk' or, more simply, 'mlk'.


All right, if we are going to go on with this thing there'll have to besome changes around here. Apart from anything else I think I'mgoing blind:so let the colours run. Actually Nicola herself, with herrecent outrages, has already forced this on me. Who says these people need so much air and space? We're all in it together now.


Kim has stopped saying 'Enlah'! She cries normally, humanly, complicatedly. No longer does she pay homage to the sudden, thesavage god of babies: Enlah!


We're all in it together now. As is the case with the world situation,something will have to give, and give soon. It will all get a lotwoollier, messier. Everything is winding down, me, this, motherearth. More: the universe, though apparently roomy enough, is heading for heat death. I hope there are parallel universes. I hopealternatives exist. Who stitched us up with all these design flaws?Entropy, time's arrow — ravenous disorder. The designer universe: but it was meant to give out all along, like something you pick up atGoodFicks. So maybe the universe is a dog, a pup, a dud, slipped our way by theCheat.


'Milt' I reckon I can live without. But 'Enlah'? Already I miss it.And I'll never hear it again. Nobody will, not from her lips. How didit sound? How well can I remember it? Where has it gone? Oh,Christ, no, the hell of time. I never guessed that you lost thingscoming this way too. Timetakes from you, with both hands. Thingsjust disappear into it.


Keith is under the impression that he has come through a sternexamination of his character and emerged with flying colours. There he stands, with one hand under his nose, with courting finger restingin the cusp between barrel and shaft, with pinkie raised - Keith'sintegers! And Guy's okay, considering. The fall guy: fool, foal, foil. Iwent to see him in hospital. There he lies, in white nightie, palely smiling. He really had us worried for a time. But they're both oncourse.


I'm not getting something and what I'm not getting has to do with the truth and it so happens that I'm well placed to take a crack at it -the truth, I mean — because this story istrue.


The form itself is my enemy. All this damned romance. In fiction(rightly so called), people become coherent and intelligible - and they aren't like that. We all know they aren't. We all know it frompersonal experience. We've been there.


People? People are chaotic quiddities living in one cave each. Theypass the hours in amorous grudge and playback and thought-experiment. At the camp fire they put the usual fraction on exhibit,and listen to their own silent gibber about how they're feeling andhow they're going down. We've been there.


Death helps. Death gives us something to do. Because it's a full-time job looking the other way.


A highly civilized note from Mark Asprey, rounded, well turned,like the man himself, and left in the study, propped against mystacked typescript:


My dear Sam: Two things are missing. (Have you been keepinglow company?) I don't expect you to have used or even noticedthese items, because you're a blameless non-smoker - whereas Iadore the harsh cut of Turkish tobacco with my morning coffeeno less than I relish at the other end of the day the rough solidity ofa colossal Havana between my lips. Item 1: onyx cigarette-lighter. Item 2: ormolu ashtray. Yours ever, MA


No mention (except between those brackets?) of my novel, whichI'm sure he has looked at - though the pages, it's true, aren't eveninfinitesimally misaligned.


I wonder if MA met with the murderee while he was here. Iwonder if MA slept with the murderee while he was here. Just now,none of that seems to matter. Wait, though: I can feel somethinggathering around me once again. Ambition, obsession. It had betterbe obsession. Nothing else is likely to keep me out of bed. All about,the study shelves are ranked with Asprey's piss . . .


In-depth updatings and debriefings have been necessary, and shehas been awfully sweet and patient with me. This much is certain: I'm going to miss her.


The weather has a new number, or better say a newangle. And Idon't mean dead clouds. Apparently it will stay like this for quite a while: for the duration, in any event. It's not a good one. It will justmake everything worse. It's not a wise one. The weather reallyshouldn't be doing this.


He frowned. She laughed. He brightened. She pouted. He grinned.She flinched.Come on: we don'tdo that. Except when we'repretending. Only babies frown and flinch. The rest of us just fakewith our fake faces.


He grinned. No he didn't. If a guy grins at you for real these days,you'd better chop his head off before he chops off yours. Soon the sneeze and the yawn will be mostly for show. Even the twitch.


She laughed. No she didn't. We laugh about twice a year. Most of us have lost our laughs and now make do with false ones.


He smiled.


Not quite true.


All that no good to think, no good to say, no good to write. All thatno good to write.


Chapter 13: Little Did They Know


haped likeA topheavy and lopsided stingray, elderly, oil-streaked, semi-transparent, and trailing its coil of feathery brownvapour, a dead cloud dropped out of the haze and made its way, withevery appearance of effort, into the dark stadium of the west. Guy Clinch had looked up. Now he looked down. To him, clouds hadalways been the summary of everything that could reasonably behoped for from the planet; they moved him more than paintings,more than exciting seas. So dead clouds, when he saw them, broughta strong response also (it was much worse since fatherhood). Deadclouds made you hate your father. Dead clouds made love hard.They made you want and need it, though: love. They made you have to have it.


This was how things stood with Guy. Or this was how theyswayed and wavered. On the night of the Wounded Bird — the kiss,when his lips had strained to meet or shun the lips of Nicola Six —Guy had checked into hospital a little after ten.


He felt fine himself. If anyone had asked him how he felt, he wouldhave said that he 'felt fine'. Apart from an itchy left eye, a sore throat,his mild mono and controllable colic (all of which fell within theever-roomier parameters offeeling fine), plus his more or lesspermanent height-related lower back pain and the numerousrumours of whatever else was in store for him mortally, Guy felt fine.Marmaduke's asthma attack, on the other hand (it developedsuddenly that evening), had every appearance of seventy. The doctorcame, and admired from a distance the desperate inflations ofMarmaduke's belly. It's not that they can't get air in; they can't getair out. Many telephone calls were made - lights sent probing intothe nooks and crannies of the health system. Now of course Guy andHope had a system too. If the best care available was private, then Hope went in with the child; if non-private, then Guy did. Such an arrangement, said Hope, answered to his egalitarian convictions, hisinterest in 'life', as she called it, with all due contempt. By eleven o'clock, at any rate, Guy had his pyjamas and toothbrush ready in a briefcase and was soon backing the car out into the street.


Guy went in the next night too, straight after he finished at theoffice, relieving Hope, who pulled aside the surgeon's mask she waswearing long enough to inform him that inch-higheczema, had broken out across Marmaduke's chest and was heading, at a speedalmost visible to the human eye, for his neck and face. With a gestureof quiet challenge she lifted the sheet. Guy stared down in wonder at the jewelled child.


Even more strangely and frighteningly, Marmaduke lay perfectlystill, and was quite silent. During past hospitalizations, when Guyhad arrived with his flowers, his bananas, his toys and cuddlyanimals, his overnight bag, Marmaduke had reliably climbed out ofeven the deepest troughs of weakness and disorientation to give hisfather a weary swipe. But today — not the smallest gob of spit. Not somuch as a snarl! Marmaduke's red-smudged eyes stared up in bafflement and appeal. When the child suffered like this, it was as ifGuy himself, or Guy's little ghost, were hawking and writhing, somewhere lost, in an alternate world. Looking down on him now, Guy felt the familiar equidistance between tears and nausea. Thelatter impulse he managed to resist. But then Hope wept. And thenGuy wept. They embraced each other. And together, and very carefully, they embraced the child.


That night Guy thought about Nicola a good deal, but unwill­ingly, and without pleasure. And he cleaned his teeth with someviolence, abolishing from his mouth the last memory of her lips. Ashe lay on the campbed in the sweltering cubicle, and jerked to his feetevery few minutes to review the red rubies which fantasticated the surface of Marmaduke's drugged sleep, her image flapped in on himin little coronaries of self-hatred and dismay. That stolen hour: Keithand his cigarettes: if Hope knew - her anger, rightful and limitless. The connexion between the illicit kiss and the child's sufferings wasperhaps as tenuous as the smoke that issued from the crafty burn ofKeith's brief vigil; but he felt it as a certainty. This is the girl thatkissed the man that asked the friend that smoked the fag to mind thekid that lived in the house that Hope built. .. Better just to wash myhands of the whole thing. It will be bearable. It won'tkill me. I'll giveher the money and that'll be the end of it. This vow, repeatedly uttered, felt calming, ascetic and renunciatory. At four he smoothedMarmaduke's forehead for the last time and collapsed into sleepmoments before the first nurse strode into the room.


In the morning, Marmaduke looked unbelievable, and sounded asif...Well, if you'd shut your eyes, you would have quickly imaginedtwo lumberjacks stooped over the handles of their doublesaw, and patiently felling some titan of the woodlands. And yet the child waswidely pronounced to be stabilizing. The cutaneous vesicles, forinstance, had already started to weep. Guy stared at the face on thebloodstained pillow and was unable to imagine that this wasanything even a child could really recover from. But Marmaduke would recover from it. And Guy would recover from it. Actually heknew, to his shame, that recovery was near, because Nicola's facewas back, and no longer half-averted; it was candid and aroused and voluptuously innocent. Being in a hospital anyway, Guy felt the urge to ask around, to find somebody who could get this face (this image,like the sun's imprint, but never fading) surgically removed. Of course, doctoring hadn't worked for the Macbeths; and it wouldn't work for him. When Hope arrived at half past ten with Phoenix andMelbaand the odd au pair, Guy slipped away and called the office,and got Richard, who said he could go for the money at noon. Hereturned just as the doctor, the in-house asthma expert, was takinghis leave.


Guy asked, 'What did he say?'


'Him?' said Hope. 'I don't know. Part allergenic, part reactive.'


'When he's better,' said Guy, who was thinking, Not too far:anyway she could meet me at the station, 'we'll move out of London.'


'Oh yeah? Where to, Guy? The moon? Haven't you heard?Everywhere's a toilet.'


'Well we'll see.'


'You can go now.'


But he stayed for a while, the good father, and watched the child.My God (Guy thought), he looks like lo. He looks like lo, Jupiter'smolten moon, covered in frosty lava, from cold volcanoes. lo'svolcanoes, caused by sulphur dioxide boiling at many degreesbelow zero in contact with sulphur . . . Just then, Hope unbuttoned her shirt and bared a breast, and offered it to the boy, for comfort.Of course, lo is connected to the mother planet by a kind of navelstring. A 'flux tube' of electrical energy. Ten million amperes.


Later, as he bent to kiss Marmaduke's lips (the only part of hisface unaffected by the popping swamp of the inflammation), thechild flinched and gave a definite sneer. Pretty feeble by his stand­ards; but Guy was heartened, and emboldened, to find his soncapable of even such a spiritless grimace. He was wearing plastic handcuffs, to stop him scratching.


A mile to the west, Keith Talent lit a cigarette with the remains ofits predecessor and then pressed the butt into an empty beer can. Inthis way did he scorn the ormolu ashtray and the onyx cigarettelighter, two recent acquisitions, which lay near by. He reached for afull beer can, tussling with the six-pack's elastic yoke. He swore. Hecoughed. He straightened up in bed. He burped astonishingly.


The noise that burp made was doubly disproportionate, dispro­portionate to his bulk, disproportionate to the podlike restriction of the room he lay in. Even Keith was slightly taken aback by it. Ahorror-film burp, a burp that cried out for at least two exorcists.Perhaps one of hell's top burp people was plying his trade in Keith'sbody. But Keith didn't care. He burped again, voluntarily, de­fiantly. From the kitchen the dog barked back. 'Keith,' called Kath.And even little Kim filed the possibility of protest. Keith gave themanother.


Lying there among the knouts and nooses of cheap sheets anddamp blankets, in his pink-tinged Y—fronts, with the beercan on hisgut and thefizzing snout in his fingers, Keith had a fairly accurate idea of who and what he was. He could taste his own essence. Thesourness of locker rooms, municipal duckboards, dormitories,prisons.


Things were bad. On the phone: 'Keith? It's Ashley. I'm going tohave to hurt you, mate. All right? I'm going tohurt you.' KeithTalent, who had done a lot of hurting in his time, who knew about hurting from both points of view, Keith Talent understood. 'I understand.' It wasn't TV, hurting. It was real. It didn't come muchrealer: finger-cracking reality. Yeah, and kicked senseless and leftupside down in a fucking dustbin somewhere.


Have the fucking bailiffs round here anyway in a minute.Characteristically you were sent two fat guys, with ginger beards,murmuring - money's janitors (they didn't want any trouble).Everything you owned got priced. Then you really found out how little you were worth. At this moment Keith himself felt like a coin


(he could taste it in his mouth), nicked and grimy, and of lowdenomination. In three nights' time he was meant to be throwing inthe Duoshare. Quarterfinals. 'Nationwide sponsorship,' said Keith.He stared with his mouth open at the middle finger of his right hand.Prestigious endorsements. No help from that lying cow either. Wasthe darts dream about to end? Was the whole darts bubble about to burst?


Keith? What's the matter? The truth was that in addition to hisusual woes Keith happened to be suffering from the after-effects ofviolent crime. You can almost hear him saying it, in moody explanation: 'I happen to be suffering from the after-effects of violent crime.' Thereare after-effects of violent crime, and they areonerous. We can be sure of that. Look: even Keith was capable offeeling the worse for them. The after-effects of violent crimehave to be considerable, to get through to people like Keith who are alwaysfeeling lousy anyway. Now he burped again and the dog barked backand he burped back again - 'Keith,' called Kath - and it all felt asragged as that, trying to outburp an old dog under a blanket offagsmoke in the low sun.


By his participation in violent crime, Keith had worked a littlegamble. In at least three or four senses, Keith had worked a little gamble withtime. He had ploughed many days' worth of the stuffinto the intensity of a scant forty-five minutes; and now those gambled hours were being subtracted from the present. A gambling man, Keith had gambled those hours; and he had lost them. He hadlost. Not everything, because he reckoned he'd got away with it okay and wouldn't be doing the kind of time you measure in years. But hehadn't won. Those gambled hours, where had they gone?


The whole thing was a farce from the start. Never work with ourcoloured brethren, Keith said to himself. It should be pointed outthat the injunction had little bigotry in it. ^t was like saying: Neverdrive down the Golborne Road on Friday or Saturday afternoons.Rubbish trucks innit. Occasioning pronounced congestion. You nipup Lancaster Road instead. Common sense. Keith wasn't prejudiced. No danger. Keith had lots of foreign mates, believing that it took allsorts to make a world. Look at horse-toothed Yaroslav, of Polish extraction. Look at Fucker Burke, pure bog-and-spud Irish. AndPongowas a Cornishman. No, Keith liked all sorts, all sorts of men,just as he liked all sorts of women, all colours, all creeds. Look atBalkish and Mango and Leeza and Iqbala. Look at Thelonius. In theend, though, he felt the wisdom of the traditional view: that when itcame towork, your average bongo'll be as much use as an ashtray on a motorbike. Same difference with the black darter. All the sincerity in the world. But no clinicism.


Their plan was deceptively simple. Thelonius's babymammaLilette worked as a cleaning-lady - but never for very long. As soonas any household felt the time was right to entrust her with adoorkey, Lilette felt the time was right to entrust it to Thelonius (whohad it copied) and then quit the following day. The following nightThelonius would be stopping by in the small hours . . . Theloniusseemed offended by Keith's mild hint that the filth would soon puttwo and two together.


'Filth don't know shit,' he said. 'This is the big one. It have longbread, man.'


'Bingo,' said Keith.


As planned, Keith showed up at the Golgotha shortly after nine.Thelonius was there, as planned. Quite untypically, and not veryencouragingly, Thelonius was drunk. 'Sdoveo,' said Thelonius. 'Svodeo.' He was trying to say 'Videos'. Another stretch of timepassed while Thelonius tried to say 'Digital'. Well, in for a penny, thought Keith (prophetically enough). Outside, Thelonius opened atrembling palm in presentation of his new car - a souped-up, low-slung maroon Mini, with rallying lights, customized chrome fendersand celebrity windows. Not discreet, thought Keith, as he bent toclimb into it.


'We won't be getting too many digital videos in here, mate,' saidKeith, pleased, at least, to be sparing the Cavalier from such a mission. 'What happened to the BMW?'


'Had to let it go, man. Had to let it go.'


Keith nodded. That's how it went. Thelonius had committed everylast fiver of his most recent windfall to the purchase of the BMW. Hehad bought the BMW off acheat. A couple of days later he waswithout the means to buy the car a litre of petrol, let alone the repairs and spare parts (item: new engine) that the BMW cried out for. So hehad sold it back to thecheat-ataheavy loss. And what does he dowith such funds as remain? Gets this eyecatching minge-wagon, plus anew fur coat. The new fur coat would already be gathering oil in theMini's boot, and Thelonius would be without the means to get itcleaned. That's how it went.


'Fifteen minutes,' Thelonius was saying sleepily, 'and we be back inna Black Cross, rich men. Sonofabitch!'


'What?'


The car contained no petrol.


And neither of them had any money.


So it was upon the Cavalier that they relied to take them to the darkcorner off Tavistock Road. On the way Thelonius rehearsed hisdreams of early retirement: the tickertaped, blonde-flanked return toSt Lucia, land of his fathers; the ranch-style villa, the private beach,the burnished helipad. No moon, no streetlamps, and a low ceiling ofcloud. The lock gave slickly to Thelonius's key.


'Bingo,' said Keith.


Little did they know that the place they were about to burgle - theshop, and the flat above it—had already been burgled the week before:yes, and the week before that. And the week before that. It was allburgled out. Indeed, burgling, when viewed in Darwinian terms, wasclearly approaching a crisis. Burglars were finding that almost everywhere had been burgled. Burglars were forever bumping intoone another, stepping on the toes of other burglars. There wereburglar jams on rooftops and stairways, on groaning fire-escapes. Burglars were being burgled by fellow burglars, and were doing thesame thing back. Burgled goods jigged from flat to flat. Returning from burgling, burglars would discover that they had been burgled,sometimes by the very burglar that they themselves had just burgled!How would this crisis in burgling be resolved? It would be resolved when enough burglars found burgling a waste of time, and stoppeddoing it. Then, for a while, burgling would become worth doing again. But burglars had plenty of time to waste—it was all they had plenty of,and there was nothing else to do with it—so they just went on burgling.


'Sonofabitch!' said Thelonius.


'What?'


'Torch onna blink!'


They thrashed around for a while by the light of Keith's Ronson.Thelonius found the till, smashed it open and triumphantly wrenchedout a fistful of luncheon vouchers.


'LVs, man. Sonofabitch LVs.’


'Wait a minute,' said Keith, with a sweep of his dark-adaptedeyes. 'I know this place. It's just a fucking corner shop. There's novideos.All they got here's a load of fuckimporp pies!'


Thelonius had hoped or predicted or at any rate affirmed that the owners would not be there when they called - would, in fact, beenjoying a late holiday on the west coast of England. How was it,then, that they could hear footsteps on the floor above, and the sounds of exasperated protest? The owners, of course, had gonenowhere: much impoverished by recent burglaries, they were stop­ping home. Thelonius looked up. 'Joolery, man,' he said, with thesudden calm of deep inspiration. 'She dripping with joolery.' He ducked into the back room and climbed the stairs with long silentbounds. Acting on pure instinct, Keith slowly filled his pockets withcigarettes. He went to the front door and opened it, wonderingwhat he was feeling. Down All Saints, outside the Apollo, greatnumbers streamed against the light. Keith stuck his head out andhad a look at the shop sign. Yeah, that's right. N. Poluck, the sign said grimly. Cornish Dairy. Confectioner & Newsagent. Yeah: tabloids, packet cakes, and milk cartons. Old Polish couple ran it,with an air of great depression and disobligingness. Typicalcornershop: never had anything that anybody might ever want. Long liveCostCheck and BestSave. Keith shut the door. Then, having check­ed the Eat-By date on the cellophane, he ruminatively consumed a pork pie.


In the upstairs bedroom Thelonius was rattling through the oddments on the dressing-table with truly unbearable agitation.Keith had never watched Thelonius at work before. A gravedisappointment, with none of that relaxed concentration you'realways hoping to see. He looked around for Mr and Mrs Poluckand soon picked them out, under a heap of clothes and upended drawers, and not stirring overmuch. Thus he also ascertained thatthere was nothing semi-violent about this particular crime. With aclear conscience, then, Keith strode up to the trembling figure of Thelonius and did two things. He tousled Thelonius's hair; he put acigarette in Thelonius's mouth and lit it. Thelonius took onedistracted drag before jerking his head back: enough. Keith left thebutt on the dressing-table, among the specks of hair-dust. Bingo,thought Keith: DNA innit. Now Mr Poluck groaned; Theloniusshouted'Where?' and thumped a gleaming gym-shoe down into hischeek. 'You don't do it like that, mate,' said Keith, peering aboutfor something you could carry water in. 'You get them both sittingup and hurt one till the other . . . You know.'


Keith had been hopeful at first. Nobody trusted banks any longer,thank God; and you could stroll out of the most improbable places with some quite decent lifesavings under your arm. But the brightdream was fading. Mr and Mrs Poluck were as tough as old boots — and as cheap. Thelonius did everything with tears of imploring ragein his eyes. What a life, eh? The exertion, the inconvenience, the unpopularity you incurred, and nothing going right any of the time.Keith had to do a bit of judicious slapping and shaking and hair-tugging. He disliked the touch of old bodies and wondered if it wouldbe any better working with the very young. Looking round the roomhe felt something like bafflement or even sadness at the whole idea of human belongings: we get them in shops, then call them our own; weall had to have this precious stuff, like our own hairbrush each, ourown dressing-gown each, and how soon it all looked like junk — how soon it got trampled into trash. For their part, to be fair, the Polucksdid well, with no excessive complaint, seeming to regard the episode as largely routine. Keith met with, and longsufferingly endured, theirstares of deep recognition, which wasn't a matter of putting a name to a face but of looking into you and seeing exactly what you were.No fun. No jewellery either. In the end they came wheezing down thestairs with a fake fur coat, a damaged TV set, a broken alarm clockand a faulty electric kettle. Then the stony light of Keith's garage andthe bottle ofporno passed through the dust to settle the crime buzzand crime flop that played on their flesh like fever.


Those on the receiving end of violent crime feelviolated: injury hasbeen dealt out to them from the hidden chaos, which has shown itselfbriefly, and then returned to where it lives. Meanwhile, in chaos'shiding place, what happens? Rocks and shells catch and grate inneither sea nor shore, and nothing is clean or means anything, and nothingworks.


'I'm a piece of shit,' Keith whispered into his beercan. He thoughtof everybody else who never had to do this. Guy, Guy's wife, in endless mini-series. Shah of Iran. Tits. A rich bird: and then you'reoutof here.


The money came in four buff envelopes. They contained used fifties.Much-used fifties. Sitting in his office (with its Japanese furniture andsingle Visual Display Unit and clean desk), Guy offered up hisdelicate and increasingly emotional nostrils to a familiar experi­ence: the scurfy smell of old money. It always struck him, the fact that money stank, like the reminder of an insidious weakness inhimself. Of course, the poets and the novelists had always patientlyinsisted as much. Look at Chaucer's cock. Look at Dickens (Dick­ens was the perfect panning-bowl for myth): the old man up to his armpits in Thames sewage, searching for treasure; the symbolic names of Murdstone and of Merdle, the financier. But all that wasmyth and symbol, a way of saying that money could somehow be thought of as being smelly, of being scatological. It was frightfullyliteral-minded of money, he thought, to be actually stinking up theplace like this.Pecunia non oletwas dead wrong.Pecunia olet.Christ, heaven stops the nose at it...Guy sealed and stacked thepackets. He couldn't wait to get rid of them — all this hard evidence of deception. So far, no outright lies. He fancied he had been ratherclever with Richard, adopting the smug yet faintly rueful uncom-municativeness of someone settling a gambling debt. It had come naturally. But it seemed quite likely that men were just easier to deceive. Guy put the money into his briefcase and smoked half acigarette as he contemplated - in its physical aspects only - the drive across town.


Everything was going perfectly normally or acceptably but he wasfinding it impossible to meet her eye. He could point his face in theright direction, and try to will himself into her looming gaze. At onejuncture he made it as far as her bare shoulder before his visionwent veering off to some arbitrary point on the bookcase, thecarpet, his own huge shoes. Otherwise, Guy clung to the belief thathe was behaving with conviction and control. The tremendoussnaps of his briefcase locks seemed to underscore his worldliness,the briskness of all his dealings. This was certainly one way ofdoing it: you gave the money, as it were disinterestedly; and then the adult verdict. Guy laid out the envelopes on the low table, andmentioned one or two of the slight difficulties he had encountered. Directing a rictus smile towards the ceiling, he spoke, for instance, of the tenuous connexion between the endlessly malleable symbolson the display screen and the hard cash in one's hand, with all itsbulk and pungency.


'Will you do me the kindness', said Nicola Six, 'of looking at mewhen we're talking?’


'Yes of course,' said Guy, and steered his stare into the sun of herface. 'I do apologize. I — I'm not myself.'


'Aren't you?'


With a limp hand half-hooding his eyes (it was all right so long as he concentrated on the cleft between her chin and her lower lip), andwith his legs crossing and uncrossing and recrossing, Guy venturedto speak of the recent struggles of his son Marmaduke, of thesuccessive nights in hospital, the sleeplessness, the seriousthinking...By now Guy was staring at the bookcase again. As he began to outline the chief theme of all this serious thinking, Nicolasaid,


'I'm sorry to hear that your little boy's been ill. But I must say Ithink it's rather tactless of you to bring that up now. If not downrightcruel. Under the circumstances.'


This promised something inordinate, and Guy was duly alarmed.He couldn't help feeling the pathos of her formulations (how theatrically we speak when we're moved); at the same time, hecouldn't help feeling that her choice of outfit was perhaps a trifleunfortunate. Well, not 'choice': arriving several minutes early, he had caught her, she said, between her exercises and her shower.Hence the little tennis skirt or tutu or whatever it was, at the brim of her bare legs; hence the workout top, which was sleeveless. Alsobackless. The effect was altogether inappropriate, what with those girlish white socks she must have quickly slipped on. He looked her in the eye and said, 'Under the circumstances?'


Now it was her turn to look away. 'I see,' she said, withdeliberation, 'I see that once again I am a victim of my own inexperience. It's an awful handicap. You never know what otherpeople might reasonably have in mind.' She hugged herself, andgasped softly, and said, 'You want to go. Of course. You want to besafe again. Away from complication. I understand. May I. . . ?Before you go, may I say something?'


She stood up with her eyes closed. She came towards him, loose ofbody, with her eyes closed. She knelt, and folded her arms to make apillow for her cheek on his knees, with her eyes closed. The room darkened. Guy felt that intimacy could actually kill you — that you really could die from all this pressure on the heart.


'It's sad, and ridiculous, but I make no apologies, I suppose. Wecan't help wanting what we want. Can we. It may have sometimesseemed that I singled you out for a purpose. You were to take me out ofmy life. Take me to the other side. Through love. Through sexual love.But really my plan went deeper than that. I'm thirty-four. I'll be thirty-five next month. The body ticks. I...I wanted to bear your child.'


'But this is too much,' said Guy, sliding his knees out from underher and trying to clamber himself upright. 'I'm speechless. I can'tbreathe either! I think it -'


'No. Go. Go at once. And take your money with you.'


'It's yours. And good luck.'


'No. It's yours.'


'Please. Don't be silly.'


'Silly? Silly? I can't accept it.'


'Why?'


'Because it'stainted.'


How incredibly lucky that everyone was at the hospital. Let's hearit for hospitals. And for asthma, and for eczema, and for infantdistress. By the time he got home, Guy was in no condition todissimulate, to act normal, whatever that was. He was in hospitalshape himself, cottony, lint-like, as if his torso were just the bandageon an injured heart. In the second drawing-room he threw off his jacket and watched himself in the mirror as he raised the brandybottle to his lips. Then a cold shower, and the welcome coldness ofthe sheets . . .How, exactly, had the fight started? It started when shethrew something at him, something so small that he barely saw itspassage or felt its impact on his chest. Then she was on her feet andthrusting the envelopes at him, and he held her slender wrists, andthen the staggered collapse backwards on to the sofa — and there theywere, in clothed coition with their faces half an inch apart. For a moment Guy could feel the hard bobble at the centre of everything.


'What did you throw at me?' he said.


'A Valium.'


He snorted quietly. 'AValium?'


'A Valium,' she said.


With relief, almost with amusement, Guy readjusted his shockedbody; and even his peripheral vision managed to renounce all but thequickest glint of her leggy disarray. Soon he found himself lying onhis back with Nicola's head resting on his chest, his nostrils tickledby her hair as she wandered weepily on. Here she was giving him the detailed confession: how she had hoped to step with him into a worldof physical love; how they might, if he, the perfect man, agreed, and after 'a lot of practice', try to make a baby; how thereafter she wouldbe content if he looked in once a week, or perhaps twice, to play withhis little daughter and (the suggestion was) to play with his littledaughter's mother. This dream, of course, she now cancelled andcursed... 'A lot of practice': there was something pitiably callowabout the phrase. There was plainly something else about it too;callow or not so callow, the words entrained a physical reaction, onethat tended to undermine his murmured demurrals and tender mewings. Guy hoped she hadn't noticed the ignoble billyclub whichhad now established itself athwart his lap. And when she accidentallyrested her elbow on its base (turning to ask if this was all just sentimental tosh), Guy was glad he couldn't see his own archly agonized smile as he slid out from under her.


They parted. Yes, Guy and Nicola were to part. She stood. She stoodthere, corrected. She was mistress of herself once more. As Guy movedheavily towards the door he looked down at the velvet chair and sawthe Valium she had thrown at him: not much of a missile, not much of aweapon, a yellow tranquillizer the size of a shirtbutton, and partlyeroded by the sweat of her fist.


'I thought I might need it', she said, following his eyes (which weremisting over at this comic poem of female violence), 'for after you left.But then I lost my temper. I'm sorry. I'm absolutely all right now. Goto your son. Don't worry. Goodbye, my love. No. No. Oh, begone.'


Well he was gone now, and wouldn't be back. Guy was in his own bed, where he ought to be. He wouldn't be back — except perhaps incircumstances of great extremity. He found that the current situation,or the Crisis, had a way of prompting the most shameful fantasies —discrepant, egregious, almost laughably unforgivable. What if yousurvived into a world where nothing mattered, where everything was permitted? Guy lifted the single linen sheet. He had never thought ofhimself as being impressively endowed (and neither, he knew, hadHope). Who, then, was this little bodybuilder who had set up a gym inhis loins?...So in his own way Guy Clinch confronted the central question of his time, a question you saw being asked and answeredeverywhere you looked, in every headline and haircut: if, at anymoment, nothing might matter, then who said that nothing didn'tmatter already?


Just when you thought she was a complete innocent or 'natural' ormaybe even not quite right in the head (manic depression? in mild,


interesting and glamorous form ?), she came out with something really


devastating. How had it gone? Tainted. The money wastainted.


Certainly those fuming fifties had quite a genealogy: privatizedprisons under Pitt, human cargo from the Ivory Coast, sugarplantations in the Caribbean, the East India company, South Africanuranium mines. This was all true: sweatshops, sanctions-busting,slain rainforests, toxic dumping, and munitions, munitions, muni­tions. But none of it was news to Guy. As Nicola talked he had satthere listening to a kind of commentary on the last ten years of hislife: the horrified discoveries, the holding actions, the long war withhis father. For ten years he had been dealing with cruel greeds anddead clouds. Nowadays the company was a good deal cleaner. And awhole lot poorer. Hope's money stank too: everywhere, vast bitesout of the planet. Go back far enough and all money stinks, is dirty,roils the juices of the jaw. Was there any clean money on earth? Hadthere ever been any? No. Categorically. Even the money paid to the most passionate nurses, the dreamiest artists, freshly printed, verydry, and shallowly embossed to the fingertips, had its origins in somebastardy on the sweatshop floor. She'd taken it. Nicola had taken it.That put paid to another thought, also uncontrollable (and here thelinen sheet gave another jolt): her on a street corner and a manwalking past in white flares (hello sailor), and the woman on herknees in the alley, and the money dropped on to the wet concrete.


Guy thought he heard Marmaduke screaming and looked withterror at his watch. No panic: time to get up. Time to return to thesinister cheer of the Peter Pan Ward. He heard the sound again, from the street; but he was accustomed, by now, to the auditory trickvalvethat turned a fizzing pipe or a tortured gearbox - or even birdsong or Bach — into a brilliant imitation of his absent son's screams. As heclimbed from the bed Guy heard the thump, and felt the internal shockwave, of the slammed front door. Five seconds later he hadhopped into his trousers and was veering round the doorway with a whiplash of shirt-tails.


The child was home! The child was home, borne aloft, it seemed, on the shoulders of the crowd, the little hero returned from the war,and screaming himself black in the face. Guy skimpleskambled downthe stairs and ran high-kneed through the hall with his armsoutstretched. And as the child joyously launched himself into hisembrace, and, with the familiar, the inimitable avidity, plunged allhis teeth into his father's throat, Guy thought that he might havebeen precipitate, or inflexible, or at any rate none too kind.


A mile to the north, Keith Talent lit a cigarette with the remains of itspredecessor and then pressed the butt into an empty beer can. Two new televised conversations joined the surrounding symposium.Several types of whining were going on: the giant's dentistry in thestreet below, Mr Frost above who was mad and dying, Keith'sfridge, various strains of music, and Iqbala next door going on at her boyfriend about the clothes money he'd borrowed off her last weekand promised to refund on Wednesday. Keith listened closer:someone somewhere was actually shouting, 'Whine! . . . Whine!.. .Whine?Ah yes. Keith managed an indulgent leer. That would belittle Sue down below and to the left, calling to her son Wayne. Therecame another repeated shout: 'Sow!. . . Sow! . . . Sow!' That wouldbe Kev, calling to Sue. Keith leered again. He and Sue had once beenclose. Or was it twice? His place. Kath in hospital. Now Keith calledto his wife, who duly appeared in the doorway with Kim in her arms.


'Idea,' said the baby.


'Lager,' said Keith.


'Here,' said Kath.


'Adore,' said the baby.


'What's that?' said Keith, meaning the TV.


'Ordure,' said the baby.


'News. Nothing on the Crisis,' said Kath.


'I'll giveyou a crisis in a minute,' said Keith.


'Adieu,' said the baby.


'Lager,' said Keith.


'Adieu, adore, ordure, idea.'


The doorbell rang, or rattled faultily.


'Check it Kath,'he said in warning as she turned.


Keith sat up straight with long eyes and open mouth. If that wasKirk and/or Ashley and/or Lee, if that was the boys, then Keith hadmiscalculated, and seriously. Over the past week, with all this talkabout the breaking of his darting finger, Keith had had time to ponder, with many an elegiac sigh, the steady erosion of criminalprotocol. In the old days you kicked off by threatening someone'sfamily. None of this nonsense about starting in on a man's darting finger. How about Kath and Kim? Weren't they worth threatening?But maybe that was what Kirk and Ashley and Lee had decided to do: threaten his family. (They couldn't have come here for Keith, after all, or not directly: home was the last place they'd reckon on finding him.) In principle he might have approved. Still, threateninghis family wasn't any good if he happened to bewith his family at thetime. He could hardly hide under the bed. Hide under the bed?Keith? No way: there was ten years of darts magazines down there.


'It's all right. Just a woman,' said Kath.


Two beats later he heard the front door croak open, Kath'scautiousYes? and a foreign female voice saying,Good afternoon.I'm your new worker.Keith sank back.


Chronic innit, he thought (he was gorgeously relieved). Diabolicalas such. They come in here . . .Where's Mrs Ovens? Ah, well, I'mworking in conjunction with her. We'll liaise.Liaise. I'll liaise you ina minute. Keith thought of his probation officer, the absolute lustrelessness of her hair and skin and eyes and teeth, the verticallines that busily lanced her upper lip. Runs me ragged. All this abouttheCompensations. He had skipped their last five appointments:she'd have him reporting on Saturday afternoons, minimum, orswabbing out the Porchester Baths.And how is the little one? Yeah,that's it. Call it the little one because she can't remember its name. How's diddums? How's toddles? They come in here . . .And is your husband in employment at present? Power like. Stick their fuckingoar in. Got no kids or one family's not enough. Keith craned forward and saw one flat black shoe suspended in the air beneath the kitchen table and slowly rocking.


'And is your husband at home at the moment', he heard the voice ask, 'or is it you who's smoking all these cigarettes?'


At that Keith let out a savage and protracted belch, a belch thatsaid to all that he would never yield.


Clive barked. Kath said, 'He is, yes. He's not been well.'


'So it would appear. The child . . . You're aware, no doubt, of theharm caused by passive smoking?'


'I smoked passively every day of my life and it never did me anyharm.'


'Didn't it?'


Keith was now burping in varied and horrid volleys.


'I'm afraid I might have to see about a hygiene order.'


'Hygiene? Listen. 1 mean we haven't got what some have. We're justtrying, you know?'


'You tell her, Kath,' shouted Keith.


'I mean you come in here . . .'


'Speak your mind, girl,' shouted Keith.


Kath said, 'I'm starting to wonder about whatyou're doing andhowyou're feeling. There's nothing I wouldn't do for my baby.Nothing.'


'Except you haven't got anymoney, have you. You just haven't gotenoughmoney. My God, the smoke. And I can't say I like the look ofthat dog. Do you abuse your daughter, Mrs Talent?'


'Oi!'


Keith could stand for this no longer. His protective instincts werestirred. Loyalty: it was a question of loyalty. Nobody talked that wayabout Keith's dog - or about his cigarettes, which were superking- sized and had international standing. He was out of that bed by nowand struggling with the mangled length of his ginger dressing-gown.Heavily he appeared in the doorway - browngowned Keith, fag inmouth, one arm working at the flapping sleeve, in variegated whiteness of pants and vest and flesh - and looked into the eyes ofNicola Six.


What was she doing?


What was she doing?


If the intelligent eye could lift off and climb past eaves andskylights, and speed over rooftops, and settle as it liked where peoplethought they were alone — what on earth would it see?


Nicola backing towards her bed with a glass of champagne in onehand and the other raised and beckoning, in black elbow-lengthgloves and a cocktail dress the colour of jealousy, and on her face anunrecognizable smile. Now she sat, and placed the glass on thebedside table, with a languid stretch of her wings, and remained for a moment in perfect profile, facing the window: pensively. Then her black gloves began to take rapt interest in the presumably exquisitetexture of her dress — that bit that housed her breasts. Oh, the look ofyoung wonder! She shook back her hair and started to unclasp.


Who was watching? Who saw her stand and lower the dress to her feet and step out of the lillybed in her high heels? And turn, and lookup sleepily, and blow a little kiss, and wiggle a black finger. Nobody.Or nobody now. Just the single eye of the pistol-grip camera, placedon the chest by the door.


This would undoubtedly be for Keith.


'Jesus,' I asked her, 'what are you doing?'


'Oh, it's nice to get out and about. Look who's talking. Whatabout you and your crazed excursion?'


I held up an open palm at her.


'Your love-quest. . . I'm sorry. Are you very sad?'


'I'll live,' I said. Not the happiest choice of words. 'It wasn't meantto be.'


Nicola nodded and smiled. She was sitting opposite me, the lowerhalf of her body strongly curled into the lap of the wicker chair. Itwas about two a.m. When she spoke you could see deep darkness inher mouth. 'Your nerve went,' she said.


'Listen. We're not all puppetmasters like you. And even you needthe run of the play. You need accidents, coincidences. I happen toknow there's a nice little accident that'll help speed things up withGuy.'


'I do need real life. It's true. For instance, I need the class system. Ineed nuclear weapons. I need the eclipse.'

'You need the Crisis.'


Blinking steadily, she sipped red wine and lit another blackcigarette. A strand of tobacco stuck to her upper lip until hertongue removed it. With gusto she scratched her hair, and thenfrowned at her fingernails, each of which seemed to contain abouta quid deal of hashish. Yes, she certainly looked off-duty to­night. I'm the only one who ever sees her like this. She lets me. Shelikes me. I'm a hit with all the wrong chicks: Lizzyboo, Kim, Incarnacion.


'Nicola, I'm worried about you, as usual. And in a peculiar way,as usual. I'm worried they're going to say you're a male fantasyfigure.'


'Iam a male fantasy figure. I've been one for fifteen years. It reallytakes it out of a girl.'


'But they don't know that.'


'I'm sorry, I justam. You should see me in bed. I do all thegimmicks men read up on in the magazines and the hot books.'


'Nicola.'


'So they'll think you're just a sick dreamer. Who cares? You won'tbe around for that.'


'You neither. I was thinking. You're hard to categorize, even inthe male fantasy area. Maybe you're a mixture of genres. A mutant,'I went on (I love these typologies). 'You're not a Sexpot. Not dizzyenough. You're not a Hot Lay either, not quite. Too calculating.You're definitely something of a Sack Artist. Anda Mata Haritoo. And a Vamp. And a Ballbreaker. In the end, though, I'm fingeringyou for a Femme Fatale. I like it. Nice play on words. Semi-exotic.No, I like it. It's cute.'


'A Femme Fatale? I'm not a Femme Fatale. Listen, mister: FemmesFatalesare ten a penny compared to what I am.'


'What are you then?'


'Christ, you still don't get it, do you.'


I waited.


'I'm a Murderee.'


We went out walking. We can do this.Oh — what you see in London streets at three o'clock in the morning, with it trickling outto the eaves and flues, tousled water, ragged waste. Violence is nearand inexhaustible. Even death is near. But none of it can touchNicola and me. It knows better, and stays right out of our way. It can't touch us. It knows this. We're the dead.


My love-quest did something to me.Heathrow did something to me. I can still feel the burning vinyl on my cheek. What happens,when love-thoughts go out — and just meet vinyl?


Now I've had some bad airport experiences. I've been everywhereand long ago stopped getting much pleasure from the planet. In fact Iam that lousy thing: a citizen of the world. I've faced utterimpossibilities, outright no-can-dos, at Delhi, Sao Paulo, Beijing. But you wait, and the globe turns, and suddenly there is a crevicethat fits your shape. Heathrow provided no such fuel for optimism,or even for stoicism. Zeno himself would have despaired instantly.The queues, the queues, cross hatched by the extra-frantic, theextra-needing. Too many belongings. Too many people all wanting to do the same thing . . .


And now the dreams have come. Something happened to me. Ifell, down, down, tumbling end over end.


The dreams have come, right on schedule, as Dr Slizard warned.And if the dreams have come, then can the pain be far behind?


I always thought I was up to anything that dreams could throw atme: I'd just sleep right through them, and get some much-neededrest. But these dreams are different, as Slizard said they would be.After Incarnacion has been here the bed is plump and impeccably uniformed, and I repose trust in its square-shouldered pride, itsbursting chest! On most nights, though, it looks about ready for me, intricately coiled, waiting for the stripped creature on his handsand knees.


As Slizard foretold, the dreams are notrecuperableby memory,or not yet anyway, and this suits me right down to the ground. Ihave the impression that they deal with the very large and the verysmall — the unbearably large, the unbearably small. But I can'tremember them, and I'm glad. Bad news for me, these dreams turnout to be bad news for Lizzyboo, too. I always used to think howheavenly it would be — at least in the abstract — to wake up toher, to wake up to all that honeytone and health (the sun lightsthis scene gently: her back bears warm creases from the pressof her fanned hair; and then she turns). No longer. I'm not going to wake up to anybody ever again. I couldn't let Lizzyboo wake up to me, a gaunt zero, zilched by death. I can feel the unslepthours and the unremembered dreams queuing in waves above myhead.


Quaintly, Slizard advises me not to eat cheese. This from hisoffice in the Pan Am building in New York, the envy of the uni­verse. I heed his words. Cheese? No thank you. I stay right off thatshit. Don't grate no cheese on my pasta. Not a single Dairylea splitwith Kim. At the Black Cross, I take a pass on the cheese-and-onion crisps. Offered cocktails at the Clinches', I don't touch so much as acheese football. And yet when 1 sleep what reeking Stiltons, whatslobbering camemberts and farting gorgonzolas come and oozeacross my sleep.


Lizzyboo says she eats too much when she is unhappy. She tells methis, between mouthfuls, in the Clinch kitchen. She tells me more over her shoulder from the icebox or the cooker. It's a terrible thing with her. Always the kiddie stuff: fish fingers, milkshakes, bakedbeans, sticky buns. Her weight shoots up. Lizzyboo and her weight! Ididn't know? Yes, the slightest sidestep from her starvation diet -and grotesque obesity is at the door with its bags. I wonder if it can bethe force of suggestion, but over the past few days a quarter-moonseems to have formed beneath her chin, and an extra belt of flesharound her midriff. She takes her head out of the bread-bin to tell methat she doesn't know what she's going to do about it.


Although I could point a finger at the world situation, I'm clearlymeant to take the blame for this. For this disaster also I am obliged topocket the tab. 'Come on, honey,' I say to her. 'There are plenty offish in the sea.' Again, a poor choice of words, perhaps. Because therearen't plenty of fish in the sea, not any more. Lizzyboo shakes her head. She looks at the floor. She gets up and heads for the grill andsadly makes herself a cheese dream.


When entering America these days it is advisable to look yourbest. Wear a tuxedo, for instance, or a vicar outfit. Penguin suit,dog collar: take your pick. Me? I looked like a bum, in bum suit,under bum hair, on bum shoes, when I crept into a cab, twentymiles from Missy Harter. My eyes felt as red as cayenne pepper - asred as the digital dollars on the cabby's moneyclock. It was night.But I could see the cabby's signs as clear as day. Passengers wereasked to stow their own bags(driver handicapped) and, ofcourse, to refrain from smoking(driver allergic). pleasetalk loudwas a third notification of the cabby's many disabili­ties and cares. Even with three of the four lanes down we madegood speed into the city. Just enough moon to see the clouds by, clouds shaped like the tread of a gumboot, or a tyre, or a tank. Overthe sky's sandflats the gibbous moon seemed tipped slightlysideways and smiling like a tragic mask. Beneath, half-clearedrustbelt.sherato. texac. Even the big concerns losing theirletters. Then the city: life literalized, made concrete, concret­ized, massively concretized. Here it comes. And as we passed thePentagon, the biggest building on earth, visible from space, I saw thatevery last window was burning bright.


That was my American dream. America? All I did was dream her. Iwoke up and I was still in Heathrow Airport, with my cheek on thehot vinyl. For fifteen minutes I watched a middle-aged man chewinggum, the activity all between the teeth and the upper lip, like a rabbit.And then I just thought: Enough.


It was hard getting back into London: I nearly flunked even that. Even getting back into London took my very best shot (No danger.You won't get a cab here, pal. No way). Before, I never thought I'd beable to live with myself if I failed to get to Missy and America. But maybe I can. After all, it won't be for terribly long.


Thatdream...So dogged, so detailed - so literal. One of thosedreams where things happen at the same speed as they do in real life.It included a convincing four-hour wait in Reimmigration. MissyHarter used to dream like that, always; she used to lie by my side, andspend half the night in the Library of Congress or shopping atValducci's. Something tells me that I won't dream like that everagain. From now on, each night, it'll be special relativity —Einsteinian excruciation. So maybe the American dream was afarewell to dreams. And to much else.


What was I doing? The whole thing, the whole love-quest, thewhole idea: it was from another world. Forget it. Turn back. Back totry the art and dice with death and hate, and not fight for love in someunreal war .


Chapter 14: The Pinching Game


f we couldpass through her force field (and we can't quite dothis, force fields being strongest round the beautiful and the mad),we would know that her stomach wall hurt and weighed heavily,that she felt occasional drags and brakings of nausea, that all sorts ofsalmon were bouncing upwards against the stream. But here shecomes, the character, Nicola Six on the street, on the GolborneRoad, bringing a packet of light through all the random hesitation. Not that the street was without colour and definition on this day: itlooked shorn in the low sun, plucked and smarting, with a bristle ofgolden dust. But Nicola brought light through it, human light, even dressed as she was, for simple authority: black cord skirt and tightblack cashmere cardigan, white shirt with blue ribbon serving as bowtie, hair back (before the mirror, earlier, a daunting emphasis ofeyebrow). She was getting all the right kinds of look. Womenstraightened their necks at her; men glanced, and dipped their heads. Only one discordant cry, from the back of a truck, and fading: 'MissWorld! Miss World!' Everyone else seemed to be shifting sideways ordiagonally but Nicola was travelling dead ahead.


The entrance to Windsor House immediately extinguished all herlight. Nicola slowed for an instant, then kept going; she used amental trick she had of pretending not to be there. The steepedconcrete shone in the low sun, and even fumed slightly with the fiercetang of urine. It would have been a humiliation to approach them, soclearly were the lifts defunct — slaughtered, gone, dead these twentyyears. She peered up the vortex of the stone stairwell and felt-she wasunderneath a toilet weighing ten thousand tons.


'Want I mind your car?' said a passing four-year-old.


'I haven't got a car.'


'Die, bitch.'


She climbed up past scattered toilet-dwellers, non-schoolgoing schoolboys and schoolgirls, non-working men and women, past thenumb stares of the youthful and the aged. She faced them all strongly;she knew she looked enough like the government. She felt no fear.Walking naked up these steps (she told herself), with her bare feet onthe wet stone, Nicola would have felt no fear. That was part of it: nomore fear. She paused on the tenth floor and smoked half a cigarette, watching an old toiletman tearfully trying to uncap a damaged can ofPeculiar Brew.


Like everybody else, Nicola knew that council flats were small —controversially small. In a bold response to an earlier crisis, it was decided to double the number of council flats. They didn't build anynew council flats. They just halved all the old council flats. As shewalked along the ramp of the fifteenth storey, open to the search of thelow sun, Nicola could hardly fail to notice that the front doors alternated in colour, elderly green interspliced by a more recent buteven flakier dark orange. The front doors were also hilariously closetogether.


She halted. Faultily the bell sounded.


It was Nicola's view that she was performing very creditably,especially during the first two or three minutes, in that storm or panicof sense-impressions. To begin with there was the kaleidoscopicwheeling that her entry forced upon the kitchen, the chain ofrearrangements made necessary by the admission ofone more personinto the room. Then vertigo relaxed into claustrophobia — armpit-torching, heat-death claustrophobia. Distractedly her parched eyessearched for a living thing. There was a plastic pot on the minif ridge. Init, some kind of maimed gherkin was apparently prospering; it rose from the soil at an unforgivable angle. Then she had to confront thepallor and distress of the mother, and the surprising child on the floor(the intelligent valves of its watchful face), and the flummoxed dog. Christ, even the dog looked declassed. Even the dog was meant forbetter things. Next door to the left a man and a woman werequarrelling with infinite weariness. The room was split-levelled with cigarette smoke. Nicola pressed her thighs together to feel the goodsilk between her legs. She hadn't been anywhere this small since shewas five years old.


Still hidden from sight, Keith hardly went unnoticed. As theolfactory nerve-centre of this particular stall or cubicle, Keith hardlywent unnoticed. Although he remained at the far end of the flat, he was none the less only a few feet away. Keith was very close. Nicola couldhear a beercan pop, a lighter worked and sworn at, the severe intakesof air and smoke. Then the inhuman hostility of his eructations . . .Time to flush him out. Time, because the place could not be borne -was astonishingly unbearable, even for an expert, like her. Feeling youwere in Nigeria was one thing. In Nigeria, and trapped in Nigeria, andnot at the scene of a drought or a famine but of an industrialcatastrophe caused by greed. And there for your own advancement, tomake what you could of the suffering. The talk was two-way torture.She said,


'Except you haven't got anymoney, have you. You just haven't gotenoughmoney. Do you abuse your daughter, Mrs Talent?'


'Oi!'


They waited.


And Keith loomed, loomed large in the Keith-sized kitchen. He wasn't that big; but he was gigantic in here. When their eyes met hepaused heavily. Up from the depths of the brown dressing-gown camea sallow blush of shame or rage or both.


'I'm sorry,' said Nicola, with some haughtiness, 'but it seems to methat self-hatred is more or less forced on one in conditions like these.There'd be no way round it. Without self-hatred you wouldn't last fiveminutes.'


'Hey,' said Keith.'Hey. You.Fuck off out of it.'


Kath turned slowly to her husband, as if he were a wonderfuldoctor, as if he were a wonderful priest. She turned back to Nicola andsaid, 'Yes. Care? What kind of care do you get from an office? Andfrom someone like you, doing your hobby or whatever it is you're doing. Get out.'


Tell her, Kath,' said Keith calmly.


'Get out, you old witch. Get out. You vicious thing.'


'Well as I said before, 'said Nicola, gathering herself and looking up into Keith's considering sneer, inches from her eyes, 'it's nothing morenor less than a question of money.'


She swayed out on to the ramp. Violently yanked from inside, thedoor gave an agonized creak and then closed almost noiselessly.


Nicola found that she was short of breath and taking great bites out ofthe air. Now to get back and prepare for Keith's coming. As she turnedshe heard the voices from the toy house.


'Vicious. Purely vicious.'


'They can't touch you, girl. You are who you are. Don't ever forgetit. You are who you are, girl. You are who you are.'


So when he rangher bell, when he buzzed and blurted and camejinking up the last flight of stairs, Nicola was ready for this summitmeeting, ready to turn all the new energies her way. She had done Keith violence, but she wanted no violence done to her, not yet. Shewanted that violence violently stoppered. It was all right: she had the money. And any innocent or idiot could tell that a considerable sex-deflection would also be called for. Thinking this, Nicola hadbreathed in sharply and embraced herself, bristling - even her breastshad bristled. Love wouldn't do it. (Keith wasn't the type.) Sexwouldn't do it either, all by itself. Not even Nicola's sex, whose powerhad so often astonished even Nicola Six: the threats, the reckless bribes (money, marriage), the whimperings, the unmannings and unravellings, the bared teeth, the tendons of the neck so savagelystretched . . .


Keith entered. Nicola stood at the table in the darkened room,counting money under an angle lamp. She wore a black nightgown ofcandid vulgarity. With her hair freed and a third of each breastshowing and no smile on her business face, she hoped to resemble aMonaco madame after a hard week in her first tax year of semiretire-ment, or something like that, as seen on TV. She removed her darkglasses and looked into the shadows for him. He looked back into thelight. Silently, their force fields touched. And said:


Home was his secret. Nobody had ever been there before. Oh, therehad been ingress: rentmen and census people, the police, and cheatingelectricians and would-be plumbers and so on as well as real socialworkers and probation officers—but nobody he knew. Not ever. Only the dog, and the woman, and the child: the insiders. They, too, weresecrets. Home was his terrible secret. Home was his dirty little secret.And now the secret was out.


'Once upon a time,' saidNicola carefully, 'your wife must have beenvery lovely.'


'You shouldn't've fucking done it, Nick.'


'And the little girl is divine. What did you say your dog was called?’


'You shouldn't've fucking done it, Nick.'


'Such a noble beast. Keith, Iunderstand. You didn't want me toknow, did you, that you lived like a pig.'


'That's so...That's so out oforder.'


She had a bottle of whiskey and two long glasses ready. One of theglasses she filled with perhaps a quarter of a pint of neat spirit. She tooktwo swallows, and came round the table towards him.


'Have some of this.'


And he took two swallows.


Nicola could be taller than Keith when she wanted to be. She wascertainly taller than him now, in her four-inch high heels. Keeping herlegs straight she leant back on the table and dropped her head,murmuring, 'I took some of your money and spent it on new stockings and things. I hope you don't mind.' She looked up and said, 'You doknow why I'm doing this, don't you, Keith? You do know what this whole thing is really all about?' Nicola didn't feel like laughing. But she did think it was wonderfully funny.


'What?'


'It's your darts: listen.'


The speech went on for five or six minutes. She then took him by the hand and guided his leaden body towards the sofa, saying, 'I've made alittle tape for you, Keith, which in its curious way will help show youwhat I mean.'


. . . The black elbow-length gloves, the look of young wonder, thejealous dress, the blown kiss, the wiggling black finger, beckoning.


'Slow it,' moaned Keith, as the fade began. With a soft snarl hesnatched at the remote. Then Nicola's quarter-clad brown bodydashed backwards, and became a clockwork mannequin, then a livingstatue, as Keith froze the frame of choice.


'That,' said Keith, and sighed, not with yearning so much as withprofessional sincerity, 'that is the real thing.'


She gave him the money now, negligently tossing handful afterhandful into a tradenamed shopping-bag, and then led him into thepassage. Every now and again Keith tried to look shrewd anddeserving, but his lips kept scrolling into an adolescent leer. Standingabove him at the top of the stairs, she folded her arms and appeared to gaze downwards at herself. 'The eternal appeal of the cleavage, Keith.What is it, I wonder. The symmetry. The proximal tension.'


'Prestigious,' said Keith. 'Looks nice,'


'In the books, they say, rather wistfully, that men want to put theirfacesthere. Return to mother, Keith. But I don't agree. I don't think men want to put their faces there.'


Keith nodded his head, and then shook it.


'/ think they want to put their cocks there, Keith.I think they wantto fuck the tits. Ooh, I bet they do.'


'Yeah cheers,' said Keith.


This wasn't the real thing. Just a mannequin, on the remote.'Remember. Next time you see him: mention poetry. I don't care how.And meanwhile, masturbate about me, Keith. Beat off about me. As a form of training. A lot. All those things you wanted to do to girls andwere too shy to. Or they wouldn't let you. Do them to me. In yourhead.'


Keith's eyes seemed to be seeping upwards beneath his lids. 'Giveme a taste. Come on, doll. Give me a taste.'


She must touch him. With three long fingers she felt his hair: as dry as fire-hazard gorse. One spark and it would all go up. She took a gripnear the snagged parting line and pulled back slowly. Then, leaninginto his opened face—and already hearing the swill of mouthwash, thetwanging floss (it isn't me doing this: it's Enola, Enola Gay) - she gavehim the Jewish Princess.


The telephone was ringing. Nicola drank whiskey. She lifted thereceiver, heard the panicking pips, paused, and dialled six. 'I'm afraidI'm not here,' she said. And she even meant it, in a way. 'If you'd like toleave a message, please speak after the tone.'


Of course, there was no tone, and they both waited. Christ, howmany seconds?


'Hello? Hello, Nicola? . . . God, I'm completely soaked. It's soawkward, talking to a machine. Listen. I've been -'


She pressed down with a finger.


Carefully Guy ducked his head out of the telephone cubicle and turnedto face the street-wide wall of rain. Music was playing — it came andwent beneath the thunder-racetrack of the sky. The right music, too. Guy turned: an old black man in the corner with a sax and the fiercemelancholy of Coleman Hawkins. What was it? Yes. 'Yesterdays'.Guy would certainly be giving him money.


He stood in the steeped emptiness of the underground station onLadbroke Grove, barely half a mile from the house, where he hadrecently discovered a live telephone box - in a long rank of dead ones.Quite a find. Like seeing a pterodactyl, complacently perched on atelegraph wire among the sparrows and worn old crows. Foreverintensifying, the rain was now coming down so hard that even the cars seemed to be wading off home. Just buses, like lit fortifications, stalledin the wet night. That song: such complication, such grievous entan­glement. First you go through this, it was saying. Then you go throughthis.Then you go throughthis. Life, thought Guy. When at last theman was finished Guy went over and pressed a ten-pound note into hisstyrofoam cup. 'That was beautiful,' he said. No answer. Guy turnedand walked. And then the man called out: 'Hey buddy. Ilove you.'


Five long strides got him under the bus-stop shelter. Already he wasfarcically drenched. Rather than go straight home, where Marma-duke was in any case well-attended despite the nanny shortage (two night nurses until he was better again), Guy dreamed up reasons forbreaking the journey with a visit to the Black Cross: two hundredyards along Lancaster Road. He kept on waiting for the rain to slack­en. But it didn't. It kept on doing the other thing. It was lashing down,just like they said, whipstroke after whipstroke, in climbing anger.Extremity upon extremity, and then more extremity, and then more.


As Guy dodged and jumped towards the Portobello Road and itslow-strung lights he saw a figure splashing about like a stage-drunk inthe swollen gutter beneath the lamp.Keith. And he wasn't staggering.He was dancing, and laughing. And coughing.


'Keith?'


'. . . Yo!'


'My God, what are you doing?'


Keith sank backwards against the lamp-post, his head up, his gutsoftly shaking with laughter or exasperation -with laughter or defeat.He had a green carrier-bag, crushed to him beneath his crossed arms.'Oh, mate,' he said.'You tell me. What's it all about, eh? Because Idon't fucking get it.'


'Come on in. Look at us.'


'Because I don't fucking get it.'


'What?'


'Life.'


Now a tomato-red Jaguar jerked round the corner and came to anurgent halt beneath the lamp.


'Here comes summer.'


The back door opened and a voice said from the containeddarkness, 'Get in the car, Keith.'


'Cheers, lads.’


'Get in the fucking car, Keith.'


Guy straightened, showing all his height. Keith held up a dripping hand. 'It's okay,' he said. 'No, it's okay. Only messing.' Keith steppedforward, and stooped. Then he said casually over his shoulder, 'We'llhave a drink. Not in there. Inna Golgotha. I'll -' A hand came out ofthe shadow and Keith flopped suddenly into the back seat. 'Ten mimff.Oof!'


He shouted something else and sustained another blow but Guycouldn't hear in all the rain's swish and gloss.


Re-entering the Golgotha meant rejoining it, at heavy expense,because Guy hadn't brought his stencilled nametag and could donothing with the doorman's wordless stare. With some reluctance heordered aporno (in the context of the Golgotha, Keith frowned on allother drinks) and secured a table by the fruit-machines, some distancefrom the band. As he did so he marvelled at this new thinghe had: guts.Guy didn't even look around for another white face. For some reason the physical world was feeling more and more nugatory. He thoughtthat perhaps this was a consequence or side-effect of the time he wasliving through: the sudden eschatology of the streets; the tubedsaplings and their caged trash, marking the place where each humanbeing might be terribly interred; her leggy disarray and the bubble at the centre of everything . . . Keith came in; he held up a bent thumb,and then vanished, soon to reappear with a glass and an unopenedbottle ofporno - a litre bottle, too, or possibly even a magnum.


'Are you all right?'


Keith's grinning face looked hot and swollen, and one of his earswas a startling crimson, with the beginnings of a rip showing beneath the lobe. A patch of blood on his hair had had time to dry and then todeliquesce again in the rain. He kept looking at the middle finger of hisright hand as if it had a ring on it, which it didn't.


'Nah, load of nonsense. They're good as gold really. All forgottennow as such.'


His clothes were smoking. But so were Guy's. Everyone wassmoking in the Golgotha, and everyone's clothes were smoking too. This was what happened when water met with warmth; and the rain that fell on London now gave off smoke for reasons of its own.


After a few quick glasses Keith said, 'I'm going to treat meselftonight. Debbee Kensit. Debbee - she's special to me. You know what I mean? Not yet fully mature. And pure. Natural love. Not like some.Nothing dirty. No way.’


'Dirty?' said Guy.


'Yeah. You know. Like gobbling and that. Seen uh . . ?'


At once Guy raised a forefinger to his eyebrow. 'Not in a while.'


'I don't understand you, Guy Clinch. I don't. Know what she said tomethe other day? She said, "Keith?" I said, "Yeah?" She said,"Keith?" I said, "Don't start." She said, "Keith? You know, there'snothing -I wouldn't do - when I go a bundle on a bloke like that." There. That's what she said.'


Guy was staring at him in addled incredulity. 'Wait a minute. She . . . toldyou -'


'Or words to that effect,' said Keith quickly. 'Now hang on. Hangon. You're getting off on the wrong foot here, pal. She didn'tsay it.Obviously. Not in so many words.'


'So she said what?'


'It was like from thispoem or something,' said Keith, with whatcertainly seemed to be sincere disgust. 'Christ! How'm I supposed toknow. Eh? I'm just scum. Go on. Say it. I'm just scum.'


'You don't -'


'Jesus. Oh, excuse me, mate. No no. I'm not sitting through this. Icome in here. Relax. A few drinks. You try to bring two people together in this world.'


'Keith.'


'I expected better of you, Guy. I'm disappointed, mate. Verydisappointed.'


'Keith. It's not like that. Look. I really apologize.'


'Well then. And listen: I didn't mean no disrespect to her either.Neither.'


'Keith, of course you didn't.'


'Well then. Okay. Yeah cheers. I'm glad we... Because you andme, we . . .'


Guy suddenly felt that Keith might be on the verge of tears. He hadcertainly been punishing theporno. Something else told Guy that thewordlove was not too far away.


'Because you and me, we — we ought to look out for each other.Because we're in this together.'


'In what?' said Guy lightly.


Keith said, 'Life. In this life.'


They both sat up straight and cleared their throats at the same time.


'I didn't see you there Saturday.'


'You were there, were you?’


'You didn't -'


'No, I couldn't. What was it like?'


Keith dropped his head and peered up at Guy with an expression ofrich indulgence. He said, 'Obviously the visitors were keen to blood their new signing from north of the border, Jon Trexell. How wouldthe twenty-three-year-old make the transition from Ibrox Park to Loftus Road? At just under a million one of Rangers' more costly acquisitions in the modern era, no way was the young Scot about todisappoint. . .'


Twelve hours later Guy came down the stairs of his house inLansdowne Crescent, carrying the breakfast tray and hummingnon piъ andrai.He paused and fell silent outside the door of the maindrawing-room. He put two and two together. Hope was interviewing,or importuning, a new nanny. Guy listened for a while to the conjuringof large sums of money. Nanny auditions were a constant feature ofHope's daily life. There had been a standing ad inThe Lady ever since the week of Marmaduke's birth... He went on down to the kitchen,bidding good morning to a cleaning-lady, a maid, a nurse, two elderly decorators (the cornices?), and an outgoing nanny (Caroline?), whowas openly drinking cooking-sherry and taking deep breaths as shestared in wonder at the garden. Blindingly lit by the low sun, the near end of the room was still a slum of toys. Both the closed-circuit TVscreens were dead but Guy's attention was drawn by a portableintercom on the table. Its business end must have been in the roomabove, because you could hear Marmaduke in stereo. He wasevidently being quite good, as was often the case when a new nannywas in prospect. To hear him now, a stranger might have thought thatthe child had suffered nothing worse in the past few minutes than a savage and skilful beating. Abruptly everyone in the kitchen yelpedwith fright at an atrocious crash from the room above.


'No no,Melba,'Guy sang, heading off the maid as she went for the industrial vacuum-cleaner beneath the stairs. Til do it.' Present myselfto the new nanny: present the normal smile. One behaves as if that's allnannies could possibly want: normality.


'Melba!'yelled Hope as Guy came swerving into the room,grappling with nozzle and base. Marmaduke had somehow toppledthe full-length eighteenth-century wall mirror, and was now gamelystruggling to go and throw himself in its shards. Hope held him.Between the child's legs the cord of a lamp dangerously tautened. Guy stared into the Kristallnacht of fizzing glass.


'Melba'.'yelled Guy.


After a few minutes Guy helpedMelbafold the crackling binliner.He got up from his knees, brushed himself down — ouch! — and turnedas Hope was saying,


'. . . quite as hectic as this. Darling, don't. Please don't. This is myhusband, Mr Clinch, and I'm sorry, what did you say your name was ?'


'Enola. Enola Gay.'


You look for the loved one everywhere, of course, in passing cars, inhigh windows — even in that aeroplane overhead, that crucifix of theheavens. You always want the loved one tobe there, wherever. She isthe object of the self's most urgent quest, and you search for her sleeplessly, every night, in your dreams . . . Guy felt panic, andpleasure: she was here, she was closer, and how gentle she looked inpink. Obeying a lucky instinct, Guy came forward and kissed his wifegood morning. Whatever other effects this had it predictably causedMarmaduke to attack him. Left free for a moment to wander down theroom, the child saw the caress and ran back over to break it up. ThusGuy was busy pinning Marmaduke to the floor as he heard Hope say,


The money I think you'll agree is extremely generous. I've neverheard of anyone paying anything even approaching that. You canwear what you like. You'll have backup most of the day fromMelbaand Phoenix and whoever. You'll have the use of a car. You get adouble rate for any Saturdays you might like to do, and triple forSundays. You can ha ve all your meals here. You can move in. In fact —'


Melbaknocked and re-entered. Three builders or gardeners stood ominously in her wake.


'Do excuse me for a moment,' said Hope.


So then. Leeringly chaperoned by Marmaduke, Guy and Nicola satten feet apart, on facing sofas. Guy couldn't talk to her; he found, onceagain, that he couldn't even look at her.


But Marmaduke felt differently. He slid from his father's grip. Heput his hands in his pockets and sidled across the carpet. Checking outa new nanny — checking out her tits and weakspots: this was meat anddrink to Marmaduke.


'Hello then,' he heard her say. 'You're a cool customer, aren't you?Guy, I'm so sorry. I hoped you wouldn't be here. I had to do this-I hadto see. Ow! I say, that's quite a pinch. I got your message and I felt so—Isee. Well, two can play at that, young man. Come to me today. Youmust. It's called the Pinching Game.'


The door opened. Guy looked up: Hope was summoning him withher strictest face. He trudged from the room in his enormous shoes.Hope knew: it was soobvious. Guy felt as though a new force had beenintroduced into nature, like gravity but diagonal and outwards- acting: it might take the lid off everything, the room, the house.


'Well?' said Hope in the hall with her hands high on her hips.


'I . . .'


'We take her, right? We grab her. We gobble her up.'


He hesitated. 'Has she any qualifications?'


'I didn't ask.'


'Has she any references?'


'Who cares?'


'Wait,' said Guy. At his back he felt the glare of what he assumed tobe dramatic irony. 'Isn't she a bit goodlooking?'


'What? It's incredibly quiet in there.'


'You always said that the goodlooking ones weren't any use.'


'Who are we to be picky?'


Guy laughed briefly and quietly.


'I mean,' continued Hope in a loud whisper, 'he's worked his way through all the ugly ones.'


They heard a harsh moan from within. It was quite unlike any soundthey had heard Marmaduke make before. The parents hurried in,expecting the usual scene. Nanny hunched in a corner or diagnosingsome facial injury in the mirror. Marmaduke brandishing a lock ofhair or a torn bra strap. But it wasn't like that. Enola Gay was lookingup at them with unalloyed composure while Marmaduke Clinchbacked away, nursing his wrist, and with a new expression on his face,as if he had just learnt something (one of life's lessons), as if he hadnever known such outrage, such scandal.


The house was a masterpiece. How it scintillated, how itthrummed.So much canvas, and so much oil. How confidently it put forward itsnoble themes of continuity and repose, with everything beautifullyinterlinked. And Nicola's presence was like a fuse. Because she could make the whole thing go up.


Of course, the house wasn't art. It was life. And there were costs.Naturally, money was one of them. The house didn't eat money. Itscattered money. Money flew off it, like tenners fed to an open propeller. From miles around people came to scour and primp it, to doctor it for more use, more work. Scrubbers and swabbers on their knees, the quivering plimsolls of an electrician upended beneath thejoists, a plumber flat on his back, a mangled sweep slithering up thechimney, labourers, repairmen, staggering installers, guaranteecheckers, meter readers; and, of course, Marmaduke's many myrmid­ons. Sometimes Guy imagined it was all laid on for the child. The dinkyboy-drama of skip-removal. The spillikins of scaffolding. All the ruinand wreckage.


The other thing the house used up wasorder. Each day thedoublefronted dishwasher, the water softener, the carrot peeler, thepasta patterner got closer and closer to machine death, hurtlingtowards chaos. Each day the cleaning-lady went home tireder, older,iller. A citadel of order, the house hurried along much entropyelsewhere. With so much needed to keep it together, the house must deep down be dying to collapse or fly apart. . . Feeling hunger, andthe desire to do something suddenly serious, Guy went downstairsagain, stepping over a carpet-layer and pausing on his way toexchange a few words withMelba,whose strength for years he hadbought and sapped . . .


His hands were steady as he poured milk and buttered bread.Now here was another conjugal secret: he pulled out the morningpaper from beneath a stack of Marmaduke's toy brochures, wherehe had earlier hidden it from Hope, and turned again to the op-edpage. There was the article or extract, unsigned, offered withoutcomment. Of course, in these days of gigawatt thunderstorms, multimegaton hurricanes and billion-acre bush fires, it was easy toforget that there were man-made devices — pushbutton, fingertip —which could cause equivalent havoc. But then all this stuff wasman-made, not acts of God but acts of man...So the first eventwould be light-speed. A world become white like a pale sun. I didn'tknow that. Didn't know the heat travelled at the speed of light. (Ofcourse: like solar rays.) Everything that faced the window would turn to fire: the checked curtains, this newspaper, Marmaduke'stailored dungarees. The next event would come rather faster than the speed of sound, faster than the noise, the strident thunder, the heavensplitting vociferation of fission. This would be blast over­pressure. Coming through the streets at the speed of Concorde, notin a wave exactly but surrounding the house and causing it to burstoutwards.The house, in effect, would become a bomb, and all its plaster and order, its glass and steel would be shrapnel, buckshot.No difference, in that outcome, between this house and any other.His house, the thrumming edifice of negative entropy, would beordinary chaos in an instant, would be just like wherever Keith lived,or Dean, or Shakespeare. Then everything would be allowed. Guyshut his eyes and helplessly watched himself running north throughlow flames and winds of soot; then her room, torn open to a sick sky,and an act of love performed among the splinters - forgivable, but with her beauty quite gone, and everything spoiled and sullen and dead.


Tvegot to stop,' he said with a sudden nod.


'Pardon?' came Melba's voice sweetly.


'Oh, I'm sorry,Melba.It's nothing.'


'The Effects of Thermonuclear Detonations', taken from some­thing they referred to as 'Glasstone & Dolan (1977,3rd edn)', amongthe editorials on deforestation and nurses' pay, next to a report aboutConcorde moving into overall profit by the end of the year, and above the astronomy column, which said that the Apollo object torn loose from the asteroid belt would miss the earth by a quarter of a millionmiles. Which sounded good. But that was where the moon was. Farewells were sounding on the intercom when Guy crushed thenewspaper into the bottom of the rubbish bin. He swallowed as he felther force field leaving the house.


And the house was still there.


Guy peered into the hall. By the sound of it, Marmaduke haddispersed — upstairs with Phoenix and Hjordis, no doubt. Now Guyabruptly cringed to the greeting of Dink Heckler.


'Hey,' said Dink, and pointed with an index finger.


'Dink. How are you?'


'Good.'


The South African number seven was of course in tenniswear. Hispressed shorts were candy-white against the scribbled slabs of histhighs. Encased in practically cuboid gyms, Dink's feet were plantedstupidly far apart.


'You're playing', said Guy, 'in this weather?'


'For sure.' Dink stared through the half-glass front door at thebright October morning, and then stared back at Guy with an expression of fastidious disquiet. 'What's the matter? You seesomething I don't?'


'It's just the — the low sun. Rather blinding.'


Hope now came skipping down the stairs saying, 'That's good.She's starting today. At one.'


'/s she,' said Guy.


Hope looked at Guy, at Dink, at Guy again. 'Are youokay?. . .Actually I'm encouraged. I thought she was amazing. Marmadukewas quite silent with her. He looked completely stunned. Shemust have this terrific authority. You know he's having anap upthere?'


'Amazing,' said Guy.


Then Hope said with finality, 'I'm playing with Dink.'


Under the buxom duvet, in the vestiges of his wife's sleepy body-scent, behind half-drawn curtains, Guy lay staring at the ceiling, itselfsignificantly charged with the milky illicit light of a bedroom still in useduring the hour before noon. The trouble with love, he thought, or thetrouble with this love anyway (it would seem), is that it's sototalitarian.In the realm of the intellect, how idle to look for theAnswer to Everything; idler still to find it. Yet with the emotions . . .what's the big idea? Love. Love is the Big Idea. With its dialectical imperatives, its rewrites, its thought police, its knock on the door atthree a.m. Love makes you use the blind man, makes you hope for death in Cambodia, makes you pleased that your own son writhes -deep in the Peter Pan Ward. Bring on the holocaust for a piece of ass.Because the loved one, this loved one, really could turn the house into a bomb.


He awoke around two. His mind was clear. He thought: it's over.It's passed on. And he tensed himself, listening for the first whisper ofrecurrence . . . Perfectly simple, then. He would tell Hope everything(though not about the money. Are youserious?) and submit to his atonement. How marvellous, how beautiful the truth was. Ever-present, and always waiting. Love must be an enemy of the truth. Itmust be. And it kept on making you like what was bad and hate what was good.


Footsteps passed his room and climbed the stairs.


And now life lent a hand.


Through the throttled wire of a stray intercom he heard noises,voices, laughter. Hope and Dink, upstairs, changing. Having played,they were now changing, changing. A yelp,I'm all sweaty, a comicalinterdiction,Check it out, a trickle of zip then a hot silence broken by agasp for air and her seriousQuit it!. . .


And Guy thought: My wife doesn't love me. My wife has betrayedme. How absolutely wonderful.


Soon she entered, wearing a dressing-gown, the hair released fromits grips, and with burning throat. 'Get up,' she said. 'He's sleepingnow but you're on duty when Phoenix leaves. We're nannyless for therest of the day. That bitch didn't show.'


In the next room along, Marmaduke, who had been up all night, laysprawled in a shattered nap. Toys were scattered about the cot likemunitions in a stalled war. The little prisoner, with his brutalScandinavian face, was shackled in his woollen blankets, in histumbling baby rope. Flattened with sweat was his duck-white hair . .. Even in sleep the child was not unmonitored, unmediated. Drinking acup of instant coffee, Phoenix watched over him from the kitchen, closing her long eyes for several seconds at each indication that hemight be about to stir.


Before losing consciousness Marmaduke had gazed at and proddedthe twin bruises on the back of his dimply fist. He regarded them withfear and admiration. Already he was forgetting the pain that had accompanied them, but something about the way they came to be there would live on gloriously in his mind. He wanted to do tosomeone else the thing that had been done to him. 'Nice,' he hadwhispered (as one might say 'nice' of a pretty girl in the street or of thestraight drive on the cricket field: saluting skill, talent), before rollingover to twist himself into sleep, hoping to dream of the PinchingGame.


The Pinching Game was good. It wasnice.


'Ow! I say, that's quite a pinch. Well, two can play at that, young man. It's called the Pinching Game.'


Marmaduke waited.


'Do you want to play?'


Marmaduke waited.


'Now first — you pinch me as hard as you like.'


Marmaduke pinched her as hard as he liked - which was as hard ashe could.


'Good. And now I pinchyou.'


Marmaduke watched, with stoned interest. Then his vision seepedthrough tears of pain.


'Now it's your turn again. You pinch me as hard as you like.'


Marmaduke reached out quickly. But then he hesitated. Firstlooking up for a moment with an uncertain smile, he carefully gave thetenderest tweak to the back of her hand.


'Good. And now I pinchyou.’


Although I don't eat much now 1 think I still have a good appetitefor love. But it doesn't work out.


In all I spent six nights sleeping rough at Heathrow. Not much sleeping. But plenty of rough. And I despaired. The other peoplethere were better at it than I was, stronger and quicker in the standby queue, with heftier bribes more heftily offered. I could see myselfbecoming, as the weeks unfolded, a kind of joke figure in theDeparture Lounge. Then a tragic figure. Then a ghoulish one,staggering from news hatch to cafeteria with bits falling off me.


I think I still have a good appetite for love. But there's nothing I caneat.


Incarnacion relates that Mark Asprey was hardly to be seen here atthe apartment. Her own eyes retreat and soften with a lover'sindulgence as she talks of the kind of demand in which her employerconstantly finds himself. This leads her on to explore one of life's enigmas: how some people are luckier than others, and richer, and handsomer, and so on.


Of course I'm wondering whether he took a stroll down the dead­end street.


In my new dreams I think I keep glimpsing Kim, and Missy, Missy,Kim. They're trying to be nice. But in my new dreams it just doesn'twork out.


I love Lizzyboo in my own way yet when I consider hersocio-sexualtraining or grounding I have the impression that there are onlyabout four or five things that could ever really happen between her and men.


He Refuses To Make A Commitment. She Has A Problem GivingHim The Space He Needs. He Is Too Focused On His Career At This Time. They Think They Love Each Other But Given Their Tempera­mental Differences How Will They Ever Connect?


She's much more importunate these days, or she is when she's noteating. The restraints are gone. It's as if she's falling. She's falling, and at the usual rate of acceleration, which is plenty fast: thirty-twofeet per second per second. Luckily, at least, with this fallingbusiness, it doesn't make any difference how heavy you are...Iguess I could tell her I'm plain old fashioned. 'I guess I'm just a child of my time, Lizzyboo,' I can hear myself saying as I daintily removeher hand from my knee. Alternatively, there are any number of debilitating but non-fatal diseases I could bashfully adduce. Last night she took my hand on the stairs and said, 'You want to foolaround?' Me? Fool around? Hasn't she heard that fooling around is on the decrease - though maybe it hasn't been, much, in her case, ornot until recently. Dink Heckler, for example, has the look of a stern taskmaster in the sack. But she won't be getting any of that nonsense from me. I'm a child of my time.


In the wild days of my hot youth no one wanted to risk it andneither did I. Remember how it used to go...Are you free any nightthis week? I thought we might step out together - to the hospital.That nice place on Seventh Avenue. If it makes you feel more relaxedabout it, bring your personal physician along. I'm bringing mine. I'llbe around to get you about half past eight. In an ambulance. Aw honey, don't be late.


It's not quite like that any more. Let's consider. The vaultingviruses, all those wowsers and doozies and lulus, are of courseincreasingly numerous but they seem to have simmered down a gooddeal. Purely out of self-interest, naturally. They're only parasites,after all, and the career guest and freebie-artist doesn't really want totear the whole place apart (except when unusually drunk). So thewisdom of evolution prevailed; they adopted astable strategy, with their own long-term interests held sensibly in view; and now they'rejust part of the dance. Besides, we all know we're not going to live forever. We do know that. We forgot it for a while. For a while, thelive-forever option looked to be worth trying. No longer. Even inCalifornia the workout parlours and singlet clinics are paint-parchedand gathering dust. Three score and ten is a tall order, even for the very rich, even for someone like Sheridan Sick. We subliminallyaccept that life has been revised downward, and once again we startsleeping with strangers. Or some of us do. The act of love takes place in a community of death. But not very often. Just as you won't findmuch corridor-creeping in the modern hospice, despite all the superbfacilities.


I met her eleven years ago. We felt safe. More than that. We feltsolved. We weresolved.


Now she won't talk to me. My name is muck at Hornig Ultrason.I'm not feeling very well, and Ihaven't got any money.


I find myself indulging in vulgar reveries of a movie sale.


There must be a dozen hot actresses who would kill for the part ofNicola Six. I can think of several bankable stalwarts who couldhandle Guy (the ones who do the Evelyn Waugh heroes: meek,puzzled, pointlessly handsome). As for Keith, you'd need a total-immersion expert, a dynamic literalist who'd live like a trog for twoor three years as part of his preparation for the role.


The only difficulty is Marmaduke. Typical Marmaduke. Maxi­mum difficulty. Always.


Maybe you could dispense with an infant star and go with a littlerobot or even some kind of high-tech cartoon. It's amazing what theycan do.


Or, because age and time have gone so wrong now, why not ayouthful dwarf, wearing diaper and baby mask?


It's all gone wrong. The old are trying to be young, as they alwayshave, as we all do, youth being the model. But the young are now trying to be old, and what is this saying? Grey-locked, resolutelypallid, halt in step and gesture, with panto-hag makeup, crutches, neck-braces, orthopaedic supports.


Then the next thing. You start fucking around with the way yourbabies look. First, you fuck around with the wayyou look (turnyourself into a bomb site or a protest poster), then, with thataccomplished, you start to fuck around with the way yourbabies look. Dumb hairstyles - lacquered spikes, a kind of walnut-whiskeffect. Magentas and maroons, wheat-and-swede combinations. Isaw a toddler in the park wearing an earring (pierced), and anotherwith a tattoo (bruised songbird). There are babies tricked out withwigs and eyeglasses and toy dentures. Wheeled in bathchairs.


Now I know the British Empire isn't in the shape it once was. But you wonder: what will thebabies' babies look like?


Lizzyboo and I go to the new milkbar on Kensington Park Road.Her treat. She insists. The place is called Fatty's, which strikes me asunfortunate, and bad for business. On the way Lizzyboo will eat anice-cream or a hot pretzel or a foot-long hotdog. Once there, once actually in Fatty's, she will start on the milkshakes, with perhaps a banana split or a fudge sundae. Over these dishes she will sketch inthe prospect of lifelong spinsterhood.


This afternoon, a blob of chocolate somehow attached itself to hernose. I kept assuming she would eventually notice it — would feel it,would see it. But she didn't. And I let too much time pass, too much nose time, too much chocolate time. It was a big relief when sheexcused herself and went to the bathroom. As she lifted herself fromthe chair I observed that the zipper on her skirt was warped withstrain. At least five minutes later she returned, and the blob of chocolate was still in place.


'Sweetheart,' I said, 'you have a blob of chocolate on your nose.'


She was mortified. 'How long has it been there?' she said tightly into her compact.


'Since way back. Since you had the eclair.'


'Why didn't youtell me?'


'I don't know. I'm sorry.'


Because to have done so earlier would have involved an admissionof intimacy. Because it suits me if she looks ridiculous. Because Ididn't know she had stopped looking in mirrors.


They both turn heads, these girls I squire. Lizzyboo by day. Nicolaby night. They both embody whatever it is that means menhave to look.


And what is it? One of the many messages that pulses off Lizzyboohas something to do with babies. It says: Big me. I'm big already butmake me bigger. Let the SSCs get to work. Give these breasts a job. Ilay it all before you, if you're the one. If you're the one, then I lay it allbefore you.


Interestingly, Nicola's appearance makes no mention of babies. All she has to say on that subject is Watertight Contraception. I'mnot going to lose my figure and get up in the middle of the night. Iwon't be time-processed, medianized — not byyou. It would have tobe something special, something unique, something immaculate.


Like the Virgin Mary: Nobodaddy's Babymamma.


It doesn't particularly matter that I'm going blind because I can'tread anyway. Five minutes withMacbeth on my lap and I'm in asenile panic of self-consciousness. Mark Asprey's many bookshelvesare shelved with books but there's nothing much to read. It's all stufflike Good Bad Taste or Bad Good Taste or Things You Love to Hateor Hate to Love or why it's Frivolous To Be Important or The OtherWay Around.


I get stuff from Nicola but who am I kidding. There are things I'mnot seeing, or not understanding. The only writer who gives me any unfeigned pleasure is P. G. Wodehouse. And even him I find a bitheavy. He takes a lot out of me. Scratching my hair, with soft whistles, with lips aquiver, I frown overSunset at Blandings.


Pretty soon I'll be obliged to ask Nicola to show me what she looks like in the nude. I find I'm looking forward to it. I can't imagine she will deny me this simple request. She knows how seriously I take mywork.


Chapter 15: Pure Instinct


 All right then,'said Nicola. 'Shall we start?''Yes,' said Guy. 'Let's.'


She gazed at him with an expression of sensitive expectancy.


He shifted position in his chair and said with a quavering voice, 'Ireally do find it quite extraordinary.'


'What?'


'Someone as beautiful as you. And never been kissed withpassion.'


'I suppose it is in a way. But 1 know you'll be terribly patient and gentle with me.'


'I'll do my best. Oh by the way. Before we start. What did you doto Marmaduke? He was absolutely angelic until tea-time.'


'A silly thing. The Pinching Game.' She explained, with thebriskness of impatience or even vexation (children: a delicate sub­ject hereabouts). 'A little lesson in adult injustice. Or arbitrariness.They give you a soft pinch and expect a soft pinch back. Not a hard pinch.'


Literalmindedly, Nicola was wearing white. A full white partyfrock with many a flounce and purfle. The dress was certainly notmeant to be provocative. Far from it: there was something forbidd­ingly juvenile in the way her arms emerged plumply from the puffedsleevelets and a special awkwardness conferred by the waist-thickening sash. She had also applied her makeup with excitableprodigality, as a twelve-year-old might prepare for her first big ball.


Nevertheless, Guy gazed at her dress, with its fringe of petticoat, andimagined the history of underwear being enacted within.


He said hoarsely, 'No attempts? Not even at parties or anything?Quite extraordinary.'


'Yes, my sexual life . . . just never happened. Perhaps it had to dowith my parents dying when they did. An only child. Thirteen. Mynature turning on its hinges. And I had seen what happened toEnola.'


'Oh yes.'


'I was curious, of course. I had longings.'


'You must have felt their interest. Men must have been intenselyinterested.'


'Do you know what I felt?'


'No?'


'I felt that my emotional — or sexual — being was like a little sister.A very spirited little sister. An inner sister. Whom I must alwaysprotect. I had to keep her in. Even though she yearned to come outand play.'


'It's almost tragic.'


'Though I've always suspected that my nature is in fact highlysensual. The way I respond to art tells me this. To poetry. To paintings.'


Guy had long been aware of a faint pulsing action in the middle ofhis lap. Now he noticed that with each passing second his teacup andsaucer had begun to click. He recrossed his legs and said uneasily. 'Iwonder what happens to all that - all that sap.'


Nicola straightened. She turned her face to one side. 'Does itcurdle, do you mean?'


'I'm sorry.'


'No no. It's quite all right. Does the moisture . . . does thejuice . . . ? It never felt like that. Perhaps it just wastes its sweetnesson the desert air.'


'Yes, born to blush unseen. Yes I've always thought', Guyenthused (and she smiled so bravely!), 'that Empson was quite rightabout that. The situation is stated as pathetic but it doesn't exactlyencourage you to change it. A jewel doesn't mind being in a cave, anda flower prefers not to be picked. If anything. You could —'


'There was a boy', said Nicola, 'with oil-black hair and themuscles of a panther. Pinto, the Corsican gardener's son. This was inAix-en-Provence. Every night we would meet in the warm gardenbehind the abandoned villa. He caressed me so thoroughly with histongue and his rough fingertips that I kept thinking I would unravel completely or fold myself inside out.'


'. . . When was this?'


'I was twelve.'


Twelve?'


Nicola gave Guy time to complete the following train of thought-that of driving out to the airport with his foot on the floor, taking the first plane to Marseille and running the wily Pinto to ground in someflyblown shadowland . . .


And give the blacktoothed brute the thrashing of his life. Guy triedto imagine Nicola at twelve and saw a brown belly, a collection of clefts and flexed sinews, and the same face he faced now. She wassmiling, and patting the cushion at her side.


'Come on then,' she said. 'We're not going to do much with yousitting all the way over there . . . Are you comfy? You're walking in afunny way. Okay then. Shall we start?'


'Yes. Let's.'


'What with?'


'With kissing, I suppose.'


'Right. Go on then.'


Twenty minutes later Guy whispered, 'This is heavenly. But do you think you could open your mouth a little bit?'


'I'm terribly sorry.'


'No it's all right. Or at least,' he said, 'at least don't shut it quite sotightly.'


Down in the street below Keith sat slumped in the Cavalier listening to a darts tape on the stolen Blankpunkt. They're taking their fuckingtime about it, he thought. He looked longsufferingly across the road at Guy's VW: on a meter. Still, he imagined there would be no greatbreach of decorum (he reviewed his instructions) if the Cavalier were to occupy the slot when Guy went on his way. Leave it here'll the carget a ticket. Or clamped. Fucking bastards . . .


What a difference a day makes. It was hard, in some ways, to creditthe change that had come over Keith in a scant twenty-four hours.He sat back. The low sun warmed him. Blinking through thewindscreen, whose fuzz and splat now subtly harmonized with thepond-mantle and the bobbing tadpoles of his tarnished vision, Keithrecalled that recent self, that self of rage and terror, coming up herstairs with murder in its soul — or at least with murder in its brow. Imight have taught her a lesson. Straight: I'd have swung for heryesterday. Happily hungover, Keith snorted (and coughed), andshook his head with a thickskinned smile. He comes into her loungeand it was all dark. Like a Danish sex club. No, not Danish. Er, Arab.With candles, and screens. She was wearing a black gown that was so— beautiful. No way here'll that not be an exquisite garment. Not cheap neither. Either. As for the woman it encased: you had to begiving her all kinds of credit for the nick she'd kept herself in. And allthe money on the table like, like TV as such.


'You shouldn't have fucking done it Nick!'


'Keith, Iunderstand. You didn't want me to know, did you, thatyou lived like a —'


His eyes opened, and flickered. He rubbed them, with hisknuckles, like a child. And then, after that, after something so - after saying something sowell out of order, she goes and changes my life,just like that. Magic. Because she understands me. She understandsme. She's the only one that really understands me. About mydarts . . . Keith sniffed and stirred, and wiped the tears from his eyeswith a mahogany thumbnail. Not ashamed to admit it... A wholenew life now. Keith's mind slid sideways: the last dart flying home(had to be a bull finish: had to be), and Keith turning to embrace thesporting shrug of his adversary; and then a pastel arcade of goodsand services. And pastel women. The night before, after the quart ofpornowith Guy, a visit to Debbee Kensit, and a final call paid onTrish Shirt, Keith had gone home and caught up with some of his viewing: American football, and the frame-by-frame analysis of thecheerleaders in their flickety white skirts. You had to hand it to the Yanks: they got the sport groupies all there, andin uniform.


How did it go again ? Your home life, Keith, is stifling your dartingtalents, and throwing a pall over your darting future. It's a questionof darting attitude — getting your darting head right for the big one. I see you, Keith, as a young boy in the street with your face crushed upagainst the glass. But it's not a shop window. It's a TV screen. We'retalking TV stardom here, Keith. Behind the screen is where you've got to get to. That's where all the other stuff is — all the stuff youwant. Let me take you there, Keith. Let me take you to the other side.


'Yeaeaeah,' said Keith as the darts tape achieved its climax. Hepunched the buttons. Meteorologist Dennis Car: HurricaneJuanita.Phone-in: money matters. Geopolitics: another scan for the Presi-dent's wife. Local news: police had made an arrest in the case of themurdered five-year-old in South London's Camberwell. Keithlooked indignant. Younever heard anything like that on the newsany more. Said it just encouraged it. Don't ask Keith why. Kill a kid,he thought. Get your name on the radio. Or TV.


And then that video. Jesus. Keith had been — and still was -profoundly moved. The lighting, the production values, the sheerprofessionalism. Not overly explicit, but top-quality work within itsown terms. In the past, Keith had done loads of videos with birds,and had taken it very seriously indeed. And to this day he felt puzzledby the monotonous squalor of his results. For with a video camera on his shoulder and a ladyfriend on the carpet or the couch - Keith wasall aesthete. He tried to make it beautiful, and it came out ugly; and the birds looked mad. And mad in the wrong way. So when NicolaSix, alluringly reduced to two dimensions, had climbed out of thedeep green dress and had gazed, in bra-and-panty set, so pensivelyout of the window, Keith had felt a tingle up his spine and a prickle ofthe hairs on the back of his neck. Had felt, in fact, that sense ofpregnant arrest which accompanies the firm handclasp of art.


Actress like. Real pro: knows what she's doing. The others:amateurs. Nor was this favourable impression in any way dispelledwhen she talked dirty to him on the stairs. The poetry of the cleavage.Nicolaseemed mad too, then, for a minute. But mad in the right way.And you expected a bit of that — indeed you looked for it— in the sex-genius sphere. To follow Keith's thoughts where they wouldn't quitego (and anyway he was thinking with his blood): onlyimbalancewould lead a woman to invest such a lot of herself in such anunreliable area. Take Analiese. 'Masturbate about me, Keith,'Nicola had said. And Keith had honoured her plea. 'All those thingsyou wanted to do to girls . . . Do them to me. In your head.' Keithconsidered. There wasn't anything, by now, that he had wanted to do to girls and hadn't gone ahead and done — as Trish Shirt, amongothers, could defeatedly attest. And he'd never raped Trish Shirt:he'd never seen the need. No, Keith did everything he wanted to do —except, occasionally, sexual intercourse, which had a habit of slipping his mind (fifteen minutes later, in the street, he would stopdead and snap his fingers), so busy was he with all his otherstunts . . . Oh yeah. Therewas one thing he had wanted to do to girlsand had never gone ahead and done. He had wanted to do it quitebadly and often, too (when they nagged and cried and that, orwouldn't let you do everything you wanted). He had never murderedany of them. He had never done that. And her kiss (Jesus), like fallinginto a swamp or quicksand . ..


Keith put a fresh darts tape into the Blankpunkt and resettledhimself in the hot Cavalier. That classic encounter at the Embassybetween Kim Twemlow and Nigel House. Such darts immersionwas, in Keith's view, the ideal preparation for his upcomingquarter-final at the George Washington on England Lane. He benthis head and looked up wincing at Nicola's high window. Hethought: they're taking their fucking time about it.


Guy felt a fiery crack on the side of his head. His neck jerkedbackwards into thin air, and gravity tugged him urgently to the floor.


After a moment of white flurry Nicola was kneeling by his side.


'On wo,' she said. 'Oh my darling, I'm so sorry.'


Guy raised three fingertips to his temple. He closed his eyes, and then blinked mechanically.


'Let's see. Ooh. That looks quite nasty. I'd better get you somemeat for it. I must have caught you with my ring. Oh God. Youshould have warned me about yourtongue.'


Guy half sat up. He called after her, unable, for the moment, tokeep the querulousness out of his voice, 'You saidPanchoorwhatever his name was used his tongue.'


With swollen eyes, and one hand clamped over her mouth, Nicoladropped to her haunches in front of the open refrigerator. Then herface cleared and straightened. 'In my ear,' she called back. 'Not in mymouth.He was just a dirty little gypsy or something.'


'Well how was I supposed to know?'


She returned. Guy noted her blush of contrition.


'Christ! What's that?'


'Pork liver. Anyway it's all I've got.'


The purple organ was dangling hideously close to Guy's eyeball. 'Idon't even know', he said, '— I don't even know what this wholebusiness with meatis. Do you?'


'I imagine it's meant to limit the swelling or something. I'm quite shocked at myself. It was pure instinct.'


'Oh I'm all right.'


'Mm. It certainly isn't working, this meat. It's coming up ratheralarmingly. You've got such delicate skin. Like a child's. Oh dear.Whatever will you tell your wife?’


'What, it's a proper black eye, is it?'


'I fear so.'


He held her gaze for a moment. 'Isn't there somethingJude like this? She throws a pig bladder at him or something? I mean, it's not thought to be terribly friendly.'


'It hasn't been a great success, has it. Our first session.'


'No, but..."Guy placed a fist on his heart.'In here.'


This surprised her, and softened her, and made her partly relent.Nicola's eyes moved meaningly across his face. After all, it would doKeith good to wait. 'I'll tell you what,' she said. 'Let me lead. I'll justuse my imagination. Close your eyes and I won't be so shy . .. Let me kiss it better. I'll just get rid of this disgusting meat.'


Without will, he sat back against the base of the sofa. As shemoved round him on the floor, all he felt were her lips, her fingertips,her breath on his face. He heard sighs and rustlings, and the sound ofhis own blood. At one point he felt a soft weight on his groin - thepressure, perhaps, of the gathered material of her dress or petticoat.»Anyway, it wasn't serious, because her next kiss had the shape of asmile.


She gave him the Rosebud, the Pouter, Youth, Cousins TouchingTongues, the Deliquescent Virgin, the Needer.


'Don't stop,' he whispered.


She gave him Anybody's, the Toothcount, Lady Macbeth, theGrand-A-Night Hooker, the Readied Pussy, the . . .


'Please,' he said, his eyes still closed but starting to struggle.'Please. No.'


Here we go: he's coming . . .now. Keith struggled into position. To make things 'look good', Keith had obtained, at Nicola's suggestion,a workmanlike prop: a stolen leather bag full of stolen tools - spirit-level, light hammer, chisel, tyre-iron. Doesn't see me. They can dothat: look right through you.


Guy was coming back down the garden path, and movingawkwardly, half doubled-up, and listing. He looked round in fearwith the ghost's eyes of the deceiver. Always this problem of re-entry.How the strands of duplicity tightened, like the veins on the surfaceof a sclerotic soul.Why did you come to the house? he had asked her.Toestablish something. Your wife doesn't love you. Poor Guy . . .Guy couldn't bear to believe this, Dink or no Dink. But in any case the duplicity was now all doubleknotted: one would have to go at itwith fingernails, with tweezers. He paused (winded, battered); he feltas if he had been flying for twenty-two hours in economy class, andthat the dead-end street, with its unstirring trees dust-feathered in the low sun, might just as well be Australia. Guy scanned the scene, notfor faces, not yet, but for figures with their inimitable weight and outline, as Giacometti might: Phoenix, Richard, Terry, Li/zyboo —Hope!


'Yo!'


Guy gave a stark yelp.


'Prestigious,' said Keith, shuffling stockily across the road with hisbag. 'Eurobank. Motorway contraflow. Intercool.'


'Keith.'


'Oi!'


'What?'


'Whew. That's a bit tasty.' Keith's scowl of concern now widenedinto a friendly sneer. 'You come on a bit rough, did you? Forced todefend her honour, was she?'


'No, I tripped on my way up the stairs.'


'Course you did. Listen.'


Keith reached up and put an arm round Guy's shoulder. Guyflinched but then quickly fell in with Keith's confidential amble. Wasit okay, asked Keith, if hetook his place. He'd nip in where Guy'djust been.


'I wait for you to go and then slot in after you. I'll ease in there. Nosweat.'


Guy looked down at the upturned rhomboid of Keith's nose, itsscored bridge, its tunnel-of-love nostrils.


'Because they fucking clamp you round here.'


'Do they? Yes of course, Keith.'


'Bollinger. Veuve Clicquot. Oh uh. Tomorrow night.'


Tomorrow night? What fresh hell was this? Guy opened his eyes aswide as they would go.


Keith's cigarette-bearing hand suddenly froze on its way to hislips. 'You forgotten,' he said with full menace.


'No no. I'll be there.' Where? Judging by the energy that Keithcontinued to trap in his stunned visage, Guy felt that the date must beof high significance, like a visit to the dogs or to the shrine of somesainted bookie.


'Onna darts,' said Keith at last.


The VW Estate was wedged tight into its bay, with perhaps threeinches spare at front and rear; it took Guy a long time to work the carout into the street, and Keith was alv/ays there, directing matters likea policeman, beckoning, fending off, beckoning again, and finally raising the great bent thumb.


Be no good at fighting, decided Keith as he climbed the stairs. Atotal banana. When a man was called on to look to his fists - and his feet, and his knees, and his teeth, and his chisel and his tyre-iron and his beer bottle - Guy'd crap it. Hopeless! Keith saw the likes of Guyall the time (on TV): jeered from the bedroom, snivelling in theirtweed suits. Aboard theTitanic he'd be one of the blokes that dressedup as birds, whereas Keith would meet his fate like a man. Whatthough the cocktail bar be at forty-five degrees, Keith would be down there propping it up, and murdering the Scotch. On the second-floorlanding he paused to catch his breath. He lit a cigarette and slumpedback against the window sill. By the time he had stopped coughingthe cigarette was down to its filter. So he lit another one. He had nothing to blow his nose on but found an old tit magazine in hisstolen bag and did what he could with that. Plus there was thecurtain. Then he staggered on up the third flight, wondering whatLady Muck had in store.


'We all have a dirty little secret, don't we, Keith?'


'Yeah?' said Keith, with slow hauteur, as if he didn't have a dirtylittle secret. In fact, of course, Keith had lots of dirty little secrets. Hehad dirty little secrets galore. To make no more than a briskselection, to name but a few: Trish Shirt and his father and hisdarting doubts and the crate of ripped knicker brochures in thegarage and his failure in the eyes of Chick Purchase and DebbeeKensit's birth certificate framed on her bedroom wall and anunshakable conviction of worthlessness and Kath-and-the-flat.


'It has always been a disappointment to me, a bitter disappoint­ment, Keith, that literature — that art — has failed to own up to it. Tothe dirty little secret. Which is, of course . . .'


'Thatain't no secret. I'm at it all the -'


'Oh, there's Larkin's "Love again: wanking at ten past three" anda few bursts of confessionalism from the Americans. But surely this isthe responsibility of the novelist, who works with the quotidian, whomust become the whole of boredom, among the just be just, amongthe filthy filthy too, Keith.'


'Yeah,' said Keith absently. 'Same difference.’


'You'd think that the twentieth century, unfastidious enough inevery other respect, would go ahead and grasp the nettle, wouldn'tyou, Keith? But no.'


'I seen a film', said Keith, 'where a girl did it. The other day.'


'Which film was this?'


Keith cleared his throat.'Miss Adventures in Megaboob Manor,'he said carefully.


'We'll get round to that in a minute, Keith.'


Two hundred and seventy-five quid.'


'I suppose one of the great things about masturbation is that nobody wants to be seen doing it. Generally, they don't want thenews to get around. Why should people be staring at the ceiling withthatkind of expression on their faces? Let me freshen that for you,Keith.'


'Er, thanks, Nick. Ola.'


Keith watched her pass: the soft shake of her dress. Employing thedarting finger, he made an up-and-under feint at her white-flouncedrump. The friction of underthings: quitenoisy, that dress. Like the bird inside it. Keith sucked hard on a section of his upper lip. Heconsidered himself to be thoroughly at ease, and nicely holding up his end of the sexual lecture or exchange or foretalk. He thought ofthe ecstasy aunts in the magazines, and of their certain approval. Breaking new grounds in frankness. An adult exchange of viewsinnit. Mutual pleasure. We all have our needs. But both his legs weredead they were that tightly crossed. And his palms felt siltily viscid.Jesus, hang around here all night. This rate the Cavalier'll get aticket. Or clamped. Fucking bastards . . .


'Like so much else, Keith, it's all to do with time. How old are you?'


Twenty-nine.' Said boldly, as if his age were one of his lessarguable virtues or qualifications.


'A child. A baby. You're reaching the age when, according toliterature, you'll soon be putting all that behind you. You won't ofcourse. Ever. They won't stop you stropping it, will they, Keith. Ohno. I look at you, and I see a man', she said, her face flooding with roguish admiration, 'who'd beproud to die with his Johnson in hishand.'


'Yeah cheers.'


'Cheers! But don't worry. We won't be watching. It's okay untilyou're about the same age as Christ was at Calvary. Thereafter, noone wants to know. Because it just gets sadder. Sadder ?nd sadder allthe time.'


Keith shrugged. He could feel himself sinking into the privacy ofhis hangover — into the deep and settled privacy of how he felt. Hereall the difficulties were undivulged. Oops. Oi. Hello. Oof. Jesus.Dear oh dear. But in silence. Whole'll. . . whole thing'll go upanyway. And Thelonius with his mangos and his weights. And Guy.


Now Nicola came and joined him on the sofa. The great layeredspread of frock and petticoat. The legs folded seethingly underneath.Her face dipped but her eyes still sought his. 'You're clearly something of a connoisseur', she said softly, 'of pornography.What's your special taste? Be frank. I understand. As you know I —I'm quite "non-judgmental".'


Keith liked this word. To him it evoked a new dawn, a betterworld, one finally free of all juries and magistrates and QCs. Heflexed his eyebrows and said, 'Same as the next man.' He knew — heeven hoped - this was probably false (and felt the formation, acrosshis upper lip, ofa Zapatamustache of sweat). On average Keithspent between two and three hours a day in a largely fruitless questfor the sort of pornography he liked (i.e., pornography, whore-art,and not the sex-free sex films slipped his way by othercheats or therubbish you get in the shops). But there was a time when porno­graphy had played an altogether more central role in his life. Whenhe was a bachelor, Keith had done pornography the way somepeople did heroin. Pornography pauperized Keith and made him fearfor his sanity and his eyesight. Pornography was the main reason hehad sought Kath's hand in marriage. Videos. From a towelhead — Abdelrazak - in Brixton. (Abdelrazak was nonjudgmental too. Youcould say that for him: 100 per cent nonjudgmental, was Abdelra­zak.) Keith knew that he had no resistance to pornography. He had iton all the time, and even that wasn't enough for him. He wanted it onwhen he was asleep. He wanted it onwhen he wasn't there . . . 'Justnude birds,' said Keith. 'Basically. Obviously.'


'It's funny, isn't it. The dirty little secret may be neglectedelsewhere. But here's a genre, starting assamizdat and ending up as aglobal industry, which is aboutnothing else. Women don't usuallyapprove of pornography, do they, Keith. I shouldn't think, forinstance, that yourwife approves of it.'


Oi, thought Keith. What was the matter with all this? In his head, ideas wanted to be named, but remained nameless. Something to dowith sinning singly, invisibly. You locked the door behind you. Onlythe porcelain saw, and the old towel. He felt the desire to speak andopened his mouth but there was nothing there.


'Women talk about the violence it does to them. But I don't know.Look at the most innocuous entertainment imaginable: a magicshow. The assistant minces around in a bikini, and then lies downgrinning her head off to get sawn in half. I think women don't likepornography because it excludes them. Women are there when pornography is made. Ruined sisters. But they're not there whenpornography is used. That's men's work. They don't share their littlesecret with women. They share it with pornography.'


She stood up. Look: she had the remote in her hand. The TV gaveits electric crackle. She laughed musically (crazily) and said, 'Really,the Englishman's taste! Nurses and schoolmarms and traffic war­dens. It's sosweet. I suppose it all comes from nannies and publicschools and things. Though not in your case.'


'No danger,' said Keith (he was busy watching).


'Still, thereare lots of randy plumbers and winking window-cleaners and so on.'


'Yeah cheers.'


'I'm going to have a bath. Would you unzip me, Keith? Thank you.I'll be in the tub, oh, for at least fifteen minutes. It's the little catch atthe top. That's it. Thank you. There are some paper tissues on thetable there. Let me know when you're done . .. It's all right, Keith. Iunderstand.'


She welcomed and applauded the death of just about anything. Itwas company. It meant you weren't quite alone. A dead flower, thedisobliging turbidity of dead water, slow to leave the jug. A dead carhalf-stripped at the side of the street, shot, busted, annulled,abashed. A dead cloud. The Death of the Novel. The Death ofAnimism, the Death of Naive Reality, the Death of the Argumentfrom Design, and (especially) the Death of the Principle of LeastAstonishment. The Death of the Planet. The Death of God. The death of love. It was company.


The death of physics, for example. Physics had died only the otherday. Poor physics. Perhaps fifty people on earth understood it fully, but physics was over, just in rime for the millennium. The rest was mopping up. The rest was funeral direction. They had found proton decay, at 1032years, uniting the strong and the weak atomic forces,giving the strongelectroweak. Then all they needed, for the GrandUnified Theory, for the Theory of Everything, was gravity. And thenthey got it. They got gravity.


She had read the cautious popularizations in the news magazines;and everyone agreed that the Theory made beautiful sense. The maths were beautiful. The whole death was beautiful. As sheunderstood it - well, it was very simple (it courted intuition) - thekey to Everything was this: time was a force as well as a dimension. Time was a force; but then ofcourse it was. Elementary. Six forces.And time was the sixth force, not just a measure but a motivatortoo. Time 'softened up' quanta for all the other interactions, savinga special intimacy for its workings with gravity; the tug didn't tug without the massage of time. Uranium felt time as a force easing itsjourney into lead. Yes. And human beings felt time that way too(how anthropomorphic the Theory was, how sentimental!), not just as a temporal arena, but as apower. Don't we feel time as a power,and doesn't it feel like gravity? When we rise from the bed to faceanother year. When we reach and bend, when we try to strainupwards. What is it that is always pulling us back down?


As for the death of love . . . Was it really coming? Was it alreadyhere? Naturally she had wondered, as all artists do, whether she wasjust arguing out from her own peculiarity. But now the news wasabroad and everybody was talking about it. And how to explain herred-throated anger and bitterness (she felt violated, plagiarized)when she first saw the phrase in print? The diagnosis was in on love,the diagnosis was coming in; and love was as weak as a kitten, and pitifully confused, and not nearly strong enough to be brave or evenunderstand. Dying, the human being can formulate a strategy fordeath, gentle or defiant; but then death moves in completely anddecides to run the show, at some point, near the end. Near the death. (She wasn't having any of that.She would be running things right upto the very last second.) And now the twentieth century had comealong and after several try-outs and test-drives it put together anastonishing new offer: death for everybody. Death for everybody, byhemlock or hardware. If you imaginedlove as a force, notestablished and not immutable, patched together by all best inten­tions, kindness, forgiveness — what does love do about death foreverybody? It throws up its hands, and gets weaker, and sickens. It is crowded out by its opposite. Love has at least two opposites. One ishate. One is death.


All her conscious life she had loved the dinosaurs (to this day sheoften imagined herself as a kind of moll tyrannosaurus, greedy, savage, faithless, yet still fought-over often and atrociously, and living for eighty million years). What killedthem? She had thetheories cold. An exploding star that drenched the globe in cosmicrays. A meteorite shower that kicked up a coating of dust. A new breed of baby stealers, oviraptors, velociraptors. Or, more bathetic-ally, and more hauntingly, the notion that evolutionary success, abillennium of good living, rendered them incapable of propagation. In other words (she put it), they got too fat to fuck. She played withthe idea, trying to combine it with the death of love, and imagined the heavy richness of a distempered paradise, where something was notquite right; and here the ancient creatures slowly sensed that their world had begun to fall away. They smelled the death-ubiquity. Itwasn't just that they were all too fat and generally out of shape. Theyweren'tin the mood. And so beyond the fuming purple of the mireand beneath the blood-boltered sky, in a forest full of snoozing teeth and spikes, still shattered and reeking from another day of chase andsnatch and chomp, on a low branch one lovebird turns to the otherand says (she translated from the pterodactylese): 'Leave me alone. The scales have fallen from my eyes. You're a monster. Leave mealone. I'm notin the mood.'


Their story was over. More than that, their reality was concluded.You can feel it coming. Women would of course be expected to soldier on a little longer, with their biological imperative and so on,and the gentle feeling for children would naturally be the last thing to disappear, but women would never get very far with lovelessness andthey too would weaken in the end. Nicola used to think (not often,and long ago) that even she might have been saved by love. Love wasPlan B. But it never happened. She could attract it, she could bring love in, modern love anyway: she could make a man feel he was atlast really living, she could give his world high colour — for a coupleof months. But she couldn't generate it, she couldn't send love out.Not even kitten love, curled and purring, with kitty smile. And if love was dead or gone then the self was just self, and had nothing to do allday but work on sex. Oh, and hate. And death.


Keith coughed outside the bathroom door. This cough of Keith'sstarted out as a butler's discreet reminder but quickly developed intoa ragged diphtheria of barks and snarls. While it raged, while itwrecked itself on the other side of the wall, Nicola had plenty of timeto take up the shower attachment and rinse her breasts, her belly, herdeep backside, to pat herself down with a wide volume of towel, totake up position by the door in her pink bathrobe, and wait. Hewouldn't want to face her. Sad animal, having sinned singly. Now hewas wishing that he hadn't done it. In ten minutes he would bewanting to do it again.


'Are you all right?'


Keith gave a cough like a full stop.


'Off you run then. There's a present for you. On the table there.'


'. . . This?'


'It's a briefcase.'


'Looks . . . It's more like kindofasatchel.'


'Never mind. It's full of money.'


She opened the door a single notch, no greater distance than itsown thickness. Just the lightest touch offeree fields, the white steamand pink towelling and rosy flesh escaping like draught into thegloom of the passage: not much solider, in fact, than their congress ofmoments before, with her electronic presence meeting whatever issued from Keith's eyes. But still he looked up now in temporaryterror from his nosebag of notes. His downturned face seemed adolescent, even childish. If she had yanked the door open and stepped out to confront him, he might have cringed, collapsed — he might have unravelled completely.


'Appreciate it,' he said. 'Genuinely appreciate it.'


'My pleasure.'


'And uh, loyal tape, Nicola. Quality. They ought to give you anOscar.'


She paused and said, 'What should we call it, Keith?'


'Uh. Hang about. "Bobby..." Uh. Wait. "Bobby..." It'scoming. "Bobby...on the Beat." There you are. "Bobby on theBeat."'


'Very good, Keith.'


'Orjust'Tithead".'


"Tithead", Keith?'


'It's what you call them. The hat.'


'I see.' The plastic hat had cost Ј3.50 from the toyshop inKensington Park Road. Everything else had come out of her actress trunk. How many other outfits could she find in there? Smoulderingbarrister. Lewd prison wardress. Had there ever been any lady executioners? A steaming Amazon, maybe, with liftedpanga.Shesaid, 'Always bring the satchel with you when you come to see me.Spend the money. There's lots more: it's all Guy's. Express yourselfwith it. Remember whatkind of money it is, Keith. Get some newclothes. Accessories for your car. Relax with a few drinks. Clear yourmind completely and concentrate on one thing. Which is?'


Keith nodded grimly. 'My darts.'


'Your darts.'


'Ton-forty,' said Keith. 'Maximum. Bull check-out. Sincerityfinishing.'


With satchel and toolbag Keith came carefully down the front steps. He halted. He adjusted his belt. He peered downwards at his zipper.He laughed loosely. Keith was in fact sustaining a mild attack ofesprit de I'escalier.'Filth', he thought. Yeah. Would have been best. Just call it 'Filth'. Blimey. He looked up, back over his shoulder: thehigh windows burning in the low sun. Keith made a face. The face ofa man recalling pain. But soon his violently buckled features resolvedthemselves into a forgiving sneer. Whistling, whistling piercingly (some sentimental ballad), Keith started forward, opened the gardengate, and headed for the heavy Cavalier.


Behind and to the right, flanked by flaking pillars in a doorway further up the dead-end street, Guy watched him go.


I receive a quite fantastically offensive letter from Mark Asprey. I've read it eight or nine times now and I still can't believe what he'strying to do to me. On Plaza notepaper:


My dear Sam:


I can't refrain from this hurried missive. Yesterday, after a rathergood lunch, I was musing and browsing at Barnes & Noble, downin the Village. How clean and airy the Village is now! Imagine, if you will, my elation on seeing a goodly stack ofMemoirs of aListener —by Samson Young. Well, naturally, I snapped one up.And seldom have I gained such pleasure from the outlay of a mere98 cents.


I paced the room. I paced the room on my newshtetl legs — mytwanging pool-cue legs. I tore at my hair.What hair? I phoned theHandicraft Press. Oh, the fearsome blast I would give Steve Stultifer.No answer. It was three a.m. over there. 'A poignant charm', Aspreygoes on,


is afforded by the helpless contortions of your prose. But why doyou think anyone wants to hear about a lot of decrepit old Jews? Still, I admire your nerve. An autobiography is, by definition, a success story. But when some pipsqueak takes up his pen as the evenings lengthen - well, full marks for gall! And the remainder shops do deserve our full support.

 




 Of course, I knew that sales of my book were modest. But this is asavage blow. And the reviews were good. Both of them. And theyprinted so few -I mean, they can't have soldany at all.


You should turn to fiction and the joys of the unfettered fancy. Ihad rather a hectic time in London, seeing friends old and new and clinching that book deal you might have read about. I gather youspent the entire week at Heathrow. Why didn't we link up? Youcould have treated me to 'a wad and char'. Or I could have smuggled you into the Concorde Lounge!


Yours ever,


Mark


P.S. Oh, yes. Always thinking of ways to amuse you, I have left afavourite of mine on the bedside table - Marius Appleby'sCrossbone Waters.Nowthat's non-fiction.


There goes my confidence. I could feel it leaving. I could evenhearit: it rushed out the door and whistled through the street. Until thismorning I was, as they say, up and down about this project of mine.Half the time I mentally polished my Pulitzer acceptance speech. Theother half I planned incendiary suicide withThe Murderee in my arms.


Let me soberly state that I don't think my book is reallyprizewinning material. Though the panel might feel differently aboutit if they knew it was true.


Christ, it's only just occurred to me: people are going to imaginethat I actually sat down and made all this stuff up.


For now I devote myself to the small concerns. I go where even Ifeel huge and godlike.


My new project: teaching Kim Talent to crawl. I am her crawling coach. Kim and I are really working on her crawling. Crawl, crawl,crawl. And it isn't easy, in Keith's joke pad. I wait until Kath is asleepor out pacing the walkways with the alcoholic housewives, thetranqued mums, the bingoid single parents. I shove at the squatarmchair until most of it is wedged into the hallway. Then I lay out a towel on the floor and plonk Kim down in the middle of it. I scatterrattles and squeaky toys at an inviting distance from her nose. In training shoes, in tracksuit bottoms (with my stopwatch and mysteroids), I cheer her on from the touchline. Come on, Kim. You cando it, baby. Get out there andcrawl.


With tiny grunts and pants, with sublime patience and resolve, shesquirms and edges and inches. The expression she wears is one ofdemure audacity. Do you really want to see something? Well watchthis! Watch that!I'll show you . . . On she shoves and shoulders. She licks her lips. On she inches and edges. And what happens? She justgoes backward. And not very far. How like life. How like writing. Allthat effort, and the result is just a small minus. She starts to frownand wince. She starts to see that it's a poor deal (and no one gave her fair warning). She starts to cry.


After some comfort, some juice, some deep breaths, she is ready togo again. She nods her head: she is ready. I cheer her on from themargin of the towel, as her frowning face recedes from the rattles, thesqueaky toys. As her face recedes from me. Next door, the mother rests. Teaching Kim to crawl.


Kath doesn't let me change her any more. I wonder why. Some Irish imperative, as the child's first birthday approaches? I keepthinking 1 see bruises, welts, in the shadowy cracks of her Babygro.


Yesterday I arrived on the walkway, and stood there fidgeting withthe key, wondering if I'd need it. 1 peered in through the window. Keith at the table, humped over his tabloid. Kath at the sink. AndKim on the floor, in her bouncer chair. But she wasn't bouncing. Andshe wasn't sleeping. Her shiny head was bowed; the shape of theshoulders...I thought of that terrible phrase. And I thought: Kimhas what Kath has, what Keith has. It is called failure to thrive.


1 hope I'm just imagining this. I'm waiting for the pain and it hasn'tcome. Slizard is amazed it hasn't come.


I'm wired for pain. My eyes are wired for pain.


Vladimir Nabokov, encouragingly, was a champion insomniac.He believed that this was the best way to divide people: those whoslept; those who didn't. The great line inTransparent Things, one ofthe saddest novels in English: 'Night is always a giant but this onewas especially terrible.'


Fee fie fo fum, goes the giant. How did VN ever slay the thing? Iwander. 1 write. I wring my hands. Insomnia has something to besaid for it, in my case. It beats dreaming.


God knows why but I've startedCrossbone Waters. Travel.Borneo. Handsome Marius Appleby and the glamorous photo-grapher who's been assigned to him, Cornelia Constandne. It's anawful little piece of shit. But there's the adventure, and the loveinterest, and I have to admit I'm hooked.


Now wait a minute. How did Asprey know about me holing upat Heathrow? I don't think I said anything to Incarnacion (withwhom he is in constant and sinister touch). I don't think I've eversaid anything to Incarnacion, except 'Really?' and 'You don'tsay?'


So who does that leave? Perhaps, in a sense, I'm being wise afterthe event —though 'wise'might be putting it a bit high. Just now I wassitting at his desk next door. I noticed, on the expanse of greenleather, some new displays of trinketry, the altered disposition of themailstacks. I imagined Asprey pottering here, with his plumed penand his calculator. Idly I reached out and tried the locked drawer. It opened smoothly to my jerk.


Notes, letters, cards. Photographs.


Well, there's no longer any very pressing need for me to ask Nicolato show me what she looks like in the nude. But I think I'll ask heranyway.


'It's too adorable,' said Nicola. 'And did you both have littleanimal nicknames?'


'You have to realize', I said, 'that I was a tremendous sweetiebefore all this started.'


'Let me guess. You were Daddy Bear, and she was your little cublet.' 'I'm not saying.' 'Little meals on trays. Warmed slippers.' 'Me correcting proofs. Her reading manuscripts. Happiness.' 'Andshe always did what Daddy Bear said?' 'Not at all. In fact she was onthe bossy side. I used to call them the Hitler Sisters. Her and Page. Another tomboy. They were always pouring with blood from somefight they'd just had. Like you and MA.' 'I'm getting the picture. Youwere Goody Two-Shoes. And she was little Miss Bossy Boots. Whatdid she look like? It's too adorable.'


I got to my feet and went and stood over her. I produced the walletphotograph, Missy eight years ago, brightly lit: the tidal drifts ofdown from temple to jawbone.


'Mmm,' she said. 'Still. You must have hardly dared to pinch eachother, in case you woke up. To the twentieth century.'


I couldn't resist it. I produced the second photograph and held itup to my face. 'What kind of camera did Mark Asprey use? One witha time delay? Or did you employ some sniggering third party?'


Nicola took a time delay before she said, Time delay.' And shesaid it softly.


I said, 'No dreaming here. Plenty of pinches. Fully awake.'


She flinched as I tossed it on to her lap. She straightened, and said,'I suppose you and Missy never went in for any of that.'


'Actually we did try spanking once. It hurt. My hand, I mean. Ieven said, "Ow."'


'I can see it does look rather ugly,' she said, and her long fingersbegan to tear. 'It was what he liked. And one will do things for . . .'


'Yes. Well you did say you were "stupid" for him.'


'For a genuine artist.'


'Come on. It's shit. Oh comeok.'


'I absolutely don't agree. There's a purity in his work that remindsone of Tolstoy.'


'Tolstoy?' I just couldn't take this. It was like the world. It was likefundamentalism. The planet was insane. The truth didn't matter. As1 picked up my coat I said, 'Did you see him? When he was here.'


She made no reply.


'It's over between you two. Isn't it?'


'Some things are never over.'


There is a woman who stands in the middle of the Tavistock Road,for an hour every evening, just after dusk, with her head up and herarms outstretched: cruciform.


Not old, not shabby, not stupid-looking, she stands right there in the middle of the street. She smiles fixedly at the oncoming cars,which slow down as they pass, and the drivers stare — but few shoutout. Actually, it is terrible, this smile of hers: martyred, trusting,admonitory. Why doesn't somebody come and drag her off some­where? One drunk is all it would take. When you drive by, andespecially if you approach her from the rear, you always think of carmetal meeting female flesh and blood, the forced and instantrearrangements of collision, with flesh and blood going where itsuddenly has to go. She's perfect for the book, but I can't think of anygood way of getting her in.


She's out there now. I can see her from the window. Why don't they come and take her away? Oh, why don't they come?


Chapter16: The Third Party

he next timeGuy saw Keith he looked utterly transformed.The Black Cross, at noon; down the length of Lancaster Road and in through the pub doors the low sun burned unpreventably .. .


'Cink paint,' said Keith. 'Rear final drive.'


First, and most obviously and graphically, the clothes. Keith wore a brown shirt of moire silk with raised stripes (its texture reminded Guy of pork crackling), hipster cream flares, and a new pair ofcoarse-furred ferret-like loafers (with a hint of the scaramouch or the harem-creeper in their curled tips).


'Intake manifold,' said Keith. 'Central differential.'


The cream flares had a striking arrangement at the fly. Boot­strap or bodice effects Guy was familiar with (Antonio, the rudeventa,so long ago), but he had never seen anything quite likeKeith's crotch.


'Underbody sealant,' said Keith. 'Wheel housing liners. Flangedesign.'


Individual loops, each tied in a bow, and tasselled with fringe and pom-pom; and the trousers were so dramatically, so disconcertinglylow on the hip that there was only room for two or three of them. The trousers held Keith's substantial rump as reverently as a Grecian urnholds its essence. Guy, who found the outfit ridiculous and evenalarming, none the less envied Keith that pert rear-end, having often thought that his own life had been quite poisoned by his want of real buttock. Their occupant seemed well pleased with the new trousers,and especially the fly, whose bows and bobbles he would occasion­ally run a hand over.


'Joint trapezium arm rear axle,' said Keith. 'Cataphoretic dippriming. Galvannealed zincrometal.'


Keith was, today, in particularly baronial mood, his mannersuggesting an unpierceable detachment from the froward concerns of pub life. The reason for this was not hard to fathom, was indeedwell known and still being talked about: at theochйof the GeorgeWashington, in England Lane, on Thursday night, Keith had tastedvictory. He thus took his place in the semi-finals of the DuoshareSparrow Masters.


'A shame you uh . . . let us down Thursday,' said Keith. He wasnow cleaning his fingernails with a dart. Guy looked again: Keithhad been manicured! Gone were the frayed cuticles, the scabs ofkippered nicotine. 'There was... it caused considerable disappoint­ment.'


'No I feel very bad about that,' said Guy. 'But the boy was sickagain. And at the moment we haven't got any — any choice. I was upall night with him.'


Keith looked puzzled. 'Your wife okay is she?'


'Sorry?'


'Still walking is she?'


'I'm sorry?'


Keith no longer looked puzzled. He just looked mildly surprised,and mildly displeased. Turning an inch or two, he jerked hiseyebrows atPongo,who smartly refilled his tankard. Then Keithpointed his darting finger at Guy until Guy said,


'Oh I'll have the same.'


Now Keith looked away. He seemed to be unhurriedly probing histeeth with his tongue. He began to whistle — just three casual notes ona rising scale. He ran a hand through his hair, which had beenrecently cut, and moussed, and extravagantly blow-dried.


'I'm sorry I missed it,' said Guy. 'Anyway welldone, Keith.' Hereached out a hand towards Keith's shoulder, towards his streamingbrown shirt, but then thought better of it. 'I hear you really —'


'Keith? Carphone!'


'Er, excuse me for a minute, would you, Guy?'


Guy stood there tensely with his drink, every now and thenreaching to scratch the back of his neck. Time passed. He turned andlooked (the angle of his head feeling vaguely craven) as Keith steppedback in from the radiance of the street and paused by the door tohave words with Fucker and Zbig One. 'Jesus,' Keith was saying in his deepest voice. These birds. No peace. Relax. Few drinks.' Guy looked away again.


Now with full gravity and silent promise of discretion Keith drewGuy to the fruit-machine, into which he began to insert a series ofone-pound coins, and along with whose repertoire of electronicditties and jingles he would confidently sing.


'I'm glad you're seeing Nicky again,' said Keith. 'Derdle erdleoom pom. Unrecognizable.'


'Sorry?'


'No comparison innit. Derdle erdle oom pom. Meemawmeemaw-meemaw. None of this moping around, what's the point, nopoint. What's the point. She's transformed.'


'Ah yes, you went round there to . . .'


The boiler.'


'Ah yes.'


To look at the boiler. Puckapuckapuckapucka. Bah bar deebirdie dee bom: ploomp! A, an exceptional woman, that. Notoverly versed, though, in the, in the ways of the world. You agree?'


'- Yeah,' said Guy.


Keith shook his head and smiled with affectionate self-reproach.'First time I went round there I thought she was one of them -Derdle erdle ooom pom. One of them birds that's really, well, youknow.'


Guy nodded suddenly.


'Meemawmeemawmeemaw. Oozing for it. You know. Drippingfor it. Sliding all over the floor. You're in there five minutes,minding your own business, and suddenly — Bah bar dee birdie deebom: ploomp!'


'I know the sort.'


'Not been in there five minutes and she's smacking your cods allover the park. Puckapuckapuckapucka. You come through thedoor, you take off your coat, you look down. She's got your gun inher gob. Derdleerdle oom pom. Bah bar dee birdie dee bom:ploomp! . . . Derdle erdle oom pom. Derdle erdle oom pom.Derdle -'


'Yes,' said Guy.


'Yeah well. Not a bit of it. Her? No way. Keeps herselfto herself.The real article: a lady.Look at this fucking thing.’


After several shoves and slaps Keith left the fruit-machine rockingsteadily on its base and led Guy back to their drinks. Keith positionedhimself comfortably, inclining backwards with his elbows on thebar.


'Yes,' said Guy, who seemed somewhat calmer, 'she's quite naive in some ways.'


'Doesn't surprise me.'


'Almost otherworldly.'


'Same difference.'


'That's right.' Guy's face cleared further. He even began on asmile.


'She's not. . .' The angle at which Keith was leaning afforded hima rare glimpse of his waist. He appeared to become absorbed by thetasselledloopingsof his groin, weighing each bobble in turn with hisclean fingers. For a moment a look of amusement or fond memorycrossed his face. But then his solemnity returned. He raised his hand to his hair, and looked upwards at the ceiling. He said, 'She's not just some fucking old slag like some.'


Out on the street Guy groped his way into a lamp-post and stood fora moment with his forehead pressed to the damp rust. He keptcasting his mind back . . . No, his mind kept going there under its own power, with great sudden backward vaults through time. Guykept thinking of his very first visit to her flat. Keith coming down thestairs — Hello, mate — and Nicola lingering (or recovering) in herbedroom; and then emerging (he glimpsed the tousled linen in themirror), walking awkwardly, bowlegged and bent in the middle, with her lewd and feverish face - It's sohot - and a welt or graze onher temple, as if, perhaps, in their rough passion . . . 'Oh my dear,' Guy found himself whispering (to whom?), with an incomprehens­ible smile on his lips. 'Such repulsive thought. Cannot be. Simply cannot be.' He moved off, but soon paused again, and paused again,and always with fingertips poised near his eyes.


And so Guy headed home, into the low sun. Quite uncanny, thesun's new trajectory, and getting lower all the time. Seen from therear, I must look exactly like I feel: a silhouette, staggering blind intothe photosphere of an amber star . . . And just as the sun burns offmist from the warming land, so the cumulus and thunderheads gaveway, as Guy walked, to cores of silver, and even spots of blue, in the sky of his mind. The only evidence: Keith's face. The face of KeithTalent, on the steps (with his toted toolbags). That unmistakablecontortion of gross lechery, and of lecheryin some way gratified. Butlook at it from another angle; and bear in mind that, for all his betterpoints, and through no real fault of his own, Keith remained anunbelievable berk. He might have a spyhole somewhere and peep on her in the bedroom or the bathroom. Window-cleaner wiles, keyholecunning. Perhaps he steals or at least inspects her underwear: quite easy to imagine Keith with his whole head in the laundry basket.Possibly he has contrived a way to exploit her innocence - some littleprocedure, insignificant to her, significant to him. Builders andplumbers are always manoeuvring women into close contact. Remember Hope complaining about it. Get you into the airingcupboard. He might ask her to bend down so that she can - she canlook at a pipe or something. Even I couldn't avoid seeing her breastswhen she leaned over that afternoon. So brown. So close together.Or he gets her to go up a ladder. As she strained to reach the skylightor whatever it was, her buttocks, in their white panties, would be locked together, and muscularly tensed, and sweetly unaware . . .


By the time Guy approached his front garden the adolescent chaos of his thoughts had in fact disqualified him from returning home. Hewas unpresentable. And he didn't even notice until he reached for hiskey and found that he could hardly get his hand into his trouserpocket. Guy swivelled, and dropped his head, and walked awayfastening all three buttons of his long tweed jacket. A brisk jog up thesteep bit of Ladbroke Grove, and a five-minute reverie about PepsiHoolihan, proved to be of little help. In the end Guy fashioned a kindof splint with his belt and ducked fast through the front door straightinto the lavatory beneath the stairs. He could hear women's voices downstairs until they were drowned by the rush of the cold tap.


'So how's Room Service?' asked Lizzyboo, who had just beencrying, and was now eating.


'WhatRoom Service?' said Hope. 'He's willing enough, some­times, but the orders come out wrong. He brings me tea with sugar. He brings me coffee with milk. I hate milk.'


'What do you think's up?'


'With Room Service? I have two theories. Either he's flipped. Youknow, that was always possible.'


'Or?'


'Or he's dying.'


'. . . I don't think he's dying,' said Lizzyboo.


'I don't either,' said Hope. 'Of course there's a third possibility.He's in love.'


'Room Service?'


'Like he was with you.'


'He was neverin love with me.'


'Sure he was. I found him snivelling over your dress, remember?'


'What dress?'


'The ballet dress. Flo-Flo's ballet dress. The blue one.'


'It wasn't blue.'


'Yes it was.'


'It was white.'


'No it wasn't.'


With his big feet Guy now started coming down the stairs. Hopestood up and started clearing away. Lizzyboo went on eatingShreddies.


'Hi,' he said.


'Hi,' said Lizzyboo.


'You get in any good fights today?' said Hope. 'Have you shownLizzyboo your black eye?'


'Wow,' said Lizzyboo,


'It's clearing up now,' said Guy.


'Yeah,' said Hope. 'It only looks like someone just spat a badoyster in your face.'


'Hope!' said Lizzyboo.


'Where's Marmaduke?'


'Out with Terry somewhere.'


Terry was back. Terry was back, and at rock-star wages. But not for long. The Clinches were passing through the nanny choke-point of autumn: several new ones would be starting over the next couple of weeks. Terry found it easier, or at any rate practicable, if he tookMarmaduke off somewhere. Hope permitted it, so long as Marma­duke was in the open air for no longer than thirty minutes, or at most forty-five. They had stopped asking where Terry took him. The ToyMuseum. Some snooker hall. Marmaduke would be back, soonenough.


'Have you eaten?' asked Lizzyboo with her mouth full.


'Yes. No. Anyway I'm not hungry. Feeling rather weird, actually. Ithink I'll just go and lie down for a bit.'


And up the stairs he went on his big feet.


The sisters stayed silent for quite a time.


'Flipped,' said Lizzyboo.'Dying,' said Hope.


These, then, were the terms in which Keith encapsulated hisThursday-night victory at the George Washington on England Lane:'In the final analysis' - and Keith had said this often by now, leaningbackwards on the bar of the Black Cross, the shrewd sweep of his eyesincluding Dean, Norvis, Bogdan, Fucker, Curtly, Netharius, Shakes­peare, Zbig One - 'the senior player could find no answer to thefluency of my release.'


In truth there were other things that the senior player could find noanswer to the fluency of: namely, the whispered taunts and threats with which Keith had regaled him immediately before the match,during the announcements, and in between every leg and set (while thetwo darters stood solemnly side by side, marshalling their thoughts).This was a questionableploy, and Keith was always loth to resort to it:I mean, you tell your opponent you 're going to rip his ear off and flob inthe hole, then you step up there, breathing hellfire, lose yourconcentration - and throw 26!Rebounds on you. Defeating its ownpurpose. But when Keith laid eyes on Martin Permane, the fifty-five-year-old ex-county thrower, with his exophthalmic stare, his warysmile and his village-idiotphysique (not to mention the dartingmedalson his breast: had some phenomenal averages in his classic seasons),well, he decided to give it a try. Although Martin Permane showed noresponse to the white-lipped cataract - hormone pills, prostateoperations, walking frames, hearing aids and coffin prices were someof the themes Keith played on — his darts definitely suffered. Lethimself down, did the senior slinger. Failed to throw to his fullpotential. And when, after the match, Keith ordered octuple SouthernComforts for himself, Dean and Fucker, and proceeded there andelsewhere to get unfathomably drunk, the older man merely frownedinto his consolation shandy, observing that darting styles hadprogressed a bit since he was a lad, and falling silent altogether as Keithlurched over to pound him on the back.


No matter. All that was in thepast: you take each match as it comes.Keith now girded himself for the future, getting his darting head rightfor the big one.


He threw himself into his darts. Darts was in his blood (his onlypatrimony, except for the darts pouch itself and the Ronsoncigarette-lighter). The darts in his blood coursed through him, feedinghis darts brain. A darts brain, that's what he had: darts nerve, dartssinew. A darts heart. A darts soul. Darts. 158? Two treble 20s,double 19. Or two treble 18s, bull. Darts. 149? Treble 20, treble 19,double 16(the best double on the fucking board). Darts. 120?Youjust shanghai the 20: treble zo, big 20, double 20. Tops. Darts.Darts, darts, darts. Darts.Darts. Keith Talent: Mr Checkout. KeithTalent — the man they call the Finisher.


When not actually practising his darts (brief breaks for aporno ortwo, and a ruminative smoke, as opposed to all the non-ruminativesmokes he had while actually practising), Keith pored over hisdarting bible:MTD: Master the Discipline: Darts:


If your opponent does a bad shot, like z6, punish him, capitalize, kick him when he is down with a maximum or a ton plus. If you do that no way will he get back in.


Yeah, thought Keith. You capitalize.


Never ask about an opponent. You play the darts not the man.


Never ask about an opponent, thought Keith. You play the darts not the man.


Those Pilgrim Fathers are said to have thrown darts while sailingto America in 1620 on the so-called Mayflower.


1620! thought Keith.


Christ knows how they managed it as they only had a small boatas they were tossed about on the 'Atlantic' Ocean. King Arthur was also said to have played a form of darts.


'Heritage,' Keith murmured. Following an unwonted but enticingtrain of thought, Keith saw himself as a key figure at the court of KingArthur, hailed initially for his darting skills, but going on to winmore general acclamation for his dirty jokes, his ability to hold hisale, his frenzied wenching. Not King Keith, granted (no way), but SirKeith, possibly. Tall-backed chairs, and a great pile of Clives by the fire. Had enough, sleep there if you like. Once a simple country lad.Of humble extraction. Sings for his supper as such. And then untilthe wonderful lady, with her hanky, and her fan, and her heavingbosom, takes his hand and leads him up, up, to the great tower . . . All this the girl in the dead-end street was making possible. Keithrealized, as he stood there in the dusty garage, his right toe on thechalk line, exactly 7ft 9 1/4 ins (2.37 metres) from the board, with hisdarts in his hand - Keith realized that his entire face was covered intears. Gratefully, exaltedly, he raised the cigarette to his lips: a fallingteardrop - here was more marksmanship - landed on its smokingcoal. But by puffing hard Keith succeeded in keeping the fire alive.


Tears at the dartboard, lachrymae at theochй:this was Keith'spersonal vision of male heroism and transcendence, of male grace under pressure. He remembered Kim Twemlow in the semi of lastyear's World Championship. The guy was in agony up there (and nowKeith flinched as he saw again the teartracks on that trex-white face),trailing four sets to nil and two legs down in the fifth. No one, not evenKeith, had given him a fucking prayer. A burst gastric ulcer, they saidlater, brought on by a few curries and a late night out. But what does the guy do? Calls a ten-minute medical delay, sinks a few Scotches,wipes away his tears, picks up his darts - and he throws. And hethrows . . .Five-four it was in the end. And the next night he only goesout there and butchers Johnny Kentish in the big one.Seven-fucking-nil. INNIT.


Kim and Keith: they were men. Men, mate. Men. All right? Men. They wept when they wept, and knew the softnesses of women, andrelished their beer with laughter in their eyes, and went out there whenit mattered to do what had to be done with the darts. Take them for allin all. That was what the Guy Clinches of this world would neverunderstand. Keith had often wondered why Nicola Six was doing himall these favours. And the thing or area known as hischaracter was thelast place he had looked for an answer. But now (the tears, the darts, the sawdust) it all seemed possible. We're talking success. And I canhandle it. A guy like Keith — and she must have sensed this — there wasnothing he couldn't do, there was nothing beyond him. A guy likeKeith could go all the way.


The baby saw the father in his usual chair. She made towards him.After a while she was no nearer. After a while she was no nearer. Keithstepped over her from the living-room to the bedroom. The baby wheeled around, or she tried. Keith just got further off-centre. Hestepped over her from the bedroom to the bathroom. The babywheeled again. She pressed down on her hands and looked up andinquired of him. Keith bent and picked up the heavy life (and theyareheavy, even the slightest of them, the possibilities, the potentiae, alldensely packed) and took a single stride into the middle of the kitchen.


His wife stood there in her tired light. Wordlessly Keith offered herthe smiling child. Without moving his feet he leaned back on thedoorjamb and watched critically as Kath prepared the bottle,fumbling and staggering every now and then, little Kim hookedawkwardly over her thin shoulder. Keith sighed. Kath turned to himwith a pale flicker in her face: a request for leniency, perhaps even asmile. Well, dream husband innit, thought Keith. Loads of moneysuddenly. Cheerful round the house. And all this was true, except forthe bit about being cheerful round the house. Keith was in a constantand unprecedented fury round the house. Everything round the houseprodded and goaded him.


He sat down and began on his Boeuf Stroganoff and Four IndividualMilford Flapjacks. Keith's mouth was full, and he had been drinkingall afternoon, and all morning, at the Black Cross, so he seemed to say,


'You got yourboeuf statificate on you?'


'Got my what?' asked Kath cautiously. Could it be that Keith wasnow complaining about her cooking, something he had never donebefore? She gave him what he wanted. Her hotpots and fondly spicedIrish stews had ceased unremarked about three days into their marriage.


'The bit of paper that says how old you are.'


'Not on me, no, Keith.'


He straightened a fork at her. 'When was you born then?'


'. . . Born?' said Kath, and named the year.


He stopped chewing. 'But that means you ain't even twenty-twoyet! Got to be some mistake, love. Got to be... You know what it'slike ? It's like an horror film. You know, where the bird's okay until thelast five minutes. Then she's just this boiler. Suddenly she's just ash andsmoke. Ash and smoke.'


Keith completed his meal in silence, with a couple of breaks forcigarettes. Then he said, 'Come on, Clive. Up you get, mate.'


The great dog climbed stiffly to its feet, one back leg raised andshivering.


'Come on, my son. Don't sit around here in this fuckin old folks'home, do we.'


Grimly, his long head resting on an invisible block, like anexecutionee, Clive stood facing the front door.


'No way. We're off.' He looked at his wife and said, 'Where? Work.In the correct environment.' He extended an indulgent knuckle to thebaby's cheek, and then added, with perhaps inordinate bitterness,'You just don't comprehend aboutmy darts, do you. What my dartsmeans to me. No conception.' His eyebrows rose. His gaze fell. He shook his head slowly as he turned. 'No . . .conception.'


'Keith?'


Keith froze as he opened the door.


'Would you give her a bottle when you come in?'


The shoulders of Keith's silver leather jacket flexed once, flexed twice. 'Ask me no questions,' he said, 'and I'll tell you no lies.'


Down on the street Clive lent his lumpy cooperation as Keithhauled him into the front passenger seat of the heavy Cavalier. Sothey weren't walking, not tonight. The dog could already taste themoist carpet of the loved pub, his aromatic lair in the corner beneaththe table, the place that smelled of many things but mostly his own archaeological deposits, his drooling growls, his whimpering sleep,his maturity, his manhood, the distant fluxes of his distant dog days.Clive had spent about two years of his life in this agreeable spot: dog years, too, seven times longer, or quicker, than the human reckoning. Now, before they got there, Clive had reconciled himself to a chilly wait of ten or fifteen minutes, alone, on the front seat. But he couldhandle it.


Like a dog itself the car lumbered through the lampless streets, on snuffling treads, with yellow eyes, heading for Trish Shirt's.


While Keith drove, Guy showered. With costly inerrancy thebubbled pillar of water exploded on his crown; below, supplemen­tary waist-high jets also sluiced his thighs, his insubstantial backside; and his great feet slapped about in the twirling wash. It's the Coriolisforce that makes water spin like that; in the southern hemisphere itspins the other way, clockwise; and on the equator it doesn't spin atall. Guy looked down through the tempest, through the privatizedprisms: yes, the bodybuilder was back. Like Terry. It had returned,recurred,craning into being, dumb and hopeful. The sheep look up.He had had this tumescence now, it seemed to him, for almost amonth. And it was thesame tumescence, not a series of new ones. Inthis respect it resembled Marmaduke's tantrums or screaming fits,which could be seen as essentially thesame tantrum or screaming fit:twenty months old and beginning on the day he was born.Tumescence and tantrum alike spoke eloquently of mysterious pain.It hurt now, for example. Just as Marmaduke hurt now (hear himholler). It hurt a lot all the rime. For the past few days Guy's groinhad entertained an ache of steady severity; it seemed to drift or cruiseabout in his lower systems, variously snagging itself in his spine, hisscrotum, his guts. Chainmailed in money, in health (he felt fine), incaution, Guy had never had much to do withpain. Except thatshiner: pure instinct- the dear fist. How could pain ever find him? Soin a way he welcomed and honoured it, the pain. It was like the painin his heart, in his throat; it was love, it was life. He didn't want totouch it, the pain, didn't want to disturb or molest it. No. You wouldn't want to touch it.


And now it juddered before him like a vacated diving-board as hestrode from the shower to the billowcloud of the Turkish towel, andhe tented it tenderly in white cotton shorts, and dressed the painquickly, and looked for a way out of the house on his taut leash, past the quiet wall of his wife's contempt — a contempt not doubled but squared or cubed by the presence of the sister, silently eating.


'Is the milk on?' said Hope.


By averting her eyes a quarter of a degree, Hope might have seenfor herself that the child's bottle was indeed warming, like a missile in the silo of its Milton. But this was an expression of her higher responsibility (she was measuring medicines): so might the brainsurgeon tell the lab char to give her mop a good squeeze.


'Yes,' said Guy. 'The milk's on.'


On the steps, the doublefronted house looked down on him,proudly - the masterpiece, the swelling arsenal of neg-entropy. Allaround the pressure was gathering, in pounds per square inch.


Nicola Six had just got Enola Gay out of Phu Quoc and was in theprocess of ferrying her to Kampot when Guy said suddenly,


'So really you see quite a lot of Keith.'


'. . . Yes. He's in and out a good deal.'


'The boiler and so on.'


'The boiler. And the pipes,' said Nicola (who in truth knew even less about this kind of thing than did Keith Talent).


'Do you ever — does he ever have you go up ladders or anything likethat?'


Guy crossed his legs and realigned his buttocks. He was, herealized, succumbing to a reckless agitation. Not that the evening had - on paper anyway - provided much excitement so far: a two-hour one-man play, translated from the Norwegian and performedin a Totteridge coffee-bar, about the demise of the reindeers; then asimplethough no doubt perfectly nutritious meal in a vegetarianBangladeshi restaurant in Kilburn. There had certainly been noanxiety about running into anyone he knew. But Nicola at night was a novelty, and a revelation (and in the City money was moving instrange ways and Guy felt again that the time was short. Short, shortwas the time) . . . The sun does many things but it's far too busy to flatter the human being with its light. Human beings do that, withtheir light. Guy didn't quite say it to himself, but human light made Nicola look experienced: the thinness or fineness of the skin roundthe hollows of jaw and cheekbone; the dark breadth of the mouth.And how incontrovertibly illicit were the shadows of the apartment, the folds of her silver-grey cashmere dress, the glaze of her legs. Ateleven o'clock at night — at her place — love was no allegory.


'Let me think. Does he have me go up ladders. No.He goes upladders.'


'He doesn't get you in corners. By the sink or something.'


'In corners . . . No 1 don't think so.'


'How does Keith strike you? Generally, I mean.'


She shrugged minutely and said, 'I suppose he's rather anattractive character.'


'Of course you know', Guy heard himself saying, 'that in someways he's little better than a common criminal. Or worse.'


'Or worse? Guy, I'm shocked. I think it's so unkind to judge peopleby hearsay. Or by their backgrounds.'


'Just so long as you know. I mean, you haven't found anythingmissing. Cash. Jewellery. Clothes.'


'Clothes?'


'Scarves. Belts. He might give them to his girlfriends. He's got lotsof girlfriends, you know. Underwear.'


'Whatever would Keith want with my underwear?'


'These questions will seem quite pointless to you. But has he evergot you in the airing-cupboard.'


Nicola did a slow frown and said, 'It's funny you should mentionthe airing-cupboard.'


Guy sat back. He stretched his neck and looked along his nose ather.


The other day there was some sort of problem to do with theairing-cupboard. Some . . . pipe thing. Well it's awfully cramped and


stuffy in there, And I was wearing my short blue thing 1 do my


exercises in.’


'Go on,' said Guy regally.


'Well he told me to read the nipple gadget on the stopcock. Are yousure you want to — it's all rather shaming. I had to strain upwards tosee the dial. I had one foot on the chair. And one on the towel rack.Rather an undignified sight. And very uncomfortable, with my legs stretched apart like that. And then . . .' She gave a secretive smile.


'What?'


'You'll never guess.'


'I think I can. Keith did something. Didn't he.'


'No no. Keith was in there, in the bathroom, testing thetemperature level in the bidet. No. The towel rack slipped and Itumbled to the floor with all the sheets and everything coming downon top of me!'


Guy smiled palely.


'Fortunately I was able to collect myself completely by the time hehurried along to help. No, the real reason I need him here so much —and you're not to be cross or tease me. The real reason...is the littleone.'


'I'm sorry?'


'Oh. If at the other end of a great chain of ifs and buts, and far inthe future and everything, if there is a future, and only when youwant to, we do decide to have a baby daughter, then there are allsorts of things I might as well get done now. And if we're going tomake any progress this evening then do please come and sit over here. I'm dying to do some kissing.'


Guy left about an hour later, soon after midnight. And somethinghappened, just before he left, something dramatic, something painful — though Guy would later derive much complicated comfort fromthe incident. First he had paid a stooped visit to the bathroom, where, gasping and wincing, he had rearranged himself with the aidof his belt and the vibrant elastic of his boxer shorts. In the hall he joined Nicola, who stood in profile with her arms folded. This', shesaid, 'is the famous airing-cupboard.' In they peered. 'Come on,' she said, and stepped inside. Sober Guy suddenly felt rather drunk: thepine racks of bedding, the polythene puff of the heater, the narrowspace where a man and a woman might very well contend withcertain harassing proximities. 'You can just imagine me up there,' she said, as she turned to him, 'with one leg here and one leg there.Careful.'...As had been the case before, their farewell kisses, beingemblems of their own termination, were by far the most liquid anddistendedof the evening; and the heat in there was so furtive, sofeminine . . .Not that their bodies were actually touching or anythinglike that; but Guy could feel the ghosts of various contours, ofpromising pendencies, or perhaps just the electric field, the cashmerenimbus, of her dress. To further this delicious calibration he slightlybent and parted his legs, urging himself forward half a famishedmillimetre. At one point, as she breathed thickly into his ear, his hand moved from her shoulderblade to the surprising bounty of her armpit,and then hovered and fell (he thought he heard a moan of assent) onher waiting breast.


Later,Guy could never finally decide whether he had in fact lostconsciousness, though Nicola would always regretfully assert that hehad. When the world's lineaments returned, in any event, he was lying in the foetal position with his head on thepassage carpet and with bothhands cupped and trembling over his groin. The colour of his face(Nicola would remark) had some interesting affinities with the colour of his healing black eye: grey on a background of pale green. She wascalling his name as if through rain and from a considerable distance.


'Guy? Guy? Guy! Guy...I can't bear it. I did it again. Just pureinstinct. Terrifying how dramatic it was. You went down like a ton of bricks. Have you been ill? Ooh. Does ithurt dreadfully? Come on . . .oof. I suppose we can look on the encouraging side. My breasts wereburstingand when you touched me there was this great convulsionright through my body. Can you drive? Can you walk? Can youspeak?Say something. Guy? Guy? Ah I can'tbear this. Why is it that Ialways seem to be causing you pain?'


After Guy left, Keith called. Nicola stared at the seething booze in herglass as she heard the pips of the payphone, the bearpit clamour ofsawdust and bloodlust. ..


Now this was a little bit naughty of Keith to call so late like this. Buthe wanted to see another one of those videos, being incorrigible as he was. And, quite frankly, after the kind of eveningshe'd had(that play!that meal!), well, where was the harm in a little bit of fun?


Nicola poured more brandy. She giggled uglily: ugly giggling. Sheknew the giggling was ugly but that only made her giggle all the uglier.She went to her dressing-room, taking the glass, and the bottle.


D'you knowsomething? She was really in the mood. She was. Keith,he did love her to wear her frillies. Said it made him feel dead fruity.Nowthis . . .is a lovely garment. Dirty great brute like him but they'reall just little boys really when they see you in your scanties. (Andtheydo like a spiky shoe.) All the pound notes Guy gave her she would spend on wondrous frillies and costliest scanties. For him!For Keith!


She unbuttoned her dress and slipped out of it. She let her hairdown. Ugly giggling.


Guy parked the car in Lansdowne Crescent and sat waiting for thepain to go away. Seventy-five minutes later Guy was still there. But then so was the pain. With his lips as far apart as they had ever beenasked to stretch he slid across the seat and out into the night.


The great house swam towards him, darkly streaming. Hesearched its face: no dreaded yellows of emergency or vigil. Was itpossible that his return might coincide with Marmaduke's tortured small-hour drowse? The front door admitted him. His bones creak­ed and split and popped into the hall. With reckless swiftness hetiptoed towards the kitchen stairs.


Under surgical lights, surrounded by washers and driers andstacks of nappies, Guy inspected himself, unkindly, like an armydoctor. His animal parts looked hard-done-by, traduced, but nomore unprepossessing than usual. It was his face that seemedaltered, shrunken, livid - his fool-for-love face, terrified by thebright mirror. Among Marmaduke's innumerable talcs and salvesthere was nothing for what ailed him.


As he came out of the washroom adjusting his trousers, a bolt offear traversed the kitchen: a spectral nightdress in a mouth of whitelight. Not Hope — Lizzyboo. Raiding the icebox.


'Marmaduke quiet?' he asked.


'Mm-hm. As of ten minutes.'


He thought of their one embrace, the embrace Hope never knewabout, in the bathroom, in Italy, the not-so-little little sister,flattered, foregrounded, breathlessly promoted. How big she wasnow. And how other. Poor Lizzyboo.


'Goodnight.'


She chewed and swallowed. 'Goodnight,' she said.


Guy stole upstairs, falling quieter on every step, and undressed inthe dark of the visitor's room. Naked, he stole across the passage onthe balls of his feet. The furious physics of the door fought himevery inch of the way: its croaks and twinges, its rasp against thecarpet's nap. When you're trying to be quiet, you see that every-thing is dying to be noisy. And Guy twanging there with the physicsof everyday h'fe. Hope lay in the darkness, curved like an ess or a zed,or a query.


Wehn Kieth got back that. . . When Kieth . . . Wehn Keith got backthat nite, okay. Eezy does it. Where's the lite? Okay. No way wasthem lastpomostoo cJever. Ditto going again to Shirt Trish again.But Nik siad OK to drink waht felt okay. Dim matter. Siad it dimmatter. Man is the hunter . . .


He sJammed the front door behind him. He stood at the sink anddrank a Jot of warm water. Then he felt better. Then he fell over.Suddenly, and in no particular order, Keith burped the wife, took thebaby outside for a pee, and fucked the dog.


Kim Twemlow's lifestyle.' Still strolling about in his white shoes. Even up here on the ceiling there were lights of cars. The house, thecircular drive, and selected guests for luncheon. Why, Cymphia.Amphea! Generally find a glass of chapmange quite refreshing at thishour. Smampha. Corimphia.'My dear Aramimpha?. . . Keith? Youcould have the Jot, mate. Yeah, you cuold. You colud do it son. Youculod. Yeah you fucking cloud . . .


What was it? Driving back like that - what was it? in the car, andClive sleeping. The moon. And London like it used to be. Many moons of the street-lamps, many moons ago. TV. Jesus. Coming upon me now. Felt yung innit. Uh-oh. What goes down must - oop.Whoop. Yeah that was the phing. Yooph, mate, yooph.’


I must go to London Fields, before it's too late.


If I shut my eyes or even if I keep them open I can see the parklandand the sloped bank of the railway line. The foliage is tropical andinnocuous, the sky is crystalline and innocuous. In fact the entire vista has a kiddie-book feel. There in his van putts Postman Pat: Postman Pat and his black-and-white cat. It is all outside history.Vicars, spinsters, parkies, gardeners, widows so old, so long-widowed, that they have reverted to a state of virginity. The onlyhard evidence of sex is the children - and, in the distance (and not sohard), soft hills in the shape of breasts.


There was a stream, fordable, jumpable, not dangerous, perfectlyscaled for five-year-olds, for boys, for my brother and me. David! Sam! Oh boys, you are heartbreaking and mysterious. The way you cock your weak bodies — to essay something, to dare something.Your love of war. Look! Watch! Oh, boys, why do you have to dothis?


But boys have to do this.


I must go back. I mustn't leave it too late.


One can only assume that Missy has a thing for men and weapons— for arms and the man.


Look at me: pre-nuked and dead-already.


Look at Sheridan Sick. That time I met him. High up over Du PontCircle, a party in the boardroom of Hornig Ultrason (HornigUltrason: a beacon for everything bad). I asked him to explain thenew phenomenon of superbolt lightning. Missy stood at his side, atmy side. I knew nothing.


'Solar supergranulation,' said Sick. 'Sam? imagine soup boiling ina pan 20,000 miles across. Even when it gets here the flare wind is still travelling at 400 miles per second. Then it hits a ghost basin inthe magnetosphere. Bingo. Superbolt.'


Quite unenlightened, I said, 'You give the impression that you know a lot about these things.'


'I'm learning, Sam. We're working more and more with theQuietWall community.'


'Well, stop. And don't do it again.'


'That's funny,' he said. With a really disgraceful smile. On hisreally disgraceful face.


Sheridan Sick: a smart cookie. Yeah, a biscuit, with a haircut ontop, powered by a certain je-ne-sais-quoi. It takes all kinds to make aworld. It takes only one kind to unmake it. My father was of thelatter school, though in an unrecognizably younger world, caught upin fresher historical forces. And not doing it for the money.


Of all the forces, love is the strangest.


Keith looks like love (though I'm sure he doesn't feel it. And givenhe's Keith). The spring in the step, like Johnny Head-in-Air.


And Guy looks like death.


Love can make a woman pick up a bus, or it can crush a man underthe weight of a feather. Or it just lets everything go on as it wasyesterday and will be tomorrow. That's the kind of force love is.


God knows why I persist withCrossbone Waters. I guess itemboldens me: that stuff like this gets published. It's an awful littlepiece of shit.


In his skiff or whatever, with his sweaty fatigues and his trustyguide Kwango, Marius Appleby retraces the old pirate routes offestering Borneo. Many long descriptions of celebrated pillagingsand rapes. Especially rapes. Marius often seems to wish he were backthere in the old days, and that the pirates were taking on new hands.


But the good bits are all about the photographer assigned to him by the colour magazine, Cornelia Constantine: five feet twelve,twenty-seven, octaroon complexion. Her eyes areas black as ebonyand she hasflaming waist-length red hair. He meets her at theairport. She's one of those natural blue-bloods, disdainful,self-sufficient, dedicated to the art of taking photographs. ButMarius is posh too (he lets it be known), and handsome, and nostranger to the love of women. Cornelia's previous boyfriendsinclude a world-famous sculptor, an EEC Prime Minister and a deadracing-driver. When she alights from the jeep, even thebustlingstreets of Samarinda go into freeze frame, like on Keith's TV.


They hire old Kwango and set off in the skiff, which is calledAphrodite.Invoking the deity, Marius vows to possess Cornelia. Hischances don't look good, but you find yourself rooting for him somehow. As he awakes on the first morning he sees her standingnaked in the cerise lagoon, her flaming hair perched on the crux ofher muscular buttocks. On her way out, after her swim, she faces thetravel writer boldly, without shame, as noble beauties will. And he raptly notes that her breasts areproud and her hair-colournatural.


Oh yeah. A story of natural love. The whole thing is like this: athesaurus of miserableclichйs.It's anawful little piece of shit. But Iguess I'll keep going. The thing is, I really want to know how Mariusmakes out with Cornelia.


Like my heroine or villainness, like my murderee, Lizzyboo, too,has a strategy for getting to the end of men. Her strategy is this:Weigh Two Hundred Pounds.


There is a major obstacle in her journey towards two hundredpounds: food poisoning. Common sense: if you eat more food, thenyou eat more poison. I think this works in my favour, all in all. She's in bed now, sick, too sick to eat much or to feel like getting fresh.


Imagine the miraculous expansion of Missy Harter's girth. I keepgetting the wild idea that if we could buy babies in stores or go look at them in zoos and theme parks, and they never grew up but stayedat fifteen months for say six or seven years, yes, we'd still beinterested, some of us, we'd go look at them and maybe buy a couple and keep them under the ping-pong table in the basement and bringthem out to show our friends.


Every day the sun is getting lower in the sky.


The pain hasn't come yet. Slizard is amazed. But I still have thisstrontium sting or plute ache in my ankles. I find the roads are gettinglonger, the hills steeper. I use the car.


Now - the streets, the traffic. We know that traffic reflects thetemperaments of the great capitals (and here in a farewell flourish I invoke my world citizenship): the unsmiling triumphalism of Paris,the fury and despair of old New York, the cat-and-mouse audacityof Rome, the ragged murder of Cairo, the showboat longevity of Los Angeles, the industrial durance of Bombay or Delhi, where,four times a day, the cars lash the city in immovable chains. Buthere, in London — I just don't get it.


They adore doubleparking. They do. This is true love - a lovewhose month is ever May. They park in the middle of the goddam­ned street. I turned into the All Saints Road - and it wasn't a roadany longer. It was a lot, a doubleparking lot. The traffic lights arebarely more than decoration, like Christmas lights. You hit a red at the crossroads but you inch forward anyway, into the lock, into theheadlock. You may even decide the time is ripe to get out and runan errand. Why? Why not? Everybody else does it. It seems clear tome, after five seconds' thought, that if everybody does it thennobody gets around, nobody gets anywhere. But everybody does itbecause everybody does it. And here's the other thing: hardlyanyone seems to mind. At the crossroads the drunken youth dropsout of his van and waddles into GoodFicks or Potato Love or theButchers Arms, and the cars don't mind. They just nudge and shoveeach other, the old heaps, and not angrily, in this intimacy of metal and rust and not getting anywhere.


That was more or less how it was ten years ago. That was moreor less how it was ten days ago. Now, in the last little packet oftime, it's all changed. We have moved from purgatory to fullinferno. And suddenly everybody minds. Even the gentler sex. And if plump mums scream over thegrizzle of their strapped kids, if oldladies in old Morrises parturate with venom and smack freckledfists on the horn, then how are themen taking it? Four times in thelast few days I have sat tight in the car, gridlocked under the lowsun, with no way out, while jagged figures discover what the hardmachine can do to the soft: what the hood of the car can do to thehuman nose and mouth, what the tyre-iron can do to the back of the human head. Traffic is a contest of human desire, a waitinggai.ie of human desire. You want to go there. I want to go here. And, just recently, something has gone wrong with traffic. Some­thing has gone wrong with human desire.


I don't get it. No - I do! Suddenly I do, though there's no realreason (is there?) why anybody else should. In traffic, now, we areusing up each other's time, each other's lives. We are using up each other's lives.


Cornelia's morning swims have become a ritual. Marius will now stand on the deck with bronzed arms akimbo and openly admire heras she wades toward the shore. Her breasts, apparently, are -


A package, delivered by uniformed courier. I was expecting, with very little enthusiasm, the medication promised by Slizard. This wasfrom Hornig Ultrason, however.


It contains the first chapters of my typescript. And the outline. Anda check. Option-money. I don't know how she worked it. Butthis . . .


I'm aware that art can be sweet, and love sweeter, the recognitionand forgiveness in the eyes, the hand and its needed touch, the mind-body problem so sweetly solved. But this, this (the money quivers in my fingers),this is true felicity.


The turbulence of my joy was such that I didn't notice, for amoment, that the pain had come.


And now the pipes are starting up again. The pain - the inorganicagony.


Jesus, the whole apartment is writhing and twisting with it.


Is it ever going to stop? Is it ever going to stop with that stuff?


Notnow. But when? When's a good time for it — for pipes, forpain? It never is, it just never is, it justnever is the time.


Chapter 17: Cupid's College


lovejuice.  ungovernable passion.The earth moved innit.'


'Hello, Keith. How are you?'


'Give herself utterly. The consummation of their bliss. One up theKhyber.'


'How are things?'


'Mutual body pleasure. The importance of sufficient foreplay. Afull but firm figure. Consenting adults.'


When he was with her, Guy's trust was absolute and entire.Although Nicola's kisses sometimes shocked him - with theirliquidity, their penetration, their hunger — her inhibition wasunassailable, without blindspots, and impressively intransigent.How her whole body seemed to lock or jam whenever his handentered the force field surrounding her breasts, her thighs, herheartbreaking belly. Elaborately conditioned by her sensitivity (andby the two powerful blows he had recently sustained), Guy wasalmost as tentative, as virginally hairtriggered, as Nicola herself. Itwas a relief for them both to be elsewhere, in all the places wherenothing could happen. Sometimes, in the afternoons, they visited obscure museums or earnest cinemas. They went for walks, makingthe most of the clear weather: Guy relished a good tramp, and Nicolasaid she liked it too. The further out the better, Guy in his big wetshoes, Nicola in her dark-green wellies, her patched blue jeans: theyheld hands, and walked with their joined arms swinging. Just northof Barnet they found a wood they both adored. The muffled rustling,the way the trees husbanded moisture. Of course, there were littletricks and japes. She would knock his hat off into a puddle, then run and hide. Guy would scamper after her. She once wrote I Love You with a stick in the phlegmy mud of a dried stream. There were manydelicious kisses under the branches of the tinkling trees. Birds stirredand damply flapped but they saw no animals, no small woodland creatures, not even a squirrel or a rabbit: only the animal fawns of the light cast by the low sun. Nicola said that these moments wereespecially precious, away from the city and its sense of approachingcatastrophe.


When they got back to her flat Nicola would serve tea, on a tray,usually with biscuits. And for a while they would carefully neck on the sitting-room sofa. Yet when the time came for him to leave, and the kisses at the top of the stairs became kisses of farewell they alsobecame wanton, and she would now squirm with vivid appetite in hisarms. Smaller than him, and shoeless by this stage, Nicola would seem to be climbing up his body with the aid of various points ofsuction. Now, as he went on his way, his chest bore the fudgyimprints of her breasts, his belly was embossed by her culverts and contours. Further down, all was muscle memory: the tilt and camberof her excruciating pith. And she would soon be braver, she said. 'Soon I'll be braver,' she whispered hotly into his humming ear.


Still, Guy counted himself pretty lucky if he managed to get in and out of there without bumping into Keith. As Guy staggered down thestairs, bent, breathless, coated with electricity, Keith would bestaggering up them. Alternatively, when Guy rang the buzzer on theporch, it would be Keith who personally yanked open the front door,looking glazed, lordly, propitiated. Something like this happenedslightly more often than not. And once it happened twice: on the wayinand on the way out — as if Keith was just politely and brieflyvacating the eminence that was rightfully his. There were also othervisits, Guy knew. Sometimes, when he was passing by or at any ratein the general neighbourhood, or when he had nothing better to do (asurprisingly capacious timeframe), Guy would haunt her dead-endstreet. On one occasion he saw Keith pull up and stolidly hoist satchel and toolbag from the boot of the heavy Cavalier. On another- and this was more or less pure accident - Guy's Volkswagen wasinvolved in a minor delay, close to the significant junction; the delaywas caused by Keith, who at some risk to himself and others wasbacking out into the main road; a few minutes later Keith drove past, sneering volubly into his new earphone.


In the early mornings Guy would lie in bed next to the shape of hissleeping wife (so distorted, now, in all his feelings about her, by theweight of what she didn't know) and stare at disgusting tableauxvivants, coarse grey travesties of potting shed and parkie hut, ofelderly nurseries, with Keith saying, 'The doctor told me I have to do it once a day. Just lie down there,' or, more coaxingly, 'You just put itin your mouth until - it's just a funny game really.' Stealthily Guydrained himself from the bed. Next door he sat on the edge of thebath and moaned and shouted into the towel's cumulus. Then helooked down at his own loins with amazement and humiliation: there was the farcical animal, the winking elf. Godlike and archaic, he rose and began to cover the wound. In the mirror a pale warrior,vizor-boned, bodkin-browed — the starved lips! The two corners ofhis jawline had grown sharp rivets. His hipbones stuck out like thehandles of a cooking urn. An urn that contained? The stew of all hisstewed love.


And the century so close to its ending. The thing was, the troublewas, what it came down to was . .. No. Guy never dared think it. Set free, the thought would have gone like this. You could imagine Nicola, someone like Nicola, someone in her position, someone soplaced, so cloistered, at the end of the nineteenth century or at theend of the eighteenth century or any other century that had anumber. But not the twentieth century, which must leave its markon everyone. Not the twentieth century. Not looking like shelooked.


Keith said, 'What do you do with Guy then?'


'What do you think I do?' said Nicola. 'I tease his fucking cockoff.'


Keith nodded slowly at her, with genuine affection. Then hestretched. 'Yeah. You know...he went to the university. Okay. Buthe done know fucking nothing.'


'It's a paradox, isn't it, Keith.'


'Nothing.'


'Whereas yourself, Keith, a student at the university of life . . . ?'


'Up the hard way. Street-smart as such. No, okay: he was borninto a life of wealth and privilege like.' Keith lifted a finger. 'But henever lifted a finger for it. For me - for me, that's like unbelievable.Half the time he must think he's fuckingdreaming.'


'Keith? May I demur? Happiness isn't relative, any more thansuffering is. No one's going to feel grateful that his life isn't anyworse. There's always enough pain, Keith. And the rich baby cries aslustily as the poor.'


'Yeah cheers.'


Keith was lying on Nicola's pretty bed, in his trousers and vest:thoroughly relaxed. His plump feet seemed to quiver lightly in theirbrown socks. Beside him rested the silver tray, the dregs of the devilish espresso, the saucer frilled with cigarette ends. Talentedly,Nicola was wearing a charcoal business suit and a white silk shirt fastened at the throat with an antique brooch of high formality. Hernails were varnished ovals; her linked bracelet stirred and settledwith delicate distinctness. She sat on a straightbacked chair, insimple and streamlined authority. She corporate, he corporeal: the power breakfast.


Til leave you alone for a little while,' she said, standing andsmoothing herself down. 'It's a rather glossy little piece I've preparedfor you this morning.' She handed him the remote control, andreached for the tray. 'You'd never guess what these lady executivesget up to in their offices. On a warm day, perhaps. After seeing somehandsome window-cleaner going about his rough work. Oh, Keith: how discreet are you being these days?'


'Cross my heart and hope to die.'


'Yes yes. But how discreet are you being? It doesn't really matter.Of course, you don't say a word to Guy. But otherwise just do what comes naturally. He'll just think you're lying, anyway. Let me knowwhen you're done.'


She drifted into the body of the flat, the sitting-room, the kitchen.She placed the silver tray on the wooden draining-board. She madeanother cup of coffee and smoked another cigarette and readTime magazine . . . This week's cover story was about the weather. Asusual. It was hard to believe thatthe weather had until quite recently been a synonym for small talk. Because nowadays the weather wasbig talk. The weather made headlines all over the world. Every day. On TV a full reversal had taken place: the handsomest newscastersand the brainiest pundits were all weathermen now; and thewhimsical tweed-suited eunuchs, who used to point rulers at chartsand apologize about the rain, came on at the end to give the othernews, or what was left of it. Meteorologists were the new war-correspondents: after John on hurricanes, and Don on glaciers, yougot Ron on tropospherics. Rhythmically flicking the nails of herthumb and forefinger, Nicola read about the low sun, and the latestexplanations. The change of angle was apparently caused by an unprecedented combination of three familiar effects:perihelion(when the earth is at its shortest distance from the sun),perigee(when the moon is at its shortest distance from the earth) andsyzygy(when the earth, sun, and moon are anyway most closely aligned).The confluence made gravity put on weight, slowing the planet's spinand alsoslowing time, so that earth days and nights were nowfractionally but measurably longer. 'Yeah cheers,' murmuredNicola, who had only twenty days and nights on earth to go. ShetossedTime over her shoulder and arrived at her own explanation.Love made the world go round. And the world was slowing up. Theworld wasn't going round.


Still, the earth's new tilt meant that London would get the fulleclipse. London would witness 'totality' on November 5. Andalready there were boys on the street with their guys, begging. 'Pennyfor the guy?' The guys themselves were insultingly perfunctory: solittle thought had gone into them, so little care, so little love. Theyweren'tworth a penny. And a penny was worth nothing.


After a long limbo (neglect, oblivion), she knocked on thebedroom door. Normally he alerted her with a confidential cough.But Keith's urbane throat-clearings, once begun, could rage on for over an hour. 'Yeah?' he said thickly. The moment she entered shewas angrily aware that Keith had not availed himself of his solitarytreat. Quickly she followed his gaze to the television screen: herself,freeze-framed, at her desk next door (and with one leg up on it), thecharcoal suit in fascinating disarray. Nicola looked at him again, andshut her eyes as part of the effort of not laughing. For Keith was in tears. Warmly they had flowed; their tracks were yellowish on hisporous cheeks. How she had underestimated her Keith! Porno­graphy awakened all his finer responses. It wasn't just the sex. He really did think it was beautiful.


'I expect,' said Nicola, with relief, with amusement, with genero­sity (though not all the anger had been purged from her voice), 'Iexpect that after you visit me, you go off and see some girl, don't youKeith. Some little cracker. You do, don't you, Keith.'


Keith kept his counsel.


That's good. I approve. Then you do to her all the things you wantto do to me. All the things youwill do to me, very soon. Ooh, I betyou do. You do, don't you, Keith.'


Keith kept his counsel.


'I just want you to do what feels right foryou,' said Nicola. Afterthe yob art, she thought she might as well throw in some yob love, onthe off chance that it might make any difference to anything. 'Oh, Idon't expect to hold you, Keith, not now or later, a man such asyourself. That's why I'm spinning things out like this. Especially notlater. The girls will all be after you, and who can blame them? But I'llalways be pushing for you, Keith, even when I'm just one of yourmemories. You won't have to let me know when the big one comes along: I'llbe there for you, Keith. When you're throwing your darts for the Embassy, for the number-one spot, I'll be somewhere in thecrowd, Keith, cheering you on.'


Keith sat up straight and put his feet on the floor. As he lookedabout for his shoes he said, 'Notfor the Embassy.At the Embassy.Notfor. At.'


She ducked into the bathroom, to change into her jeans and wellies for the next act. But first she threw on all the taps, pulled the lavatory flush, buried her face in a towel and almost killed herself laughing. Itwas a warm and timid little face that peeped through the crack in thedoor as Keith moodily took his leave.


'Guy,' said Keith, with his head down. 'What you tell him I comehere for? Tell him I what? Fix the toilet? Lie on the kitchen floor withme tongue up a funnel?'


'. . . Something like that,' said Nicola.


Success has not changed me, thought Keith as he came down thestairs. Success, and recognition. Obviously it's nice to enjoy the fruits of stardom. Obviously. The money and the — the adulation like. Thegoods and services. I worked like a - like a dog for my crown. Nodanger I'll relinquish it in a hurry. But obviously basically I'llhopefully be the same Keith Talent I always was.'


Keith wiped the additional tears from his eyes and opened the front door. That sticklebrick of pallor, money, invented pain andgood teeth - known as Guy Clinch - was feeding coins into a parkingmeter. His smile flickered up at Keith, who stood on the steps withhis legs apart, shrugging into position the strap of his stolen toolbag.


'Good morning,' said Guy defeatedly.


But Keith moved past him with just a glazed wipe of the eyes andcrossed the road for the heavy Cavalier.


Nicola was right. After he visited her, Keith went to see aladyfriend. Moreover, Keith visited a ladyfriendbefore he visited her. Only certain unrepealable physical laws stopped him going tosee a ladyfriendwhile he visited her. Nicola was right again. The girls were all after him, or at least they weren't getting out of his way. AndKeith was really putting himself about, with an urgency, a cartwheel­ing canine frenzy he had never known before. Was someone puttingsomething in his lager? It couldn't be healthy (even Keith was sure of this), and he genuinely feared for his darts, not to mention his sanity.Compulsive behaviour innit. But the birds were as bad. Indeed, overthe great city, or in those flues and runnels where Keith scamperedand paused, his whiskers working, a sewery fever seemed to be abroad, all wastepipes and floodgates and gargoyles, rat-borne. For Keith it was sharp and brackish, like the ever-present smell of urinein the streets. Of course, you had to be persistent, and having nothing to do all day unquestionably helped. After he'd fetched her milk forthe ninth morning running, Iqbala consented, once again, to turn thetelly up loud. Popping in on Petronella Jones with a series of high-octane gifts to celebrate her recent marriage to the oilrigger, Keithhad found that one thing led to another. Since Thelonius's arrest,Keith had been doing the right thing, making regular and glad-handed visits to Lilette and the kids, and he could all too easily see himself developing an obligation there (Lilette okay for a baby-mamma, and not pregnant, or not very pregnant, just now: give the kids a tenner get lost for twenty minutes). It was getting so bad hehardly had time to hang around for hours on end relaxing over a few drinks with his colleagues in the Black Cross. While he performed -in bed, on the couch or the carpet, up against the radiator - while hejerked and stabbed and fought for breath, his thoughts, his desperatepresentiments, were all of money, transformation, Nicola and, forthe first time in his life, his own death. And here was one final proofthat all was not well. He'd stumble in at Christ knows when, afterdoing Christ knows what to Christ knows who all day, followed by nine hours of darts and rounding it all off at Trish Shirt's - and findhimself elbowing Kath awake at four in the morning! Now why would he go and do a thing like that? Kath.Kath, in whose body hehad long lost all but a reflexive, Friday-night interest. It was like thattime in the middle of the pregnancy, when Keith had been brieflystirred to find himself alongside this cool newfat chick with the big titsand the beer gut. I don't know what's got into me, he now thought, ashe pressed her shaking shoulders down the bed. Really and truly Idon't.


Keith pulled off in the heavy Cavalier. Being a professional, hedrove with some sedateness, keeping his concentration, and his temper, as you had to do. The thick fingers depressed the indicator,and flashed the lights, in warning, in sufferance. The meat of the handcame down on the horn in brute denial, or tapped it tw;ce, to sayhitoacheator make a woman swivel and show her face . . .Mind you, Keithwasn't complaining. Complain? Keith? Not the type. Got on with it.Just as he imagined the world being held together by blind and hidden forces, so everything generally rested easy in his reptile mind. Andguess what: Analiese Furnish had moved back into town. Keith accelerated, then braked, then traumatized a Learner with shout ofhorn and glare of lights. What theydoing on the roads. Analiese, withher poems, her crushed flowers, her newspaper clippings(our secret love), her Caramac hair, her bountiful summer dresses.Tired of Slough, tired of mildly scandalizing the blighted dormitory estate, Analiese had dropped her Heathrow baggage-handler, packedher many suitcases, and dramatically appeared on the White Citydoorstep of the unemployed violinist in whose love she knew she couldalways trust. 'After you, darling,' said Keith. 'Come on. Come on. Come on. Comeon. Jesus. COME ON.' Yeah. Picked up sticks andmoved back into town. I don't know how he wears it. Ah, but Analieseunquestionably had a knack or a power when it came to love — to loveof a certain kind. With her scrapbooks, her costume jewellery, and herfat legs, Analiese had always been able to find a certain kind of man(fuddled, failed in art and love, patient, tender, older), who wouldhouse her, listen to her, worship her, and vow to keep his hands off her.'What's this? Jesus, look at that stupidbastard.' Move it.'Move it.' Yeah. You heard: never lets him lay a finger on her. Before longAnaliese was to be found in all her old haunts — the stage doors of theNational Theatre, the carpark of the BBC, the van outside RonnieScott's—while Basil stopped home, scratching his beard, rereading her diary, and genuflecting in front of the laundry hamper. Basil's little flat in White City was dead convenient for Keith.


Now he wound down the window and stuck his head out of it.'Don't fuckin say phankyou, whoah ya!' Christ, the manners of theroad. Not that he was entirely happy with the situation. The postmanalways rings twice as such. For instance, Keith liked to show up onimpulse, going at things freestyle like, in his own way. And everytime he sauntered whistling down the basement, with a sixpack of Peculiar Brews in one hand and his belt buckle in the other — therehe'd be, mister misery. Get back. 'Get back, you little bitch.' Itcramped a man's style. Where was the spontaneity.Cheers, Baz,Keith would say menacingly, and plonk himself down for a wait.Analiese just stared at Basil through the silence. As often as not she'd have to tell him. Honour my privacy, Basil. Respect my space, Basil. All this. And then with a shudder he'd rear up, fling on a mack and,Keith assumed, slope off down the drinker. Not ideal. But what could Keith do? That's it: block the whole fucking road. He couldn'tentertain her at the garage - his lair of darts: even Trish Shirt used tobalk at that, the way the grit got worked into the back of her dress.And Dean's flat was a tip. And so was Dean's van. Maybe if he put it the right way to Lilette, or Petronella, or Iqbala. Or Kath. Take your time, pal. I'm only here for my health.'Cunt!' In theory, now that hehad a couple of bob he could always take her to a nice little hotel. But there weren't any nice little hotels. There were only nasty little hotels.And the big ones frightened him. Anyway you don't want to liearound all day hearing her banging on about safe sex or religion. Gotto be quick. Cavalier'll get a ticket. Or clamped. Fucking bastards.Isthe Vodafone better than the Celmate, with improved specifications? Fucker'll know. '11 ask Fucker.


The traffic thinned, and Keith gratefully dropped into second gear.He had travelled perhaps five hundred yards. 'Freedom.' Besides, he needed his spare cash. For Debbee Kensit. Her mum had only uppedthe rates again. What with the petrol going all the way out there anda couple of quid for the gift he religiously took along, Debbee beingspecial, you were talking almost a ton a visit. Keith maintained aconsidered silence about it but with Debs turning sixteen this monthfor sheer nerve it took your breath away. Hello. Give her a little beep.Now what have we —


A Krakatoa of truck horn atomized Keith's thoughts. For a suddeninstant his windscreen was all chrome ribcage and scorching lights.Then the massed frequencies all fled past him in a deep scoop of air.Keith had straightened rigid in his seat: now he sank back, anddecelerated, and pulled over - or at any rate he quenched the car of motion. For several minutes he sat there, doubleparked, rubbing hisface with his hands. He lit a cigarette and exhaled vehemently. Seewhat I mean ? he thought, and felt brief love for the truckdriver and hisskills. Another couple of feet. Another couple of feet and they'd behosing me off the bonnet. See what I mean ? It can't be healthy. And a calculated risk, that one: saw the truck coming and knew it was goingto be tight. But I had to look, didn't I. Rarity value. Couldn't let thatone walk on by, no way. Because you don't often see that. You don't.Had to look. An old woman not fat with really big tits.


Keith pulled out again, and proceeded to Ladbroke Grove andTrish Shirt's.


'I don't know how he does be doing it,' said Norvis, with honestbafflement as well as envious admiration. 'He here, he there. Heeverywhere.'


'Yes,' said Guy.


'No one approach he for energy. No one have he staying power.Soon as he finish, he off, looking for more.'


'So they say.'


'It have no one like Keith when it come to the chicks.'


Guy looked furtively along the bar. Keith was down at the darkerand more fashionable end of it, with Dean and Curtly, near themicrowave, the poppadam-warmer, the pie-nuker. Now Keith wasdelighting his friends with an anecdote, vigorously delivered: he wasmaking a horn-squeezing gesture with his right hand, which thendropped only to rise again suddenly, darting finger first. The froth onDean's beer exploded in mirth . . . Guy looked about himself,through the spore-filled air. Just when it seemed that Keith's pubprestige could rise no higher, it had yet jumped a palpable notch. ButGuy himself, no less clearly, had been intolerably demoted. Here he stood, gratefully conversing with Norvis — comfortably the least celebrated of the Black Cross brothers (being unathletic, ill-favoured and hard-working) — fine-sprayed with spittle and obscenities andpork-pie crumblets, and transfixed by the hairless coccyx of an albino builder. Guy scratched himself with all ten fingernails. Thereappeared to have been a complementary revision of his status atLansdowne Crescent. Guy's laundry, once discarded, no longer tangily rematerialized in his walnut chest of drawers. This morninghe had wedged his shirt into the laundry basket and then, a minute or so later, tugged it out again.


'As I say, it beat me how he does be doing it.'


'Excuse me for a moment, Norvis, would you?’


With his head up, impelled by nothing more than inevitability,Guy squeezed and sidled his way forward, deeper into the pub's horn and hide and boiling fangs. Finally he gained the little clearing wh'chalways formed near where Keith relaxed with his favourites of thehour. Keith now stood in conference with Dean and Curtly: thetabloid was stretched open in his grip as he proudly showed the ladswhat Hurricane Keith hadjust done to Philadelphia. Sea surge anddevil wind: one of the worst in history — even inrecent history. Thatmorning Guy had himself read up on Hurricane Keith's depreda­tions. Seven feet of water dumped from the sky in twenty-four hours:a day when all the weather gods rush for the bathroom . . . Dean andCurtly straightened slightly on Guy's approach. Keith offered themboth a last glance of silent facetiousness and then assembled his mostsolemn stare, like a sergeant turning from his corporals to face the gawky lieutenant.


'Morning, Keith. How have you been?'


Keith stared on. He made no answer. Dean and Curtly lookedelsewhere — outwards, downwards.


'All set then', said Guy, with an archness that he had already begunto regret and revile, 'for the big push?'


Keith's expression slowly changed, or filmed over, the lidshooding Guy off. What was it? The eyes were in their pre-fight glaze,their search for animal severity. No. They looked like they lookedafter some stunning feat at theochй.Airless concentration, self-love,a darts trance. Keith's trance of darts!


'Bidding fair for the semi-finals,' said Guy, half-raising a palethumb and turning jerkily to the bar. Here he facedPongo.Guyindicated his empty tankard, whichPongoregistered withoutinterest, finding other instructions to attend to while Guy continuedwith his musicalexcusemes.


'Ride comfort,' said Keith in a low voice. 'Anti-knock rating.'


Guy couldn't tell where the words were going, so quickly did heabort his turn of head and stricken smile. Maybe Keith was talking tothe pub itself, its smoke, its dust.


'Aeroback. Her sobs of pleasure. Higher take-up. A veritable wildcat. Anti-perforation warranty. Lovejuice . . .'


There was some delay getting out, caused by an altercation nearthe front door. Things seemed to settle down; but then a blood-striped figure lurched up again off the floor, and it all began again. Atthis point Guy re-encountered Norvis, who shouted,'He got another one now!'


'Sorry?'


'He got another one now!'


'Really?'


'Yeh. Oh yeh. She rich. Just round the corner. He go round thereevery morning and does be doing she arse off. And she make shevideos. For he. Dark bitch. They the worse.'


Zbig Two, who was standing near by, abandoned or otherwisebrought to an end a joke he was telling Manjeet (one that featured, asdid all Zbig Two's jokes, a prostitute, a policeman and a purulent mackerel), and turned round and enthused, 'The first time he goneround there she came on like Lady Muck. But Keith's smart.'


'He patient.'


'Next time - bingo.'


'Yeh. Oh yeh. Frankly it get me how he does be doing it.'


'And this onepays him for it.'


'He she toy boy.'


'Payshim for it.'


They sounded ready to go on like this indefinitely, the informationbeing so fresh in their minds. It seemed that Keith had just held apress conference on the subject, here in the Black Cross. Guy couldimagine him: the tabloid rolled and raised . . . Another questionfrom the back there .. . I'm glad you asked that.Yes. She .. . Grinning at the floor Guy listened on: her own penthouse, tall, wellturned out, legs on the skinny side but good bum, tits so closetogether you could —


'What's her name?' said Guy hilariously.


Norvis and Zbig Two looked at each other, two experts, teeteringquiz-contestants, stumped by the obvious. It's. Hang on. She call.Wait a bit. It have so many. Nita. Nelly, Nancy. With his mouth openGuy blinked and waited. The depth of their frowns, the temple- banging, the ecstasy of thwarted recall. He wondered if he coulddecently ask them to exert themselves so.


'Nicky! That's it.'


'Nicky. Yeh. Oh yeh.'


'Nicky. That's it: Nicky.'


'Nicky. That's it. Nicky.Nicky.'


The compact opened and Nicola's enlarged face filled the roundmirror. It stared back at its mistress. It bared its teeth and licked itslips. With a sweep of wall and dimity and velvet the mirror closedagain.


She looked up. 'There you are,' she said softly, and got to her feet.'Are you all right? You sounded rather miffed on the telephone. Let'stake off your mack.'


'No, I'd rather not, actually.'


Nicola backed into the sitting-room. As Guy followed her shelooked up at him with humility and concern. 'Darling, what is it?' shewhispered. 'Sit down. Can I get you anything?'


Guy shook his head; but he did avail himself of the low armchair. He raised his hand in a gesture of placation, a request for silence, for time. Then gently he rested the palm against his right ear, and closedhis eyes . . . That morning, as he lay in bed, and as Marmaduke priedat his clenched lids, Guy felt an odd sensation, inappropriate, balmy,sensual: in fact, a trail of Marmaduke's hot drool was gathering inhis ear. It hadn't bothered him at first, but now half his head was blocked and pulsing. Some glutinous - or possibly sulphurous -property of the child's spittle had done its maleficent work, deep inthe coiled drum. The room tilted, then swayed. Maybe everything isso mad now, he thought.


'There's something I must ask you.'


She looked at him with unbounded willingness.


'I'm probably a complete idiot,' he went on, for her house, her windows, her curtains, had seemed so blameless from the outside.'But there's something you ought to know too. Now you mustpromise in advance to forgive me if I — '


Guy hesitated. Quite clearly he could hear the sound of a toiletflushing nearby. Too near to be anywhere else. Then Keith came outof the bathroom. He had a silver leather jacket held over his shoulderand was saying, 'That was my favourite, that was. I like them whenyou —'


'Ah, Keith,' said Nicola lightly. 'I'd almost forgotten you were stillhere.'


Freeze-framed, italicized, caught absolutely redhanded, Keith'sfigure began to inch back into life, to move and breathe again — and to shrink, to shrink to nothing, as Guy rose reflexively to his feet.


'Hello, mate -'


The leather jacket, held a moment ago insouciantly shoulder-high,Keith now gathered into his hands where he could crease andcrumple it. A strong interaction was taking place between the men:the power of class, at its strongest over short distances. Guy lookedat Keith with contempt. And this was the Knight of the Black Cross.


'I expect you'll want tobe on your way,' said Nicola, 'here's your—case. I put something in it for you.'


A coughing fit seemed about to free Keith indefinitely from theobligation of speech; but then he gulped suddenly with a thickeningof the neck and said, 'Appreciate it.'


'Oh and Keith? You couldn't bear to have another go with thegrinder, could you? It's there. It packed up again, I'm afraid.'


'Willco,' said Keith, gathering his things.


'Same time tomorrow?'


Keith looked at Nicola, at Guy, at Nicola. 'Er, yeah!' He nodded,and tubed his lips, and shuffled sideways towards the door.


'Goodbye, Keith,' she called, and turned to Guy. 'I'm sorry. Whatwere you saying?'


He waited. Keith's strained whistle started up and retreated down the stairs. 'Is he,' asked Guy, sitting, and looking around, 'is he hereall the time?


'I'm sorry?'


Guy said reedily, 'I mean, if he's not actually in here it's quite ararity if I don't see him on the stairs.'


'Keith?'


'I mean, what does hedo here day in and day out?'


'Does he say anything to you?'


'What? On the stairs? No, he just says "Cheers" or "Innit" orsomething,' said Guy, as his hand sought his brow.


'I mean generally. He hasn't told you our little secret?'


'Whose little secret?'


'Keith's and my little secret,' Nicola smiled at Guy with rueful mischief. 'Oh well. I suppose it's got to come out. I'm afraid I've deceived you rather.'


'I see,' said Guy, and raised his chin.


'He'd be horrified if you knew,' she said, and looked closely intoGuy's crippled face. Its weakness she identified for the hundredthtime as something predetermined, already etched, something madefor a specific purpose, but too long ago. 'And of course he's veryworried that his wife will find out about it.'


'I think,' said Guy, 'I think you'd really better tell me.'


Well, in a minute, she thought. A few more choice ambiguities,perhaps. No - all right. Okay:one more. 'I mean, what does it matterif he's only a common working lad?' she asked. Then she widened her mouth and tented the lines on her brow and said with martyred calm: 'Iteach him.'


'Keith? I don't understand.'


'Of course he's only just literate and a complete dunce in all sortsof ways but the desire is there, as it so often is. You'd be surprised. Ilearned that with my work in remedial reading.'


'When did all this start?'


'Oh, ages ago.' She frowned, seeming to remember. 'I gave him acopy ofWuthering Heights. I didn't know how serious he was but he persisted. And now we're doing it properly. We've just started on theRomantics. Look.' And she held up her Longman'sKeats. 'I'm wondering if it's wise to start him off on the Odes. Today we had a quick look at "Lamia". The story helps. I was thinking perhaps "La Belle Dame Sans Merci". Or "Bright Star". It's a favourite of mine.Do you know it? "Bright Star! Would I were steadfast as thou art" ?'


'Nicola. Has he done anything to you?'


Even she had her doubts about the look of radiant puzzlement shenow gave him — doubts about its supportability, in any scheme ofthings. 'I'm sorry?'


'Has he ever tried to make love to you?'


Slowly it formed, the pure incredulity. After a moment she put ahand over her mouth to catch a silent hiccup; then the hand moved upwards to her eyes.


Guy got to his feet and came forward. In no uncertain terms, andwith his mind half-remembering some analogous recital, someprevious exercise in illusion-shattering (when? how long ago? whatabout?), he told her what Keith and his kind were really like, how they thought of women as chunks of meat, their dreams of violence and defilement. Why, only today in a rough tavern Keith had been blustering about the uses he had put her to — yes, her name sharedand smeared in gross fantasies of enslavement, humiliation, appetite,murder.


Nicola looked up. He was standing over her with his feet apart.


She said, 'Oh — does it mean that much? They believe in each other's lies just like they believe in television . . . What's that?'


'. . . What?'


She drained her face of all experience and raised it towards him. Then her head levelled again and she pointed with a finger.'That.'


'Oh, that.’


'Yes. What is it?'


'Whatis it?'


'Yes.'


'You must know, you must have read . . .'


'Yes, but why is it so - so protuberant?'


'I don't know. Desire .. .'


'May I? It's like rock. No. Like that stuff that some dead stars are made of. Where every thimbleful weighs a trillion tons.'


'Neutronium.'


'That's right. Neutronium. Would I bleed?'


'I don't know. You've gone on horses and things.'


'And this bit under here is important too, is it? Oops! Sorry. Thisis fascinating. And in some circumstances a woman will take this inher mouth?'


'Yes.'


'And suck?'


'Yes.'


'I suppose the idea would be to suck absolutely as hard as one could. What a strange thing to want to do.'


'Yes.'


'So regressive,' she said, and briskly stroked and patted him, asone might dismiss a friendly but unfamiliar animal. 'Though I can see it might be fun for you.' She was smiling up at him, her mouthlike a split fruit. 'What's the line in "Lamia"? "As though inCupid's college she had spent sweet days"? That really is the worstthing in all Keats. So vulgar. But Cupid's college is where you'dbetter send me for a while, until I know all the tricks.'


He left about an hour and a half later.


His ear was worse. At least three-quarters of his face wasunrecallably numb, and heavy, too, to the muscles of the cheek.That was Marmaduke's work. But his good ear had also received alot of attention, from Nicola's lips and tongue; as he came downthe stairs, stepping from carpet to bare board, Guy realized that hewas in fact clinically deaf. Outside made his lips feel raw andchapped from kissing — and these kisses so wolvish all of a sudden,especially when he felt her breasts which he was now permitted todo (from without only), and the breasts themselves so responsiveand distended and seeming to link up with all the complications of his own low wound.


Across the street he rode, on his rogue boner. Pale rider. Under thefantastic clarity of the evening sky. He looked up. The mooncertainly did look closer than usual, but beautifully close, and not yetshining, like the crown of a skull or a Goth helmet; and not just a mask or a shell but a body, with mass and depth, a heavenly body.And the only one we ever really see, the planets too small, the starstoo distant, and the sun too vast and near for human eyes.


Dead cloud. Just then — awful sight. Just then he saw that a deadcloud was lurking above the near rooftops. Awful sight. What did itthink it was doing there, so out of kilter? They were always lost, deadclouds, lost in the lower sky, trembling drunkenly down through thethermals, always looking in the wrong place for their brothers andtheir sisters.


Guy pogoed on. The world had never looked so good . . . Brightstar! And with so much doubt gone he could reproach himself in fullmeasure.


Well might Guy curse himself for a brute and a swine. Histhoughts were all crosspurposed, while hers were all of truth andbeauty, beauty, truth.


Isaw a dead cloud not long ago. I mean right up close. This wasNew York, mid-town, mid-August, the Pan Am building (you could feel its monstrous efforts to stay cool), the best piece of real estate inthe known universe. How could some dump of a white dwarf orinnocently hurtling quasar stand up to this golden edifice onheliographic Park Avenue? I was in Dr Slizard's office, just below therestaurant, the revolving carvery or whatever they have up therenow. The dead cloud came and oozed and slurped itself against thewindow. God's foul window rag. Its heart looked multicellular. I thought of fishing-nets under incomprehensible volumes of water,or the motes of a dead TV.


'Science', said Slizard, in his epigrammatic style (his good colour,his busy eyes, his accountant's beard), 'is getting very good at explaining how it killed you. How it killed things. But we still don'tunderstand dead clouds.'


Luckily I've known Slizard all my life. How else could I affordhim? I always enjoyed his company, until I got sick. My father taughtSlizard at NYU before he switched subjects. He used to come to the house one or two nights a week. He had long hair then. Now he hasno hair at all. Only the talking beard.


Marius Appleby lives for the ritual of those morning swims, and sodo I. Cornelia's breasts, apparently, aremagnificent, splendid,awesome, majestic -and all the other words that mean 'big'. Andwe're only on page fifty-nine.


Cornelia has Afghani blood. She rides a horse like a crazed ghazi.She shaves her legs with a Bowie knife. Marius has yet to win a smilefrom her, a civil word. Old Kwango (bent, pocked, muttering),himself deeply roused by her, for all his years, suggests the time-honoured and locally popular strategy ofrape, where a man mustroughly take what he claims to be his. Marius demurs. He's watched her with her bullwhip. But he also sees the need for something butch— some act of manly valour. Oh, it's tough, with Cornelia stridingabout so proudly and nobly the entire time. And she seldom has a stitch on.


The weight of her head and the plumpness of her cheeks causeKim to pout while she sleeps. Her arms are arranged in one of herSpanish-dancer positions. If you could take twenty snaps of thesleeping child and flick them in a booklet, she would perform themovements of the castanet artist, one hand aloft and curved, onehand lowered and curved also, and always symmetrical.


She stirred. Every time, now, I'm frightened she won't recognize me. People don't. People I haven't seen for three days look rightthrough me. I myself keep going to the mirror for an update . . . Her breath was deeply charged with sleep; and she looked momentarilydisgraceful, as babies can look, her face puffed, and latticed with the ephemeral scars of sleep. She focused on me, and pounded her legs -but almost at once her face formed an appeal, as if straining to tell mesomething, something likeyou wouldn't guess what's been donewhile you've been gone.Of course, as babies inch toward speech,and their expressions so intelligently silent, you expect the firstwords to penetrate, to tell you something you never knew. And whatyou get is stuff likefloor orcat orbus. But then with a bent finger Kim pointed at a lesion on my arm and said, with clarity and conviction:


'Ouch.'


I was astounded. 'Ouch? Kim. My God. So you can talk now, canyou?'


The baby had no more to add. Not for the time being. I carried herinto the kitchen. Kath was elsewhere (in the bedroom). I made theformula and put a slow teat on the bottle. She cried when she saw it. She cried because she wanted it and crying was all she had. I fed herwith frequent burp-stops and burp-outs. She wiggled a leg as shedrank. For of course if a leg is dangling attractively, then a baby mustwiggle it, must never miss the chance to wiggle it. Toward the end of the bottle I felt the warm seep-swell of her diaper. So I put the mat onthe table and got ready to change her.


Then Kath intervened, appearing suddenly. 'Ah there,' she said.She took the child from my arms and the Huggy from my hand. Some mick rule here — a chill of priestcraft?


She went with the child into the living-room. I watched the baby'srolling face as it bobbed on Kath's shoulder. The astonished eyes.


'Ouch,' the baby said to me, before Kath shut the door.'Ouch.'


' "For Galen knew that from that day forth he would always dreamof she who had come to him that night in Toledo, and tousled himawake with a lover's impatience." There.' Nicola said nothing.'Comeon. It's so obviously terrible. It's not even literate. "Ofshe who." Ofher who, for Christ's sake.' Nicola said nothing. 'Thesentiment is repulsive enough. But I guess he didn't botheryou with sentiment. Too busy climbing into his Beelzebub outfit.' Nicola saidnothing. 'It's funny he's so bad at women. All powder-puffed andair-brushed. Without physical functions. He places them in thatgolden age, now alas long past. You know the one: before women went to the toilet.'


Nicola spoke. She looked at me mistily and said, 'You're wrong.His work speaks very directly to women because he idealized them sopassionately. Isn't this a great theme - the struggle of the man, the warlike creature, to accommodate gentleness? Asprey is surelyLawrentian here.'


'. . . This shatters me, Nicola.' This shatters me. Because itdiscredits, it explodes her artistic sense. And her artistic sense is all Ihave to go on. 'Oh well. You must be a theatre-lover. Moreperversity. There's nothing there, in English anyway. Just Shake­speare, and that's that. Which is some kind of cosmic joke. As ifTitian was a scene painter, or Mozart wrote movie scores. As ifGod just directed rep.'


I was now being a little too glib — or a little too something — for theenigmatic Miss Six. (These last sentences were in fact direct quotes from a long letter I was writing to Mark Asprey.) She left her chairand went to the table. She poured out and drank eight swallows ofbrandy. She looked at the black window. 'I go out walking,' she sang, 'after midnight, in the moonlight, just like we used to do. I'm alwayswalking, after midnight. Searching for you.’


'. . . Your voice is pretty nice. I guess you sang when you didpantomime. But it's kind of a cold voice. Holds something back.'


When she sank down on the sofa beside me her legs went up aboutthree feet in the air. Her gaze also had the caloricity of liquor. I felt I was fending it off.


'To work,' I said, and took out my notepad. 'Let me have some more on these nature rambles you take Guy on. These little loveparodies — they're among the worst things you do.'


'You only have to write them up. I have to go on them. I hatewalking. 1 mean,where to? It's like being in an ad. An ad for mentholcigarettes - remember? In the days of threepenny bits?" She thoughtfor a moment and said, 'No, it's like being in an ad for love. An ad for love.'


'I still don't get it. The Guy-torture. But I'm expecting some cooltwist. Oh yeah. It's about time I saw one of these videos. One of theseads for sex.'


'There aren't any. I don't keep them. I hate them.'


'How very disappointing. I take it Asprey's snaps are a little out of date. How disappointing. How am I meant to describe the delights ofyour body?'


She reached for her top button and said, 'I'll take all my clothesoff.' She paused. She leaned closer. 'Don't you feel we could belike terrible little cousins and show each other everything. All thesticky smelly bits. Look at you. You don't fancy it, do you, in fleshand blood. Listen. I have a confession to make. I have this shame­ful habit. Every day I go to a bad place and do a bad thing. Well, some days I manage not to — but then the next day I might do ittwice. I go to the toilet. Come on, Sam. Help me beat this thing. You be my bathroom buddy. Every day, just after breakfast, whenI feel the temptation — I can call you up and you can talk me down.'


'Nicola,' I said. I got to my feet. 'At least tell me this terrible thingyou did. To Asprey. It might cheer me up.'


'I put a brick through his windscreen. A big un, too.'


'Oh, sure. Come on. That would be no more than routine.'


'I'm not saying.'


'Why?'


'Why? Why? Why do you think? Because it's toopainful.'


She's right in a way. There is no language for pain. Except badlanguage. Except swearing. There's no language for it. Ouch, ow,oof, gah. Jesus. Pain is its own language.


The pain-kit arrived in good time. It came by courier, mid-afternoon, so I was able to call Slizard immediately. 'It's beautiful,' I croaked. 'Like a box of liqueurs. Or a chemistry set.'He knew I'd likeall the labels: when it comes to pain-classification, he said, we'reback in the middle ages, or the nursery. Suddenly I asked him, 'Hugo,what's happening? Worldwide I mean. I called some contacts in Washington. It's all leak and spin. Where's theinformation? Howare you seeing it?'


'. . . It's serious.'


'How so?'


'It's like this. The pressure is coming from two directions. Do yougo in now, and take the chance, or let the system degrade further. The Pentagon is for going in; State would prefer to ride it out; the NSC istorn. There is hypertension, also dyspnoea. There may be embol­isms. Me, I'm for ride-out. They must get past the millennium. Theycan't risk it now.'


'Hugo, what are we talking about here?'


He sounded surprised. 'Faith,' he said.


'Excuseme?'


The President's wife.'


Our world of pain, as here arrayed and classified: how like life it is,how like childhood and love and war and art. Shooting, Stabbing, Burning, Splitting. Tugging, Throbbing, Flashing, Jumping. Dull,Heavy, Tiring, Sickening. Cruel, Vicious, Punishing, Killing.


'The single pill in the black bottle,' I said. 'With the modern skull-and-crossbones..."


'That's for when the living will envy the dead. That's for the most painful condition of all. Life, my friend.'


OnAphrodite, Cornelia continues to disdain all congeniality. Andall clothing. It's driving Marius and Kwango crazy.


It occurs to me that certain themes - the ubiquitization of violence, for example, and the delegation of cruelty — are united in the personof Incarnacion. There is, I believe, something sadistic in herdiscourses, impeccably hackneyed though they remain. I wonder ifMark Asprey pays her extra to torment me.


She has been giving me a particularly terrible time about the stolenashtray and lighter. And I'm often too beat to get out of her way.


Endlessly, deracinatingly reiterated, her drift is this. Some objectshaveface value. Other objects havesentimental value. Sometimes theface valueis relatively small, but thesentimental value is high. In the case of the missing ashtray and lighter, theface value is relativelysmall (for one of Mark Asprey's means), but thesentimental value is high (the gifts of an obscure but definitely first-echelon playmate).Being of highsentimental value, these objects are irreplaceable,despite their relatively lowface value. Because it's not just themoney.


Do you hear her? Do you get the picture? It takes me half a day torecover from one of these drubbings. I am reminded of the bit inDonQuixotewhenSanchohas spent about fifteen pages saying nothingbut look before you leap and waste not want not and a stitch in timesaves nine, and Quixote bursts out (I paraphrase freely, but I really understand): Enough of thine adages! For an hour thou hast beencoining them, and each one hath been like a dagger through my verysoul.


Chapter 18: This Is Only a Test


keith frowned, andsipped on his cigarette, and read thesewords:


It is a definite historical fact that Boadicea played a form of darts.Quite a warrior for a woman, she was thought to have honed herskills, by playing darts. Little good it did the Queen of the AncientBritons in the end, for she was defeated by the Romans andperished by her own hand in the year 'AD' 61.


' AD' 61! thought Keith.


Early dartboards have definitely been recovered from ancientlocations. It is not known for definite what form of darts Boadiceaplayed. Probably not 501, which shapes the modern game but some other form of darts.


Pensively Keith removed his darts from their purple pouch. Then,with the aid of this same pouch, he dabbed away his tears. A cigarette later, he sat with his pad, his darting diary, on his lap and a biro in hishand. The biroholding hand waved in the air for a while like a sketcher's. Then he wrote:


Eazy on the drink.A cigarette later, he added:


The trouble with darts they are no good when you are pist.


He resumed his practice session, his darting workout at theochй.The darts thunked into the board. He retrieved them. He threw again.He retrieved them. He threw again. He retrieved them. He threwagain . . . Eight cigarettes later, he sat down and wrote:


Get the basics right. Lean on front foot, nice eazy follow thrugh. Indoors you just get moaned-at. Sap's a mans ability to concentrate completely on his darts.


The darts were thrown, retrieved, thrown again (they thunked into the board), retrieved, and thrown again, and again. The six cigaretteswere torched, consumed, ground out on the crackling floor. He threw2.6 four times running. A wave of self-pity went through him. No oneoutside the sport realized just how tragicallyhard it was to throw a dart 5ft 9 1/4 ins, with clinicism. He paused, and sat, and wrote:


Keep throwing fucking '2,6'. Better Tomorrow. Don't reckonNicksskeem scecm skeem.


'Good morning to you, Keith.'


Scheme, thought Keith. TV had not prepared him for anything likethis. Or scam. 'Good morning ah... Miss Six,' said Keith. Load of nonsense.


'Nicola, please! Now just sit in your normal place and I'll be with you in a minute. Coffee?'


Basically, Michael, I'm just the sort of guy who just likes to meet upwith his mates down the pisser. Down the drinker. Down the pub.Basically I just drink to relax. To relax? Torelax? thought Keith, andsaw himself (last night, 3 a.m.) on his knees in the garage with a bottleof pornoin either hand. Gracelessly Keith sat himself down on the sofa(he was thoroughly out of sorts). Earlier instructed by Nicola not tolook at the camera, he looked at it anyway, through his low lids: on thelittle bookcase there, its twin red lights unkindly glowing. Keithrocked with the pulse of a contained cough or burp or retch, then lit acigarette. Here she comes. Nicola wore a checked grey suit, squarelycut, and flat black shoes; her hair was swept up from her lightlypainted face, the bun rich and grained and gordian. Looks the part allright, you could say (there was even an apple on the table).Schoolmarm outfit innit.


'Why don't we begin', she said, 'with Keats's "Bright Star"?'


'Yeah cheers.'


'Page eighty-six. It is five lumps, isn't it, Keith.’


86, thought Keith. Treble 18, double 16. Or you could go bull,double18. Darts.


'Now.' Nicola settled herself erectly at his side. Hummingsomewhere just beneath their hearing threshhold, the video camera was positioned to Nicola's rear, over her shoulder, catching Keith in profile as he turned towards her grimly. She didn't really look like aschoolmarm. At that moment Nicola crossed her legs with a lift ofthe skirt and briefly shivered her rump into the cushion. On TV more like a Mother Superior who gets up to things. Or the dog in the officein the touching romantic comedy: take her glasses off and she's a goer. The skirt had a slit in it, or a fold, like a kilt.


'Keith? Why don't you take us through it.'


'You what?'


'Read it out loud. Use mine. Come a little closer.'


'Bright,' said Keith, 'bright - star!' He jolted, apparently rathertaken aback by the exclamation mark. 'Would...I would I were -'


'Would I were steadfast,' whispered Nicola.


'As . ..'


Thou.'


'Art.' Keith wiped his toiling brow. 'Not in lone, not in lonesplendour.' He coughed: a single bark from the dog within. 'Pardon. Splendour hung aloft the night — and watching, with, witheternallids, apart, like —'


'You seem to be reading one word at a time. As if you're lassoing itwith your tongue. When was it you learned to read?"


Keith's open mouth went square. 'Yonks,' he said.


'Go on.'


'Er, like nature's . . . patient, sleepless . . .'


'Eremite. Hermit. Recluse. And 'patient' has the sense ofdevout,Keith.'


'The moving. Jesus. At their . . .'


'At their priestlike task of pure ablution round earth's humanshores,' said Nicola; and as she read on she opened up her skirt to thewaist (and Keith could see the sheer of the stockings, the interestingbrown flesh, the white silken prow):


'Or gazing on the new soft-fallen maskOf snow upon the mountains and the moors; No - yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,To feel for ever its soft fall and swell, Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever - or else swoon to death.


.. . Well, Keith?'


'Yeah?'


'So what does it mean? Take your time.'


Keith read the poem again. Two vertical worms of concentration formed in the centre of his forehead. The letters on the page seemed as unanswerable, as crammed with silent quiddity, as the impurities in his own eyes. Keith moved through an awful dream of missedconnexions, sudden disappearances, horrendous voids. He won­dered if he had ever suffered so. Three or four minutes later, when he thought he might actually be about to lose consciousness, Keith felt words fighting their way to the surface and the air.


'There's this star,' Keith began.


'Yes?'


'And', Keith concluded, 'he's with this bird.'


'Well that's more or less the size of it. But what is the poet trying tosay?'


And Keith might have put an end to everything, right then andthere. But now Nicola turned the page: Keith's eyes were presented with an index card with writing on it — her corpulent, generous, feminine hand.


'Now I may not be an educated man,' read Keith, with only a littledifficulty. It sounded halting, honest. It sounded good. 'But it seems to me to go against common sense to ask what the poet is "trying tosay". The poem isn't a code for something easily understood. Thepoem is what he is trying to say.'


'Bravo, Keith.'


'The lover looks to the star as an image of, of constancy. WhatKeith — what Keats is expressing here is a yearning to be outside time.Suspended with his fair love. But I think the uh, movement of thepoem gives a little twist to that reading. The star is identified withpurity. The clean waters. The newly fallen snow. Yet the lover mustbe bold. He must come down from the heavens, and enter time.'


'Exactly, Keith. The lover knows he cannot escape the human


sphere, with all its ecstasy and risk, "Swoon to death": for the


Romantics, Keith, death and orgasm are equivalent.’


'Yeah, well, same difference.'


'The first eight lines really are quite beautiful, but I can't helpfeeling that the sestet is terrible tosh. What now? The Odes? I thinknot. Let's look at "Lamia" again. It's one of your favourites, isn't it,Keith.' She placed the book on her lap; she talked and read; sheturned the pages with long fingers which then trailed across her bare thighs in negligent indication or caress. 'Some demon's mistress, orthe demon's self. . . Real are the dreams of Gods .. . Cupid'scollege . . . Subtle fluid . .. Weird syrups . . . Dear me: all thismelting and blushing and fainting and swooning. That purple-lined palace of sweet sin.' Here they encountered another index card, andshe smiled at him encouragingly.


'It would seem that Keats,' said Keith, more confidently, 'for all hiscelebrations of the physical, is not a little coy and uh, evasive, even inthe safety of his enchanted forest.'


'A little fearful too. His maiden is a snake in disguise.'


'Exactly,' Keith improvised.


For a while Nicola talked of the life, theLetters, the neglect, theearly death. Keith started to enjoy his weighty contributions, hisvoice becoming deeper, richer, with the imagined power of suddenlytalking like this, feeling like this, thinking like this. He even began folding his arms in an authoritative way, and scratching his temple with what remained of the fingernail on his right pinkie.


The story ends in Rome, in i8zo.'


1820! thought Keith.


'He was twenty-six.'


Double 13, thought Keith. Not nice. You got three darts better go 10, double 8.


'The son of a rude stablehand, he died in a bitterer obscurity."Here lies one whose name was writ in water" were the words hewanted engraved on his tomb.'


'It's tragic to reflect,' read Keith huskily, 'that Keats will never knowhow he lived on in the hearts of his many admirers. Admirers from such different walks of life. Now someone like Guy', Keith went onwith a thick and sudden frown, 'clearly has something of the, of the poetic spirit in him. And I honour it. But I myself, in my, in myunschooled way, have also found my life enriched . . .'The index cardhere said, simply, 'by John Keats'. But Keith felt at this stage that hecould do a little better than that. 'Enriched', he said, 'by the plucky little...by the . . . talented Romantic whose . . . whose untimely -’


'By John Keats,' said Nicola. The skirt was straightened, the booksnapped shut - and, with it, Keith's wordhoard. 'I think that'senough for today, don't you? One final quote, Keith:


Who alive can say,


"Thou art no poet; may'st not tell thy dreams"?Since every man whose soul is not a clodHath visions, and would speak, if he had loved And been well nurtured in his mother tongue.


And I think you've shown again today, Keith, the truth of thoselines.'


Keith took a breath, and longed to soar and sing. But all wassilence in his huddled mind. He nodded soberly, and said, 'Yeahcheers.'


She saw him out. On her return she walked through the sitting-room, across the narrow passage and into the bedroom. Guy wassitting primly on the bed, the broad hands palm upwards on his lap.Nicola kissed him on the mouth and held him at arm's length.


'Noware you satisfied?'


Guy smiled wanly at the television screen, which showed the sofa'sback, the empty room. 'Revelation,' he said. 'I'm sorry. Feelingrather ridiculous and ashamed. I did say it wasn't really necessary.Quite amazing, though. I could hardly believe it. The judgment. Thenatural critical sense.'


'I told you he was keen.'


'You are good, Nicola.'


Yeah cheers, she almost said, as she took off her coat. 'One has todo what one can.' Tipping her head, she started to unbutton herblouse. 'A funny reason to enter a lady's bedroom for the first time. Idon't think I'm quite ready, yet, to swoon to death. But as for yourfair love's ripening breast. . . Ripening, indeed. Feel for ever its softfall and swell. Ooh. I hope your hands are nice and warm.'


'These warm scribes, my hands. Just one thing. I thought you wereterribly cruel', he said in a clogged voice, and smiling, 'to poor old Keats.'


John Keith, thought Keith, as he drove away. Top wordsmith, andbig in pharmaceuticals. Books: one way to make a fast quid.Breakfast by the pool. Wife in good nick. 'Really, dahling, I got tOstop writing them Hollywood scripts and get down to seriouswriting.' Fucking great study full of leather. Snooker! Jesus. LadyMuck with the schoolmarm skirt round her waist. Wasn't bad. No.In the end I thoroughly enjoyed it. Showed Guy. But an awful oldload of old balls. Keith wondered, parenthetically, if Keats had everplayed a form of darts.


He moved out into the main road. As he did so he felt a witheredagitation in his gut, like the last wing-flickers of a damaged bird. Oi.He felt it in his throat and lungs too — waste, consumption. During one of several long delays Keith picked up the Vodafone and calledPetronella. Line disconnected? Hard to tell: he couldn't even hearhimself swear for the mind-ripping clamour of a nearby skip-remover. He felt again the coppery friction in his abdomen. Itoccurred to Keith that he ought to be under the doctor. This wasn'tthe welcome satyromania of old. It was like a panic attack. Andalthough the spirit was willing — was ravenous, was desperate — the flesh was inexplicably weak. It was taking him ages, every time. Hefelt sore and ticklish: he thought with a wince of the snails he hadkilled with salt as a child.


This doubleparking! Keith queued and edged and weaved his wayto Ladbroke Grove, and doubleparked in Oxford Gardens. Hestrolled into CostCheck, nodding to Manjeet. Past dairy products,past toiletries, past videos he whistled his way: an affecting ballad, Spanish, called 'Los Sentimentados'. He stepped aside as a fight gotgoing between an attendant and some kid by the Alkool display,hopping backwards in a practised veronica when a bottle broke,fearful for his flares. Down in the storeroom Keith looked through the split in the hardwood door. Trish Shirt was lying on the groundwith one leg hooked up on the cot: the exact-same position in which Keith had left her ten hours ago. Keith's teeth contrived a censorioussqueak as saliva moved from lips to tongue. It would take half anhour to slap any sense into her, easy. Another considerationobtained: much earlier that day, as he wrenched off her crammedpanties, Keith had been influentially reminded of his dartboard down in the garage, the bit near the treble zo where there was a bigfringed lump due to darting overuse. The modern dartboard,however, whilst known as the bristle board, is not made from animal hair but from vegetable matter; sisal, prepared from the spiny leavesof the agave plant, is imported from Africa, compressed into therequisite shape, backed by chipboard, and finished by screen-colouring and wiring. Innit. The resemblance had excited Keith atthe time, but not for long enough; soon, thoughts of power scoring —the ton-forties, the unanswerablemбximums- had wrecked hisconcentration. Now Keith looked at his watch. He went backupstairs, bought a six-pack of Peculiar Brews, and climbed into theCavalier for the ninety-minute mile to White City and Analiese Furnish, in no mood for any nonsense from Basil.


Keith returned to Windsor House just after six. He stood in thekitchen, as frazzled as London traffic. Invaluable hours of pricelesspractice had been lost — so many thunks, so many precious retrievals. You couldn't blame Basil: he had absented himself smartly enough,after Keith had taken him aside, man to man, and given him a clip round the ear. It wasn't Analiese's fault either: she had given of her best, and hadn't complained, and Keith had seen for himself thetortured tendons of her jaw. Nah: murder getting home, with the streets full of personnel and Shepherds Bush cordoned off again ...Kath appeared, holding the baby like a magic shield against him. Keith looked at her expressionlessly, at her tired light. Tomorrow: the Semis. And a considerable dilemma. The match itself Keithregarded, or thought he regarded, with titanic equanimity. Whatworried him was his choice of guest. In the normal course of things, no problem: Debbee Kensit or Analiese Furnish, showing a cleavage you could park your bike in. But this was a high-profile fixture,prestigious as such. Trish Shirt had got wind of it. And Nicky said shewanted to be there. And even Kath had mumbled something about itif you please.


'Where's my meal.'


'Would you come and look at this, Keith?'


'Jesus. What?'


'It's the TV.'


Keith pushed past her and stopped dead on the brink of the lounge.


'It's the same on every channel.'


Keith peered forwards with his lips moving. The screen said:


This is only a test of the Emergency BroadcastSystem. If this had been a Real Emergency,this would show you which channel to turn tofor the Latest Information.

But this is only a Test.


'You know something?' said Keith to Kath. 'You scared thefucking life out of me then. Thought the TV was down.' He waggedhis head at the screen. 'That's all right. Look. Look! It's back on again now. Where's my meal?'


As Keith contemplated, with relish, his Mexican Chilli and Four Apricot Madeleines, Kath said,


'I went to the library. There's no newspapers.'


He took the tabloid from his armpit. 'What's this then. You gone blind or summing.'


'But they -'


Keith was now staring at his empty teacup. Kath stood, childishlyerect, and went next door to put the baby down. She came back andreached across him for the shrouded pot.


'That's not a newspaper.'


His eyes swelled at her warningly.


'There's nothing in it. About the Crisis.'


'Fuck off,' said Keith conversationally. 'They, there's always something about it.' Over the past month Keith had kept himselfabreast of the Crisis by sometimes reading the filler that his tabloidsometimes ran at the foot of page fourteen. The little headline varied.yanks:&@*! orred NYET or GRRSKI! Or, once, in unusuallysmall type:towelhead deadlock. Keith now turned to pagefourteen with a flourish. There was an article by the Slimming Editor on the health of the President's wife. But no filler.


'Nah well. Can't be anything happening then.'


'You think not.'


Keith fell silent. He was immersed in an item about the movie starBurton Else. Burton's aides utterly refuted the rumour that Burtonwas bisexual. Since the mysterious death of his young wife, Burtonhad been entirely occupied in his attempts to make contact with Liana beyond the grave. By way of illustration there were twophotographs, one of Burton, one of Liana, both topless.


'They say they'll -'


Keith dashed his knife and fork on to the tabletop and got to his feet. 'Look mind your own fuckin business okay? Jesus, you callyourself a wife 1 got a fuckin semi-final tomorrow night and you're giving me this crap? Sticking your fuckin oar in. Come on Clive, nopoint staying in here. Get to work. Come on Clive. Come on me oldmate.Jesus.'


The baby was awake. But she wasn't crying. Her eyes glittered.


At nine o'clock in the Black Cross, Keith downed his darts anddowned his drink and went out the back to the phone. It took ages forManjeet to get Trish to come to the stockroom.


'Been cancelled,' said Keith perfunctorily.


'Why?'


'Question-mark over me fitness innit.'


'What?'


'Sidelined with a finger injury innit.'


'What happened? She cross her legs?'


'Shut it.'


'I'm coming anyway.'


'Free country innit,' said Keith, more or less truthfully for once.


'You coming round later?'


Keith hung up without saying maybe. Back in the bar he saw Guy.


'Cheers, Keith.'


'Hello, mate.'


Keith felt something he didn't feel often: embarrassment. Or ratherhe would have felt it-embarrassment-if he'd had the leisure. In truthKeith was seldom bothered by embarrassment: a book calledKeithand Embarrassment would be a short book, trailing off after two orthree pages . . . He looked up. Guy was gazing at him with an expression of pitying fondness.


'Demands,' said Keith. 'You got commitments. All these demands.On your time . . .'


Guy was nodding.


The big occasion,' said Keith, flexing his darting finger. 'You digdeep.'


Guy kept on nodding. He seemed ready to accede to anyproposition Keith might put forward.


The big occasion.That's what I respond to. You coming tomorrownight? Course you are. Yeah well could you do me a favour, mate?'


'Sure.'


'See: I can't. Bring Nicky.'


'Sure.'


'Nicola. See: I can't.'


They leaned back for a moment with their elbows on the bar, likeequals. Then Keith said absently, 'I'm up to here in minge.'


The bent copper, John Dark, came over. John Dark - the iffy filth.Keith bought the drinks: he owed Dark some money for settling theThelonius business. More nonsense. Thelonius's name had poppedout of the DN A computer smartly enough. But then, so had Keith's.Careless work: saliva on the pork pie crumbs. Keith would do a lotfor pork pies, Keith would do a lot in the name of pork pies; but going to prison for them, he reckoned, was well beyond the call. . .The three men spent half an hour calking about the difficultiesRangers were having in asserting themselves up front and translatingtheir aerial superiority into goals. Then the conversation moved onto the depressing attendance figures for the early months of theseason. Dark said, with his permanent cheerfulness,


'It breaks your heart. And it could get worse. This morning, what comes up on the screens? Contingency plans. Partial evacuation ofCentral London.'


Keith looked sideways. Guy looked downwards.


'Where would Rangers be then, eh?' Dark laughed. 'This lot? Shiftthis little lot? They must be fuckingdreaming.'


Shakespeare put his head through the door and gestured. Keithmade his excuses. Outside, Big Dread was standing under the lamp­post, with Truth. They all huddled round as he unfolded a section ofnewspaper and bore its contents to the light.


'That them?' said Keith.


That them all right,' said Truth.


'They the right kind?'


'From the gym,' said Big Dread. 'Anabolic innit.'


'It won't give me tits or nothing?'


'Never,' said Truth. 'Enhance your darts innit.'


'How much each?'


It was, of course, his darts he had in mind. But Keith took onesteroid there and then (saving the other two for the followingmorning, on Truth's non-committal instructions), and went off totry it out on Trish Shirt.


Just before noon the next day Guy left Lizzyboo in the kitchen, whereshe was wordlessly eating corn on the cob, and wandered up the stairs and into the hall, nodding, now and then to a half-familiar nanny or au-pair. In the second drawing-room he went and stared without avidity at the whisky and brandy in their crystal tantalus. Next door, in the first drawing-room, so broad, so under-used, hetried music, something unstrenuous, something he knew well (theConcern Grossi), and decided, after a few minutes, and to hisamazement, that the piece no longer interested him. On his way upthe stairs he saw another new nanny, dark-skinned, exotic, serenelyslovenly. There had been a tacit relaxation of the rule about pretty nannies. Indeed, when the heat was up and the low sun filled thewindows, the place had an air of luxurious ill fame: languid, ante­bellum. These nannies had come on the market suddenly over the last two or three weeks, and Hope had snapped them all up. At a time like this, Guy thought (but there had never been a time like this), younggirls might feel an atavistic urge to get inside a big house. Inside a bigcave.


Hope was in the bedroom, at the dressing-table, brushing her hair.Every time he encountered her now he saw their past life together flash by, as if their marriage were a person fatally drowning. He managed to take a little low comfort in the spectacle of her tennis gear. Dink had not been as much around as one might have liked.


'You're playing?' he said. 'With Dink?'


'No courts until six. What's the matter with everyone? Why aren'tthey working?'


'No one's working. Have you noticed? Building sites and every­thing...Is Lizzyboo pregnant?'


She turned to him: an intelligent oval in which indignation andcoldness were equally represented.


'I only wondered. Not just her size but the way she eats. Cravings. She's eating corn on the cob down there. She had about nine in threeminutes. I was put in mind of an electric typewriter.'


'It's just her way of dealing with it. Eating's okay, you know. Youshould try it.'


Guy was leaning against the doorpost with his hands in his pockets. He looked down the corridor. 'Did he have a nap last night ? Anyway.He's stirring,' said Guy, unnecessarily, because you could hearMarmaduke's unfaltering roar and the ever-surprising violence ofhis rocking cot. 'Has he been out today? I thought I might stroll him.'


'The girls will take him out back.'


'I'd like to. What? No, I would.' This was of course a grotesqueuntruth. But Guy had need of a telephone. Not to call Nicola, whomhe was seeing that night (he would squire her to the darts). No: to callRichard at the office. He had spoken to Richard at length and withurgency three times already that day and didn't want to alarm the household further. That was another thing about deception: your black lies made your white lies darker. Your stars were all dimmingin heaven.


'Do you think it's really safe out there?'


'Oh, it's all right.'


He was now faced with the task of equipping Marmaduke for the outside world - of dressing him entirely, from soup to nuts, with thechild throwing all he had at him every inch of the way. In the nurseryGuy took off Marmaduke's nappy and despairingly wedged him intothe potty. 'Are you going to make a present for daddy?' he asked, againquite hopelessly. Twenty minutes later, following Marmaduke's reliable failure to make a present for daddy, Guy wrestled him intonappy-liner, nappy, nappy pants, vest, shirt, trousers, socks, shoes,jumper and, downstairs, anorak, gloves, face mask, bobble hat, scarf.As he was dragging him towards the front door and reaching out tofree the doublelock, Marmaduke 'went supervoid', in the local phrase(the phenomenon usually marked the end of Marmaduke's experi­ ments in week-long, white-lipped constipation). The child, in otherwords, had swamped himself in ordure. When Guy unravelledMarmaduke's scarf he saw that some of it was even peeping over thecollar of his shirt. In the nursery again Guy wrestled him out of bobblehat, face mask, gloves, anorak, jumper, shoes, socks, trousen, shirt,vest, nappy pants, nappy and nappy-liner, waved away the game butgagging nannies, hosed Marmaduke down in the master bathroom,and wrestled him back into nappy-liner, nappy, nappy pants, vest, shirt, trousers, socks, shoes, jumper, anorak, gloves, face mask,bobble hat and scarf. During these struggles, Marmaduke's lifelongenthusiasm for hurting his father- and, within that, his specializationin hurting his father's genitals — was given play only twice. A flyingheadbutt to the testicles, and an unrestrained blow with a bluntinstrument (a toy grenade-launcher) to the sensitive tip. The new painsjoined and reinforced and starred in all the ensemble pains that werethere already. This time, he actually got the front door open before Marmaduke was noisily and copiously sick.


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


'There's a good boy.'


'Nnno!. . . Ant mummy.'


'Come on, darling,'


'Antcadjew.’


'Oh all right.'


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


Royal prisoners, Guy thought:that's their status. Babies are royalprisoners, imperial internees, little Napoleons, tiny Hirohitos. Ouch!Must clip his nails. Passive resistance — well, within certainconventions 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 isyour problem. And just as you think the old boyis coming along quietly for once — 'Not in the eyes' — there'll be somefrazzled lurch for the door, some fumbled sabotage. Or a last, heroicself-fouling. Ow. Ouch. Right up the nose with that one. Whose war isit ? Aren't we their friends, their enemies' enemies ? Of course, you cannever treat the royal prisoners cruelly or harshly, because they're royaland must be seen to be perfect when hostilities end. . . Before he was afather Guy didn't realize just how many babies and children therealways were about the place. But now — he was entering LadbrokeGrove with its shops and pubs and bus-stops - Guy saw that the royalprisoners 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 mortarof the street had an emollient effect on Marmaduke, who was perhapshoping to pick up some tips for use elsewhere. Presiding over the carhorns and engine surges, and the turning wheels of ordinarycommerce, small concerns, and the permanent smash and scuffle atthe pubs' lantern jaws, came the dead notes of six or seven burglar alarms exasperatedly sounding. The post-office, whose floor stayedwet in any weather, was a skating rink of drunks and supplicants andlong-lost temper—and self-injury, Guy thought, noticinghow nobodynoticed the woman in the corner rhythmically beating her head against the join in the wall. He queued for a callbox, or milled for acallbox, 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 goodtime for the millennium. Even Marmaduke Seemed somewhatdaunted by the swirl. Guy was thinking of trying his luck at Conchita'sor Hosni's or possibly the Black Cross when a booth became clear andno one serious interposed. He called Richard, who forthrightlyconfirmed what they had both suspected: all American money wasleaving 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, towhat he felt was inevitable. The American retreat was in any case farless significant than the rollover it might entrain. And his own holdingposition was probably sound. But he suddenly felt a universal steepening. Guy held the child, but wants and needs now flailed outfrom him, basic, cheap, ordinary, the stuff we have to have. It occurredto him that he was perfectly free to call Nicola, and this he did. Sleepilyshe revealed that she was lying on her bed, after a bath, and that he wasmuch 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 endof the street like a nuclear detonation. And Guy knew that the sunshouldn't be doing this. No, the sun really shouldn't be doing this. Thesun shouldn't be coming in low at us like this, filling windows andwindscreens with rosy wreaths of dust, setting the horizon on fire likethis, burning so aslant like this, at this terrible angle, makingeverything 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 sizzlingin its pan. The sun turns slums into crystal battlements. But the sunshouldn't be doing this, it really shouldn't be doing this, branding ourminds 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 ona garden wall and tried to embrace him. Into the eager flurry of smallfists he bent his face, his searching lips. He had just seen himself in thefuture: he was with Marmaduke, at the zoo in Regent's Park — thezooworld of annulment, dissolution, visiting rights, half-orphan­hood. Thecafйs,the concourses were sparsely scattered with otherdivorced fathers, other sundered children. But the cages were empty,


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


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


Countries go insane like people go insane; and all over the worldcountries reclined on couches or sat in darkened rooms chewingdihydrocodeine and Temazepam or lay in boiling baths or twisted instraitjackets or stood there banging their heads against the paddedwalls. Some had been insane all their lives, and some had gone insaneand then gotten better again and then gone insane again. America:America had had her neuroses before, like when she tried giving updrink, like when she started finding enemies within, like when shethought she could rule the world; but she had always gotten betteragain. But now she was going insane, and that was the necessarycondition.


In a way she was never like anywhere else. Most places just aresomething, but America had to mean something too, hence her vulnerability - to make-believe, to false memory, false destiny. Andfinally 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 handand talking about all the rewards of the cloistered life. How very different from the sleeping arrangements and general atmosphereaboardAphrodite, where Marius swelters in the port cabin, listeningto Cornelia's insomnias of stoppered longing in her Starboardbunk . . .


There was a time when I thought I could read the streets ofLondon. 1 thought I could peer into the ramps and passages, into the smoky dispositions, and make some sense of things. But now I don'tthink I can. Either I'm losing it, or the streets are getting harder toread. 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 tobe hard - metal-lined, reinforced, massively concrete. And gettingharder, 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 circleeveryone else, everyone else we can get in range, looking for theother, 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 mightbecome too strong and troubled. What's that line inearly Updike -in innocent, amorous Rabbitland? America is beyond power: sheacts 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 tobe 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 intohurt feelings. Feelings 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 likeTime magazine.


I call her everywhere and nothing happens.


Keith asked me if he could bring Analiese Furnish to theapartment. As he filed this request, and sensed some of my unease, hegave 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 Keithcarriesaround with him, and physically she measured up. All in all sheseemed (i) a little less pretty (ii) quite a lot more crazy (iii) about fiveyears older and (iv) about nine inches shorter than the image formedby my typewriter.


I made ready to leave but they insisted I stuck around. Long silencefrom the bedroom. Then the sound of what I can only describe asintense mutual difficulty. Then a dozen furious cowboys finally hitSanta 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 thepark.'


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 herclub-like ankles, cringing under the floral print of her dress, seemed toknow when I was looking at them. Christ: the expansion of mind, thecommunications 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 yourheart, as all human beings do. I watched her, an older man, failed in artand love. Fat ankles. Dear flesh.


And now in the same park but in different weather I stand with Basilside by side. Nothing divides us — just a screen of rain. You'd call usstuffed men but even the stuffing has been knocked out of us. We hugourselves to hold what warmth remains and because no one we lovewill. Basil, the weeping violinist. And no good at that either. You andme, 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 herand 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, inonly a cartridge belt, Cornelia pushes him aside (her magnificentbreasts areheaving) and blows its head off. She reminds me of someone. I know: Burton Else.


And, like Burton Else, likeeveryone else, Cornelia has her softerside. 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 doomedracing-driver - his flashing smile, his lustrous quiff. Here is a womanwho will not give herself lightly to any man. But when she does,Marius figures, she gives herselfutterly.


Nevertheless the sands of time are running out: he only has aboutfifty 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 vampiremovie, when the cowgirl or barmaid comes too close with her whitethroat, 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 Ido. 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 arefreshing 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 goout 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 thenmore 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 theyear 1899 (and in all the years between: the millennium is apermanent 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, aftertaking 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 isstanding on tiptoe, head cracked back on his neck, with only nostrils,pouting lips and a lump of straining forehead visible above the risingtide. 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 ahuman face - aman's face, because men did it. Can you see himthrough the smoke and heat-wobble? His scalp churns with boils and baldspots and surgeon's scars. What hair is left is worried white. Theface beneath is saying: I know I shouldn't have tried that stuff. I know Ishouldn't have messed with all that stuff. I really want to change andstraighten out but I think I went and left it a little too late. I get an awfulfeeling that this is stuff you can't recover from. Look what it's done tome. Look what it'sdone to me...


In a sinister reversal I am now established as Keith's darts coach. Hedoesn'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 Ican't help him with the tactical side of it (there isn't any), but I can helphim with the psychological side of it, and there's apparently plenty ofthat. Everything depends on the savagery of your desire to get that dartto go where you throw it. Afterward, eerily, the money still changeshands 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 supremeaccolade), 'Darts, Keith'. Every now and then we get into reconditestuff about muscle memory and the destiny of the shaft and so on, but mostly I just stand there saying things like 'Be accurate, Keith'. 'Beaccurate, Keith': what kind of advice is that? What does it cost me tosay 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 andall that tiring stuff. There is a tab. Light bleeds out of the other things.


Last night, around eleven, something happened to Keith thatshould never happen to acheat: he ran out of cigarettes. Flabbergas­ted, he searched the garage for his spare few dozen cartons — andcouldn't find a single pack. That shows you just how long he has beenneglecting 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 fora leisurely look at his notebook, his darting diary. And among the littlehomilies about the wayward third arrow, the illiterate fantasies ofsudden 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

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, wassuch a quality contest being staged at the Black Cross. On this nightKeith looked to a far more prestigious venue: Acton's the MarquisoнEdenderry.That was the drinker Keith had always represented - thefoaming tankard, the purple arrowpouch, the clinical finishing. No way would you catch Keith throwing for the Black Cross, whosedrunken troupe of cosmopolitan stylists had never come close toSuperleague, had never, in fact, been known to win a darts match.Your more cultured arrowman was always going to be turningelsewhere for his sport. Basically it was to a more dart-orientatedboozer that Keith was obliged to gravitate, where you found thedarting dedication. The Marquis of Edenderry: its terraces ofbrothelly red velvet and tinkling chandeliers, the barman in braces,striped shirts and porkchop side burns, the barmaids with theirmilkmaid outfits, wenchy cleavages and sound knowledge of dartsaverages and lore. Magnificent facilities, with eight boards all in aline, and then, for the big occasions, the raisedochйcomplete withmimic target and digitalized scoring. Kath helped dress him: theburnished Cubans, the toreador flares, the black shirt short-sleevedfor flowing throwing with its silver-scripted admonition:keith talent —the finisher. Then the bat-winged darting cape...Inthe damp shadows of the Black Cross the figure Keith cut couldoccasionally seem taciturn and remote; but put him in a class pisserlike the Marquis of Edenderry and, well, the guy just came alive. Keith loved the Marquis of Edenderry. He sometimes came over allfunny about the Marquis of Edenderry, and would tearfully beat up anyone who spoke slightingly of the place.


'Yes. This is it,' said Guy. He gave a sideways smile of encourage­ment and asked, 'Are you all right?'


Nicola smiled back at him without opening her mouth. 'I think so.'She took his hand. 'It's just that I'm not a great one for pubs,' saidNicola, who in truth had always preferred expensive cocktail barsand violent speakeasies.


'We met in a pub.'


'Well then. They can't be all bad.'


He got out and moved round quickly to her door. A handappeared. He raised her up into the night.


'You look splendid,' he said, and added in a louder voice: 'I'm justwondering whether we oughtn't to leave your coat in the car.'


Nicola looked like a million dollars. Or a million pounds, anyway.Over the V-neck jacket and rear-split skirt of a black velvet suit wasflung a blond mink coat ('It's fake,' she had lied); court shoes, sheerstockings, diamonds on her ears and on her throat at the end of a finegold chain, and a gold watch, and a gold clasp on the black leatherbag.


'I mean,' said Guy, 'they won't know it's not real.' When, earlier,as planned, she had come straight down the stairs in response to hisbuzz, Guy had been seriously alarmed (and, of course, seriously touched) by the guileless opulence of her dress. How hard, and withwhat intelligent success, she had tried to look sophisticated. Andthey were only going to the pub to watch the darts and root for Keith,who perhaps had told her that the place was rather grand.


'Who won't?'


'The people in the pub.'


They'll try and steal it, do you mean? But you'll protect me. Anyway they wouldn't dare.'


Guy smiled palely. All he had meant was that the coat might causeill feeling, in the Marquis of Edenderry. But of course he kept this tohimself.


They entered the pub and its loud world of primitive desires,desires owned up to and hotly pursued and regularly gratified. Dailyfears having been put aside for the night: that was the idea. Thedesiderata included goods and services, sex and fights, money andmore TV, and, above all, in fateful synergy, drink and darts. A shiftingtabletop caught Guy an early and awkward blow, flooding his visionwith a familiar distress; so he just squeezed his way through after her,after Nicola, for whom the heavy press seemed to part as far as the tipsof her coat's bristles. Hell will be noisy and crowded, he thought. Hellwill bebusy. Now they reached the body of the Marquis of Edenderry,and here was air, and space - and tables, and chairs. The pub wassimply too big to be slaked by mere human beings. They sat, and wereimmediately attended by a uniformed waiter whose erectness and impatience declared that tonight would be high efficiency, highturnover, the managerial team having no doubt set their sights on anepic profit. There were also alert sweepers with longhandled brushes and dustpans, to tackle the upended ashtrays and the shattered glass. And when a fight broke out near by — surprisingly vigorous andsanguinary for so early in the evening — two ageing bouncers cruisedalong and floored the likely victor with crisp punches to the nose; theythen administered some exemplary stomping with cross looks cast about. Guy hummed and hawed and twice apologized to the waiter before deciding on a beer, Nicola having asked, with an air of considerable timidity, for a cognac, which is what she had beendrinking all afternoon. The waiter stiffened, wiring himself stilltighter, and moved off. Guy was pleased, or at any rate looked pleased, to see some of the same old faces from the Black Cross. They nowregarded Nicola with an admiration that expressed itself in frowns ofpain, of grave disappointment. The sexual slanders, the lies told in the Black Cross, Guy felt, were somehow active here in the Marquis ofEdenderry; but they could never really touch her. He gazed at Nicola, serious and inviolate, in her glad rags. He didn't know that her mindwas working like silicon with incredible calculations as it might be the trajectory of the last dart bisecting the angle of his erection: arcs,tangents, targets.


'1 hope Keith wins,' he said.


'Oh he'll win,' she said. Guy smiled at her with his head tipped, as ifquestioning her certainty. She could have told him what she believedto be true, that she felt it in her tits; 1 feel it in my tits. But of course shekept this to herself.


At 7.4 5 precisely North Kensington's Keith Talent pushed open thedouble doors of the Marquis of Edenderry and stood there removinghis car gloves while all the heads turned. Stay cool but don't tighten up.


He lifted his chin, surveying his immediate responsibilities. Therewere some shouts from further back. Heavy support. Don't askabout an opponent. You play the board, not the man. Mike Frame,the landlord. And Terry Linex and Keith Carburton from RarePerfumes: a nice gesture. Appreciate it. Now Mike Frame stepped forward and placed a serious hand on Keith's shoulder, urging himon to the cleared stretch of barspace. Two men in suits, sponsorsfrom Duoshare. And Tony de Taunton from DTV. DTV. TV.With intense formality Keith was offered a selection of select wines,a choice of choice spirits. No way. Lager. Lager's kegged. It'skegged.


'I understand you usually throw number three for the pub, Keith.'


'Third gun. That's correct, Tony.' Keith explained that the pub'stwo top darters, Duane Kensal and Alex O'Boye, had both been unavailable when the Duoshare came round this year. Absently headded that such things were always unpredictable, where matters ofparole and remand were concerned. 'No, I'm the underdog tonight,' said Keith. Lower expectations. 'Suits me down to the ground.'


'Well good luck.'


'Thanks, Tony. Yeah cheers.'


7.50 and the double doors swung open again, meaningly: theclatter faltered, and there was a schoolyard sound from within,whoops, harsh laughter. Keith turned. Not too quick. And faced theentrance with his ready sneer. Four Japanese.That one! Paul Go!Seen him down the Artesian! Fucking maniac on the treble twenties!Did two ten-darters in half an hour! Came out of his trap with amaximum! Never smiles! Did the 170 finish! . . . Don't ask about anopponent. Keith sipped his lager. So Paul Go beat Teddy Zipper. The fast-throwing oriental had what it took to put one over on the SouthLondon drayman. Keith parked his sneer at the bar while theexclusive huddle opened out to include his adversary. Then heturned, looked for a moment into the unknowable ferocity of Paul Go's lidless stare, nodded his farewells, circled his tongue round hisright cheek, and slowly unmoored himself into the smoke and thenoise — and the pub's waves of love.


'He's coming over,' said Guy. 'I think he's coming over. Hecertainly looks . . . ready for anything.'


'Doesn't he,' said Nicola. 'I love the stingray outfit.'


'I think we might need more chairs. If he joins us we might needmore chairs.’


Still some distance off, Keith was now walking the gauntlet of hisfriends and fans. Handclasps and handsmacks, savage and farcical winking, the great dry head jerking in recognition and acknow­ledgment. Playfully he slapped the drinks from offering hands,and tossed spare cigarettes over his shoulder, like Henry VIII withhis chicken legs. Laughing faces filled Keith's wake.


'He looks like the Pied Piper,' said Nicola.


'He looks . . .' said Guy, with doubt, but so raptly that it cameout anyway. He couldn't imagine ever feeling superior to Keith again: the male principle, so positively charged. 'He looks', said Guy, 'like Marmaduke.'


Finally he was nearing their table, back first, and windmilling hisarms - at Curtly, Dean, Fucker, Zbigs One and Two, Bogdan, Piotr, Norvis, Shakespeare.


'Best of luck, Keith,' called Guy, his glass raised, but much too early, for Keith was still craning to heed some chant or goad.


'Best of luck, Keith.'


'Yes, good luck, Keith,' said Nicola.


He was now looking beyond them and flapping his hands inauthoritative summons.


'I think we might need more chairs,' said Guy.


'Right then,' said Keith, and gave a courtly sniff. 'Guy, Nick:Debbee. This is Debbee. Debbee? This is Analiese. Analiese? Pet-ronella. Petronella? Say hello to Iqbala. Iqbala? Meet. . . meet. . .meet. . .'


'Keith!'


'Sorry, darling . . .'


'Sutra!' said Sutra.


'Sutra,' said Keith, who had not known Sutra long.


'1 think we might need more chairs.'


'Right then. What's it going to be? Glass of milk for you is itDebs?'


'Keith!'


'Jesus,' said Keith, closing his eyes in the greatest disgust. 'Here comes summer. Look what the fuckin cat's dragged in. Look what'sjust crawled out from under its fuckin stone.'


Guy and Nicola both turned and looked up: behind them stood a faded blonde, or a blonde's ghost. She stared at Keith with what appeared to be numb yearning.


'I'll get another chair.’


'Guy? Don't move a muscle. She's pissed, innit,' said Keith, goingover Guy's head. 'You. Fuck off out of it.'


'No. Uh, I think Ishall get another chair.'


Guy was travelling ever further afield for his chairs; when he returned, having tugged and wiggled another one loose from thesurrounding stockades of noise and need, he found Keith inmellower mood, hospitably waving a hand in the air.


'Irish like,' said Keith as Trish slowly sat. 'Pint of vodka, is it?Bucket of mephs?' And he started to order drinks, at no point and inno wise neglecting the flurry of ogreish winks and pouts and thumb-upping and triple-ringing with which he primed the hopes andassuaged the fears of the innumerable followers and disciples and other Keith Talent-addicts who had filled the place as thoroughly, itseemed, as they would have filled his own apartment. A home fixture: Keith was playing at home.


'Blimey. We'll haveKath in here in a minute. I'm like You fuckyNefner that's who I'm like. I have, I have never made no secret of my, my admiration of the, the female charms. Look at this,' said Keith,turning on Debbee with the hot wind of his stare. 'Miss Debbee Kensit. Sixteen today. On your feet, girl.'


Debbee rose. The black net T-shirt with its lively catch of breasts;the loose white knickers worn, fashionably, outside the tight blackshorts; then the two bands of stark flesh before the thick pink tubingof her legwarmers. Debbee's round face was pleasant, more thanpleasant, until it fully smiled. The smile did a lot for Debbee: it didthings like halving her IQ. And it took you, if you would follow, into a world of gum and bone, of dismay, and childish deals to do withlove and pain (though only Keith knew the touch of the terrible tenners left trembling on sideboard and mantelpiece). Guy, who found himself taking comfort from the vivid sprawl of Keith's commitments, had always believed that you had to be thirty-five orforty before you got the face that you deserved. Debbee showed thatyou could get that face on your sixteenth birthday. Butdeserved didn't come into it; no, not at all.


'Sixteen as such,' Keith was going on. 'Pure as soft-fallen snow. Avirgin innit, saving herself for the man of her dreams. Me I never laid a finger on her. No danger. Because she's special. Special. Special tome.'


'How is your finger, Keith?' said Trish. 'How's your poorfinger?'


'Not thy expect any you old slags to appreciate something likethat. Hey! Now now, girls,' he said with a priestly look. 'Now now,ladies.' Around the Marquis of Edenderry loudspeakers were clearingtheir throats. 'Best behaviour, all right? Don't do it for me. I'm notasking you to do it for me. Do it for darts. Okay? Do it for darts.'


Apart from feeling that she might, at any second, black out fromneglect, or even die of it and save everyone the trouble, Nicolaconsidered herself to be usefully placed for the time being, and wellprepared, like an athlete or an artist, for a necessary audacity in theplay. She sat sunk down into the shape of her chair and her coat withher shoulders combatively flexed, her legs crossed, and one shoe bobbing patiently. Looking from face to face - Debbee, Analiese,Sutra, Petronella, Iqbala, Trish - she felt no jealousy; but rivalry had always roused her. Only Petronella, she had incidentally concluded,would give her any trouble in a fight. Petronella was tall and thin but powerfully well-balanced in the thighs and, most crucially, would behugely and astonishingly dirty, would go nuclear, in the very first instant. Nicola had always been both gratified and alarmed by how good she was at fighting with women, on the rare occasions when ithad come up. She liked women, and women liked her, despite everything. In the past she had had many close girl friends, and oneclose girlfriend. But in the end there was nothing you coulddo towomen (and there was nothing they could do to you). Except youcouldscratch and bite them, you could mark and twist their softness, ifthe need arose, and Nicola was good at fighting women. She hadlearned how in a much heavier league, fighting with men...It was Keith who worried her. Keith, she decided, was not at his best. Shedidn't at all mind his talk, his gruesome presence, his antigallantry. The trouble with Keith, tonight, in the Marquis of Edenderry, aselsewhere and at other times, was that he was formless — he had no form. He had gathered women round him or up against him to makean island ofnonor neg terror, for terrornight. And it hadn't workedout. He was terrified. She could see that he was terrified, pitiably brittle, with a disgraceful bad-stomach recalcitrance in the constantflicker of his face. So Nicola was now looking for a hook (knowingthat a hook would be there), to get them through it, something to givehim courage and lend form to his chaos. She wasn't going to let him bethe louser-up of her reality. However, she didn't feel like talking yet, and was glad when Guy showed he had his uses by asking, with a frown of interest,


'Keith, who are you up against tonight?’


'Never ask about an opponent. You play the board, not the man.It's a thing between you and the darts . . . Paul Go.'


'Is he Japanese?'


'I got respect for every man I play.'


'A very determined people.'


'Fucking loansharks,' said Keith, assaying, for once, a racial slur.He could think of nothing worse to say about them, having, for example, barely heard of World War II. Keith's father, who hadcertainly heard of World War II, and had successfully deserted from it, might have asked if everyone knew the terrible things they did tosome of our boys back then; but Keith was reduced to a few half- remembered grumbles from the fillers in his tabloid.


They got a big yen for big yen. Tokyo Joe, he'll be stuffing hispockets.'


'Yes well they do have their critics.'


'So do I, mate! Oh yeah. I've heard them. They doubt my power. Question mark over my temperament - all this. I'm just a jammybastard, according to some.' There came the spit and crackle ofanother announcement, and again Keith's face flickered huntedly. 'Well the shoe'll be on the other foot. I'm going out there to silencethe knockers once and for all.'


But Keith stayed where he was, as time kept passing, and despitethe general lurch the pub gave towards the streetward side of the arena. The women looked at him from their accustomed state when out on the town with their men: that of more or less frowzy silence. Trish had already gone off and faded away somewhere.


'Better be going to the dressing-room,' said Keith irresolutely.'Compose my thoughts.' He smashed a palm into his chest andquickly staggered to his feet. A heart attack? No: Keith was feelingfor his darts pouch. Brutally he yanked it out. 'It's not a dressing-room, not as such,' he went on, with a shy smile. 'The Gents. Theyclear the lot of them out. To allow the two contestants to — to compose their thoughts. Okay ladies! Wish me luck!'


The ladies wished him luck, all except Nicola, who excused herselfand disappeared in search of the Ladies.


Where does a lady go, in a pullulating pub, if she wants to meet agent, and enjoy a bit of privacy? Nicola knew the answer. Not theLadies: you can't have a gent in there. The ladies wouldn't like it. Notthe Ladies. The Gents, the Gents — the gents being so much moretolerant and fun-loving in this regard. Ladies aren't supposed to go inthe Gents. Only gents are. But this was no lady. Unless she be - unlessshe be Lady Muckbeth . . .


At first Nicola lingered near the entrance, by the machines. Whatwould they be dispensing these days? Not just cigarettes andcondoms, not in here: also hairpieces and prostate-kits andpacemakers. After one last hopeless shout through the doorway the man in the frilly shirt moved off — and Nicola walked in, into theworld of white testosterone.


She did so proprietorially. The big youth who came fast out of thestall looked at her and hesitated on his way out, thinking better ofwashing his hands. She lit a cigarette with detailed calm, and raisedher chin for the first inhalation. There were three men in the men's room: Keith, who looked up from dabbing his face at the basin andfrowned softly as he caught her eye in the mirror; a haggard milkmanbent over the white pouch of a urinal, his forehead pressed to thetiles, weeping and faintly whinnying with pain as he micturated; and Paul Go. It was over to him in his corner she sauntered, to Paul Go,expressionlessly tending his darts, aligning flights, barrels, shafts, points. She stood so close to him that in the end he had to look up.


'Do you speak English?'


He gave a sudden nod.


'And where are you from? Japan, yes - but Honshu, Kyushu,Shikoku?'


'Honshu.'


Tokyo, Kyoto, Nagoya, Yokohama, Nagasaki?'


'Utsonomiya.'


'What?'


'Utsonomiya.'


'Been with us long, have you Paul? Tell me. Do you know what Imean by Enola Gay?'


He gave a sudden nod.


She stared for a while at the black fluff on his upper lip and thenturned her blond fur on him, and said to Keith, 'It's funny, isn't it,darling?'


Keith seemed ready to agree.


'People are always saying that the Japanese are different from us.From you and me. More different. More different than the black.More different than the Jew. More different, even, than that littlecreature over there.' She indicated the micturating milkman, whowasn't at all offended. Still entirely caught up in his lone drama ofself-injury, he had lifted a hand to his tear-stained face, and altered his stance to that of one about to seat himself on a high stool. 'We should surely be able to address the matter in a liberal and inquiringframe of mind. I mean, when all is said and done, just how different from us, spiritually, humanly,' she said, and turned again,'are these fucking monkeys?'


Paul Go waited. Then he smiled.


'And now you're showing those teeth that nobody understands.'


The last words were said into a surprising silence, as some freshdisposition established itself in the hall beyond. The man with thefrilly shirt had reappeared; and there were other onlookers. Losing no time now, Nicola clicked back across the floor, opening her handbag. She gave Keith a kiss, the Wounded Bird, and carefully wiped his mouth with a paper tissue. Standing back, she consideredthe whole man, with eyes of love.


'Keith, your shirt! It must have got a little creased in the car!'


She bent to straighten the ridged rayon. She bent lower.


'. . . On your knees, girl,' said Keith calmly.


So that was the necessary: the diaphanous stockings, meeting the other shine on the toilet floor. Nicola knelt. She tugged downwardson the shirt's hem, and wetted a finger to collect some fluff from the vertical stripe of the trousers. She said,


'Win, Keith. Dispose of the challenge of the — thehibakusha. Cometo me tomorrow. I'll have more money for you . . . You're my god.'


'On your feet, girl.'


Paul Go moved past them. Even the old milkman levered himselffree of the urinal and set his course for the door. Keith stayed for awhile and looked at her, nodding his head. But she was the last toleave.


Guy patrolled the Marquis of Edenderry, his questing nose out front,the indeterminate mouth with its wince-smile and flinch-grin. Thepub, the entire cavern of leather and glass, had been tipped sideways,its contents toppling towards the street, towards the raised dart-board, the trampledochй.All you could see up there was a man in apurple dinner jacket, above the crowd; his voice might not have been the worst voice of all time, but it was certainly, the worst voice yet (anightmare of fruity pomp); with this voice he was saying, 'So I'd liketo thank you for kindly thanking us for bringing you this contest heretonight. . .'Guy could see Debbee and-was it?-Petronella standingtogether on a table, a few feet from the swaying rampart of heads andshoulders. He was afraid he had been rather a dub with Keith's harem;most awkward; they had seemed to look right through him, to lookright through his well-enunciated questions about where they livedand what they did; though he did manage to exchange some words with Analiese about the theatre. He craned and flinched and felt theneed for Nicola: a childish need, like being lost on some market street,and desperate for one of the bustling mannequins to slow and softeninto the kind shape of the loved one. She must be still in the Ladies, Guythought, as he went to use the Gents.


He couldn't imagine that Nicola would want to watch the wholething, or even any part of it, so he returned to their table to wait for herthere. Others, too, were sitting it out, busy drinking or petting orfighting. He emptied his glass and blinked at the crowd. Then he felt alight touch on his shoulder, and with a forgiving smile he turned to facethe authentic ruin of Trish Shirt.


'Whoops! Are you all right?'


She stared into nothing, as he helped her sit; she stared into nothing—or she stared, perhaps, at her own thoughts, at her own insides. Herewas a blonde to whom everything that could happen to a blonde hadgone ahead and happened. As the darts crowd, the arrowshower,steadily grew in its growling, Trish Shirt said, with infinite difficulty,


'I don't know ... I don't know what the world's . . .going to.'


This remark seemed to Guy about as shocking as any he had everheard. He watched her carefully. To attempt so little in the way of speech, of response, of expression: and then to fuckthat up.


'In thetoilet,' she said.


Guy waited.


'He comes round my owce. Eel bring me...booze and that. To myowce. And use me like a toilet.'


'Oh I'm sure not,' said Guy, reflecting that even the wordowce wasan exalted epithet for where Trish lived, if of course Keith'sunsympathetic descriptions of the place were to be trusted.


'Keep meself got up like a titmag. In my owce. Case he wants tocome round and lam the yell out of me. In me ohnous. Where's therespect? Where's the appreciation. Does he...does hetalk aboutme?'


'Keith?'


'Keith.’


She had asked the question with such total abjectness that Guy wasat a loss for the right reply. He thought of straw: was this the kind youclutched at, or the kind that broke your back? Keith did in fact talk about Trish frequently, even routinely, as a way of advertizing his movements around town; and he backed up these mentions with asmuch violent detail as he had inclination or time to transmit. Guy said,


'He talks about you often, and fondly.'


'Keith?'


'Keith.'


'Oh I love him dearly with all my heart,' she said. 'Truly I do.' Herface softened further: a mother watching over a sleeping child. Amother who had been away some time, in an institution. A crackedmother. A mother — alas! — that you wouldn't wantyour child near,with her wrong type of love. 'Go on. What's he say?'


'He says,' said Guy, helplessly but rightly concluding that Trishwould believe anything, 'he says that his feeling for you is based ondeep affection. And trust.'


'Why then? Why, Keith, why? Why's he rub my nose in it? Withher. In thetoilet.'


'What,here? . . . Yes, well, he does behave impulsively at times.'


'On her knees.'


Guy looked up. What he saw made his shins shiver, like theanticipation and recoil he felt at the instant of Marmaduke's half-hourly injuries. Nicola was standing alone on the bar, her arms folded, her shoes held in her right hand, her blond fur coat like a low sun, andsupervizing the contest with an expression of inexplicable coldness.


Trish was crying now and Guy took her hand.


'Everything,' she said through her tears, and again with infinitedifficulty, 'everything's coming...to the dogs.'


And while Trish stared - stared, as it now seemed, into her owneyes — Guy held her hand and watched the crowd: how it bled colourfrom the enormous room and drew all energy towards itself, formingone triumphal being; how it trembled, then burst or came or died,releasing individuality; and how the champion was borne along onits subsidence, his back slapped, his hair tousled, mimed by female hands and laughing, like the god of mobs.


'So: the fairytale continues,' said Royal Oak's Keith Talent, draininghis glass and wiping his mouth with his sleeve. 'Basically thecomplexion of the match changed in the second leg of the third set.


Recovering from his wayward start, when nothing would go right forthe fast-throwing oriental, the little guy from the east was permittedthree clear darts at the double 16, the board's prime double. Thebigger man could only stand and watch. But his fears proved fleeting,for the young Jap crapped it. Relishing the home fixture, the North Kensington chucker went from strength to strength, stepping in topunish the smaller man, who never recovered from the blow. Yes, the slip cost him dear. After that, no way could he stave off defeat.'


So saying, Keith closed his eyes and yawned. Secretly he was amazedby his voice. Instead of not working at all, which would have been fairenough, his voice was working phenomenally well (though even hewas shocked by how deep it had become since the last few drinks). Butwhat authority, what rolling fluency! Keith yawned again: the inhalation, the ragged wail. It was so late now that the Marquis ofEdenderry had in fact been shut for almost half an hour; but the partylingered on behind bolted doors, their glasses proudly rebrimmed bythe manager, Mike Frame. Keith yawned again. Perhaps he wascatching these yawns from his companions (who had had nearly fivehours of his post-match analysis). They moaned suddenly and unanimously as Keith said,


'Going for a considerable finish in the nailbiting fourth set, the . . .'


Keith stopped, or paused. He noticed that Trish was asleep, or atany rate not conscious. The women all had their heads bowed, infatigue, or in the piety of love. Keith felt so happy and proud that hismouth dropped open and these words emerged, as his right hand (witherect darting finger) counted from girl to girl: Debbee, Analiese, Trish,Nicky, Sutra, Petronella, Iqbala . . .


'Eeny meeny miney —'


Nicola sat upright. And Guy stirred. And in the general flurry ofmissed clues, ungot jokes, Trish Shirt came to with a shout. She left herchair but she didn't straighten: she stood there cocked in a haggard crouch and pointing with her whole arm at Nicola Six.


'You! It's you! Ooh, I saw you. In the Gents. She was down on herfuckin knees in the Gents! For Keith. She was down on her knees in theGentssucking his -'


Keith stepped masterfully forward and hit Trish once on thecheekbone with his closed fist. He stood above her, panting, but thebody didn't move. In the near background Mike Frame waitedindulgently, jinking his keys.


'A chapter', said Nicola in the car, 'of epic squalor.'


'Yes. Surprisingly dreadful.'


'When I get home I shall have a scalding shower.'


'Hideous business. I'm sorry. We should have left straight after thematch and let them get on with it.'


'You know, when Keith hit the madwoman, that was his idea ofbeing gallant. To me. Like laying his jacket over a puddle.'


'You think?'


'Curious how madness and obscenity go together. Like madness and anti-Semitism. Shakespeare was right. Ophelia . . .'


'Oh yes. A rather sorry Ophelia, I'm afraid.' Guy was still awashwith adrenalin and anger, and with confusion about his ownresponse to the Talent enormity. He had felt no fear, only paralysis,as if everything he believed in had been wiped out of existence. NowGuy added to himself, 'Hard to see what to do . . .'


A little later she said, 'I love your tongue. All this kissing.'


'You're frightfully good at it.'


'Beginner's luck.'


They were parked in her dead-end street. She now gave him aseries of literary kisses, Maud, and Geraldine, and Eve in the Garden,and (a happy creation) Ophelia Before and After the Death of Polonius. Then she threw in the Grand-a-Night Hooker. She didenough, in any case, she confidently imagined, to rebrim his sobbingboner. Then she reached for her handbag with the last of many sighs.


He said abruptly, 'Your stockings. The knees are both torn.'


'I know. I can't see the point of stockings when they're this sheer.Of course, a pair of good hardy tights is what one really wants.Watch me to the door. Don't get out.'


She climbed from the car and walked to the garden gate. But thenshe turned and walked back — walking as she would on anothernight, very soon, to another man in another car. She approached andbent before the driver's window, which Guy smartly lowered. Nicola put her head into the car and gave him the Jewish Princess.


When it was over, Guy involuntarily raised a hand to his mouth.That-that was . . .'


'Unforgivable?' said Nicola mysteriously. 'By the way. I'm goingto stop teaching Keith.'


'Really?' said Guy lovingly.


'One tries to do what one can. But I've finally put my finger onwhat 1 can't bear about him.’


Which is?' said Guy, even more lovingly.'He's so working-class.'


Working-class or not, Ken-Chel's Keith Talent was still abroad. Thenight was young. Though of humble extraction - the son of a simple criminal - Keith Talent was still very much at large.


He had made, in the heavy Cavalier, a magisterial tour of Greater London: Plaistow for Petronella, Arnos Grove for Sutra, Slough forAnaliese (Basil was behaving strangely), then to Ickenham, to getlittle Debbee home safe and sound. And for a while he sat in her semi,drinking instant coffee and passing the time with her perfectly fanciable mother, who had heard of Keith's victory on the TV (it came in the form of a newsflash, in the middle of a darts match shewas already watching) and had stayed up to congratulate him and, ofcourse, to ensure that her little Debbee didn't give Keith one on the house. In no way had Keith neglected his responsibilities to Trish Shirt, personally helping Mike Frame to shove her into the minicaband himself standing there with the cocked twenty, giving the driver full instructions. Nor had he forgotten Iqbala, whom he had left untillast, her being a neighbour, and who was now fast asleep (he'd checked) in the boot of the car.


The instant coffee was drunk, the cigarettes smoked, the timepassed. A new Keith Talent. The taste of victory is sweet. In the olddays Keith and Debs would have slipped away at some point for theirlittle cuddle, Keith later settling with Mrs K. Or he might have waitedin the Cavalier, smoking more cigarettes and listening to darts tapes, until Debbee threw a key down from her window, and he'd pop backin for a freebie. But tonight? Well, it was a new Keith Talent theywere looking at. And Debbee was special. She cost Ј85. And hefound that he wasn't really bothered one way or the other, now thatshe was sixteen, a good deal of the magic having gone out of it. No.He gave Mrs Kensit a kiss and a squeeze, and Debbee an even chastergoodnight on the doorstep, and was on his way. In the car hesmacked a darts tape into the stereo (the Obbs-Twemlow final: evergreen) and drove to Trish Shirt's.


Twenty minutes later he sat in his garage and smoked twenty cigarettes and drank a bottleof porno. Tsk, tsk: bloodstains on hiscollar. In long but regular intervals, tears of pride dropped on to hislap. Another bockle? Already bit tiggly. That bull finish: right in themiggle. No diggling, but give Debs a lickle cuggle. Quick piggle.


From time to time he would stare up at the swimming beauty of thedartboard: the kaleidoscope of every hope and dream. She did it.Nicky did it. Old Nick. Then home, to the chores of love. He walkedthe wife, burped the dog, and . . . Semiconscious, then, also semi-literate and not even semiskilled, Double-U Eleven's Keith Talent rested his head against the semipermanent cork wall, and thought of semiprecious Nicola, beneath the cold black sky of seminight.


And now under the low sun I go to Kim Talent with a lover's impatience, with a lover's tearing impatience, fearful that the worldwill die before I meet the searching blaze of her eyes. On the way inthe quiet riot of Golborne Road I see three young women walkingalong together, licking and sucking their fingers. Why? Whatprofane novelty .. . But yes of course. They've been eating frenchfries, eating chips from the open bag covered in vinegar and salt. Andnow licking their fingers. Long may they do so. Long may they havethe freedom, the fingers, and the lips. With a lover's impatience Ishall unbutton her Babygro. With a lover's impatience I shall tear at the sticky tabs of her diaper.


Kim was sleeping. So was Keith, at three in the afternoon. He'dtried getting up; he'd tried the bracing stroll to the Black Cross. Andhe'd come right back again. His tortured snoring filled the flat. AndKim's sleep too was restless, pain-jabbed, caught up in the baby'spassionate, eternal and largely obscure struggle not just to getthrough being a baby, an infant, a child, a young one, but to deal rawly with the knots and tricks of being. Even a baby knows thatdeath isn't one idea: it is the complex symbol. Baby, what is yourproblem? Daddy, it's this: the mind-body problem. I asked Kath whyshe didn't take the chance to go to the shops. I said it forcefully orfrantically. The resolute colourlessness of her face told me no, no; but then her eyes closed, and something was decided, something important was decided. And she left us.


Got to stop hurting K.With a lover's impatience I woke her. Nogood fust takeing it out on the Baby.She cried in confusion andsadness as I unbuttoned her on the living-room floor. With a singlewrench I pulled off her diaper . . .What kind of planet is it where youfeel relief, where you feel surprise, that a nought-year-old girl is still a virgin? Then I turned her over.


On the right buttock, a bruise, perfectly round and shockingly dark,and grainy, like an X-ray, shining black light on the internal world ofcells. On the left buttock, three cigarette burns, in a triangle.


I got up so suddenly that I banged into the standard lamp and if theroom had been any bigger I would have fallen over backward right on to the deck. The wall held me up with a blow to the cranium. Showingeffort and eagerness, Kim turned herself over, a new skill of hers, andlooked up at me from the floor.


'He's been hurting you, hasn't he?'


'. . . Mm. Urs,' she said.


'It's daddy, isn't it.'


'. . . Earse.'


I went down on my knees and said through the sound of hiswindow-rattling snore, 'I'll -I don't know what I'll do. But I'll protectyou. Please don't worry. Please. My darling.'


'Please,' I said. 'Do this one big last thing for me. Please.'


Nicola pushed her face forward. 'Christ, I saidokay.'


'But what good is your guarantee? You're alone. On what can youswear? You don't love anything or anybody.'


'Well you'll just have to take my word for it, won't you. I was goingto do something like this anyway. What's the big deal?'


'Just bear with me,' I said. I had toothache in my knee and legache inmy mouth and earache in my ass. I nodded. 'Good. So. You'll haveKeith move in. Or spend a lot of time here. And make him happy. Untilthe big night.'


'I won't wake up with him. That's out of the question and is never going to happen. And you realize it'll mean sending Guy away for awhile.'


'There go my unities.'


'I rather thought America.'


'America ?' I sighed heavily. But we all have to make sacrifices. I tooka breath and said, 'Outstanding work, by the way, at the Marquis ofEdenderry. You got us out of a tricky situation.' I was there, of course,at the Marquis of Edenderry. I was there. But am I anywhere ? I look atmy outstretched hand and expect it to disappear, to begin its slow wipefrom the screen. I move in and out of things. I am an onlooker in myown dream. I am my own ghost, kissing its fingertips.


Indulgently she said, 'Have you finished your letter to Mark?'


'No. And it's about eight thousand words long.'


'Don't finish it. Or don't post it. Here's a better idea. Post it toyourself. Do you know the Borges story, "The Aleph " ? It's very funnyabout literary envy.' She finished her drink and dashed the empty glassinto the fireplace. Typical.


'Is it now?'


Here they come again, the pains. Gather about me, my little ones.


Exquisitetristesse on finishingCrossbone Waters. I can't thinkwhy. It's an awful little piece of shit.


Marius returns from a crepuscular soul-ramble to find Kwangopacking his meagre possessions. Ridiculous conversation. Kwangosays he will be gone for three moons. Why,OKwango? The woman isready. She waits. How,OKwango, do you know this? How do youknow this,Ogreat Kwango? The birds whisper it. I smell it in thewaters.


Nor does Kwango speak with forked tongue. Marius hastens toCornelia's cabin, and gets the lot...


Or you infer that he does. Marius goes all posh and manly at thisjuncture ('Towards morning, I took her again'), with much Kwan-goan rambling about water, femininity, ebbings, fluxes. I expectedherto be manly. I expected her to really strap Marius on. But no: she's asimpering sonnet in the sack.


At any rate the seventy-two-hour debauch concludes with Kwan-go's return and a brisk voyage back to Samarinda, where Cornelia'sseaplane is already bobbing in the harbour. No promises. No regrets.Just one last kiss . . .


I'm devastated. I reallyam falling apart. Why the sighs, why thetears, why the rich and wistful frowns ? It's anawful little piece of shit.


My last act of love took place ninety days ago.


I ambushed and ravished her. I was frictionless and inexorable.How could she possibly resist me? Burton Else couldn't have handledit better. Kwango himself would have wept with pride.


It was a precision raid. Everything was sweet. On the appointed dayI unsmilingly flew fromLa Guardiato Logan. Then the six-seater tothe Cape: how aerodynamically carefree it was, how the baby planewas whisked up on the thermals, out over the boatless water. I lookedback with a shrewd glance: Boston at dusk with the sun behind it -heaven's red-light district. We landed with extreme delicacy, as did theold open-prop stratocruiser that was coming down alongside, like acorpulent but thin-shanked lady, skirts raised to toe the moist tarmac.Onward.


Sand spills had closed the thruway. In my hired jeep I ruggedly drovethrough battened Provincetown, then on past the sign that says CapeCod Light, and into the woods. Many times I climbed out to untangle the drag of queer growths, the grasp of nameless vines made bitter bytheir own ugliness, taloned briars, sharp-knuckled twigs, all under astorm of blackfly. Then at last the camp, the unlocked screen door, and Missy Harter on the piano stool, clasping her coffee cup in both hands.


She had come for remembrance, as she did every year: her father, whom she loved, whom I loved, Dan Harter, with his old-guy jeans,his Jim Beam and his Tom Paine. She was perfect for me.


I cried. I laced her coffee with bourbon. I told her I was dying too. Iwent down on my knees.


How could she possibly resist me?


Last night, as I entered, Nicola gave me her most exalted andveridical smile and said,


Tvereached a decision. God, it's all so clear now. I'm calling the whole thing off.'


'You're what?'


'I'll go away somewhere. Perhaps with Mark. It's simple. Plan B. I'lllive.'


'You'll what?'


She laughed musically. 'The look on your face. Oh don't worry. I'mall talk. I'm just a big tease. It's still Plan A. Don't worry. I was just kidding. I was just playing nervous.'


Last night was our last night, in a sense. We both felt it. The worldwas coming into everything. The room where we now talked, Nicola'shabitat, would soon be altered, compromised, as would Keith's, aswould Guy's. These places would never be the same again. I said,


'I'm going to miss our talks.'


'There's another thing I've been teasing you about. Of all my recentdeceptions, this was the hardest. Technically. I mean keeping astraight face. Pretending to be a virgin is a breeze Ўn comparison. MarkAsprey.’


'Oh yes?'


'His work. His writing.'


'It's . . ?'


'It'sshit,' she said.


'.. . My heart soars like a hawk.'


What was she wearing? I can't remember. No outfit or disguise ofinnocence or depravity. Justclothes. And she wasn't made-up either;and she wasn't drunk, and she wasn't mad. Very much herself,whatever that was, herself, fraying but shiny like worn velvet, ex­treme, aromatic, nervous, subtle.


She said, 'How do you feel about me? The truth.'


The truth?' I got to my feet saying, 'You're a bad dream, baby. Ikeep thinking I'm going to wake up' — here I snapped my fingersweakly - 'and you'll disappear. You're a nightmare.'


She stood and came toward me. The way her head was inclinedmade me say at once:


'I can't.'


'You must know that it has to happen.'


'You've come across this. When men can't.'


'Only by design. It's easy: you make yourself leaden. Don't worry.I'll fix it. I'll do it all. Don't even try and think about love. Think about- think about the other thing.'


Later, she said, 'I'm sorry if you're angry with me. Or with yourself.''I'm not angry.' 'I suppose you've never done that before.' 'Yes, I didthink I might get through life without it.' 'You may surprise yourselffurther. As Keith says, it's never over until —' 'Until the last dart strikes home.' 'Anyway,' she said, 'this will only happen once.' 'Anyway,' Isaid, 'I'm mostly grateful. It's made me ready to die.' 'That was myhope.' 'With Mark, what was the—?' 'Hush now . . .'


We put our clothes back on and went out walking, in the dripping alleys, the dark chambers of the elaborately suffering city. We're thedead. Amazing that we can do this. More amazing that we want to. Hand in hand and arm in arm we totter, through communal fantasy and sorrow, through London fields. We're the dead. Above, the sky has a pink tinge to it, the cunning opposite of health, like somethingbad, something high. As if through a screen of stage smoke you can justmake out God's morse or shorthand, the stars arranged in triangles, and saying therefore and because, therefore and because. We're the dead.


Chapter 20: Playing Nervous


lthough for himpersonally the future looked bright, Keithwas in chronic trouble, ascheats and suchlike always were, withhis Compensations.


His caseworker, a Mrs Ovens, was coming down on Keith hard.Increasingly riskily, he had skipped their last seven appointments;and the eighth, scheduled for the day after his historic victory at theMarquis of Edenderry, he had noisily slept through. Now, if he wasn't careful, he'd be looking at a court appearance and at least thethreat of a mandatory prison term. Keith rang Mrs O. the next day on his carfone and ate shit in his poshest voice. For a consideration,John Dark, the iffy filth, would also vouch for Keith's goodcharacter. She gave him one last chance: on the morning of the Finalof the Duoshare Sparrow Masters, if you please. And Keith hatedthis like a deformity because it was part of the failure he would soon be gone from: turbid queues, and the office breath of afternoons, and a press of difficulty, made of signs and symbols, that never began to go away.


Keith's Compensations. They really were a torment. Oh, thethings he went through, the suffering he endured. For some people, itseemed, a fiver a week (split sixteen or seventeen ways) just wasn'tgood enough . . . Keith's Compensations represented the money hepaid, or owed, for the injuries he'd meted out during a career that spanned almost two decades. You'd think that being a child prodigyin the violence sphere would have its upside Compensationswise,since some of the people you damaged and hurt (and naturally youwere always going to be concentrating on the elderly) would be dyingoff anyway. But oh no: now you had to pay their relatives, or even theirmates, so only the lonely forgave their debts, some of them going backtwenty years, a crushed nosebridge here, a mangled earhole there,every one of them linked to double-digit inflation and continued-distress upgrade and spiralling medical costs and no end of a fuckingpain all round.


'Is it your Compensations, Keith?' said Kath, as Keith replaced thecarfone.


'I'll give you a Compensation in a minute.'


Thoroughly out of sorts, Keith was taking Kath to the hospital for her tube trouble, the ambulance service having been discontinued intheir area for the foreseeable future. It was the first time since their marriage that Kath had been in Keith's car.


'What's that noise?' Kath asked, and looked more closely at thesleeping baby on her lap. 'Whimpering.'


Keith wrenched his head round to check on Clive; but the great dogwas silent.


'And banging.'


Now Keith remembered—and scolded himself for not rememberingsooner. Quickly he thumped a darts tape into the stereo and turned itup loud. 'It's thenext car,'he said. They were in a traffic jam, and therewere certainly plenty of other cars near by, and no shortage of bangingand whimpering. 'All thiscongestion,' said Keith.


He dropped Kath and the baby at the gates of St Mary's. Then hedrove round the first corner, pulled up, and got out. Preparing himselffor yet more reproaches from the female end of things (even Trishwould be ha ving a go at him later), Keith longsufferingly let Iqbala outof the boot of the car.


'Lady Barnaby,' said Hope. 'Oh that's awful.'


'What?'


'She's dead.'


'How did you -?' said Guy, lengthening his neck towards her.


'There's an invite here to her funeral or whatever.'


'How frightful,' said Guy.


They were having a late breakfast in the kitchen. Also present wereMelba,Phoenix, Maria, Hjordis,Auxiliadora,Dominique andMarie-Claire. Also Lizzyboo, bent over her muffins. Also Marma-duke: having spent a lot of time noisily daubing his breakfast all overthe table, he was now quietly eating his paint set.


'Oh I suppose we can get out of it,' said Hope.


'I think we ought to go.'


'What for? We don't care about her friends and relatives, supposingshe has any. We never cared about her, much, and now she's dead.'


'Show respect.' Guy finished his bowl of Humanfhit and said, 'Ithought I might go in.' He meant the office, the City. Or that's what hewould have meant if he hadn't been lying.


'Trading has resumed?'


'Not yet,' he said. 'But Richard says it looks hopeful.' This was alsountrue. On the contrary, Richard had said that it didn't look hopefulat all . . .Guy felt that he had just about reached the end of his capacityto inquire into contemporary history, into What Was Going On. Hekept postponing that call to his contact at Index, somehow, to askwhat the chances were that this time next week he would be folding hisonly child into a binliner. People were avoiding, avoiding. He cast aneye over Hope's mail: the goodbye to Lady Barnaby was all that wasbeing offered in the way of social life, on which there seemed to be amerciful moratorium. But Richard, unmarried, childless - he lovednobody—was a mine of unspeakable information. That at the momentof full eclipse on November 5, as the Chancellor made his speech inBonn, two very big and very dirty nuclear weapons would bedetonated, one over the Palace of Culture in Warsaw, one over Marble Arch. That until the cease of the flow of fissionable materials from Baghdad, the Israelis would be targeting Kiev. That the President'swife was already dead. That the confluence of perihelion and syzygywould levitate the oceans. That the sky was falling —


Guy got up to go. As he drained his coffee cup he allowed himself adisbelieving stare at Lizzyboo, who was now addressing herself to theremains of Marmaduke's porridge. The bent head, and the motionlessbulk of the shoulders beneath the dark blue smock, sent out acontradictory message: the self within was shrinking, even as the bodybillowed. And not long ago, only the other day, in her tennis wear . . .


Hope said, 'Before you go would you do the garbage and bring thewood in, and do the water-softener, and check the tank. And bring thewine down. And call the glazier. And the garage.'


The telephone rang. Guy crossed the room and picked it up. Abrutish silence, followed by a brutish phoneme-some exotic greetingor Christian name, perhaps. Then the dialling tone.


'Wrong number.'


'All these wrong numbers,' said Hope. 'I've neverknown therebesomany wrong numbers. From all over the world. We live in a time', shesaid, 'of wrong numbers.'


Nicola, who loved nobody, who was always alone, stared at thewashing-up thatlay there formlessly, awaiting resuscitation, awaitingform; dead and dirty now, the cups and saucers and glasses neededclean water, green liquid, brush, rag, and her gloved fingers, and thentheir pretty redeployment on the dresser's shelves. Excitingly, it was getting to the point where a teacup, say, could be used and put aside,unwashed (or thrown away, or shattered) — used for the very last time.Items of clothing could be similarly discarded. No more shampooneed be purchased now, no more soap, no more tampons. Of courseshe had plenty of money for luxuries and non-essentials; she had plenty of disposable income. And, in these last days, she wouldcertainly give her credit cards a fearful ratcheting. The week before, her dentist and gynaecologist, or their secretaries, had coincidentallycalled, to confirm routine appointments, for scaling, smearing. She had fixed the dates but made no move for her diary . . . Now Nicolarolled up her sleeves and did the dishes for the last rime.


Soon afterwards, as she was changing, the telephone rang. Nicolahad had several such calls: a loan company, wanting to help her withher lease, which had just expired. She didn't care because she had a month's grace; and a month's grace was more grace than she would ever need. She heard the man out. Her lease could be renewed, withtheir help, he said, for up to a thousand years.


A thousand years. The loan company was ready, was eager, to underwrite a millennium. Hitlerian hubris. From what she knewabout events in the Middle East, from what she gathered from whatremained of the independent press (contorted comment, specula­tion), it seemed possible to argue that Hitler was still running thecentury — Hitler, the great bereaver. Although they were enteringNovember now, there was still time for him to reap exponentialmurder. Because what he had done you could do a thousandfold in the space of half an afternoon.


Was she nervous? Without question it would be disagreeable, at this late date, to be upstaged by a holocaust. If history, if currentaffairs were to reach a climax on November 5 during the full eclipse,then her own little drama, scheduled for the early minutes of thefollowing day, would have no bite, no content — and absolutely noform. And no audience. No undivided attention. On the other hand,you wouldn't want to miss that either, the big event. I identify with theplanet, thought Nicola, with a nod, as she started getting dressed. Iknow just how it feels. They say that everything wants to persist in itsbeing. You know: even sand wants to go on being sand. I don't believethat. Some things want to live, and some things don't.


As she clothed them she consulted her breasts, which told her thatthe big event wouldn't happen, and that the little one would.


'It is thought by some', read Keith,


that the secret of Stonehenge lies in darts. The circular stone ruinsare shaped in a circle, like a dartboard. This may explain a mysterythat has puzzled historians for literally ages. For Stonehenge goesback to 1500BC.


1500BC! thought Keith.


What is a definite historical fact is that early English cavemenplayed a form of darts. This is definite from certain markings on thecave walls, thought to resemble a dartboard. Many top dartersbelieve that darts skill goes back to cavemen times. The topcaveman would be the guy who brought back the meat every time,employing his darts skills. So in a way, everything goes back to darts. If you think about it, the whole world is darts.


No matter how many times he pondered it, this passage never failedto bring a tear to Keith's eye. It entirely vindicated him. And Keith'splump teardrop might have contained tenderness as well as pride. The whole world was darts: well, maybe. But the whole world—on certainscreens, in certain contingency plans - was definitely a dartboard. Keith bent open his notebook and slowly wrote:


Remember you are a machine. Delivring the dart the same wayevery time.


While he was actually plagiarizing an earlier passage fromDarts: Master the Discipline, Keith was also originating it in his inimitableway.


Clear ideas from your head. You do'nt want nothing in yourfukcing head.


Now he contemplated that last sentence with the stern eye of thetrue perfectionist. He crossed outfukcing and put infucking. Anobserver might have wondered why Keith took the trouble to makethese deletions and insertions. Why correct,OKeith, when the words are for your eyes only? But someone watches over us when we write.Mother. Teacher. Shakespeare. God.


Oy! Ooh. That itch again. That abdominal vacuum. Chronic, innit.And suddenly, in one fell swoop, all his women had disappeared: justlike that. Petronella had gone to Southend with her husband, Clint, ontheir honeymoon. Analiese was back in Slough (and the M4trafficyou just wouldn't believe). Debbee was sixteen. Iqbala, following hermisadventure in the Cavalier, wasn't talking to Keith, or indeed toanybody else. And Sutra (Sutra!) had levered herself back into theworld from which she had so surprisingly emerged: hurry, hunger,seen through window and windscreen — other women, more women,women found and unfound, and Keith up above, multiform, like amurder of crows, sayingcaw, caw, caw . . . Which left Trish. And hewasn 't going roundthere again, no danger, after this morning and thestate she was in. About an hour ago, at noon, he had popped intoNick's for a video. But Nick's videos, Keith decided, were like Chinesemeals. As for Nicola herself, on this side of the screen, Nicola in the flesh, the mysterious flesh, with dark-adapted eye and unaccustomed lips, and the way she filled her dresses, Keith was neither patient norimpatient: even sitting next to you with thighs touching she was bothnear and far, like TV.


The telephone rang. As Keith crossed the garage to answer it, he wasfirmly of the opinion that success had not changed him.


'Keith Talent? Hello there. Good afternoon there. Tony deTaunton, executive producer.Dartworld.'


Oh yeah: Marquis of Edenderry . . .Dartworld? Dartworldl


'Congratulations,' said Tony de Taunton. 'Sterling effort there theother night. Smashing effort. Tight thing.' With terrible candour hewent on, 'You were all over the shop there for a while. And with Paul Gowell out of form I thought, Hello. Dear oh dear. Blimey. It's goingto be one of those nights. But you seemed to take heart there, withlikkle Paulie throwing such crap. In the end, it was your character gotyou through.'


'Yeah cheers.'


'Now you watch the show don't you Keith.'


'Consistently,' said Keith fiercely.


'Right. Now with finals and celebrity challenges we do a short docu on the participants. You've seen them. Couple of minutes each. So wewant to do you, Keith.'


Keith smiled cannily, unfoolably.'. . . But that's TV,' he said.


'Right. Like they say. You know: your lifestyle.'


'Kind of like a lifestyle feature.'


'You've seen them. Where you live, where you work, hobbies,family, interests: all this. Your lifestyle.'


Keith looked up: the stinking ruin of the garage. Tony de Tauntonasked if they could start tomorrow and Keith said that they could.


'Address?'


Keith gave it helplessly. The wife, the dog, the joke flat.


'Smashing. See you there then. Goodbye there.'


Keith's face was all poll tax and means test as he dialled Nicola withshimmering fingers.


'Don't worry. Wait a while, and then try again,' said Nicola, andreplaced the receiver. Then she put her hand back where it was before.'My God. It's harder than the telephone. That was a wrong number.Another wrong number. It is. Even through this rather heavy tweed,it's harder than the telephone. It is. This isn't in nature, surely.'


Guy's face was trying to look pleasant; but its expression was unmistakably strained.


'Do other men become as hard as this?'


'Oh I expect so," said Guy croakily. 'In the right circumstances.'


Takes a bit of getting used to. I've been consulting my fictionshelves, without much luck. It seems to be the nature of the subject thatthe writer assumes a general stock of knowledge and procedure from which his characters subtly diverge. In code, usually. No help to me,I'm afraid.'


'Well this, after all,' said Guy (his head was tilted slightly), 'is definitely non-fiction.'


'Now what? . . . The idea is, I suppose, to move the outer skin verygently against the inner. This tweed doesn't chafe you, does it? I imagine you've got pants on too or something?. . . And of coursethere are all these arrangements further down. Do they play a part? I suppose stroked or squeezed they might - Guy. Guy! What a ghastlyface you just made!'


He tried to speak, reassuringly.


'What? Is it painful or something?'


'A little,' he mouthed.


'I don't understand. I thought it was meant to benice.'


Guy did some explaining.


'Oh, darling! Sweetheart. You should havesaid. Oh it's too patheticof me. Well let's...I'll...'She reached for his belt buckle. Then her long fingers paused and she smiled up at him self-deprecatingly. 'I'vejust thought of something. It's - it's sort of a game. I think it'll do thetrick. And I'll try something really daring. Guy?'


'Yes?'


'You couldn't just leave me alone for a little while first, could you?Half an hour or something.' Again the smile of childish challenge. 'Toscrew my courage to the sticking place?'


He said 'Of course' so sweetly that she had a mind to cup his narrowcheeks in her hands and tell him how many, many, many men hadwritten their names in come all over her stomach and breasts and faceand hair. What signing sessions. What autograph hounds . . . But allshe said was, before she let him out, 'You know, you make me sohappy sometimes that I think I must be going to die. As if just to go onliving were really too much to ask . . .'


In the market street he kept seeing piles of shoes, piles of hats, vastlytumbled, piles of handbags, piles of belts. Woundedly he walked, witha thumping in the drool-damaged ear. Guess who'd been there, when Guy arrived at Nicola's? Keith. Keith was on his way out. Keith wasjust picking up his things: while he finished doing so, Guy had beenobliged to wait on the porch, shielding his eyes as he searched for theCavalier under the low sun. The two men passed at the front door;Keith was looking fantastically washed-out but otherwise seemedvery pleased with himself, justifiably, some might say, after his recentefforts at the Marquis of Edenderry. It was as unlikely as anythingcould be, Guy thought: but if he was being deceived, well, then it wasquite a deception; and if Nicola and Keith were lovers, then it wassome love. Goats and monkeys! Now a San Marco of pigeons pattern­ed the street like iron filings drawn by the little boy's magnet. At thecrossroads one pigeon in particular was eating pizza, and wanting more pizza, and risking pizzafication itself as a lorry loomed near.


Perverse and unchallengeable hunger attacked him. He entered thefirst food outlet he could find, a potato restaurant called the Tate orTatties or was it Potato Love? The queue or flock was populous butswiftly flowing. At its head sat a Spanish girl in a steel pen. She took theladen paper plates from the hatch behind her and split each spud with adab of marge or cheddar or hexachlorophene. Then she passed itthrough the Microsecond: and that's how long it took - half a pulse.Guy knew that the device used TiredLight, that adaptable technology.The food just goes on cooking, on your plate, in your mouth, in your guts. Even beneath the streets.


'Thank you,' he said, and paid the amount that was asked.


The girl was coarsely beautiful. But she probably wouldn't be thatway for very long. There was the evidence of the mother, operating outof the hatch and framed in it like someone on a primitive TV set. Butthis was no cookery programme. It was about what kitchens tended todo to the female idea. And the daughter would get there quicker thanthe mother had, because the modern devices saved time but also used itup - sucked time out of the very air...Guy collected his plasticutensils and looked round for a stool. With difficulty he half-seatedhimself (that's better), and carefully parted the loose lips of his potato. Its core sizzled, smokelessly bubbling with TiredLight, but its surface was icy to the touch. He shuffled back to the penned girl.


'This potato', he said listlessly, 'is undernuked.'


Half a pulse later and it was dropped back on to his plate like a spentcartridge. Now it was overnuked. And suddenly ancient. Guy lookedat the potato and then looked at the girl. With a pale smile he asked,'Do you really expect me to eat this?' She just raised her eyebrows andinclined her head, as if to say that she had seen people eat worse. He leftit there on the counter and walked back to Nicola. And on his waydown the market street he kept seeing those heaps of gloves and hatsand handbags, little shoes. And what was that supposed to remind you of? Guy thought he kept seeing heaps of glasses, heaps of hair.


'Now it's really a very simple game,' she began. 'And completelyjuvenile, of course. I learned it from some of the brassier girls at thechildren's home, years and years ago. It's calleddare. It's also known asnervous. I believe it's played all over the world, as such things usually are. Playingnervous.'


'Don't know it. What happens?'


She laughed rosily. 'Not a great deal. You put your hand on mythroat, say, and let it descend until I saynervous. Or on my knee. Or Iput my hand on your tummy and move it slowly downwards.'


'Until I saynervous?'


'Or until / saynervous. Shall we play? I suppose,' she said, revealingthe white strap of her brassiere beneath her shirt and producing a blush, 'I suppose it would be fairer if I took this off. Turn away.’


Guy turned away. Nicola stood, unbuttoning her shirt. Leaningforward, she unhooked herself and slowly released the brocaded cups. She gave a special smile.


Next door, wearing Y-fronts, earphones, and a froggedsmoking-jacket she had recently bought him, Keith lay slumped on Nicola's bed. He was watching the proceedings on the small screen. His peepers bulged. His kisser furled into a collusive sneer. Nicolarebuttoned briskly, to the top, to the brim of the brimming throat.Keith was shocked. He had always suspected that when Guy and Nicola were alone together they just talked about poetry. Keithshrugged limply.


'Jesus, some mothers,' he murmured to himself.


And so they playednervous, nervous, nervous. Nicola playednervous,though she wasn't nervous (she was playing), and Guyplayednervous, though he wasn't playing (he was nervous). 'Undo thetop button. And the next. Wait. . .Nervous. No, go on...Notnervous.You can kiss them.' And there they were, so close together, infearful symmetry. Guy dipped his lips to them. What could you sayaboutthis breast. Only that it was just likethat breast. Why comparethem to anything but each other?


Hello, boys, thought Keith. Nice bouncers she got. Pity a bit on the small side. Still you lose respect after a while for the bigger tit. Goodlaugh at first. Now Analiese . . . He wiped his sniffer.


With blips and bleeps and scans and sweeps their hands moved uptheir thighs. His fingers reached the stocking tops and their explosion of female flesh.('Nervous!' she sang.) Hers were warm and heavy asthey moved in beneath his belt.


'Nervous?'she asked.


'. . . No,' he said, though he was. 'But / am,' she said, though shewasn't. 'But I'm not,' he said, though he was.


Working him up to a fever pitch innit, thought Keith. He made aliquid sound with his gnashers. Nervous? He'll be a fucking nutter in aminute. Here —


'Does it feel as it should feel?' she was asking.


'Yes very much so.'


Keith felt the soft arrival of sweat on the palms of his feelers. Helooked away for a moment, as if in pain. Then he felt a lash of panic that almost flipped him on to the floor as Nicola said,


'Quick. Let's go to the bedroom.'


With a great jerk Keith struggled himself upright. He paused: it'sokay. He lay back again, listening to his steadying ticker and Nicolasaying,


'No — here — now. Stand up. All these buttons. It seems to ... I'llhave to..."


'Oof,' said Keith, He whistled hoarsely, and those blue gawpersfilled with all their light. Blimey. No, you don't - you don't do that.Not. To a guy. You don't, he thought, as his flipper reached down forhis chopper. You don't do that to a guy.


'Lie down. And close your eyes.'


So Keith saw it all and Guy saw nothing. But Guy felt it. Guy didall the feeling. He felt the hands, the odd trail of hair, the hot and recklessly expert sluicings of the mouth. And other strange matters.A suspicion (a fleeting treachery) that now, after this, he could be free and safe and home, the fever passed, and her forgotten, and thelong life waiting with child and Hope. But then too there wereconsequences: immediate consequences (the male animal, never lostfrom thought). Soon, and with embarrassing copiousness...hemight drown her. He might drown them both. Physical fear wasnever wholly absent in his intimate dealings here down the dead­ end street, down the dead-end street with the mad beauty, when shewas taken by sexual surprise. He held her head. The world wasdying anyway. Towards the end, which never came, he said help­lessly,


'I'm . . . I'm . . .'


Then something happened — something tiny in the layered swell­ings.'Enough,' he said, and pulled her clear from the struggle, and atlast was lost from thought.


She was kissing his eyes. He blinked out at her.


'You sort of fainted,' she said. 'Are you all right? You sort offainted.'


He looked down. It was all right. He hadn't made a mess of things.


'You sort of fainted,' she said again. 'Oh, I see I've made anothermess of things.'


'No no — it was heavenly.'


As she was showing him out, or, rather, helping him to the stairs (hehad an eczema seminar to attend), she held him back and said,


'You know, you needn't have stopped. I was prepared — for yourswoon to death,' she quoted prettily, though she thought she hadtimed it beautifully — that tiny reminder of her teeth. 'I mean the other swoon. In fact 1 was longing for you to fill my mouth. Because I'm prepared for everything now. I want you to make me,' she said, andgave him the Grand-A-Night Hooker. 'There's only one thing you'llhave to do first.'


Guy wiped his dripping chin and said, 'What's that? Leave mywife?'


She started back. How could he be so wide of the mark? How couldyou! Guy had begun to apologize for his flippancy when she said,


'Oh no. I don't want you to leave her. What kind of person do youthink I am ?' And this was asked, not in reproach, but in a spirit of pureinquiry. 'I don't want you to leave her. I just want you to tell her.'


In the bedroom Keith was taking the liberty of savouring a well-earnedcigarette. Technically, smoking was banned in the bedroom, althoughNicola, a heavy smoker, smoked heavily in the bedroom all the time.Now she stood leaning on the door frame with her arms folded.


'Smoking-jacket innit.'


She gave him a slow appraisal, one of fascinated, inch-by-inchdetestation, from the feet (red-soled and faintly quivering) to the face,which looked ruminative, grand, prime-ministerial.


That smoking-jacket looks great on you, Keith. And you lookgreat init.'


'Yeah cheers.'


'I do hope you're not going to be spooked by this TV business,' shesaid, and watched his face instantly collapse. Keith's tongue nowseemed to be trying to sort things out inside his mouth. 'Isn't thiswhat you've worked for? What we've worked for? Well, Keith?'


'Invasion of privacy like.'


'Or darts stardom . . . TV isn't true, Keith, as you've just seen. Or not necessarily so. Darling, you must put all this out of your mindand leave everything to me. Let me translate you. I'll not fail you,Keith. You know that.'


'I appreciate it.'


'I've made a new video for you. But in a sense you've already seenone. And I can tell by the mischievous expression on your face thatyou - that you did it already.'


'Yeah,' said Keith perplexedly, averting his eyes. '1 did it already.'


Keith came down the passage and out through the front door whistling 'Welcome to My World'. As he passed he happened toglance at her name on the bell. 6: six. Six. 6! thought Keith. Double3! . . . Nasty, that. Worst double on the board. Never go near it less you've fucked double12and then come inside on double 6. Murder.


3 's the double all the darters dread. Right down the bottom like that, atsix o'clock, you're sort ofdropping it in. And if you come inside it's 1,double 1. Pressure darts. Old Nick. Double 3.6.6.6. Nasty, that. Verynasty. Ooh wicked . . .


An old woman with hair like coconut fibre limped past whipping herself with a home-made switch. For a moment Keith stood therelistening to or at any rate hearing the cries of the city, like the cries ofdogs or babies, answering, pre-verbal, the inheritors of the millen­nium, awaiting their inheritance.


In tortoiseshell spectacles and grey silk dressing-gown Guy kneltpoised over the Novae, his long back curved in a perfect semicircle,like a protractor, his curious nose inches from the board (this difficultposition seemed to ease his nether pain, his tubed heart, which hurt alot all the time): six moves in and he was only one pawn down, andhalf-expecting to survive into what used to be called the middle game.He wanted to survive as long as possible, because when he lost hewould have to go to Hope with the truth.


Every few minutes without turning round Guy would take awrapped toy from the straw tub and toss it back over his shoulder toMarmaduke. Thus, before he could wreck it, Marmaduke first had tounwrap it, and this took him a little while. Guy could hear his snarledbreathing and the tear of paper; then the grunts of effort as the toy began to snap and give.


One of the troubles was that chess was over, chess was dead. TheWorld Champion would now have no chance against Guy's Novae,which cost Ј145. As a human construct chess had challengedcomputers for a creditable period; but not any more. Once a usefulsparring partner, chess now jumped off the stool, snorting and ducking in its trunks, and was explosively decked in the very firstround. Gamesbetween the computers were unfollowably oblique and long-armed, a knight's jump away from human understanding,with all the pieces continually realigning on the first rank (as if therewere an infinity of previous ranks, the minus one, the minus two, the minus nth rank), invariably drawing through elaborate move-repetition after many days, with hardly a piece being captured. When programmed for win-only the computers played like sui­cides . . . Guy's nose twitched as he saw that one of Novae'sbishops was unprotected. This wasn't unusual: it was always lobbing minor pieces at him, and even the computer Queen wasregularlyen prise. He could capture, but then what? He captured.Novae replied sharply.


'Yes. Brilliant,' Guy whispered.


Four moves later (how pitiless the silicon was) he stared blinking athis wedged king. At that moment Marmaduke, who must have heldhis breath as he approached, sank his teeth into the Achilles tendon ofGuy's right heel. And by the time his wits returned the child had forcedthe busby end of a toy guardsman down his own throat and was turning an ominous colour as he fell backwards on to a bulkypersonnel-carrier. LuckilyPetrawas near by, as well as Hjordis, and together they were able (Marie-Claire was also at hand) to straightenthings out with Paquita's help and the ever-calming presence ofMelbaand Phoenix.


Guy showered, and swabbed and dressed his heel. Later, in thekitchen, he inspected the guarantees on the lamb cutlets - thestaggered dates, the fine print - and readied them for the grill. 'It mustbe true, all that,' he said to the room in general, 'you know, about foodand love. Have you come across the idea?' He waited, with his backturned.'When food gets too far from love . . .The preparation of food has to do with love. Mother's milk. And when food gets too far from love there's a breakdown, like a breakdown in communication. Andwe all get sick. When it gets too far from love.' He looked over hisshoulder. The sisters were listening, Lizzyboo with full attention (shehad even stopped eating), Hope with patient suspicion. As Guy addressed himself to the cooker he felt his wife's eyes busyingthemselves on the breadth of his back, on his hair, on the very pricklesof his neck. How strong were their scrutiny and grip ? What held them ?With a few bags of pitta bread and an institutional tub of taramasalata, Lizzyboo repaired to her room. Now was the time: thetime was now. Guy felt powers move in him but his face, with its rinsed blue eyes, looked especially weak—the weakness that was inevitable inhim, the weakness he weakly cleaved to. How beautiful the truth is, hewas thinking. Because it never goes away. Because it's always there, just the same, whatever you try to do to it. Hope was talking to himintermittently about various chores he hadn't done (domestic, social, fiscal); during her next breather he said intelligently, with his back aimed at her,


'I've got something to say.' And already he was on the other side.'It'll sound more dramatic than it really is, I expect. I think you've gotsomething to say too.' Here he turned. Here, of course, he was about tointroducethegravamenthat Nicola herself had recently stressed: thefact that Hope had, 'rather sordidly', taken a lover in Dink. But onelook at the solar hatred in Hope's eyes and Guy thought: poor Dink! He's gone - he was never here. He's been unpersoned. He isn't evenhistory. 'I mean, for quite a long time it seems to me there's been a needto.. .redefine our . . .All I'm proposing really is an adjustment. And Ido think it's important, very important, vital, really, to be as honest as one can be. And I don't see why we can't just work this out like tworeasonable human beings. With the minimum of disruptions allround. There's someone else.'


Guy experienced a certain amount of difficulty, as he checked into thehotel on the Bayswater Road. It was the fifth hotel he had tried.Although the injuries to his face would turn out to be mainlysuperficial, he must have cut an unreassuring (and unprosperous)figure at the reception desk, with his fat lip, swelling eye, and thedramatic lateral gash across his forehead. Then, too, the top fivebuttons of his steaming, rain-soaked shirt were missing; and all he had in the way of luggage was a plastic bag with a bit of wet Y-fronthanging over the brim of it. But finally his osmium credit cardprevailed.


In his room he cleaned himself up and called Nicola. There was noanswer. He unpacked his belongings — two shirts and the fewundergarments he had managed to pick up off the front lawn - and tried again. No answer: not even her disembodied voice, on the softmachine. He went out and plunged through the cabless streets,through the diagonal arrowshowers of reeking rain, through the desperate maelstroms of Queensway and Westbourne Grove: theinspired hordes of the poor. He splashed his way up the dead-endstreet and climbed her porch and rang her bell and then leaned on it. There was no answer. In the bright heat of the Black Cross he drankbrandy, and talked to Dean and Fucker, who informed him that Keithwas on the town up west with his sugarmummy, a dark bitch calledNick who gave him cash gifts and who, moreover to recommend her,could suck a lawnmower through thirty feet of garden hose. Guy heard them out with heavily rattled scepticism, and returned to her door, where he remained for the next two hours.


. . . On his way back to the hotel he went past Lansdowne Crescent. It seemed to him that the house, his house, was already unbearably lit,from within, like a house of death, a house where a child had chillinglydied. On the other hand he found two drenched pairs of socks in therosebed, and all his silk ties. He stopped in Queensway and purchased toiletries at the all-night chemist. Again he had some pleading to do at the reception desk before they delivered up his key. He called her, andwent on calling, in between trips to the minibar. No answer. Andthere's nothing to be done when people can't be reached. When there isno answer, no answer.


Bright and early next morning (you got to be quick) Keith stoodflapping his arms on the stone stairway to Windsor House.


Jesus, talk about a night out: dinner at the Pink Tuxedo, drinks inthe Hilton, the special club with the models up on the ramp, and thenback to her place for a couple of videos, to round the evening off. Keithspared a bitter thought for Guy, who had tarnished this last chapter with his incessant phoning. Still. Now Keith removed the souvenirmenu from his inside pocket: he'd hadfaisбna la mode de champagneor some such nonsense. Refused the wine, mind, and stuck with lager.Can't go far wrong with lager. Lager'skegged. All the same, Keith wasn't fully convinced that rich food agreed with him; his suspicionrested on the five-hour visit he had made to the bathroom on hisreturn. At such times you really felt the inconvenience of so compact an apartment. In that kind of spot, in that kind of groaning extremity,the last thing a man wants to hear is the wife and kid scuttling about and creating all night long.


A chauffeur-driven two-door saloon pulled up, followed by a vanmarked with the famed darts logo. Slightly dizzy from his firstcigarette of the day enjoyed in an upright posture, Keith steppedforward to greet Tony de Taunton, executive producer, and Ned von Newton, the man with the mike himself. Shaking his head, Keith contemplated Ned von Newton, for a moment unable to believe hiseyes. Ned von Newton. Mr Darts.


'A true honour,' said Keith. 'Listen, lads: slight change of plan.'


'We got the address right, didn't we Keith ?' asked Tony de Taunton, lifting his rippled face to the tower block, which burned in the low sunas if at every moment all its glass were being hammered out of the clearsky.


'Moved, innit. Why don't I lead the way in the Cavalier?’


We can't stop. She can't stop.


Oh the dolorology of my face, with pains moving into positionslike sentries, like soldiers who hate my life. This nuked feeling, thekind of ache you get from a vaccination — when the syringe is six feet long. And not in the arm or the ass. In the head, the head. The paincan't stop.


Christ, even that prick of a wasp prospecting for dust on the glass of the half-open window...It waddles up the pane, then drops andheavily hovers, then climbs again, and won't fly clear. Getting in andout of windows ought to be one of its main skills. What else is it anygood at, apart from stinging people when it's scared? Just as thepigeon that Guy saw, that I saw, that we all see, faces a narrowrepertoire of decisions: to go for pizzanow, and risk becoming pizzaitself, or flap uglily in the air for a second or two and go for the pizzathen.


I find I have spent the last ten minutes looking out of the window,watching a twelve-year-old boy wearily stealing a car. While heaccomplished this, a very old man limped by in running-shoes. It wasn't my car. It wasn't Mark's car, He phones me to say that he iscoming over for a party on Guy Fawkes Night, or Bonfire Night as he calls it. He is full of praise for the Concorde. I'm not to worry - he'llfind a warm bed elsewhere; but maybe we'll meet. After last night, Idon't hate him any more. I can feel some new emotion waiting toform. What? Asprey asks if I enjoyedCrossbone Waters. I lied, andsaid I didn't. The book gave rise to some enjoyable scandal, he tellsme: there's something about it among the magazines on his bathroom floor . . . This morning, Incarnacion came. Rather than sit around listening to her, rather than sit about listening to Incarnacion murdering the human experience, I went out. But I soon came back.Too many people denying themselves the pleasure, or sparing themselves the bother, of beating me up. When I see the fights I resolve to be incredibly polite to big young strong people. Incarna­cion was in the study. She seemed to be looking at my notebook.Another thing. The toaster-like photocopier — I thought it didn'twork, but there it was with its light on. It hummed warmly .. .Sometimes (I don't know) I take a knight's jump out of my head and Ithink I'm in a book written by somebody else.


The wasp is gone. But not out the window. I can hear it bumpinginto things. It'll be back. It will turn toward me. Insects and death always turn toward you. Gesture them away, and they turn towardyou. All the awful things in the end turn toward you.


Now here's a revelation.


Dink doesn't do it. Lizzy boo told me. I wormed it out of her atFatty's. I plied her with fudge sundaes and cremebrulйesuntil shefinally came across. The food is sweet like chainstore romance, likehappy-ever-after. The food is yuck. She hates what she's doing toherself but she can't stop, can't stop. (Nobody can. I can't.) Tears rundown her cheek - sauce runs down her chin. We must have looked like the couple in the postcard joke. In the seasidecafй.Jack Spratwould eat no fat. Which is the cruel one?


Dink doesn't do it. Dink didn't do it to Lizzyboo and he hasn'tdone it to Hope either: so Hope's clean, more or less (though I won'tuse it. I don't need it). Dink'll roll around and everything, and neckand pet. You can see him in the nude if you really insist. But he doesn't do it. He fears for his tennis — his rollover backhands, hiswhorfing smashes. Dink hasn't come for thirteen years. And the hairy bastard is still only the world ninety-nine.


There's also the fatal-disease consideration. If Dink caught one ofthem,he'd stop being the world ninety-nine. And start being theworld five-and-a-half billion. Dink's smart. Dink's hip. He knowsthat dead men don't play tennis. That's how come he has this rule.


The poor sisters, surrounded by these dud males with these dudrules. Even masturbation is too many for them. Guy, Dink; and nowI'm at it. Yes, I've quit too. Actually I have nothing against theactivity. I always thought I'd babywalk into the bathroom with mypants around my anklesmaybe just one more time. But recently, withthese new lesions on my hands and everything, I've put all thatbehind me. I'm frightened of catching a venereal disease from myself.Is this a first? And why doI care?


Kath claims that Keith is cheerful around the house, when he's there. But not quite cheerful enough, evidently, to refrain from giving her anew bruise on her chin. All the women in the street suddenly seemblack and blue and scarlet — violet eyes, crimson lip.,. Some of thesecruelty instructions come from upstairs. Cruelty is being delegated.


E=mc2is a nice equation. But what is the theodicy ofuranium? Ferocious physics. And the everyday medium-sized New­tonian stuff, the deckchair and map-folding and meter-feedingphysics of ordinary life: all that has it in for you too. Babies arefinding out about physics the whole time (how they slip and stagger)in their school of hard knocks.


A new bruise also on the little ass with its precocious nobility ofcurve, and three new cigarette burns, again in a triangle. The leftbuttock saidtherefore; the right buttock saysbecause. I try, but Ican't see Keith doing this. His eyes lit by the cigarette's coal.


It must be like an addiction, and addiction I can understand — as Isurf on the crest of something irresistible and unholy. The heavycalm the ungratified addict feels, awaking to the sound of the voice that says today will be the day: the day of indulgence and an end tostruggle — pleasureday. And the morning will pass so sweetly, withsin so secure.


'Nor her choo.'


I moaned with fright: the baby was awake, and staring, and naked.From the floor came Clive's growl, ticking over in warning.


'Nor her choo.'


'What?' I said (I was astonished). 'No. Not hurt you. Not hurt you.No, of course not, my darling.'


Is there someone else coming in here I don't know about? A socialworker like Nicola in disguise? A smiling uncle, like me, myself. Is itme? I rub my face. Outside, the hell, the torment, the murder of thelow sun, and its cruel hilarity. I say nothing. Kath says nothing. And Kim can't tell me. Kim can't tell. And somebody can't stop.


The life isn't over, not quite. But the love life is. I might as well getthe love stuff wrapped up. 'Please. My darling,' I said, ninety-somedays ago now, elsewhere. 'Do this one big last thing for me. Do it,Missy. Not here. Christ, no. We'll take an attractive little condosomewhere — say in Palm Springs, or Aspen. Do it, Missy. I'll be thedream patient. I promise. Do this one big last thing for me.'


Even nature was telling me I'd lost, that love had lost. She washating everything, herself, me, contemporary circumstances. Thesecond and final act of love had taken place that morning, and I hadheard or felt (I believed) the fateful pop or pang of conception. Shewas hating everything, but most of all she was hating nature, thetrees in their postures of injury and recoil, the spongy froth along theshore, that log on the path in the shape of a seal tragically or just pathetically overturned in death. She had loved it here.


I hid in plain sight. I took the boat out on the water. At first, the skylooked like one of Darwin's warm little pools, sugary blue, where lifewould ineluctably form; but the pond itself was tired. It didn't have too long to go now, with the ocean smashing at the dunes to the eastand getting yards closer every week. The oars slid through the surface tracery of dead waterskaters. I gave a shout as I saw that theclan of snapping-turtles was still in occupation, huddled up among the reeds. In their heyday, when they had discipline and esprit, theylooked like the ranked helmets of Korean riot police. Now these survivalists wallowed loose and exhausted: soiled bowls in the soupkitchen. And myself the old kitchen stiff with his sleeves rolled up.For an hour the sky was Cape Cod true blue, with solid cloudsgrandly gleaming like statuary. After that, just heat, with the sun and the sky slowly turning the same colour.


Nothing much was said. Nature continued to do most of thetalking. The LimoRover came for her at dusk. It was driven by one ofSick's sidekicks, Mirv Lensor, another kind of Washington wretch.'Mirv Lensor: Expediter', said the card he flicked out of the windowat me when I disobeyed orders and staggered out on to the drive — inpreposterous defiance. Sheridan Sick has a ventilation system in hisapartment which removes all nitrates from the air he and Missy breathe. The ageing process is thus measurably retarded. Time goes slower there, slower than it goes with me.


After she'd gone, night fell, and I worked on the fire. I spent theevening staring at the lamplit back window. It held me, it includedme, it said everything: my reflected face, and then, a couple ofmillimetres beyond, the outer surface like a glass-bottomed boat,only deep-sea, heavy-water, with all kinds of terrible little creations out there, tendrilled, dumbbelled, gravity-warped; or like a prepara­tion for the crazy scientist's microscope, disgraceful cultures incompound opposition, the ambitious maggot with its antennaerolling like radar sweeps, the gangly moth briefly clearing the deckswith its continental wing-frenzy, the no-account midges, thehaunchy ants and grimly ambling spiders, the occasional innocuous white butterfly fainting away from the glass, all of them seeking theatomic brightness, the nuclear sun of the lamp's bulb. And all thewrong things prosper.


It's happening.


At last, late at night, the cries of the city are coming together andturning into something, with the eclipse so close now — the city isfinally finding its voice, like the thud of a sullen heart, saying, 'No . ..No . . . No . . .' It can't stop. And a mile from my window someoneelse is listening. And she can't stop saying, 'Yes . . . Yes . . . Yes . . .'


I'm helpless against these forces. You can't stop them — the centurysays you can't stop them. I must become the tubercular toreador,whom Hemingway knew. The bull weighs half a ton. You let him have the strength.


Manolito, was it? Dead in the sawdust of Madrid.


Chapter 21: At theSpeed of Love


uy got hisnight with Nicola. Guy Clinch reached the finalswith Nicola Six. And got his night of love.


It happened, after a fashion, in its own way. The love force thatswathes the planet, like weather, found a messenger or an agent,that night, in Guy, who had never felt so fully elemental. He didn'tknow that she was just a weatherwoman, with stick and chart. Forhim it was the real thing. He didn't know that it was just an ad.


First, though, she had to account for the asphyxiating vacuum of her absence: not just for that one night of rain, when Guy's houseblew up in his face, but for the further thirty-six hours which she hadselflessly devoted to Keith Talent and his needs. Helping her Keith.Oh, how she lived for others . . .


'I went', said Nicola, 'to visit my parents' graves. In Shropshire.'


Guy frowned. Nicola's men, and their vermicular frowns. 'Ithought you said you knew nothing of your parents.'


'That', said Nicola, who had half-forgotten a lot of this early stuffby now, 'was a deliberate untruth. In fact long ago I bribed a nurse atthe orphanage and she told me where they were buried.' Sheshrugged and looked away. 'It's not much, is it - just their graves?'


'. . . Poor mouse.'


'Goodness, the trains. Like Russia during the purges and thefamines. I felt like Nadezhda Mandelstam. It's a pretty littlecemetery, though. Tombstones. Yews.' If he had asked where she'dstayed, she might have hazarded, 'In a rude tavern.' But it didn'tcome up. After all, he was dreadfully pleased to see her. 'I shouldhave told you, I know. I was in a strange state. Strangely inspired.'


'Well. You're back safe and sound.'


They were having a candle-lit supper on the floor of her sitting-room, in front of the open fire. Firelight and candlelight paid theircompliments to her full pink dress (in reply you could hear the whisper of petticoats, the faint gossip of gauze) and to the artless pink ribbons in her disorderly hair. How simple and sustaining:bread, cheese, tomatoes, a smooth but unpretentiousvin depays . . .Nicola had in fact peeled off the labels to disguise the thickclaret she'd chosen, a Margaux of intensely fashionable vintage.


'This may sound fanciful,' she said wanly, 'but I felt I had tosquareit with them. You.'


Guy nodded and sipped, and sipped, and nodded. His palate,his tutored papillae, continued to savour the fruit, the flowers, thefull body (stout, plummy, barrelly, tart) of the examined life, thelife of thought and feeling so languidly combined. He was rich inunderstanding. He was also, by now, a rather poorly paramour: a sick man, in fact, and thoroughly distempered. The cold he hadcaught in the unwholesome rain soon developed into an arcticfever. Thrice he had called down to demand the complete replen­ishment of his minibar, on which he had depended for a diet ofpretzels, cashew nuts, Swiss chocolate and every potable from brown ale to sweet sherry. Apart from bloodying his chewedfingertips on the telephone dial, he had been incapable of action,or of thought. In his dreams, when he wasn't escorting disfiguredchildren through empty zoos, he was attracting many varieties ofunwelcome attention, in moral nudity, and priapic disgrace . . .Now he was full of understanding, full of weakness — and whatelse? Such vigour as remained seemed to be packed into thelogjam of his underpants. Visiting the bathroom soon after hisarrival at Nicola's flat, he had been obliged to try a kind of hand­stand before eventually backing up to the toilet seat with his facealmost brushing the carpet.


'I suppose 1 have some sort of obsession,' she said, now tastingthe sensation of risk, 'with the sanctity of the parental role.Certainly for the great rites of passage. Like losing one's . . . likeone's first act of love.'


So in a sense Guy got everything.


First, starting at around 10.45, on the rug, before the fire, thestroking of hair, and the gazing into one another's faces, anddelicious avowals, and solemn kisses.


At midnight he was led by the hand to the bedroom. Left alone (shewouldn't be long), he unbuttoned his shirt with a battered smile, andtenderly winced as he sat to remove his shoes, and then with grateful fatalism entered naked the weird coolness of someone else's linen. At 12.20 he disobeyed her order to close his eyes as she ran through thedoorway and jumped into bed in her flesh-coloured training bra andworsted tights, slipped on, perhaps, in a last whim of modesty . . .


It took her an absolute age to get warm! What playful stops andstarts they had before she was fully enfolded in his robust caloricity.He never dreamed there would be so much laughter, so muchchildish gaiety. Adorable little sulks and grumps, too, and suddenfailures of nerve and syrupy successes. At 1.15 the thick bra was undipped. For the first time he felt the liquid coldness of her breastson his sternum. At 2.05 the fizzy tights came crackling off. When hehad got it really toasty he was allowed to run his hand down theshining power of her inner thighs.


Meanwhile and throughout, the hot compacts of kisses tasting of sleeplessness and fever and the intimate dismissal of tomorrow morning or any future. There was the sheer of light sweat every­where, and, for him, the jabs and volts of the uncovenanted caressespaid to his exterior heart. Her panties, innocently unfeminine intexture (their lateral elastic even suggesting some medical exigency),were last seen at 3.20.


The room had changed colour many times that night but it was fullof the pallor of dawn, and of the unslept hours they had loggedtogether, when at last he loomed above her, at 4.55. By now her flesh,too, had a sore transparency; the tracings of blue in her breastsappeared to rhyme with the queries of damp hair on her neck andthroat.


'Yes. My darling.'


It seemed to push all the breath out of her.


'How it hurts. Oh, how it burns . ..'


He had entered on tiptoe; but by 5.40 he was fully and hugely established in the purple-lined palace of sweet sin. For an hour, hersharp inhalations, her arias of exalted distress, were the guides to his diminishing caution. By 7.15, with five toes on either shoulder, fourfingertips in his buttock, a light palm weighing his scrotum, and mostof his face in her mouth, Guy was swinging back and forth in themystic give and take of a negro spiritual, hymned by all the choirgirlsand choirboys of love.


'Now,' she said. 'Stopnow.'


He stopped. She applied her little finger to his chest. And then shewas gone, and Guy was falling down through thin air.


'I've just realized what is wrong. What's so terribly wrong.'


Guy blinked into the pillow.


'It would be awful. Quite inexpiable.'


Guy lay there, waiting.


'You have to tell your parents. And your wife's too, of course.'


Already, as if after a lucky escape, she was putting on her panties. They really did look like Elastoplast, there in the morning light. Guy laughed strangely and said, 'I've only got a father. And she's only gota mother. And tell them what?'


'Just square them.'


'I'll call them.'


'Callthem?'


At 7.2.0, when they had finished discussing it, Nicola said, 'Thengo to New York. Go to New England. Go to New London.'


Go to London Fields.


Keith was displeased.'So there you was, basically,' he said to Kath as she served him a


late breakfast, 'sticking your oar in again. With your questions. Eh?


Eh?'He stared out at her from the clogged seclusion of his hangover.


Given a night off by Nick while she sorted it with Guy, Keith had


ventured out to the Black Cross, and to the Golgotha, where, as the


night progressed, he had so convinced himself with drink . .. Kath


returned to the washing-up. She said,'He volunteered the information.''I'll volunteer you in a minute. Tony de Taunton?''He just said they were making this little programme. About you.'Wagging his head about, Keith said, 'And you goes "He's my


husband" and all this.' He wagged his head about again. ' "We got


little girl. "All this.''I didn't say nothing.'She offered this lightly. Keith seemed mollified - though it


remained clear that he was thoroughly out of sorts. He dropped his


knife and fork on to the plate as Kath asked,'When's it on then?'


'What?'


'The TV programme."


'Never you mind. Business, innit. Darts. It's not..."Keith paused.He was actually in great difficulty here. Himself on TV: he couldn't work out how the two worlds overlapped. Try as he might, bringingall his powers to bear, he just couldn't work it out. He straightened his darting finger at her. 'Like the news. You don't want to believe everything on TV. No way to carry on.'


'You can believe the darts, surely to God.'


'Yeah but. . . This thing. It's - it's noton TV,' he said.'Obviously.'


'What isn't? The TV programme?'


'Jesus.'


Keith thought it prudent to change the subject. So he startedtalking about how ugly Kath was now and how depressed he became(he swore it broke his fucking heart) every time he looked at her.


'You know what I'm talking?' he concluded, much more moder­ately. 'Success. And I happen to be able to handle it. It's a lifestyle youcouldn't conceive. It's out there, girl. It wants me. And I'm gone.'


The baby gave notice of waking: the labour of baby consciousnesswould soon resume. Soon, the baby would be rippling with grids andcircuits. And Kath herself gave a jerk as she reflexively moved for thedoor. Keith's blue eyes filled with everything he could no longerendure: his lips tightened, then whitened, and then vanished inwardsas he said, with unbounded venom,


'I intend to complete my preparation elsewhere.'


Sourly handsome Richard was present at the office to let Guy in, asarranged. For a while they stood there amid the Japanese furniture, conversationally revising their holding positions. The world theyreferred to now comprised about half a percentage point of Guy'sreality; to Richard, it had always been everything.


'I see no alternative to riding it out,' Richard said. 'It's sheer cuckooland, of course.'


'Agreed.' Every time their eyes met Richard seemed to lean afurther inch backwards, as if to put more distance between himselfand Guy's impermissible disarray. I suppose (Guy thought), Isuppose I must look . . . 'Agreed,' he said again.


'You know the new buzz word over there?Cathartic war.’


'Really.'


'Poor old deterrence is in bad shape, so you give it a little jolt. Twocities. It's good, isn't it. We'd all feel so much better after a catharticwar.'


Richard laughed, and Guy laughed too, with real amusement. Ofcourse, it suited him, up to a point, if nothing whatever mattered. Butthen such generalized hilarity might be considered a necessarycondition for nothing mattering. About a year ago he had at lastfinished Martin Gilbert'sThe Holocaust, and had sombrely decidedthat this thousand-page work could also be read as a treasury ofGerman humour . . . Guy went to his desk and called his father on the direct line. He was connected quickly but he still had to get pastall the staff: lessening densities of Hispanic bafflement giving way tothe forensic interceptions of stewards, secretaries, lawyers, game­keepers. 'It's nothing to do with the office,' he kept telling a Mr Tulkinghorn. 'It's personal. And rather urgent.' Eventually his fatherlurched exhaustedly on to the line, as if the receiver itself were some new burden he was being asked to shoulder.


'What's it about?'


'I can't discuss it now. It's far too delicate.'


'But what's it about?'


Guy told him what it was about.


'Well, there's nothing much more to say, is there. You have my. . .my "okay". All the best, dear boy. I'm glad we talked.'


A few seconds later Richard knocked and entered.


'You're absolutely right,' said Guy. 'It's pure fantasy. It'll blowover.'


Guy hadn't come to the office to talk to Richard. He had come forhis passport and travel cards — and for that spare cane which heelatedly glimpsed leaning against the wall by the door. As he movedacross the room to get it, Richard, who was Guy's younger brother, said, 'Then why are you going to New York? Have you got a hernia or something? I was listening in. It sounds as though you've cocked things up nicely. Youtit.'


Guy looked at the floor: Richard wouldn't understand, of course, but he had never felt happier in his life. Guy looked at the ceiling.'You wouldn't understand,' he said, 'but I've never felt happier in mylife.'


'Youtit,' said Richard.


He took the tube to the Strand, where he bought a travel bag andlots of new stuff to put in it. In the golden silence of the departmentstore he went from men's wear to women's, in search of a silk scarf for Hope's mother, and one for Nicola, while he was there. The vaults andgalleries of female clothing, their catholicity of cut and colour,surprised and impressed him. Compared to all this, men went aroundin uniform. But then . . . But then, just now (and in a sense it had beenthis way for half a century): we are all in uniform. Not volunteerseither, but pressed men and women, weeping conscripts. The children in anaconda file on the zebra-crossing are in uniform. The old ladyover there dithering from hat to hat is in uniform. Our babies are born,not in their birthday suits, but in uniform — in little sailor suits. Hardfor love. Hard for love, with everyone being in the army like this. Lovegot hard to do.


Now the revolving doors delivered him on to the street (the brass-topped cane really did make a difference). Above, the low sun painted the shape of an eagle on to the cirrus haze. Today an eagle, with eagleeye; tomorrow a vulture, perhaps, flexed over London carrion.Looking down, he saw a pretty cat behind the bars of a basementwindow; it yawned and stretched, outside history. An old man walkedpast; he was shyly stifling a smile as he remembered something fond orfunny. Preserve this! Yes, certainly! Guy stopped a cab and reachedquick agreement with the driver in his beefeater outfit. He climbed in.He was no longer afraid. On the way to Heathrow he looked at the books she had given him for his transatlantic reading and glancedagain at the inscriptions. Towards the west, like madlady's hair, thethin clouds sucked him into the completion of his reality. He was nolonger afraid; and he no longer feared for love. Partly it was her showof principle, so bravely self-sufficient, when you thought about it,with the eclipse only days away. Partly it was the recession of Keith'simage in his mind: the only bane here was the recently revealed talentfor literary criticism (what other charms and skills might Keith acquire?). But mainly, he admitted to himself, it was those panties.Guy smiled, and went on giving smiles of pain at every bump the cabtook on its way. Quite a fright. Unpleasant to the touch, too (and hisfingertips had explored their every atom). Exactly the sort of thing you'd expect a virgin to wear, at thirty-four.


Double17, thought Keith. Bad one. Come inside, you're looking at 1, double 8. But she don't even look thirty. Not nice either. Better go 10,double 10. Moisturizers innit.


'Now where are my keys,' she said.


Keith stared moodily at her stocking-tops as she led him up thestairs. She paused and turned and said,


'When you had two darts for the66 pick-off. I thought you'd go16, bull. But no. You went bull, double 8. Magic. That's finishing, Keith.'


'Yeah cheers.'


'And the 125! Everyone was expecting triple 19, big 18, bull. But you goouter bull, triple 20, tops. Brilliant kill. . . Keith! What's thematter? Why are you looking at me like that?'


'It'streble. Not triple. Treble.'


Nicola climbed the last flight with her head at a penitent angle. In the sitting-room she said cautiously,


'Darling what do you think? We could go and eat quite soon, or doyou want to relax here for a bit first?'


'Never do that,' said Keith with a wipe of his palm. 'Not when Ijust come through the door. I get my bearings, okay?'


'Forgive me. Would you like to take your coat off and try it out?'she said, referring to the new dartboard of which she had takendelivery that afternoon. 'Whilst I go and get you your lager?'


'All in good time.'


'Do you like it?'


'No it's smart.' Keith took off his jacket and reached masterfullyfor his purple pouch. 'Wood-grained wall cabinet. Of maturemahogany.'


Nicola hurried to the refrigerator, where the cans of lager were stacked like bombs in their bay. He hadn't actuallysaid she couldfetch him a drink, and she did hope she was doing the right thing. Shehesitated, listening for the thunk of his darts.


Over the next few days she took him (Keith) to illustrious old-stylerestaurants in whose velvet and candlelight he fuzzily shone with class dissonance, with villainy, with anticharisma; he sat with thetasselled menus and heard Nicola translate. She translated him(Keith) to sanctums of terrible strictness, accusatory linen andtaunting tureens, where he always had what she had. She bought him(Keith) the dinky black waistcoats and black trimmed trousers thathe loved; as a result, when he returned from the toilet to their table,hands would go up all over the room, like in class, when the pretty teacher asked an easy question. He never talked (Keith). He never talked. At first she assumed that he was in the grip of an inscrutablerage. Was he still brooding on her solecism with thetriple? Hadsomeone spoken ill of the Marquis of Edenderry ? Then she realized:he thought you didn't. He thought you didn't talk. Though othersdid. He sat there, chewing (Keith), with caution, without zest, deepin his dreams of darts. Or perhaps he was wondering why, in thefantasy, you felt at home in places like these, whereas of course younever did, and never would. With the waiters, Keith was as a fly towanton boys; the lightest glance of the maitre d' could harrow up hissoul. Nicola supposed that this explained the proletarian predilec­tion for Indian food - and Indian waiters. Who's afraid of thosebrown-faced elfs? He once tried a glass of Mouton Rothschild(Keith) and spat it out into his napkin. She paid, ostentatiously,always querying the bill, while Keith turned a pensive stare on the chandeliers. He knew the required demeanour of the man shedding humble origins: you act as if you feel it's all your due. But he washaving a job feeling that, these days, and a job acting it. When the godlike greeter talked to her in what was presumably French, whenhe advised and beseeched, wringing his hands, Keith always thoughtthey were asking her what she was doing, going out with someonelike him. Like him. (Keith.)


At home, though, in her flat, Keith wasit. He came in at around tenor eleven and looked at her through the shards, the swirlingparquetry, of his shuffled hungers. She dressed wealthily for him, towin that admiring sneer. Before he started on his lagers or hisLucozades he was served croissants, and devilish espresso, and onceor twice she coaxed him into humour with a Tequila Sunrise, wheresomething sweet fought the heavy tug of the booze. Then he threwdarts all day, pausing only to acknowledge receipt of an exquisitesnack, for example, and a lager served in the engraved pewtertankard she had bought him, or to relish a new video; with Keithnow needing four or five of these a day, Nicola was far from idle! Tobegin with he desisted from his darts when the telephone rang and itturned out to be Guy, shouting through the ambient clatter of someairport or gas station; but after a while, such was his local suzerainty, he practised right through the calls. On one occasion Guy rang froma deserted motel and remarked on the background noise: Nicola said that it was probably a monitor or money meter, thus covering for the slow triple thunks of Keith's tungstens. When she talked to Guy shesounded like Keats. For Keith, this was all low heaven. He loved heras he would his own manager, in the big time. You sensed it theinstant you stepped in off the street: the whole house stank ofpornography and darts.


On the eve of Bonfire Night, of Final Night, a couple of hoursbefore the TV teaser - Keith's docu-drama - was about to bescreened, Nicola decided to spare him the usual gauntlet of tuxedtorturers and took Keith for a light supper at 192., the mediarestaurant in Kensington Park Road. He sat there with his orangejuice, warily awaiting the sushi she had suggested he try.


'A penny for them, Keith?' said Nicola gently.


He said nothing.


192. The best thing with that is: smack in a maximum. Psycho­logical body blow. Leaving12. But if you come inside, leaves6. 6.Double 3. Murder. Avoid it. Here's another way it can happen.You're on 57 and go for 17 to leave tops - and hit the treble. 51.Leaves 6. Or you're going for double 14 and hit double11. Leaves 6. Wrong bed. Or you're on double 9, pull one, and hit 12. Leaves6. OrGod forbid you're on double11and you hit double 8! Wrong bed.Leaves 6. Wrong bed. Nasty, that. Fucking wicked. Murder.


A fourteen-hour wait in the VIP Lounge at Heathrow; the Mach IIto Newark; the helicopter to Kennedy; the 727 to Middletown; thelimousine to New London. America moved past him behind treatedglass. The pain had now spread downwards as far as his calves and upwards as far as his nipples. Every tick of the second hand on hiswatch administered an exquisite squeeze to the trauma of his being.He looked out at the cordoned, the sweated fields of New England,and at the woodlands, also brutally worked, but still holding theirtwiggy, ribboned, Thanksgiving light. Impossible even to imaginethat Mohawk and Mahican had once wandered here - yes, and Wampanoag, Narraganset, Pequot, Penobscot, Passamaquoddy,Abnaki, Malecite, Micmac. He had a sense, as you were bound tohave in America now, of how a whole continent had been devoured, used up, chewed up.


The night before he had tarried in Middletown, at a recentlyopened airport hotel called the Founding Fathers. Again he had run into indefinable difficulties as he tried to persuade the managerial staff that he was neither poor nor mad nor ill. One of the troublesseemed to centre on his new habit of giggling silently to himself.Perhaps he looked like one of the first English sailors, panting withscurvy, his turn-ups swinging round his calves. In any case hisiridiumand titanium credit-cards prevailed. After a shower he made asecond successful call to the retirement home and confirmed theappointment with his mother-in-law. After a Virgin Mary in theMayflower Room, he had an early dinner in the Puritan Lounge. By hisplate lay the two books she had given him: one for the way out, one forthe way home. It was over Stendhal'sLove that he now frowned andchuckled and mused . . .In his room he made the last call of the day toNicola, who despite the late hour and the bad line (the metronomicthunks of the money meter) gave him an extraordinary fifteen minuteson her plans for his return. This complicated his next action: amanoeuvre of long-delayed self-inspection, achieved naked, with onefoot up on the writing-desk before the mirror. Mm, quite bad. Possibly rather serious. It really was the sort of sight that would have the nursesscampering from the Delivery Room. There were some tangy tints of green in there, and the surface was rippled as if in a sharp breeze; but overall his flesh was almost picturesquely blue. The blue, perhaps, ofthe blue lagoon. He fell asleep wondering what would happen if youtransposed the heroines ofMacbeth andOthello. With a ScottishDesdemona there would be no story, no plot, no slain kings. But with aMediterranean Lady Macbeth you might have got a stranger tale, and a bloodier one, because such a woman would never have looked sokindly on Cassio's cares, and might have headed straight forlago. . .Now he rode on to New London.Love nestled on his lap, also thesecond book, as yet unopened, something calledThe Light of ManySuns.Guy wasn't reading: the migraine in his groin had somehowestablished connexions with the blinding ballsache in his eyes. He watched the news on the limousine's TV, as it were reluctantly andaskance, in the same way that the chauffeur watched his unreassuring passenger, with stolen glances in the rearview mirror. The Presidenthad made his decision. They were going in. They had decided to operate on the President's wife.


The ninety-second biodoc on Keith Talent was watched by 27 1/2million people — in the UK, in Scandinavia, in the Netherlands, in therockabilly states of America, in Canada, in the Far East and in Australia. It was watched by dartslovers everywhere, and then shot out into space at the speed of light.


It was watched by Nicola Six, perched on Keith's knee.


Go-getting Keith Talent is an upcoming merchandizer operatingout of London's West Kensington.


To the hectic tumbles of a xylophone solo, Keith was seen noddingshrewdly into an intercom. Between his finger and thumb he rolled abiro shaped like a dart.


In the elegant West London flat where Keith lives and works, thecalls come winging in from Munich and LA. In business as in darts, no way does Keith play to come in second best. Winning is what it's all about is Keith's byword. Never far from Keith's side is his trusty girl Friday Nicky with a helping hand.


Assistant Nicky, in T-shirt and jeans and dark glasses, appearedbehind her boss with several sheets of paper, which Keith started nodding shrewdly at before they were in front of his face. One handrested on his shoulder as she pointed with the other. Now anestablishing shot of the Marquis of Edenderry, and then Keith'semotional face filling the screen.


''I'm basically the sort of guy who likes to relax with a few drinkswith the guys. Here. With the bestf- with the bestf- with the bestsupport of any pub in London.'


Nicky was sitting beside him. He seemed to have her in a kind ofheadlock. The xylophone solo had given way to Hawaiian guitar. Keith drew near-tearfully on his cigarette.


Dartwise, Keith is known for his clinical big finishes. The 170s, the167s, the 164s, the 161s. 'The 160s.'(This was Keith, pitilesslyoffhand.)'The 158s. The 157s. The 156s. That's correct. The 155 s.Some question my power. But come Friday I intend to silence thecritics.'


Keith and Nicky strolled out into the carpark, hand in hand, theirlinked arms swinging.


A bachelor, Keith and Nicky have as yet no plans to wed. But onething is certain.


There was a fish-eye rearview shot of the Cavalier, and the sound of heavy-metal, and then the car fired off into the distorted street.


Keith Talent is going a long, long way.


'. . .But Keith,' said Nicola in a stunned voice, during thecommercial break. 'You were quite amazing. A true natural. The TVcameraloves you, Keith.'


Keith nodded, rather sternly.


'I only wonder slightly what your wife will make of it.'


He looked at her with qualified hostility, as if unsure whether or not he was being trifled with. Nicola was aware that Keith was in astate of near-psychotic confusion on this point. And she didn't knowthe half of it. In fact he was still clinging to the notion that thebiodoc would be screened only at those locations where it had been filmed: her flat, and, of course, the Marquis of Edenderry. But evenKeith found the notion tenuous; growing doubts about it hadtempted him to tamper with the TV at Windsor House, in the onlyway he knew how, by switching it off and putting his boot through it. In the end he shrank from such sacrilege, and just went on tellingKath that — although reason declared that there wasn't much pointin the TV biodoc unless it was on TV - the TV biodoc wasn'ton TV.


'Still,' she said, 'who stands behind you now? Who is it whoreally understands about your darts?'


'Shut it,' said Keith, who in a sense was feeling more and more athome down the dead-end street. A commercial break had justended and before another one had the chance to begin a voice wassaying,


. . .a little look at Keith's opponent for the big one, and KimTwentlow will be saying why he thinks it's going to be a little bitspecial. After this.


Now although Keith never asked about an opponent, he'd natur­ally been keeping up with events (by means of half-hourly tele­phone calls). The second semi-final of the Duoshare SparrowMasters was to have been disputed by Keith's old enemy, ChickPurchase, and the young unknown from Totteridge, Marlon Frift.But there'd been a problem, and a postponement. Following a nightout, Marlon had had a heart attack; and there were still doubts about his fitness.


Nicola waited for the start of the organ solo and then said, 'Whois it, Keith?'


'Never ask about an opponent. Immaterial as such. You play theboard not the — jammy bitch's bastard.'


. . .due to the very sad Marlon Frift tragedy. By a walkover.


On screen, big Chick patrolled his coin-op store, appeared at the races in morning-suit and topper, was seen on horseback himself, then fishing at some blighted canal. Chick down the gym, with thechest-flexer, in the plunge pool, all chest gloss in the solarium —Chick, big Chick, with his ponies, his birds, his pitbull . . . And then Kim Twemlow, the ex-world number one, with his white shoes, his white belt, his shot face, saying, 'Look at the averages and it's got tobe big Chick, by a mile. All credit to Keith for progressing as he has.


Must have got his head beautiful for the big occasion and that. But oncurrent form he's not fit to empty Chick's ashtrays . . .'


After a while Keith said hoarsely, 'So be it.'


'Who is thisChick person?'


He gave a taciturn version of the dispute with his old businessassociate. Of the rape of Chick's sister, and Keith's subsequenthospitalization, the smaller man had this to say: 'We came to blowsover this bird, the big fella coming out second best. And nowtomorrow night him and I have a rendezvous. To sort out who'snumber one once and for all.'


'Good, Keith. This could work for us. Now I expect you'd like toforget the pressures with a nice video. It's something a little bit special.On a Halloween theme. We're a few days late, but whatof that, Keith.'


'Horror like?'


'In the old calendar it used to be the last night of the year. When allthe witches and warlocks were abroad.'


As Keith trudged into the bedroom, Guy's limousine entered thegrounds of the institution. The little TV screen within was nowshowing a colour-coded diagram of the uterus of the President's wife.The President's wife, so young, so blonde . . . Guy asked the driver if he wouldn't mind pulling over for a moment. The driver minded, butpulled over anyway. Guy bent his long body and out he climbed.


He made to straighten up — and nothing happened. The driver watched in settled distaste as Guy grunted, first with surprise, thenwith effort, and remained in a jagged crouch on the verge. After asecond attempt, and a second failure, he backed himself on to awooden bench. Here he rested with his fingers folded over the handleof the cane in soft support of his chin. Now he saw the L-shaped Tudor-type mansion, the slated roof and leaded windows, the pondlike a silver coin pitched on to the front lawn; and he saw too the sizeand nature of the task ahead of him. Before, it was just something to begot out of the way as he sped towards something else - towards inevitability. But now of course it filled the sky. And the sky wasfalling.


The physics felt strange, the physics felt fierce. Gravity was pushingdown on him, but ifGuy pushed down, hard enough, on the cane,then, slowly, he went up, up.


As Guy straightened, Keith reclined, and made himself comfortableon Nicola's bed: a lengthy procedure. She plumped his pillows andpulled off his boots; Keith also suffered her to bring him a fresh canof lager from the fridge. Now he looked about with an inconveni­ enced expression for the box of paper tissues.


'Wait, darling,' she said. 'These might be more fun.' She opened a drawer and started browsing through it. 'All the good stuff seems to be in the wash. From the videos, Keith. Wait.' She turned, and bentforward, and reached up into her dress with both thumbs. 'Use these.We'll put them on your head until you need them. You can watchthrough the legholes. Might look rather comic on anyone but you, Keith.'


The black gusset puffed out for a moment as Keith said, 'Yeahcheers.'


She left him there, sprawled on the covers in his frilly gasmask.Then re-entered, in electronic form. On screen, she came into thebedroom slowly in black cape and thigh-high boots and witch's pointy hat. And as she turned and the black cape swirled you could see, within, the simple ways the simple shape (legs, hips, haunch,waist) can be made to shine on the reptile eye, and burn on the reptilebrain. The glamour: charms, rhombs, wishbones, magic rings -gramarye, sortilege, demonifuge . . .


Keith was doing handsome.


Then she came into the bedroom slowly in black cape and thigh-high boots and witch's pointy hat.


Keith was doing handsome. Then the real thing —the necromancer— came into the bedroom.


It would go beautifully.


Guy muffled his delight when the matron or health-operative or death-concessionaire informed him that Mrs Broadener's conditionwas far advanced. She wouldn't understand what he said to her. Andshe wouldn't respond. With any luck. It would go beautifully. Hopedisliked her mother, of course, and her mother disliked Hope; Guyhad not seen Mrs Broadener for seven or eight years. The only thing he knew about this place, her last refuge, was a detail that Lizzyboohad let slip. Although no old lady would ever walk out of here, each old lady had to be able to walk in: company policy. Mrs Broadenerhad walked in; she wouldn't walk out. Now Guy moved throughproliferating parlours: waiting-rooms, in various degrees of disguise.There appeared to be no other visitors.


Triscilla?' he said, when they were alone.


He stared down. At what? Something caught up in the more or lessdisgraceful struggle at the end of existence: the process from whichso little can be salvaged. He took this person's hand and sat besideher.


'You remember me, don't you,' he began. 'Guy? Hope's husband? You're looking well. Thank you for seeing me. Uh — I bring... Ibring good news! Everyone is well. Hope's wonderfully well.Marmaduke, your little grandson, is in tremendous form. A handful,as always, but. . .'


She watched him as he spoke, or she seemed to. Her face minutelybobbled on its spindle; the eyes swam in their huge new pools, butnever blinked. Priscilla's hands were tightly clasped or fastened.


'Lizzyboo is full of beans. She's put on some weight recently butthat's not the end of the world, is it? No, everyone's well and theysend their love. It's wonderful, isn't it, it's so absolutely marvellous, Ido think, when a family is really close, and everyone loves one another,' he said, and hesitated as he realized how quickly his facehad covered itself in tears, 'and they, no matter what, they protecteach other. And it's for ever.'


Suddenly she spoke. She just said: 'It's all —'


Guy waited. Nothing followed. 'Well. I suppose I'd better bethinking about going. Goodbye. Thank you for seeing me.'


'Shit,' she said.


He waited. 'Goodbye, Priscilla.'


Nicola and Keith were sitting up in bed together, smoking. Theydrew huskily on their cigarettes. Nicola raised her chin as sheexhaled. She said,


'You're not to reproach yourself, Keith. It happens to everyone.'


'. . . Oh yeah? Well it ain't never happened to me before. Noway.'


'Really? Never?'


'No danger. Me — I'm in there. Boof. Ain't never happened tomebefore.'


In fact, of course, ithad happened to Keith before. It happened toKeith, on average, about five times a week. But it also didn't happen to him pretty regularly too. And in this case he felt he was entitled to a certain amount of bafflement, and anger. What was it? Her skinnyankles, maybe. All thetalking. Or the way that, despite her evidentlitheness, she had felt so heavy — as heavy as an automobile, as heavyas the heavy Cavalier. It was like parking a pantechnicon, just tryingto turn her over.


'I should imagine it even happens', she said, 'to Chick Purchase.Every now and then.'


'Way he treats minge he ought to be locked up,' said Keith soberly.He further reflected that Chick Purchasewas locked up, prettyoften, on bird-related matters, as well as in the normal course ofbusiness.


'You're a very sensitive man, Keith. As well as an incredible tykeand everything, with your rugged ways. You should give yourselfcredit for that.'


Keith flexed his eyebrows. Come to think of it, he was wonderingwhy he didn't feel more angry. But anger didn't come. Self-pity came.Not the usual kind, which looked and sounded just like anger. Adifferent kind: self-pity of a far nobler strain. 'Pressures of darts,' hesaid.


'Yes. And a little difficulty switching from one medium to another.That's what this whole thing is really about.'


'Yeah. Well.'


She saw that Keith's eyes were starting to pick out articles of hisown clothing, flattened on the floor: the grovelling trousers, for instance, trampled, twisted-out-of.


'Early night and that. Compose myself for the big one. See how Clive's doing.'


'Oh Keith. Before you go.'


She picked up her black dressing-gown and left the room,returning almost at once with a silver tray: an imposingly expensive-looking bottle and two glasses, and some sort of device like a foreignlantern with tubes.


'This is as old as the century. Try some.This', she said, 'is practically newborn, and just in from Teheran. I went to sometrouble to get it.'


'Yeah I smoke a little keef,' said Keith. 'Now and again. Relax.'


'It may interest you to know, Keith, that the word "assassin"comes fromhashish. Assassins — killers by treachery and violence. They used to give the men a good blast of this before they went out todo their stuff. And if they died in action, they were promised an immediate heaven. Of wine, women and song, Keith, And hash, nodoubt.' A little later she said, 'But that's enough etymology for now.


I'm beginning to sound like a schoolteacher. Why don't you just lieback and let me find out what makes this cock tick?'


Guy linked up again with his courier or expeditor at the airport inNew London. Here he was told that, if he wished, he could get an air-taxi straight to Newark. With luck he might catch an earlierConcorde and shave perhaps half a day off his journey. The couriersmiled and twinkled potently; everything was possible; his was themaximum-morale specialism of deeply expensive travel. At this point he paid off the chauffeur, whose disaffection remained secureagainst Guy's reckless tip. Outside in the warm dusk the light was thecolour of a grinning pumpkin, Halloween light, promising trick ortreat.


Before he retired to the Celebrity Lounge (there would be a slightdelay) Guy wandered the concourses, full of love's promiscuousinterest, among pantssuit and stretchslack America. Even thoughthere was said to be less of it now, the human variety on display, withits dramatic ratios of size and colouring, still impressed and affected him. It was true that you did see signs of uniformity (one nation), allthe people wearing off-white smocks and pink, gymkhana-sized rosettes, like that family over there, four of them, in perfect-familyformation, man and woman and boy and girl, each with the squeamish smile of the future . . . Guy threw away his painkillers -their tubes and sachets. Everywhere young women looked at himwith kindness. But of course there was only one woman who could really kill his pain. The eyes of certain faces, children's faces, madehim wonder whether this whole adventure of his, so agitated andinspired, and so climactic, wasn't just a way of evading the twentiethcentury or the planet or what the one had done to the other.


Because love . . . But wasn't nature constantly asking you what allthe fuss was about? It was hard to shirk this question when you sawthem trouped together like that, the old ladies, walking downpassages at five yards an hour, or humped on chairs in parlours, their heads trembling in anger and negation, insisting, saying never, never,never. All of them had been adored and wept over, presumably, atone point, prayed to, genuflected in front of, stroked, kissed, licked;and now the bald unanimity of disappointment, of compound grief and grievance. It was written on their mouths, on their lips, markedin notches like the years of a sentence. In their heads only thethoughts that just wouldn't go away, cold and stewed, in their littleteapot heads, still brewing beneath frilled cozies of old-lady hair . . .Whatever it was women wanted, few of them ended up getting it.


He advanced into the Celebrity Lounge, where there were compli­mentary coffee and free telephones, and where he hoped to finishLove.


'Now,' she said. 'Stopnow.'' And she hadn't even heard the telephonering.


'Okay,' said Keith cheerfully (with that cheerful little throat-clearance on the consonant).


He climbed up her body until she felt the scrawny sharpness of hisknees on her shoulders.


'Shut your eyes and open your mouth.'


But Enola Gay, being Nicola Six — Enola shut her mouth and opened her eyes . . .


'. . . Hello? Darling? I was just thinking about you,' she said. 'Andhaving a rather blinding little weep.'


'Jesus,' said Keith.


'. . . Nothing. Do I? I can't imagine I'll be getting much sleeptonight, so do call later if you like. I just can't sleep for thinking aboutyou. Yes, you know I sometimes suspect I'm never going to sleepagain.'


Settling on the pillows like, Keith ran a hand down her throat as such, and reached for the brandy bottle innit.


'. . . Come to me, my darling. Come to me. At the speed of love.'


Dust storms grounded the midnight Concorde. Guy was driven from Newark to New York, and spent a few pricy hours at the Gustave onCentral Park South. He couldn't sleep. TV said real estate andwrestling and medical ads and fireside shopping and pulpit stuff andlast-best-hope stuff and dial 1-800. As he was driven through thecity, towards Kennedy and the rerouted morning flight, he thoughtwhat he always thought when he was in New York now. He thought:where have the poor gone? The places where the poor shop, theplaces where the poor feed: where have they gone?


At the speed of love...He ran it through his head as he paced theVIP Lounge at five miles per hour. She can turn a phrase, that girl.Delightful. At the speed of...Yes, really quite lovely.


I guess it looks like a cheap shot, the revelation, at this stage, thatRichard is Guy's brother. But I can only duplicate my own astonish­ment. It was news to me too. I could always go back and fix it. Now isnot the time, though. It is not the time. It never is. It just never isthetime.


You could have knocked me over with a feather. Of course, ifknocking me down with a feather were what anyone was interested in, I'd never get off the deck. They wouldn't even need the feather. I reach for a fresh sheet of paper and there's this splitcrack in my arm, as ifsome spore-coven or fat maggot has just detonated in the crimson in­nards of a log fire. Dying reminds me of something, something I'd justgot over and successfully put behind me when, all of a sudden, I starteddying. Middle age: that's what. Yes, it's perfectly okay, so long as youdon't try anything too butch or sporty, like walking down the streetfor a pint of milk, or pulling the flush handle, or kicking off your shoes,or yawning, or reaching too sharply for the vitamin E, or loweringyourself with any suddenness into the herb-green bath. All that stuff isout. Like middle age, like my dreams, death is packed with informa­tion. At last you really find out the direction time's taking. Time'sarrow. Time works! And, more than this, you are monstrous . . .


When middle age comes, you think you're dying all the time. Dyingis like that too. But here, finally, all resemblance ends. All resemblanceends.


Nine-thirty, on the morning of November 5.


Nicola has already been with me for over three hours. She's next door...I can hear her, pacing. Fortunately she is not demanding myundivided attention. She has had the decency, for example, to let mefinish Chapter zi. I keep her fuelled with coffee. She had a shower. Later, she had a bath; and she asked for dental floss. When she isn'twalking up and down she sits on the sofa in one of Asprey's dressing-gowns, not even smoking: she just stares at the window — at the lowsun, which has now reached its apogee and will stay that low all daylong until the moon intercedes, coming between the sun and our eyes.Every now and then she goes all trancelike and I can tiptoe off to the study, and write. But how she fills the flat, how her presence fills the flat, like a rich smell, or like anger. She's switched the TV on again, looking, no doubt, for news from Washington or Bonn or Tel Aviv,news of the storms, the tides, the moon, the sun (the sky is falling!), butlooking through all this for a correlative, the thing out there that mightsay yes to the thing in here. Events, and possible events—the world hastowant it. Whereas for me it's easier: the TV itself is my correlative,pandar,hack, mediator, foot-in-the-door, vilepaparazzo.


It's in the nature of an obsession, I suppose, that one will get to the bottom of whatever's available. One will tend to get to the bottom ofit.


Next to Mark Asprey's baronial can there's a hip-high stack ofassorted magazines. All they have in common is a certain amount ofeditorial matter about Mark Asprey: a profile, an interview, what he'spulling down, his favourite colour, who he's fucking. The mags get older and Mark gets younger as I work my way down the pile (theeffect is speeded up by the increasing frequency of my visits). Until, lastnight, I find myself staring through tears of strain at paired photo­graphs of Mark Asprey and Cornelia Constantine under the heading,did they or didn't they?She says they didn't. He says they did.


Ofcourse. Marius Appleby is a pseudonym. It's Asprey. I knew it: I wasn't even surprised. It was almost bathetic. What else could explainthe familiar taste, and the poundcake richness, of my love-hate forCrossbone Waters?


Digging deeper into the stack, I find additional earlier reports: scandal, accusation. She sued him; he settled out of court; doubtslinger. 'The book is all lies,' say Cornelia and her lawyers. 'Whathappened happened,' Asprey insists.


Naturally I now root for Cornelia. But two puzzles remain. In allthere are about a dozen photographs of her, including someswimwear poses, and physically she measures up, except in twoparticulars. First, it is clear that Cornelia is dramatically flat-chested.The second point has to do with her face, or her expression, whichnever changes, and which bespeaks (or so this reviewer feels) really helpless stupidity.


What actually happened? I guess the person to ask, if it's the truthyou want, would be old Kwango.


Before I could even bring this up with Nicola she said abruptly, 'Ihate it here.' 'Yes, it is a little rich for some tastes.' 'It's the acme ofvulgarity. But it's not just that. The gowns, the baubles, the awards and everything. They're all fake.' 'No.' 'Look at that translation. It'sgobbledegook. He has them printed up.' 'But he's, he's so —' 'He just writes schlock plays and cute journalism. Christ, why do you think you never heard of him?'


I said, Then why does he do it?'


'Why do you think? To impress the gullible.'


'Whoops,' I said. 'I do beg your pardon.'


Regrettably, disappointingly, altogether unacceptably, and like allthe other dying people I've ever come across, I am suffering from eructation and its related embarrassments. If I extrapolate from thedeath of my father, the death of my brother, the death of Daniel Harter, and the death of Samson Young, then I may conclude thatbuying it is a pretty windy scene . . . I'm glad I no longer have to hangout in the Black Cross, where I've experienced many armpit-torchingmoments. Nobody recognizes me in there (every day is like the firstday), and I have to stand around behaving 'characteristically'.


The baby cries, the baby cries and turns, in its awful struggle to bea baby. Its struggle is with all that is changeless and unworkable. Shefarts with the effort. Whoops. Maybe farts are frowned on for noother reason than their connexion with mortal weakness, with beinga baby, with dying. To her, to Kim, evidently, or so I've read, thebreasts, the penis — these mean life. And the stool, the piece of ordure,this means death. But she shows no natural aversion, and babies find nothing disgusting, and don't we all have to be trained quite hard to hate our shit?I am the father of Missy's baby. Or Sheridan Sick is. ('I suppose it'sSide's.' 'Don'tcall him that.' 'It's hisname, isn't it?') She flies over toEngland. To be by my side. Or for an abortion. I hear a ring on thebell and I go and answer and she's there...I'd have no time for her,one way or the other. Only time to write it down.


Missy had to go. For reasons of balance. Reasons of space. Shebelongs to some other version. She preferred to run her own life. Shedidn't want artistic shape. She wanted to be safe. Safe, in America, atthe end of the millennium.


I still believe love has the power to bring in the loved one, to reelher in. You can send the line out halfway across the planet and it willbring the loved one in. But I don't even try and call her any more.Love failed, in me. It was sapped by something else.


She has her slot in my dreamlife, as if the dreams were vestiges ofthe love power. These dreams of Missy are like Missy's dreams, verylogical and realistic — not like the nuclear sizzlings of my nightmares.We keep having this conversation. On the Cape. I say, 'Nurse me.'She says, 'What about your book?' I say, Til give it up. I want to giveit up. It's a wicked book. It's a wicked thing I'm doing, Missy.'


Then she says, 'Watch the girl. Be careful. There's going to be a surprise ending. It isn't Keith. It's the other guy.'


When I let her in this morning around six-thirty she looked sotransparently ruined and beat — and so transparent: ghostly,ghosted, as if the deed were already done and she had joined me onthe other side. After a few showers, and several cups of laced coffee,she started telling me about it: the night of hate. At one point, quiteearly on, I looked up from my notes and said, 'That's outrageous.Oh, my poor readers. Shame on you, Nicola. Shame on you.' I askedwhy in Christ's name she hadn't kicked Keith out after the initialfiasco. So much better thematically. And a nice contrast with Guy. 'Itwould have meant that nobody really had you.' 'Only you.' 'Thisdoesn't have anything to do with me . . .'


'You're worried about Guy, aren't you. You think he's the one.You think it's going to be him, don't you. It won't be. I swear. Youlove him, don't you.'


'I guess I do. In a way. He must have called me twenty times fromthe States. He says I'm his best friend.Me. Whereare everyone's friends? Where's everyone's family? Where's Kath's family? Whyisn't she smothered in sisters and mothers? You can rest up but I'mgoing to be tearing around all day. I can't handle this physically. Theairport! How'll I get a cab? I can't bear these novels that end in madactivity. "Jane? Call June and tell Jean about Joan. Jeff - get Jimbefore Jack finds John." All this goddamned fetching and carrying. How're you supposed to do anywriting? My leg hurts. Heathrow!''Easy.Calm down. It'll all work out. Here's what you do.'It didn't sound too bad, after she mapped out my schedule for me. And I was more relieved than intrigued, for instance, when she saidI'd get a three-hour writing break between nine and midnight...I looked up at her. She had just brought me another cup of coffee andwas standing beside me, carelessly stroking the back of my neck with the knuckles of her left hand.


'Mark Asprey might show up,' I said. 'I really hope there's nounfinished business between you two.'


'He won't be here until tomorrow,' she said. 'When I'll be gone.' Nicola was looking out, at the window, at the world. Her slenderthroat tautened, and her eyes filled with indignation or simple self-belief She had about her then the thing of hers that touched me most: as if she were surrounded, on every side, by tiny multitudes of cleverenemies.


Just come in again. And must now go out again.


I write these words to keep my hand steady. And because nothingmeans anything unless I write it down. I can't go out there, not just this very second. But of course I'll go. I'll go. There is some kind ofabsolute obligation here.


The phone rang and the instant I picked it up I felt a breeze of awfulness whistling liplessly down the line. How could I get it so wrong? How could I not see? Everywhere there are things that I'mnot seeing.


'Kath,' I said, 'what happened? Where are you?'


'Somewhere else. The baby — go and get the baby. I'm a wickedwoman, Sam.'


'You . . . No you're not.'


'Then what is it? Tell me what it is.'


'It's just the situation.'


As I hung up, Nicola came out of the bathroom and I said,


'You're wearingthat? Oh my God, look at us. And you know whatthe worst thing about everything is? About you. About the wholeStory. About the world. About death. This: it'sreally happening.’


Chapter 22: Horrorday


he first threeevents - light, sound and impact- were all butinstantaneous. First, the eye opened to the scalding bulb of thefoundered standard lamp; next, the rushing report of some lofted cherrybomb or megabanger; and then the brisk descent of thecrammed glass ashtray. This ashtray had been teetering for hours onthe shelf above the bed: now it was dislodged - by the frenziedphysics of everyday life. It fell at the usual rate of acceleration:thirty-two feet per second per second: thirty-two feet per second squared. And it flipped in mid-air. So Keith copped the lot. Impact,crushed butts, a shovelful of ash — right in the kisser. Right in the mush. This was the fifth of November. This was horrorday.


Keith spat and struggled and thrashed himself to his feet. She was gone. Where? With his eyes bobbing and rolling in their sockets, hefocused on the horrorclock. No. He swore through a dry cloud ofhorrordust. In the spent tempest of the bedroom he sought out hisclothes. When he pitched himself towards the toilet he barked ahorrortoe on the bed's brass stanchion. Tearfully he mollified hisincensed bladder. In the mirror Keith's reflection started gettingdressed. A split horrornail kept snagging in the blur of fabrics, all ofthem synthetic: made by horrorman. On the wall Keith's shadow straightened and dived headlong from the room. He paused in thepassage and roughly freed a segment of his scrotum, nastily snared in the seized teeth of his horrorzip.


Out on to the street he stumbled. He made for the car — for theheavy Cavalier. Builders' dust and builders' orange sand formed an orange mist at the level of his eyes, his agent-orange vision, which was itself engrained with motionless impurities, like a windscreensplattered with dead insects. In a ditch, in a bunker full of pipes and cables, a workman was giving his drill a horrid kneetrembler, louder than an act of God. Like me, myself, last night, with her. Underfootthe pavement crackled with horrorgrit. It went crackling right intothe roots of Keith's horrorteeth.


The carlooked funny. Keith scrunched up the parking tickets.Then he froze. The front window on the passenger side had beenstove in! Keith's body throbbed from the sudden wound. He wentround and unlocked and opened the door - and felt the horrorslideand horrortrickle of the crushed glass. The welded stereo had beenscrabbled at, its dials torn off, but. . . Keith's library of darts tapes! Itwas okay: intact, entire. They hadn't stooped that low. For a while he stared at the faulty burglar alarm he had recently stolen. Without thinking he reached down and with his right hand brushed from the seat the jewelled horrorglass.


Fresh catastrophe: the stained tip of his middle finger had beensweetly pierced by the horrorshard. No pain: only mental anguish. Afat dome or bulb of horrorblood now pulsed above the yellow rind. Itstarted dripping. On the car floor he found a crumpled pin-up withwhich he rudely dressed his damaged darting digit. And the digital onthe dash — what was the horrortime? — remained garbled, made nonsense of, by the rays of the low sun, which had surely never beenlower (he was on his way now), bouncing at bus height over thespines of traffic. Through the open window the sound of passing carscame like the zip and sniff of a boxer's feints and punches. Ten-twenty. His appointment with Mrs Ovens had been scheduled for9.15. But there were always queues. As he drove, motes of the shattered glass, quarks of glassdust, seemed to tickle his scalp likeparticles of horrorlight.


He arrived at the tricky junction on the Great Western Road: familiar horrorspot, with zebra-crossing, bus station, and hump­backed bridge over the canal, all complicating access. Fifteenminutes later, he was still there. Timing their runs to split-secondperfection, the launched horrorcars, the bowling horrorlorriessuccessively denied the heavy Cavalier. Whenever a gap appeared, sowould some contrary vehicle, seeming to pounce or spring intoposition. Either that, or, as Keith inched forward, the undergroundstation would emit a resolute trainload on to the crossing before him. Keith pounded his fists on the steering-wheel's artificial leopard skin.At his rear he sensed the climbing volume of thwarted hurry: how itgroaned and squirmed...In his face he felt the low sun like a lamp bent for interrogation. Now the road cleared but as Keith revved andshuddered, and yearned forwards, another watch of horrorsoulsbobbed on to the zebra - the passing faces of the horrorsouls.


Finally he churned his way through with his bloodied hand on the horn. And into what? Driving was like a test film or a dramatizationof the Highway Code, whateverthat used to be, with every turn and furlong offering multiple choice, backing learner, swearing cyclist,peeking perambulator. Richly sectioned with doubleparkers andskip-collectors and clamp-removers, the roads became a kiddy-bookof excavators, macadam-layers, streetlamp-changers, white-linepainters, mobile libraries, armed-personnel-carriers, steamrollers,bulldozers, tanks, ditch-diggers, drain cleaners. For an extended period he was wedged behind a leaf-disposal truck. From its rear avacuum tube slurped up the sear broomed roadside pyramids. Hewatched the suck, the feathery flip; sex re-entered his head andfound no room there. Everything he had ever done to womankind he had done again ten times last night, with her. The whipped dance ofthe moistened leaves. Defoliated, deflowered, stripped of leaves andflowers, with trees sharp-lined like old human faces, and wringing their bare hands, London could still drown in all its horrorleaves.


At the civic building, at 10.55, a stroke of good fortune - ormotoring knowhow. The back street was double, tripleparked,parked out, with cars parked beside, athwart, on top of. But as usual nobody had dared block the old dairy exit (which Keith knew to bedisused) — or so it seemed, when he peered into the dusty fire of hisrear window. Keith backed in smartly. This was horrorday,however. Therefore, a horrorbike was waiting there, leaning on its stick, and Keith heard the eager horrorcrunch. Worse, when Keithcrept out to disensnare his bumper, the horrorbike's own horror-biker formidably appeared — one of that breed of men, giant miraclesof facial hair and weight problem, who love the wind of the open road, and love the horrorbikes they straddle there. He hoisted Keithon to the boot of the Cavalier, and banged his head on it for a while, and then direly raised a gauntleted horrorfist. Keith whimpered his way out of that one, offering up a stolen credit card in earnest of his false address. He went and parked about three miles away and tear-fully sprinted back through the fuming jams and the incrediblecrowds of the horrormany.


Guy Clinch was heading towards London at twice the speed of sound, one of half a dozen passengers on the hurled dart of theConcorde. He had missed the earlier flight by ten minutes and hadspent three hours trying to sleep, in a kind of capsule hotel atKennedy, before taking off, smoothly but dramatically, in the still centre of Hurricane Lulu. Now he was in another capsule, his eyes rinsed by the coldly beautiful blue of the troposphere. Through hisporthole Guy could also see both sun and moon, the formerdiscreetly filtered by the treated plastic. Because of the elevation andvelocity of this particular observer, the two bodies seemed to bemoving towards each other with uncelestial haste. Below, theturning planet fell through its curve of spacetime, innocent (thoughmuch traduced) in its blond fur coat. Beyond, inanely vast, theinanity of space.


Two glamorous, multilingual stewardesses exhaustively pam­pered him; he had recently relished a plateful of scrambled eggs andsmoked salmon; and he was readingLove. Even so, Guy happened tobe in dramatic discomfort. Bending to refill his cup with the excellentcoffee (a mixed roast, he would guess), one of his stewardesses hadnoticed the odd tilt of the meal tray: she had given it a careful nudgeand then, suddenly, leaned on it quite hard with the full weight of hershoulder. When Guy reopened his eyes, probably about ninety seconds later, he was confronted by the frown of the cabin steward,solicitously crouched in the aisle. The stewardess was hanging backwith the knuckle of her forefinger pressed against her teeth. Guyapologized to them and eventually they went away. But the painwent nowhere.


The last chapter ofLove was called 'Concerning Fiascos': ' "Thewhole realm of love is full of tragic stories," said Madame deSйvignй,relating her son's misfortunes with the celebrated Champ-meslй.Montaigne handles so scabrous a subject with great aplomb.'Guy finished the chapter, wonderingly, and then flipped through thecopious appendices. It would be a relief to be done withLove: thisfamished sampling of erotic thought would never ease his hungerpains.Concerning Courts of Love. Guy smiled modestly as hethought of that last telephone call and the delightful carnality heseemed to have awakened in her. 'The plea of marriage is not alegitimate defence against love.' No doubt she would meet himhalfway up the stairs, with all that colour in her face. 'A lover shall,on the death of the other lover, remain unattached for two years.' Asthey kissed, he would place both palms on the back of her thighs,beneath what might well be that black cashmere dress with thebuttons, and almost lift her whole body on to him. 'Success too easilywon soon strips love of its charm; obstacles enhance its value. Every lover grows pale at the sight of the beloved.' As they moved throughthe sitting-room her breath would be sweet and hot (andhers:everything would behers); teardrops, too, perhaps, rather delici-ously. 'Suspicion and the jealousy which derives from it aggravatethe condition called love.' It didn't matter what happened in thebedroom and in a way one feared for the loss of individuality (in theblinding rapture and so on); yet how strange her face would look from that angle, when, as she had laughingly promised, she knelt to remove his trousers and undershorts. 'A person in love is unremitt­ingly and uninterruptedly occupied with the image of the beloved.' So brown, so close together. 'Nothing forbids a woman to be loved by two men . . .'


Guy putLove aside and took up the second book,The Light ofMany Suns.For a moment he vaguely wondered what Keith was up to; but then his eyes fell on Nicola's inscription, over which he had already done some puzzling:


Thou art the grave where buried love doth live,Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone,Who all their parts of me to thee did give, That due of many now is thine alone:Their images I loved I view in thee, And thou - all they — hast all the all of me.


One of the Sonnets, of course (and Guy knew the Sonnets tolerablywell); a complete sestet. How did it. .. ? Ah yes: Thy bosom .. . Thy bosom is endeared with all the hearts . . . Rather a knotty one, this.Addressed by the man to the woman. The past lovers aren't just'gone': they're dead. But people died earlier in those days. Wish I hada copy. And there reigns Love, and all Love's loving parts. Absolutelyfascinating.


'That leaves four hundred', said Mrs Ovens, 'for the nose.''Nose? What nose? There weren't nonose.’


'Same incident, Keith.'


'That was an earhole.'


'You can'tfracture an ear, Keith. And we're coming to that. Thetorn ear.'


'Bitten,' said Keith firmly. 'Bitten.'


'Which reminds me: the tooth'll be twelve-fifty.'


'Twelve-fifty! Blimey . .. Gone up again, has it?'


'The seven-fifty's for a molar. This is an incisor. Canines areseventeen-twenty-five.'


'Jesus. I mean, I'm just a workingman.'


'It's what the law considers fair, Keith.'


'Capitalism innit,' said Keith. 'Just bloodsuckers as such.' Hesighed longsufferingly.


'And then there's the split tongue.'


Keith now raised a dissenting forefinger. 'When there was all this,'he said carefully, 'I,I was hospitalized on thirteen occasions.Sustaining permanent injury to me chest. We don't hear nothingabout that. No danger.'


'Yes, but what were youdoing at the time, Keith?'


Trying, in my own way, to establish a small business. Escape thepoverty trap. That's it. Go on. Laugh.'


'The split tongue, Keith.'


'Jesus.'


In the end Keith agreed to up his weekly payment from Ј5 toЈ6.50. On top of that, to show good will, he committed himself toforty-eight hours of community service. Consisting as it did ofstealing odds and ends from very old people, community service wasnowhere near as bad as it sounded. Community service, in Keith'sjudgment, had been much maligned. But on a day such as this aman's thoughts should surely be with his darts. Not haggling herewith some old hippie about the price of horrornose, of horrortooth,of horrortongue.


Keith drove to the garage in Rifle Lane. Fortunately Fucker was onshift.


'Who didthis fucker?' asked Fucker. 'It'll be a rough job. Butyou'll have security.'


Gratefully Keith relaxed on a winded carseat in the back room. Heread the ripped mags: nude skirt. Peace at last. Beside him in a largecardboard box an even larger cat lay dying. Cruelly cramped, it struggled and sneezed and sighed. It began weeping rhythmically.


Keith was used to noise, incessant and unwelcome noise. Most of hislife was played out to a soundtrack of sadistic decibelage. Noise,noise — noise on the brink of bearability. He was used to unwelcomenearnesses, also, to stinging proximities; but did the bald cat'ssneezes really have to bubble and dampen the very thigh of histrouserleg? It wept in rhythm. Sounds almost like . . . The nude birds in the book. Nothing on Nick. She'd show them. He closed his eyesand saw himself naked and twanging back and forth with incompre­hensible violence and speed, as if in controlled preparation forspaceflight. There she was, just a G-spot in a G-string. And there was Keith in his G-suit, ready to take on gravity...A new noise, a newnearness, a new order of alarm: Keith was staring at the horrorcat.


'Gone, has she? It's a rough job,' said Fucker.


They stood there inspecting the Cavalier's warped windowframe, the mauled glass, smothered in fingerprints.


'But you've got security.'


'Appreciate it.'


And Keith bent into his pocket and parted with the money:endlessly, horrornote after horrornote.


With the low sun like a prickly sweater gently pressed into hisunshaven face, Keith drove to the Black Cross, for his breakfast. The backslaps and the fagsmoke, the lagers and the Scotch eggs, did notcombine well. A pork pie, Keith decided, was what he really fancied.Then you feel twice the price. Shakespeare staggered over and fiercely tousled Keith's hair for at least a minute. When he hadstopped doing that, Keith looked down at the bar: a new soft-fallen mask of dandruff now salted his food, and melted into the lager's horrorhead. At that moment his teeth lanced a spectacular impurity among the knotted gristle inside his mouth. Keith, who took hischances and ate a great many pork pies, was no stranger to impurity;but he had never encountered anything so throatfloodingly gangre­nous as this. Without interrupting the conversation he was havingwith somebody else,Pongohanded him the bottle of green mouth-wash kept under the bar, and Keith loped off to the Gents. Half anhour later, when the tortured gagging had subsided, to the relief of everyone in the building, Keith returned and drank the complimen­tary Scotches and dabbed at his eyes with a piece of newspapertenderly torn byPongofrom his own tabloid. Keith nodded as he studied the pork-pie wrapping: the eat-by-date was placed well into the next millennium. He had a few more Scotches and was cheeringup enough to make a start on telling the lads about his night withNick. His stomach still bubbled and spat, still noisily rueing thathorrorpie.


When everything began to go dark.


'Look!'


Through the stained glass they stared, or some of them did, as inperfect parallax the two white balls conjoined like somethingunanswerable under the microscope, and the moon began to burnlike a little sun.


'It's eclipse . . . Eclipse! . . . What fucking clips? . . . Fuckingpower-cut. .. It's the fucking eclipse . . . Put the fucking lightson...Eclipse, innit. . . It's the fucking eclipse ...'


Keith turned away, in horror. To his left a dartsman waited at thedimmedochйwith his arrows, head dropped in a martyrdom ofimpatience. Someone pitched a coin on to the counter. It clattered onits rim, noisily, like a cold car just before it fires. And the coin went onwobbling, clattering, faster, tighter. That was him last night, himself, twirling to the very end of his band . . . Shivering Shakespeare stoodten feet away with his face between the double doors of the Black Cross. Today was the day when, in Shakespeare's scheme of things,he was due to lead his chosen people to the mountains of Eritrea: thepromised land. As he looked round the Black Cross that morning, though, it didn't look terribly likely . . . Outside, he had sensed the cold, the eclipse wind, the silenced pigeons. Four hundred milesacross, the point of a dark cone of shadow a quarter of a millionmiles long was heading towards him at two thousand miles per hour.Next came the presentiment of change, like the arrival of weather- front or thunderhead, with the light glimmering - but getting fierier.Then a shade being drawn across the sky. Totality. Shakespeare wascrying. He knew that something awful had to happen, whenhorrorday was horrornight, when horrorsun was horrormoon.


Up above also (if anybody had been able to find her), and lookingher very best in the sudden twilight, proudly shone Venus, daughterof Jupiter, wife of Vulcan, lover of Mars, and never brighter thanwhen the darkness of totality played across the earth.


Where was Nicola Six?


Nobody knew.


The Light of Many Sunsturned out to be a war memoir: ratherremarkable in its way. Guy finished hisfaisanаla mode dechampagneand shamefacedly went on drinking the claret, which hesuspected would have a restaurant price of about three times theminimum weekly wage. Group Captain Leonard Cheshire, VC,OM, DSO, DFC, the author, a Catholic and obviously a good egg,was one of the two British observers of the atom-bombing of Hiroshima.


Guy looked out of the porthole. The 'second contact', or the first moment of full eclipse, had occurred twenty minutes earlier. Thepilot of the Concorde, an eclipse-enthusiast and member of theThousand Second Club, had announced his intention of stayingwithin the eastward-moving umbra until he began his descent over Ireland. Thus totality was lasting far longer than its terrestrial three minutes. When it came, Guy had tensed, as if for an impact. Or hehad tried to. But he realized then that he couldn't get any tenser thanhe was already. Just as his phallus couldn't get any harder. At the moment that the moon's shape fully covered the sun, then with fantastic simultaneity the solar corona bathed the circumferencewith unforgettable fire. Guy was amazed, harrowed, by the tightnessof the fit. Surely only the divinely privileged observer would be blessed with this full-true billiards shot, straight, dead straight, forninety million miles. Perhaps that was the necessary condition ofplanetary life: your sun must fit your moon. The umbra began to overtake the plane; the pilot came on again and with emotioncommanded his few passengers to admire the 'diamond-ring' effect of the 'third contact', when the leading slice of the sun re-emerged. Yes, yes, yes: just like a sparkler on its band. Like a ring for her,perhaps. Heavenly engagement.


The descent began. Guy picked upThe Light of Many Suns. On page forty-six he dropped the book to the floor. He reached for his paper bag and opened it in front of his mouth. He waited. Perhapsthere was an explanation. Perhaps, after all, it was something quiteinnocent...


'Enola Gay' was the plane that flew the mission to Hiroshima. The pilot named the aircraft after his mother. He was once her little boy.


But Little Boy was the name of the atom bomb. It killed 50,000people in 120 seconds.


Keith stood on her stoop, fumbling weepily with his great ring ofkeys - Keith's keys, his gaoler's keys, keys for Debbee, Trish andAnaliese, keys for flat, for car, for go-down and lock-up. But keys forNicola? He rang the bell again; he tried all the keys again. Now Keithwas close to panic, to cursing, rattling panic. He wanted to see hervery badly, not for the act of love and hate, which, to his surprise,and so far as he could tell, he wanted never to perform again withanybody. No: he wanted her for her belief in him, because she wasthe other world, and if she said that Keith was real then the otherworld would say it too. But hang on. Suppose she's under a bus some­where? His darts boots, his darts strides, his darts shirt, his very - ! Keith clapped a hand to his horrorchest. Then his knees gave withrelief. All is not lost. His darts pouch remained in its rightful place, in the pocket closest to his heart. He buzzed the buzzer again; he triedall the keys again. Throughout he was aware of eyes on his back.Today, even the dead-end street was crowded, and sharply chargedin voice and gesture: a sense of population shift. Keith turned. A lonepoliceman was watching him from the pavement, motionless againstthe plunging figures beyond. Just a kid. In a uniform. Fuckingtithead. Keith was fairly confident that the policeman wouldn't try nothing here, or he'd get lynched. But now he was coming forward,his shoulders interestedly inclined, and — okay — maybe it didn't looktoo good, unkempt Keith crooked over his keys. So he did a great mime of casually patting his pockets, then swivelled, shaking hishead. He sauntered down the path and, with a bit of the oldinsouciance (the Scotches and supplementarypornos were abouttheir work), hopped into the heavy Cavalier. Keith started off withan unintended bound, just missing an unattended pram, andmonitoring in his rearview mirror the shape of the taperinghorrorfilth.


With the low sun playfully tickling the hairs in his nostrils, Keithdrove to Windsor House. Nick'd show up later: call her from there.And, besides, he wanted to see how Clive was doing. The radioworked all right. As he drove home he listened irritatedly to thenews, the dissolution of the Crisis, the improving condition of thePresident's wife, the delegations leaving simultaneously for Paris andPrague (not a summit: more like twin peaks), and wondered if thisexplained the pronounced congestion he encountered in Ladbroke Grove. He doubleparked outside Maharajah Wines. On the way tothe lift his gait changed from its accustomed boxy shuffle to thesudden dance of a paddler entering a cold sea. His right foot, deep in horrorturd. Luckily, on the other hand, the lift was working, more orless. It came all the way down in answer to his punched summons.


But it didn't get very far up. Sitting on the floor, waiting the twentyminutes for the next power surge, Keith took a matchstick to the slender grids of his tarnished sole. One mercy: the dog responsiblefor such a dropping was by now almost certainly dead. His thoughtswere all with horrordog and horrorcat as, after a sickening drop, heshuddered his way tormentedly upwards, wedged in the pungenthorrorlift.


On the narrow walkstrip Keith attacked the lock, which was oftenrecalcitrant. But today was horrorday. He stared down at the singlegnarled key. On the outer mat were four horrorletters: twohorrorbills, a horrorsummons, and a horrororder of distraint. Keithhad had enough with all this locks and keys: he took a step back anddetonated himself against the door. Normally it would have givenlike a dunked biscuit. But the devices Keith himself had sometimesdeployed were evidently in place: the bars and braces used by him tokeep out bailiffs, bad-debt buyers, repo men, cheated horrorcheats.


'Kath,' he said in a low voice.


He flinched at the misted glass. A warning shape moved away,then reappeared, like a figure glimpsed in church.


'I saw you,' it whispered.


'Fuck off,' coaxed Keith. 'What? When? Come on, darling.'


'On the telly.'


'. . . That weren't nothing. Just for the telly like. Load of nonsense.For the telly.'


'You told the world,' she said. 'On the telly.'


And Keith had no answer.


Even the old Metrocab coming in from Heathrow had its own slantabout forms of torture. For one thing, the vibration, the cauldron-bubble beneath the seat, appeared to whet the pain in Guy's groin,assuming that any kind of increase was possible down there. But it wasstranger than that. The driver treated his cab as a peasant might treathis horse or ass, with numb and proprietorial cruelty. The bursts of acceleration were like long-toothed, lip-flapping exhalations; thencame the looping whinny of the brakes. It was diversion of a kind tolisten to the grades of neigh and whinny, of anger and submission, thatthe driver thrashed out of his livelihood, the black machine.


As he paid, a passing child tossed a jumping-jack in through thewindow, and paused to watch it raise hell in the back of a cab - its headbanging ecstasy of entrapment.


'Bombfire night,' said the driver, listlessly.


Guy walked on down the dead-end street; he had called her fromthe airport, without success; he didn't expect her to be home. Norwas she. He let himself in at the front door and climbed the stairs.The second key opened up an olfactory world that Guy remembered from his schooldays: duckboards and lockers, the lavatory where thesmokers went. He saw the dartboard, the pewter tankard engravedto him, to Keith. Next door, through the thin passage, he saw theruin of the bed, the upended ashtray on the pillow and its droppingson the sheets. Scattered about the floor were shiny puddles of exotic underwear. He saw the three empty brandy bottles, the hookah pipe.On the chair, as if laid out ready for school, brocaded trousers andthe red shirt saying,keith talent -the finisher.


Next door again he found an envelope markedGuy, unpromin-ently displayed among the fashion and darts magazines on hercrowded bureau. The note said: 'Gone to the darts.' There was a passor ticket attached. The telephone rang. He waited before picking itup.


'Where the fuck a you been?' said a voice Guy knew well.


'. . . Guy here.'


'. . . Oh, hello, mate. I uh, I had some stuff I was picking up. Shethere is she?'


'No, she's not here.'


'Know when she be back?'


'No, I don't know.'


'Minge,' said Keith indulgently. 'Never around when you wantthem. Always there when you don't. I couldn't, I couldn't pop — Nah.Yeah well cheers.'


Guy waited.


'Okay. See you later then, pal.' He added monotonously, 'Yeahwell she said you'd want to be there. As my virtual sponsor. Helpingwith the funding like.'


'No doubt.'


'Onna darts.'


No joy there then, thought Keith. He can't be feeling too brill neither.Either. But this is it,it, success in this life always going to the guywho . . . The dartboard in Keith'sgarage looked on as he finished hisporno,removed his clothes, and, jogging lightly on the cold floor,washed himself, horribly, in the horrorsink. Keith's lifestyle. Scepti-cally he connected the electric kettle he had recently stolen. Ithummed faultily for several seconds, and Keith's hopes soared. Butthen the machine gave a scorching fizz and pooped the blackenedplug from its horrorrear. He shaved in lukewarm water before the mirror's acne. Next, with the jellied shampoo, colder still, hishorrorhair. He donned his number-three darting shirt, so damp andcreased. It said:keith talent -the pickoff king. He dried hishair with some old horrorrag.


A sudden orange cockroach rushed past and Keith stamped on it,urbanely, out of grooved urban habit. But the glazed and tendrilledbody of the cockroach, even as it collapsed inwards, sent Keith areminder that his foot was unshod, unsocked. Just a horrorfoot.Keith yanked his whole leg up with a senile yodel of disgust. So hewas still capable of disgust; and he didn't go all the way through withthat skilful stomp of his. The look he gave the half-crushed roachmight even have been mistaken for appalled concern. The vermin laythere, half-turned; its various appendages were all moving atdifferent speeds - but none of them were human speeds. Me, myself,only hours ago, thought Keith, with intense lassitude . . . He put on his left shoe. After many unsatisfactory minutes with a scrubbing-brush, he put on his right shoe. Reckon I get there early, in good time.Soak up the atmosphere. He got to his feet. Blimey. You just decideyou're going to enjoy every minute of it. Wouldn't miss it for the world. Never ask about...He zipped up his windcheater. Relax, few drinks. Take the opportunity of using the celebrity practiceboards. And generally compose myself, Tony. It's fortunate, Ned,that I seem to respond to the big occasion. On his way out he took alast look at the hate-filled face of the flickering horrorroach.


Guy had gone home.


Or he had gone to Lansdowne Crescent. His housekeys were still in his pocket, but manners - and caution - demanded that he ring thebell. Through the half-glass door and its steel curlicues a redoubtablefigure loomed. Guy thought it might be Doris — the one who couldn'tclimb stairs. Because of her knees. The one who feared and hated allstairs.


The door opened. It was Lizzyboo. He couldn't help staring. And he couldn't help thinking of the helium blimp he had seen that day,effortfully hovering over Terminal Four.


'Isn't it wonderful? Isn't itwonderful.’


She said this joyfully. And as Guy listened he clearly saw the otherLizzyboo, the one he had loved for a month, the one he had kissedand touched among the trembling porcelain. The other Lizzyboowas still there all right, hiding within; and now it was safe to comeout.


'Everything's okay again.'


Of course this was neither here nor there to Guy, because she onlymeant the planet. 'How's Hope? How's the boy?'


'You'd better go on up.'


He went on up. As he turned the corner of the stairs he wasdisquieted by the sight of a silhouette in the passage, near thebedroom door. Something about the waiting shape was admonitory,ritualized, ecclesiastical. As he approached he saw that it was a little boy, in full armour.


'Who is it?' came a voice. 'Darling?'


Guy was about to frame a grateful reply. But the little boyanswered sooner. 'A man,' he said.


'Whatman?'


'. . . Daddy.'


Marmaduke stepped aside, with some formality, and Guy enteredthe room. The little boy followed, and then moved quietly past hisfather to the side of the bed, where Hope lay, on her barge of pillows.


'Where is everyone?' said Guy, for the house was eerily stairless.


'All gone. There's no need. He's different now.'


'What happened?'


'It was quite sudden. The day after.'


As they spoke, Marmaduke was undressing, or unbucklinghimself. He laid down sword, dagger, pike and shield, neatly, on thechair. He freed his breastplate. Finger by finger he loosened his gauntlets.


'And you?' said Guy.


Her face expressed, in terms of time and distance, the kind ofjourney he would have to undertake if he were ever to return. It was along journey. Perhaps even the earth wasn't big enough to containit...One by one Marmaduke removed his shin-guards, then thelittle chainmail slippers. Next, his authentic-looking tights weremeticulously unpeeled.


'No nappy!' said Guy.


Marmaduke stood there in his underpants. These too he stepped out of. He climbed into bed. 'Mummy?’


'Yes, darling?'


'Mummy? Don't love Daddy.'


'I won't. I certainly won't.'


'Good.'


'. . . Byebye, Daddy.'


Guy came out into the fading afternoon. He looked at the pass orticket she had left for him and wondered how he would ever kill all that time. Bent with his bag, he stood by the garden gate. He lookedup. Already the sky was dotted with firebursts, rocket-trails: itsproxy war. Soon, all over London, a thousand, a million guys wouldbe burning, burning.


It's weird: you pull the sunguard down and it don't - the sun's stillthere, like Hawaii. Keith motored to the studio, which was veryconvenient, being amongst the refurbished warehouses down by theold canal. Once there, he availed himself, as instructed, of the privatecarpark. A janitor came hurdling out from behind the dustbins and told Keith, in no uncertain terms, to park elsewhere. On Keithproducing ID, the janitor huddled over his faulty walkie-talkie.Keith listened to denial, to horrorfizz and horrorsquawk, and endlessdenial. When the clearance eventually came through Keith sniffedand realigned his jacket, and decisively shoved the car door shut withthe flat of his hand. The window on the passenger side explodedoutwards. Firmly the janitor brought him dustpan and horrorbrush.Celebrity practice boards?What fucking celebrity practiceboards? He was taken through the canteen and into a stockroom that happened to have a dartboard in it. Incredibly the sun sought him outeven here. What was the sun made of? Coal? Oxyacetylene? Glo-logs? What was the matter with it? Why didn't it go away? Whydidn't it goout?No: it went on funnelling its heat into hisexhaustedly hooded eyes. He blinked into the numbered orb of the board, itself like a low sun, the vortex of all his hopes and dreams.His head bowed in its horrorglare. With the purple pouch in his hand(how very worn and soiled it looked) Keith paced out the distance,turned, sniffed, coughed and straightened himself. The sun vanished.The first dart was flying through the horrornight.


I return from my latest mission to find a note from Mark Asprey onthe mat. Hand-delivered. Out of the Connaught. Now wait aminute. . .


Dear Sam:So glad you toiled your way to the crux of the CorneliaConstantine business. She was telling the truth when she said thatCrossbone Waterswas 'all lies'. There was no cerise lagoon, no rabid dog, no tears by the campfire beneath the throbbing stars. There was, above all, no marathon seduction. In fact, in truth, Ihad the idiot in hysterics on the very first day, after lunch, at the hotel — a location from which, during the entire fortnight, weseldom strayed.


No doubt you're wondering about those 'magnificent breasts'of hers. Those also I created with two deft dabs of my facile fancy:they had no more reality, alas, than the courtly Kwango. Youknow the type — great fat arse but racing tits. And so stupid. Witha peculiar habit of-


There follow three or four hundred words of the grossestpornography. The letter concludes:


You don't understand, do you, my talentless friend? Even as youdie and rot with envy. It doesn't matter what anyone writes anymore. The time for it mattering has passed. The truth doesn'tmatter any more andis not wanted.


'Wait a minute,' I said. Nicola was coming out of the bathroom. I looked up at her. 'My God, you won't get fifty yards. It's grotesque.'


She had noticed the letter, with her intelligent eyes. She said, 'Areyou ready to hear the bad thing I did to him? It might perk you up. Come in here. I want to keep doing my hair. Actually it has certain affinities with your own case. He wrote this novel,' she said, as Ifollowed her into the bedroom. 'He'd been trying to write it for years.He showed it to me. It was in longhand, in a big exercise book. And ithad something. It wasn't the usual trex he writes. It was from theheart.'


'And?'


'I destroyed it. I locked him in the bedroom and fed it to the fire. Pageby page. Taunting him a lot and everything.'


'Hey, not bad.'


She was watching the way my eyes moved. 'Don't worry. I haven'tdestroyed yours.'


'Thanks. Why not? What came over you?'


'No need.'


'I don't understand you, Nicola.'


'That's right. You look terrible. Aren't thereany pills you can take?'She sighed and said, 'Tell me about the child.'


Pain travels through diffuse interconnexions, through prolixnetworks of fibres, past trigger zones, along branches, throughthickets . . .You want it to be over. Over! Butfear isall about wantingit to be over. This might be its defining characteristic. The immediatephysical symptoms are mild, and not distracting, as pain is.


I felt the baby's fear when I entered. A sudden pall of mid-afternoon,and silence, and no Keith and no Kath: just Kim, the squirming bagelat my feet on the kitchen floor. She seemed unhurt, only soaked and crying — and afraid. And that was enough, too much, should neverhappen. Oh I know when the babies come how we patter and creep like mice through the dark tunnels, to tend them, anticipate them, topick them up and give them comfort. But it must be like that. It mustalways be like that. Because when we're not there, their worlds beginto fall away. On every side the horizon climbs until it pushes out thesky. The. walls come in. Pain they can take, maybe. Pain is close and they know where it comes from. Not fear, though. Keep them fromfear. Jesus, if they only knew what wasout there. And that's why theymust never be left alone like this.


Or not quite alone. When I knelt down to take her I heard awarning growl - from Clive, sitting erect in the Clive-sized squarebetween the four joke rooms. 'It's all right,' I said. 'I'm good. I love her. I'm not bad. Good dog.' You can apparently tell this to a dog: adog will believe it. He came forward; with sigh and half-leap he hadhis front paws up on the sink, watching for Kath or Keith; from therear he looked like a trained gunman, ready, knees bent, weapon up. When the child was calmer I noticed on the table a box of matches, and a single cigarette. This was Kath's note to me.


Because I'd gotten everything wrong. And life is always forcingyou into yet stranger positions.Got to stop hurting K, Keith had written.Just takeing it out on the Baby. ButK wasn't Kim.K wasKath. But Keith couldn't stop. And Kath couldn't stop.


I had only one idea. I dressed her. When I changed the diaper I sawwithout surprise that there were no new marks. Kath had resisted theforce of her own powerlessness, this time. I left a note, and a number,and I might have written there and then that some people get othersto perform their greatest cruelties. They get others to do it for them.


And then this.


With her bobbing, rolling face on my shoulder I carried the childthrough the streets - and through a sudden carnival: an outbreak of human vigour and relief, with balloons and steel bands, loudspeak­ers propped on window-sills, pubs turned inside out. We werecaught up in the beat of it and jounced along through the swiftly gathering crowds. One of those moments when everybody wants tobe black, lithe, hellraising; and against their dark brilliance, thewhite faces, shyly smiling, ashamed to go out in the light, to be seenat all. The streets were infantile and drunken. There the donnishindulgent stroll of the policemen. There a black lady dancing in a bobby's hat. There a child's rapt uplifted face.


Life! Like the warm life in my arms. But then there can suddenly betoo much of it, too much life, and different breathlessness, differentdanger...A tight intersection on the Portobello Road, and lifepressing in from all four directions, more headcounts everywhere, like stacks of cannonballs, and the mysterious arrival of panic, witharms now windmilling as they fought their way to the edge. And therewas no edge, only life, more life. I held Kim above my head,right up there among the screams. And the crowd, the large creatureof which we formed a cell, started to topple centipedically, and (I thought) only one outcome, as you must fall or trample or do both.


Then it was over and we were on the other side. I used thebasement door at Lansdowne Crescent. Lizzyboo could do it. Shewas all healed and clear. I said that Kath would call. I said I knew shewould do what was right. I said she had all my trust.


'It's all right for you. You just had a whole chapter off. I've been dicing with death out there.' 'Yes, so you claim.' 'I swear I wasthatclose.''I too have been far from idle.' 'Putting your warpaint on.' 'Yes. And reading.'


I waited, and watched her brow.


'You made me ridiculous. How did youdare? I thought I wasmeant to be tragic. At least a bit. And all this stuff as if I wasn't incontrol.Every second.'


'I'm sorry,' I said. 'I don't see you that way.'


Then she said something I didn't quite catch. And didn't want her to repeat. I started getting ready to leave.


'Do you think this dress is sufficiently disgusting?' she called out.'I'd better tell you something I'm going to do on the way there.'


She told me.'Nicola.'


'You'd be surprised how eloquent a bit of dirt can be. Carefullyapplied.'


'I've just thought. I'll see you at the studio and everything- but thisis goodbye.'


'Take my flat key. Get there early and you'll have a good view.'


I looked for challenge in her coldness. I said coldly, 'You're goingto be gone from nine to twelve, right? I can't imagine how you'regoing to work it.'


'The story of your life. Off you go. Kiss.'


'Let's stop it. Let's abort. . . Oh, wear a coat, Nicola. It's notworking. It's not working out. I'm losing it, Nicola. There are things I'm not seeing.'


I'm going.


I'm back.


It seems for the time being that Nicola has confounded us all.


Chapter 23: You're GoingBack With Me


he black cabwill move away, unrecallably and for ever, its driver paid, and handsomely tipped, by the murderee. Disgust­ingly attired (howcould she?), she'll click on her heels down thedead-end street. The heavy car will be waiting; its lights will come onas it lumbers towards her. It will stop, and idle, as the passenger doorswings open.


His face will be barred in darkness, but she will see cracked glasson the passenger window-frame and the car-tool ready on his lap.


'Get in.'


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


'Getin .'


And in she'll climb . . .


Disgustingly attired: howcould she? In white thinstrapped tanktop picodress, cauterized at the waist, promoting all the volume of thesecondary sexual characteristics, and so tight below that the outlined panties give a nappy-puff to the rounded rear; and bare-legged, withscarlet satin shoes, the heels unforgivably long, heels that would looklonger still (the suggestion was) when their shadows played on thebacks of berks! Her hair was sprayed with glitter, and savagelytousled. As she made her way to the studio she selected a good brick wall, steeped in London smoke and moisture, and went and pressedher rump against it. The dress was man-made, drulon, trexcett,man-made in every sense, made by men with men in mind. Shewanted to walk the whole way there, to test her nerve and tautenher breasts.


She shimmied her rump against the moist brick wall. Of course, there was no mirror, and she couldn't really check; but the contactfelt just right.


Keith said, 'Where's the pub then?'


'Pub? What pub?' Tony de Taunton looked at Keith curiously.


'The venue. The —' Keith snapped his darting finger — 'the Chuckling Sparrow.'


'There's nopub. Don't you think we have enough grief already,Keith. Without wheeling a couple of hundred pissers in and out of here four nights a week.' As he spoke, Tony de Taunton gave Keitha glass of low-ale and led him by the arm to the window. 'No no,friend. All those jolly butchers and smiling grannies - that's librarystuff. We use cutaways and dub the pub later.'


'Common sense,' said Keith. They were standing in a cavernous lot, full of hidden noise. Shifters and fixers moved stoically aboutwith planks under their arms. All were expert noisemakers. Sheetsof silver cardboard imparted the spectral light of watery dreams.On the wall was a sign bearing the saddest words Keith had everread:no smoking. Also a mirror, in which he made out a funny-looking bloke in a wrinkled red shirt: TV's Keith. Therewas a bar,though, with four or five stools you could perch on. But none ofthat fog and gurgling clamour that he had come to think of as his darting lifeblood. Where the pub parrot, effing and blinding on itssoiled hook? Where the pub dogs, whinnying in nightmare beneaththe round tables?


'Look. Here comes Chick,' said Tony de Taunton. 'You got tolike his style.'


A cream Rolls-Royce had pulled up in the carpark below. Twomen climbed out slowly.


'Where areyour guests, Keith?'


'Be along. Who's that with him?'


'Julian Neat.'


Julian Neat: agent to the darting stars. Agent to Steve Notice, toDustin Jones.


'Yes. They say Chick's all signed up.’


Nick and Chick had come in through different doors but they madetheir entrances together, which was frankly ideal for television'sKeith Talent, who, by this stage, felt he could do with a little support— felt, indeed, that he might die or go mad at any second. She pushedpast the greeters and moved with hesitant hurry towards him. Hehad never seen her looking quite so beautiful.


'Oh my Keith.'


'Where youbeen, girl?'


'What happened? Did you lose your keys? I saw your darts clotheswere still on the chair.'


'Where youbeen, girl?'


Imploringly she flattened herself up against him. 'I'll tell you aboutit later. Making arrangements. For us, Keith. We're going on awonderful journey.'


'Break it up, you two,' cajoled Ned von Newton: Mr Darts. 'Comeand be friendly.'


They went to join the others at the semicircular bar. Keith strolledover with some insouciance (he saw the way that Chick clockedNick). She was holding his hand - gazing, with the demurelygratified eyes of love, at TV Keith.


Guy stood with his back to the building, facing the flatlands ofdemolition. Squares of concrete, isolated by chicken wire, in each ofwhich a bonfire burned, baking the potatoes of the poor. Apparentlycleansed by its experiences of the afternoon, the moon outshonethese fires; even the flames cast shadows.


As he turned he saw a hooded figure by the doorway. He halted.


'They're in there,' it said.


Guy thought: it's a girl. He moved closer. One of Keith's women.The ruined blonde who —


'Keith,' said Trish Shirt. 'And . .. Nicky.' She sighed nauseously.'Now they getting married like.'


'I hardly think so.'


'They are. It was on the telly.' She leaned forward and placed ahand on his arm. 'Say I'm waiting. Tell Keith. Forever in a day like.I'll always be waiting.'


When Guy got up to the lot he hung back by the door, able tolinger, it seemed, in a frenzy of unobtrusiveness. At first all he felt wassimple disappointment. He had hoped Nicola would be there, andshe wasn't. Nicola wasn't there. He could see a girl in the grouproundthe bar, under a bulb of light: she looked a lot like Nicola. ShewasNicola, almost certainly. But she was somebody Guy didn'tknow.


He'd thought Trish seemed disembodied, in her hood, neutered, anitnot a she — or just non-human. But the girl at the bar, unhooded,turned to the light, indeed fully opened out towards the world, was lesshuman than the thing in the hood.


Nicola was laughing with her mouth as long and wide as it would go.The energy equation here could be represented as something likex=yz2,ybeing a certain magnitude of solitary female beauty,z beingthe number of men present, andx the Platonic gang-rape which, incertain possible futures, might harden into action. It had to be said thatthe men around her only frowned and smiled, as if chastened by her colour, her volume, her spin of ravenous risk. Where does the guestlook when the host's little girl is doing her somersaults for him: it's sotransparent? But this was no little girl. As she worked herselfbackwards on to her stool she gave a vivid flinch and turned to Keithlike one confidently seeking forgiveness; and there was no way out of joining Nicola in her amusing struggles with the hem of her dress.Their indivisible attention: that's what she had.


Keith watched her proudly. And Chick watched her—Chick, ChickPurchase, large, delicate, deliberate, thick-haired, deep-voiced, anddangerous, with hardman or just criminal glow, like an actor, like astar, who accepts the role that the ordinary imagination assigns him. In his face you could see the associated pleasures of making love towomen and of causing harm to men, or beyond that even, to the links between disseminating life and ending it. There was also somethingridiculous, sinisterly ridiculous, in the way he looked: he dressed like agirl, he dressed like a chick. He filled the flow of his trousers with someof the lilt that a girl would, and his shirt had a flounce to it, the kind of flounce chicks like. But this was no little girl. There was no mistakinghis sex. Chick? In the tight waist-to-thigh panels of his orangetrousers, it was visible, and sinisterly ridiculous. A slobberer for skirt: that was how come he hadn't yet gone all the way, in crime or darts. Tonight, no roadshow hopeful or wet T-shirt at his side: only, in thecream Roller, Julian Neat, who looked like what he was, a successfulmiddleman, in an exhausted culture.


The past is past,' Keith was saying. 'Let's forget any unpleasantnessand shake on it. Fair enough, mate?’


'Okay,' said Chick deeply. 'Tell me something, Keith. What's a girllike this doing with a little coon like you?'


'Chick,' said Julian Neat.


'See?' said Keith.


'I think that's very unfair, Chick,' said Nicola earnestly. 'Keith'svery good at darts.'


'Okay, break it up, you lot,' said Miles Fitzwilliam as heapproached, pulling his headphones away from his ears. 'Pre-matchinterview.'


The two contestants slid ponderously from their stools.


Guy saw his chance. But his chance of what? For one thing, heseemed to have forgotten how to walk.


Nicola saw him: she smiled and waved with puppet animation. As he crossed the vault the hope gathered in him that she would becomethe woman he knew; but she just went on getting stranger. Strangersmile, and stranger eyes. When he was near enough he saidexperimentally,


'Hello.'


'Silence. Oil'


She pouted a kiss at him and prettily crossed her lips with acautioning forefinger.


'Obviously,' Keith was saying to the camera, which was jack-knifed in fascination a foot from his face, 'hopefully'll the best manwin. When we go out there.' He realized that more was expected ofhim. 'So let's hope the bloke, the guy with the, the superior techniquewill, will run out winner against, against the man with the . . . leastgood equipment. Dartwise. At the death.'


Nicola applauded silently; then her palms came to rest, as if inprayer.


'I'm confident, Miles,' Chick was chipping in. 'Got to be, withthose averages. And — see, Keith and I go back a bit. And I know he'sgot this funny habit. Of bottling it. At the death. Frankly, I just hopeit's not too one-sided. For darts' sake.'


'Thanks, lads. Five minutes, yeah?'


Nicola wiggled a finger and Guy moved closer. 'Darling,' said herhot breath, 'don't worry! - this is only a dream.'


Keith's heart leapt or jolted when he saw the new arrival: Kim


Twemlow, the ex-world number one, with his smile, his jewelledshirt, his white shoes. The guy was like a god to Keith, no matterabout his orange-peel face. Let others dwell on that funny lump in hisside, that walking-frame. He had a good head of hair, for thirty-eight. Just that some of us live so full, our flames burn so bright, thatthe years go past not singly but six or seven at a time, like the years of dogs.


As for Guy, Keith saw him and closed his eyes and reopened them elsewhere.


Julian Neat was telling another one.


Nicola was laughing with her mouth as long and wide as it wouldgo, when Guy stepped forward.


'You're going back with me.'


They all turned.


'You're going back with me.'


They all stared. They all stared at this bit of unnecessaryunpleasantness. The pale loiterer with his boiled eyes. Nicola'sexpression showed that although she always tried to see the amusingside of things, well, on this occasion she reallywas rather shocked.


Guy seized her wrist and she gave a practised shriek as her stoolslewed. Round about now Keith was always going to be stepping in.


'It's over. Don't be a prick.'


'You're going back', said Guy, with immaculate enunciation, as ifperhaps she hadn't heard or understood, 'withme.'


She looked at him. Her upper lip hovered over her teeth. 'No I'mnot. What for? To talk about love, and Enola Gay? No I'm not. I'mnot going back withyou.'


'Right,' said Keith to the nape of Guy's neck. 'She's going backwith me. For more of what she got last night. She's going back with me.'


'No I'm not. No way. Innit. I'm not going back withyou.'


They all waited.


'I'm going back withhim,' she said, leaning forward and placingher hand on the penis of Chick Purchase.


Guy left, but Keith was going nowhere.


They said they'd put the sound on later, that inimitable pub bustle,the whoops, the laughter, the crack of glass, even the computerized thunks of dart meeting board. So the buzzers buzzed, and shiftersfixed, and fixers shifted: each noisemaker made his noise. Also thesteady belching of the cigarette-smoke simulator, sending its greyclouds out over the occludedochй.Laughter remained, but it wasn'tpub laughter. It was the laughter of Julian Neat, Kim Twemlow, andNicola Six.


'Keith . . ? Shame it didn't go your way, Keith,' said MalcolmMcClandricade. 'But it's not the end of the world. Sorry, Dom?'


'They're saying they can't use it.'


'There you go, Keith! Spare your blushes down the Marquis. Well.That's a relief all round.'


'They're saying they're using it. Thought they had a ladies' semibut they ain't.'


'Sugar. How'll they fill it? All we got's ten minutes.'


'They going to bung in a pub song or something. A knees-up. Anda raffle or something.'


'Jesus. Still, Keith. Not surprising you didn't do yourself justice.With that handful. Talk about trouble. Keith? Keith? Dry your eyes,old son.'


'He's okay?'


'What do you think?'


'Get a car round?'


'Keith?'


But Keith snapped out of it, out of his ruined dream, his trance ofdarts. He stood up and said with boyish directness, 'I could point tothe finger injury I was nursing. But tonight's been a valuableexperience for me. For my future preparation. Because how's yourdarts going to mature, Malcolm, if you don't learn?'


'That's the right attitude, Keith.'


'Because she's dead. Believe it. You know what she is, Malcolm?She's a fuckin organ-donor. Do that and live? No danger. She'shistory, mate. You hearing me?'


'Anything you say, Keith.'


Will be taken down and used... He spun round the shaking cage of the spiral staircase. Every impact of his boot was louder, harsher, his force and mass growing with all that was neg and anti. Then hehit the cold night air, and saw the moon - redder, to his eyes, than the midday sun.


Keith ran low towards the heavy Cavalier.


I must go back to London Fields — but of course I'll never do itnow. So far away. The time, the time, it neverwas the time. It is a far,far...If I shut my eyes I can see the innocuous sky, afloat above thepark of milky green. The traintrack, the slope, the trees, the stream: I played there with my brother as a child. So long ago.


The people in here, they're like London, they're like the streets ofLondon, a long way from any shape I've tried to equip them with,strictly non-symmetrical, exactly lopsided — far from many things,and far from art.


There's this terrible suspicion. It isn't worth saving anyway.Things just won't work out.


Be gone now, for the last act.


Chapter 24: The Deadline


own the dead-endstreet the car was waiting. And so wasI...


I'm here. I'm in it. And howstrange it is in here, fish-grey,monkey-brown, all the surfaces moist and sticky, and the air no goodto breathe. Already destroyed. And not worth saving.


The car was there on the other side of the dead-end street. Whenmidnight struck or tolled I crossed the road and bent my body andlooked in through the broken window, broken by my own hand, so long ago. The murderer turned toward me.


'Get out of the car, Guy. Get out of thecar, Guy.'


He was crying. But so what? We're all crying now, from here onin.


It was Guy. Of course it was. After a thousand years of war andrevolution, of thought and effort, and history, and the permanentmillennium, and the promised end of mine and thine, Guy still had allthe money, and all the strength. When Keith came running lowacross the carpark, Guy was waiting, with all that strength. Theysquared up to one another. And Keith lost. For the second time thatnight, Keith tasted defeat: obliterating defeat. He got driven into theground like a tentpeg. Where was he now? Somewhere: cradled, perhaps, in the loving arms of Trish Shirt.


'Look what she's done to me.'


'Get out of the car, Guy.'


'Look what she'sdone to me.’


We closed our deal. As he walked away he hesitated, and turnedwith a wide wag of the head.'Jesus, Sam, don't do this for me.' 'Isn't it always someone else? Who does it.''Don't do this for me.'But he kept on going.


The black cab has pulled away, unrecallably. Here she comes now onher heels, crying, shivering, through the smell of cordite. There arestill fireworks in the sky, subsiding shockwaves, the memory ofdetonations, cheap gunfire, whistlingdecrescendoand the smoke ofburnt guys. I can see marks on her face. Another hour with Chick and he might have saved us all the trouble. He might have saved us all thegoddamned grief. I flicked on the lights and the car lumberedforward. It stopped and idled. I opened the passenger door. I said,


'Get in.'


My face was barred in darkness. But she could see the car-tool onmy lap.


'Getin:


She leaned forward. 'You,' she said, with intense recognition.'Always you .. .'


'Get in.'


And in she climbed.


There are one or two things left to write.


That pill went down easily enough. I have about an hour. All told.For now I feel great luxury. I was seven when I learned the facts oflife. I learned the facts of death even earlier. Not since then, I realize,not once, have I felt such certainty that the world will keep on goingfor another sixty minutes.


She outwrote me. Her story worked. And mine didn't. There'sreally nothing more to say. Always me: from the first moment in the Black Cross she looked my way with eyes of recognition. She knewthat she had found him: her murderer. 1 wonder if she knew there'd be a queue . . . 'I've found him. On the Portobello Road, in a placecalled the Black Cross, I found him.' Imagination failed me. And allelse. I should have understood that a cross has four points. Not three.


I've just taken a casual glance at the beginning - who knows, witha little work, it might somehow accommodate a new ending. Andwhat do I see? Chapter 1: The Murderer. 'Keith Talent was a badguy . . . You might even say that he was the worst guy.' No. I was the worst guy. I was the worst and last beast. Nicola destroyed my book.She must have felt a vandal's pleasure. Of course, I could have letGuy go ahead and settled for the 'surprise' ending. But she knew Iwouldn't. Flatteringly, she knew I wasn't quite unregenerate. Sheknew I wouldn't find it worth saving, this wicked thing, this wicked book I tried to write, plagiarized from real life.


Originally I'd planned to do a final chapter, in the old style: Where Are They Now? It hardly seems appropriate. But still, in life's book alittle I can read. Pale Guy will go home, on his hands and knees. Wemade a deal. Keith's fate is of course more uncertain — Keith, with hiscultured skills, his educated release. But he will be linked to Guy,through the child. I made Guy swear. To dowhat's right. In the end,he delegated cruelty. I, kindness, or paternalism, or money. It was thebest I could do.


And Nicola. Necropolitan Nicola, in her crimson shoes. PoorNicola - she was socold. It made it easier: even that she planned. 'I'm so cold,' she kept saying. 'I'm so cold.' And: 'Please. It's all right to doit...It's all right.' And after the first blow she gave a moan ofvisceral assent, as if at last she was beginning to get warm.


Yesterday, in the hour before dawn and her arrival, I had aprophetic dream. I know it was prophetic because it's now cometrue. Yesterday I dreamt I ate my teeth.That's what murder feels like. I failed, in art and love. I wonder if there's time to wash all this bloodoff my hands.


Endpapers


Letter to Mark Asprey


You return, I fear, to a scene of some confusion. I will be lying onyour bed, quite neatly, I hope, eyes open to the mirrored ceiling, butwith a stoical smile on my face. In the car on the ledge, under a sheet, lies another body, rather less peacefully composed.


On your desk in the study you will find a full confession. That's all it is now. Perhaps it is also an elegy to the memory of an unfortunatelady, whom you knew. But I can't justify any of it and am indifferentto its destiny. I die intestate, and without close family. Be my literaryexecutor: throw everything out. If an American publisher called Missy Harter makes inquiries, do me the courtesy of delivering afinal message. Send her my love.


Even the dream tenant should always sign off by apologizing forthe mess — the confusions, the violations, the unwanted fingerprints.This I do. You will encounter the usual pitiful vestiges of anexistence. The usual mess. I'm sorry I'm not around to help you put everything into shape.


PS: If you have an hour or two, you might care to look at a little something I left on the drawing-room table: a brief critique of theDrama.


PPS: You didn't set me up. Did you?Letter to Kim Talent


I find I am thinking of the words of the exemplary War Poet: 'It seemed that out of battle I escaped . ..' The poem is a vision or apremonition of death (accurate, alas: his death was days away), in which the war poet - himself a forced collision, himself a strangemeeting-joins his counterpart, his semblance, from the other side: 'Iam the enemy you killed, my friend:


I knew you in this dark: for so you frownedYesterday 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 strangecollision. He was young; and the young aren't meant — the youngaren't scheduled - to understand death. But he understood.


Also I am haunted by the speech of surrender of the Indian ChiefJoseph, leader of the NezPercй:subjugated, and then defeated inbattle (and then routinely dispossessed):


I am tired of fighting...I want to have time to look for mychildren and see how many I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead . . . From where the sun now stands, I will fightno more forever.


Even when we don't have any, we all want time to do this, time tolook for our children and see how many we can find. With fingers alloily from being rubbed together, in ingratiation, vigil, glee, fear,nerves, I cling to certain hopes: hopes of you. I hope that you are withyour mother and that you two are provided for. I hope your father isaround 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: Isaw my little brother dead. I know from the look on his face thatnothing can survive the death of the body. Nothing can survive a devastation so thorough. Children survive their parents. Works ofart survive their makers. I failed, in art and love. Nevertheless, I askyou 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 usedeverybody, 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'tcare.


Dawn is coming. Today, I think, the sun will start to climb a littlehigher 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 bycity 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 juston the edge of the possible. And things create impressions on babies.It really is the case. Everything created impressions on you. The exactcrenellations of a carpet on your thigh; the afterglow of myfingerprints on your shoulders; the faithful representation of the gripof your clothes. A bit of sock elastic could turn sections of your calvesinto Roman pillars. Not to mention hurts, like the bevel of somepiece of furniture, clearly gauged on your responsive brow.


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


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

 

This document was generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter program

---

MARTIN  AMIS'S

London Fields

Martin Amis is well known on both sides of the Atlantic asthe author ofLondon Fields, Einstein's Monsters, Money,Other People, Success, Dead Babies,andThe Rachel Papers. Hehas contributed to such periodicals asVanity Fair, TheObserver,andThe New Statesman. His latest novel will bepublished by Harmony Books in the fall of 1991. He lives inLondon.

 by the same author

THE RACHEL PAPERS DEAD BABIES

SUCCESS


OTHER PEOPLE: A MYSTERY STORYMONEY

einstein's monsters

journalism


INVASION OF THE SPACE INVADERS THE MORONIC INFERNO AND OTHER VISITS TO AMERICALONDONFIELDS


MARTINAMIS


Vintage International

Vintage Books

A Division of Random House, Inc.New YorkTo my father





First Vintage International Edition, April 1991Copyright © 1989 by Martin Amis


All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books,

a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Originally published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd. in 1989.

First published in the United States by Harmony Books,

a division of Crown Publishers, Inc., New York, in 1990.


Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data


Amis, Martin.London fields / Martin Amis.—1st Vintage international ed.

p.   cm.—(Vintage international)"Originally published in Great Britain

by Jonathan Cape, Ltd., in 1989.

First published in the United States

by Harmony Books.. .in 1989"—T.p. verso.

ISBN 0-679-73034-6

I. Title.

PR6051.M5L6  1991

823'.914—dc20              90-50471

CIP


Author photograph copyright © Jerry Bauer.

Manufactured in the United States of America10  9  8   7  6  5  4

 

Contents

 


Chapter 1: The Murderer


Chapter 2: The Murderee


Chapter 3: The Foil


Chapter 4: The Dead-End Street


Chapter 5: The Event Horizon'


Chapter 6: The Doors ofDeception


Chapter 7: Cheating


Chapter 8: Going Out With God


Chapter 9: Doing Real Good


Chapter 10: The Books inKeith Talent's Apartment


Chapter11 : The Concordance of Nicola Six's Kisses


Chapter 12: The ScriptFollowed by Guy Clinch


Chapter 13: Little Did They Know


Chapter 14: The Pinching Game


Chapter 15: Pure Instinct


Chapter16: The Third Party


Chapter 17: Cupid's College


Chapter 18: This Is Only a Test


Chapter 19: The Ladies and the Gents


Chapter 20: Playing Nervous


Chapter 21: At theSpeed of Love


Chapter 22: Horrorday


Chapter 23: You're GoingBack With Me


Chapter 24: The Deadline


Endpapers

 

 

Note


A word about the title. Several alternatives suggested themselves. Fora while I toyed withTime's Arrow. Then I thoughtMillenniumwould be wonderfully bold (a common belief:everything is calledMillenniumjust now). I even flirted, late at night, withThe Death ofLove.In the end the most serious contender wasThe Murderee, which seemed both sinister and deeply catchy. And I wavered andcompromised with things likeLondon Fields, or The Murderee:Final Version . . .


But as you see I kept ironic faith with my narrator, who wouldhave been pleased, no doubt, to remind me that there are two kinds of title - two grades, two orders. The first kind of title decides on aname for something that is already there. The second kind of title ispresent all along: it lives and breathes, or it tries, on every page. My suggestions (and they cost me sleep) are all the first kind of title.London Fieldsis the second kind of title. So let's call itLondonFields. This book is calledLondon Fields. London Fields . . .


M. A. London.


 


LONDON FIELDS


 


 


This is a true story but I can't believe it's really happening.


It's a murder story, too. I can't believe my luck.


And a love story (I think), of all strange things, so late in thecentury, so late in the goddamned day.


This is the story of a murder. It hasn't happened yet. But it will. (Ithad better.) I know the murderer, I know the murderee. I know the time, I know the place. I know the motive(her motive) and I know the means. I know who will be the foil, the fool, the poor foal, alsoutterly destroyed. And I couldn't stop them, I don't think, even if Iwanted to. The girl will die. It's what she always wanted. You can't stop people, once theystart. You can't stop people, once theystartcreating.


What a gift. This page is briefly stained by my tears of gratitude.Novelists don't usually have it so good, do they, when something real happens (something unified, dramatic and pretty saleable), and they just write it down?


I must remain calm. I'm on deadline too here, don't forget. Oh, thepregnant agitation. Someone is tickling my heart with delicatefingers. Death is much on people's minds.


Three days ago (is it?) I flew in on a red-eye from New York. Ipractically had the airplane to myself. I stretched out, callingpiteously and frequently to the stewardesses for codeine and coldwater. But the red-eye did what a red-eye does. Oh, my. Jesus, I looklike the Hound of the Baskervilles . . . Shaken awake to a sticky bunat 1.30 in the morning, my time, I moved to a window seat andwatched through the bright mists the fields forming their regiments,in full parade order, the sad shires, like an army the size of England.Then the city itself, London, as taut and meticulous as a cobweb. I had the airplane to myself because nobody in their right mind wantsto come to Europe, not just now, not for the time being; everybodywants to go the other way, as Heathrow confirmed.


It reeked of sleep. Somnopolis. It reeked of it, and of insomniacworry and disquiet, and thwarted escape. Because we are all poets or babies in the middle of the night, struggling with being. There werehardly any Arrivals, apart from me. The business of the airport wasall Departures. As I stood in some stalled passage and listened to thecanned instructions I looked down on the lots and runways through the layered insult of dawn rain: all the sharks with their fins erect,thrashers, baskers, great whites — killers. Killers every one.


As for the apartment — well, it takes my breath away. I mean it.When I come in the door I gotee-hee-hee. The place kills me. All this for a personal ad in theNew York Review of Books? I have certainly gotten the better of the deal. Yes, I have well and truly stiffed MarkAsprey. I tramp through the rooms and think with shame of my contorted little crib in Hell's Kitchen. He's a fellow writer, after all,and I would have felt happier, if not with exact equivalence, thenwith broad parity. Of course even I suspect that the decor is inregrettable taste. What does Mark Asprey write? Musicals? He writes charming notes. 'Dear Sam: Welcome!' his begins.


Not a thing in the place is content to be merely handy orconvenient. The toilet brush is a mustachioed sceptre. The kitchentaps squirm with gargoyles. Clearly, here is someone who heats his morning coffee on the torched wind of Circassian dancing girls. MrAsprey is a bachelor: no doubt about that. For instance there are agreat many signed photographs on the walls - models, actresses. In this respect his bedroom is like some joint called Two Guys fromItaly. But this guy's from London; and it isn't his pasta they'repraising. The effortful inscription and looped signature: self-injury,done to the tender, the legendary throat.


On top of all this I get to use his car, his A-to-B device, whichobediently awaits me on the ledge. In his note Mark Aspreyapologizes on its behalf, letting me know that he has a better one, amuch better one, moored to his country cottage, or country house, or country estate. Yesterday I staggered out and took a look at it. Of the latest design, the car strives toward a state of stone-grey invisibility.Even my scrutiny it found inordinate and embarrassing. Featuresinclude fool-the-eye dent-marks, a removable toupee of rust on thehood, and adhesive key-scratches all over the paintwork. An Englishstrategy: envy-preemption. Things have changed, things haveremained the same, over the past ten years. London's pub aura, that'scertainly intensified: the smoke and the builders' sand and dust, thetoilet tang, the streets like a terrible carpet. No doubt there'll besurprises when I start to look around, but I always felt I knew whereEngland was heading. America was the one you wanted to watch . . . I climbed in and took a spin. I sayspin to help account for the ten-minute dizzy spell that hit me when I came back into the apartment. Iwas impressed by its force. Giddiness and a new nausea, a moralnausea, coming from the gut, where all morality comes from (likewaking up after a disgraceful dream and looking with dread for theblood on your hands). On the front passenger seat, under the elegantrag of a white silk scarf, lies a heavy car-tool. Mark Asprey must beafraid of something. He must be afraid of London's poor.


Three days in and I am ready - I am ready to write. Hear myknuckles crack. Real life is coming along so fast that I can no longerdelay. It's unbelievable. Two decades of fastidious torment, two decades of non-starting, and suddenly I'm ready. Well, this wasalways destined to be the year of behaving strangely. Let me say withdue modesty and caution that I have the makings of a really snappylittle thriller. Original, too, in its way. Not a whodunit. More awhydoit. I feel sickly and enraptured. I feel bright green. I think I amless a novelist than a queasy cleric, taking down the minutes of real life. Technically speaking, I am also, I suppose, an accessory beforethe fact, but to hell with all that for now. I woke up today andthought: If London is a spider's web, then where do I fit in? MaybeI'm the fly. I'm the fly.


Hurry. I always assumed I'd start with the murderee, with her, with Nicola Six. But no, that wouldn't feel quite right. Let's startwith the bad guy. Yeah. Keith. Let's start withthe murderer.


Chapter 1: The Murderer

eith talent wasa bad guy. Keith Talent was a very bad guy.You might even say that he was the worst guy. But nottheworst, not the very worst ever. Therewere worse guys. Where? Therein the hot light of CostCheck for example, with car keys, beigesinglet, and a six-pack of Peculiar Brews, the scuffle at the door, thefoul threat and the elbow in the black neck of the wailing lady, thenthe car with its rust and its waiting blonde, and off to do the nextthing, whatever, whatever necessary. The mouths on these worstguys - the eyes on them. Within those eyes a tiny unsmiling universe.No. Keith wasn'tthat bad. He had saving graces. He didn't hatepeople for ready-made reasons. He was at leastmultiracial inoutlook - thoughtlessly, helplessly so. Intimate encounters withstrange-hued women had sweetened him somewhat. His savinggraces all had names. What with the Fetnabs and Fatimas he hadknown, the Nketchis and Iqbalas, the Michikos and Boguslawas, theRamsarwatees and Rajashwaris - Keith was, in this sense, a man ofthe world. These were the chinks in his coal-black armour: God blessthem all.


Although he liked nearly everything else about himself, Keithhated his redeeming features. In his view they constituted his onlymajor shortcoming - his one tragic flaw. When the moment arrived,in the office by the loading bay at the plant off the M4 near Bristol, with his great face crammed into the prickling nylon, and the proudwoman shaking her trembling head at him, and Chick Purchase andDean Pleat both screaming Doit. Do it (he still remembered theirmeshed mouths writhing), Keith had definitely failed to realize hisfull potential. He had proved incapable of clubbing the Asianwoman to her knees, and of going on clubbing until the man in the uniform opened the safe. Why had he failed? Why, Keith, why? Intruth he had felt far from well: half the night up some lane in a car fullof the feet-heat of burping criminals; no breakfast, no bowelmovement; and now, to top it all off, everywhere he looked he saw green grass, fresh trees, rolling hills. Chick Purchase, furthermore,had already crippled the second guard, and Dean Pleat soon vaulted back over the counter and self-righteously laid into the woman with his rifle butt. So Keith's qualms had changed nothing — except hiscareer prospects in armed robbery. (It's tough at the top, and it'stough at the bottom, too; Keith's name was muck thereafter.) If hecould have done it, he would have done it, joyfully. He just didn'thave...he just didn't have the talent.


After that Keith turned his back on armed robbery once and forall. He took up racketeering. In London, broadly speaking, rack­eteering meant fighting about drugs; in the part of West London thatKeith called home, racketeering meant fighting about drugs withblack people - and black people are better at fighting than white people, because, among other reasons, theyall do it (there aren't anycivilians). Racketeering works through escalation, and escalationdominance: success goes to the men who can manage the exponen­ tial jump, to the men who can regularlyastonish with their violence. It took Keith several crunchy beatings, and the first signs of a likingfor hospital food, before he concluded that he wasn't cut out for racketeering. During one of his convalescences, when he spent a lotof time in the streetcafйsof Golborne Road, Keith grew preoccupiedby a certain enigma. The enigma was this. How come you often sawblack guys with white girls (always blondes, always, presumably for maximum contrast-gain), and never saw white guys with black girls? Did the black guys beat up the white guys who went out with blackgirls? No, or not much; you had to be discreet, though, and in his experience lasting relationships were seldom formed. Then how was it done? It came to him in a flash of inspiration. The black guys beatup the blackgirls who went out with white guys! Of course. So muchsimpler. He pondered the wisdom of this and drew a lesson from it, a lesson which, in his heart, he had long understood. If you're going tobe violent, stick to women. Stick to the weak. Keith gave upracketeering. He turned over a new leaf. Having renounced violent crime, Keith prospered, and rose steadily towards the very crest of his new profession: non-violent crime.


Keith worked as acheat. There he stands on the street corner, withthree or four colleagues, with three or four fellowcheats; they laughand cough (they're always coughing) and flap their arms for warmth; they look like terrible birds . .. On good days he rose early and put inlong hours, going out into the world, into society, with the intentionof cheating it. Keith cheated people with his limousine service atairports and train stations; he cheated people with his fake scentsand colognes at the pavement stalls of Oxford Street and Bishopsgate(his two main lines were Scandal and Outrage); he cheated peoplewith non-pornographic pornography in the back rooms of short-lease stores; and he cheated people on the street everywhere with theupturned cardboard box or milk crate and the three warped playingcards: Find the Lady! Here, often, and occasionally elsewhere, the boundaries between violent crime and its non-violent little brotherwere hard to descry. Keith earned three times as much as the PrimeMinister and never had any money, losing heavily every day atMecca, the turf accountants on the Portobello Road. He never won.Sometimes he would ponder this, on alternate Thursday lunchtimes,in sheepskin overcoat, his head bent over the racing page, as hequeued for his unemployment benefit, and then drove to the turfaccountants on the Portobello Road. So Keith's life might haveelapsed over the years. He never had what it took to be a murderer,not on his own. He needed his murderee. The foreigners, the checkedand dog-toothed Americans, the leering lens-faced Japanese, stand­ing stiff over the cardboard box or the milk crate — they never foundthe lady. ButKeith did. Keith found her.


Of course, he already had a lady, little Kath, who had recentlypresented him with a child. By and large Keith had welcomed thepregnancy: it was, he liked to joke, quite a handy new way of puttinghis wife in hospital. He had decided that the baby, when it came,would be called Keith - Keith Jr. Kath, remarkably, had other ideas.Yet Keith was inflexible, wavering only once, when he briefly entertained the idea of calling the baby Clive, after his dog, a large,elderly and unpredictable Alsatian. He changed his mind once more;Keith it was to be, then . . . Swaddled in blue, the baby came home, with mother. Keith personally helped them from the ambulance. AsKath started on the dishes, Keith sat by the stolen fire and frowned atthe new arrival. There was something wrong with the baby,something seriously wrong. The trouble with the baby was that itwas a girl. Keith looked deep into himself, and rallied. 'Keithette,'Kath heard him murmur, as her knees settled on the cold lino.'Keithene. Keitha. Keithinia.'


'No, Keith,' she said.


'Keithnab,' said Keith, with an air of slow discovery. 'Nkeithi.'


'No, Keith.'


'. . . Why's it so fucking yellow?'


After a few days, whenever Kath cautiously addressed the baby as'Kim', Keith no longer swore at his wife or slammed her up againstthe wall with any conviction. 'Kim', after all, was the name of one ofKeith's heroes, one of Keith's gods. And Keith was cheating hard thatweek, cheating on everyone, it seemed, and especially his wife. So Kim Talent it was - Kim Talent, little Kim.


The man had ambition. It was his dream to go all the way; he wasn'tjust messing. Keith had no intention, or no desire, to be acheat for the rest of his life. Even he found the work demoralizing. And merecheating would never get him the things he wanted, the goods and services he wanted, not while a series of decisive wins at the turfaccountants continued to elude him. He sensed that Keith Talent had been put here for something a little bit special. To be fair, it must besaid that murder was not in his mind, not yet, except perhaps in someghostlypotentia that precedes all thought and action . . . Characteris destiny. Keith had often been told, by various magistrates, girlfriends and probation officers, that he had a 'poor character', and he had always fondly owned up to the fact. But did that mean he had a poor destiny?. . . Waking early, perhaps, as Kath clumsily dragged herself from the bed to attend to little Kim, or wedged in one of thetraffic jams that routinely enchained his day, Keith would mentallypursue an alternative vision, one of wealth, fame and a kind ofspangled superlegitimacy - the chrome spokes of a possible future inWorld Darts.


A casual darter or arrowman all his life, right back to the baldboard on the kitchen door, Keith had recently got serious. He'dalways thrown for his pub, of course, and followed the sport: youcould almost hear angels singing when, on those special nights (threeor four times a week), Keith laid out the cigarettes on the arm of thecouch and prepared to watch darts on television. But now he haddesigns on the other side of the screen. To his own elaboratelyconcealed astonishment, Keith found himself in the Last Sixteen ofthe Sparrow Masters, an annual interpub competition which he hadnonchalantly entered some months ago, on the advice of various friends and admirers. At the end of that road there basked thecontingency of a televised final, a Ј5,000 cheque, and a play-off, alsotelevised, 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 wasfull of all the people he did not know and could never be. Televisionwas the great shopfront, lightly electrified, up against which Keithcrushed his nose. And now among the squirming motes, theimpossible prizes, he saw a doorway, or an arrow, or a beckoninghand (with a dart in it), and everything said - Darts. Pro-Darts.World Darts. He's down there in his garage, putting in the hours, hiseyes still stinging from the ineffable, the heartbreaking beauty of abrand-new dartboard, stolen that very day.


Magnificent anachronism. The lights and mores of the moderncriminal Keith held in disdain. He had no time for the gym, the fancyrestaurant, the buxom bestseller, the foreign holiday. He had nevertaken any exercise (unless you counted burgling, running away, andgetting beaten up); he had never knowingly drunk a glass of wine (oronly when he was well past caring); he had never read a book (we here excludeDarts: 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 youngcheat, also a darts-man, also called Keith: Keith Double. The plane was overbookedand the two Keiths were seated twenty rows apart. They stilledtheir terror with murderous drinking, courtesy of stewardess andduty-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 hebegan to stagger out to the stairwell for his smokes, he encounteredKeith Double. 'Cheers, Keith!' The mandatory health insuranceturned out to cover alcohol poisoning, so everyone was happy, andbecame even happier when the two Keiths recovered in time to maketheir return flight. Keith Double was in advertising now, and hadfrequently returned to America. Keith hadn't; he was still cheatingon the streets of London.


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


Keith didn't look like a murderer. He looked like a murderer'sdog. (No disrespect to Keith's dog Clive, who had signed on wellbefore the fact, and whom Keith didn't in the least resembleanyway.) Keith looked like a murderer's dog, eager familiar of ripperor bodysnatcher or gravestalker. His eyes held a strange radiance -for a moment it reminded you of health, health hidden or sleeping orotherwise mysteriously absent. Though frequently bloodshot, theeyes 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 dryas 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 PanWard), or like a criminal's cream Rolls-Royce, parked at duskbetween a tube station and a flower stall, the eyes of Keith Talentshone with tremendous accommodations made to money. And murder? The eyes - was there enough blood in them forthat? Notnow, 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.


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


For reasons not yet altogether clear, I seem to have adopted ajovial and lordly tone. It seems antique, corrupt: like Keith. Re­member, though: Keith is modern, modern, modern. Anyway, Iexpect 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 theseyears, to sit down and actually start writing fiction. But let's not getany big ideas. This is actually happening.


How do I know, for instance, that Keith works as acheat? Be­cause he tried to cheatme, on the way in from Heathrow. I'd beenstanding under the sign sayingtaxis for about a half-hour whenthe 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 nota limoeither. 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 themetre said Ј54.50.


'Slough!'


His eyes were burning at me warily in the rearview mirror. 'Wait asecond, wait a second,' I began. One thing about my illness orcondition. I've never been braver. It empowers me - I can feel it. Likelooking 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 twentyquids and Trafaljar Square andBarnet. Slough? Comeon. If this is akidnap 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. Ithought: "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, inbrutal dismissal, toward the clock, which was of curious design andpossibly home manufacture and now said Ј63.80. 'Don't mind, doyou, pal?' He pointed to a line of pebbledash semis — we were, I nowsaw, 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 savagebackground of taunts and screams.


'Darts,' he said, and switched it off. 'I'd ask you in but — me oldmum. 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 currentprotector, who worked nights, slept with his legendary soundness inthe 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 wayto go). On the back was a colour photograph of the Queen and acrudely superimposed perfume bottle: '"Outrage" — byAmbrosio.’


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 forAmbrosioof Milan, Perfumes and Furs


There followed some more information about the perfumes, 'Scan­dal', 'Outrage', and minor lines called Mirage, Disguise, Duplicityand Sting, and beneath, in double quotes, accompanied by anaddress and telephone number, with misplaced apostrophes: Keith'sthe 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 Ј143.10 on the blatting clock when the car pulled upand I awoke again. Slowly 1 climbed from the car's slept-in, trailersmell, as if from a second aircraft, and unbent myself in front of thehouse — 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 aflinch 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 anengraved panel high up in the masonry. Anno Domini. 1876.


'1876!' he said. 'So somevicar had all this.'


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


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


We entered through a second front door and climbed a broad flightof stairs. I think we were about equally impressed by the opulence andelaboration of the apartment. This is some joint, I have to admit. Aftera few weeks here even the great Presley would have started to pine forthe elegance and simplicity of Graceland. Keith cast his bright glancearound the place with a looter's cruel yet professional eye. For thesecond time that morning I nonchalantly reviewed the possibility thatI was about to be murdered. Keith would be out of here ten minuteslater, 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 fortheatre 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 Ihave to say it touched me, this chastened look. Of course (he wasthinking), TV people all know each other and fly to and from the greatcities and borrow each other's flats. Common sense. Yes, behind allthe surface activity of Keith's eyes there formed the vision of aheavenly elite, cross-hatching the troposphere like satellite TV - above it, above it all.


'Yeah well I'm due toappear on TV myself. Hopefully. In a monthor two. Darts.'


'Darts?'


'Darts.'


And then it began. He stayed for three and a half hours. People areamazing, 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 thatstage I was perfectly disinterested; I had no idea what was happening,what was forming right in front of me. Within fifteen minutes I wasbeing 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. AndNew York. True, I gave him a fair amount to drink: beer, or lager,plentifully heaped like bombs on their racks in Mark Asprey'srefrigerator. In the end he charged me Ј25 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, everylunchtime and every evening, in a pub called the Black Cross on thePortobello 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 sayin the matter. Twenty-two hours later I opened my eyes again and wasgreeted by an unwelcome and distressing sight. Myself, on the ceilingmirror. There's a mirror on the headboard too, and one on the facingwall. It's a chamber of mirrors in there, a hell of mirrors . . .Hooked—Ilooked not well. I seemed to be pleading, pleading with me, myself. DrSlizard 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 severaltremulous sorties. The first thing I noticed in the street (I almoststepped in it) struck me as quintessentially English: a soaked loaf ofwhite bread, like the brains of an animal much stupider than anysheep. 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, andwhat's been happening? Ten years of Relative Decline.


If London's a pub and you want the whole story, then where do yougo ? You go to a London pub. And that single instant in the Black Crossset the whole story in motion. Keith's in the bag. Keith's cool. And I amnow cultivating our third party, the foil, the foal, Guy Clinch, who, tomy horror, seems to be a genuinely delightful human being. I find I have a vast talent for ingratiation. But none of this would ever havegotten started without the girl. It didn't have a hope in hell without thegirl. Nicola Six was the miracle, the absolutedonnйe.She'sperfect forme. 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 issuperatmospheric and therefore, in a sense, supermeteorological (canyou really call itweather??. 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 itseems to bring me close to hysteria, as indeed does everything now.


Chapter 2: The Murderee


he black cabwill move away, unrecallably and for ever, itsdriver paid, and handsomely tipped, by the murderee. She willwalk down the dead-end street. The heavy car will be waiting; itslights will come on as it lumbers towards her. It will stop, and idle, asthe 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 theword's ending, it tends towards the feminine: a feminine ending),whatis 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. Rightfrom the start, from the moment that her thoughts began to be consecutive, Nicola knew two strange things. The second strangething was that she must never tell anyone about the first strangething. The first strange thing was this: she always knew what wasgoing to happen next. Not all the time (the gift was not obsessively consulted), and not every little detail; but she always knew what wasgoing to happen next. Right from the start she had a friend - Enola, Enola Gay. Enola wasn't real. Enola came from inside the head ofNicola Six. Nicola was an only child and knew she always would be.You can imagine how things might work out. Nicola is seven yearsold, for instance, and her parents are taking her on a picnic, withanother family: why, pretty Dominique will be there, a friend,perhaps, a living friend for the only child. But little Nicola, immersedin romantic thoughts and perfectly happy with Enola, doesn't wantto come along (watch how she screams and grips!). She doesn't wantto come along because she knows that the afternoon will end indisaster, in blood and iodine and tears. And so it proves. A hundredyards from the grown-ups (so impenetrably arrayed round thesquare sheet in the sunshine), Nicola stands on the crest of a slopewith her new friend, pretty Dominique. And of course Nicola knowswhat is going to happen next: the girl will hesitate or stumble: reaching out to steady her, Nicola will accidentally propel herplaymate downwards, down into the rocks and the briars. She willthen have to run and shout, and drive in silence somewhere, and siton 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.


When Nicola was good she was very very good. But when she was bad . . . About her parents she had no feelings one way or the other:this was her silent, inner secret. They both died, anyway, together, as she had always known they would. So why hate them? So why love them? After she got the call she drove reflexively to the airport. Thecar itself was like a tunnel of cold wind. An airline official showed her into the VIP Lounge: it contained a bar, and forty or fifty people in varying degrees of distress. She drank the brandy pressed on her by the steward. 'Free,' he confirmed. A television was wheeled in. Andthen, incredibly (even Nicola was consternated), they showed livefilm of the scattered wreckage, and the bodybags lined up on fields of France. In the VIP Lounge there were scenes of protest and violentrejection. One old man kept distractedly offering money to auniformed PR officer. Coldly Nicola drank more brandy, wondering


how death could take people so unprepared. That night she had


acrobatic sex with some unforgivable pilot. She was nineteen by thistime, and had Jong left home. Potently, magically, uncontrollably attractive, Nicola was not yet beautiful. But already she was an illwind, blowing no good.


Considered more generally - when you looked at the humanwreckage she left in her slipstream, the nervous collapses, the shattered careers, the suicide bids, the blighted marriages (androttener divorces) - Nicola's knack of reading the future left her with one or two firm assurances: that no one would ever love her enough,and those that did were not worth being loved enough by. Thetypical Nicola romance would end, near the doorway of her attic flat,with the man of the moment sprinting down the passage, his trousersround his knees, a ripped jacket thrown over his ripped shirt, and hotly followed by Nicola herself (now in a nightdress, now inunderwear, now naked beneath a half-furled towel), either to speed him on his way with a blood libel and a skilfully hurled ashtray, orelse to win back his love, by apologies, by caresses, or by main force. In any event the man of the moment invariably kept going. Often she would fly right out into the street. On several occasions she had taken a brick to the waiting car. On several more she had lain down in front of it. All this changed nothing, of course. The car would always leaveat the highest speed of which it was mechanically capable, though sometimes, admittedly, in reverse. Nicola's men, and their escape velocities . . . Back in the flat, staunching her wrists, perhaps, orpressing an ice-cube to her lip (or a lump of meat to her eye), Nicolawould look at herself in the mirror, would look at what remainedand think how strange — how strange, that she had been right allalong. She knew it would end like this. And so it proved. The diary she kept was therefore just the chronicle of a death foretold . . .


One of those people who should never drink anything at all,Nicola drank a very great deal. But it depended. A couple ofmornings a month, stiff with pride, deafened with aspirin (and reckless with Bloody Marys), Nicola would adumbrate seriousreform: for example, only two colossal cocktails before dinner, abroad maximum of half a bottle of wine with her meal, and then just the one whisky ordigestнfbeforebedtime. She would frequently stickto the new regime right up to and certainly including the whisky ordigestifbefore bedtime the following day. By then, bedtime looked a long way off. There was always a lot of shouting and fistfighting todo before bedtime. And what aboutafter bedtime, or after thefirst bedtime, with several bouts of one thing or the other still to go? Soshe always failed. She could see herself failing (there she was, clearlyfailing), and so she failed. Did Nicola Six drink alone? Yes, she drank alone. You bet. And why did she drink alone? Because she wasalone.And she was alone, now, at night, more than formerly. What could never be endured, it turned out, was the last swathe of time beforesleep came, the path from larger day to huger night, a little deathwhen the mind was still alive and fluttering. Thus the glass banged down on the round table; the supposedly odourless ashtray gave itslast weak swirl; and then the babywalk, the smudged trend to the loathed bedding. That was how it had to end.


The other ending, the real death, the last thing that already existedin the future was now growing in size as she moved forward toconfront or greet it. Where would she see the murderer, where wouldshe find him — in the park, the library, in the sadcafй,or walking pasther in the street half-naked with a plank over his shoulder? The murder had a place, and a date, even a time: some minutes aftermidnight, on her thirty-fifth birthday. Nicola would click throughthe darkness of the dead-end street. Then the car, the grunt of itsbrakes, the door swinging open and the murderer (his face inshadow, the car-tool on his lap, one hand extended to seize her hair) saying,Get in. Get in... And in she climbed.


It was fixed. It was written. The murderer was not yet a murderer.But the murderee had always been a murderee.


Where would she find him, how would she dream him, when wouldshe summon him? On the important morning she awoke wet withthe usual nightmares. She went straight to her bath and lay there for along time, round-eyed, with her hair pinned up. On important days she always felt herself to be the object of scrutiny, lewd and furiousscrutiny. Her head now looked small or telescoped, set against the squirming refractions of the giantess beneath the water. She rose with dramatic suddenness from the bath and paused before reachingfor the towel. Then she stood naked in the middle of the warm room.Her mouth was full, and unusually wide. Her mother had alwayssaid it was a whore's mouth. It seemed to have an extra half-inch at either wing, like the mouth of the clowngirl in pornography. But thecheeks of the pornographic clowngirl would be painted white,whiter than the teeth. Nicola's face was always dark, and her teethhad a shadowy lustre, slanting inwards, as if to balance the breadthof the lips, or just through the suction of the devouring soul. Her eyeschanged colour readily, eagerly, in different lights, but their firmstate was a vehement green. She had this idea about the death oflove. . .


The funeral, the cremation she was due to attend that day was nota significant one. Nicola Six, who hardly knew or remembered thedead woman, had been obliged to put in a tedious half an hour on thetelephone before she managed to get herself asked along. The deadwoman had briefly employed Nicola in her antique shop, years ago.For a month or two the murderee had sat smoking cigarettes in the zestless grotto off Fulham Broadway. Then she had stopped doingthat. This was always the way with Nicola's more recent jobs, ofwhich there had, for a while, been a fair number. She did the job, andthen, after an escalating and finally overlapping series of latemornings, four-hour lunches, and early departures, she was consid­ered to havelet everyone down (she wasn't there ever), and stoppedgoing in. Nicola always knew when this moment had come, and chose that day to stop going in. The fact that Nicola knew thingswould end that way lent great tension to each job she took, right from the first week, the first day, the first morning ... In the more distant past she had worked as a publisher's reader, a cocktailwaitress, a telephonist, a croupier, a tourist operative, a model, alibrarian, a kissogram girl, an archivist, and an actress. An actress —she had gone quite far with that. In her early twenties she had donerep, Royal Shakespeare, panto, a few television plays. She still had atrunk full of outfits and some videotapes (poor little rich girl, sprynewlywed, naked houri maddeningly glimpsed through fogsmoke and veils). Acting was therapeutic, though dramatic roles confusedher further. She was happiest with comedy, farce, custard-pie. Thesteadiest time of her adult life had been the year in Brighton, takingthe leadin Jack and the Beanstalk. Playing a man seemed to help. Shedid Jack in short blazer and black tights, and with her hair up. Amillion mothers wondered why their sons came home so green and feverish, and crept burdened to bed without their suppers. But then the acting bit of her lost its moorings and drifted out into real life.


With a towel round her belly she sat before the mirror, itself atheatrical memento, with its proscenium of brutal bulbs. Again shefelt unfriendly eyes playing on her back. She went at her face like anartist, funeral colours, black, beige, blood red. Rising, she turned tothe bed and reviewed her burial clothes and their unqualified sable.Even her elaborate underwear was black; even the clips on her garterbelt were black, black. She opened her wardrobe, releasing the full-length mirror, and stood sideways with a hand flat on her stomach,feeling everything that a woman would hope to feel at such amoment. As she sat on the bed and tipped herself for the first blackstocking, mind-body memories took her back to earlier ablutions, self-inspections, intimate preparations. A weekend out of town withsome new man of the moment. Sitting in the car on the Friday afternoon, after the heavy lunch, as they dragged through SwissCottage to the motorway, or through the curling systems ofClapham and Brixton and beyond (where London seems unwilling ever to relinquish the land, wants to squat on those fields right up to the rocks and the cliffs and the water), Nicola would feel a pressurein those best panties of hers, as it were the opposite of sex, like thestirring of a new hymen being pinkly formed. By the time theyreached Totteridge or Tooting, Nicola was a virgin again. With whatperplexity would she turn to the voluble disappointment, thebabbling mistake, at her side with his hands on the wheel. After aglimpse of the trees in the dusk, a church, a dumbfounded sheep,Nicola would drink little at the hotel or the borrowed cottage andwould sleep inviolate with her hands crossed over her heart like a saint. Sulky in slumber, the man of the moment would neverthelessawake to find that practically half his entire torso was inside Nicola'smouth; and Saturday lunchtime was always a debauch on everyfront. She hardly ever made it to Sunday. The weekend would endthat evening: a stunned and wordless return down the motorway, asingle-passenger minicab drive of ghostly length and costliness, orNicola Six standing alone on a sodden railway platform, erect and unblinking, with a suitcase full of shoes.


But let us be clear about this: she had great powers — great powers.All women whose faces and bodies more or less neatly fill thecontemporary mould have some notion of these privileges andmagics. During their pomp and optimum, however brief andrelative, they occupy the erotic centre. Some feel lost, somesurrounded or crowded, but there they are, in a China-sizedwoodland of teak-hard worship. And with Nicola Six the genderyearning was translated, was fantastically heightened: it came ather in the form of human love. She had the power of inspiring love,almost anywhere. Forget about making strong men weep. Seven-stone pacifists shouldered their way through street riots to be homein case she called. Family men abandoned sick children to wait in therain outside her flat. Semi-literate builders and bankers sent her sonnet sequences. She pauperized gigolos, she spayed studs, she hospitalized heartbreakers. They were never the same again, they lost their heads. And the thing with her (whatwas it with her?), thething with her was that she had to receive this love and send it back inopposite form, not just cancelled but murdered. Character is destiny;and Nicola knew where her destiny lay.


Fifteen minutes later, dressed for death, she called her black cab anddrank two cups of black coffee and tasted with hunger the blacktobacco of a French cigarette.


In Golders Green she dismissed the taxi, and it pulled away forever. She knew she'd get a lift back: you always did, from funerals.The sky above the redbrick lodge she entered was certainly dullenough for a person to take leave of it with equanimity. As usual she was quite late, but the volley of pale glances did not pierce her. Withno attempt at self-muffling she walked evenly to the back and slippedinto an empty aisle, of which there was no shortage. The deadwoman was not being populously farewelled. So this was all you got:the zooty sideburns and masturbator's pallor of an old Ted in a blacksuit, and the secular obsequies. Nicola longed equally for a cigaretteand the lines you sometimes heard: a short time to live, full of misery. She was always especially stirred — this was why she came — by thespectacle of the bereaved elderly, particularly the women. The poorsheep, the dumbfounded sheep (even mere nature dumbfounds them), as reliable as professional mourners but too good at it really,too passionate, with hair like feather dusters, and frailly convulsed with brute grief, the selfish terrors . . . Nicola yawned. Everythingaround her said school, the busts and plaques, and all the panels withtheir use of wood to quell and dampen. She hardly noticed thediscreet trundling of the coffin, knowing it was empty and the body already vaporized by fire.


Afterwards, in the Dispersal Area (a heavy blackbird was flyinglow and at an angle over the sopping grass), Nicola Six, looking andsounding very very good, explained to various interested parties who she was and what she was doing there. It solaced the old to see suchpiety in the relatively young. She reviewed the company with eyes ofpremonitory inquiry, and with small inner shrugs of disappoint­ment. In the carpark she was offered several lifts; she accepted one more or less at random.


The driver, who was the dead woman's brother's brother-in-law,dropped her off on the Portobello Road, as instructed. PrettilyNicola said her goodbyes to him and his family, extending a glovedhand and receiving their thanks and praise for her attendance. Shecould hear them long after the car had pulled away, as she stood onthe street readjusting her veil. Such a nice girl. So good of her to come. That skin! What hair! All the way back Nicola had beenthinking how good a cigarette would look, white and round betweenher black fingers. But she was out of cigarettes, having almost gassedherself with tobacco on the way to Golders Green. She nowprogressed along the Portobello Road, and saw a pub whose nameshe took a liking to.'tv and darts' was the further recommenda­tion of a painted sign on its door, to which a piece of cardboard hadbeen affixed, saying,'and pimball'. All the skies of Londonseemed to be gathering directly overhead, with thunder ready todrop its plunger . . .


She entered the Black Cross. She entered the pub and its murk. Shefelt the place skip a beat as the door closed behind her, but she hadbeen expecting that. Indeed, it would be a bad day (and that daywould never come) when she entered a men's room, a teeming toilet such as this and turned no heads, caused no groans or whispers. Shewalked straight to the bar, lifted her veil with both hands, like abride, surveyed the main actors of the scene, and immediately sheknew, with pain, with gravid arrest, with intense recognition, thatshe had found him, her murderer.


When at last she returned to the flat Nicola laid out her diaries on theround table. She made an entry, unusually crisp and detailed: the final entry. The notebooks she used were Italian, their coversembellished with Latin script. . . Now they had served their purposeand she wondered how to dispose of them. The story wasn't over,but the life was. She stacked the books and reached for a ribbon .. .Tvefound him. On the Portobello Road, in a place called the BlackCross, I found him.’


I think it was Montherlant who said that happiness writes white: itdoesn't show up on the page. We all know this. The letter with theforeign postmark that tells of good weather, pleasant food andcomfortable accommodation isn't nearly as much fun to read, or towrite, as the letter that tells of rotting chalets, dysentery anddrizzle. Who else but Tolstoy has made happiness really swing on the page?When I take on Chapter 3, when I take on Guy Clinch, I'll have to do,well, not happiness, but goodness, anyway. It's going to be rough.


The moment that Keith Talent saw Nicola Six — he dropped histhird dart. And swore. The 32-gram tungsten trebler had pierced hisbig toe...I thought I might be able to make a nice play on wordshere. Cupid's dart, or something like that. Arrows of desire? But it wasn't desire that Nicola Six aroused in Keith Talent. Not primarily.I would say that greed and fear came first. Going for broke at the pinball table, Guy Clinch froze in mid-flail: you could hear the ball scuttling into the gutter. Then silence.


While the scene developed I melted, as they say, into thebackground. Of course I had no idea what was taking shape in front of me. No idea? Well, an inkling, maybe. This moment in the publichouse, this pub moment, I'm going to have to keep on coming backto it. Edging down the bar, I was intrigued only in the civilian sense -but powerfully intrigued. Every pub has its superstar, its hero, its pub athlete, and Keith was the Knight of the Black Cross: hehad to stepforward to deal with the royal tourist. He had to do it for the guys:for Wayne, Dean, Duane, for Norvis, Shakespeare, Big Dread, for Godfrey the barman, for Fucker Burke, for Basim and Manjeet, for Bogdan, Maciek, Zbigniew.


Keith acted in the name of masculinity. He acted also, of course, inthe name ofclass. Class! Yes, it's still here. Terrific staying power, and against all the historical odds. What is it with that old,old crap?The class system just doesn't know when to call it a day. Even a nuclear holocaust, I think, would fail to make that much of a dent init. Crawling through the iodized shithouse that used to be England,people would still be brooding about accents and cocked pinkies,about maiden names andsettee orsofa, about the proper way to eat aroach in society. Come on. Do you take the head off first, or start with the legs? Class never bothered Keith; he never thought about it'as such'; part of a bygone era, whatever that was, class neverworried him. It would surprise Keith a lot if you told him it wasclassthat poisoned his every waking moment. At any rate, subliminally orotherwise, it was class that made Keith enlist a third actor in his dealings with Nicola Six. It was class that made Keith enlist GuyClinch. Or maybe the murderee did it. Maybe she needed him. Maybe they both needed him, as a kind of fuel.


Do / need him? Yes. Evidently. Guy pressed himself on me, sameas the other two.


I left the Black Cross around four. It was my third visit. 1 neededthe company, hair-raising though much of it was, and I was doing allright there, under Keith's tutelage. He introduced me to the Polacksand the brothers, or paraded me in front of them. He gave me a game of pool. He showed me how to cheat the fruit machine. I bought a lot of drinks, and endured a lot of savage cajolery for my orange juices, my sodas, my cokes. Taking my life in my hands, I ate a pork pie.Only one real fight so far. An incredible flurry of fists and nuttings; it ended with Keith carefully kicking selected areas of a fallen figurewedged into the doorway to the Gents; Keith then returned to thebar, took a pull of beer, and returned to kick some more. It transpired that the culprit had been messing with Dean's darts. Afterthe ambulance came and went Keith calmed down. 'Not with aman's darts,' Keith kept saying almost tearfully, shaking his head.People were bringing him brandies. 'You don't... not with hisdarts.’


I left the Black Cross around four. I went back to the apartment. Isat at the desk in Mark Asprey's bay-windowed office or study or library. Actually it's more like a trophy room. Actually the wholedamned place is a trophy room. Walking from living-room tobedroom — and I'm thinking of the signed photographs, the erotic prints - you wonder why he didn't just nail a galaxy of G-strings to the walls. In here it's different. Here you're surrounded by cups and sashes, Tonis and Guggies, by framed presentations, commenda­tions. Cherished and valued alike by the critical establishment, themedia, and the world of academe, Mark Asprey has honorarydegrees, pasteboard hats, three separate gowns from Oxford, Cambridge, Trinity College Dublin. I must look at his books, ofwhich there are a great many, in a great many editions, in a great many languages. Hungarian. Japanese.


I left the Black Cross around four. I went back to the apartment. I sat there wondering why I just can't do it, why I just can't write, whyI just can'tmake anything up. Then I saw her.


Across the way from Mark Asprey's bay-windowed library there is a lot-sized square of green, with two thin beds of flowers (low-ranking flowers,nupe flowers) and a wooden bench where old-timers sometimes sit and seem to flicker in the wind. On this green patch, rather regrettably, rather disappointingly (how come Aspreystands for it?), there is also a garbage tip: nothing outrageous, no compost or bathtubs or abandoned pantechnicons, just selectedrefuse, magazines, old toys, a running shoe, a kettle. This is a Londontheme; the attempt at greenery would itself appear to attract the trash. The cylinders of wire-netting they put up to protect youngtrees sufficiently resemble a container of some kind, so people cramthem with beercans, used tissues, yesterday's newspapers. In times of mass disorientation and anxiety . . . But we can get back to that. Onwith the story. The girl was there: Nicola, the murderee.


I was sitting at Mark Asprey's vast desk - I think I might even havebeen wringing my hands. Oh Lord, these chains! Something I havesuffered for twenty years, the steady disappointment ofnot writing—perhaps exacerbated (I admit to the possibility) by Mark Asprey'sgraphic and plentiful successes in the sphere. It shocked my heart tosee her: a soft blow to the heart, from within. Still wearing her funeral robes, the hat, the veil. In her black-gloved hands she heldsomething solid, ribboned in red, the load settled on her hip andclutched close as if for comfort, like a child. Then she raised the veiland showed her face. She looked so...dramatic. She looked like thevamp in the ad, just before the asshole in the helicopter or thesubmarine shows up with the bathcubes or the chocolates. Could shesee me, with that low sun behind her? I couldn't tell, but I thought: Nicola would know. She would know all about how light works onwindows. She would know what you could get away with in the curtainless room, what adulteries, what fantastic betrayals . . .


Nicola turned, wavered, and steadied herself. She dropped herburden into the trash and, embracing her shoulders with crossedhands, moved off in a hurrying walk.


For perhaps five minutes of stretched time I waited. Then down Iwent and picked up my gift. Not knowing what I had, I sat on thebench and pulled the ribbon's knot. An adorably fat and femininehand, chaos, a menacing intelligence. It made me blush with porno­graphic guilt. When I looked up I saw half of Nicola Six, thirty feetaway, split by a young tree-trunk, not hiding but staring. Her starecontained - only clarity, great clarity. I gestured, as if to return what 1 held in my hands. But after a pulse of time she was walking off fastunder the wrung hands of the trees.


I wish to Christ I could do Keith's voice. Thet's are viciouslystressed. A brief guttural pop, like the first nanosecond of a cough ora hawk, accompanies the hardk. When he sayschaotic, and he says itfrequently, it sounds like a death rattle. 'Month' comes out asmumf.He sometimes says, 'Im feory . . .' when he speaks theoretically.'There' sounds likedare orlair. You could often run away with the impression that Keith Talent is eighteen months old.


In fact I've had to watch it with my characters' ages. I thought GuyClinch was about twenty-seven. He is thirty-five. I thought KeithTalent was about forty-two. He is twenty-nine. I thought NicolaSix . . . No, I always knew what she was. Nicola Six is thirty-four. I fear for them, my youngers.


And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of makingeveryone look and feel like shit. You got that? And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look, and feel,like shit.


Chapter 3: The Foil


uy clinch wasa good guy — or a nice one, anyway. Hewanted for nothing and lacked everything. He had a tremend­ous amount of money, excellent health, handsomeness, height, acapriciously original mind; and he was lifeless. He was wide open.Guy possessed, in Hope Clinch, a wife who was intelligent, efficient(the house was a masterpiece), brightly American (and rich); andthen there was the indubitable vigour of the child . . . But when hewoke up in the morning there was - there was no life. There was onlylifelessness.


The happiest time of Guy's fifteen-year marriage had come duringHope's pregnancy, a relatively recent interlude. She had taken her fifty per cent cut in IQ with good grace, and for a while Guy hadfound himself dealing with an intellectual equal. Suddenly the talkwas of home improvement, of babies' names, nursery conversions,girlish pinks, boyish blues — the tender materialism, all with a point.Never entirely free of builders, the house now thronged with them,shouting, swearing, staggering. Guy and Hope lived to hormonetime. The curtain hormone, the carpet hormone. Her nausea passed.She craved mashed potato. Then the nesting hormone: an abruptpassion for patching, for needle and thread. Seeing the size of her, thebarrow boys of Portobello Road (and perhaps Keith Talent had beenamong them) would summon her to their stalls, saying sternly,masterfully, 'Over here, my love. I got the stuff you want.' And Hopewould rootle to the base of damp cardboard boxes — rags of velvet,scraps of satin. In the eighth month, when the furniture had begun itsdance round the house, and Hope sat with regal fullness in front of the television, darning and patching (and sometimes saying, 'What am Idoing?'), Guy consulted his senses, scratched his head, andwhispered to himself (and he didn't mean the baby),It's coming . . .It's on its way.


Oh, how he had longed for a little girl! In the sparse gloom of theprivate clinic, the most expensive they could find (Hope distrustedany medical care that failed to stretch searchingly into the four figures: she liked the scrolled invoices, with every paper tissue andsoldier of toast unsmilingly itemized; she had no time for thebargain basements and the Crazy Eddies of the National Health), Guy did his share of pacing and napping and fretting, while titledspecialists looked in from dinner parties or popped by on their way to rounds of golf. A girl, a girl, just an ordinary little girl - Mary,Anna, Jane. 'It's a girl,' he could hear himself saying on the telephone (to whom, he didn't know), 'Five pounds twelve ounces. Yes, a girl.A little under six pounds.' He wanted to be with his wife throughout,but Hope had banned him from labour and delivery wards alike — forreasons, soberly but unanswerably stated, of sexual pride.


The baby showed up thirty-six hours later, at four in the morning.He weighed nearly a stone. Guy was allowed a brief visit to Hope's suite. Looking back at it now, he had an image of mother and son mopping themselves down with gloating expressions on their faces,as if recovering from some enjoyably injudicious frolic: a pizza fight, by the look of it. Two extra specialists were present. One was peeringbetween Hope's legs, saying, 'Yes, well it's rather hard to tell whatgoes where.' The other was incredulously measuring the baby'shead. Oh, the little boy was perfect in every way. And he was a monster.


Guy Clinch had everything. In fact he had two of everything. Twocars, two houses, two uniformed nannies, two silk-and-cashmeredinner jackets, two graphite-cooled tennis rackets, and so on and soforth. But he had only one child and only one woman. After Marmaduke's birth, things changed. For fresh inspiration he rereadThe Egoist, and Wollheim on Ingres and the Melting Father. The baby books had prepared him for change; and so had literature, upto a point. But nothing had prepared him or anybody else for


Marmaduke... World-famous paediatricians marvelled at his


hyperactivity, and knelt like magi to his genius for colic. Every halfan hour he noisily drained his mother's sore breasts; often hewould take a brief nap around midnight; the rest of the time hespent screaming. Only parents and torturers and the janitors ofholocausts are asked to stand the sound of so much human grief.When things improved, which they did, though only temporarily(for Marmaduke, already softly snarling with asthma, would soonbe emblazoned with eczema), Hope still spent much of her time in bed, with or without Marmaduke, but never with Guy. All night helay dressed for disaster in one of the two visitors' rooms, wonderingwhy his life had suddenly turned into a very interesting and high-toned horror film (one with a Regency setting, perhaps). Hishabitual mode of locomotion around the house became the tiptoe.When Hope called his name - 'Guy?' -and he repliedYes? therewas nevei any answer, because his name meantCome here. Heappeared, and performed the necessary errand, and disappearedagain. Now, with Hope's requests, the first time of asking soundedlike the second time of asking, and the second time of askingsounded like the ninth. Less and less often Guy would try to hoist the baby into his arms (under the doubtful gaze of nanny or night-nurse, or some other of Marmaduke's highly-paid admirers),saying, rather self-consciously, 'Hello, man-cub.' Marmadukewould pause, reviewing his options; and Guy's bashfully inquiring face would somehow always invite a powerful eye-poke or a jet of vomit, a savage rake of the nails, or at the very least an explosivesneeze. Guy shocked himself by suspecting that Hope kept the infant's nails undipped the better to repel him. Certainly his facewas heavily scored; he sometimes looked like a resolute but talent­less rapist. He felt supererogotary. The meeting, the rendezvous, itjust hadn't happened.


So two of everything, except lips, breasts, the walls of intimacy,enfolding arms, enfolding legs. But that wasn't really it. What hadmeant to come closer had simply moved further away. Life, there­fore, could loom up on him at any moment. He was wide open.


Guy and Hope had been away twice since the birth, on doctor's advice: their doctor's, not Marmaduke's. They left him in the care of five nannies, plus an even more costly platoon of medicalcommandos. It had been strange, leaving him behind; Guy fullyparticipated in Hope's dread as the cab made its way to Heathrow.Fear was gradually eased by time, and by half-hourly telephonecalls. The inner ear was tunedto infant grief. If you listened closely,everything sounded like a baby crying.


First, Venice, in February, the mist, the cold troubled water - andmiraculously earless. Guy had never in his life felt closer to the sun; itwas like living in a cloud, up in a cloudy sea. But many of themornings were sombre in mood and sky (dank, failed), and seemedbest expressed by the tortured and touristless air of the JewishQuarter, or by the weak dappling on the underside of a bridge (where the pale flames pinged like static, briefly betrayed by a darkerbackground) — or when you were lost among the Chinese boxes, the congestion of beauties, and you could have likened yourselves toShakespearean lovers until there came the sound of a wretchedsneeze from an office window near by, then the nose greedily voidedinto the hanky, and the resumption of the dull ticking of a typewriteror an adding machine.


On the fifth day the sun burst through again inexorably. Theywere walking arm in arm along the Zattere towards thecafйwherethey had taken to having their mid-morning snack. The light was getting to work on the water, with the sun torpedoing in on everypair of human eyes. Guy looked up: to him the sky spoke ofRevelation, Venetian style. He said,


'I've just had a rather delightful thought. You'd have to set it asverse.' He cleared his throat. 'Like this:


The sun, the sun, the . . . daubing sun:The clouds areputti in its hands!'


They walked on. Hope's oval face looked resolute. The juices in her jaw were already addressing the toasted cheese-and-ham sand­wich she would presently enjoy; then the notebook, the little Amex guide, the creamy coffee. 'Dreadful pun, I suppose,' Guy murmured.'Oh, God.' A press of sightseers confronted them. As they forged through, with Hope taking the lead, their arms were sundered. Guyhurried to catch up.


'Thetourists,' he said.


'Don't complain. That's idiotic. What do you thinkyou are?'


'Yes but-'


'Yes but nothing.'


Guy faltered. He had turned to face the water and was craning his neck in obscure distress. Hope closed her eyes longsufferingly, andwaited.


'Wait, Hope,' he said. 'Please look. If I move my head, then the sunmoves on the water. My eyes have as much say in it as the sun.'


'. . .Capiscol


'But that means—for everyone here the sun is different on the water.No two people are seeing the same thing.'


'I want my sandwich.'


She moved on. Guy lingered, clutching his hands, and saying, 'Butthen it's hopeless. Don't you think? It's . . . quite hopeless.'


And he whispered the same words at night in the hotel, and went onwhispering them, even after their return to London, lying in sleep'scaboose, seconds before Marmaduke woke him with a clout. 'But thenit's hopeless . . . Utterly hopeless.'


In excellent fettle, in the pink or the blue of boyish good health duringtheir absence, Marmaduke sickened dramatically within a few hoursof their return. Evenhandedly he dabbled with every virus, everyhatching, afforded by that early spring. Recovering from mumps, hereacted catastrophically to his final whooping-cough shot. Superflufollowed superflu in efficient relay. Doctors now visited him, unaskedand unpaid, out of sheer professional curiosity. At this point, and for no clear reason (Sir Oliver asked if he might write a paper about it),Marmaduke's health radically improved. Indeed, he seemed to shedhis sickly self as if it were a dead skin or a useless appendage: from the feverish grub of the old Marmaduke sprang a musclebound wunder-kind, clear-eyed, pink-tongued, and (it transpired) infallibly vicious.The change was all very sudden.Guy and Hope went out one day,leaving the usual gastroenteritic nightmare slobbering on the kitchenfloor; they returned after lunch to find Marmaduke strolling round thedrawing-room with his hands in his pockets, watched by several speechless nannies. He had never crawled. Instead, he appeared tohave worked it out that he could cause much more trouble, and havemuch more fun, in a state of peak fitness. His first move was to dispensewith that midnight nap. The Clinches hired more help, or they tried. An ailing baby was one thing; a strappingly malevolent toddler wasquite another. Up until now, Guy and Hope's relationship, to the childand to each other, had been largely paramedical. After Marmaduke's renaissance, it became, well — you wouldn't say paramilitary. You'dsay military. The only people they could get who stayed longer than an hour or two were male nurses sacked from lunatic asylums, Aroundthe house, these days there was a kind ofswat team of burly orderlies,as well as a few scarred nannies and au pairs. Dazedly yet without bit­terness, Guy calculated that Marmaduke, now in his ninth month, hadalready cost him a quarter of a million pounds. They went away again.


This time they flew first-class to Madrid, stayed at the Ritz for threenights, and then hired a car and headed south. The car seemedpowerful and luxurious enough; it was, without question, resound­ingly expensive. (Hope whaled on the insurance. Guy studied thegold-rimmed document: they would airlift you out on almost anypretext.) But as they cruised, as they cruised and glistened one eveningthrough the thin forests near the southernmost shore of the peninsula,a great upheaval or trauma seemed almost to dismantle the engine at astroke - the manifold, the big end? In any event the car was clearlyhistory. Around midnight Guy could push it no longer. They saw somelights: not many, and not bright.


The Clinches found accommodation in a rudeventa.What with thebare coil of the bulb, the lavatorial damp, the flummoxed bed, Hope had burst into tears before theseсorawas out of the room. All night Guy lay beside his drugged wife, listening. At about five, after aninterval reminiscent of one of Marmaduke's naps, the weekendroistering in the bar, the counterpoints of jukebox andImpactomachine, exhaustedly gave way to the shrieking gossip of the yard -with a cluck-cluck here and a whoof-whoof there, here a cheep, there amoo, everywhere an oink-oink. Worst or nearest was a moronicbugler of a cock, playing tenor to the neighbours' alto, with his room-rattling reveille. 'Cock-a-doodle-do', Guy decided, was one of the world's great euphemisms. At seven, after an especially unbearabletenor solo (as if the cock were finally heralding the entrance of someimperial superrooster), Hope jerked upright, swore fluently andfoully, applied valium and eyemask, and bunched herself down againwith her face pressed to her knees. Guy smiled weakly. There was atime when he could read love in the shape of his sleeping wife; even inthe contours of the blankets he used to be able to read it...


He went outside, into the yard. The cock, the grotesquegallo,stood in its coop — yes, inches from their pillows — and stared at him withunchallengeable pomp. Guy stared back, shaking his head slowly.Hens were in attendance, quietly and unquestioningly supportive,among all the dust and rubbish. As for the two pigs, they were yahooseven by the standards of the yard. A dark half-grown Alsatiandozed in the hollow of an old oildrum. Sensing a presence, thedog jerked upright, waking sudden and crumpled, with sand driedinto the long trap of the jaw, and moved towards him with compulsivefriendliness. It's a girl, he thought: tethered, too. As he went to pet theanimal they became entangled, entangled, it seemed, by the veryamiability of the dog, by its bouncing, twisting amiability.


In pastel daubings the new prosperity lay to east and west but thisplace was kept poor by wind. Wind bled and beggared it. Like thecock, the wind just did its wind thing, not caring wherefore. Hot airrises, cool air fills the space: hence, somehow, the tearing and tugging, the frenzied unzippings of this sandpaper shore. In his tennis shortsGuy stepped off the porch and walked past the car (the car avoided hisgaze) on to the tattered croisette. A motorbike, an anguished donkey shackled to its cart — nothing else. The sky also was empty, blownclean, an unblinking Africa of blue. Down on the beach the wind wentfor his calves like an industrial cleanser; Guy gained the hardenedrump of damp sand and contemplated the wrinkly sea. It openedinhospitably to him. Feeling neither vigour nor its opposite, feeling nocloser 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 hebarged his way down the incline, breathed deep, and pitched himselfforward in the swimmer's embrace of the sea . . . Twenty minuteslater, as he strode back up the beach, the wind threw everything it hadat him, and with fierce joy the sand sought his eyes and teeth, thehairless 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 awakeningventa.The daughters of theestablishment were mopping up; two men boldly conversed across thelength of the dark room. Guy stood straight, barefoot, his skin andhair minutely spangled by the sand. An interested woman, had shebeen monitoring him with half an eye, might have found Guy Clinchwell made, classical, above all healthy; but there was somethingpointless or needless in his good looks; they seemed wasted on him.Guy knew this. Stocky mat-shouldered Antonio, leaning against thepillar by the door, one hand limp on his round belly - and thinkingwith complacence of his own blood-red loincloth, with the goodshoelace-and-tassel effect down there on the crotch — registered Guynot 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 breadmoistened with olive oil, out on the banging porch. He then took atray into Hope, who ripped off her mask but lay there with her eyesclosed.


'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 tothem. He wasn't given to pornographic thoughts). The thought wasthis: Hope splayed and naked, being roughly used by an intent Antonio . . . Guy had then taken his last piece of bread into the yardand offered it to the tinned dog. (He also took another incredulouslook at the cock, the stupidgallo.)The dog was whimperingrhythmically, but showed no appetite. Dirty and gentle-faced, thebitch just wanted to play, to romp, to fraternize, and just kepttripping on her tether. The length offнlthyrope — six feet of it —saddened Guy in a way that Spanish cruelty or carelessness had neversaddened him before. Down in the yard here, on a wind-frazzledstretch of empty shore, when the only thing that came free andplentiful was space and distance — the dog was given none of it. Sopoor, and then poor again, doubly, triply, exponentially poor.I'vefound it,thought Guy (though the word wouldn't come, not yet).Itis . . . 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 firstsection of grilled bread. She paused. 'I can't bear it. You aren't goingdreamyon me, are you Guy? Listen, we're out of here. We aregone.'


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


Thereafter it was all quite easy: not clear and not purposeful, but notdifficult. Guy Clinch looked round his life for a dimension throughwhich some new force might propagate. And his life, he found, wassewn-up, was wall-to-wall. It was closed. To the subtle and silentmodulations of Hope's disgust, he started to open it. Guy had a job. Heworked for the family business. This meant sitting about in a bijouflatlet in Cheapside, trying to keep tabs on the proliferating, the pullulating hydra of Clinch money. (It, too, was like Marmaduke:whatwould it get up to next?) Increasingly, Guy stopped going in andjust walked the streets instead.


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


tv and darts,said the sign.and pimball. The first time Guyentered the Black Cross he was a man pushing through the black doorof 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 whitewine 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 whisper­ingwho'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 himbitterly, 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 finallysilenced 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 eachtime he returned. But going there at night was another entry.


Keith was the key: Keith, and his pub charisma. Keith was the pubchamp. 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 — adarts force in the Black Cross . . . Now plainly Keith had to dosomething about Guy, who was far too anomalous to be let alone, with his pub anticharisma. Keith had to ban him, befriend him, beathim 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 tonguebetween his teeth: and bought Guy a drink. The hip pocket, the furledtenners. Keith's house had many mansions. The whole pub shookwith silent applause.


Cheers, Keith! After that, Guy belonged. He sailed in there almost with a swagger and summoned the barmen by name: God, orPongo.After that, he stopped having to buy drinks for the black girls, andstopped having to buy drugs from the black boys. The heroin, the cutcoke, 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'tdrop 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 wasjustgrass . . .Now Guy could sit in a damp pocket of pub warmth, andwatch. Really the thing about life here was its incredible rapidity, withpeople growing up and getting old in the space of a single week. Likethe planet in the twentieth century, with its fantasticcoup de vieux.Here, in the Black Cross, time was a tube train with the driver slumpedheavy over the lever, flashing through station after station. Guy always thought it was life he was looking for. But it must have beendeath — 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 andstood 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 withgravity and efficiently plunged towards the centre of the earth. What halted its progress was Keith's left foot, which was protected only bythe frayed webbing of a cheap running-shoe: you could see the littlebullseye of blood. But there was another arrowman or darter in theBlack Cross that day; perhaps this smilingp«ffo lurked in the artworkof the pinball table, among its sinbads and sirens, its goblins andgenies. Eye of the Tiger! When he saw her green eyes, and the breadthof 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, whococked 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 werealready run. Keith gave the instructions, the mangled fiver, then turned assessingly. Death wasn't new in the Black Cross, it waseveryday, 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'sSix."


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


Now Guy moved into her force field. Intensely he confirmed the lineof dark down above her mouth. You saw women like this, sometimes,at the bars of theatres and concert halls, in certain restaurants, inaeroplanes. You didn't see them in the Black Cross. She too looked asthough she might faint at any moment. 'How do you do?' he said (inhis peripheral vision Keith was slowly nodding), extending a hand towards the black glove. 'Guy Clinch.' His fingers hoped for theamperes of recognition but all he felt was a slick softness, a sense ofmoisture 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. Thehand 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 justsome old boiler. Comes to us all as such.'


They talked on. With a violent jerk of self-reproof, Guy boughtmore drinks. Keith leaned forward murmuring with cupped hands tolight 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 hishand (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 afuneral.'


Keith looked him up and down. 'Life goes on innit,' he said, withmost of his usual buoyancy. He straightened his windcheater and gavea 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 amoment, a pub moment, and then followed him.


That night in Lansdowne Crescent, at 8.45, his twelve-hour trystwith Marmaduke now only minutes away, Guy sat on the second sofain the second drawing-room with a rare second drink and thought:How will I ever know anything in the middle of all this warmth andspace, all this supershelter ? I want to feel like the trampolinist when hefalls 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 intwo days, even with all the fieldwork I have to go out and do. Everythird day, now, I do more fieldwork, and wince and gloat into mynotebook. I write. I'm a writer . . . Perhaps to offset the looming bulkof Mark Asprey's corpus, I have laid out my two previouspublications on the desk here.Memoirs of a Listener. On theGrapevine.By Samson Young. Me. Yes, you. A valued stylist, in mynative America. My memoirs, my journalism, praised for their honesty, their truthfulness. I'm not one of those excitable types whoget 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 anice guy, originally. Anyway at the moment reality is behavingunimprovably, 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 HornigUltrason. There are others I could approach. Publishers regularlyinquire about my first novel. Publishers dream nights about my firstnovel. Sodo I. I'm getting old, and at a peculiar rate. Missy Harter, ofcourse, has always been the most persistent. Maybe I'll call her. Ineed the encouragement. I need the stimulation. I need the money.


Keith came over this morning. I suppose hehas to be teeing me upfor 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 littlebit 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 Ј189.99.


It was calledWhen Scandinavian Bodies Go Mouth Crazy. Thetitle proved to be accurate — even felicitous. I sat with Keith for awhile and watched five middle-aged men seated around a tabletalking in Danish or Swedish or Norwegian without subtitles. Youcould make out a word now and then.Radiotherapy. Handikap-toilet.'Where's the remote?' Keith asked grimly. He had need of theFast Forward, the Picture Search. We found the remote but it didn'tseem to be working. Keith had to sit through the whole thing: aneducational short, I assume, about hospital administration. I slippedinto 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 andsaid, 'Bastard.'


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


I too have need of the Fast Forward. But I must let things happen atthe speed she picks. I can eke out Chapter 4 with Keith's sexualconfessions (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 elderlywidow — also fine material), I staked out the Black Cross hoping Guywould show. For the first time I noticed a joke sign behind the bar:no fucking swearing.And what's with thiscarpet? What do you want acarpet for in a place like this? I ordered an orange juice. Oneof 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'sovercoat, the plastic shoes, the never-washed dreadlocks. He's thelocal shaman: he has a religious mission. His hair looks like an onionbhaji. 'You trying to cut down, man?' he slowly asked me. Actually Ihad to make him say it about five times before I understood. Hisresined face showed no impatience. 'I don't drink,' I told him. Hewas nonplussed. Of course, non-drinking, while big in America, wasnever much more than a fad over here. 'Honest,' I said. 'I'mJewish.'. . . Quite a kick, saying that to a barful of blacks. Imaginesaying it in Chicago, or Pittsburgh. Imagine saying it in Detroit. 'Wedon't, much.' Gradually, as if controlled by a dial, pleasure filledShakespeare's eyes - which, it seemed to me, were at least as malarialand sanguinary as my own. One of the embarrassments of my condition: although it encourages, or enforces, a quiet life andsensible habits, it makes me look like Caligula after a very heavyyear. What with all the grape and the slavegirls and everything, andall those fancy punishments and neat tortures I've been dolingout. . . 'It's all in the eyes, man,' said Shakespeare. 'All in the eyes.'


In he came - Guy - with a flourish of fair hair and long-riderraincoat. I watched him secure a drink and settle over the pinballtable. Smugly I marvelled at his transparency, his flickering, flinching transparency. Then I sidled up, placed my coin on the glass (this is thepinball etiquette), and said, 'Let's play pairs.' In his face: a routine thrill of dread, then openness; then pleasure. I impressed him withmy pinball lore: silent five, two-flip, shoulder-check, and so on. Wewere practically pals anyway, having both basked in the sun ofKeith's patronage. And, besides, he was completely desperate, asmany of us are these days. In a modern city, if you have nothing to do(and if you're not broke, and on the street), it's tough to find peopleto do nothing with. We wandered out together and did thePortobello Road for a while, and then — don't you love the English — he asked me home for tea.


Once inside his colossal house I saw further avenues of invasion. Isaw beachheads and bridgeheads. His frightening wife Hope I soonneutralized; I may have looked like a piece of shit Guy'd broughtback from the pub (on the sole of his shoe) but a little media talk andManhattan networking soon schmoozed her into shape. I met herkid sister, Lizzyboo, and looked her over for possible promotion. Butmaybe the currentau pair is more my speed: a ducklike creature, notyoung, with a promisingly vacuous expression. As for the maid,Auxiliadora, Ididn't mess around, instantly hiring her for theapartment. . .


I kind of hate to say it, but Mark Asprey was the key. Everyonewas frankly electrified when I let slip my connexion to the great man.Hope and Lizzyboo had seen his latest West End hit,The Goblet,which Asprey is even now escorting to Broadway. Dully asked by meif she'd liked it, Lizzyboo said, 'I cried, actually. Actually I cried twice.' Guy didn't know Asprey's stuff but said, as if to himself, inamazement, 'To be awriter like that. Just to sit there and do whatyou do.' I fought down an urge to mention my own two books(neither of which found an English publisher. Run a damage-check on that. Yes, it still hurts. It still exquisitely burns).


So one dud writer can usually spot another. When we were alonetogether in the kitchen Guy asked me what I did and I told him,stressing my links with various literary magazines and completelyinventing a fiction consultancy with Hornig Ultrason. I can invent: Ican lie. So how come I can'tinvent? Guy said, 'Really? How interesting.' I sent a sort of pressure wave at him; in fact I wasrubbing my thumb and forefinger together beneath the table when hesaid, 'I've written a couple of things . . .' 'No kidding.' 'A couple of stories. Expanded travel notes, really.' 'I'd certainly be happy to takea look at them, Guy.' 'They aren't any good or anything.' 'Let me bethe judge.' They're rather autobiographical, I'm afraid.' 'Oh,' I said.'That's okay. Don't worry aboutthat.


The other day,' I went on. 'Did Keith follow that girl?'


'Yes he did,' said Guy instantly. Instantly, because Nicola wasalready present in his thoughts. And because love travels at the speedof light. 'Nothing happened. He just talked to her.'


I said, That's not what Keith told me.'


'What did he say?'


'It doesn't matter what he said. Keith's a liar, Guy . . . What happened?'


Later, I got a look at the kid. Jesus.


I'm like a vampire. I can't enter unless I'm asked in over the threshold. Once there, though, I stick around.


And come back whenever I like.


Now here's a pleasing symmetry. All three characters have givenme something they've written. Keith's brochure, Nicola's diaries,Guy's fiction. Things written for different reasons: self-aggrandize-ment, self-communion, self-expression. One offered freely, oneabandoned to chance, one coaxingly procured.


Documentary evidence. Is that what I'm writing? A documentary? As for artistic talent, as for the imaginative patterning of life, Nicola wins. She outwrites us all.


I must get into their houses. Keith will be tricky here, as in everyother area. Probably, and probably rightly, he is ashamed of wherehe lives. He will have a rule about it - Keith, with his tenacities, hisberk protocols, his criminal codes, his fierce and tearful brand- loyalties. Keith will naturally be tricky.


With the murderee I have a bold idea. It would be a truthful move, and Imust have the truth. Guy is reasonably trustworthy; I can allow for his dreamy overvaluations, his selective blindnesses. But Keith is a liar, and I'll have to doublecheck, or triangulate, everything he tellsme. I must have the truth. There just isn't time to settle for anythingless than the truth.


I must get inside their houses. I must get inside their heads. I mustgo deeper - oh, deeper.


We have all known days of sun and storm that make us feel what itis to live on a planet. But the recent convulsions have taken thisfurther. They make us feel what it is to live in a solar system, a galaxy.They make us feel — and I'm on the edge of nausea as I write thesewords — what it is to live in a universe.


Particularly the winds. They tear through the city, they tearthrough the island, as if softening it up for an exponentially greaterviolence. In the last week the winds have killed nineteen people, andthirty-three million trees.


And now, at dusk, outside my window, the trees shake their heads like disco dancers in the strobe lights of nightlife long ago.


Chapter 4: The Dead-End Street


 Dreaming of it.Begging for it. Praying for it.'


Keith pushed his way out of the Black Cross and girdedhimself there on the stone step, beneath the sign.tv and darts. He looked right, he looked left; he grunted. There she was. There wasNicola Six. She stood out clearly like a rivulet of black ink against therummagings and barter pastels of the market street. Past the stallsshe moved wanderingly, erring, erring. If it had occurred to Keiththat Nicola was waiting for him or leading him on, that he was included in any design of hers, he would have dismissed the idea. Butthere was pressing invitation in the idleness with which she wandered, the slow shifts of weight in the tight black skirt. For a briefpassage of time Keith had the odd idea that Nicola was watchinghim; and that couldn't be right, because Keith was watching Nicola,and Nicola hadn't turned. Something tugged him. She's leading meon, he thought, and started following her.Beauty, extreme yetambiguously available:this, very roughly, was what Nicola'sentrance into the Black Cross had said to Keith. But he didn't knowthe nature - he didn't know the brand - of the availability. Keithburped hotly. He was going to find out.


Now Nicola paused in profile, and bent to inspect the cheap chinaof a covered barrow. Raising her face she had words with thebarrow's owner, acheat Keith knew well. She raised her veil. . .When she'd raised her veil in the pub Keith had looked at her withsharp interest, certainly, but not with desire. No, not exactly desire;the point of the dart in his foot precluded desire, hurt too much fordesire. Nicola was tall - taller than Keith in her heels - and, it would seem, delicately made, the curve of the ankle answering to the curveof the throat. She looked like a model, but not the kind of modelKeith generally preferred. She looked like a fashion model, and Keithgenerally preferred the other kind, the glamour kind. The demean­our of the glamour model proclaimed that you could do what youliked with her. The demeanour of the fashion model proclaimed that she could do what she liked with you. Besides, and more basically,Keith generally preferred short girls with thick short legs and bigbreasts (no theoretical limit) and fat bums - girls in the mould ofTrish Shirt and Peggy Obbs, of Debbee Kensit (who was special) andAnaliese Furnish. The legs appeared to be particularly important. Keith couldn't help noticing that the legs he most often forced open,the legs he most often found dangling over his shoulders, tended to be exceptionally thick in the ankle, tended, in fact, to be ankleless,and exceptionally thick in the calf. He had concluded that fat legs were what he must generally prefer. The discovery pleased Keith at first, then perplexed and even worried him, because he had neverthought of himself as being fussy. Nicola's ankles: you weresurprised they could bear all that height and body. Perhaps she justwasn't his type. Oh, but she was. Something told him that shedefinitely, she deeplywas.


Nicola moved on. Keith followed. Other possibilities aside, sheinterested Keith in the same way that Guy Clinch or old LadyBarnaby interested him. She was in the A. i. bracket. Keith wasn't thesort of bloke who disapproved of people who had a lot of money. Heliked there to be people who had a lot of money, so that he couldcheat them out of it. Keith was sorry, but he wouldn't want to live inthe kind of society where nobody was worth burgling. No way.Thus, as he trailed Nicola through the trash of the harrowed street, thinking that her backside might well be fatter than it looked andanyway the thinner bird often made it up to you in the crib, severalconsiderations obtained.


He waited until she approached the flower stall and stood thereremoving her gloves. Then he went in. Giving the nod and the pointedfinger to old Nigel (who owed Keith and had good reason to be wary ofhim), and moving with his usual confident clumsiness, he wrenched ahandful of brown paper from the nail and edged along the barrowpicking the soaked bunches from their plastic tubs and saying,'Discover the language of flowers. And let their soothingwords..."He paused, trying to recapture the full jingle. 'Soothe away all your cares like.' No wedding ring, he thought. Could tellthat, even under the glove in the Cross. 'Daffodils. Glads. Some ofthem. Some of them. The lot. A time like this.' He held forth thethrottled posy. 'Why be retiring? On me.' Bites her nails but thehands are lazy. Dead lazy. 'You heading on down this way? Or I gotthe Cavalier round the corner.' Without quite touching her, hishands merely delineating the shape of her shoulders, Keith urgedNicola forward along the street. Expensive suit. Not cheap. 'I see agirl like you. Bit of a beauty. Head in the clouds as such. You said yougot your own place.' She nodded and smiled. 'Now.' The mouth on her. That veil'd be useful too. 'Me? I'm Handy Andy. Mr Fixit innit.You know, the fuse's gone. The boiler's creating or the bell don'twork. You need somebody with a few connexions.' The shoes: half a grand. Got to be. 'Because I know. I know it's hard, Nicky, to engageany real services these days. To be honest with you,' he said, and hiseyes closed with stung pride, 'I don't know what the fuckingcountry's coming to. I don't.' She slowed her pace; briskly she removed her hat and the black clip that secured her chignon. With aroll of her throat she shook out her hair, Jesus: highpriced. Theywalked on. TV. 'All I'm saying is I'm a man can get things done. Any little prob like. Cry out for Keith. This it?'


They had approached the entrance to the dead-end street.


'I live down there,' she said. 'Thank you for these.'


As she slowed, and half turned, and walked on, and slowed again,Nicola fanned herself with the flap of a glove. Her colour was high. Sheeven hooked a thumb into the V of her black jacket and tugged. She'shung, too, he thought. The bitch. Remarkably, this final bonus beganto have a dispiriting effect on Keith Talent. Because perfection wouldbe no good to him. Rather wistfully, he imagined she might have a bigscar somewhere, or another blemish that he, for one, might willinglyoverlook. Failing that, in her mental instability he would repose hishopes. The condition of her nails was some comfort to him. Cold comfort only, though. By Keith's standards, they weren't that bad. They were bitten; but they weren't bitten off. That left her accent,which was definitely foreign (Europe, thought Keith: somewhere inthe middle), and they might do things funny where she came from.Well, there was no harm in trying, he decided, although there'd been alot of harm in trying as hard ashe had, once or twice in the past.


She said, 'It's very muggy, don't you find?'


Torrid,' said Keith.


'Goodness.'


'As close as can be.' His smile was playfully abject as he pitched hisvoice low and thick and added, 'Anything you want, darling.Anything at all.'


'Well as a matter of fact,' she said, in a tone so clear and ordinary that Keith found himself briefly standing to attention, 'there are oneor two things that certainly need looking at. Like the vacuum cleaner. It's very good of you.'


'What's your phone number, Nick,' said Keith sternly.


She hesitated; then she seemed to give a sudden nod to herself.'Have you got a pen?'


'No need,' said Keith, re-emboldened. 'Got this head for figures.'And with that he let his mouth drop open, and rested a large tongue on the lower teeth as his bright eyes travelled downwards over her body.


Her voice gave him the seven digits with a shiver.


'Sweet,' said Keith.


Thoughtfully Keith retraced his steps to the Black Cross. He had inmind a few drinks, to loosen the throwing arm; and then someserious darts. In the Portobello Road he encountered Guy Clinch,apparently browsing over a stall of stolen books. Keith never failedto be amazed that books fetched money. 'Yo,' he said, and paused fora few words. He considered. His circle of acquaintances wasdefinitely expanding. It was through Guy, basically, that Keith had been introduced to Lady Barnaby. That's how it's done: the old-boynetwork . . . Keith had, of course, been friendly with people like Guybefore: in prison. They were in for fraud, mostly, or drugs, oralimony default. White collar. They were okay (Guy was okay); they were human; they showed you respect, not wishing to get beaten upall day. But Guy wasn't in prison. He was in a huge house in Lansdowne Crescent. According to Keith, people like Guy admiredand even envied the working man, such as himself. For some reason.Maybe because the working man lived that bit harder, in both workand play. When Guy now gamely asked him, 'Any luck?' — meaningNicola - Keith waved him away, with a groan of hard-livinglaughter, saying he had too many birds on as it was.They parted. Keith's plans changed. He looked in at Mecca, histurf accountants, for an expensive few minutes, then hurried off to do some work.


Keith used the heavy knocker. Slowly the door opened, and apleading face blinked out at him. Filled, at first, with extremecaution, the pale blue eyes now seemed to rinse themselves in delight.


'Why, Harry! Good afternoon to you.'


'Afternoon, Lady B.,' said Keith, striding past her into the house.


Lady Barnaby was seventy-seven. She wasn't one of Keith's birds.No way.


In his bachelor days Keith had been a regularromeo.He had been areal ladykiller. In truth, he had been quite a one. Even Keith's dogClive, in his dog heyday, had been no keener or less choosy or moreincapable of letting a female scent go by without streaking after itwith his nose on the ground and his tongue thrown over his shoulder like a scarf. Then came change, and responsibilities: Kath, his wife,and their baby girl, little Kim. And now it was all different. These days Keith kept a leash on his restless nature, restricting himself tothe kind of evanescent romance that might come the way of anymodern young businessman on his travels (the wife or sister or daughter or mother of somecheat in the East End, perhaps, whereKeith went to get the perfume), plus the occasional indiscretionrather closer to home (Iqbala, the single parent in the next flat along), plus the odd chance encounter made possible when fortune smiles onyoung lovers (closing time, pub toilet), plus three regular andlongstanding girlfriends, Trish Shirt, Debbee Kensit, who was special, and Analiese Furnish. And that was it.


Most interesting, in her way, most representative, most modern,was sinuous Analiese. Naughty, haughty, dreamy and unreliable,given to panic attacks, swoons, hysterical blindness, Analiese, inKeith's view, was mental. She read books and wrote poems. She sent letters to celebrities in all walks of life. She hung around outside TVstudios, concert halls, the Institute of Contemporary Arts. In theletters she sent to people whose faces she had seen on the televisionand in the newspapers Analiese Furnish often enclosed a photo­graph; as a result, she often got replies. Not that these photographs were lewd or revealing or fleshy. Oh no. Snapped by one or other ofher male protectors (abject, tongue-tied types, platonic attendants:


she thought, absolutely wrongly and with characteristic lack of


imagination, that they loved her for her mind), these photographsshowed Analiese in pensive poses, gazing out of windows, or insylvan settings, bending in her frock, perhaps, to relish the touch of a flower. Yet the replies came in, guarded, cajoling, exploratory. Why?What did the photographs say? The wideness of the eyes told of a heavy dream life; the brow was the brow of someone who could belied to, and successfully; and the wide mouth and tropical henna ofthe hair suggested that when Analiese gave herself to you, she wouldgive herself utterly, and probably wouldn't ring the house. In this lastparticular alone, appearances were deceptive.Analiese was decep­tive, but not predictably. Also, she had a figure of full womanly power and beauty, except for her legs (which were fat and always hidden up to the last moment. These legs were the bane of her life).What you did with famous people just wasn't your fault. Different rules applied. You were swept away. And when it was over (and itwas usually over quickly), well, you were wryly left with youralbums and scrapbooks, your poems, your train-tickets, yourmemories, your dreams, your telephone calls to his wife andchildren, your letters to the editors of all the tabloids.


Keith had met Analiese on the street. She came up to him andasked, in her husky and theatrical voice, if he was television's RickPurist - Rick Purist, of TV quiz-show fame. Keith hesitated. So might some medieval hermit have hesitated when the supplicant poor staggered through the dripping forest to his hovel, and asked ifhe was the Emperor Frederick or Baldwin IX, Count of Flanders,risen from the dead and come to redeem them, to give succour, to free from sorrow. Well now, the hermit must have wondered in his rags:am I or aren't I? It might be fun for a while. On the other hand . . . Keith peered at Analiese's heaving chest, and trusted to instinct. Headmitted it to be so: hewas television's Rick Purist. Thus the opening, tone-setting phoneme of their relationship — his slurred 'yeah' - was an outright lie. He accepted an invitation to join her fortea in her West Hampstead bedsitter. Keith drank the sherry whileshe showed him her memorabilia of the great and talked about theprimacy of the human soul. Twenty-five minutes later, as Keithleadenly climbed into his trousers and headed for the door, he glanced back at the sofabed in the confident hope that he would seeAnaliese no more. But one night, a month or two later, he grew fondand wistful, and called her at three o'clock in the morning from the


Black Cross. She read out a poem she'd written him. Keith went


round there anyway. A month after that he opened his tabloid andsaw a piece entitledstolen hours with tv's rick. There was apicture of Analiese, in her frock, savouring the scent of a municipalbloom. There was another picture of Analiese, without the flower,and without the frock (and cut off at the knee). There was also apicture of a puzzled Rick Purist: he did indeed look a bit like Keith.Here in cold print Keith learned that he was 'very romantic' and 'afantastic lover' who was, moreover, 'built for love'. Rick Puristdenied it all. Rick's wife Traci was standing by him. Words could notdescribe the elation Keith felt. He bought thirty copies of thenewspaper and was about to shower the Black Cross with them. But just in time he realized that this would be an inappropriate response to a really singular slice of luck. Powerfully eroticized all the same,Keith called in on Analiese that very week. She knew by now, to hercost and embarrassment (or to the cost and embarrassment of the tabloid's editors), that Keith was not Rick Purist. But she forgot andforgave, and invented new fictions for him: Keith as fly-by-night, as man with no name, a crossword of aliases, a Proteus and Pimpernel.Keith didn't get it; but he certainly liked it. Never before had his unreliability and heartless neglect been seized on and celebrated as the core of his appeal.


Obviously there were little complications: obviously. Sometimes,when he stumbled into her bedsit in the small hours, Analiese was not alone. An adoring baldy or four-eyes - some wally, wimp, nerdor narna — might be sleeping on the chair, or on the floor, like a dog, in which case Keith would speed them into the night with a taunt and(whoops!) a kick in the arse, pick himself up off the floor and joinAnaliese in the sofabed with her warmth and her breasts and herlaughter. On other occasions he surprised her in bed with famous people. This didn't happen very often (Keith didn't go round there very often), and the famous people were no longer very famous; but it did happen. A classical musician, some terrified poet: these werethe kind of celebrities, and non-tabloid readers, to whom Analiesewas now reduced. No hard feelings. Fair was fair. Keith would take afew swigs of whatever was available, crack a few jokes, and be on hisway, usually to Trish Shirt's. Once he surprised her in bed with Rick Purist. Analiese was making amends (she later explained) for the disruption she had brought to Rick's marriage. On came the bedsidelamp: Keith and Rick looked quite alike. Keith stared. He'd seen


Rick on the telly! It was one of the strangest moments in Keith's


strange life. He soon hopped it...That night seemed to sum it allup, really. She lived out in Slough now, did Analiese; and Keith was abusy man.


And Debbee? Little Debbee? Well, Debbee wasspecial. Dark,rounded, pouting, everything circular, ovoid, Debbee was 'special'. Debbee was special because Keith had been sleeping with her sinceshe was twelve years old. On the other hand, so had several otherpeople. All completely kosher and Bristol-fashion because she'd hadher tubes done and you just gave cash gifts of seventy-five quid to hermum, who wasn't bad either. Keith was very straight with DebbeeKensit. Respect. Consideration. Nothing dirty. Natural love. You got a ghostly feeling as you separated from her, on the small bed, inthe small room, its walls fadedly rendering the lost sprites and dwarfs and maidens of childhood; and the white smell of very young flesh.Plump and prim (and fat-legged) on the man-made lower sheet lay little Debbee. And shockingly naked: untasselled, ungimmicked,unschool-uniformed. Such extras were to be found, plentifully enough, in her top drawer; but Debbee was always naked for herKeith, as nature intended. She wouldn't suggest wearing those things— no, not with Keith. And Keith was always too embarrassed to ask.Last autumn, Debbee had celebrated her fifteenth birthday. In thepast Keith had gone round there as often as he could afford (or moreoften: he had sometimes knowingly bounced cheques on Mrs K.).Since November, though, he was less frequently to be seen there. ButDebbee would always be special to Keith. She would always be special. At least until she was eighteen. Or sixteen.


And finally, invariably finally, there was Trish Shirt, blonde andpale and getting on a bit now, thinnish Trish (but sturdy-legged),who couldn't remember how old she was or what kind of blonde herhair had been when she started out, so many years ago. She livedunder a supermarket on Ladbroke Grove, which was convenient, and even necessary, because she hated going out. Trish neededseveral tumblers of vodka before she could face the strip lighting andthe caged goods. Keith brought Trish her dole, sparing her thefortnightly mortification, with money subtracted for her drink, thussparing her a much more frequent ordeal. This figured strongly in thesteady increase of his powers. Keith was like a god to Trish. 'I'd do anything for you, Keith. Anything,' she said. And Keith took her upon it. But every time he strode out of CostCheck clutching the keys to the heavy Cavalier, or silently got dressed (or rezipped himself) while staring at her pale body, Keith vowed that this visit would be his last.


Every time he pushed open the plywood door, every time Trish cameto welcome him on her knees, Keith was that little bit angrier. Forthis he would give Trish payment. God save us, what was hedoing tohimself? Why was he here, with her, with that, when he hadfunloving little Debbee, and sinuous Analiese (and Peggy and Iqbala and Petronella and Fran) ? Well, it was true that Trish had somethingto be said for her. Trish had a certain quality. She was nearest.


How to account for Keith's way with women, such as it was? Howto account for Keith's talent? He had a knack. Keith could tellwomen what they were thinking. No doubt this has never been easy.But it's quite an accomplishment, with these women, in these days.


On the other hand, how much of a way with women did Keithreally need? One was drunk, one was nuts, and one was fifteen. The ladykiller. These, then, were Keith's birds.


The nearest he had ever come to love, funnily enough, was withChick Purchase. For years Chick had invaded and usurped histhoughts: Keithhated him, with a passion. And Keith could have loved the guy...It all went back to that business disagreement, atthe plant off the M4 near Bristol. But there were also rumours,legends, about an incident at a party, an incident involving Keith andChick's sister, Charlotte Purchase. Some spoke of improper sugges­tions; others, of attempted rape. Whatever the truth of the matter,Keith, fresh out of hospital after a daring raid on a rival's drugs pub,had been promptly rehospitalized by Chick. Looking back on it now,with mature hindsight, Keith said that it was all crap about theattempted rape (which, he claimed, had been an unqualified success),and that a darker tale lay behind the enmity, something of which a man might not easily speak. At the bar of the Black Cross it wasgenerally agreed, in fearful whispers, that the two men had fallen outover a disputed darts score. Well, there was no coming back from that. And Keith could have loved the guy.


'And how are you, Harry?' asked good Lady Barnaby.


'Good,' said Keith. 'I'm good, Lady B. Everything shipshape?'Keith made a perfunctory tour of the house, checking therefurbished boiler, the patched and sanded kitchen floorboards, theshifted furniture, the new window pane . . . The old window panehad been personally smashed by Keith Talent a few days ago, as ameans of speeding his introduction to Lady Barnaby. It was GuyClinch who had first drawn Keith's attention to the old woman,pointing out a stooped figure on Ladbroke Grove: 'Knew herhusband . . . the house is far too big for her now.' Keith did what heusually did when he wanted to get to know a member of the oppositesex. He followed her home. Then the brick in the soiled handker­chief. 'Excuse me, missis,' Keith had panted when Lady Barnabyeventually came to the door (and peered through the letterbox), 'some black kids just put a brick through your downstairs window. I chased them but the little - but they got away.' It took a while beforeshe let Keith inside. The old dear was all aflutter; she had been humming over a flower arrangement a few feet from the exploding glass. She wept on his shoulder. They drank half a bottle of cognac.Keith calmed her with tales of his unpleasant experiences with our coloured brethren . . . Ever since that day Keith was always lookingin on Lady B., to do odd jobs, or rather to supervise them. He had noidea about any of that, merely leasing out the work to variouscowboys he knew in White City. Lady Barnaby was fiercely grateful to Keith. She often said that it did her old heart good that people like him still existed.


'Well, Harry? What do you think?' asked Lady Barnaby uneasily.


Uneasily Keith slapped the boiler and pronounced it a fine piece ofwork. In fact even he could tell that something very serious indeedwas about to go wrong with it. He felt nervous being in the sameroom — or on the same floor — as this labouring gravity-bomb in itspadded vest.


'Real craftsmanship,' he said.


'Listen to it, though, Harry. That terrible clanging. And thosespitting noises.'


'That's just the vents, adjusting to the new, to the increased flow, Lady B. The - thecladding. It's the cladding as such.'


'Wait for me!'


In the kitchen Keith said,


'You're going to have a smashing time in Yugoslavia, Lady B. What? Are you sure! / saw your mouth water when you took a look at that brochure. Your own suite, private pool, five-star dining. It'sgoing to be heaven out there, love. Oh, heaven.' Briefly Keith thoughtof the holiday package he had concocted with his mate in thebucket-shop off Harrow Road: the hotel half-built and half-rotting;the shadow of the abandoned factory; the blighted shore. 'You neverknow,' he said, 'you might meet someone nice.'


'Harry!’


'No, come on. Because you're a pretty old lady, Lady B. You are.Not like my mum. Tell you what: I'll run you out to the airport on Friday morning. Shut up. Nothing simpler. I'll see you then then.And if you have any probs, Lady B., you know what to do. Any littlething, cry out for Keith. I mean Harry.'


Keith had a late lunch at the Amritsar and then returned to theBlack Cross and played darts for eleven hours.


Expedient to a fault in most things, Keith was a confessed romanticwhen it came to his darts . . . The deal went something like this. A house in Twickenham or thereabouts: in the environs of Twick­enham. An aviary. Park the wife and kid. Keep greyhounds. A household name. Figure in the England manager's plans: throw yourheart out in an England shirt. An ambassador for the sport, a credit to the game. Give every barmaid in Britain one: no female pubgoeron earth can resist a celebrity darter, a personality. Tours ofScandinavia, Australia, Canada, the States. Build up a personal library of every victory on video. Be on television, a face known bymillions. On TV innit. TV. TV...


Earlier in the summer, while completing (with infinite pain anddifficulty) his entry form for the Duoshare Sparrow Masters, theknockout interpub darts competition in which he was doing so wellnow, Keith pondered and agonized for several days before filling inthe section markedhobbies. He wanted to putdarts and leave it at that. But darts was work. It would be like saying that his hobbieswerecheating, burgling andreceiving. Besides, he had in the pastwon two self-sufficiency awards from the British Darts Organization— darts bursaries, darts scholarships, as it were, to help him in his bidto go pro. He wasn't too clear on all this (and the cash grants had kept Keith self-sufficient for about fifteen minutes each in the turfaccountants), but a struggler in the world of small businesseswouldn't tell you that his 'hobby' wasexpanding a timber-yard orrunning a fag shop,now would he? What, then,were Keith's hobbies? He couldn't putbirds. It might get back to Kath. Hecouldn't puthorses orwalking Clive orgoing to the pub. Pool andfruit machines had, if little else, the stamp of authenticity...He toyed with certain fictions:potholing, rallying, growing vegetables.But his pride rebelled against the imposture. Growing vegetables?You must be...In the end he searched his soul for the last time,white-knuckled his grip on the biro, and put TV.


It was no less than the truth. He watched a very great deal of TV, always had done, years and years of it, aeons of TV. Boy, did Keithburn that tube. And that tube burnt him, nuked him, its cathodescrackling like cancer. 'TV,' he thought, or 'Modern reality' or Theworld'. It was the world of TV that told him what the world was. How does all the TV time work on a modern person, a person likeKeith? The fact that he would have passed up a visit to the Louvre or thePradoin favour of ten minutes alone with a knicker catalogue —this, perhaps, was a personal quirk. But TV came at Keith like itcame at everybody else; and he had nothing whatever to keep it out.He couldn't grade or filter it. So he thought TV was real...Ofcourse, some of itwas real. Riots in Kazakhstan were real, stuffabout antiques was real (Keith watched these shows in a spirit of professional dedication), mass suicides in Sun City were real, darts was real. But so, to Keith, wasSyndicate andEdwin Drood: TheMusicalandBow Bells andThe Dorm That Dripped Blood. Not an active reality, like, say, darts, on which the camera obligingly spiedand eavesdropped. No, an exemplary reality, all beautifully and gracefully interconnected, where nothing hurt much and nobody got old. It was a high trapeze, the artists all sequin and tutu (look at thatbird!), enacted far above the sawdust, the peanut shells and poodledroppings, up there, beyond a taut and twanging safety-net calledmoney.


In the days after their first meeting, the image of Nicola Six began to work on Keith's mind. It worked like television. He thought of heroften — while inspecting a shop window in Oxford Street, whilebaring after his scattered urges in the last moments before sleep,while finishing himself off with Trish Shirt. Although many of thesethoughts were frankly pornographic (but class porn, you know? Notlike the rubbish you get here), by no means all of them were. He saw himself in lace-up swimming-trunks, on a lounger, frowning over a balance-sheet by a personal plunge-pool, and Nicola walking past inbikini and high heels, bringing him a drink and tenderly tousling hishair. 'LA innit,' he whispered. Or Keith in a tuxedo, on a patio,outside Palermo: glass table and candles, and her in a flowing gown.An international entrepreneur with wide business interests. Re­deemed, and freed from sorrow. On the other side. Where darts might yet take him. Where he belonged.


He left it for a bit, then called her.


His exit from the Black Cross that afternoon was marked for its airof studious and purposeful calm. Outside, the day was still; the flaresof Keith's trousers billowed gracefully as he walked to the heavyCavalier. With lips compressed and sternly pushed forward, hepicked his way through the doubled traffic.


In fact, Keith was displeased. He hadn't much cared for the soundof her, on the phone. That small voice might be doing no more than wasting his valuable time. Or playing it cool. But that was okay. Nowoman could play it cooler than Keith — Keith, with his prodigies ofthoughtlessness. Like being late. Keith was always late for his dates,especially for the first one. And if he had a standby he seldom showed up at all.


'I'll be right over,' Keith had said. He now doubleparked outsidethe Indian Mutiny on Cathcart Road. Seated at his usual table, Keithate poppadams and bombay duck while the staff fondly prepared hismutton vindaloo. 'The napalm sauce, sir?' asked Rashid. Keith was resolved, in this as in all things. 'Yeah. The napalm sauce.' In thekitchen they were busy responding to Keith's imperial challenge: to make a curry so hot that he couldn't eat it. The meal arrived. Lively but silent faces stared through the serving-hatch. The first spoonfulswiped a mustache of sweat on to Keith's upper lip, and drew excited murmurs from the kitchen. 'Bit mild,' said Keith when he could talkagain. That day, the Indian Mutiny had no other customers. Keithchewed steadily. His lion's hair looked silver in the shadows. Tears inched their way over his dry cheeks. 'Bland, Rashid,' said Keith, later, as he paid and undertipped. 'What you looking at? It's five percent. Bland. Dead bland.'


'Nicky? Keith,' said Keith, after the long push on the buzzer.


A second buzz, and the door succumbed to his touch. He turned and looked out at the dead-end street.


Keith contemplated the stairs. The mutton vindaloo rippedanother stunning burp out of him. Lingering only to inspect a lockand to hold a brown envelope up to the light, and to lean against thewall for five minutes with his brow on his wrist, Keith began theheavy climb.


He came to the top, and found a door. He opened it. 'Jesus,' hesaid. More stairs.


Nicola stood on the brink of this final storey, wearing a softwoollen dress the colour of a Siamese cat, three of its nine buttons, itsnine lives, already unfastened, and emerald earrings like tiger's eyesin the pockets of her black hair, and the silver collar, and every finger ofher clenched hands barbed with rings.


'Come on up.'


'Champagne,' said Keith. 'Cheers,' he added. 'Jesus.'


He followed her down the passage and into the sitting-room,wiggling a finger some millimetres from her backside. Then, with aserious sniff, he confronted the room and its mental arithmetic. Nicolaturned to face him, and Keith's calculations continued. The sum gotbigger. Including jewellery. Outlay. TV, he thought. When she raiseda hand to her throat Keith fumbled and crashed round his mind,looking for a pun onchoker. He didn't find one.


He said, 'Prestigious.'


'. . . Do you want a drink or something?'


'Work before pleasure, my love,' said Keith, who was quite drunkalready. On the whole he wished he wasn't, because hangovers played havoc with a man's darts. But he had seemed to need those seven pints of lager (you got to, with that stuff) and the chain of brandies withwhich he had rounded off his meal. Keith wondered why. It was out ofcharacter, so early in the day. Not that it mattered, because Keithcould hold his drink. No one knew the difference. He thought with all modesty of the times he had burst through Trish Shirt's plywood doorand walked straight into the wall, and she never said a word. Keith justcarried it off.


'You're quite drunk already, aren't you, Keith,' said Nicola.


'Little celebration,' said Keith smoothly. But—you don't do that, hewas thinking. You don't say it. No, you don't. That's what youneverdo . . .Keith looked at his feet, wrong-footed, and felt her eyes move strictly over his pub hair. Nicola's legs, he saw, were set combatively apart, and the last button of her dress was unfastened. Nicola's dress: Keith had been intending, at an early stage in their encounter, to ramhis hand up it. But not now, he thought. No way.


She looked at her watch and said, 'I suppose we might as well getstarted.' And Keith was being led into the kitchen. Grimly and without profit he fingered the faulty vacuum cleaner, peered into the block-prone waste disposer, manhandled the hingeless ironing-board.


'This is hopeless,' said Nicola.


I'm a busy man, thought Keith. I can't just drop everything. I comeup here...'I come up here,' he said. 'I'm a busy man. I can't just dropeverything.'


There's the coffee-grinder.’


The coffee-grinder was produced. They both stared at it. It lookedokay to Keith.


'Do you think it's the fuse?' she asked confidentially.


'Could be.' Grinder, he thought. Here we go. Grind her. A good -


She offered him a screwdriver and looked on with interest. 'I can'tdo it. The screw's too tight.'


Screw, thought Keith. Too tight. Yeah. He was surprised, again, tofind no joke, no icebreaking salacity, on his slowly smiling lips. Hangabout: it's coming. Too tight. Screw. If it's . . . you can't have a...


He applied the tool with will. The blade ground into the scratchedhead - and skidded off into the mons of Keith's thumb.


'Fuck,'he said, and dropped everything.


Now I had no choice but to end that chapterright there. I too hadto drop everything. Maybe I can go back later and soften thetransition, if there's time.


Keith's version just couldn't be trusted for a second longer. Sheloves him up in the bathroom? She makes him a cash offer? No. No. I had to make my move (no rest for the wicked). I had to get out there.


Up to that point the Talent narrative was of such mortifyingsqualor — it had to be no less than pedantic truth, in my opinion. Itwas relayed not to me alone but also to Dean, Thelonius, Fucker and Bogdan, in the Black Cross. Everyone tacitly agreed that Keith was emerging well from the tale.


How is this? Remember: modern, modern. Because it was all atribute to Keith's indifference. To Keith not caring about anything.This would pave the way for still greater triumph in the sexual arena,where, of course (in Keith's version), an impenetrable mendacity took hold.


A real shock this morning. A cockroach — in Mark Asprey'sapartment. It dashed the length of the kitchen, from beneath one labour-saving facility to another. It looked like a little coach-and-four, with a tiny driver, wielding a tinier whip.


Now I knew they'd reached here, these big fat black ones, andcolonized the place. But in Mark Asprey's apartment! The Clinchesevidently have them too. I expected and hoped that the first roachwave would respect the local traditions. I thought they'd all hang outat Keith's. But try explaining class to a cockroach. Cockroachesdon't understand the English, like I do. I understand the English. I'm ashamed to say I pride myself on it.


Iwant to hang out at Keith's. I long to be asked over. Dartslessons, which turn out to be incredibly horrible, only get you intoKeith's garage. The lone tower block at the end of GolborneRoad: I can see it from my bedroom window. I'm working on it.


Auxiliadorawill start coming in this week. I am beset byinvitations from Lansdowne Crescent. I see myself standing outsidethe master bedroom, naked, with my clothes in a little bundle,knocking on the door.


So I tethered the diaries in their original ribbon and went aroundto Nicola's apartment. That's the thing: 1 justdid it. Unlike GuyClinch, 1 have Nicola's address and phone number. 1 have all her pastaddresses and phone numbers too. They're all there, on page one: hernomad progress through the city. Chelsea, Blackfriars, Regent'sPark, Bloomsbury, Hampstead, and so on. And now the dead-endstreet. She's never been so far west before. Nicola Six has livedcare ofan awful lot of people. But they didn't take enough care, and shesoon moved on.


'6: six,' said the tab. 'Yes, hello?' The voice was guilty and defiant.No one likes to be surprised, at home, on late afternoons. No onelikes to be surprised. And I could have been Keith. I said, 'My name isSamson Young. Hello. We met in the pub, remember, the Black Cross? And later that day we saw each other on the street? I havesomething of yours I would like to return to you.''.. . I don't wantit.' 'Yes you do.' 'No I don't.' 'Okay. Then I'll try the police.'


'Christ,' she said. 'Another literalist. Look. Come back in anhour.'


I played a mild hunch. That's what writing is, a hundred hunches,a hundred affronts to your confidence, a hundred decisions, every page. I said, 'There's no need for you to dress up for me. I'm not acontender in all this. I'm - disinterested. I won't stay long and I don'tcare how you look. I won't dissuade you .. .' There was a silence.Then she hung up. There was another silence. Then the buzzer sounded and I pressed my way through.


It took me at least as long as it took Keith to get to the top. I passedthe usual stuff: lurking bikes, the loathed mail of tan envelopes,mirrors, potted plants. On the last flight, past the inner door - youcould feel it, well before she actually appeared on the stairs. Now I'mno chaser, and I failed in love, but I've felt these powerful feminineauras, these feminine shockwaves. Nothing like this, though, suchintensity poised and cocked, and ready to go either way. Oh, entirelyready. And when she appeared at the top of the stairs - the white dressing-gown, the hair aslant over the unpainted face - I fielded the brutal thought that she'd just had fifteen lovers all at once, or fifteenperiods. I followed her into the low room.


'It's characteristic,' I said. 'Pleasantly anarchical.' Meaning the room. I couldn't get her to look up at me. Her demeanour appearedto express great reluctance, or even physical fear. But it's hard to know what's really happening, on a first date.


'Do you want a drink or something?'


'You have one.' A half-empty bottle of red wine stood on the table by the window. On another table Keith's flowers stood dying in theirbowl. Nicola left the room; I heard the surge of the faucet; then shereturned with the rinsed glass. The cork came off silently. Set againstthe clear light of the panes, the glass bore two faint smears of red,wine at the base, lipstick at the rim. Today's wine, yesterday's lipstick. She wore no lipstick now. Nor had her dressing-gown beenrecently washed. There was a certain pride in this. Her body hadafter all been recklessly adored, every inch of it. Even her secretions,even her waste (she perhaps felt), even her dust was adorable. Shesmelled of tragic sleep and tobacco. Not cigarette smoke but tobacco- moistly dark.


Two wicker chairs faced each other, by the small table and itslamp. She sat in one chair and rested her feet on the other. The phonewas at arm's length. So this was her telephone posture. I felt hope: she would communicate. I was looking at her but she wouldn't lookat me. Everywhere else, but not at me.


'Siddown,' she said wearily, indicating the couch. I placed thediaries on the floor at my feet. 'So you read them.' 'It wasn't difficult,'I said. 'I couldn't put them down.' She smiled to herself, secretively, so I added, 'You have a way with language, and with much else. Infact I'm envious.' 'Everything? You read everything.' 'Yup.' Sheblushed — to her fierce annoyance. It was quite a light-show for a while, the olive skin thickening with violet. Yes, some tints of rose were present in her darkness, She arranged the hem of her dressing-gown and said,'So you know all about my sexual. . .'


'Your sexual . . . weakness? Predilection? Bugbear?'


'Perversion.'


'Oh. It's quite common.'


'Is it?'


She looked at me now all right. Her lower lip hung in consideredhostility. I'd better get this one right, I thought. Or it could be all over. And if I wanted the truth from her, then I had to give the truthtoo. And Imust have the truth.


'Are you going "to go to the police" about it?' she asked.


'We are most of us', I said, 'in some kind of agony. I'm not here tojudge you.'


'Thanks. Whatare you here for?'


I was close to full confession, but I said, 'I'm just an observer. Or alistener.'


'What's in it for me? For me you're just an unwelcome complica­tion.'


'Maybe not. Maybe I'll help simplify. I'm intrigued by what you say about the death of love . . . Nicola, let me be your diary.'


At this point she must have made her decision. I found out why shemade it, just before I left. We started with Keith's visit and talked forabout forty-five minutes. She answered all my questions, even the most impudent, with considered clarity, and intense recall. I had toresist the temptation to take notes. And she threw in a tour of the apartment: through the inner passage, into the bedroom, and outagain.


'I'm going to keep my promise and slip away,' I said. 'Can I callyou tomorrow? Oh - you're a Scorpio, right? When is yourbirthday?' This was vicious. What's the matter with me? Who do I think I am? But she didn't seem to mind. 'Isn't that Guy Fawkes'Night?'


'Yes. Bonfire Night.'


'You know it's also the day of the full eclipse?'


'Yes I know. It's good, isn't it?'


We both stood up. Then we did something that people hardly everdo in real life. We looked at each other - for twenty seconds, thirty,forty. It was especially tough for me, with my eyes and everything. In the flinch that at one point she gave I noticed that her teeth, stronglyslanted, wore the faintest signs of neglect. The discoloration(vertical, resinous) was itself fatalistic. Well, why bother? Thosestains gave me my first and only erotic pang of the afternoon, not thewarm outlines of the breasts, nor the conviction of nakednessbeneath the cotton, sweetly soiled. No one had looked at me thatway for quite a time; and I was moved. When she shaped herself for aquestion or statement, I could see what was coming, and I knew itwas fully earned.


'You're-'


'Don't say it!' I said (I astonished myself), and clasped my hands over my ears. 'Please. Not yet. Please don't say it.'


And now she raised a hand, to stifle or cover a smile she knew to bewicked. 'My God,' she said. 'You reallyare.'


On the way back two swearing children offered me a handful ofsweets: Jimmies, or Smarties. I considered, as I listened to thesqueaked, the squandered obscenities of the seven-year-olds.


I really ought to think about what I'm doing, accepting candy fromstrange children.


Before I left, Nicola gave me back her diaries and told me to throwthem on a skip somewhere. I tried to look casual about it. I couldn'ttell her that I'd spent half the day Xeroxing them in their entirety. Mark Asprey has a Xerox, a beautiful little thing. It seems to work like a toaster, when it works, which it doesn't, not right now. I wentto the Bangladeshi stationer's in Queensway. It was a real drag and cost just enough to tip me into a money panic. I cracked at once andrang Missy Harter at Hornig Ultrason. Naturally I didn't talk to herdirect, but I had words with her assistant, Janit. Not quite true. I hadwords with Missy Harter's assistant's assistant, Barbro: Janit'sassistant. Missy Harter will apparently return my call.


Of course it's far too early to start thinking about an advance. Or itwas then, a couple of hours ago. But I don't see how I can be stopped,now I've found common cause with the murderee.


I'm ridiculously pleased, in Chapter 4, with that bit about theEmperor Frederick and Baldwin IX, Count of Flanders. WhenAnaliese comes up to him in the street, and he wonders whether to gowith the Rick Purist ticket, or stick to Keith. I stole it fromThePursuit of the Millenniumby Norman Cohn. Like everybody else I'mfinding it harder and harder to pick up a book, but I can still managebrief engagements with Cohn, with his fascinated, his fully grippedintelligence. Also I'm nearly halfway through Hugh Brogan's one-volume history of America. Soon I'll have to rely on Mark Asprey'sshelves (or Mark Asprey's writings), which don't look promising.


These pseudo-Baldwins and pseudo-Fredericks, medieval hermits(medieval bums, often) deified by desperate populations, by theinspired hordes of the poor. They had a good run, some of them.They led uprisings; they marched on capitals and squatted in palaces.They screwed around, they partied like there was no tomorrow - fora time. But they all paid the price — on the stake. And when theydid, pseudo-pseudo-Fredericks and pseudo-pseudo-Baldwins sprangup to replace them, quickly risen from the dead. Then they gottorched too.


Even the Old Testament expected the Apocalypse 'shortly'. Intimes of mass disorientation and anxiety . . . But I am trying toignore the world situation. I am hoping it will go away. Not the world. The situation. I want time to get on with this little piece ofharmless escapism. I want time to go to London Fields.


Sometimes I wonder whether I can keep the world situation out ofthe novel: the crisis, now sometimes called the Crisis (they can't beserious).Maybe it's like the weather. Maybe you can't keep it out.


 


Will it reach the conclusion it appears to crave - will the Crisisreach the Conclusion? Is it just the nature of the beast? We'll see. Icertainly hope not. I would lose many potential readers, and all my work would have been in vain. And that would be areal bitch.


 


 


Chapter 5: The Event Horizon'


 


Like the flowerson a grave bearing the mother of asentimental hoodlum, Keith's bouquet leaned and loitered in its bowl on the round table. Nicola always beheld these flowerswith disbelief. The colours spoke to her of custard, of blancmange— a leaden meat tea served on pastel plates, the desiccation of aproletarian wake for some tyrant grandad, or some pub parrot ofa granny, mad these thirty years.


She found that, far from brightening the place up, as Keith had predicted they would, the flowers rendered her flat more or lessuninhabitable. In India (where Nicola had once been) certain coloursare associated with the colours of certain castes. These were low-caste flowers, casteless flowers, untouchable flowers. But Nicoladidn't throw them away. She didn't touch them (you wouldn't want to touch them). Keith Talent was expected, and the flowers wouldremain. Nicola didn't yet know that Keith's blue eyes werecompletely flower-blind or flower-proof. He wouldn't see the flowers, and he wouldn't see their absence. Just as a vampire(another class of creature that cannot cross your threshold unin­vited) gives no reflection in glass or mirrors, so flowers, except in thecommon-noun sense (he knew birds liked them, as did bees), sent no message to Keith's blue eyes.


He telephoned on time, the day the flowers died. Even as shepicked up the receiver she felt — she felt how you feel when thedoorbell goes off like an alarm in the middle of the night. Anunpleasant mistake, or really bad news. She steadied herself. Afterthe repeated pips, themselves punctuated by Keith's ragged obsceni­ties, she could hear the squawkings and garrottings of the BlackCross at a quarter past three. Even though pubs were now open moreor less round the clock (there was one near the entrance to the dead­end street), they still exploded at the old closing times: codedmemories deep in the genes of pubs . . . Keith's tone was mawkishlypally, seeming to offer the commiserations due to a shared burden (faulty household appliances; shoddy workmanship; life, life), as ifthey had known each other for years — which, in a sense, she thought,they almost had.


'Tell you what then darling,' he said with that lugubrious lilt,'yeah, I'll be right over.'


'Sweet,' he added when Nicola said yes.


She arranged herself for Keith's visit with considerable care.


When Nicola was just a little girl she had a little friend called EnolaGay. Enola shared in all Nicola's schemes and feints, her tantrumsand hunger-strikes, in all her domestic terrorism. She too had theknack or gift of always knowing how things would unfold. Enoladidn't exist. Nicola invented her. When adolescence came Enolawent and did a terrible thing. Thereafter she kept a terrible secret.Enola had borne a terrible child, a little boy called Little Boy.


'Enola,' Nicola would whisper in the dark. 'What have you done, you wicked girl? Enola!Enola Gay . . .'


Terrible though the child was, Enola shone through Little Boy with the light of many suns. Nicola knew that she would nevergenerate such light herself. She was vivid; she was divinely bright;when she walked the streets she seemed to be lit by her personalcinematographer. But it wasn't the light that burned in Enola Gayfrom Little Boy. That light came from the elemental feminine power:propagation. If Nicola had had that light her power might haveapproached the infinite. But she didn't have it, and never would haveit.


With her, light went the other way. . . The black hole, so longpredicted in theory, was now, to Nicola's glee, established astrono­mical fact: Cygnus X-1. It was a binary system; the black hole wasorbiting a star thirty times the mass of our sun. The black holeweighed in at ten solar masses, but was no wider than London, It wasnothing; it was just a hole; it had dropped out of space and time; ithad collapsed into its own universe. Its very nature prevented anyonefrom knowing what it was: unapproachable, unilluminable. No­thing is fast enough to escape from it. For mother earth the escapevelocity is seven miles per second, for Jupiter thirty-seven miles persecond, for the sun 383 miles per second. For Sirius B, the first whitedwarf they found, the escape velocity is 4,900 miles per second. Butfor Cygnus X-1, the black swan, there is no escape velocity. Evenlight, which propagates at 186,287 miles per second, cannot escape from it.That's what I am, she used to whisper to herself after sex.Ablack hole. Nothing can escape from me.


Sodomy pained Nicola, but not literally; it was its local preval­ence, as it were, that pained her so greatly. It was the only thing aboutherself that she couldn't understand and wouldn't forgive. Howgenerally prevalent was it (and an unwonted humiliation, this, toseek safety in numbers) ? It wasn't like masturbation, which everyonesecretly knew everyone secretly did, apart from the odd fanatic orostrich or liar. Masturbation was an open secret until you werethirty. Then it was a closed secret. Even modern literature shut upabout it at that point, pretty much. Nicola held this silence partly responsible for the industrial dimensions of contemporary porno­graphy - pornography, a form in which masturbation was theonlysubject. Everybody masturbated all their lives. On the whole,literature declined the responsibility of this truth. So pornographyhad to cope with it. Not elegantly or reassuringly. As best it could.


When you came to sodomy . . . Instinct declared that nowherenear everybody did it, but one could harbour one's suspicions heretoo. Nicola remembered reading, with a blush of pleasure, that fullyseventy-five per cent of female v. male divorce suits featured sodomyunder one subhead or another, anything fromphysical cruelty tounreasonable demands.How unreasonable was it? How cruel?What did it mean when a woman wanted it? The tempting location, so close to its better sister . . . But wherever it was (in the armpit,behind the kneecap), it would have its attractions. Be literal, andlook at the human mouth. The mouth was a good distance away.And the mouth got it too.


Literaturedid go on about sodomy, and increasingly. This hugelysolaced Nicola Six. Now, if she could consider it as a twentieth-century theme . . . Just as Keith Talent would be proud to representhis country in an England shirt, so Nicola, in garter-belt andstockings and ankle-bracelet, would be perfectly prepared to repre-sent her century. It started, she supposed, with Joyce, who was clearlyinterested in it: a murkynostalgic. Lawrence was interested in it: earth, blood,will (yes, and enforced degradation). Beckett wasinterested in it: a callowly uncomplicated yearning (Nicola decided) to cause distress and preferably damage, trauma, to the female parts.As for the Americans, theyall seemed to be interested in it: with JohnUpdike, it was mainly just another thing humans could do, andeverything human interested Updike; of Norman Mailer one didn'tneed to inquire too deeply (a mere timekiller, before greater violence);Philip Roth, with what must be farcical irony, bedroom-farcicalirony, refers to it as 'anal love'. V. S. Naipaul, on the other hand, who was very interested in it, speaks of 'a sexual black mass'. Well,black,anyway. And a black hole was mass, pure mass, infinite mass.


No, not everybody did it. But Nicola did it. At a certain point (and she always vowed she wouldn't, and always knew she would) Nicolatended to redirect her lover's thrusts, down there in the binarysystem . . . She had a thing of readying herself with the third finger ofthe left hand. The marriage finger. It was appalling, the crassness withwhich the symbolism suggested itself: the marriage finger, seeking adifferent ring, in the place whence no babies came. It was the only timeshe ever lost control. Not during (certainly not), but after, later, with silent tears of dismay. How much had she cried about it? How muchtearfall? How many inches a year?


What saddened and incensed her was the abdication of power, socraven, the surrender so close to home. And power was what she wasin it for. Nicola had lived deliciously; but she was promiscuousonprinciple,as a sign of emancipation, of spiritual freedom, freedomfrom men. She was, she believed, without appetite, and prided herselfon her passionless brilliance in bed. But then, the subtle rearrange­ment, and the abject whisper . . . And it poisoned everything,somehow. Again, not literally. Although Nicola liked doing whatnobody else did, although she liked danger, she didn't likethat kind ofdanger, vandal danger, with no form to it. She was promiscuous, buther lovers weren't (they usually had wives instead); and her gynaecologist assured her, one night, when she still had time to care about such distant matters, that it was safe enough if youdid it last. Well, when else would you do it - would you do the last thing? The thing itself was the last thing. It always seeded the end of the affair. And Nicola took some comfort from that fact: maybe it was just her strategy for sending love back the other way.


The only other compensation was an artistic one. At least it wascongruous with her larger tribulation; at least sodomy added up. Most types have their opposite numbers. Groups have groupies.There are molls for all men, and vice versa. The professional has hisperkie; scowlers get scowlies; so smuggles, loudies, cruellies. So thefailed suicide must find a murderer. So the murderer must find a murderee.


After about fifteen minutes Nicola was sure that Keith was going tobe late - significantly late. She changed her plan. She adopted Plan B.Herlife had a Plan B, or it had had: to live on. But intimations of early middle age had settled that. With these intimations, otherintimations: the second half of life; and natural death. Theseintimations were very informative, they were packed with news -and no thanks! You got old quick, like the planet. Like the planet,you could only prostrate yourself before the wonders of modern medicine, modern can-do. But can-do was nothing, when comparedto already-done. You had to trust in cosmic luck. The heavenlyoperation, facelift, transplant. Divine rain.


She changed her immediate plans. Had Keith been prompt, hewould have 'surprised' Nicola in tennis shorts, T-shirt and reversedbaseball cap, the outfit she wore when, in an ecstasy of vexation, shedid her weekly dusting. But he was late. So she took off her shortsand put her jeans back on and coolly went to the shops with thecanvas bag.


When Nicola walked the streets she was lit by her personalcinematographer, nothing too arty either, a single spotlight trainedfrom the gods. She had a blue nimbus, the blue of sex or sadness. Anyeyes that were available on the dead-end street would find their way to her: builders in the gutted houses, a frazzled rep in a cheap car, aman alone at home pressing his face against the window pane with asnarl. There were three shops at the junction: tobacconist's (andsub-post-office); Asian grocery (and off-licence); and, incongru­ously, a travel agent's, a shop that sold travel. At the first Nicolabought fuses, and picked up her French cigarettes. The tiny old creature behind the counter (impossible to entertain the idea that shehad ever been a woman) ordered the cigarettes especially; and Nicola felt the ghost of an obligation to give warning to stop: I can tell herI've quit, she thought. At the grocer's she bought lemons, tonic, tomato juice and what she confidently hoped would be her last-everplastic bottle of toilet cleanser. The tobacconist overcharged her, thegrocer gave short measure . . . Passing the travel agent's, with itsgreat lists of destinations (and prices, hysterically reduced, in normaltimes, but now brutally upped: even Amsterdam cost the earth),Nicola abruptly realized that she would never go away again. Wouldshe, ever? Not even a few days with Guy in Aix-en-Provence or aweekend with Keith in Ilfracombe or Jersey or some other paradise of duty free? No. There just wouldn't be time.


On the way back, near the entrance to the dead-end street, she wasstared at by two builders who sat half-naked eating Scotch eggs anddrinking beer on the porch steps of a corner house they weresupposedly or at any rate cursorily renovating. Nicola had noticedthem before, this exemplary pair. One was sixteen or seventeen, leanand suntanned and wholly delighted by the onset of his powers; theother, the senior man, puffy, thirty, with long hair and few teeth, andquite ruined, as if he got a year older every couple of months. The boyclimbed to his feet as Nicola approached.


'Miss World!' he said in a quavering voice. He wore an expressionof ironic entreaty. 'Give us a smile.Please. Ah, come on — light up. Itmight never happen!'


Nicola smiled. Nicola turned to him as she passed and smiledbeautifully.


She arranged herself for Keith's visit with considerable care, despitethe fact that she knew how things would go anyway, more or less. Ofcourse, she was in a funny situation with reality (though this neveroccurred to her with any weight), coaxing it into a shape she knew italready had — somewhere, in phantompotentia . . . Simply doing the next thing that came naturally, Nicola had what she called a whore'sbath, standing naked on a towel before the basin and the mirror. Asshe washed, she mentally developed an erotic design. It would behumiliating, and quite unnecessary, to think too specifically on thematter; but one had to be prepared. Taking an example at random, the pretty divots of her armpits, so aromatic and erogenous, so oftenpraised and slobbered over, clearly such excellent value — these mighthave to go. He might want them shorn. Not yet. It would depend.


Her underwear she selected without a flicker of hesitation:suspender-belt, stockings, brassiere - but all white this time, allwhite. She sat on the bed, tipping backwards, then stood up with herhead bent sharply, making the right adjustments. Nicola was amazed— Nicola was consternated — by how few women reallyunderstoodabout underwear. Itwas a scandal. If the effortless enslavement of men was the idea, or one of the ideas (and who had a better idea?), why halve your chances by something as trivial as a poor shoppingdecision? In her travels Nicola had often sat in shared bedrooms andcabins and boudoirs and powder parlours, and watched debutantes,predatory divorcees, young hostesses, even reasonably successfulgood-time girls shimmying out of their cocktail dresses andballgowns to reveal some bunched nightmare of bloomers, tights, long Johns, Y-fronts. A prosperous hooker whom she had hung outwith for a while in Milan invariably wore panties that reminded Nicola, in both texture and hue, of a bunion pad. To ephemeralflatmates and sexual wallflowers at houseparties and to otherunder-equipped rivals Nicola had sometimes carelessly slipped theunderwear knowledge. It took about ten seconds. Six months laterthe ones that got it right would be living in their own mews houses in Pimlico and looking fifteen years younger. But they mostly got it wrong. Over-elaboration or lack of self-love, or sheer lack of talent;plus minor vagaries, like the persistent and profitless fallacy ofblackunderwear, which showed the right brothelly instinct, and beat boxer shorts and training-bra, but missed the point. Perhaps women couldn't believe how simple men really were - how it could all bedecided in five minutes at the hosiery store. At this particular end ofthis particular century, they wanted tight bright white underwear, white underwear. They wanted the female form shaped and framed,packaged and gift-wrapped, stylized, cartoonified, and looking, for amoment at least, illusorily pure. They wanted the white lie ofvirginity. Men were sosimple. But what did that do to the thoughts of women, to the thoughts of women like Nicola Six?


Never in her life, not ever, had Nicola decisively discarded any item of clothing. The flat's large second bedroom had become asupercloset - it was like a boutique in there, the suits, the partydresses, the theatrical costumes and disguises, the belts, the scarves, the hats. Imelda Marcos herself might have wondered at the acreageof Nicola's shoes...If Keith Talent were dressing her now, if Keithwere designing her (she speculated), how would he want things to go? What did he want, at the top of the stairs? Nicola in thigh-high pink boots, rayon mini-skirt and bursting blouse. Yes, either that orNicola in low-corsaged opal balldress and elbow-length ivorygloves, with a sable-trimmed brick-quilted dolman, a comb ofbrilliants and a panache of osprey in her hair. Queen of Diamonds,Queen of Hearts. But of course you couldn't do it quite like that.


'Come on up,' she said.


As Keith followed her heavily into the apartment, Nicola didsomething right out of character: she cursed her fate. Then sheswivelled and inspected him, from arid crown to Cuban heels, as hecast his scavenging blue eyes around the room: Keith, stripped of all charisma from pub and street. It wasn't the posture, the scrawninessof the shanks and backside, the unpleasant body scent (he smelled asif he had just eaten a mustard-coated camel), the drunken scoop ofhis gaze - unappealing though these features certainly were. Just thatNicola saw at once with a shock (I knew it all along, she said toherself) that the capacity for love was extinct in him. It was neverthere. Keith wouldn't kill for love. He wouldn't cross the road, he wouldn't swerve the car for love. Nicola raised her eyes to heaven atthe thought of what this would involve her in sexually. And inearnest truth she had always felt that love in some form would be present at her death.


'Well let's get started,' she said, directing Keith towards thekitchen and its dead machines. Once there, Nicola folded her armsand watched, increasingly astonished by how things evidently stood between Keith and the inanimate world. Such flexed and trembling helplessness, such temper-loss and equipment-abuse. She was ineptin the kitchen herself; she had never, for instance, produced anything even remotely edible from the electric cooker, now long disused. But this frenzy of domestic quackery . . . Keith went at the ironing-board like the man in the deckchair joke. The tube of the hoover became a maddened python in his grasp. After his final misadventure with thecoffee-grinder plug and the screwdriver Nicola handed him a paper tissue for his gouged thumb and said in a puzzled voice,


'But you're completely hopeless. Or is it just being drunk?'


'It's all right, it's all right,' said Keith rapidly. 'See, I don't normallydo none of this myself. I got a team in White City. Real craftsmen.Here we go.'


With difficulty - there were blood and sweat and tears on thebakelite by now - Keith at last wrenched off the cap. Together they stared down at the pastel tricolour of the plug's innards. Their faceswere close; Nicola could hear the soft baffled panting throughKeith's open mouth.


'Looks okay,' he volunteered.


'It could be the fuse.'


'Yeah. Could be.'


'Change it,' she suggested, offering him a new fuse from the paperbag.


Chipping a yellow fingernail, swearing, dropping screws, confus­ing fuses, Keith accomplished this deed. He then slapped the plug into the wall, pressed the switch, and briskly actuated the coffee-grinder. Nothing happened.


'Well,' said Keith after a while. 'It's not the fuse.'


Then could you take a look at the lavatory seat at least.'


The bathroom was unexpectedly spacious — carpeted, and full ofunnecessary air; there seemed to be a great distance between the fatbathtub and the red chaise-longue. Here was a room, here was a setthat had experienced a lot of nakedness, a lot of secretions andablutions and reflections. Through the round window above thebath the sun cast its spotlight. Keith's face flickered or rippled as Nicola closed the door behind them.


The toilet,' he announced with savage clarity. He approached thecommode and raised the wooden lid. Nicola tingled suddenly — herarmpits tingled. She knew what Keith was looking at: the smallfaecal stain on the cold white slope. On seeing it there earlier, Nicola had resolved to clean the bowl. She knew, however, that if she didn'tdo it at once, then she wouldn't do it. She hadn't done it at once. Soshe hadn't done it.


The seat wobbles,' she said. 'And it slips.'


As Keith knelt and toyed doubtfully with the lid, Nicola sat herselfdown on the red sofa. She assumed a thinker's pose, chin on fist.Keith glanced her way and saw what was there to see: the light-grey cashmere, the white stockings, the brown underflesh of her crossedleft leg.


'Wobbly toilet,' Keith said to her in a gurgling voice. 'Can't havethat. Might do yourself an injury. Might ruin your married life.'


Nicola stared at him. There was perhaps an infinitesimal swellingin the orbits of her eyes. Several replies offered themselves to her withurgency, like schoolboys raising their hands to please the prettyteacher. One was 'Get out of here, you unbelievable lout'; another, remarkably (and this would be delivered in a dull monotone), was'Do you like dirty sex, Keith?' But she stayed silent. Who cared?There wasn't going tobe any married life. She stood up.


'You're dripping blood. Here.' She fetched a tin from the shelf. Thelight changed as she moved towards him.


Now she applied plaster to the meat of Keith's gently quivering thumb. Seen close up, flesh looks genital: minutely hair-lanced,minutely pocked. If his hands looked genital, what would his genitalslook like, close up? The physiological effects of this thought told herall over again that he was the one. Their hands dropped. In differentdizzinesses they saw, against the cold bowl, his bright bloodmeandering through the dark of her waste. This is disgusting, shethought. But it's too late now.


'Through here,' she said.


Five seconds later Keith was standing in the passage as Nicola zestfully loaded him up with ironing-board, iron, hoover, coffee-grinder. While she did this she talked to him as if he were subhuman, ormerely representative. Would you very kindly. A great help. If youcould also. Be most grateful. . .She loomed above him. Keith's Cubanheels began to edge backwards down the stairs. He peered up at her, sovery hampered. He looked like a busker. He looked like a one-manband.


She said, 'I'd better give you a deposit,' and reached for somethingon the side table. She came closer. 'The man in the Black Cross. Guy.'


'Yeah. Guy,' said Keith.


'He's someone - he's someone of importance, isn't he, Keith.'


'Definitely.'


'Oh really?' Nicola had expected Keith to balk at any favourablemention of Guy Clinch. But his tone was respectful, even admiring. Atthis moment he seemed to need all the support and associationalglamour he could get.


'Definitely. He works in the City. He's titled. I seen it on hischequebook. The Honourable, innit,' said Keith shrewdly.


Nicola stepped forward. With her fingers she was rolling two fifty-pound notes together. Keith twisted himself, in preparation. 'Wait,'she said. 'You'll drop everything.' He was wearing a black fishnet shirtwith a patched chest pocket. But his darts were in that. So she rolled themoney tight and placed it in his mouth. 'Is he rich?' she asked.


Keith worked the tubed notes sideways, as if his lips were used tohaving money between them. 'Definitely.'


'Good. There's a thing you and I might do together. A money thing.Have him call me. Will you do that? Soon?'


He twisted again, and nodded.


There's just one other thing.' And what was it, this one other thing?She had a sudden, antic desire to lift her dress to the waist, to pivot, andbend - like a terrible little girl, with a terrible little daddy. She saiderectly.


'My name is Nicola. Not Nicky or' - her lips closed in a flat smile -'"Nick".'


'Right.'


'Say it.'


He said it.


Her eyes returned to the black fishnet shirt. She placed a finger onone of its wide central squares. 'This sort of stuff, she said thought­fully, '— it should be on my legs. Not on your chest. Goodbye, Keith.'


'Yeah cheers.'


Nicola returned to the sitting-room and lit a cigarette. She heardhim crash down the stairs — Keith, with the money in his mouth. Fora minute or so she smoked intently, with dipped head, then moved tothe tall window in the passage. She saw him, across the street,toppling in graphic difficulty over the open boot of his car. It was theright car: the murderer's car. With a boyish flinch Keith looked upinto the evening sky, whose pale pink, as usual, managed to suggest the opposite of health, like the face of a pale drinker. Their eyes met slowly through the glass. Keith was about to essay some kind ofacknowledgment, but instantly ducked into a fit of sneezing. Thereports of these sneezes — quacked and splatty — travelled towards Nicola at the speed of sound: Keith's cur's sneezes. With his hand flatover his mouth he worked his way round the car and climbed in, and moved off softly down the dead-end street.


'Sneezes like a cur,' said Nicola to herself.


It was six o'clock. She yawned greedily, and went to the kitchen for champagne. Lying on the sofa, she sketched out the next fewmoves, or she turned up the dial, revealing the contours that werealready there. Guy would call the day after next. She would arrangeto meet him in the park. She would choose a cold day, so that shecould wear her blond fur coat. Beneath that, at least, she would be able to keep some entertaining secrets. Her shoulders shook as shelaughed, quietly. When she laughed, her whole body shook. Herwhole body laughed.


In the popular books, when they tried to get you to imagine a blackhole, they usually conjured a sample photon of light wandering nearby, or (more popularly, and more phallically) an astronaut in aspaceship: a man in a rocket. Approaching the black hole, thetraveller would encounter theaccretion disc, circling matter bled from the neighbour star (and containing, perhaps, the wreckage ofother men, other rockets); then, notionally, theSchwarzschildradius,marking the point at which the escape velocity equalled thevelocity of light. This would be theevent horizon, where spacetime collapsed, the turnstile to oblivion beyond which there was only one future, only one possible future. Now there can be no escape: duringthe instantaneous descent, all of eternity has passed on the outside. Caught in the imploding geometry, the man and his rocket enter theblack hole.


Or look at it the other way. Nicola Six, considerably inconveni­enced, is up there in her flying saucer, approaching the event horizon.She hasn't crossed it yet. But it's awfully close. She would need all herreverse thrust, every ounce, to throw her clear . . .


No, it doesn't work out. It doesn't work out because she's alreadythere on the other side. All her life she's lived on the other side of theevent horizon, treading gravity in slowing time. She's it. She's the naked singularity. She's beyond the black hole.


Every fifteen minutes the telephone rings. It's Ella from LA, it'sRhea from Rio, it's Merouka from Morocco. I have to break in overtheir hot cooings to tell them an unappetizing truth: I am not Mark Asprey. He's in New York. I give them my number. They hang up instantly, as if I'm some kind of breather.


Scented letters with lipstick imprints pile up on the mat. The girls,they come around the whole time: they practically picket the place.When I tell these pictures and visions, little duchesses, dazzlers andponies de luxe that Mark Asprey isn't around — they're devastated. Ihave to reach out to steady them. The other morning an adorablyflustered-looking creature calledAnastasiawas there on the stoop,hoping for a few minutes with Mark. When I broke it to her, Ithought I might have to call an ambulance. No, not so good for a guy not so lucky in love, or in art, as I stand in the passage scratching myhair in thought, and look up to see the framed dream-queens and theinscriptions scribbled wildly across their throats. Tomy Apollo. Nobody does it quite like you. Oh I'm so completely yours . . .


Anastasiacouldn't have been sweeter (I gave her a good hug andshe stumbled off mouthing apologies, her face a mask of tears). Butsome of the other ones, some of the snazzier ones, look at me withincredulous distaste. Can I blame them, especially when I'm in mid-chapter, exhausted, exalted, quilted in guilt, and unshaven to thewhites of my eyes?Yesterday evening there was an unusual telephone call. It was forme.


When I heard the sound, the subtle crepitation, that 3,000 milesmakes, I thought it might be Missy Harter, or Janit, or at any rateBarbro. It was Slizard.


I like him personally and everything, but calls from Dr Slizard failto set my pulse racing. He wants me to go and see some people in aresearch institute south of the river.


'How's America?'


'Crazy like an X-ray laser,' he said.


Slizard admits that the visit isn't really necessary, but he wants me to go along. 'Send me the pills,' I said. But I also said I'd think aboutit.


'Tell me,Auxiliadora,'I began, 'how long have you worked for theClinches - for Hope and Guy?'


Auxiliadorawas great. She gave me, while she worked, at leastthree chapters' worth of stuff in about fifteen minutes. A goodcleaner Auxi may well have been, but she was certainly a sensationalgossip: look how she smears and bespatters. She read their lettersand eavesdropped on their telephone calls; she went throughtrashcan and laundry basket alike with the same forensic profession­alism. Interesting sidelights on Lizzyboo. Fine material on Marma-duke. I listened, seated boldly at Mark Asprey's desk — not hisworking desk in the study but his writing desk in the living-room(where, I imagined, he tackled his lovemail). I was recuperating fromChapter 5. Heavy stuff, some of it. I can already hear Missy Hartertelling me that America won't want to know all this (particularly ifwe're looking at a pub-date in say late spring, when the crisis, and theyear of behaving strangely, will both be over, one way or another). ButNicola is heavy stuff. Nicolais heavy. I guess I could tone itdown, if there's time. But tone it down to what? I guess I could 'makesomething up', as I believe the expression goes. Spanking orwhatever. Her on top. Lovebites. But I can't make anything up. It justisn't in me. Man, am I a reliable narrator... I was sitting at the desk,as, with equal flair, Auxi cleaned the flat and dished the dirt, and making notes with a casual doodling action (and warmly lookingforward to the domestic haven, the blameless hearth of Chapter 6),when there was a light rattle of keys, a slam of the door- and anotherwoman strode furiously into the room.


She was Spanish too. Her name was Incarnacion. And she was Mark Asprey's cleaning-lady. She told me this in English, and said something of the same toAuxiliadorain a volley of oath-crammedAndalucian. I quickly located Mark's welcome note: sure enoughthere was a P.S. about his Spanish 'treasure', who was holidaying inher native Granada but would shortly return.


It was all very embarrassing. In fact it was all very frightening. Ihaven't been so scared for weeks. I took Auxi to the door, andapologized and paid her off. Then I went and hid in the study. WhenIncarnacion flushed me out I moved back into the sitting-room tofind the large walnut table — previously bare but for a bowl of pot­pourri — infested with new gongs and cups and obelisks (dug up byIncarnacion from some bottomless trophy chest) and about a dozen photographs of Mark Asprey, making acceptance speeches, beingfawned over by starlets, or in frowning conversation with deferentialfellow bigbrains . . . He looks like Prince Andrew. Maybe heisPrince Andrew: the Prince as a bachelor, before he got so stout, onFergie's cooking. The grinning eyes squeezed by the fleshiness of the cheeks. The inordinate avidity of the teeth.


Dinner tonight at Lansdowne Crescent. Lizzyboo will be there.On the way over I'm due to stop in at the dead-end street: cocktailswith Nicola Six.


As against that, I'm close to despair about getting into Keith'splace. I have just this one idea, and it's a long shot: Kim, the kid. The little girl.


Keith's house is not a home. (And it's not a house either.) It'ssomewhere for the wife and child, and somewhere to flop, until Keithcomes good on the ponies or the darts. Though often lost in praise ofhis dog Clive, he never mentions his girl Kim, except when he'sespecially drunk. Then it's /think the world of that little girl andThat little girl means the world to me.But if prompted, or goaded, hewill deign to denounce Kath's idleness and lack of stamina, when it comes to the kid.


'I mean,' he said to me in the Black Cross, or it may have been the Golgotha, his drinking club (the Golgotha is open twenty-four hours


a day. But so is the Black Cross), 'what she expect? Moaning on.


Baby this. Baby that. Can't sleep. Babies is what skirtdoes’


'It can be very hard, Keith,' I cautioned. 'I've looked afterchildren - babies. They worship their mothers but they torturethem too. They torture them with the sleep weapon.'


He looked at me consideringly. You don't need much empathictalent to tell what Keith's thinking. He doesn't do that muchthinking in the first place. The very difficulty, the disuse of themuscles, writes headlines on his forehead. Keith, and his tabloidface. Shock. Horror. You just read his flickers and frowns. Now itwas something likeWhat would a blokelook after babies for? Hesaid, 'Yeah but it's not like real work as such. Half the time you justbung them in their -in thatpen thing. Why was you looking after kids?'


Two years ago I lost my brother.' This was true. Also unforgive-able. David. I'm sorry. I owe you one. It's thiswriting business. 'Ohyes. They had a two-year-old and another one just arrived. I was with them through all that.'


Keith's face said, Sad, that. Happens. Say no more.


But I did say more. I said, 'All Kath needs is a couple of hours aday with the baby off her hands. It would transform her. I'd be gladto do it. Guy employs male nurses,' I threw out. 'Take her to thepark. I love kids.'


Well he didn't much like the idea, clearly. (He started talking about darts.) No, I thought - you've lost this one. Babies, infants,little human beings: they're a skirt thing. The only blokes who lovebabies are transvestites, hormone-cases, sex-maniacs. For Keith this was all very turbulent ground. The child-molester — the nonce, theshort eyes — was the lowest of the low, and Keith had come acrossthat sort before. In prison. He talked freely about prison. In prisonKeith had gotten his chance to beat up child-molesters; and he had taken it. In prison as elsewhere, everyone needs someone to look down on, someone categoricallyworse. The serial grannyslayer got his go on the exercise bike, the copycat sniper had his extra sausageon Sunday mornings, but the short eyes . .. Suddenly Keith told me why: the hidden reason, beneath all the visible reasons. Keith didn'tsayit; yet it was written on his brow. The prisoner hated the child-molester, not just because he neededsomebody to look down on, not only out of base sentimentality either, but because it was theone place left for his parental feelings. So when you striped the short eyes with your smuggled razor you were just showing the ladswhat a good father you were.


I was grateful to Keith for the insight. That's right, I remembernow: we were in Hosni's, the Muslimcafйwhere Keith sometimesbriefly recuperates from the Golgotha and the Black Cross. Just then,one of the pub semi-regulars passed our table. He leaned over andsaid to me:


'Here. I know what you are. A four-wheel Sherman.'


An explanation was effortfully supplied. Four-wheel = four-wheel skid = yid. Sherman = Sherman tank = yank.


'Jesus,' said Keith. 'Jesus,' he added, with an iconoclast's weari­ness. 'I hate that crap. "Your almonds don't half pen." Jesus. Youever going to stop with that stuff? You ever going to stop?'


Most of Mark Asprey's apartment quite likes me. But some of ithates me. The lightbulbs hate me. They pop out every fifteenminutes. 1 fetch and carry. The mirrors hate me.


The bits of Mark Asprey's apartment that hate me most are thepipes. They groan and scream at me. Sometimes at night. I've evenconsidered the truly desperate recourse of having Keith come in and look at them. Or at least listen to them.


After its latest storm, after its latest fit or tantrum or mad-act, thesky is blameless and aloof, all sweetness and light, making themacadam dully shine. Sheets and pillows in the wide bed of the sky.


Still no word from Missy Harter.


Chapter 6: The Doors ofDeception


n his dreamGuy Clinch edged closer to the bare body of a softlyfaceless woman. For a moment of dream time she turned into athirteen-year-old baby, smiling, crooning, then once more became awoman without a face. Not even a baby face. This wasn't a sexdream. It was a love dream, a dream of love. He edged towards an oozingyes . . .


In actuality, in real life, Guy Clinch was edging towards a ratherdifferent proposition. Inches from his touch lay Hope inher dressing-gown, unblinkingly wakeful, and far from faceless:the healthy oval and its long brown eyes. Inches from his head, onthe innumerable pillows, crouched Marmaduke, his hands joinedand raised. As Guy entered the warmth-field of his wife'sbody, Marmaduke's twinned fists thumped down into his openface.


'Ow!' said Guy. The flesh fled in rivulets. He looked up in time tosee the blurred arrival of Marmaduke's next punch. 'Ow!' he said.Unplayfully he sat up and wrestled Marmaduke to the floor.


'Take him,' said Hope in a tranced voice.


'Was he very bad?'


'And quick with breakfast.'


'Come on, you little devil.' He picked up Marmaduke, whoembraced the opportunity to sink his teeth gum-deep into Guy'sneck. Guy gasped and began the business of trying to force openMarmaduke's jaws.


Hope said, 'He needs changing. He seems to have eaten most of hisnappy again.'


'Loaded or unloaded?'


'Unloaded. Hold his nose. He'll give up in a couple of minutes.'


Guy pinched the sticky nostrils. Marmaduke's teeth tightenedtheir grip. The seconds ticked by. Finally he released his mouthful,sideways, for greater tear, and sneezed twice into his father's face.Holding the screaming child out in front of him like a rugby ball or abag of plutonium, Guy hurried towards the adjoining bathroom.This left Marmaduke with only one option for the time being - thereverse kick to the groin - which he now duly attempted. Guy puthim face down on the far corner of the bathroom carpet. Hemanaged to shut and bolt the door and crouch on the lavatory seatbefore Marmaduke was up and at him again . . . There were two reasons why Guy favoured the seated position: first, because it helped accommodate the unenlargeable erection he always woke upwith; and secondly because Marmaduke, while feigning babyish absorption in the flush handle, had once smacked the seat down onhim with incredible suddenness and force, dealing Guy a glancing blow that had none the less empurpled his helmet for a month and ahalf. As Guy used lavatory paper to staunch the flow of blood fromhis neck, Marmaduke paced yelling round the room looking forgood things to smash.


'Milt,' said Marmaduke.Toce.Milt.Toce.Milt!Toce!Milt!Toce!Milt!Toce!'


'Coming!' sang Guy.


Milk toast, thought Guy. An American dish, served with honey orsyrup. Hope likes that, and so does Lizzyboo. Hello, something missing: the strainer.


Marmaduke paused and spitefully watched his weaving father, theman with two pairs of hands.Toce,'he said, in an altogether more menacing tone.Tocedaddy.Daddy.Tocedaddy. Daddytoce.'


'Yesyes.' He stood there, skilfully buttering toast as Marmadukeclawed at his bare legs. Then the moment came and Marmaduke sprang for the knife. After a fierce struggle beneath the table Guy disarmed him and climbed to his feet, holding his nose whereMarmaduke had bitten it. The knife again. He adored all knives. Acalling, but for which occupation ? Friends and relatives, on their rareand foreshortened visits, always said that Marmaduke, when hegrew up, would join the army. Not even Guy's ancient father, a brigadier in World War II, had seemed to draw much comfort from this prospect.


Now he crouched smiling and offered up a piece of toast toMarmaduke's drooling mouth.


'Good Lord,' he murmured.


Guy had often suggested that they get specialist advice about Marmaduke's eating. After all, they were getting specialist adviceabout everything else he did. The child had of course been to severalcelebrated dieticians, and had been placed on regimes designed toquench him of vigour. The most recent one, said the doctor in histeak-panelled consulting rooms, would have reduced an Olympicsprinter to helpless enervation within a matter of days. It hadn't worked on Marmaduke, whose natural taste, incidentally, was for chips and hamburgers and monosodium glutamate and any kind ofjunk . . . Guy had seen greedy infants before - but nothing like this.The famished desperation, the neck-ricking bolts and snaps, thecoruscating saliva. Halfway through his fifth brick of honey, butterand bronzed wholemeal Marmaduke released a dense mouthful andground it into the tiles with a booteed foot: a sign of temporarysatiation. Guy stuck a bottle in him and carried the child upstairs at arm's length. He locked him into the bedroom, then returned for thetray.


Hope lay back on her barge of pillows. This was more like howthings were supposed to be: the tea tray, the telephone, the wallet ofmail. The weekend skeleton staff had arrived and were amusingMarmaduke in the nursery above; only faintly could you hear hisscreams and theirs, and the occasional sickening impact. Guy lay onthe sofa, reading the papers. Hope ran her glance cruelly over one gold-trimmed invitation after another. She said,


'I saw Melissa Barnaby yesterday. Out back.'


'Oh yes?' said Guy. Lady Barnaby: good, sad Lady Barnaby, withher milky eyes. She babysat for Marmaduke in the old days, once ortwice. No. Once. The telephone call to the restaurant, just as the cocktails were arriving .. .


'She was looking rather well. She said she felt ten years younger.She's found this marvellous young man. He's fixed up the house. Andnow she's off to Yugoslavia for a week.'


'How nice.’


'We need one.'


'What? A holiday in Yugoslavia?'


'A marvellous young man.'


'It says here that tourists are advised not to visitcomeconcountries. Idiots. They're deploying QuietWall. Darling,' he asked,'how was it? Did you get any sleep at all?'


'Some, I think, between five and five-fifteen. Lizzy boo relieved me.He was terrible.'


Hope's sleep was a sacred subject in this house — more sacred,possibly, more hedged with wonder and concern, than the subject ofMarmaduke himself. Guy had recently come across a scientificdescription of the amount of sleep Hope got, or claimed to get, during her nights with Marmaduke. It arose in speculation about the very early universe, nanoseconds after the Big Bang.A Millionth of the time it takes the speed of light to cross a proton. Now that reallywasn't very long at all...On the alternate nights when Guy did Marmaduke, he usually got in a good three-quarters of an hour, and frequently dozed while the child wearily belaboured him or beat hisown head against the padded walls.


'Poor you.'


'Poor me. Guy,' said Hope. She held a waxed document in her hand. 'What', she asked, 'isthis shit?'


Guy went on reading, or at least his eyes remained fixed to thepage. In the last month he had given Ј15,000 to charity, and he wasfeeling terribly guilty.


'Fifteengrand?' said Hope. 'Save the Children, huh?' She herselfhad given a similar amount to charity in the last month, but togalleries and opera houses and orchestras and other repositories of social power. 'What aboutour child? Who's going to save him?'


'Marmaduke', said Guy, 'will have plenty of money.'


'You've seen how he gets through it? Eighteen months old andalready it burns a fucking hole in his jeans. In his Osh Kosh B'Gosh!You need therapy, Guy. When this whole thing started Ibegged youto have therapy.'


Guy shrugged. 'We're rich,' he said.


'Get out of here. You're giving me cancer.'


After a deft and speedy bowel movement Guy showered, thenshaved: the French soap, the cut-throat razor. He dressed in anassortment of profoundly expensive and durable odds and ends,hand-me-downs some of them, clothes worn by his father, bycousins, eccentric uncles. His closet was a City of business suits - buton most days now his clothes no longer needed tosay anything. Theouter man was losing his lineaments. Soon there would just be an inner one, palely smiling. A flowingly tailored tweed jacket, shape­less khaki trousers, a bright blue shirt, the thumping shoes (Guy'sfeet were enormous). As he came down the stairs he met with a raresight: Marmaduke calmly ensconced in his mother's arms. Hopeheld him protectively while denouncing a nanny, a brawny Scandin­ avian whom Guy had not seen before. In his left fist he clutched his bays: a posy of long blonde hair.


'And where do you think you're going?' said Hope, turning from one defendant to another.


'Out. Out.'


'Where to? What for?'


'See some life.'


'Oh. Life! Oh I get it.Life.1


Reflexively, but with all due caution (and a shrewd glance at Marmaduke's free hand), Guy bent trimly to kiss his wife goodbye.Then everything went black.


He was in Ladbroke Grove by the time his vision returned. Thesloped length of Lansdowne Crescent had reeled past him in thesun, popping and streaming in gorgeous haemorrhages; and onlynow at the main street, with its man-made noise and danger, did hefeel a real need for clear sight. The eye-fork again: the first andsecond finger of Marmaduke's right hand, searchingly poked into Guy's candid orbits. Wonderfully skilful, you had to admit: suchtiming. He shook his head with the respectful admiration one knows before a phenomenon, and thought of the six-foot nurse he had seenthe other week running down the front doorsteps, not even pausing to sue, with a bloody handkerchief pressed to her nose. Personal-injury suits were another way Marmaduke had found of costing Guymoney. None had so far proved serious, but there were now quite afew pending. Marmaduke, and his permanent tantrum; the onlything that silenced him was a parental tantrum, one that left the adultactors still shaking and weeping and staggering, long after Marma­duke's original tantrum had resumed . . . Guy came to a halt on the street and blinked twice with his whole forehead. He raised a hand.With two soft pops he freed his lower eyelids, and waited for the sluicing tears. He had begun to enter the world of duplicity. He waspassing through the doors of deception, with their chains of lies. Andall London swam.


What kind of man was this? How unusual? Guy gave money tocharity. For every other man in his circle, charity began at home. Andended there too. Or not quite: charity continued for a mile or so, into the next postal district, and arrived at a small flat with a woman in it.These men winced at their wives' touch; they jerked up too soon to kiss them hello or goodbye. And Guy wasn't like that.


The thing was, the thing was...he was straight arrow. Hisdesires described a perfect arc: they were not power-biased, theywere not perverse. He may have had at least two of everything, buthe had only one lady. Hope was it, his single woman. When theymet at Oxford — this was sixteen years ago — there was somethingabout Guy that Hope liked. She liked his curly-ended fair hair, hishouse in the country, his shyness about his height, his house inLansdowne Crescent, his habit of hooding his eyes against a lowsun, his title, his partiality to cherries (especially ripe ones), his largeprivate income. They lived together during the last academic year, and studied together at facing desks in the double sitting-room ('IsSamson Agonistesepic or tragedy?' 'What were the long-termeffects of Pearl Harbor, as opposed to those of Sarajevo andMunich?'), and slept together, vigorously, in the small double-bed.They had both been unhappy at home, had both felt underloved;now they became each other's family. So marriage, and London, and the City, and . . . Hope's social ambitions took Guy by sur­prise. The surprise wore off after a while (during the thousandthdinner party, perhaps), which was more than could be said for the social ambitions. They didn't wear off: they shone with a gathering brilliance. One of their effects was that Guy naturally came acrossmany beautiful and accomplished and dissatisfied women, at least adozen of whom propositioned him, in secluded corners, in crushbars, towards the end of masked balls. Nothing really happened.These advances were often sufficiently subtle to escape his noticealtogether. True, every few years he secretly 'fell in love'. Theredhaired wife of the Italian conductor. The seventeen-year-olddaughter of the computer heiress. It was like an illness that passed after a couple of weeks; the love virus, efficiently repelled by adetermined immune system. Most worrying and dramatic by farwas the case of Lizzyboo, Hope's big little sister. Hope knew something was up the minute she found Guy in the visitor's roomweeping over Lizzyboo's ballet pumps. Lizzyboo was sent away thattime: seven years ago. All forgotten now, or not even forgotten: ascandalous family joke. Hope herself normally retained severalmenfriends (a partygoing philosopher, a dandy architect, a powerfuljournalist), but she was so strict and impeccable that it never seriously occurred to Guy - no no, nothing of that kind. For himself,the world of other women shaped itself into a great gallery, like the Hermitage, crammed with embarrassments of radiance and genius, but so airless, so often traversed, so public — a gallery where Guysometimes sauntered for an hour, or where he sometimes hurried, looking straight ahead (squares of sublimity moving by like passingcars), or where he was sometimes to be found, though not often, standing before a blazing window and wringing his hands . ..


Marry young, and a melancholy comes over you at thirty, whichhas to do with thwarted possibilities. It was worse for Guy. Hope was a little older, and had had her fair share of guys at Oxford,earlier on, and at NYU, and for that matter in Norfolk, Virginia. Soa new adventure: they overcame their ecopolitical anxieties anddecided to go ahead and have a baby. Even then there weredifficulties - Guy's difficulties. A process that began with himequably switching from jockey pants to boxer shorts ended up withhim out cold and his legs in stirrups while a team of Japanesesurgeons and a particle-beam laser rewired his nethers. Thus, afterhalf a decade of 'trying': Marmaduke. For years they had worriedabout the kind of world they were bringing their child into. Nowthey worried about the kind of child they were bringing into theirworld. The gap or hollow that the baby had been meant to fill — well,Marmaduke filled it, and more; Marmaduke could fill the GrandCanyon with his screams. It appeared that from here on in a mixtureof fatigue, depression and incredulity would be obliged to keep themfaithful. Most of the psychiatrists and counsellors agreed thatHope's unreasonable fear of getting pregnant again might soon startto fade. Their last attempt at lovemaking had featured the pill, the coil, the cap, and three condoms, plus more or less immediatecoitus interruptus. That was July. This was September.


But he wasn't about to stray. He was straight arrow. Divagation, errancy - to Guy this spelt humiliation. It would be disastrous, andinexpiable. No second chances. She'd kill him. The girl in the Black Cross with the extraordinary mouth - he would never see her again.Good, good. The flu, the malaria she had given him would be gone ina week. The thought of his life with an absence where Hope nowstood (or wearily reclined) was enough to make him stop dead inthe street and shake his hair with his hands raised and clawlike. Hewalked on, steadily. He would never stray.


'I mean — that's life,' said the young man. 'You can't argue with it.It's just one of them things.' He paused, and without fully straight­ening his body leaned forward and spat through the open door intothe street. 'Okay,' he resumed. 'I got into a fight, I came out thewrong side of it, and that's life. No complaints. Fair enough. That'slife.'


Guy sipped his tomato juice and stole the odd glance over hisbroadsheet. Good God: sothat's life. The young man continued histale. The two girls he told it to listened in postures of mildsympathy.


'I was out of order. Got taught a lesson.' He shrugged. 'That's it.'


Conversationally, philosophically, and often pausing to hawkblood into the street, the young man explained how this very recentaltercation had cost him a broken nose and cheekbone and the lossof nearly all his top teeth. Guy folded his newspaper and stared atthe ceiling. The rapidity of change. Anyone in Guy's circle who sustained equivalent damage would have to go to Switzerland for ayear or two and get completely remade. And here was this wreck,back in the pub the very next morning, with his pint and histabloid, his ruined face, and the occasionalpbthook! through theopen doors. Already he had changed the subject and was talking about the weather, the price of beer. The two girls thought no lessof him for it, particularly the scarred brunette; if he was lucky, and assuming he had one, he might get to take her home. Life goes on. And thiswas life, it really was, uncared for, and taking no care ofitself.


Keith came in, causing the usual low pub murmur. He saw Guy and pointed a finger at him, then wagged his thumb backwards,indicating John Dark: John Dark, the corrupt policeman — the bentcopper, the tarnished badge, the iffy filth. Dark was short andwell-scrubbed, of that no-hair-but-good-teeth mould of man, and ahorrid-jumper expert. He was the only regular in the Black Crosswho looked at Guy with critical inquiry, as if he (Guy) really shouldknow better. Dark's own position was ambiguous. He had a certain standing; but nearly everyone treated him with theatrical contempt.


Especially Keith . . . Guy inferred that Keith would be with him in aminute. And sure enough, after a few words with Fucker about theCavalier (Fucker being the pub car-expert), Keith came over andleant forward seriously on Guy's table.


'You know that skirt who was in here? Nicola?'


'Yes, I know who you mean.'


'She wants you to . . .' Keith looked around unhappily. With impatience he acknowledged the salutes and greetings of Norvis, Dean, Thelonius, Curtly, Truth, Netharius, Shakespeare, Bogdan,Maciek, and the two Zbigs. 'We can't talk here,' he said, andsuggested they repair to the Golgotha, his drinking club, anddiscuss things over a quiet glass ofporno, the drink he alwaysdrank there (a Trinidadian liqueur). 'It's a matter of some delicacy.'


Guy hesitated. He had been to Keith's drinking club once before. The Golgotha, while no more private than the Black Cross, and noless noisy, was certainly darker. Then he found himself saying,'Why not come back to my place?'


Keith hesitated. It occurred to Guy that the offer might seemoffensive, since it was an invitation that Keith could never return. Aone-way offer, unreturnable. But Keith glanced at the pub clockand said cannily, 'Good one.'


They moved together through the activity of the PortobelloRoad, Guy tall and questing in the sun, Keith stockier, squarer, hishands bunched in his jacket pockets, his flared trousers tapered andthrottled by the low-flying wind, his rolled tabloid under his arm,like a telescope. Out on the street they couldn't talk about NicolaSix because that's what they were going back to Guy's place to talk about. As they turned into a quieter avenue their own silence grew louder. Guy chose a subject which had often helped him out in thepast.


'Are you going to the match?'


Both men supported Queens Park Rangers, the local team, andfor years had been shuffling off to Loftus Road on Saturdayafternoons. In fact they might have come across each other earlier,but this had never been likely: Guy stood in the terraces, with hispie and Bovril, whereas Keith was always to be found with his flask in the stands.


'They're away today,' said Keith through his cigarette. 'United,innit. I was therelast week.'


'West Ham. Any good?’


Some of the light went out in Keith's blue eyes as he said, 'Duringthe first half the Hammers probed down the left flank. Revelling in the space, the speed of Sylvester Drayon was always going to poseproblems for the home side's number two. With scant minutesremaining before the half-time whistle, the black winger cut in on the left back and delivered a searching cross, converted by Lee Fredge,the East London striker, with inch-perfect precision. After the interval Rangers' fortunes revived as they exploited their superiorityin the air. Bobby Bondavich's men offered stout resistance and the question remained: could the Blues translate the pressure they wereexerting into goals? In the seventy-fourth minute Keith Spareproduced a pass that split the visitors' defence, and Dustin Houselyrammed the equalizer home. A draw looked the most likely resultuntil a disputed penalty decision broke the deadlock five minutes from the final whistle. Keith Spare made no mistake from the spot. Thus the Shepherd's Bush team ran out surprise 2—1 winners over the . . . over the outfit whose theme tune is "I'm Forever BlowingBubbles".'


Keith's belated sigh of effort reminded Guy of the sound thatMarmaduke would occasionally emit, after a rare success with sometaxing formulation likemore chips orknife mine. Guy said, The new boy in midfield, Neil . . . ? Did he do all right?'


'Noel Frizzle. He justified his selection,' said Keith coldly.


They walked on. Guy had of course been friendly with people likeKeith before: in the City. But the people like Keith in the City wore Ј1 ,000 suits and platinum wrist-watches and sported uranium creditcards; at weekends they sailed yachts or donned red coats andmounted horses and went chasing after some rabbit or weasel; theycollected wines (at lunch they crooned over their Pomerols and Gevrey-Chambertains) and modern first editions (you often heard them talking about whatNew Year Letter orStamboul Train mightnowadays fetch). They weren't poor, like Keith. Keith had his fistfuls of fivers, his furled tenners and folded fifties; but Keith was poor. His whole person said it. And this was why Guy honoured him and pitiedhim and admired him and envied him (and, he sometimes thought, even vaguelyfancied him): because he was poor.


'Here we are,' said Guy.


He assumed his wife would be out or sleeping. She had been OUt, andwould soon be sleeping, but Hope was right there in the hall whenGuy showed Keith Talent into the house. It went quite well, considering, Guy thought. When he introduced them, Hope putconsiderable energy into dissimulating her astonishment and con­tempt. And Keith confined himself to an honest nod (and anot-so-honest smile); he didn't look at all uneasy until Hope saidthat Lady Barnaby was downstairs, saying goodbye to Marmadukebefore gallivanting off to Yugoslavia.


'If you got company..."said Keith, edging back towards the door.


From below came a harsh shout of childish triumph, followed byan unforced scream. Lady Barnaby sprinted up the stairs andappeared holding her forehead in one hand and her spectacles in theother. Urgently Guy moved forward, but Lady Barnaby seemed torecover very quickly.


'Perfectly all right. Perfectly all right,' she said.


'If you're sure? Oh, Melissa, I'd like you to meet Keith Talent. Afriend of mine.'


Keith did now appear to be quite overwhelmed by the occasion.Perhaps, it's the title, thought Guy. It's a good thing he doesn'tknow about mine.


Lady Barnaby blinked up gratefully, raised her glasses to hereyes, and slowly nodded towards the hatstand.


'Oh my God,' said Guy. 'This is awful. Did Marmaduke do that?How? You simply must let us pay for them. Not with his fingers,surely.'


A nanny now stood at the top of the stairs. Resignedly sheexplained what had happened. Lady Barnaby had come ill-advis-edly close to the highchair to feast her eyes on the boy. Marmaduke had cobwebbed both lenses with a skilful stab of the sugar-tongs.


'Have you got another pair?' asked Guy. 'Whoops! Darling, Ithink perhaps you ought to see Melissa home.'


In the drawing-room Keith asked for brandy, and was given one.He drank that, and asked for another. Guy, with whom alcohol didnot always agree, poured himself a derisoryTнo Pepe.They sat down facing each other on broad sofas. Guy felt that his instincthad been sound. Good to hear this in your own house: there couldbe little harm in it now.


'It's like this,' said Keith, and hunkered that little bit closer. 'Iwent round there, okay? See if I could help her out with anything. Ido that. It's like a sideline. Nice place she got. And I thought, inaddition . . .'Keith tailed off fondly.'Well, you know what I'm like.'


But Guy did not know what Keith was like. He waited.


'You know,' said Keith, 'I thought she might want seeing to.'


The flat?'


'No. Her.'


'How do you mean?'


'Christ.' Keith elucidated the point.


'And?' said Guy nauseously.


'Well it's hard to tell, you know, with some birds. She's funny. Anenigma innit — you know the type. Half the time she's coming on dead tasty. And I meansorely in need of it. And then, you know,suddenly it's Lady Muck.'


'So - nothing happened.'


Keith considered. At least one nice memory seemed to tickle hisnose. But he said, 'Nah. Fuck all, really. And, I'm taking my leave and, as I say, she asks about you. Wants you to phone her like. Saysshe requires your help.'


'What about?'


'Don't ask me, mate.' He looked around the room and back again.'Maybe she likes her own sort. I mean I'm nothing, am I. I'mjust acunt.'


It was hard to know how to react, because Keith was smiling.Throughout he had been smiling, when he wasn't coughing. 'Oh,come on, Keith!' said Guy palely.


The door opened. Hope stood there inexorably. 'I'm going to bed.Kenneth,' she said, 'would you put that cigarette out please? I took her back and she's calmer now. She's a little worried about going to Yugoslavia with only one set of glasses. Her boiler sounds terrible.It's lucky she's deaf. I was glad to get out of the house. If you use thekitchen I want everything cleared away. Without trace.'


'Birds,' said Keith when Hope had gone. He was taking a last few draws of his cigarette, one hand cupped under the long coal, as Guysearched for an ashtray. 'Can't live with them, can't live withoutthem. Tell you what. Your wife's a cracker. And that kid of yours ain't bad neither. Either,' said Keith.


Duplicity consumed time. Even deciding to have nothing to do withduplicity was time-consuming. After Keith left, to run a local errand,Guy spent an hour deciding not to call Nicola Six. The urge to callher felt innocent, but how could it be? He wasn't about to runupstairs and share the experience with his wife. A pity in a way, hemused, as he paced the room, since all he wanted was thegratification, the indulgence of curiosity. Sheer curiosity. But curiosity was still the stuff that killed the cat.


At four o'clock, leaving Hope asleep and Marmaduke safelycordoned by nannies, Guy popped out to make a telephone call. Heimagined it would take about ten minutes of his time, to find outwhether there was anything he could reasonably do for thisunfortunate girl - why, there was a telephone box at the veryjunction of Lansdowne Crescent and Ladbroke Grove . . . Therewas no one in the telephone box. But there was no telephone in iteither. There was no trace of a telephone in it. And there was no hint or vestige of a telephone in the next half-dozen he tried. These little glass ruins seemed only to serve as urinals, as shelters from the rain,and as job-centre clearing-houses for freelance prostitutes and theirclients. In widening circles Guy strayed, from one savagedpissoir toanother. He hadn't used a telephone box in years, if indeed he hadever used one. He didn't know what had happened to them and tovandalism - though a serious glance at the streetpeople who glanced at him so mirthfully, as he rummaged behind the dark glass or stoodthere shaking his head with his hands on his hips, might have told Guy that vandalism had left telephone boxes far behind. Vandalismhad moved on to the human form. People now treatedthemselves like telephone boxes, ripping out the innards and throwing themaway, and plastering their surfaces with sex-signs and graffiti. . .


By now feeling thoroughly foolish, Guy queued for the use of a telephone in the General Post Office in Queensway. On a floor that smelled and felt to the foot like a wet railway platform, Guy queuedwith the bitter petitioners of the city, all of whom seemed to be clutching rentbooks, summonses, orders of distraint. It was time forGuy's turn. His hands were shaking. That number: easy to remem­ber, impossible to forget. She answered, to his horror, and well knewwho he was - 'Ah, yes'. She thanked him for calling, with some formality, and asked if they could meet. When, following Keith'scourse (and Nicola's silence), he suggested her apartment, shemurmured demurringly about her 'reputation', which reassuredGuy, as did her accent, whose faint foreignness now seemed notFrench so much as something more East European andintellectual. . . Another silence ensued, one that deducted twenty pence from Guy's original investment of fifty. The park, tomorrow?Sunday, by the Serpentine. And she gave him instructions andthanks.


The telephone call had taken two and a half hours. Guy went out into the street and buttoned his jacket against the sudden cold. Theclouds, which were behaving so strangely these days, had gatheredthemselves into a single cylinder, east to west, like a god's rolledtowel, like the slipstream of a plane the size of America. He ran homeecstatically to relieve the nannies, get hollered at by Hope, and spendsixteen hours alone with Marmaduke.


At dawn on Monday morning Guy sat in the pale light of thekitchen. He had relieved Lizzyboo at about 3 a.m., and helpedbandage her, after remarkable scenes in the nursery. But then,around five, something like a miracle happened. Marmaduke fellasleep. Guy's first impulse was to call an ambulance; but he wascalmer now, content to monitor the child on the closed-circuit TVscreen with the volume turned up full and look in on him every fiveminutes or so and feel his forehead and his pulse. For the time being Guy just sat there whispering words of thanks and pinching himselfin the amazement of all this silence.


Quietly he approached the twin doors that led to the garden. Thegarden twinkled and simpered at him in its dew. Guy thought ofNicola Six and the continuous and inexplicable waves of suffering which the planet had somehow arranged for her - the lips, the eyes,averted in their pain. He blinked, and imagined he could see a dark-braided girl playing alone beneath the curtain of the willow tree.Perhaps it was Enola, perhaps it was Enola Gay. Enola, searching forLittle Boy.


Guy unlocked the doors to the garden.


'Guard, guard,'Marmaduke would have said (it had previouslybeen garner, garner),if he had been there to warn him. But Guy wentout through the doors.


On Sunday he had walked with Nicola Six in London fields . . .Kneeling, the children launched their boats into the cold agitation ofthe water; the smaller craft wobbled all the more eagerly, as if activity could redress their want of size; among them, a black-sailed unfamiliar . . . Her story came at him now like a series of paintings,ortableaux vivants - no, more like memories of another life: theorphanage and charity school; her years as governess, nurse,novitiate; her current life of good works and scholarly seclusion.


Impeccable, innocent and tragic in her blond fur coat. . . Guy raised his fingertips to his eyelids, then lifted his head and stared. On daysalone with Marmaduke, how he had tried to invest every minutewith wonder and discovery. Daddy's getting dressed! Shirt, trousers,shoes,yes,shoes. Look: bathroom. Tap, sponge, toy boat! Now-hoho ho — Daddy's making coffee. That's right: coffee. Not tea. Coffee!Oh, look out there. The garden,and flowers,and grass,and a littlebird - singing! And such lovely clouds . . . The oohs and aahs ofordinary life had made little impression on Marmaduke, who just shouldered his course through the day with the usual grim ambition.But something had now made wonder work for Guy. He woke upand he thought, Air! Light! Matter! Serious, poor, beautiful: everything you care to name.


Marmaduke was stirring. Marmaduke was waking. Marmadukewas screaming. He's alive. Thank God, thought Guy. I'll not touchher. No, I'll not touch her. Ever.


I'd say she really did a number on Guy Clinch. No half-measuresthere. It beats me how she keeps a straight face.


She really did a number on him. What was that number? It wasSix. Six. Six.


One thing about London: not so much dogshit everywhere. A lot still. Compared to New York, even old New York, it's the cloacamaxima. But nothing like it used to be, when the streets of London werepaved with dogshit.


Explanation. The English still love their dogs, for some reason. Butthe dogs aren't living as long as they used to. Nothing is. It's weird. Imean, one expects snow-leopards and cockatoos and tsessebes tobuy the farm eventually. Butdogs'? I have an image of fat Clive,sitting in a zoo.


How will we teach the children to speak when all the animals aregone? Because animals are what they want to talk about first. Yes,and buses and food and Mama andDada.But animals are what they break their silence for.


Keith's account of the football match. I've heard many suchsummaries from him - of boxing matches, snooker matches, and ofcourse darts matches. At first I thought he just memorized sections ofthe tabloid sports pages. Absolutely wrong.


Remember - he is modern, modern, despite the heels and theflares. When Keith goes to a football match, that misery of stringer'sclichйsis what he actually sees.


A pleasant enough evening at the Clinches' last week. Publisherand his wife, architect and his wife, director of the National PortraitGallery and his wife, sculptress and her husband. A lone tennisplayer called Heckler, the South African number seven. All the menwere extremely attentive to Hope, and the thought occurred to me that she may be sleeping with one of them, or will be soon, which would liven things up even further.


Me, I am developing Lizzyboo. A fulsomely pretty girl. She is alsovoluble, indiscreet and, I think, not too bright. She's perfect for me.






  Look at that. It's beautiful. Admittedly it took me all morning,what with the dummy-runs and everything, the ridiculous errors, all that shading. It was great, though. I felt about eleven. Bespectacled,hunched sideways over the desk with my tongue out the corner of mymouth, alone in the universe.


I took as my model the illustration in a booklet of Keith's,Darts:Master the Discipline.I also used the pen he gave me, the one shaped like a dart.


Look at that. It's beautiful. Oh, Keith - take me home!


I must avail myself of Mark Asprey's car, that dinky A-to-B deviceof his, which seems to shimmer to attention every time I walk past itand lour at me reproachfully on my return. The cab fares are killingme. It's curious. You seldom see a black London taxi any more. Youcan call them, and arrange a rendezvous within a mile of Marble Arch; but apparently they stick to the West End and the City. Black cabs are like the buggies on Central Park, a tourist thing, a nostalgia thing. And a money thing: they're blindingly expensive. The drivers wear modified beefeater outfits.


You can see how it happened. Envy-preemption. Or the simplest prudence. Black cabs are socially insensitive. Traffic jams can getugly, or uglier still; people get dragged out of these burnishedhearses. So nowadays cabs aren't even minicabs. They're just any oldheap with a removable sign up on the dash. You get in front. Then the driver removes the sign. Or sometimes he doesn't. He leaves itthere. It's okay. It's cool. It looks sufficiently shitty inside; no oneoutside can be bothered to mind.


The place in Clapham is a research institute. I sit and wait. It feels like school. It feels like London Fields.


The truth is I am stalled. You wouldn't call it writer's block. You might call it snooper's block. Tower block.


I can see Keith's tower block from the bedroom window. I scan itwith Mark Asprey's powerful binoculars. He's up there on theeleventh floor. I bet it's the one with all the ruined satellite equipment dangling from the little balcony.


Chapter 7 looms like Keith's tower block. A fortress. There's noway in.


When I entered the garage for my first darts lesson Keith turnedsuddenly and gripped my shoulders and stared me in the eye as hespoke. Some kind of darts huddle. 'I've forgotten more than you'llever know about darts,' says this darting poet and dreamer. 'I'mgiving to you some of my darts knowledge.' And I'm giving him fiftypounds an hour. 'Respect that, Sam. Respect it.'


Our noses were still almost touching as Keith talked of such thingsas theaddress of the board andgracing theochйand thesincerity ofthe dart.Oh yes, andclinicism. He then went on to tell me everythinghe knew about the game. It took fifteen seconds.


There's nothing to know. Ah, were I the kind of writer that wentabout improving on unkempt reality, I might have come up withsomething a little more complicated. But darts it is. Darts. Darts . . .Darts. In the modern game, or 'discipline', you start at 501 and scoreyour way down. You must 'finish', exactly, on a double: the outerband. The bullseye scores fifty and counts as a double, too, for somereason. The outer bull scores twenty-five, for some other reason. Andthat's it.


In an atmosphere of tingling solemnity I approached theochй,orthrowing line, 7ft 9 1/4 ins from the board, 'as decided', glossedKeith, 'by the World Darts Federation'. Weight on front foot; headstill; nice follow through. 'You're looking at that treble 2.0,'whispered Keith direly. 'Nothing else exists.Nothing.'


My first dart hit the double 3. 'Insincere dart,' said Keith.My second missed the board altogether, smacking into the wallcabinet. 'No clinicism,' said Keith. My third I never threw: on thebackswing the plastic flight jabbed me in the eye. After I'd recov­ered from that, my scores went 11, 2, 9; 4, 17, outer bullseye(25!); 7, 13, 5. Around now Keith stopped talking about thesincerity of the dart and started saying 'Throw itright for Christ'ssake' and 'Get the fucking thingin there'. On and on it went.Keith grew silent, grieving, priestly. At one point, having thrown two darts into the bare wall, I dropped the third and reeled back­ ward from theochй,saying — most recklessly — that darts was adumb game and I didn't care anyway. Keith calmly pocketed hisdarts, stepped forward, and slammed me against a heap of pack­ing cases. Our noses were almost touching again. 'You don't nevershow no disrespect for the darts, okay?' he said. 'You don't nevershow no disrespect for the darts . . . You don't never show no disrespect for the darts.'


The second lesson was a nightmare too. The third is tonight.


Warily I eye my pimpish darts pouch. Ј69.95, dartscompris,courtesy of Keith.


Guy came over just now, for tea, and I returned his short storieswith a few words of quiet discouragement. He was right: theyweren't any good or anything. He's a sweetheart, and he has somenice perceptions; but he writes like Philboyd Studge. I told him, withan inner titter, that the stories ran too close to life.


He just gathered them up shyly, nodding his head. See, he didn'tcare any more. He didn't care. Just smiled and gazed out of thewindow at the speeding clouds. All in all, debriefing him was quite asweat. I was reminded of the line inMore Die of Heartbreak, and Ichecked in the dictionary: the second definition ofinfatuation is'inspired with extravagant passion'; but the first definition is 'madefoolish'. Guy asked my advice about Nicola. I gave my advice (it wasbad advice), and with any luck he'll take it.


Then he left. I walked him downstairs and out into the street. Thepigeons waddled by, in their criminal balaclavas. Pigeons havedefinitely seen better days. Not so long ago they were drawing Venus's chariot. Venus, goddess of beauty and sensual love.


Somewhere else inMore Die of Heartbreak Bellow says thatAmerica is the only place to be, because it contains the 'real modern action'. Everywhere else is 'convulsed' in some earlier stage of de­velopment. That's true. But England feels like the forefront of some­thing, the elegiac side of it, perhaps. It makes me think of Yeats'slines (and here my memory still holds):


We have fallen in the dreams the ever-livingBreathe on the tarnished mirror of the world,And then smooth out with ivory hands and sigh.


Now I must go to Keith's garage. How I suffer for my art.


Midnight. I return in a state of rapture. I have an hysterical urge toburst right into Chapter 7, to write all night and beyond! Oh,something is tickling my heart with delicate fingers . . .


Easy now. Courage. What happened?


Keith and I were packing up after my darts lesson. I sat there on astolen case ofporno. The atmosphere was better tonight, becausetoward the end I threw a treble zo. That's right. I got a dart to go in thetreble 2.0, the flattened nose of the board's face — the treble 20, whatdarts is all about. Keith picked me up and whirled me around in the air.


Actually, it was bound to happen in the end. The darts went whereverthey liked, so why not into the treble zo? Similarly, the immortalbaboon, locked up with typewriter and amphetamines for a fewPoincarйtime-cycles, a number of aeons with more zeros than there are suns in the universe, might eventually type out the worddarts.


I was sitting there going on about how tired Kath must be and howgood I was with children. I also threw in some lies about the impossiblesqualor of my earlier years. So many times I've said all this—I'm almosttoppling over with boredom myself.


'Oh, sure,' I said. 'When I was your age I was still dodging the shit in the South Bronx. The rats were this big. You'd come out of the walkupand see the body of a child, like a broken -'


'You got the - ?'


I gave him theЈ 50. Intolerably he started talking about darts again-my darts, or rather mymechanical security. We began to leave. Igrimly assumed that we would be looking in at the Black Cross for anightcap and a few dozen games of darts. But as we went out throughthe little door Keith paused and looked at me unhappily.


'We going indoors,' he said. 'First.'


For the 300-yard journey we relied on the heavy Cavalier. We parked under the shadow of the craning block — which sparked andflickered like ten thousand TV sets stacked up into the night. Keithhurried. He summoned the elevator but to his silent agony the elevatorwas dead or elsewhere. We climbed the eleven floors, passing a litter ofsick junkies sprawled out on the stairs in grumbling sleep. Withreferred rage Keith denounced them through his wheezes: a mixture ofpersonal oaths and campaign slogans from the last election. We walked the walkway. Avoiding my eyes he leaned on the bell. And when the door opened I...I understand. I understand how Guy felt,as the veil went up (like a curtain or a skirt) to reveal the woman in theBlack Cross. It comes in leaps and bounds. Sometimes it comes, not asthunder, but as lightning. Sometimes love comes at the speed of light.There's just no getting out of the way.


Faded, patient, Kath Talent stood in the kitchen colours, in the palemargin of the kitchen. She had Kim in her arms. And the child... the child was anangel.


Chapter 7: Cheating


GOOD MORNING, LADY B.'


'Good morning to you, Harry.'


'So,' he said as he swept through the door. 'Today's the big one.'


'I —I've been watching the news.'


Keith strode into the sitting-room and switched off the television, pausing briefly to wonder how much it would fetch.


'The weather there,' said Lady Barnaby. 'And Yugoslavia is listed asone of the —'


'All stuff and nonsense, Lady B. All stuff and nonsense. This the lot?Then we're off. Oh yeah. Lady B., we got a little prob. The motor's onthe blink. Never mind: we'll take yours. The holiday of a lifetime.What, are you sure!'


Listening to Lady Barnaby's decidedly hysterical laughter, andcalmly aware of the set of housekeys and documents she always kept inthe glove compartment, Keith barrelled up the motorway, giving her'It's a Long Way to Tipperary' and a lightly bowdlerized version of'Roll Me Over in the Clover'. They drove through veil upon veil ofscalding heatmist. The sky pulsed blue, blue, blue. Whereas thecyclones and ball lightning in Yugoslavia and Northern Italy had evenmade it on to the pages of Keith's tabloid.


'It seems silly to be going away in this weather.'


'Greenhouse,' said Keith dismissively.'El Niсo innit. Tomorrowjust be pissing down.'


The remark carried little conviction. But Lady Barnaby seemed totake a surpising amount of comfort from it. Her bones knew the old English weather; whereas Keith was accustomed to a more versatilesky. Just piss down is what it just didn't do in England, not regularly,not any longer. It did that now in places like California and Morocco.


'Look at thecongestion,' said Keith.


After a half-hour delay in the rotting exhaust-pipe of the accesstunnel, and a rather longer wait at the short-stay carpark, Keithguided Lady Barnaby to the check-in stall at Terminal 2. Here the computer pronounced Lady Barnaby's ticket near-worthless. Keithtook the news with cold resignation: thecheat at the bucket-shop hadcheated him. What he didn't yet know was that thecheat who hadcheated him had been cheated by thecheat who supplied the bucket-shop. As a result, Lady Barnaby was flying to a non-holiday, and flyingone-way. Keith managed to panic her about missing her flight - and about losing her luggage, which they had luckily relinquished at thedoor. He stood there smoking and whistling and coughing andswearing as Lady Barnaby countersigned all but three of her traveller's cheques. She entered Departures in a ragged dash.


Vowing vengeance on her behalf, Keith picked up some bent dutyfrees from his contact at Freight, drove smartly to Slough for a breakneck get-together with Analiese Furnish, and then, back inLondon, rounded off a busy morning by selling Lady Barnaby's car.


'Enlah,' said the baby. 'Enlah,' said Kim. 'Enlah.'


Keith glanced up longsufferingly from his tabloid and his lunch. Hislunch consisted of Chicken Pilaff and four Bramley Apple Pies. Histabloid consisted of kiss and tell, and then more kiss and tell, and thenmore kiss and more tell. Aliens Stole My Boobs. Marilyn Monroe AndJack Kennedy Still Share Nights of Passion: In Atlantis. My Love Muscles Tightened From Beyond The Grave. All his life Keith had been a reader of the most vulgar and sensational of the mass-market dailies. But two years ago he had made a decision, and gone down­market: to the smaller-circulationMorning Lark. He was stilladjusting to the wrench. TheMorning Lark, in Keith's view, made upfor what it lacked in coverage with a more positive and funlovingapproach to life. There was no chance of tragedy or disaster drivingBeverli or Frizzbi off page three, or page two, or page one. Andalthough the girls in theMorning Lark weren't as pretty as the girls in the mass-market daily, they were certainly more numerous. Ah, the lovely smile on her - cheers you up for the rest of the day.


But now Keith was soberly rereading the filler about the death toll inYugoslavia. He pointed at the pram with a finger. Kath slipped slowlyforwards from her chair.


'Enlah,' said the baby.


The pram dominated the hallway. The pramwas the hallway, andmore. Its handles stuck into the kitchen, its fluted bonnet took up half the lounge. Again Keith glanced up longsufferingly as Kath returned,or pivoted, with the baby in her arms. The baby, who was neither tirednor wet nor hungry, established position on her mother's lap,demurely.


Kath gave a quick nod and said, 'I'm very worried, Keith.'


Keith drank tea with a mouthwash action. 'Yeah?' he said.


'War,' said the baby.


Kath said, 'It's the news.'


'Oh that,' he said with relief.


The verification,' said Kath.


'Lie,' said the baby.


Keith said, 'Nothing in it. Whatreason?'


'I don't know. You look at the . . .'


'Oil,' said the baby.


Kath said, 'A flare-up. A flashpoint somewhere.'


'Eh?'


'Wall,' said the baby.


Keith said, 'Jesus. It'll blow over, okay?'


'Or,' said the baby.


'They've been cheating,' said Kath. 'Both sides. They've beencheating for fifteen years.'


'Who says?' said Keith. There was nothing about it in Keith'stabloid. 'TV?'


'I been down the library,' said Kath lightly. 'The proper papers.'


This touched a nerve in Keith (for he was very loyal to his tabloid,regarding its readers as one big family); but it also touched a chord. Itwas through the library that Kath had won Keith's heart. She hadtaught him how to read and write—easily the most intimate episode ofhis life. Oh, easily. The thought of it made tears gather behind his eyes,tears of shame and pride, tears of difficulty, of intimacy.


'Fuck off,' said Keith equably - his usual way of registering casualdisagreement. 'So who's cheating who?'


'They both started cheating as a hedge against the other side doingso,' said Kath with the Irish fluidity that Keith had always silentlyadmired, and now silently hated. 'They're accusing one another ofnon-compliance and inaccurate denial.'


Keith started on his first Bramley Apple Pie. He knew all aboutinaccurate denial. Keith used it a lot, this technique. He was foreverinaccurately denying things. Quite recently he had had to do somevery concerted inaccurate denial - with regard to his wife, instead of inaccurately (and routinely) denying to someone or other that this orthat was stolen or worthless or broken or ruined, Keith had beenobliged inaccurately to deny that he had given Kath non-specific urethritis. it was the sternest test this tactic had ever faced . . . Keithhad been cheating on Kath with a girl who had been cheating on Keith. Her name was Peggy Obbs. First, Keith went round to the clinic; next, he offered a cash gift to Petronella Jones and a bottle of pills to Trish Shirt; then he hastened across town and started beatingup Peggy Obbs. While he was beating up Peggy, Peggy's brotherMicky came home and started beating up Keith. When Keith explained why he was beating up Peggy, Micky stopped beating upKeith and started beating up Peggy, with Keith's help. After that wasover, things got a little unpleasant: he came home to find Kath cryingby the cooker, and saw the doctor's slip and the chemist's bag. But Keith was ready. He denied it. He denied it hotly, indignantly, and inaccurately. He seized her shoulders and told her to put her coat onthat minute.They were going straight round to the doctor and havehimdo some denying. He was kneeing her out of the door by the timeshe shook free and went to comfort the weeping baby. As Keithstarted off to the Black Cross he told Kath not todare blame him for her woman's troubles ever again. For a couple of weeks he gave herhell about it, then let the matter drop, exhausted (apart fromeverything else) by all this inaccurate denial, which was admittedly effective but, he found, uniquely tiring. And, by the way, this non­specific urethritis wasn't the old kind of non-specific urethritis,which everybody in Keith's circle already had. It was the new kind ofnon-specific urethritis, implying widespread inflammation of thelumbar regions, heavy and repeated doses of antibiotics, and (in anideal world) at least a couple of months in bed. But who couldmanage these months in bed? Who had time for them? The planetneeded a couple of months in bed. But it wouldn't get them — itwouldn't ever get them.


Keith finished his fourth Bramley Apple Pie and said, 'Shut it.'A soft female cough came through the kitchen wall from theneighbouring flat. Then they heard a contented swallow, and thesound a paper tissue makes when run across a smooth upper lip.


'Iqbala,' said Keith. 'She got a cold.'


'She got a new boyfriend too.'


'Shenever.'


'Yodelling her head off again she was this morning. Like a pighaving an operation.'


'. . . The dirty little bitch.'


'Hark at him so indignant. You never said anything about the otherboyfriend.'


Keith fell silent. This was true. He never said anything about theother boyfriend. He never said anything about the other boyfriendbecausehe was the other boyfriend. Many times he had slipped nextdoor, one finger raised to his lips. Being indignant about the otherboyfriend had proved to be quite beyond his powers. He just told Kath(and Iqbala) to turn the telly up loud.


Kath said, 'Look at that now.'


Little Kim was asleep, seated more or less upright on her mother's lap. The baby's powerful face, fully formed but in miniature, with its collection of glassy roundnesses, its crescents and half-moons, lolledforward on the white trim of her jumpsuit. The cheeks broadened atthe base, pushing out the lower lip, as brightly succulent as a slice of sushi, the likes of which neither Keith nor Kath had ever seen.


'Good as gold,' he said. 'Get her down, girl.'


To free the passage they backed the pram into the kitchen. Toaccommodate the pram, the table had to be shoved still tighter to the walls; Keith then faced the draining task of pushing Clive in under itwith his feet. When two adults were active in the kitchen theyperformed closely, as in a dance, almost a smooch. But Keith wasn't feeling affectionate. His mode changed. He thought of Guy's houseand found himself in the rare state of total cluelessness; he had no clueto that kind of space and what it might mean. Keith grew up in a low-rent basement flat in Chesterton Road (about six streets further down the Grove from Lansdowne Crescent), where, so far as he knew, hismother lived on speechlessly. Two rooms, kitchen and bathroom. Allhis youth he had sat in this flat and wondered how he was going to getout of it. Conversely, a great deal of his adulthood had been spentwondering how he was going to get back into it. A while ago he learnedthat on his mother's death the flat would revert to the council, andthat, in Keith's estimation, was the end of that. It was certainly the end of his mother. He confronted the image, the bright astronomy, of whatGuy had and Keith's stream of consciousness simply stopped flowing.It dried up. TV, he thought. It was the best he could do.


Kath edged back into the room. Keith dogged her with his eyes,revising his catalogue of her physical deficiencies. Everything hecherished, everything he looked for in a woman, Kath didn't have. Shewas no Analiese Furnish or Debbee Kensit, no stocky little brabursterwith pumpkin bum and milkbottle legs. (Maybe short legs wereshortcuts . . .Yeah. They didn't mess about. Short legs were shortcutsto the biz.) When he met her five years ago she looked like the girl in theadvert for double cream: the eyebrows rurally pale, the hair and its innocent russet. Now she looked to Keith like a figure glimpsed atdawn through a rainy windscreen.


'Look at the state of you,' said Keith, and watched her shoulders tighten over the sink.


She paused in her work. 'I'm tired,' she said to the window. 'I'm sotired.'


You don't say, thought Keith. Oh really. He couldn't express letalone feel any sympathy for someone so proclaimedly in need of anambulance. And when you considered the simple heroism with whichKeith endured his bad chest, his curry-torn digestive system, theitchings and burnings of his sedimentary venereal complaints, hisdarts elbow, his wall-eyed hangovers . ..


He stood up, saying, 'I happen to be under considerable pressure atthe minute. I work my guts out.' He made an expansive gesture. 'Whodo you think's paying for all this?' In the kitchen, or indeed anywhereelse in the flat, making an expansive gesture was not necessarily a goodidea. One of Keith's outflung hands banged into the door, the other into the fridge. 'Get your head down now, for Christ's sake.'


'I think I will.'


'What. After you made my tea?'


'Yes,' said Kath. 'After.'


An hour later Keith sat catching up on his viewing, his knees inchesfrom the screen (not that he had much say in where his knees went).


'Enlah,' said the baby. 'Enlah, Enlah, Enlah, Enlah.Enlah. EnlahEnlah Enlah Enlah Enlah Enlah Enlah Enlah . . .'


With a sigh and some slow nodding Keith extinguished his mostrecent cigarette, switched off the shootout he was watching, andclimbed to his feet. He looked down at Kim, whose moses-basket was wedged between the TV and the inactive two-bar fire. He stretched,barking his right elbow nastily against the wall, and flexed his back,yawning, until his head bumped into the door. . . Outside, thebalcony was strewn with satellite receivers, all stolen, all broken. Nospace out there. No space where Clive could furiously swivel.


Keith shook Kath awake and then took the dog for his evening walk- Keith always did this, religiously, when he wasn't up to no good elsewhere. All you had to do was step into the street and you were •surrounded by royalty. The Prince Albert, the Duke of Clarence, the Earl of Warwick. Maharajah Wines. In the yellow light of the shops,while Clive sniffed at some or other excrescence, Keith looked again ata certain brunette in theMorning Lark. She was pretty. Her name wasPritti, too — or Pritti, at any rate, was what she called herself, withgrinning literalism. A bit like Nicola, thought Keith. Or Nikki. ButNicky wasn't pretty exactly, like Pritti. I blew that one. Or go roundthere and teach her a lesson . . . The arguable connexions betweenpin-ups and pornography and sex and violence: just to clearthem up,while Keith is at hand. With people like Keith, a pin-up was enough toget him going, going in that general direction. But almost anythingwas enough to get people like Keith going. Five minutes in a populatedregion of Saudi Arabia would get Keith going. And you can't yashmakfemale reality, with its legs, its breasts, its hair, its eyes...A shameabout Petronella getting married like that, even though she was talland skinny, but still quite keen by the sound of her. Thus Keith wouldpay another farewell visit to Trish Shirt. Later. He walked the full 300 yards and let Clive precede him into the Black Cross, not wanting tomiss Guy.


Keith wasn't disappointed. Six hours after his own arrival, Guy Clinchstepped over Clive's ash-strewn body and stood there swathed in the smoke and the spores. Eleven o'clock and the Black Cross was loudand crowded, and cocked tight, hairtrigger: one false move and it could all explode. The smoke was hot, the air was hot (hot Clive laylike a doorstop), even the wind outside was as hot as the late-nightbreath of Keith's TV...


Jesus. Keith shouted into a wall of sound. Earlier in the eveningsomeone had gone and put a brick through the jukebox; but God thebarman had started playing Irish folksongs over the PA system, atbalding, teeth-loosening volume. Apart from making God cry, the main effect of these folksongs (which promised a fresh dawn for aproud and drunken nation) was to make everybody shout all the time:their third and unforeseeable effect was to make Keith even angrier


with his wife, with Trish, with darts and debts, with all the pressures


on the moderncheat. He shouted and shouldered his way through toGuy, who lingered with his usual site-tenacity by the pinball machine,inoperative, because a girl was sleeping on it, or lying on it anyway. Also near by were Shakespeare, Dean, Thelonius, Bogdan and ZbigTwo.


'Did you call her?' Keith shouted.


Guy flinched. 'Yes,' he shouted back.


'Did you see her?'


Guy nodded and mimed an affirmative.


Then Keith shouted, 'Did you fuck her?'


Guy staggered back from him. He shook his head and his hand intime.'You don't understand,'he shouted.'She doesn't. . .she's not-'


'Her?' shouted Keith. 'Her?' he shouted even louder. Keith tookGuy's arm and pulled him through the open doors into the street,suddenly pausing, on the way, to stroke Clive's back with his foot. Then he turned.


'What are you after then?'


'Nothing. She's not like that.'


'They're all the fucking same. Did you try her?'


Guy smiled palely and said, 'Of course not. You know me, Keith.'


But Keith did not know Guy. All he knew about Guy he got fromTV. He said, 'Listen. I want something? I go for it. Me? I'm in there. Boof.'


'You're barking up the wrong tree, Keith.'


'I'm like a dog,' said Keith. 'You kick me? I don't run and hide. I'mback. I'm in there.'


Keith didn't look as pleased by this simile as he thought he was goingto be. In fact his sweating face spoke of general disappointment and confusion.


'Keith, you're upset.'


'You're all the fucking same,' he said, and turned back through thedoors, with an exemplary briskness. He knew Guy wouldn't be manenough to follow.


Two hours later, as Keith lurched with Clive down Lancaster Road,to pay his last call on Trish Shirt, he reviewed something Nicky hadsaidtohimthattime('Isherich? . . .There's a thingyou and I might dotogether. A money thing'), and furiously wondered if there was anyway he couldsell her to Guy Clinch.


'I've hit form just when I needed it,' said Keith. 'Come good at the righttime. As long as I maintain my composure I don't fear no one, Tony,not throwing like I am. No way will I crap or bottle it on the night. I'd just like to thank you and the viewers for the superb support. The fansis what darts is all about.'


You 're known foryour big finishes, Keith,said the voice, which was- which was what? Which was TV, dream life, private culture,learning how to read and write, worldly goods. /believe they call youMr Checkout, or the Finisher.


That's right, William,' said Keith. 'But I've worked on my power.It's an improved Keith Talent you're looking at tonight. A more com­plete darter. Still, you know what they say. Trebles for show, doubles for dough. You can get all themбximumsand ton-forties in the worldbut if you can't kill them off, if you can't stick it in at the death -'


Keith coughed for a few minutes. He wasn't on TV or anything. Far from it: the garage, the dusty morning light. He was sitting slumped ona cardboard box, in a posture of weary meditation. Just now on thephone Dean had given him some chastening news. Guess who was inthe other half of the draw for the Sparrow Masters. Chick Purchase, whom Keith hated. Chick, whose very name tasted in Keith's mouthlike hospital food. To tell the truth, Keith was looking and feelingdistinctly seedy. In fact he had a wall-eyed hangover . . .Not that he'dtarried overlong at Trish Shirt's. Clive was still sniffing about the stockroom, looking for a good place to lie down, when Keith reeledback out of there. But then he had stopped by at the Golgotha for a pensive glass ofporno. And later, around five, he had gone back toTrish Shirt's. On the other hand - as against that - you wouldn't catch him goingthere again. No way.


Seedily he peered round the garage, feeling its dust in his throat. Helit another cigarette. The bottles of drink on the workbench he nowviewed with contempt. He generally found a vodka or two quiterefreshing at this hour (it was ten in the morning), but he wouldn't betouching a drop, not now. No danger. It would be Lucozade untilFriday. He had his darts match coming up — an away fixture at theFoaming Quart in Brixton, at Brixton's Foaming Quart — and he found, as he got older (and like the planet he was getting older at apeculiar rate), that darts was a stern mistress. Take this morning.Throw a dart? He couldn't even hold one. He couldn't evenlift one. And Dean Pleat was expected with the van at ten-thirty.


As they peered seedily about, Keith's eyes registered certain itemsscattered among the debris and the contraband. They lay where he had


first hurled them; vacuum-cleaner, coffee-grinder, ironing-board,


iron. What were his plans for these appliances? When feeling at hismost rancorous he thought that on a Wednesday or a Saturday, if hehappened to be passing, he might dump them for ten quid on the tinkerin Golborne Road. Now he reconsidered. Maybe that was just moreshort-end money, just more small thought. That time in her flat, when he gashed his thumb, with that screwdriver. She dressed his wound,while he stared into the brown sluice between her breasts. TV, Keithspeculated. Brings them closer together innit. Like a bond. Heremembered the taste of her money in his mouth and the way she put itthere. A nauseous gust ruffled his head and seemed to clear it; he bent forward and whispered, with certainty, 'She . . . she has need of me.'Yes she did. In a way that went beyond his known parameters, she —she had need of him.


Keith stood up, and began to pace the floor, his hands claspedbehind his back. In this matter of posh birds Keith was, after all, by nomeans inexperienced. There had been the odd housewife in his window-cleaning and petty-theft period (Keith with ladder, bucket,and unreliable smile), the odd daughter too when he was on stake-outsfor the local firm, appearing at the front door with some choiceplausibility or other. Keith knew that some of these rich ladies liked abit of rough; but they didn'tall like it, not by any means. A lot of peoplehad difficulty with this point. Try drumming some sense into Norvisand Thelonius. They thought thatall white women liked black men;they thought that the only ones who didn't, or pretended not to, wereracist. Misguided, sadly misguided, thought Keith sadly. Some women didn't like otherness; they didn't like the other, when it cameto the other. Hope Clinch, now: there was a perfect example of a richlady who didn't like a bit of rough. They looked right through you and out the other side; for them you were nothing, not even animal — you were nothing. And Keith knew very well that hewas a bit of rough, relatively speaking, at least for the time being.


On the whole he found posh skirt shockingly arrogant in bed,always wanting to get on top and other rubbish, and often drawing the line, if you please, at some of Keith's most favoured stunts. There was,for instance, that mad bitch in South Ken. Miranda. She was at least forty, and a wild one. Single in those days, Keith had spent many anight in her mews bedroom being oiled and teased and clawed. It wenton all summer and Keith nursed high hopes of the relationship: a car,maybe, a cash gift or at least a loan. But he went off her, right off her, after she got the police round that time, when Keith paid a call on herone night, with some pals. All right, it was late (he rememberedswitching the car lights off on the way there), and - okay - thingsweretaken (namely goods, drink and liberties) and it looked bad for aminute there when they formed that queue behind him. But to screamso loud the neighbours called the filth in: that wis betrayal. Soon afterthat she changed her phone number and went away for a while. Keithwas still in a state of high indignation when he showed up with the vanand the boys (the same boys) and started bitterly stripping the house.


Keith sighed. Tomorrow he would take Nicola's stuff to GoodFicksin Cathcart Road. They would, of course, cheat Keith, and, having brought it all home, he would have to take it all back again. Theoriginal faults would perhaps be corrected, but new ones would alsobe introduced. You had to do everything, and pay for everything, atleast twice; that was the way it was. Raising a yellow finger to his lowerlip, Keith pondered the whole future of cheating. Cheating was his life. Cheating was all he knew. Few people had that much money any morebut it was quite clear that they had never been stupider. The old desire for a bargain had survived into a world where there weren't any; thereweren't any bargains. Unquestionably you could still earn a decentliving at it, at cheating. Yet no one seemed to have thought through the implications of a world in whicheveryone cheated. The other morning Keith had bought five hundred vanity sachets of Outrage, his stapleperfume. At lunchtime he discovered that they all contained water, asubstance not much less expensive than Outrage, but harder to sell.Keith was relieved that he had already unloaded half the consignmentonDamiбnNoble in the Portobello Road. Then he held Damian'stenners up to the light: they were crude forgeries. He passed on thenotes without much trouble, in return for twenty-four bottles ofvodka which, it turned out, contained a misty, faintly scented liquid. Outrage! The incident struck Keith as a sign of the times. Everyonewas cheating. Everyone was cheating — because everyone was cheat­ing. Poor Keith, and the tragedy of the commons...In such times thethoughtful man looked elsewhere: to his darts. Meanwhile, andalways accepting that he might taste defeat on theochй(that was dartsafter all, making the game what it was), the cheating situation calledfor readjustment, for daring, for vision. Keith would have to cheatmore, cheat sooner and cheat harder than the next guy, and generallyexpandthe whole concept of cheating.


He picked up the darts and threw. Hah! a 20, a 5 and a I: 26 - thejoke throw. As he plucked the darts from the board Keith rehearsed hissneer of incredulous amusement and acknowledged the jeers of thecrowd: even Keith was human. That was the only thing wrong withdarts. That was the only thing wrong with cheating. You couldn'tcheat at darts. No way.


There was the sound of a van outside. He recognized the faultysilencer.


'Keith!' yelled Dean.


'Dean!' yelled Keith. 'Okay. Let's go toworkl'


The days passed. Though making himself no stranger to pub or club Keith drank nothing and worked hard because of the life that was inhim. He sensed the pulse and body of the street-trade and heard the cars lowing in the furrows. Like new corn the young Swedes andDanes formed lines at his stall, and were reaped. He walked dog andburped baby and drew the keening of wife after his will. The hotmacadam pulled on his shoes, like desire, and he had the surety a man knows when there is a sickly Saudi granny in the back of the Cavalier.He harkened to the chirrup of fruit-machine and the tolling of pinballtable, humped the dodgy goods and defrayed life's pleasures withsweat of brow and groin and armpit, knew also the firm clasp of Analiese's ankles around his neck, the coarse reassurance of TrishShirt's hair in his fist. And ever dazed from staring at the sun, thesource of all generation. Heaven and earth was teeming around him. And how should this cease?


Keith drove up the dead-end street and braked with needless violence.He didn't park, although a space was available. He doubleparked.Then he emerged — in flared toreador pants, halfsmock shortsleeveddarts shirt, oxblood cowboy boots.


The door buzzed open for him. Keith lugged the stuff up the stairs. Despite the heat, the journey seemed a lot shorter than it had the timebefore. Just goes to show: peak fitness. He climbed the final flight,dropped his cargo in the hall, and moved through . . . and movedthrough the intoxicating emptiness of the four large rooms. Itreminded him of something. What? Oh yeah. Burgling. He called her name — the trisyllable this time. Then he returned to the hall and sawthe stepladder, the tipped skylight. He ascended slowly into thebrilliant photosphere. As the colours dripped from his vision, he saw a brown elbow, and a brown shoulder, and the rest of her, lying there inwhite underwear.


'Hello,' said Nicola Six.


Hello, thought Keith Talent.


Incarnacion is melting to me, but very slowly, on some glacial timescale. I am appreciably less frightened of her now. It's funny who hasthe power to frighten, and who has not.


Tall, broad, handsome, queenly, Incarnacion wears black at alltimes. Some of her outfits have been recently purchased; others are silvery-grey with use. There is probably enough steady death in thehills of her nativeAndalucнato keep Incarnacion in black for the restof her life. How old are these Spanish ladies, when they make the bigswitch to black?


She is coming round to me. The hiring ofAuxiliadora- thatdisgraceful solecism — we have started to put behind us. I amdeferential. I spring-clean the apartment before she gets here. I giveface. Christ, as if I need to spend more time kissing ass than I do already.


Incarnacion gives the odd smile now. She isn't exactly communi­cative yet; but on occasion she can be induced to discuss, orhaughtily enumerate, the achievements of Mark Asprey.


Like Kath Talent, who is a worried woman, I have been consultingtheproper papers. A great deal of comment (most of it stodgilyPharisaical), some analysis (jovial stuff about the verificationprocedures) — and no news, not of a geopolitical nature anyway. TheGulf, Israel of course, Germany of course, Hungary, Cambodia and so on. But nonews. I'll have to go to Queensway for aTrib.


The television is even worse. Those glamorous ladies read out thebulletins as if they're frontingBlue Peter orJackanory. The brightsmile of kindergarten kindnesses. Endless human-interest piecesabout the weather. Soap and sitcom. Oh, and a quite incredibleamount of darts. There's practically a whole channel of it, a wholenetwork of darts.


The weather is certainly playing along and doing its bit. Yester­day I went for a walk with Guy in the park. Above, the clouds weremoving with preternatural speed; you felt as if larger units ofweather were passing overhead like meteorological discs on a chart — months, entire seasons sweeping by in less than thirty seconds. And great heat. The clouds sped, and not just laterally either. They seemed to bounce and romp and tumble. Yes, there was definitely something puppyish, something almost faggy, going on up there,when like plays with like.


At one point as I walked under a tree I felt the warm kiss of avoluptuous dewdrop on my crown. Gratefully I ran a hand through my hair - and what do I find? Birdshit. Pigeonshit. I'm feeling okay for once, I'm feeling medium cool, and a London pigeon goes andtakes a dump on my head. It had this effect on me: despair. I swore and stumbled around, bedraggled, helpless, the diet of a Londonpigeon being something that really doesn't bear thinking about. Imean, what the digestive system of a London pigeon considers aswaste . . .Guy laughed briefly, then fell silent and produced a skyblue handkerchief (used but clean: in bold contradistinction to aLondon pigeon, Guy's wastes would be clean). From his height he dabbed at the quick-drying matter. He did this unsqueamishly, andwith delicacy. 'Hold still,' he told me. I tried. I put an arm around his waist to steady myself. But the top of my head doesn't reallybear thinking about either, what with the writing I now find on my pillow at dawn, and the daddylonglegs that come and gather in my brush.


Later we sat at a sidewalk table and drank coffee. Around usyoung Arab husbands grumbled while their wives shopped. Thatmustache grumbled at this mustache. This mustache grumbled atthat mustache.


'Written anything recently?' I asked him.


Guy paused and smiled and flinched. 'Yes, I have actually, Sam,Poetry,' he said.


'Sorry. I don't handle poetry,' I said daringly (and who does thesedays?). But I offered to take a look at it anyway. I know what hispoetry will be about. What poetry is always about. The cruelty of thepoet's mistress.


I myself attempt a call to Missy Harter at Hornig Ultrason. BarbroMcCambridge's secretary Olivia eventually puts me through toBarbro. Next, Janit Slotnick's secretary Rosalind puts me through toJanit. At this point I am a mere secretary away from Missy herself; but that's as far as it goes.


I negotiate with Janit and her infuriating voice. She wants asample. I offer to Fed-Ex - or even Thrufax - the first three chaptersto her. Janit says okay, but she also wants a treatment. I try toconceal the difficulties this would involve me in. I suggest a'projection'. We compromise on anoutline.


Icould stall, but for how long? Money anxieties are starting to smirk and gibber at me - and an artist shouldn't have to work underthat kind of pressure. I want patronage. True, I get some free meals atthe Clinches', and Lizzyboo, I hope, will insist on going Dutch when Itake her to the movies. But Keith's darts lessons, rounds of drinks atthe Black Cross, little presents for Kim — I have overheads.


I guess I could just wing it. But all I know for sure is the very lastscene. The car, the car-tool, the murderer waiting in his car, themurderee, ticking towards him on her heels. I don't know how to getto the dead-end street. I close my eyes, trying to see a way — how dowritersdare do what they do? — and there's just chaos. It seems to methat writing brings trouble with it, moral trouble, unexamined trouble. Even to the best.


I know. I'll ask Nicola. She already has an outline.She can damnwell do it.


No news, but plenty of rumour. Where do they come from, all therumours? A kind of inverse scepticism takes over, when there's nonews.


An Apollo object, ripped loose from the asteroid belt, is heading toward us at ten miles per second. It's so big that when its leadingedge hits, if it hits, its trailing edge will be up there where theaeroplanes fly.


A unique configuration of earth, moon and sun will cause hemispherical flooding. There will be sunquakes, and superboltlightning.


A nearby supernova will presently drench the planet in cosmicrays, causing another Great Extinction.


Oh, and nuclear weapons:those dinosaurs.


The supernova stuff strikes me as a puredefinition of rumour.How do we know about the supernova until we can see it?Nothing, no information, can reach us faster than cosmic light.There's a speed limit up there. The universe is full of signs, circled inred, saying 186,287.


And let's not forget the Second Coming, also awaited, in quietconfidence. Or not so quiet. On the street the poor rock and sway,like burying parties. All their eyes are ice.


'Call it off, Nicola,' I said (I felt 1 had to say it some time). 'So far,there's absolutely nothing inevitable about what you've entrained.Forget it. Do something else. Live.'


'It's funny, isn't it,' she said, 'that there's nothing more boring, inany kind of narrative, than someone vacillating over something youknow they're going to do. I keep noticing it in the trash I watch andread. Will the spy come out of retirement for one last big mission. Will the gangster heed his wife's warnings or go for the clinchingbank job. It's a nightmare sitting through that stuff. It's dead,dead.'


'Is it necessarily such a drag?' I said, sparing a protective thoughtfor my paragraph about Guy and the telephone call. 'Sexualvacillation is okay, surely.'


'Oh yes. Will the priest succumb to the Jezebel? Will the gypsyseduce the virgin? These are questions that deserve question marks. Theyare the story. With the other stuff there's no story until they'reout of the way.'


I said uneasily, 'But you're not in a story. This isn't some hiredvideo, Nicola.'


She shrugged. 'It's always felt like a story,' she said.


Nicola was sitting opposite me, by the table and the telephone, inher white dressing-gown. The dressing-gown had been washed recently, and now it was the elderly wicker chair that looked usedand intimate and Nicola-steeped. She folded her legs up beneathher. She had sat curled that way for many, many hours of her lifehere: introspections, piercing boredoms, incensed outwaitings. Butwith me she can let her hair down.


'Has Guy been here yet?"


'No. Soon. It's the next but one thing. I'm going to speed things up.Massive escalation.'


'Do you really need Guy? Couldn't you just edit him out?' I felt Ihad to say this too. For a moment I also felt real alarm that she might accede. If she did, I was looking at a very grim novella. Besides, I'd already Fed-Exed the first three chapters to Janit Slotnick.


'I agree it's a drag in a way but I do need him. Keith can't go it alone. There's not enough in him. Of course it could be managed.Easy. A bungled rape, strangulation. I could have managed that onthe first date. The time he followed me home I could have managedthat. But what do you think I'm after? A "senseless killing" ? Anywayevents are moving now. I just let the next thing happen.'


'Oh yeah. Nicola the determinist. "The next thing." Well how's itgoing to go? Could you — could you outline it for me?'


She exhaled, in weariness and irritation. I felt the same with Janit.She said, 'Clearly things will progress along two broad fronts.There'll be some intermeshing. I don't like . . . Why am I telling youall this?'


'I'll tell you why you're telling me all this. It's because,' I went on archly, 'it's because I'm a civilian. I'm immune. I salute your beautyand your originality and so on. And your power to shape reality. Butfor me it doesn't work. None of it. The bedroom voodoo, the FreeSpirit nihilistic heroine bit, the sex-actress bit — it just doesn't get tome.'


She did a fish mouth, and her eyes lengthened. 'Get you. Aren'tyouthe one.'


I raised a hand.


That isn't why,' she said. Til tell you why.' She looked around theroom and back again. 'Are you ready? Can I say it now?'


I looked around the room and back again. I nodded.


'You're dying, aren't you.'


'We all are,' I said.


Well, yes, we all are, in a way. But in different lanes, at different speeds in different cars.


Nicola's streamlined A-to-Z device is travelling at a hundred milesan hour and will not swerve or brake when it hits the wall of death.


Keith's personal Cavalier needs decoking, and pinks on cheap fuel,and has far too many miles on the clock (no use fiddling the speedoon this highway), with bad trouble brewing in big end and manifold.


Guy might drive for ever at a prudent thirty-five, with tons of gas —but here comes the fog and the pile-up dead ahead.


Me I'm in a rattletrap lurching much too fast over bumpy ground.I have left the road. I am out of control. The hood flies up. There goesa wheel. Only one outcome.


Bury my bones in London Fields. Where I was raised. That's whereI bought the farm. Yes I bought the farm out there in London Fields.


I must do something for the child.


Chapter 8: Going Out With God

nough of herchildhood had been spent in church to giveNicola an interest in religion. She was interested in religion, in away. (And it's a rare goodtime girl who waives all hope of Sugar-daddy.) Nicola was certainly mighty keen on blasphemy. And so sheoften found herself imagining that she was going out with God.


Or not going out with Him — not any more. He had slept with heronce, and once only: she did that to show Him what he would bemissing for ever and ever. In bed Nicola had made Him do the act ofdoubledarkness: the doublebeast with only one back. Then neveragain. God cried in the street outside her apartment. He telephoned and telepathized. He followed her everywhere, His gaze impartingthat fancy blue nimbus. God got Shakespeare and Dante working as ateam to write her poems. He hired Parthenope, Ligeia and Leucosia tosing her lullabies and romantic ballads. Appearing in various forms,He tempted her with His charisma: he came as King David, Valentino, Byron, John Dillinger, Genghis Khan, Courbet, Muhammad AH,Napoleon, Hemingway, the great Schwarzenegger, Burton Else. Preposterous flowers materialized on the stairs. Exhaustedly sheflushed the innumerable diamonds down the toilet. God knew that shehad always wanted her breasts to be very slightly larger andinfinitesimally further apart: he offered to arrange it. He wanted tomarry her and have her come and live at His place: in heaven. All thiscould be achieved at the speed of light. God said He would fix it so shelived for ever.


Nicola told Him to get lost.


Of course, there was another man in her life. His name was theDevil. Nicola didn't see nearly as much of the Devi! as - in a perfectworld - she would have liked. Sometimes, when the mood took him, he called her late and got her round to his soul club after hours, andabused her on stage while his friends looked on and laughed. Her thing for the Devil — it wasn't love. No, she could take or leave theDevil in the end. Nicola only did it because it was good fun and itmade God mad.


Guy Clinch in the park had been quite an experience.


You know how it is when two souls meet in a burst of ecstaticvolubility, with hearts tickling to hear and to tell, to knoweverything, to reveal everything, the shared reverence for the other'sotherness, a feeling of solitude radiantly snapped by fullcontact - allthat? Well, such interactions of energy are tiring enough when you'rein love, or think you are. But let Nicola trumpet the assurance thatthey're much more tiring when you're not: when you're justpretending.


Guy Clinch in the park had been murder.


'Let's talk about you. That's enough about me . . .'


'I'm sorry, am I rambling on terribly . . . ?'


'It's funny, but I don't think I've ever talked about this before..."


'That's enough about me. Let's talk about you . . .'


While, with an expression of dreamy self-pity, she frailly huggedher fur coat to her body (the day was helpfully cold) and spoke abouther spiritual struggles at the convent, it was only the thought of the spangled garter-belt and cathouse panties, the riot of underwear shewore beneath, that prevented Nicola from flopping back on thebench with her feet apart and saying, 'Oh, I can't bear this stuff. I'mlying. Nevermind.' She had to maintain an actress's discipline: it was like the fifteenth rehearsal with some dud leading man who kept onflubbing his lines. Time and again Nicola nearly corpsed. Yes: it'll beall right on the night. She played for time (taking little rests) bystaring in saintly silence at the water: the toy galleon with black sails,in whose wake . .. And when Guy was in full voice - on the ThirdWorld, on his writing, on the material inequities he found he just couldn't accept — Nicola stayed conscious by wondering how she would have processed Guy Clinch a few years ago, or a few monthsago. She would have seduced him that afternoon and sent him backto his wife with a graphic lovebite on either buttock. Suddenly he wastalking about the subsidizing of thermal underwear for the elderly inwinter; and Nicola suddenly felt she had done enough. As theyparted on the Bayswater Road it took all she had to make that second fake-impulsive swivel and give that second vague wave goodbye.


When she got home she slipped out of her coat and twirled intobed still wearing her high heels. When she awoke around midnight she bathed and then compulsively cooked herself a bushel of pastaand sat eating it and watching television and drinking nearly twobottles of Barolo.


He called the day after the day after, which was just as well. As it was,Nicola listened patiently enough to the furtive, the terrified, the pantwetting pips of the public telephone.


'I've been thinking where it might be nice to meet tomorrowlunch time,' he said, 'if you still can and want to?...The WallaceCollection - do you know it? Off Baker Street. It's always soothing, Ifind. Or the Soane Museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields. Extraordinarylittle place, rather melancholy, but in a pleasant kind of way. Or wecould meet in the V & A.'


'Yes,' said Nicola. 'Or in a restaurant.'


'. . . Yes. What kind of restaurants do you like?'


'Expensive ones' was the answer. But Nicola didn't say that. Shesimply named a restaurant of world-historical costliness in StJames's and said she would see him there at one.


Guy was early. He came rearing up out of the banquette when she walked through the door. The boyish brightness of his rough silk tiespoke to Nicola of an insufficiently examined self, or an insufficientlycritical one.


'This was a mistake,' she said timidly as she removed her gloves and lay them on the tablecloth. 'I mean the restaurant. I didn't know it would be so pretentious. I've hardly ever been to restaurants. Thename just popped out.' Speaking sideways Nicola ordered aTanqueray gin martini straight up with three olives. 'I'm sorry.'


'Nothing for me, thank you. Oh don't worry.'


She lit a cigarette and regarded him with respectful amusement.'Are you shocked by my dependencies?' she asked.'/ am. As you'vegathered I'm rather a nervous person - rather a ridiculous person,I'm afraid. It's not very often I go out into the world.'


'Actually I find it touching.’


'You're very generous. Well this is - good fun. And I did so enjoyour talk in the park.'


'I think I went on a bit.'


'No. No. In the modern world it's not often . . . But today I mustbe sensible. I do have something I want to ask of you.'


She was dressed for business. This was the story.


During her early years in the orphanage (that peeling warren ofmunicipal mortification) Nicola had befriended a little Cambodiangirl - beautiful, abandoned, with hurt four-lidded eyes. Like partnersin a concentration camp where the enemy wasn't cold or hunger or outright torture but lovelessness, lovelessness, they kept each othergoing - indeed, the tiny pals exalted themselves with the intensity of their secret and their bond. When she was twelve Nicola went on tothe charity school (cum blacking factory) while her soulmate was'adopted' or farmed out to a pitiless Iraqi. The man abused her.There was violence. She - she fell. Did Guy understand?


Guy nodded grimly.


Little Nicola, turning away from her rotting textbook or theheadmaster's switch, would weep over her friend's long letters. She had the child: a son. She was then repatriated, never to return.


'Cambodia? She's still there? My God.'


'The Proxy War,' said Nicola coldly.


Occasionally a blood-smudged dispatch written on toilet paper orElastoplast found its way through to her. Mother and child were variously sighted in a refugee camp in Thailand, a resettlementfacility in Burma, a prison in Laos.


'It's hopeless there,' said Guy. The whole area.'


'You know, in a way it's ruined my life as well as hers. I feel sodesperately incomplete without her. I think that's why I never . . .but that's another story. I must bring them back. I'll never feel wholeuntil I bring them back. You have connexions, don't you, Guy? Is there perhaps something you could do? Inquire?'


'Yes. I could certainly try.'


'Could you? Their names are here. I'd be eternally in your debt.'She smiled fondly. 'Little Boy was always known simply as LittleBoy, though he's almost a man now.Her name is En Lah Gai. I calledher Enola. Enola Gay.'


She checked Guy's face. Nothing. And a little knowledge mighthave helped him here. A little knowledge might even have savedhim . . . With a crisp fingertip Nicola directed the waiter to replenishher glass with the Chardonnay she had picked. She watched Guy'suplifted face as it filled with purpose. Then she squeezed lemon on toher eleventh oyster, and waited before adding the Tabasco. Itflinched reassuringly. After all, you eat them alive.


'I take it you're married,' she said abruptly.


'Yes. Yes. And I too have a little boy.'


Nicola inclined her head and smiled without opening her mouth.


'My wife Hope and I have been married for fifteen years.'


'Nuclear,' said Nicola. 'That's not so common any more. Howromantic. Well done.'


'I wonder if there's any more black pepper,' said Guy.


Later, on the street, they were getting ready to part. Feeling theneed of contrast, badly feeling the need to mix things up, Nicolawalked away from him, stretching her arms as if they were wings forflight. Her dark-grey business suit was, she knew, none the lessflatteringly cut, making much of her hips, making little of her waist.The city heat, re-established, and used and trapped for some daysnow, prompted her to unbutton and remove her jacket. She slung itover her white-shirted shoulder and turned to him with a shake of thehair and a hand on her hip, giving herself a thought instruction thatwent like this: You're something very negligent on a catwalk somewhere with a lot of old men watching and wondering how hardand how expensive you'd be to fuck.


'Are you all right? I must say...I must say you're looking terriblywell.'


'Am I?' She shrugged. 'Perhaps I am. But what for?'


Additional wine, and two glasses of Calvados, had got her througha deadly hour during which Guy, in innocent and meandering style, had sought to convey certain information about his heart: that it wasa good one; that it was in the right place; that it would seem to belongto another; and that it was true. The alcohol and the conversationcombined to assist Nicola in her next project, which was to startcrying. Years ago, when she studied the Method, her instructor told her that sadness - misery, tragedy - wasn't always the way. You had to think about the things that made you cry in real life. Whereas her classmates all got by with images of lost puppies, vanished fathers,Romeo and Juliet, starving Namibians, and so on, Nicola found thather one sure path to tears lay through memories of irritation andabove all boredom. So as she picked out the orange beak of a black cab in the cyclotron of one-way West End traffic and then turned toGuy distractedly, her head was full of missing buttons, passportqueues, utility bills, wrong numbers, picking up broken glass.


'You're crying,' he said joyfully.


'Help me. I'm so terribly alone. Please help me.'


As her taxi edged up St James's to Piccadilly, Nicola turned in herseat. Through the dark glass she watched Guy swaying - swim­ming, drowning — in the heavy air. And he was quite nice in a way,the fool, the poor foal. Guy: the fall guy. On paper, at least, he certainly didn't deserve the humiliation and havoc she planned tovisit on him. But this was how it was, when (among other consider­ations) you had reallygot to the end of men.


Paradoxically, or at any rate surprisingly, Nicola Six disapprovedof bikinis. She execrated bikinis. For twenty years and all over theworld she had been ricking necks on fashionable beaches: the double doubletake. A modern beuty in a racing one-piece? Themen stared, and so did the women. The girl's belly, though enviablycontoured, for some reason had no interest in being seen. Ditto thebreasts (for toplessness, too, she held in contempt). Women some­times thoughtfully covered themselves for a while after Nicolastrode by. Here was a person who didn't want her body familiar­ized. Looking down at their own torsos, bared alike to sun andeyes, the women resentfully sensed this prideful gamble. And themen: they knew that if they ever magicked themselves into the hotelroom, the quiet villa, the cabin, the changing-hut, they would seesomething that the beach had not seen, that the sun and the waves and the eyes had not seen.


Nicola loathed bikinis; the bikini she regarded as the acme ofvulgarity (and how the lines demarcated the godlike thorax,making polyps of the breasts); nevertheless, a bikini was what shewas wearing when Keith Talent jacked himself out on to the roofthat day, and stood there blinking in the blaze . . . She had bought itthat morning; and it was exceptionally vulgar, Nicola's bikini,cutely skimpy with cutaway thighs, and bright white against herPersian flesh. At first, Keith clearly thought — as he was meant to —that she was sunbathing in her underwear: he looked away for amoment, alarmed at having surprised her in this disquieting impro­visation. But then he made out the silk-aping waterproof of the curved white.


'Hello,' she said.


Keith coughed a few times. 'She wore an itsy-witsy teeny-weeny,'he then volunteered. 'Yeah cheers.'


'Do you know the etymology ofbikini, Keith?'


'Who?'


'Yes, you're right. Origin is more like it.From is more like it.From Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, Keith, the site of the US weaponstests in 1946 and 1954. First, atomic bombs. Then, in the Fifties, theSuper: the hydrogen bomb.' She laughed ruefully, and continued: 'I still don't see how this inevitably leads to a "scanty two-piece beachgarment worn by women". I looked it up in Brewer before you came,Keith. He chummily suggests a comparison between the devastating effects of the explosion and the devastating effects of the costume.'


As she spoke Nicola was looking, not at Keith, but at her bikiniand what it framed. She rightly imagined that he was doing likewise.The interproximate breasts, concavities of throat and belly, whitepyramid, the racing legs. Keith did not know, could not haveguessed, would never have believed, that half an hour ago this body had stood naked before the bathroom mirror while its mistress wept - drenching the feet of the god of gravity. Beauty is in the eye of thebeholder. Which is fun for the beholder; but what about the owner,the tenant? Nicola wondered whether she'd ever had a minute'spleasure from it. Even at sixteen, when you're excitedly realizingwhat you've got (and imagining it will last for ever), you're stillnoticing what you haven't got, and will never get. Beauty's hand is ever at its lips, bidding adieu. Yes, but bidding adieuin the mirror.


'Bang!'said Keith.


'What American men did there - one of the greatest crimes inhuman history. If you got the world's most talented shits and crueltyexperts together, they couldn't come up with anything worse thanBikini. And how do we commemorate the crime, Keith?' Sheindicated the two small pieces of her two-piece. 'Certain women goabout wearing this trash. It's very twentieth-century, don't youthink?'


'Yeah. Diabolical.'


'You know those coral lagoons will be contaminated for hundredsof years?'


Keith shrugged. 'Chronic, innit.'


' . . . You're looking very pleased with yourself, Keith,' saidNicola - affectionately, as it might be. 'And that's quite an outfit.'


'Yeah well I'm on a roll,' he said. 'I'm playing tonight.' His headdropped in a bashful reflex, and then he looked up again, smiling.'Onna darts.'


'Darts, Keith?'


He nodded. 'Darts. Yeah. My confidence is high. I'm oozingconfidence.'


Keith went on to rehearse some of his darting hopes and dreams,and told how he planned, shortly, to burst into the arena of World Darts itself. Nicola questioned him keenly; and Keith respondedwith a certain rough eloquence.


'I know the knockers take the piss, but there's considerableprestige in the sport these days. Considerable. The final's televised. IfI taste victory there I go on to play Kim Twemlow, the world numberone, before the cameras. Kim Twemlow—the man's like a god to me.'


'I see. Well I'm sure you'll prosper, Keith. And I wish you luck.'


'I — I got all your stuff fixed, uh, Nicola. It come out a bit dear in theend.' He took the invoice - or the piece of paper with figures writtenon it — from within his darts pouch. 'But forget it. This one's on me.'


'Oh nonsense.'


And she stood up. Keith turned away. She approached. With theirshoulders almost touching they looked out over the steamy roof- scape, life's top floor, its attic or maid's room, with washing, flowerboxes, skylights and groundsheets, huts and tents and sleeping-bags, and then the lone steeple of the tower block, like the severed leg of atitanic robot.


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


'Likebirds playing in a pool, Keith?'


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


'Ah yes.' Nicola thought of the kind of video Keith mightoccasionally get his hands on. The white villa, the baby blue of aMarbellan swimming-pool, the handful of topless English slags, 'playing': my, how they frolicked on diving-board and lilo! Then, asthe music modulated, one or two or three of them would slip away, with or withoutManolothe gardener, for the lucratively backbreak-ing siesta. 'Let's go down,' she said.


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


Nicola asked Keith what she owed him, and Keith spread hishands, Hindu-style. Leaving him in the passage (and feeling the forceof his blue eyes on her rump), she went to the bedroom, and closedthe door behind her. She took a thick roll of fifty-pound notes from beneath the mattress. Then she slipped her feet into her tallest whitehigh 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 acartoon. Suddenly she was obliged to muffle a sneeze of laughter -wincing, horrified, but definitely laughter, laughter that showedsigns 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 pairof eyes: tears and laughter within the space of forty-five minutes, allvery dangerous, dangerous. Across the street was a dead housewhose windows were corrugated metal. On its door was a white signbearing red letters:dangerous structure. This was her body.This was her plan.


Lightly Keith accepted the money and folded it into the pocket ofhis 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 - isthere 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 sosure.'


'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, likea snatch of Morse. Nicola ignored it and said, 'I expect you could usesome money, couldn't you, Keith, particularly now?'


'Yeah. Absolutely.'


'Can you keep your mouth shut, Keith? Do you have to run andtell 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 differentclass.Sweetheart, don't look so worried! I'll expect certain things inreturn. You know what I mean. The qualities of patience andcoolness, Keith, that I imagine you apply to your darts. Are yougoing 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, apaperback. 'You don't have to do anything with them. They'reprops. They're just props.'


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


'The first test of your discretion is on his way up the stairs,' shesaid, pressing her thumb down on the release. 'Remember: why shouldhe have all the money? Watch.' With terrible intentness sheplaced the roll of money into the prow of her bikini bottoms, andpatted 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 ownears, 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. Thetrembling 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. Theorphanage, perhaps . . .'); but this didn't stop her keeping himwaiting for a good fifteen minutes ('Please sit down!' she called fromthe bedroom. 'I do apologize'). She needed fifteen minutes. One toenvelope her bikini in a plain white cotton dress. Another to give thebedclothes a fantastic worrying. What was the delightful phrase inLolita:the guilty disarray of hotel linen suggesting an ex-convict'ssaturnalia with a couple of fat old whores? The rest of the timeNicola needed for makeup. Out came the actress palette; on went theactress bulbs. A profound and turbulent postcoital flush was theeffect she was after. She even cobbled together the imprint of a punchor 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 shevigorously tousled. It was ironic, sweetly ironic: because in fifteenminutes she could have straightened hair and bedding, had theyneeded straightening, and powderpuffed away the very plumes and blotches with which she now lewdly and firily daubed her facet Butthat's art. Always the simulacrum, never the real thing. That's art.


Nicola emerged from the bedroom in a subtle hobble, patting herhair with one hand and limply fanning herself with the other . . .Guystood sideways-on at the bookcase. He was holding a slim volume upto 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 Ihave too. Of course he can be a complete embarrassment. But theexpressiveness is the thing. In fact,' he went on, looking aroundbrightly, 'I can see many, many shared enthusiasms here. Your fiction shelves are the mirror image of mine. Apart from theAmericans. 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 lipto blow the hair from her brow. Behind her the bedroom door wasopen and a large movable mirror had been specially positioned,reflecting the bed and its satyr's heaven of throttled sheets andtwisted 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 privatetwinges, as if a ghost had gently goosed her. Guy's gaze of politeinquiry 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 thathe 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 listenat all as Guy, taking a seat opposite, began chronicling his efforts tolocate 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 neverstruck her like this), she was thoroughly galled. What would she have todo to arouse suspicion in this man? If he'd come in and found herlying naked on the sofa with one leg hooked over the back of it,satedly mumbling to herself and relishing a languorous cigarette - hewould have assumed she was suffering from the heat. Even if she gotpregnantshe 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 whichshe 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 theinterests of interest), to show him something of her temper. But here he was, in his blissful blandness. Perhaps the earlier act had workedtoo 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 Britishpeople 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 thewanton pancake seemed to be thickening in Nicola's pores, andbetween her legs she could sense the inadmissible cheapness of thewhite bikini. Well, the B-road would take her - more dully - to thesame destination. Perhaps, too, a useful doubt had been subliminally established. Nicola folded her arms. With vengeful frumpishness shewatched as Guy talked, the way his expression childishly mimickedhis 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 wasworking on unquestionably needed love in it somewhere. And if itwasn't the real thing, if it was just a contemporary dilution orsimulacrum - friendliness, helpfulness, goody two-shoes love . ..Perhaps lovewas dying, was already dead. One more catastrophe.The death of God was possibly survivable in the end. But if love wasgoing 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 Iknow at Index is trying to make contact with a clearing-house inKhorat. There are several avenues still untried.'


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


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


'I have a confession to make. Hear me out, and then go away forever. 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. Inever thought I'd meet anyone good enough. And I don't meanbeautiful enough or grand enough. I just meangood. 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 hereyes burn with all their green, and said,


'I'm in love. With you. There's just one other thing. I warned you Iwas 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'tcome across at least one more time He'd wash his hands of the wholeplanet. He had other planets, thanks, and in better parts of theuniverse. He promised plague, famine, mile-high tides, sound-speedwinds, and terror, ubiquitous and incessant terror, with bloodflowing 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 isnothing. What I am I wish to be, and whatI 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 alldirections. Extremity upon extremity, and then more extremity, andthen more.


The moment I set eyes on him I thought Keith Talent was ananachronistic kind of character. I thought that time and inflation andthe new demographics would have mopped him up by now or senthim 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 willmake it, will win through to the Cavalier, the printed brochure, thedreams of darts. They will stay out there on the street until whenever,in dumb hats and seam-busted zootsuits, looking fantasticallygreedy and devious, and fooling no one.


Fagin himself would have nothing to do with them. He'd behorrified. And these are the best and the brightest (and Keith is the best and the brightest of the best and the brightest). The others areyokels and village idiots, turnip-swaggers, ditch people - but this isLondon; and there are no fields. Only fields of operation andobservation, 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 inthe satyromaniac league (and the satyromaniacs, I guess, will always be with us). He's an obsessional tailchaser of the type that was meantto have died out years ago. He drools and slurps at everythingremotely bim-like on the street; he regales the entire pub with thethings he does to Analiese Furnish and Trish Shirt; he'll even give youfifteen minutes (noberk protocols here) on how it went with Kath the other night. On top of all this he makes no secret of his heroics id thehandjob realm. And on his diet I'm amazed he even gets around.


Is it just me, or does Keith's hormonal tumult have something todo 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, orpicture-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 (withouttrying, and without asking), is a lesson about death: an overview ofthe shorter span. After two cats and nine hamsters, the adolescent is abit 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 biglittle sister, taller, blonder, rounder faced, fuller figured. Lizzyboo'sbreasts are a family joke. Ah, those family jokes. Ah, those secondary sexual characteristics — those SSCs! This is the big question aboutLizzyboo's breasts: where did they come from? No other Broadener,past or present, has got Lizzyboo's breasts. Hope hasn't gotLizzyboo's breasts. She makes do with Hope's instead, which are awhole 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 thelast. 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 onthe street. The guys can't take it. She makes Keiths of us all — oreveryone except me, everyone except the man at her side, whodoesn'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 calledThe Dorm That Dripped Blood.Various coeds got sliced up in theirunderwear. Chainsaw, hunting-knife, straight razor. The slicer was some species of ghoul, demon or zombie - definitely a dead guy atany rate - with a grudge against the Dean. He looked like a normalfat 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 beenmore grateful for it, if I hadn't been dying. Her hand stayed where itwas, well afterThe Dorm That Dripped Blood had stopped beingscary, well after the ghoul had been torched and staked. The lightscame 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 offemale 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-boomay be the kind of girl who isn't quite sure who she likes untilprompted by a larger approval. I felt this approval, even as we walked to the movie, the image of Guy and Hope looming in the airbehind us (smiling encouragingly, her hand resting on his shoulder),like parents. Secondly, of course, I am generally retiring with theladies, and this has a lulling effect, especially on very pretty blondeswith big SSCs, accustomed as they are to living in a garrison ofhard-on and hairtrigger. I have never screwed around (whynot, 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 thoseunpleasant diseases. Thirdly - or maybe this is just point 2(b) - I'mnot interested. Which is always a come-on. Genuine lack of interest isbound 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 ina cafйonKensington Park Road. It's all very difficult. She likes me. She puts ahand on my forearm for emphasis. She practically wets herself at allmy jokes. She brandishes those SSCs. Lizzyboo digs me, which is justas well, because if she wants to find the way to my heart she's going toneed 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 togo home and work on my novel.


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


A terrifying night in Brixton, watching Keith's darts match at the Foaming Quart. I lay down my life or what's left of it for this lousynovel and do I get any thanks?


Pretty well every day now, at noon, I walk or drive to the tower block of Keith Talent, to take Kim off Kath's hands for an hour or two, to look after Kim - to protect and to cherish little Kim. Talenthimself is rarely at home when I call. He is out cheating. He is at theBlack Cross. He is in his garage, in his cave of darts. When I do runinto him on these occasions he wears a hostile leer. Kath blinks up atme when I enter. She is sitting at the table with her head in her hands.I hope she will feel some benefit soon. But misery seems to have a wayof making you forget what the other stuff is like, which is probablyjust as well, from misery's point of view, or you wouldn't put up withit. Sometimes you're down, and sometimes you're down. The rough with the rough. For worse and for worse.


'Hi,' I said as I squeezed into the kitchen (Keith having passed mewordlessly at the door).


'Oh, Sam.' She stood up — she paused. The aftermath of Keith'sheavy breakfast still crowded the small table (which in turn filled the small kitchen): fat mug of cold tea, grease-furrowed plate, V-sign ofcigarette butts in the dollop of brown sauce. Crazily Kath surveyedall this.


'Why don't I take Kim out.'


'Yes. That's best.'


The child raises her arms to me as I lean to take her. She got used tome very quickly. I smoothtalked her into it. She came across. I havethis way with chicks. Of course I don't want anything from her.Though the tales she could tell . . .


I carry her to the Memorial Park — to the park, with its punks anddrunks. I'm not really worried. The adult-and-infant combination is a relatively safe one; you don't get bothered, or not much anyway. Baby-related muggings have fallen off. The guy bending over the pram whispering threats with a broken beer bottle in his fist - nowthis is not a popular kind of guy. In slum-and-plutocrat GreatBritain, so close to the millennium, he isn't popular, he is doublyunpopular; no one's behind him. Sentences reflect this. It's not worthit, for what the average mum has in her purse. So it doesn't happen.Or not much anyway.


What impresses and stays with me is the power of the baby's face—the power.It is knit tight, like a tautly prominent navel, chockful of possibilities, tumescent with potentiae, as if the million things thatcould happen to her, the essences of the million Kims there might oneday be out there, are concentrated in this powerful face . . . But Iwonder. Nicola's face is powerful too. The very thinness of the skin that coats her closed eyes is powerful. Perhaps with her the effect isreversed or diametrical. Because Nicola's face, Nicola's life, containsonly one future, fully shaped, fully designed, toward which she nowmoves at steadily climbing speed.


So the municipal gardens, theharijan flowers, the pastel totems ofthe playground (how do we interpret them?), the untouchableyouths in their spikes, the meteorology of the sky, the casteless oldwedged into benches, and the baby with her sweet breath and facetedroundnesses, as tender as an eyeball. You wouldn't want to touchher. You wouldn't want anything to touch her.


Chapter 9: Doing Real Good

earing housecoat andslippers, and carrying her mail inher armpit, Hope Clinch strode out on to the terrace,mechanically pausing to chuck a potted plant under the chin. The plant was an amaryllis, and had cost considerably more than theaverage weekly wage; but it wasn't thriving. It wasn't working. Soonit would have to be returned — byMelbaor Phoenix, or by Lizzyboo.perhaps - to the dishonest florist for replacement or repair.


She sat at the table and opened her first letter. Looking down, shesaid, 'I just talked withMelba.About Lady Barnaby. Disaster.'


Guy had looked up from his crossword. He was still wearing hiswhite cotton nightie. Guy often slept in a nightie. Hope had foundthis endearing for a while, fifteen years ago. 'Oh yes? Tell,' he said.


Beyond their garden lay the communal green, moistly overgrassedin every season — but not in this season. Guy knew what femaledogpee did to lawns; and it seemed to him that a bitch the size of abehemoth might have caused those swathes of brown. But dogs werenot allowed in the communal garden. It was just the September sun that was doing it. The sun! Guy shut his eyes and wondered howsomething ninety million miles away could turn his lids into aHockney swimming-pool awash with fresh blood . . . Out on thelawn, like milkmaids at work, small children played among the fatguards and fatter nannies, who lowed about them, urging caution.Marmaduke was not to be seen there. He was in his nursery, tryingout a new au pair. They listened to his hearty ululations - Tarzan, asit might be, showing Jane how it went on the lianas — flinching everyfew seconds to the sound of some egregious collision. Guy smiledpromptingly at his wife's bowed head. The marriage was there (breakfast being its chief sacrament), like the crockery on theawkward table, waiting to be invaded.


The Yugoslavia trip,' said Hope, opening another letter andreading it. 'She arrived in the middle of the night. For some reason the plane went via Oslo. The next morning she was cleaned out bythe cabbie who drove her to the hotel. Only it wasn't a hotel. Youexpect a toilet but this was ridiculous: some kind of barracks full ofmad thugs.' Hope opened another letter and started reading it. 'Atthis point she completely flipped. No one knows quite whathappened next but she was found a couple of days later wanderingaround Zagreb airport without any bags and without herglasses,which I feel kind of badly about.'


'Marmaduke.'


'Marmaduke. Someone at the consulate shipped her back. She gothome and the house had been stripped bare.Melbasays there's nothing there except floorboards and paint. Then she apparentlypassed out. But luckily she came to on the stairs just before the boilerexploded. It's still under a ton of water over there.'


'How frightful. Is there anything we can do? Where is she now?'


'In hospital.'


'Insurance?' asked Guy doubtfully.


Hope shook her head. 'She's wiped out.'


'My God. So her marvellous young man —'


'Wasn't so marvellous.'


'. . . You can't trust anyone these days,' said Guy.


'You never could,' said Hope.


Now here came Marmaduke. Defeatedly watched by the stunnedau pair (her presence diluted to a mere reflection in the glass), thelittle boy erupted through the double doors. Although Guy andHope responded with grooved swiftness, Marmaduke was not to bedenied. Surmounting Guy's challenge he harpooned himself face firstinto the table leg before Hope had a chance to lift the tray. Then the world rocked: broken glasses, chipped china, childblood, spilt milk,spilt milk.


Saddened as he was by Lady Barnaby's recent reverses, Guy easilysucceeded in keeping a sense of proportion. After all, when it came totalesof extremity in strange lands — disorientation, shelterlessness, blinded decampment — he couldn't help but feel he was playing in ahigher league. Well, not playing, just watching: a pale spectatoramong tens of thousands, high up in the bleachers.


All week he had been driving into Cheapside, quite early, andcloseting himself in his office with his coffee and his four telephones.He dialled. His voice knew the circularizing tones of charity, thequiet cajolery of good works. Bad works are all about money. So aregood works. But of bad works he was ignorant: and he knew it. Ofcourse, you said the word Indochina and at once you caught thesound of breath escaping through telephone teeth — right through thereceiver's helix and into your own inner ear. 'Forget about every­where else,' said his contact at Index, with a brio to which Guy wasnot yet attuned. 'Forget about West Africa and Turkmenistan. Thisis the shitstorm.' He'd had no idea. Nobody had any idea. It seemed that there was noidea. Faced with this, and confusedly feeling the need of some bold and reckless act, Guy went out and bought some cigarettes, and sat there awkwardly smoking as he dialled.


Why was he doing this? Like everybody else, Guy had littleappetite for the big bad news. Like everybody else, he had supped fullof horrors, over breakfast, day after day, until he was numb with it,stupid with it, and his daily paper went unread. The expansion of mind, the communications revolution: -well, there had been acontraction, and a counter-revolution. And nobody wanted toknow. . . Why am I doing this? he wondered. Because it's good?Thought — consecutive thought — ended there. In his head Guy hadrescreened his lunch with Nicola so many times that the film wasworn thin, and pocked with the crud and curds and queries thattarnish tired eyes. He could see her throat, her moving lips. On thesoundtrack her voice remained virginally clear, with itsforйignness,its meticulous difficulty. She said she had Jewish blood in her. WhenGuy tried to pinpoint the attraction he thought not of her breasts, notof her heart, but of her blood, and her blood's rhythmic tug on him.What could you do with someone's blood? Smell, it, taste it, bathe init? Make love to it.Share it. Perhaps you could put this down toprotectiveness, which always contains something fierce, something animal. Was that what he was after? Was he after her blood?


Though planetary and twentieth-century, and entirely typical ofboth, the events in Indochina demanded to be thought of astronomi­cally. To begin with, they were obscure, distant, they were deepestblack. The Proxy War had put a curve on things when both sidesagreed, or when 'both sides agreed', to play their game in the dark.This condition they quickly brought about by a declared policy,much publicized in the press and on television, of killing alljournalists. No longer could the foreign correspondents hop fromfoxhole to foxhole with theirmedia tags in their hatbands and thentelex their stories over cocktails from the garden rooftops ofscorched Hiltons. In response, rogue camera crews chartered jeeps and choppers; malarial war-freaks climbed out of opium bunks andfirmed up their stringerships; one-legged photographers with lumpsof Ho's shrapnel still lodged in their brainpans stood on border roads with their thumbs in the air. They went in, but they didn't come out.Guy smoked and flinched and rubbed his eyes, and wonderedwhether anyone could really bear to watch.


What came out came out slowly or wrongly or weakly, like tiredlight. On the one hand the monosyllabic affirmatives or distractedgiggling of survivors thrown clear by the crash or the blast; on theother, the unsleeping testimony of the satellites, triumphantlyaffectless, seeming to exclude everything human from their diagrams of the dead - corpse fields, skull honeycombs. This was a new kind ofconflict;spasm war andunfettered war and, unavoidably,superwarwere among the buzzwords;proxy war because the world powers seeded it and tested weapons systems in it and kept each other busywith it; but the money was coming from Germany and Japan (andChina?), and other brokers of the balance of power. 'If you want to get an idea of what's happening there,' said his informant at the RedCross, 'read an account of what the Khmer Rouge did in theSeventies and multiply everything by ten. Body count. Area involved.No. Square it. Cube it.' Guy did just that. And here was theastronomical. Because if millions were circling in the vortex of war,then other millions needed to know whether they were living or dead, and if there were millions who cared for the millions whocared, then pretty soon . . . pretty soon . . .


He had never felt more alive.


He had never felt happier - this was the ugly truth. Or not for many, many years. He came home in the evening to his wife'ssurprised approval (he suddenly had value after his day at the office -novelty value, as well as the usual kind) and to Marmaduke'sderisory atrocities. He fixed Hope's drink and took it to her at thedressing-table and kissed her neck, his mind on other things, othernecks. It was drunk-making stuff all right, an excitation thatsparkled the way her tonic did when it hit the ice. She patted his officecheek and smoothed his calculator brow, confident that he was outthere making money. And what was he really doing? Guy had needof the great chaos he had tuned into. Feel the tug of mass misery and you want more - more misery, more mass. You have to get addicted. No wonder everybody on the sidelines had the urge to paint it black.


'Tough day?'


'Not really.'


'Poor you.'


Poor them. But good, good! His motives didn't bear inspection,not for an instant. He thought (when he thought) that he waslearning something about life, which always meant death. Hethought he had a chance to do real good. His motives didn't bearinspection. Nor did they get any. Love, of all things, saw to that —modern love, in some wild new outfit. I've got enough now, surely toGod. Call her tomorrow then, he thought, as he zipped Hope up.


Guy was coming along nicely. He was doing real good.


Lost, then, in his new mood of exalted melancholy, Guy climbed thestairs to Nicola Six's door — past the prams and bikes, the brownenvelopes, the pasted dos-and-don'ts of parenthood, citizenship,community. He paused halfway up, not for rest but for thought. Youknow of course that it's a myth or half-truth about the inexorableprosperity of the Asian subculture in the United States. The first waveof mostly middle-class Vietnamese - they did well, right enough. Butthe next lot, the Cambodians: just imagine. The last time you sawyour house it was a hundred feet off the ground and in flames, withyour mother and your father and your six children inside it. You'd need time to recover from that. After that, you'd want a rest beforetaking on America. And presumably the next batch, if it ever comes, the next batch will be even more...As Guy went on up he heardsomebody coming down: a sniffling, shuffling figure, with heavyboots. Guy stood to one side on what he assumed to be thepenultimate landing, his chin abstractedly upraised. And all this was on top of the crisis, or ratherbeneath the crisis, under its wing. This idea of the delegation of cruelty . . .


'Hello, mate.'


'-Keith ... Sorry, I'm half-asleep.'


'1 know the feeling.’


But Keith did look different. And it wasn't just the liontamer getupand the freshly blowdried hair. Actually these extras seemed to goagainst the new slant of his presence, which was one of furtiveness orhumility. He stood on restless legs with his head bowed, clutching some sort of bathroom attachment to his chest — and a book, apaperback. Neither was Guy empty-handed. He couldn't deliver twograteful refugees, but he had a present with him, a present for NicolaSix. He had thought long and fervently about this present. Whatcould he buy her? A Titian, a yacht, a diamond as big as the Ritz. Guyhad wanted to buy her the earth, but he had bought her a globe. Not the old kind: the new kind. A literal globe, the planet as seen fromspace, heavy, mysterious, baby-blue in its shawls. He held it, likeHamlet.


Suddenly Keith shrugged and wagged his chin sideways and said,'I just been — helping out.'


'Yes of course. That's what I'm here for too.'


'Same difference.'


'I'm trying to help her trace someone. Without much luck, as ithappens.'


'Still. You do what you can.'


'Exactly.' Guy looked at Keith now with pitying fondness. PoorKeith . . .


'Oh yeah. You coming tonight?'


'I'm sorry?' said Guy.


Keith stared at him with full hostility. 'To the darts.'


'The darts, yes. Of course. Absolutely.'


'BMW. Mercedes 190E. 2.5—16. Uh, it's up there, mate.'


And Keith shuffled and sniffed and hurried off down the stairs -with thatbook under his arm . . .


Guy called her name in the passage, and advanced with respectfulevenness of tread. The sitting-room was empty. It was also much ashe had imagined: interesting disarray beneath a lowish ceiling (tall Guy warily sensed a certain pressure on his crown), a teacup here, aforeign magazine there, past-their-best tulips collapsing over the sides of a glass bowl (as if seasick), a certain indolence in the furnishings, the usual pistol-grips and worn webbing of too much video equipment (his own house was a Pinewood of these inexpen­sive toys), the tobacco tang of thoughtful bohemianism. On the tablebeneath the window, by the wicker chair, an unfinished letter. . .'Nicola?' he said again, with a light shake of the head. Her voice,somewhat muffled, responded from the neighbour room witha patent untruth: she said she wouldn't be a second. He glanceduncensoriously at his watch, and stood to attention with his handsbehind his back. After a while he moved to the window and lookedbackwards over his shoulder and then sideways at the writing pad.'Dear Professor Barnes,' he read. 'Thank you for sending meProfessor Noble's paper, which I'm obliged to say I found misleadingand shoddily argued. I take his word for it that artists often have sexual relations with their subjects. One is amply persuaded thatsuch things happen. But his anecdotes can have no useful bearing onthe representational argument. I was on pins, wondering when hewas going to say that Rembrandt's portraits of Saskia — or, perhaps,Bonnard's ofMarte- were "suffused" with sexual knowledge, orreflect on the painter's yearning to "get inside" his sitter, or recliner.Such coarse speculation is where this line always leads. To lend a personal note,' read Guy, completing the page. His hand reached out to turn it. But then he desisted with a soft shudder. She knows aboutart, he thought bracingly. And a beautiful hand: not as strictlyelegant as Hope's, rounder, more expressive, with something of Lizzyboo's feminine corpulence. It abruptly occurred to Guy that hehad never done anything like this before. He had never been alone with a woman of his own age in the place where she lived, and in secret, without Hope knowing. Nicola's sitting-room was 'much as he had imagined'. What, exactly,had he imagined? He could claim,perhaps, that his reveries were chaste. But his dreams went their own way. Well, he thought, we can't help dreaming what we dream. Guyswept his gaze round to the bookcase and approached it with briskrelief. He took outThe Rainbow and looked at its opening page.What was it Keith had with him? Ridiculous. Slipped my mind.Villette? The Professor? Shirley? No, much more obvious but notJane Eyre . . .


I see. She's obviously been crying, Guy said to himself as Nicolastepped out of the bedroom. Her colourful face addressed himdeclaratively - saying what, he didn't know. It didn't strike Guy that her erectness at such a moment was unusual, because Hope was likethat too: she always addressed you with her tears, or their aftermath;she would never cringe or hide. Looking past Nicola for an instant Guy saw in the mirror the sorry anarchy of neglected linen. Yes: thehabitat of deep, deep depression. My God, look! - the poor creature can hardly walk. Such disorientation in the tread. And the sufferingface, seeming to flex from inner pain. Mm. Nasty welt or spot on thecheekbone there. Of course these days even the most radiant complexions . . . She'll bump into that table if she's not careful. Whoops. It's the same thing I always have with her, the urge, theneed to reach out and steady her, if I dared.


'It's sohot,' she said, as if in accusation.


'Yes I know,' he said apologetically.


For a while Guy attempted some praise of her bookshelves, and there were other marginalia (chess, Keith, the heat again); but itseemed heartless to tug on these tenterhooks. As gently as he could,he began. And her presence, her force field, went quite dead as itwithstood the first volley of the disappointments he had brought her.With her hands clasped on her lap she sat bent forward on the sofa,the bare knees together, the ankles apart but the toes almosttouching, like a child in the headmaster's study. Nicola's full facenever flickered - except once, maybe, when he mentioned the man atGreenpeace, in whom the name Enola Gay had briefly rung a bell,another lead that led nowhere. It was almost a deliverance when griefcame and those slow tears, astonishingly bright, began to map hercheeks.


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


A minute passed and then she said, 'I have a confession to make.'


As she made it, as he heard it, a series of soft explosions, of intimate rearrangements, seemed to take place in the back of hisskull. Delicious and multiform, a great heaviness exerted itself onhim — the force of gravity, reminding you of all the power you needjust to lug this blood around.


'One other thing. I warned you I was a ridiculous person . . .'


It was thrown out, with baffled impatience. Guy smiled to himself.Palely, inwardly, Guy smiled, and said, 'I guessed as much.'


'Youwhat? I'm sorry I...I didn't know people could tell.'


'Oh yes,' he said calmly. 'In fact it's quite obvious.'


'Obvious?'


He had long guessed it, he now felt, the pinkness and purity ofNicola Six. And after all it wasn't such a rare strategy, not in thesecautious times, these times of self-solicitude. It made sense, he thought - it rang true. Because if you took Hope away then Nicolaand I are the same. Virgin territory. Guy was now feeling the novelluxury of sexual experience. He had never knowingly met anyoneless experienced than himself; even Lizzyboo, with her four or fiveunhappy affairs, struck him as an amatory exotic (love-weathered),like Anais Nin. And this might even mean that I will be able to lovesafely.. . But where did the contrary impulse come from? What alternate message from what alternate world was telling him to wrench open that chaste white dress, to take that brown body andturn it inside out?


'Only that you have this dark glow to you. Something contained.Untouchable.'


In pathetic confusion she stood with her hands still clasped and moved towards the window. Guy groaned, and got to his feet, andcrept up behind her.


'Is this for me?' she asked. The globe stood there on her desk. Sheturned to him and raised both hands to her cheeks. 'It's still quitepretty, isn't it?'


'My dear, you're —'


'No, not me. The earth,' she said. 'Please go now.'


'. . . May I call you tomorrow?'


'Call me?' she said through her tears. 'This is love. You don'tunderstand. Call me? You can do what you like to me. You can kill me if you like.'


He raised a hand towards her face.


'Don't. That might just do it. I might just die if you touch me.'


Over breakfast the next morning Hope informed Guy that the car had been done again and he'd have to take it in. Guy nodded and went on with his cereal (the car got done about once a week). Hewatched his wife as she flowed up and down the kitchen in herdressing-gown. Previously, if she had knowneverything, she mighthave called a psychiatrist. But now, after yesterday, she might feeljustified in calling a lawyer, a policeman...As he got up to go Guy felt the need to say something to her.


'What are those pills you're taking? Oh. Yeast.'


'What?'


'Yeast.'


'What about it?'


'Nothing.'


'What are you talking about?'


'Sorry.'


'Christ.'


The car got done about once a week. In the street Guy opened thedoor of the VW (it was never locked) and covered the broken glasson the driver's seat with the sign that saidstereo already gone.He drove to the garage in St John's Wood. Before he climbed out heremoved the service book from the frazzled wound in the dash wherethe stereo used to be (years ago). The usual shrugs and nods. As Guywaited for the usual unreliable promise he might have reflected onhow easy the Other Woman had it: she didn't make you take the car in ever, and she swallowed her yeast in private.


Guy walked down Maida Vale. Having lost their leaves too early,the trees sunbathed, wrinkled and topless and ashamed. Londonbirds croaked in pity or defiance. The sun was doing what it did andalways had done, day and night, for fifteen billion years, which isburn. Why didn't more people worship the sun? The sun had somuch going for it. It created life; it was profoundly mysterious; it wasso powerful that no one on earth dared to look its way. Yet humansworshipped the human, the anthropomorphic. They worshippedpromiscuously: anybody. An Indian keep-fit fanatic, an Ethiopianmass-murderer, a nineteenth-century American angel calledMoroni-Guy's own Catholic God or Nobodaddy. Almost humorous insome lights, the down on her upper lip. The sun was a unit away: anastronomical unit. But today you felt that the sun was no higher than Everest. Not good to be out in it, really. Giver of all life, the sun wasnow taking life away, the lifetaker, the carcinogenic sun. A trick ofperception, or is there a certain spacing in the join of her hips andlegs, a curved triangle of free air between the thighs, just at the top?Guy walked on, down Elgin Avenue. He felt happy — in obedience,perhaps, to the weather (and if this sun were rendered in a children's book it would surely be smiling); happy anticipations, happymemories, an embarrassment of happiness. He remembered one morning over a year ago. Yes, he had just burped Marmaduke; in fact the child had been sick on his shoulder (the drycleaning mancomes and scratches the corduroy with a doubtful fingernail and yousay 'Baby sick', and everyone smiles, forgivingly, everyone under­stands). I was sitting on the bed with the baby, while she changed orbathed next door. I felt cold suddenly — his sick was cooling on myshoulder - and there was the baby's head, the hair slicked flat withwomb-gloss, biospherical, like a world. Or a heavenly body. I felt itsheat, the warmth of the baby's head, and I thought (oh these punsand their shameful mediocrity - but I meant it, I really meant it): I'vegot, I now have...I now have a little sun.


And God - look out! — the Portobello Road, the whole trenchscuffed and frayed, falling apart, and full of rats. Guy could feel thestreet frisking him - to see what he had and what he might give up. Aqueue of tramps had formed at the gates of the Salvation ArmyHostel, waiting for soup or whatever was offered, the troops of the poor, conscripts, pressed men, hard pressed. Tall, and with cleanhair, clean teeth, Guy moved past them painfully, the tramps and their tickling eyes. All he saw was a montage of preposterousfootwear, open at the toes like the mouths of horses, showing horse's teeth . . . Once upon a time, the entrance to the Black Cross was theentrance to a world of fear. Nowadays things had changed places, and fear was behind him, at his back, and the black door was morelike an exit.


Eleven-thirty, and the moment they'd all been waiting for:heralded by his dog, a plume of cigarette smoke and a volley ofcoughing, Keith Talent was so good as to step into the Black Cross.Keith's status, his pub twang, always robust, was now, of course,immeasurably enhanced, after the events of the previous night. An interested general murmur slowly coalesced into light applause and then slowly dissipated in fierce, scattered cries of goading triumph. Relief barmanPongowas the most eloquent, perhaps, when, havingreadied Keith's pint, he extended a plump white hand and simplysaid: 'Darts.'


'Yeah well cheers, lads,' said Keith, who had a wall-eyedhangover.


'You did it, man,' said Thelonius. 'You did it.'


Keith rinsed his mouth with lager and said thickly, 'Yeah well hecrapped it, didn't he. No disrespect, mate, but there's always going to be a question mark over the temperament of the black thrower. Firstleg of the second set I was way back and he goes ton-forty and hasthree darts at double 16? When he shitted that I knew then thatvictory was there for the taking. In the third leg of the vital second set1 punished his sixties and then - the 153 kill. Treble zo, treble 19,double18. Champagne darts. Exhibition. That was probably thehighlight of the evening. You can't argue with finishing of that quality. No way.'


'It was a stern test,' said Thelonius deliberately, 'of your dartingcharacter.'


Bogdan said, 'You responded to the - to the big-match atmos­phere.’


'The choice of venue could have posed problems to a lesser player,'said Dean. 'You fended off the . . .'


'You disposed of the . . .'


'Challenge of the . . .'


'Brixton left-hander,' said Thelonius with a sigh.


Keith turned to Guy Clinch, who was leaning on the pintable andwatching them with a diffident smile. 'Andyou,' said Keith, coming towards him. 'Andyou,' he said, with prodding finger. 'You handledyourself superb. Handled himself excellent last night. Handled himself excellent.'


Guy gazed gratefully enough into Keith's eyes — which didindeed (he thought) look most peculiar this morning. Keith's eyescontained a bright array of impurities and implosions, togetherwith a vertical meniscus of unshed tears; but the strangest thingabout them was their location. The mortified pupils seemed to betrying to put distance between either socket — they were practi­cally in his temples. My God, thought Guy: he looks like a whale.A killer whale? No. Some benignly wheezing old basker. A blue whale. A sperm whale. Yes and with the incredible pallor . . . Guy sipped his drink and listened to Keith's praise, and to the praise of Bogdan, of Norvis, of Dean and Pat and Lance. He inspected their faces for evidence of irony. But all he found was approval, andwelcome.


'I never knew,' said Keith, 'I never knew you was so tasty.'


Had there, after all, been that much to it? After his meeting withNicola, Guy returned home and spent teatime with Marmaduke.Hope was playing tennis with Dink Heckler. He then had a longshower (can be difficult, sometimes, getting all that custard and treacle out of one's hair), changed, and, at about seven, made hisentry into the Black Cross. And into a delirium of darts. Banners andhats bearing the legendkeith, and shouts of 'Darts, Keith!' and'Keith!', and Keith himself, highly charged, hoarsely yelling'Dartsl'Outside, two vans revved tormentedly. In they all piled, with thenatural exception of Keith, who was relying on alternative transport.'I'm taking him,' Fucker had said, 'inthat fucker,' and pointedthrough the doors at a gunmetal Jaguar. Then Guy got forty minutes in the back of the van, where the whites and the Asians smoked andlaughed and coughed all the way, and the blacks silent with unreadable hungers, and half-bottles of Scotch grimly and unquesti-oningly passed from hand to hand.


'On the way in they was obviously going to start something,' saidDean.


'Really?' said Guy, who hadn't noticed anything untoward, except for the jostling and the raillery, and a great presence, a great heat ofbare black muscle. 'How could you tell?'


'They stabbed Zbig One,' said Zbig Two.


'Nothing serious,' said Keith. 'Zbig One? He's all right. Out next week some time.'


The darts contest took place, not in the Foaming Quart proper(with its stained glass and heavy drapes and crepuscular funk), but inan adjoining hall, such was the intensity of the local interest. As Keithsaid, the fixture had captured the imagination of all Brixton.Standing ankle-deep in sawdust, Guy guessed that the hall had beenused recently, and no doubt regularly, as a discotheque and also as a church; less recently, it had served as a school. He just sensed this.There were no especially pointed reminders of the establishments hehad attended (their thousand-acre parklands, Olympic swimming- pools, computer studios, and so on); but the low stage, the damagedskylights, the Roman numerals of the clock, the quelling wood — alltold Guyschool. A boys' school, too. He looked around (thisdidworry him) and there were no women anywhere . . . Benches had been set out as in an assembly room, many of them tipped over inoutbreaks of horseplay, and eventually everyone sat down. But when the match began, with no ceremony, everyone stood up. If everyone had sat down you could have watched from your seat. But everyone stood up. So everyone stood up.


Not that there was a great deal to see, in the way of darts. Keith's opponent was very young and very black, and strikingly combinedthe qualities of violence and solemnity, the face perfect and polished, and the shaved head holding a tint of violet, like an impeccable penis,impeccably erect. With many hesitations and corrections, two oldblack men refereed and kept score with chalk and mike. Loping and sidling in electromagnetic shirt and toreador flares, Keith was easilythe most coarse and slovenly figure on the stage; but he looked by farthe best adapted.


'You wound them up beautiful,' said Dean.


'The hostility of the crowd', Keith agreed, 'put me under pressure. What they didn't know is — Keith Talentthrives on pressure.'


'You wound them up beautiful,' said Dean.


'Showmanship innit,' said Keith. 'Sheer showmanship.’


The hostility of the crowd, Guy had noticed, was certainlymarked. Early on it assumed the form of screaming and coin-throwing and foot-stomping, together with at least three quiteserious attempts on Keith's life. Later, though, as Keith's darts told,as the crowd's dream was pricked into nightmare .. . there wasmuch weeping and keening and beseeching (had the women got inhere at last?), and Guy watched a man holding a slice of beerbottle to his own neck, muttering fast with his lids half-shut and flickering. Onstage, Keith responded - with showmanship. This showmanshipconsisted of a wide variety of obscene gestures, a series of feinted kicks aimed at the heads of the groundlings, and a habit (especiallyincensing) of appearing to free, or of actually freeing, his underpants from between his buttocks just as he turned and prepared to throw.


Anyway, after half an hour in the howling bodyheat, with Guycontributing to both the heat and the howl, shouting 'Darts!' and'Keith!' and 'Darts, Keith!' with more and more licence, it seemed to be generally agreed that the match was over and that Keith had wonit. In a flourish of forgiveness Keith turned to his opponent, who advanced on him suddenly with one dart raised like a knife.


'Stabbed himself. In the hand. With his own dart.'


'Passions were running high,' said Norvis.


'Yeah,' said Keith. 'Beyond a doubt he was rueing that costly missin the second set.'


'Had to be,' said Dean. 'Had to be.'


It was in the carpark that Guy was unanimously held to have distinguished himself. He thought back: the ground's scooped andrutted surface exposed by the line of headlights under the familiarblackness of a London night, and the blackness of the human line infront of the two vans and Fucker's Jag, torches, eyes and teeth, the jink of chains, the smell of petrol or kerosene. At this point Keithhimself had fallen silent and hung back, a part of the company enfolding him, their champion or thoroughbred.


'I'd have gone in there myself,' said Keith.


'Nah.'


'Didn't want to give them the satisfaction.'


True, Dean, true,' said Keith. 'Conserving my energies. Already pondering the quarter finals as such.'


But Guy had gone in there. He made his way forward, with rectilinearity, with giraffe straightness of posture; and the lack ofhesitation, the unanswerably clear ring of his voice as he simply said'Excuse me', and, when the black boy ran at him, 'Don't be a tit', and went on through; and then, once the line had been broken to let himin, how everything just fell away . . . Guy sipped on drink and praise, and wondered. His father had been brave. In the war he had risen tobrigadier, but he made his name as a teenage lieutenant in theguerrilla action in Crete, coming down from those hills coated in blood and medals. The night before, Guy had sensed no personaldanger. He felt the black crew had something else in mind,something inscrutable. And anyway the carpark and its actors had seemed to occupy no more than ten per cent of his reality. At any moment, with mighty bounds, he could be free. Free, on the mightybounds, the quantum leaps of love.


'No,' said Keith, peering at him earnestly with his soaking eyes.'No. You did real good.'


If I'm brave, thought Guy, or brave for now, then what do I feel inthe street (the way the air just shakes you down, thatGuernica ofhoboes toes!), and still feel? Not fear, then. Shame and pity. But nofear.


A little later, at Keith's suggestion, they repaired to the Golgothafor a discreet glass ofporno. The bar was three drinkers deep, andas they waited Keith cocked a tenner and turned sideways to Guy, saying, 'You uh, see that Nicky then?'


Guy considered. He often had trouble with Keith's tenses. 'Yes, Isaw her - that time . . .'


'Helping her out.'


That's right.'


That's right.'


It couldn't be said that asilence fell between them, for there wereno silences in the Golgotha. But by the time they reached the bar (where they would remain as long as possible, like everybody else,out of brute territoriality), a hiatus had arrived and now made itself comfortable, getting fatter and fatter and shoving out its elbows.


Guy said, 'I was . . . Sorry?'


'No. You was saying?'


'No. Go ahead. Please.'


'No I was just saying — I can't be doing with all these birds. Saps aman's darts.' Keith coughed for a while and then said tearfully: 'Irespect my body. I got to take care of myself. Now. Onna darts. It'stough, with all this spare minge around but you got to draw the line somewhere. You got to.’


Edged out from the bar, they stood by a pillar with their drinks,right in the teeth of the snapping steel band.


'You wouldn't believe,' Keith shouted, 'you wouldn't believe whatI'm turning down. Take yesterday.'


And as Keith launched into a squalid decameron of recent gallopsand tumbles, instant liaisons, valiant cuckoldries, eagerly requitedgrabbings and gropings, quickies and workouts and hip-twangersand knee-tremblers, Guy reflected - and reflected wryly - on theutter artlessness of the standard male strategies. Class strategies too,he allowed. It would take a stretch of cosmic time before Keith wouldacknowledge the cosmic distance that separated himself from awoman like Nicola Six. You had to be quite near to see and to feel.After all, if you looked out from the virusless morgue of Pluto (Guywas thinking of the latestJourneyer photographs), the sun was no more than an exceptionally bright star, admonitory and cruciform, a bright star — a cold, bright star, like the brandished sword of God,long before you felt its heat.


When he telephoned her early that afternoon (from a Mexicansnackbar in Westbourne Park Road), Nicola's voice was every­thing he had hoped it would be: direct, uncomplicatedly friendly, low with charged warmth — and sane. Yes, he had hoped for thefirm clasp of her sanity, because he often feared for that delicateequilibrium. If not too good for this world, she was, in his view,far too good for this time; it was the way he saw her, as ananachronism: a museum piece, time-orphaned . . . She was justdashing off toa lecture (and here Guy screened an image of dedi­cated hurry, of books crushed to the breast and a length of scarfheld up by the breeze), but she did so terribly want to talk to him. Could he very sweetly ring her later this evening, at six o'clock, atsix o'clock precisely?


'Of course. What's your lecture?'


'Mm? Um - "Milton and Sex".'


'Well that won't last long,' said Guy, whose humour always camefrom the overflow of happiness, never from the undertow of irony. In any case, he mildly regretted the remark.


'Actually I think they mean gender.'


'Oh yes. He for God. She for God in him. That kind of thing.'


'Yes. That kind of thing. Must run.'


Guy had the Mexican lady make him up a kind of omelette hero(he hoped to use her telephone many more times) which she put in abag and which he guiltily secreted in an empty rubbish basket onLadbroke Grove.


'Well what did you think?' said Hope.


'Thank you,' said Guy. He said it, not to Hope, but to the manwhose job it was to monitor — or stand fairly near to — the automaticcheckout of the underground garage beneath Cavendish Square. Hehad seen Guy many times now and knew his face. Not that heappeared to be much bucked by this familiarity, or by anything elsethat happened to him down there.


Guy retrieved his credit card and steered them up into the light. Thetraffic,' he said.


'Jesus, how many times? Listen: You Are The Traffic.'


'. . . I thought he made a lot of sense.'


'Three hundredguineas of sense?'


'On the fresh-air question.'


'I knew you'd say that.'


'If not on the hostility-to-me question.'


'I knew you'd say that.'


The Harley Street doctor they had just consulted was an expert oninfant hypermania. He had seen Marmaduke at his surgery and hadalso paid a stunned visit to the house, where, as promised,Marmaduke was able to relax and be his normal self. Absolutelyimpossible at the surgery, Marmaduke had been absolutely unbel­ievable at home. Even today, nearly three weeks later, the doctor was still wearing a patch of gauze over his right eye. All parties agreedthat the legal matter need not affect their professional relationship.Recently, Guy had taken out insurance on Marmaduke-relatedpersonal-injury suits, on what seemed to be highly advantageousterms. More recently, he had taken out insurance on the insurance.


'On the hostility-to you question,' said Hope, 'I thought he made achange from Freud.'


'So did I. But I prefer Freud. I'd rather Marmaduke didn't like me for Freudian reasons. I don't like him not liking me because he justdoesn'tlike me. Why shouldn't he like me? I'm incredibly nice to himall the time.'


Guy turned his head. Hope was staring out expressionlessly at thecar-crammed street. With some caution he patted her twice on theknee. Their last real embrace had, in fact, been staged for that verydoctor's benefit — a paramedical embrace, as part of a demonstra-tion. At home, in the kitchen, Guy had embraced his wife while thedoctor looked on. As predicted, Marmaduke dashed the length of the room and sank his teeth into Guy's calf. Requested to tolerate it, Guytolerated it, and maintained the embrace up to the point where Marmaduke started head-butting the cooker.


'To return to the fresh-air question,' said Guy. 'Or to the half-hour question.' This referred to one of Hope's most controversial rulings:Marmaduke was not allowed outside for more than half an hour a day. 'He seemed to think that an hour was safe.'


'No he didn't. He said it could be regarded as tolerable.'


'It's the confinement. Children like to whirl around. How aboutforty-five minutes? He needs some fresh air.'


'We all do. But there isn't any.'


There wasn't any. And hard to explain that one away, hard tojustify it - to the young (Guy meant), to those who would come after. How would you begin? Well, we suspected that sacrifices might haveto be made, later, for all the wonderful times we had with our spraycans and junk-food packaging. We knew there'd be a price.Admittedly, to you, the destruction of the ozone layer looks a bitsteep. But don't forget how good it was for us: our tangy armpits, ourpiping hamburgers. Though maybe wecould have got by with justroll-ons and styrofoam .. .


'Lookl'they both cried, in childish unison. They were drivingdown the Bayswater Road and a sick squirrel stood trembling by thepark railings.


Guy and Hope laughed — at each other, at themselves. 'Look!' theyhad cried — to please Marmaduke. There was the squirrel, leaning ona tree stump, and retching apologetically. But Marmaduke was notin the car. And Marmaduke wouldn't have been pleased anyway,since he showed no interest in animals except as new things to injureor get injured by.


On the stroke of seven Guy called Nicola from a booth in the lobbyof a hotel for the homeless in Ilchester Gardens. The Mexicansnackbar was closed; but spotting usable telephones had becomesomething of a hobby for Guy Clinch. In this way Nicola keptshowing him more life. He stood there poised with his coins. Behindhis back filed whole families bearing plates with little suppers on them. Clearly the kitchen was in the basement and everyone ate intheir rooms. Guy exhaled in exquisite pity. One and ahalffishfingers? For a growing boy? And then probably the mothers haveto-


He fumbled. 'Hello?' he said. 'Hello? . . . Nicola?'


'Guy? Wait,' said the voice. 'This isn't me.'


'Hello?'


'It's a tape. I apologize, but I didn't trust myself to talk to youunmediated. I didn't trust my resolve. You see... Dear Guy, thank you for all the sentiments you have awoken in me. It was wonderfulto learn that Icould have these feelings. My reading, in future, will be much vivified. I shall look at Lawrence with new eyes. My love, ifyou . . . But I suspect there is something deeply frivolous aboutpursuing a course that holds so little prospect of good. And that'swhat we want, isn't it? The good? I'll never forget you. I shall just have to - but no matter. Never make any attempt to contact me everagain. If you had any tenderness for me — and I think you did — thenyou'll know how absolutely and unconditionally I mean that. If you get news of my friends, well, perhaps a note. I'll never forget you.


'Think of me sometimes.


'Goodbye.'


'Goodbye,' he whispered, after a while.


Nine hours later, at four in the morning, Guy turned the page andsaid:


The north wind doth blow, And we shall have snow, And whatwill poor Robin do then, poor thing?'


Marmaduke looked up from a modern edition ofGoodnight,Moon,which he was patiently, almost studiously, tearing to pieces.You could read to Marmaduke - it soothed him, or kept him happyor at least busy. But he had to be allowed to tear up the book directlyafterwards. Soon he would be tearing upMother Goose's Treasuryof Children's Rhymes and Fables. And yet for the moment the childhesitated and his father read on:


'He'll sit in a barn, And keep himself warm, And hide his head under his wing, poor thing!'


Marmaduke watched with his mouth open. The scragged copy ofGoodnight, Moonfell from his grasp. He got to his feet with a sighand approached the low chair where Guy sat. He grinned suddenly and reached out a round hand that trembled with approving interest to touch the tears on his father's cheek.


Of course, I keep trying to tone Marmadukedown. I thought hewas funny at first - but really that kid is no joke. He devastates hisparents twenty times a day. I censor him. I bowdlerize him too.There's some stuff you just can't put in books.


Turn your back for ten seconds and he's in the fire or out the windowor over in the corner, fucking a light socket (he's the right height forthat, with a little bend of the knees). His chaos is strongly sexual, no question. If you enter his nursery you'll usually find him with bothhands down the front of his diaper, or behind the reinforced bars of hisplaypen leering over a swimsuit ad in one of the magazines that somenanny has thrown in to him. He goes at that bottle like a top-dollar Vegas call-girl, like a grand-an-hour sex diva. Yeah, that's it. Marmaduke looks as though he is already contemplating a career inchild pornography: he knows it's out there, and he can tell that there'sa quick buck in it. Naturally he's hell with the help and any otherwoman who strays within range. He's always got a hand up the nurse'ssmock or a seigneurial tongue in the au pair's ear.


I wouldn't have thought Lizzyboo was his type but he goes for her in a big way.


Incarnacion and I are the best of friends. There's absolutely noproblem, any more, about her talking to me.


'Living alone, you know,' she said today, 'it's all right-it's good,'Queenly Incarnacion lives alone. Her husband is dead. Her twochildren are grown up. They live in Canada. She came here. They went there. 'You have advantages. When you living alone, you dothings when you want. Not when they want. When you want.'


True, Incarnacion.'


'You want a bath. You have a bath. You want to eat. You eat. Youdon't need them to say so. It suit you. You sleepy, you want to go to bed. You go to bed. Don't ask. You want watch the TV. Okay! Youwatch the TV. Up to you. You want a cup of coffee. — Coffee. Youwant clean the kitchen. You clean the kitchen. You want maybelisten to the radio. You listen the radio.'


Yes, and the same goes for any solitary activity you care to name.But after twenty minutes on the upside of living alone, we get twentyminutes on the downside of living alone, like there never beinganyone else around and things like that.


A letter from Mark Asprey.


He mentions a restless desire to pop back to London for a fewdays, next month sometime. He adduces the wonderful convenienceof the Concorde. He allows that it would also be convenient, andpleasingly symmetrical, if I could be prevailed upon to return to NewYork for those same few days and reoccupy my apartment —which, he adds, he doesn't use much anyway. He drops hints about a certainrather celebrated lady whom it is imprudent to entertain in his suite at the Plaza.


By now an habituated snooper, I have gone through all Mark Asprey's desk drawers. More trophies, but not for public viewing.Under-the-counter stuff. Pornographic love letters, locks of hair (head and nether), arty photographs. The deep central drawer isfirmly locked. Maybe it's got a whole girl in it.


I have even looked at some of his plays. They are terrible.Frictionless romances, down through the ages.The Goblet has an Arthurian setting. It's all pretty-pretty; but not very pretty. I don'tunderstand. He's one of these guys who hits an awful note and then isuncontrollably rewarded, like Barry Manilow.


Now here's an intolerable thought. I was looking again at Nicola'sdiaries. She uses initials for her menfriends. The docile GR, the well-fleeced CH. NV, with his suicide bids. HB, who cracked up after his divorce. TD and AP both hit the bottle. IJ, who fled to New Zealand.BK, who apparently went and joined the Foreign Legion. Poor PS,who bought the farm.


The only one she kept going back to, the only one who was half amatch for her, 'the only one I've ever beenstupid for', thehandsomest, the cruellest, the best in bed (by far): he's called MA. Aresident of West London. Connected to the theatre.


I burn no torch for Nicola Six. So why does this thoughtkill me?


It's happened. A call from Missy Harter, or, to be more accurate, acall from Janit Slotnick.


'This is Janit Slotnick? Miss Harter's assistint?' 'Yes yes.' 'Well,sir, there's certainly a lot of excitemint here today at HornigUltrason.' 'There is?' 'We know we're paying megamoney for it.''You are?' 'Mm-hm. The new book on the death of John Lennin!'


I won't transcribe all the crap she talked about the death of JohnLennon.How the KGB did it, and so on.


'Miss Harter wanted to have me call you — about your treatmint.''Well it's hardly a treatment, Miss Slotnick. More of an outline. What's the feeling on it?' 'Disappointmint, sir.'


At this point the receiver shot out of my hand like a bar of wetsoap.


'. . . agrees that the opening is strong. So is the denouemint.' 'What? The ending?' 'It's the middle we're disturbed about. Whathappins?' 'How should I know? I mean, I can't tell until I've writtenit. A novel is a journey, Miss Slotnick. What was the feeling on thefirst three chapters?' 'We feel they're a considerable achievemint. Butwe're disturbed, sir. It's a little literary.''Literary? Jesus, you must. . . I'm sorry. I beg your pardon. "Sir."I need an advance, MissSlotnick.' 'I'm not sure we're ready yet to make that kind ofcommitmint. On this point Miss Harter and myself are in totalagreemint.'


I abased myself with promises of cuts, rewrites, tone-downs andspruce-ups until Janit very coolly consented to take a look atchapters four to six.


'And we're unhappy about the names, sir.'


'No problem,' I said. 'I was going to change them anyway.'


Usually it's late at night, now, when I get the call from Nicola Six.One, two. Even three. It's then that she wants to proceed with ourdebate or battle-plan or script conference. She summons me. I alwaysshow.


I'm up to it, apparently. Not so long ago I was sleeping like anewborn: I couldn't keep my eyes open for more than five minutesrunning. Then for a while I slept like a baby: I woke twice an hour infloods of tears. But now I'm really getting on top of my game. Soon I'll be like some coppery old ascetic in the caves of Ladakh, or likeMarmaduke: sleep will be something that I can take or I can leave.So, not without difficulty, with night fear, with the heaviness of fatigue indefinitely postponed, I get out there. It's my job.


Three nights ago, or three dawns ago, as I was girding myself for Chapter 9, I got the call around two-thirty and went straight over inthe car. She took my coat and hat with a humorous expression on herface. She was dressed up — black velvet — and drinking champagne.One of her private parties. I sat down and ran a hand over my face.She asked me how I was and I told her I was good.


'What are you dying of anyway?'


'A synergism.' See our interdependence? We don't, we can't talk toanybody else like we can to each other. I can look into her eyes andsay it.


'Communicable? No. Direct or indirect? Indirect.'


'Non-communicable,' I said. 'But possibly direct. Radiogenic, naturally. They don't know. It's quite an unusual case. You want tohear the story? Takes about ten minutes.'


'Oh yes please. I'm interested.'


'London Fields,' I began.


She knew about the clusters — though of course she didn't knowthat I was in the centre of the bunch. And she is interested. She isfamiliarwith it all. At one point she said, 'Hang on. So your father was working forher.' 'Her? Pardon me?' 'HER. High ExplosivesResearch. That's what they called it.' 'Right.' Or again she'd comeout with something like 'And plutonium metallurgy. That wasanother area the British were behind on.' She smoked intently,narrowing her eyes each time she exhaled. One thing about that face:it is always beautifully lit.


'You've really gone up in my estimation,' she said when I wasthrough. 'So in a way you're at the heart of all this. In a way, you arethe Crisis.'


'Oh no,' I said modestly. 'I don't think so. I'm not the Crisis. I'mmore like the Situation.'


'So you know about Enola Gay.'


'Oh yes. And Little Boy.’


Later, she showed me the 'letter' she'd placed on the table for Guy toread. 'Professors Barnes and Noble,' I said. That's a cheap shot, Nicola.'


'It gets cheaper,' she said. 'Read on.'


'". . . Rembrandt's portraits of Saskia - or, perhaps, Bonnard's ofMarte- were 'suffused' with sexual knowledge, or reflect on thepainter's yearning to 'get inside' his sitter, or recliner. Such coarse speculation is where this line always leads. To lend a personalnote...'"


'Turn the page.'


'". . . I've sat for perhaps a dozen painters in my life, and slept withmost of them, and it never made any difference to anything, not to me,not to them, and not to that thing on the canvas."'


I looked up. She shrugged one shoulder. I said,


'I wish you wouldn't take these unnecessary risks. Very imprudent,what with you being a virgin and all. Still, I take my hat off to yourconfidence. You justknew Guy wouldn't turn the page?'


'Come on. You know, with him,passive prying is all right. Youdon't avoid what's there to see, but it's an indignity to move any closer,to listen any harder. Actually I'm surprised he dared to read a word.'


'Hubris, Nicola. Hubris. Guy is quite capable of surprises,especially where you're concerned. You should have seen him at the darts. Like a lion. I was half-dead with fear. Though I didn't read itright, I now think. There wasn't any real danger, not for us. Thoseguys, they weren't going to hurt us. They were going to hurt themselves. You're yawning. It's late. But don't you be snooty aboutthe darts. They matter in all this.'


She yawned again, more greedily, showing me her plump backteeth. 'That's why I iced Guy. To concentrate on Keith. God help me.'


I held up the letter. 'Do you mind if I take this?' She shook her head.'Nicola, what do you thinkI'm up to?'


'I don't know, I suppose you're writing something.'


'And you don't mind?'


'At this stage? No. In fact I approve. Let me tell you something. Letme tell you what women want. They all want to bein it. Whatever it is.Among themselves they all want to be bigger-breasted, browner,better in bed — all that. But they want a piece of everything. They wantin.They all want to be in it. They all want to be the bitch in the book.'


Boy, am I a reliable narrator.


I finally limped to Queensway for aTrib.


Two main stories. The first is all about Faith, the First Lady: aremarkably full account, in fact, of her recent activities. I wasbaffled; but then I remembered the speculation earlier in the summerabout Faith's health. Presumably all this stuff about hospice work,White House redecorations and anti-pornography crusading isoffered in courteous rebuttal. And as reassurance. Everybody knowshow totally the President loves his wife. He campaigned on the issue.


The second main story is puzzling also. Something about theSoviet economy. Lots of human-interest snippets: how it's goingdown with Yuri in Kiev; what Viktor thinks in Minsk. I had to readthe thing twice before I realized what the story was. The Soviet Unionis working a seven-day week.


Op-ed pieces about solar disturbances, university prayer, Israel,Mustique and summer-home winterization. Leaders about graintariffs and Medicare.


In Queensway I encounter the same bag-lady I used to see there tenyears ago. Still around! Christ, herstrength. Still arguing with herself (the same argument). Still arguing with her own breast. She takes herbreast out and argues with it.


That lady has an unreliable narrator. Many people in the streets have unreliable narrators.


Watching the children in the park when I go there with Kim - it occurs to me, as I try to account for childish gaiety, that they findtheir own littleness essentially comic. They love to be chased, hilariously aware that the bigger thing cannot but capture them intime.


I know how they feel, though of course with me it isn't funny, the bigger thing loping along in my wake, and easily gaining.


Chapter 10: The Books inKeith Talent's Apartment


eith pressed thePause button and removed from his jacketpocket the book that Nicola had given him. He weighed it inhis hand and assessed it from several angles. He read in a deep whisper:'he was born a gypsy — and lived and loved like a lord.she was the daughter of fashion - and he drove her to her grave.' Keith coughed, and continued: 'The story of Heathcliff's un . . .guvnor. . . ungovernable passion for the sister he never had.' Heread on for a while, with much flexing of mouth and brow. Then helooked up and thought: Keithcliff!...Of humble origin, successwas soon his. Wed to Kathleen, all the birds were on his case.Enjoying plenty on the side, there was one that stood out. Rich andwell-born, Keithcliff she craved. And then the day came to pass when she took him to her bed. With ungovernable passion... Helooked at the front cover; he stood up, and placed Nicola's gift inamong his other library books:Darts; The World of Antiques;Darts Yearbook; Dogs Yearbook; On the Double: The Kim Twem-low Storyby Kim Twemlow (with Dirk Smoker); and a brief his­tory - wrapped in polythene and never opened - of the regimentthat Keith's father had cooked for, and later deserted from, duringWorld War II. Costume drama, thought Keith. Awful old load ofold balls. The class system innit.


TV, thought Keith. VCR. Dynacord. Memorex. JVC. Keithpressed the Pause button and went on watching TV, or 'watching'TV — watching TV in his own way. It was a habit. Every evening hetaped six hours of TV and then screened them on his return from the Black Cross, the Golgotha, Trish Shirt's or wherever. At 3 a.m. therewould still be live transmissions, some old film, say (in fact Keith wasmissing a quite salacious and sanguinarypolicier); but he could no longer bear to watch television at the normal speed, unmediated bythe remote and by the tyranny of his own fag-browned thumb.Pause. SloMo. Picture Search. What he was after were images of sex, violence and sometimes money. Keith watched his six hours' worthat high speed. Often it was all over in twenty minutes. Had to keepyour wits about you. He could spot a pinup on a garage wall inSuperfastforward. Then Rewind, SloMo, Freeze Frame. A young dancer slowly disrobing before a mirror; an old cop getting it in thechest with both barrels; an American house. Best were the scenes thatcombined all three motifs. An oil baron roughing up a callgirl in a prestige hotel, for instance, or the repeated coshing of a pretty bankteller. He also watched major adaptations of works by Lawrence, Dreiser, Dostoevsky, Conrad — and anything else that sparkedcontroversy in the pull-out TV section of his tabloid. For skirt, you often did better with something likeThe Plumed Serpent than youdid with something likeVegas Hooker. He didn't like all thosepetticoats, though. No way. Keith's screenings were usually overquickly, but some items, he found, repaid days or even weeks ofstudy. Anything about lady wrestlers. Or women's prisons. The female body got chopped up by Keith twenty times a night: whatastronomies of breast and belly, of shank and haunch . . . Now thegreat thumb moved from Fast Forward to Rewind to Play, and Keithsat back to savour the pre- credits sequence of a serial-murder movie.Bird running through park at night. Psycho hot on her heels.


'Enlah . . . Enlah . . .Enlah.'


Keith sighed heavily (his lips flapped) as the baby came to life; herassertions, her throaty provisos could be made out in the intersticesof shirtrip and headbang. The spooky exiguity of the flat, thestartling slenderness of its partitions, often gave grounds fordepression. But there was an upside. Keith shouted for Kath andthumped on the wall with his free fist until he heard Kath fall out ofbed. These shouts and thumps entrained a relay of counterthumps and countershouts from their nearest neighbours. Keith shouted andthumped some more, reserving a special vehemence, perhaps, forIqbala's new boyfriend. Kath appeared. She was tired, but Keith wastireder, or so he reckoned. He'd been out until three doing carstereos. Dispiriting work: when you stove in the window bearing theinevitable stickerstereo already gone -on a windy night, withglass everywhere — to find the stereo already gone. Fifteen of themrunning and you wanted a nice meal when you got in: Sweet and SourPork and Six Milford Flapjacks.


'Jesus,' he said.


Five minutes later and Keith was seven or eight murders into hisserial-murder movie. He came to a good bit: a very good bit. Herewound and went to SloMo. The redhead climbed from the bath and reached for the—Oi! Hint of pube there. Amazing what gets through, even these days. All you need's a bit of patience. Bit of application.Though when they're just naked though, it's not enough. You wantsomething to — to frame it with. A garter-belt'll do. Anything. Keith'sthoughts turned to Analiese Furnish, who, in his judgment, tended toerr in the other direction. A bra with two holes in it: looks stupid. Not to mention them pants. All them frills and fringes. Zlike going to bedwith a sack of dusters. Now the redhead slipped into a light gownwhile behind her a shadow straightened. Even that's better thannothing. She still wet so you can see the outline. Here comes the nutterwith the mallet. Watch out darling! Boof.


'Keith?'


'. ..Yeah?'


'Would you burp her for me? Just for a second?'


'Can't. Watching TV innit.'


'She's got the hiccups and I've come over dizzy.'


It had to be admitted that Kath never bothered Keith with the babyexcept in the most drastic emergencies. He turned slightly in his chairand reached over his shoulder to open the lounge door. To give Kathher due, she did seem to be on the verge of authentic collapse: down onone knee and leaning backwards against the wall with the babyawkwardly crooked in her grasp.


Keith thought about it. 'Give her here then,' he said. 'Jesus, what'sthematter with you?'


He sat there watching TV with Kim on his lap. Then he even got tohis feet and jogged about a bit, the better to soothe the pulsing child.After at least three minutes of that he started shouting Kath's nameas loud as he could until she reappeared with a warmed bottle - and finally Keith got a bit of peace. He rescreened the redhead's murder


half a dozen times, and had a proper look at her, with the FreezeFrame. It being Friday, the night when Keith did his chores andgenerally helped out in the home, he then switched off the TV, puthis coffee mug in the sink, aired the dog (or, to be more specific, stoodthere impatiently while Clive shat all over the walkway), had a quickwash, took off his clothes (leaving them in a neat stack, or at any ratea single pile, on the floor of the lounge), and woke up the wife andgave her one. It took quite a while to wake her up but it didn't takelong to give her one, the wet-gowned redhead, Trish Shirt on her knees, Nicola Six and the fat moneygun in her clean white pants.


Keith turned over and lay there furiously wanting services andgoods.


When Nicola asked Keith about his romantic discretion, about hisability to keep his mouth shut on the subject of women and sex, Keithcoughed and answered in the following terms: 'Never do that. Noway.' This was untrue. It was by no means the case. Healways didthat. When it came to kissing and telling, Keith was a one-man oraltradition.


He knew it to be a fault. Ah, he knew! He could tell it was a faultbecause it kept getting him into trouble. And here was another complicating factor: being the sort of bloke who couldn't get bywithout a regular bird, even before marriage: someone indoors,taking care of things, and being cheated on. Keith had tried gettingby without a regular bird, and his subsequent disintegrations wereinvariably dramatic. All the more reason to keep your mouth shut, if you could, silence being golden, as they said.


Many times, fresh from a session, and out of sheer habit, he wouldfind himself boasting to the boyfriend or the husband of the woman he was cheating with; alternatively, he would find himself boasting to thefather or the brother of the woman he was cheatingon. Dear oh dear.In the early days of their marriage, he had come to the brink of regalingKath with hot news of an uncovenanted encounter. Also, and far moreseriously (how he suffered for it: the recriminations, the self-hatred),he kept hurrying and botching and underdoing his conquests, suchwas his eagerness to get back to the pub and give all the details to hismates. He wanted to stop people in the street and tell them about it. Hewanted to take out announcements in the tabloids. He wanted it onThe Ten O'Clock News,Boing. Unemployment: encouraging figures.Boing. Keith Talent fucks another woman: more later. Boing. He wanted to tell everyone everything about women and sex.


Keith loved to kiss and tell. But what could he tell about Nicola?Not even a kiss. In normal circumstances, lies would have done, andKeith had a paragraph ready in his head (beginning, 'Posh foreignbirds are the worst'). But these were not normal circumstances. Theconversation Keith wanted and needed would be with God thebarman or with Shakespeare, both of whom, like Keith, had a peculiar difficulty with girls. Shakespeare for preference, Shakespe­are being more passive and sympathetic a listener, and Shakespearebeing more discreet (Shakespeare being, in fact, routinely speechless on drugs or drink). The conversation would go like this - and this ishow it went in Keith's head:


'Shakespeare? Listen. I nearly did it. I nearly did it, mate.' 'Bad?''Yeah. That close.' 'She aggravate?' 'Yeah. In a bikini innit.' 'Youusingon that, man.' 'Yeah. But you should have seen her. Praying for it.' That the single worse thing you can think.' 'Yeah yeah.' 'But youcontrol you aggression.' 'Yeah.' 'You show Restraint and Respect.''Yeah. And Regard. Talked myself down.' 'You did good, man.''Yeah cheers.'


The peculiar difficulty with girls experienced by God, Shakespeareand Keith was this difficulty: they raped them. Or they used to. They had all been on the same rehab courses and buddy programmes; theyhad mastered some jargon and tinkertoy psychology; and they didn'tdo it any longer. They could control their aggression. But the mainreason they didn't do it any longer was that rape, in judicial terms(and in Keith's words), was no fucking joke: you just couldn't evercome out a winner, not with this DNA nonsense. The great dayswere gone. Shakespeare and God had both spent a long time in prison for it, and Keith nearly had. Of his two court appearances onrape charges, the first had been more or less okay ('Why, Jacqui,why?' Keith had hollered woundedly from the dock). But the second case wasvery frightening. In the end the girl dropped charges, thankheaven, after Keith sold his motor and gave three and a half thousandquid to her dad. Of course, Keith's rapes were to be viewed quitedistinctly from those numerous occasions when, in his youth, he hadbeen obliged to slap into line various cockteasers and icebergs (andlesbians and godbotherers). Rape was different. Rape was much more like all the other occasions (not so numerous, if you kept Kathout of it) when he had candidly used main force to achieveintercourse and the woman, for one reason or another, hadn'treported him.


Rape was different. And rape capability was what he felt when sheloomed above him on the stairs, her legs planted apart and laughinglike a madwoman, and he reached out his knuckles and touched. Hiswhole body felt like a human throat, his own, full of hot caffeine, fullof tannic, pleading and sobbing for its first cigarette. 'We'll do this atmy speed,' she said. No. No,not your speed.My speed. With the FastForward and the Freeze Frame and a bit of the old SloMo near the end. At a man's speed, with none of the brakes women use if you letthem.Rape, he thought, with abstract terror. Rape is different. It is maximum, like fighting, massively preemptive, with all time gamb­led or cashed, and nothing mattering. One two three four five sixseven eight nine ten. Regard, Respect, Restraint. Lucky there was someone coming up the stairs (who was it? Guy. Guy!). Lucky IrishShirt lived so near. Lucky for Keith. Unlucky for Trish.


Keith was glad he hadn't. Keith was glad he hadn't rapedNicola. Definitely. He was thrilled about the whole thing. Thedoublefight of rape, with all it asked of you, the colossal invest­ment of politico-sexual prestige, and the painful regrets (andminor injuries) it often left you feeling, was no kind of preparationfor a long game of darts - especially a stern test of your character,such as Keith had faced at the Foaming Quart. Besides, raping Nicola would have been quite unnecessary, as his next visit, thenext day, had made — in Keith's view — abundantly clear. Rape, when it happened, was always deeply necessary; and then deeplyunnecessary, half a second later.


Finally, there was no money in rape. Show Keith a rich rapist. Goon: just point one out. There was no money in rape. But there wasmoney, it seemed, in Nicola Six.


Financially, this was not a good time for Keith. Few times were,financially. Even during his best periods, his purple patches of epiphanic swiping and stiffing, of fiddling and gypping and dupingand diddling, when money was coming in hard from all directions,Keith never had a good time, financially. Always, at some point in the day, a bitter destiny lay in wait for him: pennilessness, at Mecca.Always he lost everything, without fail. Well, sometimes he won; but he always persevered until he had lost everything. Kath, who didn'tknow the tenth of it, used to ask where all the money went: where didthey actuallygo, those tenner-crammed brown envelopes, thosetoilet-rolls of twenties? For the day usually began and ended with Keith upending her handbag over the kitchen table or banging at theelectricity meter with his fists. Where did it all go? Kath had askedthis question gently, patiently, and not recently. For it made Keithmad. How could he get anywhere, how could he progress, tied downto a wife with such limited horizons — who thought so small? 'Christ.Investments like,' he told her. 'Currency speculation. Futures.' Infact, Keith did not understand that money could be accumulated, except, perhaps, on an Accumulator, at the betting-shop. On theother hand, to give him credit, Keith didn'tlike it in the betting-shop.It was not a human option tolike it in the betting-shop. Keith didn't mind the banked TV screens, the earache voiceover, the food scrapsand dog-ends: it was more the atmosphere of longshot desperation,as guys in dead shoes and fifty-pence suits stood around trying to predict the future, with nothing to help them but theEvening News.


Now Keith stood at the bar of the Black Cross, having words withThelonius. You couldn't hear them in the noonday surf. Keith worebomber jacket, flared white slacks, white chisels; he drank lager thirstily. Thelonius was immersed in a bristling full-length fur coat, and only rarely consulted his glass of orange juice. Both their faceswere lit by amusement as Thelonius enumerated something on raised ringed fingers. Thelonius laughed with his salmon-coloured tongue.Two blondes stood just outside their force field: Juniper and Pepsi.Lightly bronzed, and with a silvery Scandinavian sheen to her,Juniper was younger, and was Thelonius's. Pepsi was older, and wasanybody's, and had been anybody's for an awful long time. If thestray listener moved closer, he would soon discover that Keith andThelonius were discussing semi-violent crime.


'Calm,man. That's the whole thing:calm,' concluded Thelonius.'A golden opportunity. Think about it, man. Give it your considera­tion. All I ask.'


'Nah,' said Keith. He shook his head. 'Nah. I appreciate it, pal.Don't think I don't. I wish you all the luck in the world. In allsincerity. I'm not like some. I like seeing my mates making decentbread. It's, it's just -'


'It's your darts. Say no more, man. It's your darts.'


'Yeah.' Keith nodded. He was greatly moved. He sniffed and said,'I can't do it, mate. No way can I imperil my darts, not now. Noway. As I move into the public eye.'


'I hear you,' said Thelonius, also moved.


'Yeah cheers, Thelonius.'


Thelonius gripped Keith's shoulder. 'But if you reconsider . . . ?’


'Yeah.'


'Yeah.'


'Yeah.'


Thelonius studied the heavy ingot of his watch and wiggled a fingerfor his blonde. Juniper came forward. Pepsi remained, and lookedmeaningly at Keith, who stared hard at her as he headed for the door.


Keith and Clive made their way down the Portobello Road. As theypassed Mecca, Keith slowed to a halt. Then he straightened hisshoulders, and walked on. He wasn't going in there. No way. Hewasn't going in there because he didn't have any money - because he hadalready been in there. A honk sounded: Thelonius flashing past,the girl's blonde hair scrabbling at the half-open side window. Keithwaved, feeling the asceticism of him who strives along a quieter road,to a far greater prize. The spade lifestyle, though, he thought, as heturned down Elgin Crescent — it made a lot of good sense. Especially the way they dealt with their birds. When they took out their walletsand showed you their photos: after the blondes, after all the PointerSisters and Marvellettes and Supremes, there'd be one black bird withbuck teeth and young eyes. And you'd say, 'That your cousin or something then, Wes?' And they'd shake their heads (they took yourpoint) and say: 'Babymamma.' You see, that was the bird they hadbabies with, or at least gave babies to. Thelonius has four or five kids in a basement in Leamington Road Villas. Only go round there once afortnight, on Giro day. Then you're back in the pub with the blondeand the child benefit. Now even the flashest white bloke didn't seem tobe able to swing that. If Keith had been inclined to think in Darwinianterms, he might have said to himself that the additional blondes werepure gravy for the brothers, because they kept the black bird-poolhigh. Nevertheless, he understood, and nodded slowly. Ideal arrange­ment. Brilliant, really. And that way you got the enjoyment of havingchildren (that lovely warm glow of pride) without them ever beingaround. Stay well clear, until they're older: football. No more nappies.Whenwas that ? At two ? At nine ? The spades had their own traditions.Others, others of us chose to accept and duly shoulder ourresponsibilities. White man's burden. Civilization as such. His moodsteeply worsening, Keith shoved himself through the CostCheckdoors, gave the nod to Basim, leaned through the cage and borrowed ahalf of vodka from Harun, tethered Clive to the stockroom doorknob,and furiously trudged down the stairs to pay his last call on Trish Shirt.


And it was definitely going to happen with Nicola Six - financially,too. Of this Keith was now supremely confident. The only worry waswhen.With the rape moment successfully endured and mastered, he could probably wait for the sex. But could he wait for the money?


It was all abouttime. Time was everywhere present, was massivelyoperational, in the life Keith moved through. He saw how it strafedpeople (look at Pepsi!), how it blew them away, how it wasted them.He saw the darts players on TV: every year there was always a freshnew face - and after half a season it looked like an old one. Incommon with Leo Tolstoy, Keith Talent thought of time as movingpast him while he just stayed the same. In the mirror every morning:same old Keith. None the wiser. But in his soul he could tell whattime was doing. Keith, who had gone through his midlife crisis at theage of nineteen, didn't expect time to leave him alone, no, not for a moment.


Look at Pepsi. It used to do Keith's heart good watching little PepsiHoolihan as she flitted like a butterfly from pub to pub along thePortobello Road. And this, it seemed, was only the other day!Popular girl — a breath of fresh air. Everybody loved little Pepsi.Some nights, when she'd had more Peculiar Brews than were strictly speaking good for her, why, Keith himself would take her round theback and they'd have a bit of fun. All it cost you was a Peculiar Brew.Riding high, was Pepsi: had the world — in the form of a few pubs along the Portobello Road - at her feet innit. It was hard to credit thisnow. Keith hated to see her these days. And so did everybody else.Alas. It was fair enough and a sound career move for a bird to changetack when she was getting on in years. You go where you'reappreciated, and black blokes did love blondes. For a while, anyway.And then they got old even faster. A shocking sight, today, PepsiHoolihan in the Black Cross, whining for drinks from the dudesround the pool table with whiskers coming out of her ears. I mean, attwenty-four...Of course, Trish Shirt was much older: twenty-seven. If Keith dumped her, which he intended to do, and do soon,like today at the latest, Trish wouldn't have many options, even supposing she was mobile. He couldn't see her enjoying a long second wind, a year, six months, poncing vodkas off the brothers inreturn for God knows what. They've their own way of doing things and you got to respect that, but they didn't half treat birds horrible. Then, looking at it realistically (I'm a realist, thought Keith - alwayshave been), if she had a bit of sense and looked after herself, shemight make babymamma for some old Rasta. Like Shakespeare.Shakespeare's babymamma. Jesus. Keith exhaled through tubed lips.Time waits . . . Time don't wait. It just don't wait. Just marcheson. At the double.Take me, thought Keith (and it was like a line of poetry twanging in his head, like a cord, drawing him in),take me -take me where rich women want to fuck me.


'Poor you. You're hungover. All that celebrating, I should think,from your darts. Well you deserve it. Now take off your coat and sitdown at the table and read your paper. I'll make you a nice spicyBullshot. Believe me, it's the best thing.'


Keith did what he was told, pausing, as he sat, to wipe a tear fromhis eye, a tear of gratitude perhaps. On the other hand, the weatherhad turned again, and everyone's eyes were smarting in the drymineral wind, a wind speckled with dust and spore, with invisiblelamentation. A log fire, Keith noted, burned confidently in thehearth. Coming up the stairs Keith had been uneasily aware that he had nothing in his hands, no prop, no marker; his fingers missed thefeel of the shower attachment, the coffee-grinder, the heavy iron. He had no burden. Only the folded tabloid, which was with him all day,under the armpit like Nelson's telescope . . . This he now carefully unfurled and flattened out on the table among the books and fashionmagazines.Elle.Women in Love.He looked up coolly every nowand then, in the gaps between jokes, horoscope, cartomancy column, agony aunt, kiss and tell. He could see her in the kitchen, efficiently,elegantly and as it were fondly preparing his drink. Nicola waswearing a shirt and tie, and a pinstripe suit of playfully generous cut.She might have been the illustration to an article about the woman who had everything. Everything except children. Nicola Six: no­body's babymamma.


'Seychelles,' said Keith half-absently as she placed the interestingdrink near his bunched right hand. Then he raised his head. But shehad moved past his back and was now standing in quarter-profile bythe desk, calmly going through a diary, and humming to herself.'Bali,' Keith added.


'Them that's got shall get,' sang Nicola, 'them that's not shall lose.So theBible said .. .'


Lovely moment really, he thought. I ought to savour it. She has away of slowing everything down. She doesn't just plonk herself on achair, like some.Yack yack yack.She lets you get your bearings. Whydon't more birds do that? So fucking important to a man. Look ather hair. Beautiful cut. Christ, they must do it strand by strand.None of this ten minutes under the blaster at Madame Pom-Pom's.I bet she goes to Bond Street or somewhere . . . and Keith's mindslid off down a gleaming arcade of rich mirrors, black velvet,ticking heels, stockinged ankles. The funny thing is, the really funnything is: soon, one of these days (okay: her own speed), the womanover there is going to be sitting on the couch overthere, by the TV,sitting on my lap, well fucked, and watching the darts.


'I've been watching the darts', she said,'— on television. Tell mesomething, Keith. Why do all the players drink lager? Only lager?'


'Intelligent question. Good talking point. It's like this. Your topdarter is travelling the land, from pub to pub. Now beers vary.Some of them local brews, couple pints and you're well pissed. Butlager . . .'


'Yes?'


'But lager'skegged. It'skegged. Standard. You know what you'regetting. Now the darter has to drink. Has to. To loosen thethrowing arm. Part of his job. But within reason. You know likeyou set yourself a limit. Like ten pints. Pacing it out over anevening.'


'I see.'


'Kegged. You know what you're getting.'


As a talking point, the part played by lager in the working life ofa top darter seemed to be close to exhaustion. But then thetelephone rang. Nicola looked at her watch and said,


'Excuse me for a moment, Keith. I'll need silence . . . Guy? Wait. This isn't me. It's a tape. I apologize, but I didn't trust myself to talkto you unmediated. I didn't trust my resolve. You see — dear Guy,thank you for all the sentiments you have awoken in me. It was wonderful to . . .'


Tape? thought Keith. Keith wasn't altogether comfortable.Among other things, he was trying to suppress a cough, and hiswatery gaze strained over the clamp of his hand. Goes on a bit. AndI don't like the sound of this Lawrence she'll be looking at with neweyes. Brush-off innit, he thought, with sadness, with puzzlement,even with anger. Jesus, might as well be off out of here and get towork. Hark at her.


'... how absolutely and unconditionally I mean that, I'll neverforget you. Think of me sometimes. Goodbye.’


Nicola turned to Keith and slowly kissed the vertical forefinger shehad raised to her lips.


He held silence until the receiver went down. Then he coughedlong and heavingly. When Keith's vision cleared Nicola was standingthere with her open and expectant face.


Lost for words, Keith said, 'Shame. So it didn't work out.' Hecoughed again, rather less searchingly, and added, 'All over, is it?'


'To tell you the truth, Keith, it hasn't really begun. For him the ideais the thing. Guy's a romantic, Keith.'


'Yeah? Yeah, he does dress funny. He said, he told me he was"tracing" someone.'


'Oh that,' she said boredly. 'That was just some crap I made up to get money out of him. It'll come.'


This bird, thought Keith, now hang on a minute: this bird is reallyseriously good news. She's a fucking miracle. Where she been all mylife?


'Money for you, Keith. Why should he have it all?'


'Caviare. Uh, when?'


'I think you can afford to be patient. I must do this at my ownspeed. Not very long at all. And really quite a lot of money.'


'Beluga,' said Keith. He nodded sideways at the telephone andwent on admiringly, 'You're quite a little actress, aren't youNick?'


'Nicola. Oh, literally so, Keith. Come and sit here. There'ssomething I want to show you.'


It was all electrifying, every second of it. Every frame of it. Keithwatched the screen in a seizure of fascination. In fact he was almost sickened by this collision or swirl of vying realities: the woman onthe couch whose hair he could smell, and the girl inside the television,the girl on the tape. It might have overloaded him entirely if theelectric image hadn't clearly belonged to the past. So he could still say to himself that TV was somewhere else: in the past. Not that Nicolahad aged, or aged in the sense he knew, become gruesomelywitchified, like Pepsi, or just faded, nearly faded from sight, likeKath. The woman on the couch was more vivid (time-strengthened),richer in every sense than the girl on the screen, who none the less .. .Brooding, tousled, lip-biting Nicola, poor little rich girl, in a play;tanned, keen, wide-mouthed Nicola, in a series of adverts, for sunglasses; white-saronged, ringleted, pouring Nicola, not actuallyCleopatra but one of her handmaidens, in Shakespeare. Then thefinale: the pre-credits sequence of a feature film (her debut, herswansong), a striptease in the back room of a gentleman's club full ofsweating young stockbrokers, and Nicola up on a table wearing ametal showercap and, at first, the usual seven veils, dancing withminimal movements but with fierce address of eyes and mouth until,just before she vanished in the smoke and the shadow, you saw allher young body.


That it?' said Keith with a jolt.


'I get killed later on. You don't see it. You just hear about it. Later.'


'Jesus, beautiful. You know,' he said, not because it was true butbecause he thought she would want to hear it, 'you haven't changed abit.'


'Oh I'mmuch better now. Listen. You run into Guy pretty often,don't you?'


'Consistently,' said Keith, suddenly very pitiless.


'Good. Next time, but leave it a day or two - tell him this.'


Soon afterwards, as she was showing him out, Nicola added,


'Have you got all that? Are you sure? And for God's sake don'toverdo it. Lay it on, but don't overdo it. And mention the globe.'


'Jack Daniels.'


'Well then. Be good. And come and see me again very soon.'-


Keith turned. She was right. Shewas better. When you see photosand that of them young, you think they're going to be as good as theyare now, only newer. But it wasn't like that, not with Nick. Only theeyes, only the pupils, looked as though they'd been around. Whatwas it ? Class skirt — and some foreign skirt too — they needed time forthe flesh to get interesting. They pour oil on themselves. Massage.TV. Idle rich innit. . . Class skirt, he thought: but she wasn'twearing a skirt. Them baggy trousers (not cheap), so puffy there youhad no notion of the shape that was hiding within.


'Old Grandad,' said Keith, and coughed lightly. 'Come on, Nick.Your speed - okay. I respect that. I'll exercise restraint. But give mesomething. To keep me warm at night. Show me you care.'


'Nicola. Of course,' she said, and leant forward, and showed himshe cared.


'. . . Yeah cheers.'


'Look! I've got one more thing to show you.'


She opened a closet, and there, pinned to the back of the door, wasa poster from the long run at Brighton, Nicola full length in tunic andblack tights with her hair up, hands on hips and looking over hershoulder, the wild smile graphically enhanced:Jack and the Bean­stalk.


She laughed and said, 'What do you think?'


'Jim Beam,' said Keith. 'Benedictine.Porno.'


'. . .What?' said Nicola.


The books in Keith Talent's apartment. There weren't many booksin Keith Talent's apartment. There weren't many books in hisgarage, either. But there were some.


There were six: theA - D, theE- K,the L -R, theS - Z (the moderncheat being heavily and exasperatedly reliant on thetelephone),Darts: Master the Discipline, and a red pad which had notitle apart fromStudents Note Book - Ref. 138 - Punched for filingand which, perhaps, could be notionally christenedA Darter's Diaryor, more simply,The Keith Talent Story. Here it was that Keithlogged his intimate thoughts, most (but not all) of them darts-related. For example:


You cuold have a house so big you could have sevral dart board areas in it, not just won. With a little light on top.


Or:


Got to practice the finishing, got to. Go round the baordreligiously. You can have all the power in the world but its nogood if you can not finish.


Or:


Tedn Tendnen  Keep drifting to the left on the third dart, allthem fuckign treble fives.


Rereading this last gobbet, Keith made thetsuh sound. He reached for his dart-shaped biro and crossed outfuckign. Letting out a briefgrunt of satisfaction, and dotting thei with a flourish, he wrote infucking.Keith wiped a tear from his eye: he was in a strange mood.


The conversation with Guy Clinch, completed earlier that day inthe Black Cross, had developed naturally enough. Keith could atleast say this for himself: he had been good, and done as he was told.


'Whew, mate,' he'd remarked as Guy joined him at the bar. 'Youdon't look too clever.'


'Yes I know.’


Keith peered closer with a wary sneer. 'No. You definitely donotlook overly brill.'


'I think I must have a bug or something.'


Not that Guy ever looked as radiant as Keith believed he ought to.Personally, and having seen Guy's house, Keith wondered why Guywasn't rubbing his hands together and grinning his head off all thehours there were. But oh no: not him. Keith was habitually impatientwith Guy's habitual expression, one of temporary and precariousserenity, the face raised and slightly tilted, and the eyes wanly blinking. Today, though, his head was down and he seemed to havelost his colour and his money glow. Like every other male Caucasianin the pub, Guy was being shot in black and white. He was warfootage, like everybody else.


'It must be going round,' said Keith. 'I tell you who else ain't in thebest of health: that Nicola.'


Guy's head dropped another inch.


'Yeah. I went round there. You know I got all that stuff mendedfor her? Well they all went wrong again, you know, like they do.'This was true enough; but when Keith quietly offered to go anothermile with GoodFicks, Nicola just shrugged and said it wasn't worth it. 'Anyway she's definitely under the weather. Know what it lookedlike to me? Apaphy. Apaphy. Staring out of the window. Playing with that globe thing. Sad little smile on its face.'


Guy's head dropped another inch.


'Like —' Keith coughed and went on, 'like she was pining. Pining.Pining its little heart out. . . Jesus Christ, look at the state of thatPepsi Hoolihan. I can't get over it. I haven't seen her for a few weeks,that's what it is. She looked bad enough in the summer but look ather now. She looks like fucking Nosferatu. Cheer up, pal. Here. I gotone for you.'


And then, after Guy had crept off and Keith was standing therethinking how nice and simple life could be sometimes, God andPongotook him aside and told him, in accents of grim apology,about the visit to the Black Cross of Kirk Stockist, Lee Crook andAshley Royle . . .


This news shouldn't have surprised Keith, and it didn't surprisehim. It merely frightened him a very great deal. Ah, money, alwaysthe money. As noted earlier, Keith was not in the healthiest shape, financially. His position as regards rent, rates, utilities, police finesand Compensations, hire purchase, and so on and so forth, was aninch from disaster. But it was always an inch from disaster... In thegaragethere Keith's dusty face hardened as he spat on to the floorand reached for the bottle of stolen vodka. This was the thing: he hadbeen borrowing money on the street, more particularly on ParadineStreet, in the East End. He had been borrowing money from aloanshark called Kirk Stockist. Unable to repay Kirk Stockist, heneeded money for the heavy interest—the vig, the vig, the vertiginousvigesimal. To pay the vig, he had been borrowing money fromanother loanshark called Lee Crook. It seemed like a neat arrange­ment at the time, but Keith knew it to be fraught with danger,especially when he started borrowing money from Ashley Royle topay the vig on the loan from Lee Crook. Through it all Keith had hoped and expected everything to come good at Mecca. And ithadn't. And nothing else had either. His own business interests hadrecently unravelled in a chaos of no-shows on the part of othercheats-catastrophic welshings and skankings that caused low whistleseven among Keith's acquaintance, among poolroom hoodlums,touchy car thieves, embittered granny-jumpers. Now Keith thoughtvenomously of his betrayal at the hands of that fucking old fraudLady Barnaby, and gave a shudder as he recalled the price that her jewellery had fetched. Driving down Blenheim Crescent the other day, Keith had clenched his fist and said'Yesss' when he saw thatLady B's psychopathic boiler had eventually blown its top; the roofof the house looked like Reactor No. 4 at Chernobyl - or ReactorNo. 6, at Thierry. Oh, how Keith longed to forget his cares andthrow himself into his darts! Darts it was that had caused him toneglect his cheating: the hours of practice, and also the days of celebration, when that practice bore fruit at theochй.And there wasNicola: time-consuming too in her way, and promising uncertainrewards. Old Nick: does it at her own speed like. Keith's jawdropped open affectionately as he thought of their session in front ofthe TV, how he had begged for the Freeze Frame and the normal Play, and how she had whisked them on brutally with the Fast Forward from highlight to highlight. . .


The telephone rang and Keith did something he hadn't done in awhile: he answered it. 'Ashley!' he said. Keith didn't say much after that. He just periodically said 'Yeah' - perhaps half a dozen times. Then he said, 'Right. Right. Yeah cheers, lads.'


Solemnly Keith picked upDarts: Master The Discipline andturned to one of its most stirring passages. He read:Whilst darts is basically a twentieth-century sport, darts go wayback into the English folk Heritage. Those famed English archersare said to have played a form of darts prior to defeating theFrench at the proverbial Battle of Agincourt in 1415.


Keith looked up. 1415! he thought. 'Heritage,' he murmuredrichly.


How many times, how many, many times had he chalked for hisfather, at the chalkboards of the dartboards of the pubs of London,where he was raised. Dad would be playing, usually, with Jonathan Friend, or with Mr Purchase: Chick's dad. And if little Keith made amistake with the sums .. . Standing in the garage, Keith raised apalm to his cheek and felt it burning, still burning, alwaysburning. ..


But we mustn't go too far back, must we, we mustn't go too farback in anybody's life. Particularly when they're poor. Because if wedo, if we go too far back — and this would be a journey made in aterrible bus, with terrible smells and terrible noises, with terriblewaits and terrible jolts, a journey made in terrible weather forterrible reasons and for terrible purposes, in terrible cold or terrible heat, with terrible stops for terrible snacks, down terrible roads to aterrible room - then nobody is to blame for anything, and nothingmatters, and everything is allowed.


Ashley Royle, Lee Crook and Kirk Stockist had told Keith that ifhe didn't give them all the money they wanted by Friday, then theywould, among other things, break the middle finger of his right hand. This, of course, was Keith's courting finger: even more centrally, itwas his darting finger. He finished his vodka, straightened his flares,put on his windcheater (even the wind Keith cheated) and went off to try to find Thelonius, to talk to him about semi-violent crime.


Keith has started asking me for money. I knew this would happen.


Late last night we had a stand-up snack at Conchita's. Keith hadwords with Conchita's daughter. He wanted thechili rilienos. In duecourse a plate of devilled plutonium was set before him. It bubbledaudibly, and gave off thick plumes of ebony and silver. I wasreminded of the splattings and belchings of Sulphur Springs, in St Lucia (land of Thelonius's fathers). Keith took a matter-of-fact firstmouthful and stood there with smoke coming out of his nose andasked me to give him money.


I want to give him money. I really don't need this Theloniusbusiness. Thelonius is a joke criminal anyway, riding a farcical luckystreak. What if it all goes wrong, which it will? Keith canned: Keithout of the action. I can't bear to see them hunkered down together inthe Black Cross, saying things like 'Payday' and 'Bingo'. They'veeven got a crappy little map. On the other hand I don't want Keith'sdarting finger broken either, that precious, multi-functioned digit,on which he further depends for his Americanized obscene gestures.


No, I want to give Keith money. (I want to give Thelonius moneytoo.) But the trouble is I don't have any. And Keith needs so much, sosoon, and will presently need more. Why no call, no deal, norapturous jackpot from Missy Harter? Why? Why?


Mindful of Heisenberg's principle that an observed systeminevitably interacts with its observer — and aware too that the decentanthropologist never meddles with his tribe - I decided not to tellNicola about Keith and semi-violent crime. Then I told Nicola aboutKeith and semi-violent crime. I told her to get moving and give Keithmoney. It's okay, she says. She just 'knows' that the crime of semi-violence will take place, and it'll be okay. How I wish I could share inher hope - the awakened, lips parted, the new ships . . .


Well, I told Keith no. He stared my way in what I took to beanti-Semitic silence for about fifteen seconds, and then went taciturnon me. At least 1 think he went taciturn on me. I don't know whatthatchili rilienos was doing to his insides (it evenmeans 'red-ass'),but his tongue looked like a reefer knot. 'That's more like it,Conchita,'he eventually croaked.


I felt bad. I do owe him something. After all, where would I be without Keith?


The snack was cheap and I handled it.


Death seems to have solved my posture problem - and improvedmy muscle tone. What jogging and swimming and careful eatingnever quite managed, death is pulling off with no trouble at all. I recline with burger and fries, while death completes its own stay-fitprogramme. And with none of that sweating and grunting which some of us consider so unattractive.


Yes, for the present I flatter myself that death is having a good effect on my appearance. I definitely look more intelligent. Is thiswhy Lizzy boo digs me? I look almost messianic. The skin istightening under my jaw and over my temples, and gaining in glow.In death I shine. In death I am — I am beautiful. As cosmeticist andshape-up coach, my condition is doing a fine job. It's a little painful,true - but all good things hurt. Apart from what it does to the eyes (red-tendrilled, and swelling, or growing), the death-effect reallyisn't too bad. Apart from the eyes and the death.


I accompany Lizzyboo and Hope and Guy and Dink Heckler to the tennis club in Castellain Road. I sit on an umpire's chair andwatch. Mixed doubles: Guy paired with Lizzyboo, facing Hope andDink, the South African number seven...I don't think Guy sees what's brewing between Dink and Hope. Poor Guy. He's like me, myself. We're here. But we're not here. When we look up our eyesfind the same cloud, heavy and queasy and low-flying, the colour of an avocado, yes, and with a query of vinaigrette in its core.


Unsmiling, in supercasual sportswear, and as hairy as a tarantula,Dink is the one they all want to see, here at the club; the palesecretaries and treasurers, the ageing pros, the brilliant black kids come by to admire and envy Dink's power and touch, his rollover backhand, his snorting smashes. Wearing grey socks, grey shoes, khaki shorts and half a kaftan, Guy is easily the most rhythmless ofthe four, the least determined, and the worst adapted (his generous confirmations and disavowals, his compulsive apologies, almost asregular as the sound of bat on ball) . . . But it was the ladies I hadcome to see.


Equally tall and brown and resplendent they are also bothequipped with bravura backhands and the special looping secondserve. Optimum use has been made of the available material, withinvestment here and outlay there, at the tennis ranch and the tennis clinic. They swoop and swoon in their whites. Of course, Lizzybooboasts even more sap and down than Hope, her older sister.Yuck, they both say, when the shot goes awry.


Hope plays with severity (she is as firm and strict as the pleats onher skirt), Lizzyboo with laughter and friendly ambition. Hopeassumes a vexed expression when she plays her shots (fending off that big fuzzy bug). Get lost! her strokes seem to say. Lizzyboo'persuades' or 'caresses' the ball.Come here, says her racket.Comeback.But if the girls were playing singles, there would be nothing in it— they would be perfectly matched. Their throats shine as they grinand shriek. They must have a hundred teeth between them. When thebalance and the skill and the timing were being handed out, the sisters were given the same amount of tennis talent. But Lizzyboodefinitely got the tits.


The set went to six-six, to the tie-break. Withdrawn and indolentuntil now, Dink exploded with a horrible competence, lunging fromtramline to tramline to poach his volleys, beetling backwards ontiptoe for the whorfing overheads. He came on all masterful with Hope: hand on shoulder for the jock-intimate huddles between eachpoint, and the approving, the legitimizing pat of his rackethead on her rump. Also, to my fascination, he started thinking it would be good if he gunned for Guy at the net. Lizzyboo's short second servewould kick up in girlish invitation, and there would be Dink, wriggling into his ravenous wind-up, cocking every muscle to drillthat yellow bullet into Guy's waiting mouth. And Guy neverflinched. He fell over two or three times, and one ball scorched hishairline; but he didn't back off. He just got to his feet and apologized.At six-zero Dink aced Lizzyboo with shameless savagery, and then half-turned, his mouth white and tight and starkly crenellated, as hecuffed the spare ball toward my chair. Nobody takes a set off theSouth African number seven. Nobody. Unless of course he's the South African number six. That asshole. It didn't occur to him thatLizzyboo and Hope and Guy would be pretty good at tennis too, if they didnothing else the whole time.


Lizzyboo came and stood beside me and laid a hot head on myshoulder. I commiserated. Hope sat with Dink. Guy sat alone. He satalone staring straight ahead with a towel across his knees...Ofcourse, Lizzyboo had a thing with Dink, some time ago. And there isthis sexual plagiarism which operates between the two sisters.Lizzyboo had a thing with Dink. And it didn't work out.


And it won't work out with me either. Pretty soon she will startwondering what is wrong with her. She will become ashamed. Aren'tpeople amazing? I guess I ought to come clean. But I can't. I don't want it to get around. I'll just have to tell her that I love another.


This feels terrible. She rests her head on my shoulder. I should be taking powerful drags of her toasty sweat, her life vapours. Instead, Iavert my jaw. This feels terrible, like a mean parody of love. On the tennis court, I notice, Dink saysnothing instead oflove. Fifteen-nothing. Nothing-thirty. Even on the tennis court love has gone;even on the tennis court love has been replaced by nothing.


I've started reading books to little Kim. They're about the onlybooks I can manage these days. She's interested, and seems to concentrate, particularly when she's lulled by her bottle.


When she drinks from her bottle she sounds like someone windinga watch. She's winding a watch, against her future time.


'How I wish — how I wish, Nicola, that I could share yourconfidence, your belief that all will yet be well.' 'Yes, it's nice to havesuch a rosy view of things.' 'I've got to run. Or go, anyway. Listen. This is somewhat embarrassing.' 'For you or for me?' There are twothings I need from you — from the horse's mouth. First off, could youget Keith to unbutton a little. I need his P.O.V.' 'His what?' 'Hispoint of view. I'm not sure he knows what "discretion" really means.He still sings, but it cramps his style. Lift the D-notice a little. Just tellhim to shut up around Guy.' 'Okay. Consider it fixed.' 'Great.''That's not embarrassing. What's the other thing?'


I dropped my head. Then I raised it and said, 'Your kisses. It wouldhelp if I knew how you kissed.'


She laughed recklessly. Then she gathered herself up from the chair and came forward.


I held up a finger. 'This isn't a pitch or anything.'


'No no. My stuff doesn't work on you. Isn't that right?'


That's right. Come on. You kissed Keith.'


'After a fashion.'


'And I figure you'll kiss Guy next time.'


'Absolutely. But wouldn't this be a dangerous precedent? I mean,where's it going to end?'


'So you'll be going further. With both of them. Of course. Howfar? All the way. Where else. Relax,' I said. 'Sexually I'm deadalready. Sexually I'm Postman Pat. I just need a couple of pointers forthe next chapter.'


'Can't you makeanything up? All this literalism. You know, it's the death of love.'


'You needn't worry. You won't catch my fatal disease.'


'Why wouldI care?'


We were standing there with our force fields touching. I felt nothing in the heart but my face had begun to tremble. 'Go on,' Isaid. 'Give me a kiss.'


She placed her wrists on my shoulders. She shrugged and said,'Which one?'


I get back late and the goddamned pipes are at full throttle. Suchmoronic bugling — I think of Guy's cock or rooster, Guy'sgallo,so far away, so long ago. I walk at speed around the apartment with myhands pressed over my ears. Christ, is the wholehouse dying?


Oh, the pipes, and their brute pain. I hear you. I hear you, brother. Brother, Ihear you.


Chapter11: The Concordance of Nicola Six's Kisses


n the concordanceof Nicola Six's kisses there were manysubheads and subsections, many genres and phyla - chapter andverse, cross-references, multiple citations. The lips were broad andmalleably tremulous, the tongue was long and powerful and assharp-pronged as a sting. That mouth was a deep source, a deepsource of lies and kisses. Some of the kisses the mouth dispensed wereevanescent, unrecallable, the waft or echo of a passing butterfly (orits ghost, hovering in the wrong dimension). Others were assearching and detailed as a periodontal review: you came out fromunder them entirely plaque-free. The Rosebud, the Dry Application,Anybody's, Clash of the Incisors, Repulsion, the Turning Diesel,Mouthwash, the Tonsillectomy, Lady Macbeth, the Readied Pussy,Youth, the Needer, the Gobbler, the Deliquescent Virgin. Namedlike a new line of cocktails or the transient brands of Keith'sperfumes: Scandal, Outrage . . . Named like the dolls and toys - the rumour and voodoo - of an only child.


One kiss was especially tricky (it resisted description - it resistedeverything), featuring as it did two apparent opposites: passionatedemurral and outright inexorability. You had to fix things so thatyour partner, or opponent, felt your desperate reluctance even asyour lips homed in on his. Halfway between the Needer and theDeliquescent Virgin, it was particularly handy after fights, or whenyou wanted to turn a man around again within the space of a fewseconds (out of decrepit satiation it snatched shocking renewal). Thiswas the kiss she would bestow on Guy Clinch. Looming forward, hewould enfold her with his height. She would blink up at him inadorable distress - a distress not altogether feigned, because she did pity him the torments that were destined to come his way. With thiskiss, you didn't move your feet but it felt like tiptoe. A strainingaspiration in the breast, while the mouth, if it could, seemed to want toturn and hide. But it couldn't. Now overseen by an invisibleinteraction, their lips would inch closer. The kiss was called the Wounded Bird.


Physically, it was among her mildest. At the other end of theescalation ladder—intense, athletic, hard core—was a kiss she seldom used: unforgivably, it was called the Jewish Princess. Nicola learned itfrom a pornographic film she had seen long ago in Barcelona, but itsassociations all lay elsewhere. Rich, vulgar, young, plump, effortlesslymultiorgasmic and impossibly avid: a squanderer's kiss, the kiss of animpossible self-squanderer. Whereas, in the Wounded Bird, thetongue was conspicuous only by its shimmering absence (thatbutterfly again, caught in a screened chamber), the Jewish Princesswasall tongue — and not its tip but its trunk, its meat: brute tongue.Here, the tongue did duty for every organ, male and female, the heartincluded. Such a kiss was more a weapon than a wand; a weapon of theexponential kind (one that called upon the speed of light), because itwas almost unusably powerful. The Jewish Princess wasinordinate.Applied at the right moment, it made a man kneel on the floor with his chequebook in his hands. Applied at the wrong moment (and Nicolacould certainly pick these wrong moments), it could finish a love affairin half a minute: the man would be backing towards the door, andstaring, one hand raised, and the sleeve pressed to his lips. 'I'm sorry—don't go,' she once said. 'I didn't mean it: it was an accident.' No use.To achieve the Jewish Princess you brought your tongue out to its full extent and let it rest on the lower lipbefore the kiss began. Thus thekiss, when it came, was from the second mouth.


The kiss was called the Jewish Princess — unforgivably. But then thekiss itself was unforgivable. The Jewish Princess was unforgivable.


And what about a kiss for Keith ? What about a smacker for the kisserof Keith Talent?


When he came in that time — tabloid wedged under armpit, windedjeans, wall-eyed hangover- Nicola couldn't help it. She made herselfhuge and bristled above him saying,'You know the iron and the coffee-grinder and the vacuum-cleaneryou had fixed?'


'...Yeah?'


'Well they'veall gone wrong again.'


Keith stared back at her, the dry tongue waiting on the lower teeth.


Nicola waited, too, until the itch, the heat-flash, the eczema of detestation had passed through her and moved on somewhere else.Then she changed: she made herself small. She could be big and shecould be small but mostly she was big and when things went wrongthey went wrong on a big scale. Bath overflows, heavy tumbles, broken beds.


'Yeah well it's the way of the fucking world innit. Jesus. I come uphere . . .'


She made herself small. She compressed her body into thegamesome folds of her pinstriped suit. She clasped her hands. Shedropped her head - so that she could peer up at him as she gently said,


'Poor you. You're hungover. All that celebrating, I should think,from your darts. Well, you deserve it.' She reached out to help him offwith his electric-blue windcheater, promising him a nice spicyBullshot. 'Believe me,' she said, 'it's the best thing.'


Nicola halved the .lemon, opened the can ofconsommй,ground thepepper, poured the vodka. Every now and then she looked at him as she worked, shaking her head and whispering to herself. Her projecthad been to get through men — to get to the end of men. And what didthat leave her with ? There he sat at the table, fiercely frowning over his paper, as if it were a route-map, guiding him to buried treasure. Theround and hairless forearms lay flat on either margin. You could endthe thing now: by going over and whisking it out from under his gaze. Keith would kill for his tabloid. Any day.


'Seychelles,' he said, impermissibly, as she placed the glass sixinches from his fat right hand. Unable to do more for the moment,Nicola effaced herself, standing at the corner table and looking downblindly at her diary. Heat scattered through her. 'Bali,' he added . . .She had a question ready: to do with darts. In a silent trauma ofcontempt, broken only by the occasional incredulous cackle, Nicolahad been watching the darts on television. A twenty-stone man threw a twenty-gram nail at a lump of cork, while the crowd screamed forblood. Tiddlywinks in a bearpit. This was some destiny.


Anyway she asked the question, and he answered it; then she movedup behind him and looked over his shoulder. The centre pages ofKeith's tabloid were devoted to tabloid-sized photographs of themovie-star Burton Else and his bride Liana. Big Liana wore a smallbikini. Burton Else wore some kind of thong or opaque condom. Hishead, no larger than an avocado, blazed out above an invertedpyramid of organ meat. The accompanying text concerned itself with the Elses' marriage agreement: damage-limitation for Burton, in theevent of a divorce.


'Burton Else, innit,' said Keith, with what seemed to be a touch ofpride. 'And Liana.'


'They come and they go,' said Nicola. 'Every few years the worldfeels the need for another male literalist.'


'Pardon?'


'I wonder how many million she gets a year,' Nicola continued, 'forgoing along with the notion that he isn't a faggot.'


Could anything surprise Nicola? Was she surprisable? Onewonders. Keith now half-turned to her slowly, all patience lost, gone,as if she'd been bugging him for hours andthis was it.


'Him?' he said loudly. 'Burton Else? Fuck off.'


She took a step backwards, away from this. Then she folded herarms and said, 'An obvious and well-known faggot. A celebratedfaggot.'


Keith's eyes closed longsufferingly (give him strength).


She said, 'Come on. I mean, who cares, but look at his face. On topof that body? She deserves the money. It must be a full-time joblooking the other way.'


'Not Burton Else. Not Burton.'


Nicola wondered how far she ought to go with this. It was, in fact,common knowledge about Burton Else. Anyone who followed themovies knew about Burton Else (and Nicola followed them closely). Itwas even clear from the trades: constant static between certainpressure groups and the studio lawyers. Yes, it was common know­ledge about Burton: but not as common as theother knowledge abouthim, the big-screen and video knowledge, which said how much heloved his country and his women and his machine-guns. Burton had anew wife in every film (before she got slain by samurai or Red Indiansor Guatemalans, or some other band of intellectuals): how theseblondes adored their Burton, how they oiled and ogled him, andencouraged him with his bodybuilding! Christ, thought Nicola,hasn't everyone caught on by now? (She was intrigued by thehomosexual world, but finally disapproved of it, because she wasexcluded from it.) The workout king, the erection lookalike: however fearless and patriotic you made him, however many wives and Biblesand three-foot Bowie knives you gave him, he still belonged to lockerrooms, cuboid buttocks, testosterone hotels.


'Burton Else's a happily married man,' said Keith. 'He loves his wife. Loves the woman. Do anything for her.'


Nicola waited, thinking about love, and watching the dullinvitation to violence subside in Keith's eyes.


'Camera don't lie like. That last film he was always giving her one.She wasn't complaining, no way. She said nobody did it quite likeBurton.'


'Yeah,' said Nicola, and leant forward with her hands on the tablelike a teacher, 'and he probably had to stagger into his trailer or hisbungalow to throw up between takes. He's a fruit, Keith. And as I said,who cares ? Don't worry. It does your masculinity credit that you can't see it. It takes one to know one. And you aren't one, are you Keith.'


'No danger,' he said automatically. Then for a few seconds he blinked steadily on a heartbeat rhythm. And his face creased in childish unhappiness. 'But if...but then . . . but he . . .'


Film, Keith,she could have said.Film. All that not real. Not real.


It was six o'clock precisely, though, and the telephone rang, right onthe button, and Nicola smiled ('This is a tape'), and did her thing withGuy.


Later, after her own film show, as she escorted a hugely, an almost speechlessly gratified Keith to the stairs, as she prepared to usher himout into the wind and the rain, Nicola said reflectively, strollingly (herhands in the trouser pockets of the pluming suit),


'He's a romantic, remember. So work on that. Tell him I'm pale anddrawn. Tell him I sit by the window, sighing. Tell him I finger thebeautiful globe, and ruefully smile, and turn away. You know the sort of stuff. In your own style, Keith, of course.'


'Jack Daniels.'


It seemed now that she would finally have to kiss him. Well, he askedfor it. Nicola felt a noise, a soft rearrangement, go off inside her,something like a moan - one of those tragic little whimpers, perhaps,that thwarted lovers are said to emit. She breathed deep and leaneddown and offered Keith the Rosebud: fish mouth, the eyes thankfullyclosed. 'Mah,' she said when it was over (and it lasted half a second).


'Patience, Keith. You'll find with me,' she said, 'that when it rains, it


pours. Look!’


Jack and the Beanstalk.How the young legs sped up into the purpletunic. And the impetuous, the life-loving smile!


'Jim Beam. Benedictine.Porno.'


'What?'


'Porno.It's this drink. You get it down the Golgotha. Or by the case from the bloke at BestSave. Dead cheap, cause it's been nickedtwice.'


'. . . Run along, Keith.'


'Yeah cheers.'


She came back into the sitting-room and, seeing a patch of brief andsudden sunlight on the sofa, flopped herself down in it, her limbsoutstretched, like a dark star. Nicola's round tummy pushed upwardsthree or four times as she laughed —in helpless exasperation. Yes, allright. Porno: porno. Yes of course. If you must. Surprisingly, Nicoladisliked pornography, or she disliked its incursion into her ownlovelife. Because it was so limited, because there was no emotion in it(it spoke straight to the mental quirk), and because it stank of money.But she could do pornography. It was easy.


A performing artist, a bullshit artist, something of a piss artist, and aconsiderable sack artist, she was also anartist; and although she knewexactly where she wanted to go, she didn't always know exactly howshe was going to get there. You could never admit this, however, evento yourself. You had to make the mind shoot like a puck over all that creaky ice. You trusted your instinct, or you were dead. She laughedagain, with a brisk snort that had her stretching for the paper tissues(now who planned that—who planned that burst bubble of humorousmucus ?), as she remembered the killer line she had laid on Guy Clinch.'There's just one other thing: I'm a virgin.' Avirgin. Oh,yeah. Nicolahad never said those words before, even when she had the chance:twenty years ago, in that little gap between finding out what it meantand ceasing to be one. She had never said it when it was true (especiallynot then. And would it have made much odds to the drunken Corsicanin his mag-strewn boiler room, beneath the hotel at Aix-en- Provence?). 'I'm a virgin.' But there was a first time for everything.


The joke was, the real joke was . . . she had come close - she hadcomethat close — to muffing her big line. She almost said somethingthat would have wrecked the whole performance. Really, the actresstraining was a liability in real life: if you're the dramatic type anyway,thendon't go to Drama School. Because the associations of themoment, the tears, the indignation, the extremity, had prompted another line, another lie, one she had delivered pretty well routinelythroughout her teens and twenties, in ultimatum form, on the crest ofvarious rages, various dissolutions. She almost said: 'There's just oneother thing: I'm pregnant.' Whoops! Now that would have been quitebad. No coming back from there. 'I'm pregnant.'Those words, atleast, had fairly often consorted with the truth. She didn't go on about it or anything, internally or otherwise, but she acknowledged the scartissue of her seven abortions.


Nicola blew her nose noisily and lay there clutching the rolledtissue. Two broad fronts: the cloudy trophies of Guy's archaicheart; Keith Talent, and his reptile modernity. She was an artist,in reasonable control, and knew everything that was going to happen, more or less. But she never knew this. She never knewthis about her final project. She never knew it was going to besuch hardwork.


The black cab pulled away, thanked and tipped by the, by the...Disgustingly attired (howcould she?), and making her way into thepregnant blackout of the dead-end street. The car waited; now it nosed forward, with sidelights burning. The door opened.Get in, hesaid. And she had been so very very bad . . .You. Always you, she said.And in she climbed.


Nicola awoke, and heard the rain, and went back to sleep again, orshe tried. The rain sounded like industrial gas escaping from therooftops — tons of gas, enough to fill the storage vat that overlookedthe Park (corseted and flat-topped, the snare in God's drum set).Mauling and worrying thepillows, she squirmed and bounced aroundthe bed. She persevered for perhaps an hour while ten thousandsensations ran through her like a metropolitan marathon. She sat upsuddenly and drank most of the pint of water that had colourlesslymonitored her sleep. There came the sound of thunder, thepremonitory basses and kettles of God's new drum solo. She hung herhead. This morning, at any rate, Nicola Six could look forward to awhole day off.


She micturated angrily, as if trying to drill a hole through the hardmarble. Having wiped herself she stepped on to the scales in her heavywhite nightdress—her decidedly non-vamp nightdress, what she worein bed when all she wanted was comfort, frump-warmth and comfort.The dial shivered and settled. Eh! But the nightdress was heavy, thesleepy in her eyes was heavy, her hair (she made a mustache of one of itslocks) was heavy and smelled of cigarettes: the tobacco, not thesmoke. With a silent snarl she cleaned her teeth for the taste of thetoothpaste, and spat.


Back in the bedroom she drew the curtains and released the blind.She opened the window to the wet air: three inches, a distance that corresponded in her mind to a single raised notch on the passage thermostat. Normally, on a working day, she would have aired thebed—but she planned to return there very soon. Ten o'clock, and it wasdark outside. Against such darkness the rain might be expected to takeon the glow of silver or mercury. Not today. Even the rain was dark. She listened to it again. What was the point? What could the rain saybut rain, rain, rain?


In ritual vexation she ran a tap for her morning tea. The tapwater,she knew, had passed at least twice through every granny in London. Previously she had relied on bottled water from France, more costlythan petrol, until it was revealed that EaudesDeux Monts had passedat least twice through every granny in Lyon. You had to run the tap forat least ten minutes before it stopped tasting like tepid soy sauce. Justhow much of people's lives was spent waiting for hot water to run hot, for cold water to run cold, standing there with a finger, pointing, in thefalling column. She went and switched on the television: thesoundless, telex-like news channel. Sternly she reviewed the interna­tional weather reports.madrid 12rain.magnitogorsk9rain.mahabad14rain. managua12.rain. Therain in the right-handcolumn formed a pillar ofdrizzle. That's right: it was raining all overthe world. The biosphere wasraining.


With the tap still poling into the sink Nicola put on her dressing-gown and flew barefoot down the stairs for her mail. The men wholived beneath her . .. The men who lived beneath her got less and less keen on Nicola the nearer to the top they got. Speechlessly revered bythe man in the basement, openly acclaimed and fancied at street level,she was heartily endorsed by the man on the first floor, who tended to pooh-pooh the suspicion of the man on the second, who none the lessassociated himself with the settled hostility of the man on the third.The man on the fourth floor didn't like her one bit. In fact, on almostany reckoning, she was ruining his life. She kept him up at night withher banging and pacing; his days she poisoned with her music, herfrantic scene shifting, her vampire and vigilante videos; odds and endstossed from her windows littered his balcony; three of his inner wallsreeked of wet-rot from her leaking pipes, her overflowing baths . . .


In bed again, leaning on a rampart of pillows, with her teatray andher mail. . . And there was a time, five years ago, three years ago,when her mail weighed in at half a stone, and smelled of toilet water and pot-pourri: well-turned tributes, groveilings, poems, invitations,and a lot of free airline tickets. Now? Cathode script fromcomputerized mailing lists. 'Richard Pinkley has completed the preparation of his Autumn Exhibition and is pleased to invite you tothe Preview.''Idon'tcare,' said Nicola. 'Lucky you! Your name hasbeen selected for a chance to win the holiday of a lifetime with VistaInternational!' 'Idon'tcare,' said Nicola. 'We understand that thelease on your property will shortly expire and we would be delightedto help you with your relocation in any way we can.' 'Idon'tcare,' saidNicola. Her lease was due to expire at the end of December. Short lease. None of this millennial stuff: nine hundred and ninety-nineyears. Just thirty months was all she had wanted. The lease wasrunning out; and so was her money.


Now the real toilet—beginning with the toilet. The toilet: rightly socalled. Interesting word, toilet. 'Toilet.'Toilet. 'Arranging thehair . . .(make one'stoilet) . . . an elaborate toilet; a toilet of whitesatin . . .(room containing lavatory) . . . (Med.) cleansing of partafter an operation or at time of childbirth . . .The reception of visitorsby a lady during the concluding stages of her toilet; very fashionable inthe18th C . . . Preparation for execution (in Fr. formtoilette).' Toiletwas right. She had known girls who went to the toilet in fleetingthoughtlessness: it was something that got done between doing otherthings. Nicola wasn't like that. Nicola was heavy weather. Sherealized, with regret (but what can you do?), that she was mannishwhen it came to the toilet. Not ridiculously mannish: she didn't need apack of cigarettes andWar and Peace and a section of horse-brass tochew on; she didn't need to hold up traffic beforehand, and clear thestreet with a bullhorn. Yet the whiteness of the bowl was tinged withdifficulty, with onerousness. She flipped up her non-vamp nightdressand sat there making unreadable faces. It shouldn't really happen to aheroine—or only behind closed doors. But the reception of visitors by alady during the opening stages of her toilet was very fashionable in the twentieth century. And now the twentieth century was coming to anend.


Naked, she weighed herself a second time, while the bath thundered- while it slobbered and rumoured. Then, in an abrupt about-turn, the full-length mirror . . . Yes! Good, still good, all very very good. But time was getting ready to finger it, to make its grab; time was dryingthat belly with the heat of its breath. She looked at the pots and tubs onthe bath's rim; cleansers, conditioners, moisturizers. She looked at thenail varnish, the hair dryer, the fairground lights of the dressing table—the mirror hours, the looking-glass war! No one could seriously standthere and expect anybody to be forever having to do with allthis shit.


Something about the indomitability of the human spirit (and felt deathin its full creative force): back into battle she came the next day,pressing forward under the spiked dome of her black umbrella. Freshair - or fairly fresh anyway, relativelyfree-range and corn-fed: outerair, not inner air, not just personal gas. In bygone times of averagelassitude she had been capable of spending a week and a halfwondering whether to post a letter or return a li brary book or paint her toenails. But these days (the last days) her need for activity was clearlydesperate. She swayed in the rain as she re-experienced the killing etiolation of the previous day, all its pale delinquency. Sitting therebeside the bookcase, trying to read, in a growing panic of self-consciousness. Why? Because reading presupposed a future. It had todo with fortification. Because reading went the other way. She sent thebook flying through the air with its petticoats flapping.Women inLove!She wanted a drink, a pill, a drug (she wanted a Greenland ofheroin), but she didn't want it. She wanted the concentrated, theconsuming, the undivided male attention known as sexual intercourse(imagine the atomic cloud as an inverted phallus, and Nicola's loins asground zero), but she didn't want it. Formerly the telephone wouldhave led her off into altered states. And now the telephone's tendrilsled nowhere. All you could do was heavily move from room to room to room... So it was good to get out and busy oneself with somethingreally useful.


The rain made toadstools of the people on the street. They had atoadstool smell, too (a sodden softness), she noticed, as the wet soulsconverged at the entrance to the underground, faceless stalks, inmackintoshes, beneath the black flowers of their umbrellas. ButNicola's personal cinematographer (the cause, perhaps, of all hertrouble) was still hard at work, and lit her like a chasuble. It was hot,and the rain was hot, but Nicola would be cool. She wore a plain dressof silvery linen. The rain would ruin it, the scuff and the shuffle and thetyre squirt would certainly ruin it (her shoes werealready ruined).That didn 't matter. Because she was killing off her clothes, one by one.In the damp-dog airlessness of the train (a taxi would have taken allmorning), Nicola suffered a sense of deafness from the sleeping pillsshe had eventually taken the night before. And she also feared anincriminating pallor. Yesterday had devolved into an epic of largelypleasureless - and entirely solitary - excitation: the terrible teenager'scloggedcafarб.And yet the adolescent (she now formulated it toherself), no matter how terrible, no matter how torpid and gracelessand hormone-slowed, always had the prospect of love. Nicola did nothave the prospect of love—love, which distinguishes this place from allothers in the universe. Or it tries. Indeed, her flexings and squeezings,her compulsive caresses of the self, were further haunted by the thought that nothing significantly better was taking place anywhereon earth: no act of love that was undesperate, unmediated, unsneeringly observed. She was wrong about that, wrong also about the way she looked, though in the Spanish burnish of her face therewas maybe half a dab of hoar, the hoar of smoke or cloud or milk. Now Nicola stared at a schoolboy until he vacated his seat for her, like asomnambulist. Proudly she sat, and looked straight ahead.


An hour and a half among the warm dust and the microphoto-graphy of the Public Records Office in Marylebone High Street gaveher everything she needed to know about Walker Clinch. She knew theevidence would be there and of course it was, superabundantly.Thence to the nearby Wallace Collection, where she made a twenty-pence purchase: a single postcard. On the front was a suit of sombrearmour, the tin soul of a robowarrior slain long ago. On the back, this:


Dear Guy - Why do I come here ? This is just to say that I am well. Itdoesn't matter, because by now one has grown so used to this devastating solitude. I am not without employment. And I canalways sit and watch the rain - and watch the poor birds gettingiller and iller. No tears!


NicolaPleasedon't reply.


She had written these words in a state of simulated self-pity and indignation, but as she read them now, why, Nicola fairly beamed.Oh the very land where they grew the trees that yielded the paper forwriting love-letters on - its soil was dying, neutered with chemicals,overworked, worked to dust. She had this idea about the death oflove . . .


Which began with the planet and its fantasticcoup de vieux. Imag­ine the terrestrial timespan as an outstretched arm: a single swipe of anemery-board, across the nail of the third finger, erases human history.We haven't been around for very long. And we've turned the earth'shair white. She seemed to have eternal youth but now she's ageingawful fast, like anaddict, like a waxless candle.Jesus, have you seen her recently'? We used to live and die without any sense of the planetgetting older, of mother earth getting older, living and dying. We usedto live outside history. But now we're all coterminous. We're inside history now all right, on its leading edge, with the wind ripping pastour ears. Hard to love, when you're bracing yourself for impact. And maybe love can't bear it either, and flees all planets when they reach this condition, when they get to the end of their twentieth centuries.


Nicola found a chair and placed the card in the thick envelope shehad brought along for it. She addressed it to Guy's office (andimagined his face reflected in a visual display unit, and branded by thegreen figures). In her manly wallet Nicola's fingers finally found onelast creased stamp. As she licked, a queue formed ahead of her in hermind, edging towards the turbaned shadow in its caged stall at thesubsidiary post-office. But then she nodded, realizing that this letter was the last she would ever send, this stamp the last she would everlick. Good, good. Stamp queues (in fact queues of any kind) putNicola into a daylong fury. You bought thousands and then thefollowing week the price of mail went up again. No more of that. Good: one more of life's duties, one more of life's pieces of shit, discharged for the very last time.


With the promise of a little danger money Nicola secured a black cab and sailed up, high on Westway to keep her date for lunch.


'I once slept', she said experimentally, 'with the Shah of Iran.'


Nicola paused. Keith blinked and nodded. She gave him time towork out the dates: Nicola would have been fourteen at the time of theShah's death. But of course he didn't work it out.


'I was twenty-one at the time. The Shah of Iran, Keith.'


The towelhead,' Keith said firmly.


She looked at him with her head at an angle.


'But they're religious,' he went on.


'Nono. This was before the revolution. The Shah . . . the Shah wasthe king, Keith. An extremely profligate one, too. Have you neverheard tell, Keith, of the Peacock Throne? Anyway he scoured theplanet for the very best and hottest young women, and paid them lotsof money to go to bed with him. It was quite an experience.’


The dark-suited waiter approached, rubbing his hands togetherand saying, 'Is everything all right, sir?'


'Uh,' said Keith, 'give us some fucking privacy here, Akhbar, okay ?'


Keith was waiting for her when she arrived, stolidly established inthe very hearth of the dark restaurant. Offered a treat lunch anywherehe liked, Keith had unhesitatingly opted for the Retreat from Kabul, describing it, after some encouragement, as providing a whiff of theOrient at a competitive price. 'Afghani innit,' he had added. 'And youcan't beat a good hot curry. No way.'


The murderer remained seated as she approached his table. Nicolawondered whether it was the light, or the food he was already eating,or some routine proletarian ailment he had come down with — butKeith's face was quite yellow. The kind of yellow you saw in a healing black eye. 'Don't be shy, darling,' he said, and tensely opened a hand atthe opposite chair. He had the pint of lager and the cigarette and thetabloid and the half-finished sandwich of poppadam and pickle. 'Akhbar! A menu for my uh, for my uh - give her a menu, and don'tgimme no meat. What, in here? Three hard-boiled eggs and bung myspecial sauce on it. Not a germ on earth'll live through that. Nodanger.' Nicola returned the menu unopened and ordered her first ginand tonic, pleading a diet. For ten minutes or so Keith poured scorn ondiets, arguing that you had to keep your strength up and that menpreferred fat women. Then his meal arrived. Three additional waitersand two smocked cooks stood and watched, murmuring eagerlyamong themselves. The murmuring ceased, on the instant, as the firstspoonful of sauce entered Keith's mouth, and then you could hearthrough the hatch an explosion of adolescent laughter—from the boysin hell's kitchen . . . He chewed, then stopped chewing, then chewedagain,exploratively, like a puppy testing a hard chocolate. He closedhis eyes and fanned his hand placatingly. When, at last, he started tospeak, there was so much smoke coming out of his mouth Nicolathought for a moment that he must have quietly lit another cigarette. Keith asked Akhbar to correct him if he was wrong but didn't he askfor the hot one?


'1 was having breakfast alone at the Pierre in New York,' Nicolalater resumed, 'as was my habit in those days. Two men approached me. Swarthy, and mean of forehead, but perfectly polite and very expensively dressed. Compliments were paid, and an envelope was produced. A promissory note for $50,000 and undated first-class airticket, return, to Teheran. One night with the Peacock. I later learnedthat the Shah had many teams of such people at work in all the greatcapitals, recruiting hefty starlets from Los Angeles, the palest blondesfrom Stockholm and Copenhagen, fantasy sex-scholars from thegeisha houses of Tokyo and Osaka, hysterical goers from Copaca-bana Beach in Rio de Janeiro, Keith. Quite a thought! The wide worldwas his brothel. Now that's imperialism. I mean, you have to think:how did hedare?


At this point Keith extended a dissenting forefinger. His sym­pathies, clearly, were as yet very much with the Shah. He sat hunched forward over his meal, the spoon limply dangling as he finished a longmouthful. Smoke was coming out of his nose now, too, as he said, 'Ah.But for him-no way would that be out of order for a towelhead Royal.Ancient privilege as such. A right exercised from way back. Timeimmemorial.'


'Time immemorial? Time immemorial?No, Keith,' she said, withsoothing urgency. 'The Shah's father was just some corporal in thearmy before he made hiscoup. The purest scum, Keith. The Peacockwas born a pauper. You see what I'm saying? It's all will and accident.Anyone can burst out. You can burst out.'


Slowly Keith looked down and to the right, frowning. Nicola lip-read his thoughts. TV. Robes. Hot out there. Yul Brynner. Keith in equivalent finery. The Shah of Acton. Keith of Iran. He savoured afresh spoonful. Smoke was now coming out of his ears.


'Well I said yes, of course. $50,000 was quite a lot of money in thosedays, and I was intrigued. And unattached. You remember those TV ads for sunglasses I showed you?'


'How could I ever -?'


That's what I looked like. The CD pimps gave me a couple of fancypresents — jewellery, Keith — and said I would be hearing from them.Nothing happened for a while. Then the telephone call, the limousine,more presents, Kennedy Airport.'


'New York? Love the place. Love it.' He chewed on. Was it Nicola'sfancy, or was smoke now coming out of hiseyes?


'At the other end they took me off to some resort in the south. First, asearching medical. Then I sunbathed for a week: if you were brownalready, the Shah liked you browner. The Scandinavian blondes andthe pale colleens, I imagine, were kept in a cupboard under the stairs.Plus several hours a day of massage, and workouts with the Shah'sdirty-minded physios. Exercises designed to enhance one's twang andtwist and give. People do want value for money, don't they, Keith.’


'Definitely,' said Keith seriously. He had stopped eating. Anobscure agitation began to play over his lumpy brow.


'I was told it was going to happen in the Summer Palace at Qom. Butthere was a hitch. I was driven to Teheran. The Sharina was abroadsomewhere, frenziedly shopping. You can imagine the scene, Keith,I'm sure: the salutations, the gifts, the pre-war champagne, theflaming dinner on the dusky terrace. There was some kind ofdemonstration in the square outside which soon developed into a riot.But there we were, with the Smalltalk and the servants . . . I was led off.Humming maidens prepared me. Then a middle-aged Frenchmadame with big tits and rockinghorse eyes came in, practicallyarmoured in bracelets and necklets and armlets, and spent about forty-five minutes listing all the treats that the Shah would beexpecting of me. Final ablutions, perfumes, oils, unguents, Keith. Twolines of the choicest cocaine. And the most miraculous underwear.The panties, I would guess, were worth about a thousand times their weight in gold.'


Keith lit a cigarette. His fingers flickered like the flame. He stared ather with ponderous illegibility. Most of the time Keith's lips were easyto read — his forehead was easy to read. But not now.


'The thing was they didn't weighanything. I'm very interestedindeed in underwear, Keith, as you will soon cheerfully discover, butI've never in my life come across anything like those panties. Elitesilkworms, no doubt, specially bred and trained. Cool-pants silk­worms. It was quite a sensation, pulling them up tight, as instructed.Quite insubstantial but palpably there, like wetness.'


A pulse passed, and he nodded at her to proceed.


'When the Shah eventually removed this shrunken wisp he threw itwith gusto high towards the domed ceiling. The panties hovered,Keith, in the warm thermals of the air, and began to fall, like anautumn leaf. When he was finished, they were still falling. And His Excellency took his time. I couldn't sleep because of the gunfire. Atnoon the next day another pimp appeared and drove me to theairport.'


'Djyou.' Keith cleared his throat and said, 'Did you see him again?'


'The CD pimp?'


'Yeah. No, the . . . His Excellency.'


'The Shah never slept with the same whore twice. And I think I musthave been one of his last flings. Six weeks later there was therevolution. And the Shah was dead within a year. But he did look in thenext morning and used me rather brutally on the way to a meeting withhis American advisers and his Chiefs of Staff. I begged him for those panties — Ibegged him, Keith — but they were already beingmicrotweezered and blowdried for the next slice of...Are you allright?'


'Nicola?'


She felt a light shock at the sound of the three syllables. This wasKeith's high style.


'Nick, I'm desperate.' He clenched a crackling fist just under hisnose. 'I'm fucking desperate. I got to have itnow. Now. Not soon. Notnext week.' At this point, even more surprisingly, he straightened asallow middle finger. 'Or I just kiss goodbye to this. See ? I got to have itlike now.'


'What?'


'The money!'


'Oh for Christ's sake.'


Keith leaned back and imposingly drew in breath through his nose.She saw that the yellow in his face wasn't the colour of need or fever; itwas the colour of fear, open pored, like a grapefruit.


'You don't know the kind of pus I'm dealing with here. Okay, callme a cunt, I took double money on the street. Plans of mine did notreach fruition. Now I made the list and come Friday I get a kicking and they break my fucking darting finger and all.' Again the sallow digit was held up for admiration or review. 'That's how low they'll stoop.See, it brooks no delay. This happens, I'mout of it. I'm history. I'm afucking dinosaur.'


'All right. See Guy tomorrow. Tell him this. Call me when it's done.'


With a genuine performance ahead of her- albeit a matinee or a dressrehearsal — Nicola the love actress felt better, felt much better: she felttwice the price. You see how thin, how poor it would all be, without Guy? The next morning, stern-faced and motionless in the scarcely bearable heat of her bath, with one steaming shank hooked over theside, she gave herself up to the disciplined play of thought. The tale ofAliBabaand the Magic Panties had not gone down as well, or asenlighteningly, as she had hoped. It hadn't been much fun to tell, either (Plan A: have fun telling the story; Plan B: don't have much fun telling it), under the glare of Keith's rancid inscrutability, his wide eyes tippedatanangle, as if he was trying to identify something—the number of abus slowly surging through the rain, a racing result on the back page ofan evening paper. Was he unmoved ? Could it be that Keith was cold tothe notions of enthusiastic whoredom, foot-deep luxury, tyrant sex,and gravity-defying underwear ? A Shakespearean lament would be inorder (the world was out of joint) if Keith didn't like underwear,invaluable underwear, underwear worth all his tribe. Perhaps,however (and here her fringe fluttered, as she gasped upwards to coolher brow), Keith just likedcheap underwear. One thing, anyway: hebelieved her story. He fully credited her Arabian Night. A reliabletaxonomy of Keith's mind, his soul, his retractile heart - it couldn't be done. None of it parsed, none of it scanned. His libido would be alltabloid and factoid. Such a contemporary condition was pretty well recognized, if imperfectly understood. It had to be said that Nicolaliked the idea of trying to get to the bottom of it. Synthetic modernity(man-made), qualified by something ancient and ignoble andreptilian. Like darts: a brontosaurus in nurene loons. All the morereason, then, to wipe the money fear of f his face, to see what was in him(his dreams and dreads, the graphs and spools of his nocturnalerections) and find out what would move him to murder.


Wearing a T-shirt only and sitting on a towel, in the kitchen, withthe spread newspaper, the pot and the wooden spoon, Nicoladepilated her legs for the last but one time; she unpeeled the sections ofsimmering beeswax, like industrial elastoplasts, from her smarting calves; she sang while she worked . . . Nicola didn't know this (andknowing it wouldn't have made any difference), but she was emerging from the kind of mid-project doldrums that all artists experience, inthe windless solitude halfway between outset and completion. Thething is there now, and you know you can get to the end of it. It is moreor less what you wanted (or what you felt you'd finish up with); butyou start to wish that the powers that be, the talent powers, hadthrown you a little further or higher. How to keep that spring in the stride, that jounce in the rump, as black-stockinged Jack mounts thebeanstalk for the hundredth time? The tricks she was going to play onKeith and Guy weregood tricks; but they were low and cruel and almost unrelievedly dirty. If she could do it all sitting upright, fullyclothed (indeed, beautifully turned-out), pressing buttons withimpeccable fingertips, and not a hair out of place! But it wasn't goingto be like that. She would have to get all hot and sweaty, and roll up her sleeves and her skirts, and put in a lot of time down there on the kitchenfloor.


Nicola Six was a performing artist, nothing more, a guest Stardirected by the patterning of spacetime, and there it was. It waswritten.


Keith called at three.


She said,'Hello? . . .Good . . .What exactly did you say? . . .Andhow did it go down?...— No no. That's what I expected. That'sby the book, Keith. With luck we'll sort it all out in time.'


Nicola listened, or at least stood there with the telephone pressed toher ear, while Keith discoursed with husky briskness on his upcomingdarts clash - the quarter-finals of the Duoshare Sparrow Masters.Keith had done as he was told, and told Guy what Nicola had told himto tell. That meant that Guy would come very soon, within fifteenminutes, twenty at the outside. Already in her mind she could hear the terrifiedpeep of the buzzer, his pale hello?, his colossal bounds up thestairs. But now she obeyed a long-incubated impulse and said to Keith,


'Tell me something . . .What happens if you win this game? . . .Allright-this"match". . .Andwhat,and what if you win the semi too?'


Keith talked boldly of the final: the venue, the format, the purse, theTV coverage, the chance to face world number one Kim Twemlow(also before the cameras), the lively promise of a career in professionaldarts with its highflying lifestyle, the very real possibility of some dayrepresenting his country in an England shirt.


Yes, she thought, or in an England tent.


'Wait,'she said.'The final. Is there a date set for it? . . .When wouldthis be?'


As he told her, she gave a soft shout, and dropped her head, and feltwithin herself a warm flood of vindication, a movement and a pang,something like peeing in a cold sea. For a moment she feared theuntimely onset of her penultimate period. But that was five days away; and in this area, if in no other, she was as regular as time itself. Women are clocks, after all. They are timekeepers - keepers of the time.


'Listen,' she said. 'I have to go. Whatever happens, you're going toreach the final, Keith, don't worry. I know it. I feel it. With me behind you. You're going to get to the final. You're going all the way. Call metonight. I must get ready.'


Actually she was pretty well ready as it was. In her multipurposeblack cashmere dress, with its dozen black buttons down the middle,she was dressed for anything, she was ready for anything. Nicola hadneed of only one last prop. Seating herself before the bulb-ridged mirror, she reached for the bottle of glycerine and its little plunger.


Glycerine: a quintessentially modern substance — a viscous liquidformed by the chemical conversion of fats and used as an ointment, adrug component, a sexual lubricant, an element in high explosives.Used also for false tears, by actors and actresses. That's where Nicolafound this bottle of tears: in her box of tricks, the box of tricks of the actress.


As the first crocodile tear began to smear her vision, Nicola gazedinto the fingerprint contours and saw — and saw crocodiles. She sawthe reptile house in Keith Talent's brain. What iguanas andanacondas, what snoozing geckos languished there, presided over,perhaps, by a heraldic basilisk, a rampant cockatrice! All the reptileswere waiting, waiting. And when reptiles wait when there is foodaround, they are waiting for the food to get weaker, deader, rottener.Not a jungle, not a swamp (for this was a modern brain): asmalltown zoo, an underfunded game reserve, a half-abandonedtheme park. Deeply, unimprovably stupid, the creatures are none theless aware that they are being watched. Keith's face appeared beforeher: the bashful salacity of his alligator smile. It wouldn't be her whoromped and basked with Keith and rolled with him in the mud. It would be Enola, Enola Gay. In the theme park, in cold blood, theblindworms and salamanders gave a sudden twitch — a shrug of ooze.Then silence. Reptile vigil . . .


Nicola's head snapped back to the frightenedpeep of the buzzer.She went to listen to Guy's pale hello? Of course she had adoreddinosaurs as a little girl. She knew all their names by heart, and lovedto toll them through her mind. Dinosaur: terrible reptile. Brontosau-rus: thunderlizard. (Now she could hear him scale the stairs withmighty bounds.) A planetary society, built from bones. Would thesame thing happen when the human beings were gone? Would we be exhumed (thecheat, the foil, the murderee), would we be reconstruc­ted and remembered by the rat, the roach, the triumphal virus?


She took up position at the top of the stairs.


Ankylosaurus. Coelophysis. Compsognatus.


Crookedlizard. Hollowform. Pretty jaw.


Ornitholestes. Maiasaura. Oviraptor.


Birdrobber. Childguarder. Eggstealer.


I've been poring over her diaries again - the stuff about 'MA'. My,how those two went at it. Hammer and tongs. Like Kilkenny cats.


Nicola and MA? Nicola and Mark Asprey? I have to know.


So I in my turn have laid a trap for Nicola Six. Very simple: I justasked her over.


'What's the address?' she said on the phone.


I told her: no audible response. 'You know. Near where youdumped your diaries.'


She'll come clean. Or I'll tell by the look on her face.


'It's terrible,' said Incarnacion in the kitchen this morning, as she removed her mack and the zippered groundsheet she wears on herhead, and as she slurped out of her galoshes and gestured toward thewindow and the terrible rain: 'the terrible rain!' She's right, ofcourse. The rain is terrible. It wouldn't look so bad in a jungle orsomewhere, coming down like this, but in a northern city, suspendedfrom soiled clouds. It's all so desperate when you try to washsomething unclean in unclean water.


'Is terrible, you know?' proceeded Incarnacion, as she set aboutthe vague preparations for her first pot of tea. 'It brings you so low.When the sun shines? You happy. Feel good. Cheerful, you know?Full of the get up and go. But when is raining like this. Rain, rain,rain. When is raining? You sad. Is miserable, you know? You get depress. You wake up? Rain. Go out? Rain. Inna nights? Rain. Rain,rain, rain.How you going to cheer up and feel good and happy and cheerful when is all this rain? How? Rain! Just rain, rain, rain.'


Ten minutes of that and 1 picked up my hat and coat and went out and stood in it. Standing in the rain isn't a whole lot better than beingtalked to about it by Incarnacion, but it's got the edge. The streetcorners are swagbellied with rain. They all have these spare tyres of rain. These guts of rain.


At last. Oh happy day.


The call from Missy Harter. In mid-afternoon, under another tonof rain.


First, though, I am screened, not by Missy's assistant Janit, nor yetby Janit's assistant, Barbro, but by a male interrogator with anarmpit-igniting way with him, whose name, if he has one, is notrevealed. Even when they call you, it takes for ever to get to the top. Isuspect they might even run your voice through the computer, in caseyou're trying to give someone senior a disease over the telephone.


'At last. Missy. How are you?' 'Good. Here's the deal.' 'The deal?''The deal. I have my doubts but it's been with Marketing and theyproject it'll go.' 'Marketing!' I said. (Marketing: I was very moved.)'Marketing,' she said: 'Here it is: we tight-option volume rights at twenty per cent.' 'Explain, Missy.'


Missy explained. Or she went on talking. So far as I could follow, Igot some money now against a renegotiable advance; the latter sumwould dramatically decrease if I attempted to place the bookelsewhere, but they reserved the right to match any offer from a rival publisher, whom they would immediately sue; if they didn't like thefinished book and someone else did, I repaid their money and they returned the typescript, or else they sat on the typescript and I suedHornig Ultrason; and if I accepted a better offer elsewhere, thenHornig Ultrason sued me.


'Well I suppose it sounds okay.'


'It's standard,' she said. 'You'll hear from the lawyers. I'm time-urgent. The reason: I have a meeting. Goodbye there.'


'Oh Missy ? Before you run. Is there anything you can tell me aboutthe - the international situation? Over here it's -'


'Next question.'


1 had an image of Missy Harter, scandalized in a skyscraper,looking as prim as her name. But of course the conversation wouldbe taped at her end. And then she added relentingly, 'It's serious. Butwe feel we're in good hands. Much depends on Faith's health. Forty-five seconds. Next question.'


Faith's health. They talk about Faith as if the First Lady were theonly lady. Or the Last Lady. 'You said you had your doubts about my — about the work. Would you care to elaborate on that?'


'It ran counter to expectation. It's so unlike you. Where did it comefrom?'


'I really need the money, Missy. I'm time-urgent too, you know.'


'I know you are. And I'll try.'


But the money will not come through in time.


The coincidence of Keith's darts final and her own birthday (or appointed deathnight) has filled Nicola with fresh hope. She is rejuvenated. Oh, it's encouraging, I agree. Yes. I guess the future looks bright.


Except Keith has to reach that final. And he won't reach the dartsfinal without his darting finger. In such cases, they don't just bend the darting finger until it breaks. No. The darting finger is placed in the crack of a doorway, and the door is then kicked shut. End of dartingfinger. Farewell,Odarting finger. Nor will Keith reach the darts finalif he is locked up in prison at the time. And prison is where Keith willsurely languish (picking his nose, perhaps, with a speculative dartingfinger) if he does this heist with Thelonius. Another thing stands inhis path, as he heads toward the darts final. It has at last dawned on me that Keith isn't very good at darts.


I am fond of Thelonius, of course.


He has many excellent qualities: gaiety, warmth, considerablebeauty. In him the human essences are rich: life flows from his faceand body in a silent roar. He takes care of himself, Thelonius,fanatically, adoringly, inside and out. Boxing at the air, he runs backwards to the gym to work out with the weights. He does yoga,and spends entire weekends standing on his head. As part of his questfor physical perfection Thelonius eats nothing but fruit: even a string-bean, even a radish, would gross him out. His teeth are asflawless as any dolphin's. The secondary smoking and drinking, thetertiary snacks — the drooling meat pies — of the Black Cross reachout for him but their spores can't make it through his purple haze. He always looked after himself. And now that he's in the money, well, no imperial infant ever had it so good. Of course, it has to beconcededthat Thelonius is not without faults. One is his habit ofbreaking the law the entire time. Another is bad taste.


Explosive, exponential bad taste, a kind of antitaste: there isnothing semi-violent about Thelonius's bad taste. I recently askedhim if in his younger days he had ever visited America (and perhaps spent a few years on Forty-Second Street or Hollywood Boulevard).When Thelonius was poor, he looked like an athlete; now that he's rich (and the transformation is a very recent one), he looks like apimp. The animal kingdom may be untroubled by Thelonius's diet,but it has a lot to fear from his dress sense. His pimpsuits, pimphatsand pimpshoes are made out of bison and turtles, zebras andreindeer. Among the stolen goods in the pimpboot of his pimpcar aremore pimpclothes, swathed in pimppolythene. Every other day, as the pimpwhim takes him, his pimphair is either superfrizzed or expensively relaxed. His pimpfingers are dustered with pimprings. Boy, does Thelonius look like a pimp.


He has a further blemish: an exaggerated view of his own skillsand merits. For instance, he is not a good criminal. He is a very luckycriminal, so far. He is heading towards prison at a hundred miles anhour, and taking Keith with him.


True to the logic of the moral fix I'm in, I find myself wishing thatThelonius had much more criminal talent than reality has in fact blessed him with. If I were running things, he would inviolablyprosper — he could do what the hell he liked. He could hurt the weak, he could steal and punch and lie and club as much as he wanted, and Iwould sleep all the sounder.


I don't know why I say Keith isn't good at darts. Keithis good atdarts. Very often, the darts go where he throws them. His dartsgenius shines, and brightly. But he is no better at darts thanpractically everyone else in England. This is a darts culture here:darts is what the Brits do best, in the afterglow of empire. And Keith certainly isn't as good at darts as the darters on TV. The dartsalwaysgo wherethey throw them.


Keith, I think, is not unaware of his possible shortcomings at theochйof today. 'In today's darts,' he will concede, 'standards are outstanding.' He is becoming more and more internally reliant onwhat he calls his 'gift for rising to the big occasion'. He gets himselfgoing with fiery oratory about the address of the board, gracing theochй,and the sincerity of the dart.


And what about the other Big Occasion? The other Final?


Yeah well cheers, Keith. I know he'll go out there and give me twohundred per cent. Keith a quitter? Keith Talent? You must be — Doyou want your - ? No danger will Keith bottle it when the cosh comes down. Pressure? He fuckingphrives on it. He'll do thenecessary. Keith'll do the biz. No way is he going to go out there andnot go all the way.


Is moral 'fix' really the word I want? Does fix really cover it? Keithand Guy will both survive, after a fashion. But I mean my positionwith the murderee.


She just came over. She's been and gone.


On her way up the stairs and into the apartment Nicola did a first-rate imitation of somebody who had never been here before. Inretrospect, I salute the actress talent. At the time, I was fooled. (And Iwas happy.) The way she looked around with caustic glances at theframed photographs - but only parenthetically, just giving the placethe edge of her attention, while we talked.


I was fooled. But then I left her in the sitting-room for a minute,and silently returned, framing a question in my head about Keith and the money. And there she was: bent over Mark Asprey's desk, tryingthe one locked drawer. With a hard look on her face.


Silently I retreated. I don't want her to know I know. Not yet.


All most painful. All mostpainful, painful. My only consolation isthat according to her diaries Nicola did something sensationallywicked to that MA of hers. Oh, she was very very bad...I can'tunderstand my own feelings. This nausea. I am implicated. I can'tunderstand the implication.


This is nofix. This is moral horror, no two ways about it.


The Black Cross. A good name, I always thought, sent my way by reality. The cross, darkly cruciform, the meeting place of Nicola and Keith and Guy.


A cross has three points. Depending on how you look at it, though,it might be said to have four.


And my love thing for Kim immediately involves me in new anxiety. There was no honeymoon period.


While Kath sleeps, with morbid abandon, in the bed-sizedbedroom, I play with Kim on the sitting-room floor. Kim bears smallbruises about her small person. You can see how it happens. Almostany movement in Keith's flat involves the movement of somethingelse. You get these little chain reactions. Always you're beetling overthe child. Turn around and your nose bangs into the door. Shift inyour seat and something else shifts. I worry.


Jewellery, precious minerals, intricate glasswork, and so on, deadbeauty: none of it does anything for me. But Kim's eyes make meunderstand. Jewellery, precious minerals, intricate glassware, deadbeauty, it's all fine: an attempt to summon the living galaxy of ababy's eyes. The baby's sparklers, the Milky Way of babies . . . Babies don't mind if you stare at them closely. Everyone else does. The dying do.


At some point in the afternoon Kim likes to take a nap. Often she is woken by bad dreams. It is strangely pleasurable to pick her up andcomfort her. All you do is just stand there and be the great shoulders,the godlike thorax.


Chapter 12: The ScriptFollowed by Guy Clinch


uy sat atthe kitchen table and gazed, with steady incompre­hension, at his veal: its pallor, its puddled beach of juice. He had cooked the dinner himself, as usual, expressionlessly busying himselfwith meat-pounder, pasta-shredder, vegetable-slicer. The kitchenwas a spotless laboratory of time-saving devices. Time was constantlybeing saved. But for what? Guy used to enjoy cooking, in the relativelyold days, when you did some of it yourself. He liked to cook in anapron, not in a lab-coat. Really, Guy could have made the grade as aproletarian female. He was obedient, industrious and uncomplaining.He had what it took. Now he gazed at his veal and briefly felt the allureof vegetarianism (that friendly black boy in the Black Cross) until his eye fell on the smug pellets of the broad beans, the endlessness of thepasta. The wine, a powerful Burgundy, seemed, at least, non-alien,definitely terrestrial: forgetfulness, the warm south, it said to the juicesof his jaw. These schooled juices searched also for another presenti­ment. For the flavour of reconciliation, perhaps ? No. Of forgiveness.Guy looked up carefully at his wife, who sat across the tableconsuming her meal in vigorous silence.


A little while later he said,


'I'm sorry?'


'I didn't say anything,' said Hope.


'I'm sorry.'


'Why don't you go to the doctor?'


'No need. Really. I'll be all right.’


'Ididn'tjustmeanforyoursake . . .So how much more of this do weget?'


'More of what?'


'Of the famished mute. You don't eat anything. And you look likedeath.'


It was certainly the case that he wasn't eating anything. A literalist (and a rather literary literalist), Guy had eaten awfully little since hislast conversation with Nicola Six; in fact his appetite had begun todecline the very day they met, and since their parting (yes: for good —for the best) it had disappeared altogether, just as the woman haddisappeared. When he did eat - and the activity wasn't distasteful somuch as madly irrelevant — he had to hurry off after a minute with hishand held high. You could then hear him vomiting efficiently in the basement lavatory. What kept him going were his breakfasts — hishearty bowls of MegaBran. He could digest his MegaBran because (orso he often thought) the thick, dark, all-fibre cereal was precisely onestage away from human shit in the first place. MegaBran was on a chemical knife-edge between cereal and human shit. Guy wondered whether MegaBran shouldn't rename itself HumanShit: the letteringcould be done wavily and mistily, to suggest an imminently dawningreality. One drop of saliva was all MegaBran needed. Marmaduke,who adored spitting on people's food, had once successfully spat into a full packet of MegaBran. The results had been spectacular-thoughit ought to be said that Marmaduke's saliva had often shown itself to possess surprising and maleficent properties . .. Not so long ago Guywould have thoughtlessly chopped a banana into his morning bowl ofMegaBran; but now he was overwhelmed by the reek of the potassiumenhancement. Everyone hated MegaBran. Everyone ate it. Hopecouldn't bear cooking or even being in the kitchen but she was intensely strict and vigilant about everything everyone ate.


Guy poured more wine and said in a puzzled voice, 'Can't bear thatnoise.'


'I know. How does he do it?'


'Can't we turn him down a bit?'


'No. I'm listening for the phlegm.'


They were alone tonight. But they were not alone. Marmaduke waspresent, in electronic form: the twin screens of the closed-circuit TVsystem shook and fizzed to his rage. There were twin screens in mostrooms, on every floor. Sometimes the house felt like an aquarium ofMarmadukes. Guy thought of all the video equipment in Nicola'sapartment (what use did she have for it?) and then thought of his own, of how he and his wife had gamely wrestled with the webbing and thepistol-grips in the months after Marmaduke was born, gatheringfootage of Marmaduke screaming his head off in the playpen,Marmaduke screaming his head off in the park, Marmadukescreaming his head off in the swimming-pool. They soon stoppedbothering. After all, there was so little difference between the home movie and the closed-circuit monitor, which gave them Marmadukescreaming his head off twenty-three hours a day as it was. And whenthe twin screens weren't giving it to them (two different angles of Marmaduke screaming his head off), Marmaduke was giving it tothem: live.


Now, against the background of the child's obscure agonies, atremendously long silence gathered. This silence was shaped like atunnel. It seemed to Guy that there was no way out of it, none at all - except full confession. Or this:


'We could have another child,' he said, staring seriously at his wife.


'. . . Are you out of your mind?'


Guy's eyebrows lifted and he resettled himself like a moody pupil. Itwas true that they had been most gravely advised - on many different occasions, in many different clinics and consulting rooms, in Geneva,in Los Angeles, in Tokyo - to renounce the possibility of a secondchild, or to delay it indefinitely, or at any rate until Marmaduke was atleast fourteen (by which time Hope, besides, would be fifty-one). Thebillionaire specialists and Nobel Laureate child-psychiatrists had always warned of the disturbing effect on Marmaduke if a littlenewcomer should succeed him. None had been heartless enough tosuggest that the second child might be just like the first.


'What if it's just like Marmaduke?' said Hope.


'Don'tsay that. My God. What's he doing now?'


'He's trying to make himself sick.'


'But he's got his whole fist down there.'


'He won't manage it.'


Guy looked at Hope — surprised, heartened.


'He threw up his tea long ago. And his milk and cookies. His onlyhope now is with the phlegm.'


'He wasn't sick after lunch. Can't bear that noise. Or was he?'


'Yeah - he slimedMelba.Then he bit Phoenix on the tongue. Quitefar back. I hope she wasn't letting him French-kiss her again.'


Guy uneasily reviewed Hope's policy about Marmaduke andkissing. Members of the staff were allowed to kiss Marmaduke. But only Hope was allowed to French-kiss him.


'I had to call Terry.'


Terry!'


Even more uneasily Guy thought of Terry - his platform shoes, hisbrutal singlet. 'I hate Terry.'


'So doI . He's strictly last-resort. And even he looked pretty shaken.'


Guy looked down and gave a smile—not of affection but of wonder.He loved Marmaduke. He would joyfully die for Marmaduke. He would die for Marmaduke, not next week, not tomorrow, but now,right now. He loved Marmaduke despite the clear sense, constantlyrefreshed, that Marmaduke had no lovable qualities. Marmadukegave no pleasure to anyone except when he was asleep. When he was asleep, you could gaze down at him and thank the Lord that he wasn'tawake.


'Oh yes,' said Hope. 'Lady Barnaby. She's been struck dumb.'


'Literally?'


'Yup. Since she got back. Shock.'


That's terrible.'


'You know what you look like?' said Hope. 'A hermit.'


Guy shrugged and looked away. He didn't seem to mind thecomparison. But then he looked back again: Hope was staring at himwith concentration. He feared this stare. He readied himself.


'Not a hermit who lives in a cottage,' she went on slowly. 'In theOrkneys or wherever. I mean the kind of hermit who lives in a hotel in Las Vegas. A sordid maniac with lots of money who never goes out. The kind of person who has a "shrine" in his bedroom for somefat dead moviequeen.'


He had kept up with the Cambodia thing — with the remote andgroping search for Little Boy and En Lah Gai: the displaced persons.Making his calls each morning at the office (it was his only reason forgoing in), Guy was by now on first-name terms with various contacts— various telephonic entities — at the American Refugee Committee,the British Refugee Council and the UN Border Relief Operation.His limp fingers regularly sought his brow as he sat there and listenedto the war stories. Guy had grown up in the age of mediated atrocity; like everyone else, he was exhaustively accustomed to the sadarrangements, the pathetic postures of the dead. But you couldn't seeCambodia, the torturee nation, whose redoubling sufferings tookplacebehind a black curtain or a slammed door. This darkness seemedto have a pornographic effect on the concerned imagination. You justcouldn't escape the excitement in the voices that told tales of Cambodia. Guy himself had been sent copies of the satellite photographs and seen the death silhouette: the diagrammatichoneycomb was evidently a landscape, a wide horizon of humanskulls. He too felt the excitement, the rush of boyish manliness, whichin his case soon subsided into a distant nausea. The satellite massacres:human death as a god might see it. Guy's faith, a feebly gleamingheirloom (a locket, perhaps, that once belonged to his dead mother),was much tarnished for a while by the clear impossibility of anythingsurviving such a thorough subtraction of the human body. Take life away, and all you have is the anatomical torment of a single skull. 'Iwas there all through the Eighties,' one of the telephone ghosts roared at him (he was an American from UNBRO), bringing him messagesfrom the other side. 'I have an image for you. You all set?' The voicewas eager, greedy. 'A child's prosthetic foot, in a flipflop, marching towar. That's Cambodia, pal.' Guy nodded quickly, in placation. 'Andthere's no way out.'


Though of course, as always, there was a way out, it transpired —therewas one way out. . . Guy had persuaded himself that he wasn'tmaking a hobby of Cambodia. But this research of his remained insome sense a labour of love, a romantic duty, a means of thinkingabout Nicola in relative and arguable guiltlessness. No denying that a fantasy was being quietly and queasily unspooled. Guy would mountthe stairs of her house (against a background of flags and bunting),coolly shepherding the two shy figures; Nicola would be ready on the top landing, her hands tightly clasped, with beautifully viscous tearson her cheeks. How the laughter of En Lah Gai would nervously soundas warming broth was prepared in the small kitchen! How the eyes ofLittle Boy would burn — would burn with unforgettable fire! Anddown there at hip height Nicola's fingers would entwine his own in fond conspiracy . . .


Even Guy could tell that there was something wrong with thismotion picture, something awful, something aesthetically disastrous.The scene would have a livid colour, the music would roll along in itscorrupt or sinister gaiety, the dialogue would feel dubbed, and theactors would simper like charmless children on the brink of beingfound out. Again the word pornography came to rnind: to Guy'smind, where there wasn't any-where there wasn't any pornography.


None at all? No, not really. There had been those occasions (increas­ingly frequent, until his operation) when a nurse holding a test-tubelike a glass condom had disgustedly ushered him into a curtainedroom equipped with 'books' — torn heaps of men's magazines. Guy had turned the strange pages (in the end he relied on his walletphotograph of Hope). And there was the sprinkling of stag films hehad been obliged to watch half of during business trips to Hong Kongand other eastern Mammons. Always there came a terrible moment,in between the carnal sections, when the cast stood around pretendingto be interesting with all their clothes on, just like proper actors andactresses, obeying a properly inventive director, in a proper film. Theimposture seemed to be doubly shaming for everyone, including theviewer. Even Guy could tell that his interest in Nicola Six and hisinterest in Indochina did not sit well together (with a wag of the head he thought of a plump pinup he had once seen, fondling a piece ofhardware in a weapons brochure). Love and war-love and historicalforces — did not sit well together.


Besides, his musings were on the whole dreadfully tender andtentative. His dreams, which appeared to emanate from the pool ofwarm pressure in his chest, all followed adolescent storylines ofsurveillance, custodianship, brilliant rescue (rowing boats, a car's flattyre magically repaired and replaced). He thought of her always, even at moments of sudden stress in the office or the nursery; her face waslike a curlicue floating in his peripheral vision. Daily, cosynchron-ously, he dogged her through her day, her waking, her light breakfast, her idealized toilet — and so on. He thought of his thoughts as explorers, in virgin territory. Of course, he didn't know how muchmale thought had already gone into Nicola Six, those millions of man hours; he didn't know that every square inch of her had beenran­sackedby men's thoughts . . . Sometimes, to buy his weekly packetof cigarettes (or an extra daily paper), he went to the shop near whereshe lived. As if round a doorway he bent and peered up the dead-endstreet. Seen through eyes of love, how fiercely she would have illu­mined the ordinary prospect: the trees already leafless in September,two builders eating Scotch eggs on a stoop, a dead cloud collapsing into the fog of dark rain. This day Guy straightened his dirty mackwith a smile of pain, and walked back and round to the Black Cross.


Keith was standing by the fruit machine, contentedly picking his teethwith a dart - or with thepoint of a dart, as Guy had learned todistinguish(flight, shaft, barrel, point), after a few of his early dartingsolecisms had been menacingly corrected, here in the Black Cross.Guy found that he was glad to see Keith, and took comfort also from the damp lineaments of the ruined pub. Conspicuous elsewhere, hisown colourlessness easily merged with the circumambient grey. Thewhite people in here were black-and-white people, monochrome, likeWorld War II footage. Like World War I footage. Guy thoughtfurther of the stills that form the countdown to an elderly movie:6, +,5, *, blank, clapperboard; and the white areas of the screen grainedwith dust and nostril hairs, like the whites of soiled eyes. Keith always made Guy think of eyes.


'Fucking sickening. It disgusts me. No, it does.'


'Absolutely vile.'


'Wicked.'


'It's filthy.'


'Persistent low atmospheric pressure innit.'


By moving his head a centimetre to the left, Keith indicated that Guymight join him. As Guy came forward he accidentally stepped on thesurprising solidity of Clive's tail. Clive lifted his chin from the carpetand snarled or swore at Guy wearily.


'Sorry. Well,' said Guy. 'Haven't seen you for a while.'


Keith nodded. This was true. And what of it? Keith took the troubleto point out that he was the sort of bloke who had places to go andpeople to see. He wasn't the sort of bloke who just sat around gettingpissed all day in the Black Cross on Portobello Road. No. Keith'srestless nature demanded variety. This week, for instance (itlaboriously emerged), he had been sitting around getting pissed all dayin the Skiddaw on Elgin Avenue. But in fact Keith did look pleasantlysurprised to be in the Black Cross. Why, Guy didn't know.


'Few drinks. Relax.' Keith suddenly refocused and said, 'Whew,mate, you don't look too clever. No. You definitely do«oнlook overlybrill. It must be going round. I tell you who else ain't in the best of elpheither. Neither.'


At the sound of her name (a duosyllable in this case: for a moment itsounded like a further grammatical adjustment) Guy felt something soft exploding in the transept of his chest. His head dropped and hereached out a hand for the bar. Nicola was suffering. This washeavenly news.


'Sad little smile on its face. Like - like she was pining. Pining. Piningits little heart out.’


Guy looked up. Keith seemed to be inspecting the saloon-bar ceiling— wondering, perhaps, how many Londons of cigarette smoke hadgone into its golden brown. With evident relief he now talked of othermatters, and Guy thought, with a mild seizure of affection: he knows. Keith knows. He has divined it. Nicola and I — in a sense we're wayabove his head. But he can see what binds us (the ropes of love); andwith due respect.


'Here. I got one for you.'


Guy tried to concentrate. Keith was about to tell a joke — he wasalready chuckling ruminatively to himself. In the past Guy hadstruggled rather with some of Keith's jokes. They were oftenreasonably mild, turning on a childish whimsicality, a lugubrious pun.Only rarely, or relatively rarely, did Keith lean forward bearing hisincisors and impart some tale about a rotten haddock and the knickersof an unfortunate lady. But that could happen to you anywhere. In thebilliards room at the club. In a starred restaurant in the City. And as he had just shown, despite his superficial roughness Keith had a lot morenatural delicacy than many of the —


'How can you tell when your sister's having her period?'


'Urn,' said Guy. He didn't have a sister. He shrugged. He said, 'Idon't know.'


'Dad's cock tastes funny!'


Guy stood and stared into the tempest of Keith's laughter. Thistempest, thistormenta,kept on coming for a very long time, until, after a series of lulls and false calms, orderly waters returned oncemore. Guy was smiling palely.


'Gah!' said Keith, lifting a fist to his streaming eyes. 'Dear oh dear.Well. It puts a smile on your face. And you got to keep laughing. Yougot to. In this life . . . Dear oh dear oh dear.'


Now Guy hung back as Keith took his new joke on a tour of the pub.Its punchline was soon ricocheting from group to group. In the damplight there was many a spray of Scotch-egg crumbs, many a dull flashof Soviet dentistry. The joke went down well in all quarters, thoughone or two of the older women (were they really old or only old-young?) confined themselves to a long glance of affectionate reproach.Drinking brandy, seated by the back door, and scratching his neck, Guy watched all this in his numb fever. Compliments that comesecond-hand are said to be the sweetest; and never in his life had GuyClinch been so flattered. He sat there pulsing with the flattery of love.Today's rushes, in the screening-room of his mind's eye, showednothing more than repeated scenes of reunion, breathless andunfettered reunion. Just a hug. Not even a kiss . .. Not even a hug.These rushes were like the last framesoнIncident at Owl Creek,withthe dead hero racing through the dark dreamfields, and under falseskymaps, racing towards her, and racing, and racing, and getting nonearer with each heartburning surge . . . God andPongotook Keithaside and then he left hurriedly. He tried to shovel Clive up with hisfoot and then leaned backwards forty-five degrees on the lead, like thelast man in a tug-of-war team. Twenty minutes later, as Guy wasleaving, three men filed into the saloon bar and asked for Keith; theyasked the pub for Keith - as if (Guy mused fleetingly) the black crosswere daubed on the door and not on the sign above, and they weretelling the pub to give Keith up or to bring him out. If Keith had beentrying to avoid this trio (the white-haired one sported half a dozenearrings per ear, and had the blue lips of a cold child), then Guy didn'tblame him: they did look extremely tiresome.


The ceiling of Marmaduke's nursery swarmed with strange shadows,Medusa heads, beckoning goblins . . . Children love their toys, don't they. It's so obvious. But why? Why do they?


'Pleasedon't do that, darling,' he said.


Guy was sitting on a low chair, surrounded, like Joan of Arc, by kindling - in his case the scattered planks of a wooden train-set,together with a few torn picture-books and eviscerated teddybears.Turning from the wrecked mobile, Marmaduke was now 'playing'with his toy castle. It was 5.45 in the morning.


Children love to touch their toys because their toys are the only things theycan touch: the only things they can touch freely. Man-made objects, blunted, detoxified, with pleasure possible and paincounterindicated. Or that was the idea. Marmaduke could findmortification almost anywhere. A fluffy birdling was cute enoughuntil a child engulfed his own larynx with it.


'Milt,' said Marmaduke, without turning round. 'Big it.'


Guy looked at his watch. He went and unlocked the crammedrefrigerator on the landing. He returned with a full bottle — and fourwholewheat biscuits, which the child now repulsively dispatched.


'My God,' said Guy.


'More big it,' said Marmaduke out of the corner of his mouth (its centre being occupied by the bottle). 'More big it.'


'No!’


'More big it.'


'Absolutely not!'


The teat slid from Marmaduke's lips. 'Big it. More big it. . .'Instead of raising his voice, Marmaduke lowered it: he sometimes got a far more chilling effect that way.'Big it, Daddy. More big it. . .Morebig it, Daddy . . .'


'Oh all right. Say please. Say please. Say please. Say please.'


'Police,' said Marmaduke grudgingly.


Toys were symbols - of real things. That toy monkey stood for a realmonkey, that toy train for a real train, and so on: in miniature. Butthere seemed to be a disturbing literalism abroad in Marmaduke'snursery. That toy baby elephant, for instance, pink and gauzy and fivefeet high, with its imperial tassels and convincing little howdah (thelaunchpad of many sickening falls): the baby elephant was about the size of a baby elephant. And the same sort of thing could be said forMarmaduke's howitzers and grenade-launchers and cartridge belts,not to mention all the plastic broadswords and cutlasses and scimitars —and his cudgels and knobsticks and battleaxes. Marmaduke's latest deployment (partof a permanent modernization programme), a DID, or Deep Interdiction Device, a pucklike boobytrap which could takeout three or four toy tanks at a time, was certainly far larger than the actual contrivance now fielded byNato. Nato.Assault Breaker. Howold it all was. Though Marmaduke himself would unquestionablyfavour First Use. Marmaduke was a definite First-Use artist. Fight likehell for three days and then blow up the world.


The door opened. Hope stood there, in her small-hour glow. Asentinel in a white nightdress. One arm was raised, as if to hold acandle. He became aware of the sound of rain on the streets androoftops.


'It's six.'


'He's being very good actually,' Guy whispered. The lines of hisbrow invited and encouraged Hope to contemplate her son, who wasplaying with his toy castle, methodically weakening each ridge of theouter rampart before snapping it off. Doing this caused him to gruntand gasp a good deal. Only the very old grunt and gasp so much asbabies. In between (Guy thought), we strain all right yet keep holdingsilence.


'Upstairs.'


Upstairs on the third floor there was a room known locally as thePadded Cell. It was furnitureless and covered in three thicknesses ofduvet, wall to wall, floor to ceiling. Its only irregularity was a chest-high ledge with an extra duvet and some pillows for attending adultsto climb up to and throw themselves down on. Thither they carried thescreaming child . . .


Outside, day was forming in terms of rain-deadened light; Guy nowjoined his wife between the sheets. Rolling his neck, he took one lastlook at the monitor: a ceiling-to-floor shot of Marmaduke silentlyscreaming his head off in the Padded Cell. As he screamed,Marmaduke bounced skilfully on his slippered feet, trying to generateenough height for a damaging dive. Guy sank back. His wife searchedhim for the reliable body warmth he knew she still needed him for.


'It's our cross to bear,' she said vaguely.


Guy bent his throbbing neck and kissed her mouth, which washalf-open and half-awake and tasted of dreams and fever. He lay therevigilantly, hoping and not hoping. The weak delirium of dawn, whenthe body is childishly tired and tender, with surprising tangs and hurtsand tastes: it had happened, during shared insomnias, after summerballs, and, much longer ago, at the end of nights of soldierly study. IsTroilus and Cressidaan anti-comedy? Explore the formation of theSpecial Relationship . . . He was in fact grotesquely erect: the skindown there was tugged tight as a drum. His auxiliary heart, refusing tobecome disused, or taken lightly. Just by pressing into the linen hereone could perhaps quite easily . . .


'I'll do it,' murmured Hope, sliding from the bed in quiet animalobedience - for Marmaduke's great cries were by now of the volumeand timbre that no mother could sleep through. It was morning.Today was another day.


He turned on to his back. He had this toy of Nicola in his head, oval,blue-backed, like a Victorian miniature. Symbol of the real thing. The real thing. Three brutal jolts would certainly finish it. But all kinds ofconsiderations — including squeamishness, another kind ofamourpropre,and the thought of all the mess it would leave - combined, asalways, to stay his hand.


You wouldn't want to play with it like that.


Two days later Guy did something ordinary. And then somethingstrange happened.


He helped a blind man cross the street. And then something strangehappened.


On Rifle Lane a very old blind man was standing at the zebracrossing. Rangy, propulsive, briskly strolling, Guy paused when hesaw him. It was perhaps not such a common sight, not any more. Onedoesn't often see the blind in the streets now. One doesn't often see thevery old. They stay inside. They don't come out much, not any more.Not this year.


Tall, thin, the blind man stood with blind erectness, backward-tending, as road and pavement users crisscrossed past. Somethingwavery in his stance suggested that he had been there for some time,though he showed no distress. In fact he was smiling. Guy strodeforward. He took the blind man's blind arm. 'Would you like a hand,sir?' he asked. 'Here we are,' he said, guiding, urging. On the far kerbGuy cheerfully offered to take the blind man further — home, anywhere. Sightless eyes stared at his voice in astonishment. Guyshrugged: offer the simplest courtesy these days and people looked atyou as if you were out of your mind. And then astonishment becamegeneral, for the blind man tapped his way to the nearest wall, anddipped his head, and used his eyes for something they were still goodat. Tears came from them readily enough.


Guy reapproached the blind man with embarrassment and somepanic.


'Leave him,' said an onlooker.


'Leave him alone, for fuck's sake,' advised another.


Guy wandered off into the rain. Hours later, at home, when his confusion and his heartbeat had started to steady, he thought of something he had read somewhere . . . about the traveller and thestarving tribe. How did it go? The sun-helmeted anthropologistrevisits a tribe which he had once celebrated for its gentleness. Butnow the tribe was starving; such food as there was went to thestrong; and the strong laughed at the weak, the flailing, fading weak;and the weak laughed too. The weak laughed too, sharing in thehilarity of vanished feeling. One time, an old woman stumbled on theedge of a drop. A passing strongman - a food expert, a swaggeringfood champ — helped her over the edge with a kick in the rump. Asshe lay there, laughing, the traveller hurried forward to give comfort. And the comfort was intolerable to her. Two strokes of the hair, softwords, a helping hand:this was what made the woman cry. Thepresent seemed perfectly bearable - indeed, hilarious - until you felt again what it was like when people were kind. Then the present was bearable no longer. So the old woman wept. So the blind man wept, They can take it, so long asno one is kind.


Guy was kind, or kind that day. It was all right for him. He hadNicola's postcard in his pocket. The suit of armour: the brave words. Any other time he might have walked right past. Love is blind; but it makes you see the blind man, teetering on the roadside; it makes you seek him out with eyes of love.


'Darling? Come and sit on my lap.'


'. . . Go way.'


'Come on. And read a book. Come and sit on Daddy's lap. There's agood boy.'


'Zap.'


'Lap. Very good!Good boy. Look. Food. You like food. What'sthat?'


'Bam.'


'Bam?. . . Spam. Sssspam. Very good. What's that?'


'Agh.'


'Egg, yes. Egg. What's that? . . . What's that? . . . We're in thegarden now. What's that? What's that, darling?'


'Dick.'


'Stick. Very good. Sssstick. Now here's a flower. Say "flower" . . .Those are the petals. And this bit down here is -'


'Dork.'


'Very good,darling. Excellent. Now what do you call this? Wherethe tree used to be. Like in our garden. Where they've chopped itdown.'


'Dump.'


'Marmaduke, you're a genius. What's that?...A tree. What'sthat? . . . Grass. Don't do that, darling.Ow. Wait, look! Animals. Animals. What's that?'


'Jeep.'


'Yes, sheep. Very good. What's that?'


'Zion.'


'Lion. Lllion. Lllion. Very good. And what's this squidgy thinghere?'


'Nail.'


'Snail. Excellent! Aha. Here's your favourite. Here's the best animal of them all. No wait, darling. Hey! One more. You like this one. Whatis it? What is it?'


' . . . Gunk!'


'Yes! And what does it do? What does it do that no other animal can? What does it do?’


'. . . Dink!'


'Verygood. You know, sometimes you can be the most adorableman-cub.'


As Guy bent forward to give a farewell kiss to the increasinglyrestless child — Marmaduke caught him with the reverse headbutt. Itwas probably at least semi-accidental, though Marmaduke did do a lot of laughing and pointing. In any event the combined movementresulted in a fairly serious impact. Anyone who has ever marched into a lamp-post, or into a fellow pedestrian, knows that 3 m.p.h. is quite dangerous enough for human beings, never mind 186,000 miles persecond. He was still spitting doubtfully into a paper tissue when, about fifteen minutes later, there was a knock and the door opened.


'Doris,' said Guy.


'Guy,' said Doris.


Guy flinched a little at the familiarity - or one of his genes did. Arecent recruit, Doris was a portly blonde of thirty or forty, with mutinous legs. She was already a martyr to the Clinches' stairs.


'There's someone at the door for you.'


'Oh? Who is it?'


'Don't know. Says it's urgent. It's aman.'


Guy wondered what to do. Hope was playing at the Vanderbilt withDink Heckler and wouldn't be back till just after seven. There wassomething of a nanny famine at present; even Terry had succumbed tothe pressure, gratefully accepting some post at a prison gymnasium. And he couldn't ask Doris, who would in any case certainly refuse.Alone with Doris, within range of Doris, Marmaduke spent everymoment trying to kick her swollen shins or jeeringly punching her breasts.


'Bring him up. Sorry, Doris. Show him up. Thank you.'


In due course Keith sailed into the room- in his sailor trousers withtheir spinnaker flares. His hair was flattened by the rain, and thesoaked tabloid hung from his armpit, like an extra limb of little utility.He gave a confidential nod and said,


'Audi.'


Guy thought for a moment and said, 'Howdy.'


'Saab Turbo,' Keith went on. 'Fuel injection. Listen, mate . . .'Keith glanced over his shoulder and then at Marmaduke, who peered up with interest from the remains of his toy castle. 'Listen. I poppedround there with some stuff and - Nicola. Between you and me, pal, itdon't look too shrewd.’


Guy stared at him with earnest incomprehension.


'I mean, you seen them marks on her wrist.'


'No?'


'The left wrist. Little white scars. You know. Tried it once. Mighttry it again.'


'Christ.'


'Says to me: "Don't fix that. Don't fix this. No point. What's thepoint. Why bother. What's the point. No point." All this. Face like a -she's really down. Emotionally withdrawn. Showing suicidal tenden­cies innit. I'm just worried she's gone do itself an injury.'


'You really think?'


With a craven expression on his face Keith said, 'Go round and seeher, mate. She's been very good to me, she has. You know: a really nicelady. And if she...I'd never . . .'


'Yes ofcourse.' Guy's pupils moved around in thought and then hesaid, 'Keith, I couldn't possibly ask you to watch the child for twentyminutes, could I?'


'Course you can. Glad to. Oh uh . . .'And again he peered up at Guyneedfully. 'Use your phone?'


'Yes of course. Down one floor and the second door on your left.'


'Kath might be preparing my evening meal.'


When Keith returned - after a long and taxing interval - Guyhimself went and burst into the master bedroom to pick up his keysand his money. Driving a hand through his hair, he noticed the heavyindentation of Keith's buttocks on his wife's side of the bed. He feltsomething had to be done about that. Hurriedly he pummelled theduvet with his fists.


One more visit to the nursery: Keith was down on his haunches, hishands raised, snorting and sniffing-softly sparring with Marmaduke,who looked well pleased with his new friend.


'Youare good, Keith,' said Guy.


'Yeah cheers,' said Keith.


Intense but more or less disinterested concern prevailed until he rangher doorbell: after he heard the sound of her voice (its soft moan ofassent or surrender or defeat), he felt nothing more than the simple tugof beauty. '6: six', said the oblong sticker next to her button. Suchprodigal symmetry. Even her telephone number was somehowminutely glamorous, with the curves of its eights and zeros, like an erotic cipher. With mighty bounds he scaled the stairs.


Guy expected — or wouldn't have been surprised — to find her on acreaking stool with a noose round her neck, or lying on the sofa with amother-of-pearl derringer in her ear...In reality he found herstanding over her desk, and leaning on it capably with her small fists,and for some reason staying that way for a couple of beats after he hadchased his chariot heart into the low sitting-room. (The sitting-roommeant nothing to him: it was just the place where certain things couldhappen.) Then she turned.


'You shouldn't have come,' she said warmly. 'But I must admit I'mterribly pleased to see you.'


Guy knew that he would never forget the varieties of light in herface, the prismy clarity of the eyes, the smile with all its revelatorywhiteness of tooth - and those teartracks, their solid shine, like solder,on her cheekbones. When women cry (what was that line inPygmalion?), the hayfever russet is part of the pathos and the wholesnotty helplessness, but with her, with her -


'Just an hour ago,' she said, and smiled down at her desk, 'I got themost wonderful news.'


'That's wonderful,' he said, quite unable to keep the disappoint­ment out of his voice. Don't tell me she's crying forjoy. Howwoodenly, now, those wonderfuls echoed in the low room.


An envelope was held up towards him. Airmail: the stripedred-and-blue trim.


Nicola said, They're alive. Enola is alive. And - and Little Boy. They're still in transit somewhere between Sisophon and Chantha-buri. But everything is clear now. Completely clear.'


Guy shrugged one shoulder and said, 'Fantastic.'


She came forward and bent over the table for her cigarette lighter.With mournful disquiet Guy saw her breasts through the open neck ofblack bodice. He looked away, and felt relief when she straightened upand the material tautened. So brown! So close together!


'I fly to Seoul tonight.'


It was fatherly, the whole thing was fatherly— even the way he tookher wrist like that was fatherly, fatherly. She was unwilling but after a while consented to sit beside him and hear what he had to say. He saidthat in his view she wasn't allowing herself to face the truth of whatwas really happening — in Cambodia. He was gentle, yet firm. Therewas, he felt confident, nothing lingering in the way he smoothed andpatted her hand: a reflex of protective suasion. Guy took sternpleasure in the doubts he saw gathering in her open face. Nicola wasnodding, and biting her lip, and leaning forwards at a penitent angle.The neck of her bodice was so disposed that he might have availedhimself of her inattention; but he became absorbed, rather, in thesolicitous caresses with which he now favoured her hair, her neck, herthroat. So brown. So close together. After a silence she said,


Then I'll have to do the other thing.'


He said quickly, 'The underground railway?'


She looked up at him with no expression on her face.'. . . Yes.'


'It's unreliable. A real gamble.'


'Oh. I know.'


'And a lot of money.'


'How much, do you think?' He named a sum and then Nicola addedgrimly, 'Yes, that's more or less the figure I've heard mentioned. By mycontact in . . .Tunisia.'She opened her eyes to their full extent, saying, 'Well it's perfectly simple. I'll sell my flat. The lease isn't all that longbut it will probably realize almost that amount. I'll find a roomsomewhere. And then there's one's jewellery and clothes and so on.That fridge is nearly brand-new.'


'Surely there's no need for all that. Surely.'


'You're right. It won't be enough. Still. There are things awoman . . .'She paused, and said with slow intentness,' A woman cando certain things.'


'Surely.I won't hear of it.'


Nicola smiled at him wisely. 'Oh no. I see your scheme. Guy, thatwould be completely out of the question.' She placed a consoling handon his thigh and turned to look towards the window. 'I'm sorry, mydear one. No no. I couldn't possibly let you lend me so much money.'


It was seven o'clock when Guy got back to the house of cards, wherelove sent him bounding up the stairs again.


Unbelievably, Marmaduke was sitting motionless on Keith's lap,his stocky form partly obscured by the upraised tabloid — and by ahip-high shelf of cigarette smoke. Guy hoped it didn't seem too pointed or censorious, the way he strode in there and hurled both windows open to the rain. Claiming that Marmaduke had been asgood as gold, Keith left promptly, and with a willing anonymity, a fewminutes before Hope returned with Dink. This gave Guy time to air the room (he waved a towel about while Marmaduke gnawed at his calves) and to rootle out the six or seven dog-ends which Keith hadcrushed in to an aperture of some mangled toy. Then the house of cardsreshuffled.


Hope came up and Guy went down, taking Marmaduke, at Hope'simpatient request. Lizzyboo was in the kitchen. And so was DinkHeckler. The South African number seven sat at the table in his fumingtenniswear; as usual, he was passing the time in calm inspection ofvarious portions of his arms and legs; perhaps (Guy speculated) it wastheir incredible hairiness that held his attention. As he warmed theyelling Marmaduke's half-hourly bottle Guy could hear more yellingupstairs, a reckless exchange of voices that rose to the abrupt climax ofthe slammed front door. Then Hope skipped down the stairs,resplendent from her tennis, and from her latest domestic achieve­ment: sacking Doris.


'She stole my earrings. They were right there on the dresser,' saidHope.


'Gumbag,' said Marmaduke.


'Can I get a shower?' said Dink.


'Which ones?' said Guy.


They're worthless. Or I'd have strip-searched her,' said Hope.


'Gumbag,' said Marmaduke.


'You hear that? That's Doris. She's been teaching him newswearwords,' said Hope.


'Auntie wants a hug.Ow,' said Lizzyboo.


'Could I get that shower?' said Dink.


'Isn't it amazing, the way he always gets you bang on the nipple? Imean, what's the point of anyone if they're so fat they can't evenwalk,'said Hope.


'Guzzball,' said Marmaduke.


'Listen to him. I mean his chest! I knew it: Doris has been smoking inthe nursery. He'll have to be nebulized,' said Hope.


'Intal orVentolнn?"said Guy.


'I'll help hold him down,' said Lizzyboo.


'No way,' said Marmaduke.


'Can I get that shower?' said Dink.


There was a big mirror in the kitchen, and a big kitchen in themirror, and Guy kept glancing secretively at himself, a singular figurein this busy world of glass. Figures swept to and fro on its surface; DinkHeckler, with his one hopelessly repeated question, was the room'sonly pocket of rest. Guy explored his lips with a slow tongue: he nowbarely noticed the swelling where Marmaduke had butted him. Thatnight, he decided, he would forbear to clean his teeth. The meeting ofmouths (I'm in it now), the way their faces seemed to stall and thenlock into the same force field. Some people think that just because oneworks in the City there are these huge chunks of money lying around.He had felt no reading on his personal tiltmeter and yet their mouthswere definitely homing. Of course, she's completely innocent, completely green, about money, as about everything else. Her eyeswere closing with the slightest of tremors. Bonds would be best: might take a day or three. And there was a flicker too in the lips somewhere.Talk to Richard in the morning. When it happened he could sense thetongue behind the teeth, stirring or cowering like a wounded bird.


Hope said suddenly, 'Look at the anorexic.'


Guy laughed. He found he was piling food into his mouth: a lump of cheese, a slice of ham, a halved tomato. 'I know. I've only just realized,'he said, and laughedagain, bending his knees to lick the gob of mayodangling from his little finger, 'that I'm absolutely starving.'


'Could I get that shower?' said Dink.


'It's blood,' said Lizzyboo.


'There's blood on his hair. Guy! There's blood on his hair!' said Hope.


'Don't worry,' said Guy. 'It's only mine.'


Outside, the rain stopped falling. Over the gardens and the mansion-block rooftops, over the window boxes and TV aerials, over Nicola'sskylight and Keith's dark tower (looming like a calipered leg droppedfrom heaven), the air gave an exhausted and chastened sigh. For a fewseconds every protuberance of sill and eave steadily shed water likedrooling teeth. There followed a chemical murmur from both street and soil as the ground added up the final millimetres of what it was being asked to absorb. Then a sodden hum of silence.


Two days ago I changed Marmaduke's diaper. It was right upthere with my very Worst Experiences. I'm still not over it.


I guess it had to happen. There are nanny-lulls, still centres in thehurricane of nannies. I am always hanging around over there. I amalways hanging around where people are hanging around, or goingwhere they're going, eager to waste time attheir speed. In the endLizzyboo helped me get him under the shower. Then we mopped the nursery wall. And the ceiling. I'm still not over it.


Marmaduke possesses his mother with a biblical totality, and he isalways goosingMelbaand frenching Phoenix (and watch himsplash his way through the au pairs); but Lizzyboo is his sexualobsession. He shimmies up against her shins and drools into hercleavage. He won't have a bath unless she's there to watch. He is forever ramming his hand - or his head - up her skirt.


Of course, and embarrassingly, Lizzyboo is becoming more andmore certain that she needn't fear any such nonsense from me. No, inmy condition I'm not about to get fresh. She sometimes gives me a puzzled but interrogatory look - the eyes seem to cringe - whileMarmaduke is scouring her ear with his tongue. Or trying to forceher hand down the front of his diaper. Being human, she is starting towonder what is wrong with her. I could tell her I'm gay or religious,or just frightened of catching some fatal disease. I suppose I reallyshouldn't continue to trifle with her affections. Especially now that Idon't need to.


I have Thrufaxed all twelve chapters off to Hornig Ultrason,where, it seems, my stock is already rising high. You can tell by theway everyone speaks to you. Unless I am mistaken, even the computerized voice of the reception bank betrays a secret liking forme. 'One momint. I have Missy Harter for you,' said Janit Slotnick,in the tone of somebody preparing a three-year-old for a particularly winsome treat. 'Oh, and have you heard the news that's causing such excitemint here?' I was already romping and tumbling in the zeros of a paperback or book-club deal when Janit said: 'She's pregnint!' ButI never did get through to Missy Harter.The computer screwed upand twenty minutes later Janit called and said that Missy would soonget back to me, which she hasn't.


On impulse I said, 'Janit? Say spearmint.' 'Spearmint.' 'Now saypeppermint.' 'Peppermint.' "Thank you, Janit.' 'Sir/


Incarnacion wraps up or abandons a long anecdote about heradventures in the supermarket (a story from which she emerges withobscure credit) to inform me that Mark Asprey has phoned while I've been out — while I've been out avoiding Incarnacion.


Mr Asprey, relates Incarnacion, is endearingly keen to pay a flyingvisit to London. Of course, at a single snap of his fingers, he can putup at a top hotel, or find a bed with any number of heartsick glamourqueens — but Mr Asprey would find it far more agreeable to stay righthere, in the place he calls home, and where, in addition, Incarnacioncan bring all her powers to bear on the promotion of his comfort. Sheis altogether sympathetic to this sentimental yearning of MarkAsprey's. In fact I get thirty-five minutes on the primacy of home, with its familiar surroundings and other pluses.


Incarnacion herself suggests that I could conveniently return to New York. For her, the symmetry of such an arrangement is not without its appeal.


I don't say anything. I don't even say anything about thedifficulties of non-supersonic East-West transatlantic air travel, incase I get an hour on, say, the inadvisability of central thermonuclearwar. I just nod and shrug, confident that in the very nature of things she must eventually shut up or go away.


Last night I attended a dinner party at Lansdowne Crescent. Alsopresent were Lizzyboo and Dink. The main guests were notdistinguished; they were just born rich. Three brothers, Jasper,Harry and Scargill, three joke representatives of the English gentry(down from Yorkshire, near Guy's dad's place, for an agribusiness conference), together with their speechless wives. The boys from Bingley - and theywere boys: time-fattened, time-coarsened, butboys, just boys - did a lot of shouting at first and then fell silent overtheir plates: devout and sweaty eaters. Dink kept looking at Hopewith a bored scowl in which some other message was impatiently enciphered; Guy hardly said a word. There wasn't any competitionor, for that matter, any choice: I was the life of the party. And I have so little to spare.


It broke up just after eleven, when Marmaduke's hollerings andthunderings could no longer be ignored or even talked through. I sawthe pummelled au pair trying to free his hands from the banisters.Guy and Hope looked as though they would be gone some time.


Exhaustedly I stood with Lizzyboo on the stoop and watched thefour cars steal off into the hot night. She turned to me with her armsfolded. I was afraid. She did that thing with the lowered head and the childishly questioning fingers on my shirtbuttons, giving her some­where to look while she asked me why I didn't like her. I was afraid. Iwas afraid of something like this. What was the nature of this fear ofmine? Like the weight of a million adulteries, complications,untruths, chances for betrayal. Also the inexplicable sense that I had already loved her or liked her or felt male pride in her, long ago, andkissed her breasts and held the pressure of her legs on my back already, many times, until what love there was all ran out, and Ididn't want to do it, ever again. I wished I had a little certificate orbadge I could produce, saying that I didn't have to do it, everagain. Iwas afraid of her body and its vigour, of her flesh, of her life. I wasafraid it might hurt me. I was afraid it might break me.


'I like you very much.' All I saw was the perfect evenness of herparting as she said,


'Do you? Do you want to come to my room for a little while?'


'I uh, believe not.'


'Why? Is there something wrong with me?"


Actually the nails on her big toes are beginning to lose symmetry,she has a steep-sided mole on the back of her neck, and generally herskin (when compared to someone like Kim Talent) is definitelyshowing signs of wear, of time, of death. But I said, 'You're beautiful,Lizzyboo. Give yourself the benefit of the doubt. The thing is, I'm inlove with someone else.’


Then I went over to Nicola's for an update. I'm not in love with Nicola. Something intertwines us, but it isn't love. With Nicola it'smore like the other thing.


Missy Harter comes through on the line to say that she has a checkon her desk - enough to front me for another few months: enough. Isaid. 'Thank God. You must have cut some corners. I take it this callis not being monitored?' 'Right. It's a virgin.' 'Good. Any othernews?' 'On what you call the world situation? Why yes. Next week:breakout.' 'Surely you mean breakdown.' 'Breakout. Frank renega-tion.' 'But that's terrible.' 'Not so. The reason: if we don't, they will. Goodbye now."Wait!. .Any other news?" Yes. I have news for you.I'm expecting a baby.'


'And I have news for you. It's mine.'


'Bullshit,'she said.


'I knew it. It is!'


'Bullshit.'


'That last time. On the Cape.'


'Please let's not do this. I was drunk.'


'Yeah, and I bet you were drunk in the morning too. That's when ithappened. In the morning. I felt a pop. I even heard it. A distinctpop.'


'Bullshit. I'llend this now. I'm ending this.'


'Don't hang up! I'm coming back. Now.'


'Back? To America?' She laughed sadly. 'Haven't you heard? There's no way in.'


It is with great, with ineffable — it is with the heaviest ambivalencethat I -


I don't want to go. I don't want to go. I'm not in good enoughshape to take on America. I'm not up to America. I want to stay here,and see how it all turns out, and write it down. I don't want to go. ButI'm going. Not even I could live with myself if I stayed. Besides, thereis a sky up there that looks like a beach and I mean with white sand and blue ocean and helixed volleyballs and cumulusputti exploding out of the surf. Good for flying. Maybe good for love.


So I'm sitting here now with my bag packed and waiting for a carthat doesn't show. I just called the minicab people again (their proudslogan:you drink, we drive). A taped message, followed bythree Engelbert Humperdinck numbers, followed by the slurredevasions of a guy who speaks no English. Hard to believe that in thishovel of stop-gap there yet abides a smouldering genius who knowsthe way to Heathrow Airport. Still, no doubt someone or other will make some kind of attempt to get here in the end.


The sky is telling me that I might just get away with it. Oh heynonny nonny, or however it goes. Having failed in art and love, having lost, I may win through with both, even now, so late in the goddamned day. My affairs are in order. My actors are on hold. But where's my cab?


I called Guy and told him not to do anything rash while I'm gone. Idon't want him to do anything rash until after I get back. With luck,he'll have a quiet time of it. Or a noisy time of it. I foresee arecurrence of Marmaduke's bronchial troubles. Left in sole charge of the child for over an hour, Keith Talent, I happen to know, did more than fulfil his normal quota of one cigarette every seven minutes. Ontop of teaching Marmaduke how to box and swear and gurgle overthe pinups in the tabloid, Keith taught Marmaduke how to smoke.


Keith himself of course I couldn't do anything about. All his lifepeople have been trying to do stuff about Keith, and they never gotanywhere. They've tried locking him up. I'd lock him up too, if Icould, just for a couple of weeks. Like me, like Clive, like the planet, Keith's debt is getting old; and Keith will do whatever Keith needs todo...Anyway I went over. I trudged up the concrete stairway,through the pinged obscenities. Christ, even ten years ago, in London, it was quite an achievement to get past two men talking inthe street without hearing the wordfuck or one of its cognates; butnow they're all doing it — nippers, vicars, grannies. I let myself in, Kath having wordlessly presented me, some days ago, with a single gnarled key. Mother and child were at home: no dog, nocheat. Kimwas pleased to see me — so pleased, in fact, that if I didn't have thislove-mission to blind and dizzy me, I might have to admit that something serious is seriously wrong at Windsor House. An hour ofKeith's parenting is enough to hospitalize Marmaduke Clinch: andso Kim Talent — and so Kim Talent. . . On the nature short the adult crocodile reaches for the baby with its jaws. You fear the worst: but that ridged croc mouth is delicate enough to handle new-born flesh,cat-and-kitty style. On the other hand reptiles don't normally tend their young. And when daddy gets mad, big jaws will stretch forother reasons, for other hungers . . . Kim cried when I said goodbye. She cried when I left the room. I think she must love me very much.


I've been loved before, but no one ever cried when I left the room.Incredibly, Missy used to cry when I left the apartment. And so did I. Before I went I wrote a note for Keith (plus Ј50 for the skipped dartslesson) and left it on the kitchen table, unmissably close to theOctoberDarts Monthly.


Jesus, I could drive to the airport myself. The bigger question is:could I drive back? And Mark Asprey will want the use of his car. 'Icouldn't ask you, could I, Nicola,' I said on the phone, 'to be prudent,and keep activity to the minimum while I'm gone?' She was eatingsomething. She said, 'What takes you there?' 'Love.' 'Ooh. What a shame. I'm planning some hot moves. You're going to miss all thesexy bits.' 'Nicola, don't do this.'


She swallowed. I could hear her inhaling masterfully. Then shesaid, 'You're in luck. In fact I just told Guy I'm going away for a fewdays. To myretreat.'


'Your what?'


'Don't you love it? A place with a couple of nuns and monks in it. Where I can think things over in a sylvan setting.'


'It's good. And I'm grateful. Why are you stalling?'


'No choice. So don't worry. You've got a few days' grace.'


'What is it?'


'Guess . . . Oh comeon. The thing I can't control.'


'I give up.'


She sighed and said, 'It's the fuckingcurse.'


A lordly Indian has just chewed me out for even expecting a cab to show up anywhere definite in the calculable future. He seemed to feelI was living in the past. Things, he told me, just aren'tlike that anymore. But he'll see what he can do. I'll take the notebook, of course.And leave the novel. Neatly stacked. Many pages. Do I want MarkAsprey to read it? I guess I do. I'll take the notebook: with all thewaiting around and everything — I envisage having a lot to say. WillAmerica have changed? No. America won't have come up with any new ideas, any new doubts, about herself. Not her. But maybe I cantake a new reading: a think piece, maybe, based on my ownexperiences, a substantial (and publishable?) meditation, extendingto some eight or ten thousand words, on the way America has startedto fulfil -


Oh, this is rich. Outside - what a pal - Keith has just pulled up inthe royal-blue Cavalier. I get to my feet. I sit down again: again, theheavy reluctance, in the haunches, in the loins, whence love should spring . . . Now how will the etiquette go on this? He's climbed outof the car and glanced warily down the street. I've waved. He hasraised his longbow thumb — his bent, his semicircular thumb. Keithsports a fishnet shirt and pastel hipsters but his chauffeur's capnestles ominously on the hood. He is polishing the chrome with a JCloth. If he opens the back door first then I'm out another fifty quid.Enough. I'm ready. Let's go to America.


  Well I'm back.


I'm back.


Six days I've been gone. I didn't write a word. The way I feel now Imight never write another. But there's another. And another.


I lost. I failed. I lost everything.


Unlucky thirteen.


Jesus Christ if I could make it into bed and get my eyes shutwithout seeing a mirror.


Please don't anyone look at me. I really took a tumble - I really took a tumble out there. Oh, man, I'm in bits.


Apart from the fact that on account of the political situation theyand their loved ones might all disappear at any moment (thissentence needs recasting but it's too late now), my protagonists are ingood shape and reasonable spirits. They still form their black cross.


They look a bit different. But not as different as I look, catapultedinto my seventies and still recovering from the fall.


I go into the Black Cross and nobody recognizes me. I'm astranger. And it all has to begin again.


Perhaps because of their addiction to form, writers always lagbehind the contemporary formlessness. They write about an oldreality, in a language that's even older. It's not the words: it's therhythms of thought. In this sense all novels are historical novels. Notreally a writer, maybe I see it clearer. But I do it too. An example: Istill go on as if people felt well.


I look to the kids, who change quick too. Marmaduke, so far as Ican tell, is exactly the same except in one particular. He has stoppedsaying 'milt'. He now says — and he says it often and loudly — 'mewk'or 'mowk' or 'mulk' or, more simply, 'mlk'.


All right, if we are going to go on with this thing there'll have to besome changes around here. Apart from anything else I think I'mgoing blind:so let the colours run. Actually Nicola herself, with herrecent outrages, has already forced this on me. Who says these people need so much air and space? We're all in it together now.


Kim has stopped saying 'Enlah'! She cries normally, humanly, complicatedly. No longer does she pay homage to the sudden, thesavage god of babies: Enlah!


We're all in it together now. As is the case with the world situation,something will have to give, and give soon. It will all get a lotwoollier, messier. Everything is winding down, me, this, motherearth. More: the universe, though apparently roomy enough, is heading for heat death. I hope there are parallel universes. I hopealternatives exist. Who stitched us up with all these design flaws?Entropy, time's arrow — ravenous disorder. The designer universe: but it was meant to give out all along, like something you pick up atGoodFicks. So maybe the universe is a dog, a pup, a dud, slipped our way by theCheat.


'Milt' I reckon I can live without. But 'Enlah'? Already I miss it.And I'll never hear it again. Nobody will, not from her lips. How didit sound? How well can I remember it? Where has it gone? Oh,Christ, no, the hell of time. I never guessed that you lost thingscoming this way too. Timetakes from you, with both hands. Thingsjust disappear into it.


Keith is under the impression that he has come through a sternexamination of his character and emerged with flying colours. There he stands, with one hand under his nose, with courting finger restingin the cusp between barrel and shaft, with pinkie raised - Keith'sintegers! And Guy's okay, considering. The fall guy: fool, foal, foil. Iwent to see him in hospital. There he lies, in white nightie, palely smiling. He really had us worried for a time. But they're both oncourse.


I'm not getting something and what I'm not getting has to do with the truth and it so happens that I'm well placed to take a crack at it -the truth, I mean — because this story istrue.


The form itself is my enemy. All this damned romance. In fiction(rightly so called), people become coherent and intelligible - and they aren't like that. We all know they aren't. We all know it frompersonal experience. We've been there.


People? People are chaotic quiddities living in one cave each. Theypass the hours in amorous grudge and playback and thought-experiment. At the camp fire they put the usual fraction on exhibit,and listen to their own silent gibber about how they're feeling andhow they're going down. We've been there.


Death helps. Death gives us something to do. Because it's a full-time job looking the other way.


A highly civilized note from Mark Asprey, rounded, well turned,like the man himself, and left in the study, propped against mystacked typescript:


My dear Sam: Two things are missing. (Have you been keepinglow company?) I don't expect you to have used or even noticedthese items, because you're a blameless non-smoker - whereas Iadore the harsh cut of Turkish tobacco with my morning coffeeno less than I relish at the other end of the day the rough solidity ofa colossal Havana between my lips. Item 1: onyx cigarette-lighter. Item 2: ormolu ashtray. Yours ever, MA


No mention (except between those brackets?) of my novel, whichI'm sure he has looked at - though the pages, it's true, aren't eveninfinitesimally misaligned.


I wonder if MA met with the murderee while he was here. Iwonder if MA slept with the murderee while he was here. Just now,none of that seems to matter. Wait, though: I can feel somethinggathering around me once again. Ambition, obsession. It had betterbe obsession. Nothing else is likely to keep me out of bed. All about,the study shelves are ranked with Asprey's piss . . .


In-depth updatings and debriefings have been necessary, and shehas been awfully sweet and patient with me. This much is certain: I'm going to miss her.


The weather has a new number, or better say a newangle. And Idon't mean dead clouds. Apparently it will stay like this for quite a while: for the duration, in any event. It's not a good one. It will justmake everything worse. It's not a wise one. The weather reallyshouldn't be doing this.


He frowned. She laughed. He brightened. She pouted. He grinned.She flinched.Come on: we don'tdo that. Except when we'repretending. Only babies frown and flinch. The rest of us just fakewith our fake faces.


He grinned. No he didn't. If a guy grins at you for real these days,you'd better chop his head off before he chops off yours. Soon the sneeze and the yawn will be mostly for show. Even the twitch.


She laughed. No she didn't. We laugh about twice a year. Most of us have lost our laughs and now make do with false ones.


He smiled.


Not quite true.


All that no good to think, no good to say, no good to write. All thatno good to write.


Chapter 13: Little Did They Know


haped likeA topheavy and lopsided stingray, elderly, oil-streaked, semi-transparent, and trailing its coil of feathery brownvapour, a dead cloud dropped out of the haze and made its way, withevery appearance of effort, into the dark stadium of the west. Guy Clinch had looked up. Now he looked down. To him, clouds hadalways been the summary of everything that could reasonably behoped for from the planet; they moved him more than paintings,more than exciting seas. So dead clouds, when he saw them, broughta strong response also (it was much worse since fatherhood). Deadclouds made you hate your father. Dead clouds made love hard.They made you want and need it, though: love. They made you have to have it.


This was how things stood with Guy. Or this was how theyswayed and wavered. On the night of the Wounded Bird — the kiss,when his lips had strained to meet or shun the lips of Nicola Six —Guy had checked into hospital a little after ten.


He felt fine himself. If anyone had asked him how he felt, he wouldhave said that he 'felt fine'. Apart from an itchy left eye, a sore throat,his mild mono and controllable colic (all of which fell within theever-roomier parameters offeeling fine), plus his more or lesspermanent height-related lower back pain and the numerousrumours of whatever else was in store for him mortally, Guy felt fine.Marmaduke's asthma attack, on the other hand (it developedsuddenly that evening), had every appearance of seventy. The doctorcame, and admired from a distance the desperate inflations ofMarmaduke's belly. It's not that they can't get air in; they can't getair out. Many telephone calls were made - lights sent probing intothe nooks and crannies of the health system. Now of course Guy andHope had a system too. If the best care available was private, then Hope went in with the child; if non-private, then Guy did. Such an arrangement, said Hope, answered to his egalitarian convictions, hisinterest in 'life', as she called it, with all due contempt. By eleven o'clock, at any rate, Guy had his pyjamas and toothbrush ready in a briefcase and was soon backing the car out into the street.


Guy went in the next night too, straight after he finished at theoffice, relieving Hope, who pulled aside the surgeon's mask she waswearing long enough to inform him that inch-higheczema, had broken out across Marmaduke's chest and was heading, at a speedalmost visible to the human eye, for his neck and face. With a gestureof quiet challenge she lifted the sheet. Guy stared down in wonder at the jewelled child.


Even more strangely and frighteningly, Marmaduke lay perfectlystill, and was quite silent. During past hospitalizations, when Guyhad arrived with his flowers, his bananas, his toys and cuddlyanimals, his overnight bag, Marmaduke had reliably climbed out ofeven the deepest troughs of weakness and disorientation to give hisfather a weary swipe. But today — not the smallest gob of spit. Not somuch as a snarl! Marmaduke's red-smudged eyes stared up in bafflement and appeal. When the child suffered like this, it was as ifGuy himself, or Guy's little ghost, were hawking and writhing, somewhere lost, in an alternate world. Looking down on him now, Guy felt the familiar equidistance between tears and nausea. Thelatter impulse he managed to resist. But then Hope wept. And thenGuy wept. They embraced each other. And together, and very carefully, they embraced the child.


That night Guy thought about Nicola a good deal, but unwill­ingly, and without pleasure. And he cleaned his teeth with someviolence, abolishing from his mouth the last memory of her lips. Ashe lay on the campbed in the sweltering cubicle, and jerked to his feetevery few minutes to review the red rubies which fantasticated the surface of Marmaduke's drugged sleep, her image flapped in on himin little coronaries of self-hatred and dismay. That stolen hour: Keithand his cigarettes: if Hope knew - her anger, rightful and limitless. The connexion between the illicit kiss and the child's sufferings wasperhaps as tenuous as the smoke that issued from the crafty burn ofKeith's brief vigil; but he felt it as a certainty. This is the girl thatkissed the man that asked the friend that smoked the fag to mind thekid that lived in the house that Hope built. .. Better just to wash myhands of the whole thing. It will be bearable. It won'tkill me. I'll giveher the money and that'll be the end of it. This vow, repeatedly uttered, felt calming, ascetic and renunciatory. At four he smoothedMarmaduke's forehead for the last time and collapsed into sleepmoments before the first nurse strode into the room.


In the morning, Marmaduke looked unbelievable, and sounded asif...Well, if you'd shut your eyes, you would have quickly imaginedtwo lumberjacks stooped over the handles of their doublesaw, and patiently felling some titan of the woodlands. And yet the child waswidely pronounced to be stabilizing. The cutaneous vesicles, forinstance, had already started to weep. Guy stared at the face on thebloodstained pillow and was unable to imagine that this wasanything even a child could really recover from. But Marmaduke would recover from it. And Guy would recover from it. Actually heknew, to his shame, that recovery was near, because Nicola's facewas back, and no longer half-averted; it was candid and aroused and voluptuously innocent. Being in a hospital anyway, Guy felt the urge to ask around, to find somebody who could get this face (this image,like the sun's imprint, but never fading) surgically removed. Of course, doctoring hadn't worked for the Macbeths; and it wouldn't work for him. When Hope arrived at half past ten with Phoenix andMelbaand the odd au pair, Guy slipped away and called the office,and got Richard, who said he could go for the money at noon. Hereturned just as the doctor, the in-house asthma expert, was takinghis leave.


Guy asked, 'What did he say?'


'Him?' said Hope. 'I don't know. Part allergenic, part reactive.'


'When he's better,' said Guy, who was thinking, Not too far:anyway she could meet me at the station, 'we'll move out of London.'


'Oh yeah? Where to, Guy? The moon? Haven't you heard?Everywhere's a toilet.'


'Well we'll see.'


'You can go now.'


But he stayed for a while, the good father, and watched the child.My God (Guy thought), he looks like lo. He looks like lo, Jupiter'smolten moon, covered in frosty lava, from cold volcanoes. lo'svolcanoes, caused by sulphur dioxide boiling at many degreesbelow zero in contact with sulphur . . . Just then, Hope unbuttoned her shirt and bared a breast, and offered it to the boy, for comfort.Of course, lo is connected to the mother planet by a kind of navelstring. A 'flux tube' of electrical energy. Ten million amperes.


Later, as he bent to kiss Marmaduke's lips (the only part of hisface unaffected by the popping swamp of the inflammation), thechild flinched and gave a definite sneer. Pretty feeble by his stand­ards; but Guy was heartened, and emboldened, to find his soncapable of even such a spiritless grimace. He was wearing plastic handcuffs, to stop him scratching.


A mile to the west, Keith Talent lit a cigarette with the remains ofits predecessor and then pressed the butt into an empty beer can. Inthis way did he scorn the ormolu ashtray and the onyx cigarettelighter, two recent acquisitions, which lay near by. He reached for afull beer can, tussling with the six-pack's elastic yoke. He swore. Hecoughed. He straightened up in bed. He burped astonishingly.


The noise that burp made was doubly disproportionate, dispro­portionate to his bulk, disproportionate to the podlike restriction of the room he lay in. Even Keith was slightly taken aback by it. Ahorror-film burp, a burp that cried out for at least two exorcists.Perhaps one of hell's top burp people was plying his trade in Keith'sbody. But Keith didn't care. He burped again, voluntarily, de­fiantly. From the kitchen the dog barked back. 'Keith,' called Kath.And even little Kim filed the possibility of protest. Keith gave themanother.


Lying there among the knouts and nooses of cheap sheets anddamp blankets, in his pink-tinged Y—fronts, with the beercan on hisgut and thefizzing snout in his fingers, Keith had a fairly accurate idea of who and what he was. He could taste his own essence. Thesourness of locker rooms, municipal duckboards, dormitories,prisons.


Things were bad. On the phone: 'Keith? It's Ashley. I'm going tohave to hurt you, mate. All right? I'm going tohurt you.' KeithTalent, who had done a lot of hurting in his time, who knew about hurting from both points of view, Keith Talent understood. 'I understand.' It wasn't TV, hurting. It was real. It didn't come muchrealer: finger-cracking reality. Yeah, and kicked senseless and leftupside down in a fucking dustbin somewhere.


Have the fucking bailiffs round here anyway in a minute.Characteristically you were sent two fat guys, with ginger beards,murmuring - money's janitors (they didn't want any trouble).Everything you owned got priced. Then you really found out how little you were worth. At this moment Keith himself felt like a coin


(he could taste it in his mouth), nicked and grimy, and of lowdenomination. In three nights' time he was meant to be throwing inthe Duoshare. Quarterfinals. 'Nationwide sponsorship,' said Keith.He stared with his mouth open at the middle finger of his right hand.Prestigious endorsements. No help from that lying cow either. Wasthe darts dream about to end? Was the whole darts bubble about to burst?


Keith? What's the matter? The truth was that in addition to hisusual woes Keith happened to be suffering from the after-effects ofviolent crime. You can almost hear him saying it, in moody explanation: 'I happen to be suffering from the after-effects of violent crime.' Thereare after-effects of violent crime, and they areonerous. We can be sure of that. Look: even Keith was capable offeeling the worse for them. The after-effects of violent crimehave to be considerable, to get through to people like Keith who are alwaysfeeling lousy anyway. Now he burped again and the dog barked backand he burped back again - 'Keith,' called Kath - and it all felt asragged as that, trying to outburp an old dog under a blanket offagsmoke in the low sun.


By his participation in violent crime, Keith had worked a littlegamble. In at least three or four senses, Keith had worked a little gamble withtime. He had ploughed many days' worth of the stuffinto the intensity of a scant forty-five minutes; and now those gambled hours were being subtracted from the present. A gambling man, Keith had gambled those hours; and he had lost them. He hadlost. Not everything, because he reckoned he'd got away with it okay and wouldn't be doing the kind of time you measure in years. But hehadn't won. Those gambled hours, where had they gone?


The whole thing was a farce from the start. Never work with ourcoloured brethren, Keith said to himself. It should be pointed outthat the injunction had little bigotry in it. ^t was like saying: Neverdrive down the Golborne Road on Friday or Saturday afternoons.Rubbish trucks innit. Occasioning pronounced congestion. You nipup Lancaster Road instead. Common sense. Keith wasn't prejudiced. No danger. Keith had lots of foreign mates, believing that it took allsorts to make a world. Look at horse-toothed Yaroslav, of Polish extraction. Look at Fucker Burke, pure bog-and-spud Irish. AndPongowas a Cornishman. No, Keith liked all sorts, all sorts of men,just as he liked all sorts of women, all colours, all creeds. Look atBalkish and Mango and Leeza and Iqbala. Look at Thelonius. In theend, though, he felt the wisdom of the traditional view: that when itcame towork, your average bongo'll be as much use as an ashtray on a motorbike. Same difference with the black darter. All the sincerity in the world. But no clinicism.


Their plan was deceptively simple. Thelonius's babymammaLilette worked as a cleaning-lady - but never for very long. As soonas any household felt the time was right to entrust her with adoorkey, Lilette felt the time was right to entrust it to Thelonius (whohad it copied) and then quit the following day. The following nightThelonius would be stopping by in the small hours . . . Theloniusseemed offended by Keith's mild hint that the filth would soon puttwo and two together.


'Filth don't know shit,' he said. 'This is the big one. It have longbread, man.'


'Bingo,' said Keith.


As planned, Keith showed up at the Golgotha shortly after nine.Thelonius was there, as planned. Quite untypically, and not veryencouragingly, Thelonius was drunk. 'Sdoveo,' said Thelonius. 'Svodeo.' He was trying to say 'Videos'. Another stretch of timepassed while Thelonius tried to say 'Digital'. Well, in for a penny, thought Keith (prophetically enough). Outside, Thelonius opened atrembling palm in presentation of his new car - a souped-up, low-slung maroon Mini, with rallying lights, customized chrome fendersand celebrity windows. Not discreet, thought Keith, as he bent toclimb into it.


'We won't be getting too many digital videos in here, mate,' saidKeith, pleased, at least, to be sparing the Cavalier from such a mission. 'What happened to the BMW?'


'Had to let it go, man. Had to let it go.'


Keith nodded. That's how it went. Thelonius had committed everylast fiver of his most recent windfall to the purchase of the BMW. Hehad bought the BMW off acheat. A couple of days later he waswithout the means to buy the car a litre of petrol, let alone the repairs and spare parts (item: new engine) that the BMW cried out for. So hehad sold it back to thecheat-ataheavy loss. And what does he dowith such funds as remain? Gets this eyecatching minge-wagon, plus anew fur coat. The new fur coat would already be gathering oil in theMini's boot, and Thelonius would be without the means to get itcleaned. That's how it went.


'Fifteen minutes,' Thelonius was saying sleepily, 'and we be back inna Black Cross, rich men. Sonofabitch!'


'What?'


The car contained no petrol.


And neither of them had any money.


So it was upon the Cavalier that they relied to take them to the darkcorner off Tavistock Road. On the way Thelonius rehearsed hisdreams of early retirement: the tickertaped, blonde-flanked return toSt Lucia, land of his fathers; the ranch-style villa, the private beach,the burnished helipad. No moon, no streetlamps, and a low ceiling ofcloud. The lock gave slickly to Thelonius's key.


'Bingo,' said Keith.


Little did they know that the place they were about to burgle - theshop, and the flat above it—had already been burgled the week before:yes, and the week before that. And the week before that. It was allburgled out. Indeed, burgling, when viewed in Darwinian terms, wasclearly approaching a crisis. Burglars were finding that almost everywhere had been burgled. Burglars were forever bumping intoone another, stepping on the toes of other burglars. There wereburglar jams on rooftops and stairways, on groaning fire-escapes. Burglars were being burgled by fellow burglars, and were doing thesame thing back. Burgled goods jigged from flat to flat. Returning from burgling, burglars would discover that they had been burgled,sometimes by the very burglar that they themselves had just burgled!How would this crisis in burgling be resolved? It would be resolved when enough burglars found burgling a waste of time, and stoppeddoing it. Then, for a while, burgling would become worth doing again. But burglars had plenty of time to waste—it was all they had plenty of,and there was nothing else to do with it—so they just went on burgling.


'Sonofabitch!' said Thelonius.


'What?'


'Torch onna blink!'


They thrashed around for a while by the light of Keith's Ronson.Thelonius found the till, smashed it open and triumphantly wrenchedout a fistful of luncheon vouchers.


'LVs, man. Sonofabitch LVs.’


'Wait a minute,' said Keith, with a sweep of his dark-adaptedeyes. 'I know this place. It's just a fucking corner shop. There's novideos.All they got here's a load of fuckimporp pies!'


Thelonius had hoped or predicted or at any rate affirmed that the owners would not be there when they called - would, in fact, beenjoying a late holiday on the west coast of England. How was it,then, that they could hear footsteps on the floor above, and the sounds of exasperated protest? The owners, of course, had gonenowhere: much impoverished by recent burglaries, they were stop­ping home. Thelonius looked up. 'Joolery, man,' he said, with thesudden calm of deep inspiration. 'She dripping with joolery.' He ducked into the back room and climbed the stairs with long silentbounds. Acting on pure instinct, Keith slowly filled his pockets withcigarettes. He went to the front door and opened it, wonderingwhat he was feeling. Down All Saints, outside the Apollo, greatnumbers streamed against the light. Keith stuck his head out andhad a look at the shop sign. Yeah, that's right. N. Poluck, the sign said grimly. Cornish Dairy. Confectioner & Newsagent. Yeah: tabloids, packet cakes, and milk cartons. Old Polish couple ran it,with an air of great depression and disobligingness. Typicalcornershop: never had anything that anybody might ever want. Long liveCostCheck and BestSave. Keith shut the door. Then, having check­ed the Eat-By date on the cellophane, he ruminatively consumed a pork pie.


In the upstairs bedroom Thelonius was rattling through the oddments on the dressing-table with truly unbearable agitation.Keith had never watched Thelonius at work before. A gravedisappointment, with none of that relaxed concentration you'realways hoping to see. He looked around for Mr and Mrs Poluckand soon picked them out, under a heap of clothes and upended drawers, and not stirring overmuch. Thus he also ascertained thatthere was nothing semi-violent about this particular crime. With aclear conscience, then, Keith strode up to the trembling figure of Thelonius and did two things. He tousled Thelonius's hair; he put acigarette in Thelonius's mouth and lit it. Thelonius took onedistracted drag before jerking his head back: enough. Keith left thebutt on the dressing-table, among the specks of hair-dust. Bingo,thought Keith: DNA innit. Now Mr Poluck groaned; Theloniusshouted'Where?' and thumped a gleaming gym-shoe down into hischeek. 'You don't do it like that, mate,' said Keith, peering aboutfor something you could carry water in. 'You get them both sittingup and hurt one till the other . . . You know.'


Keith had been hopeful at first. Nobody trusted banks any longer,thank God; and you could stroll out of the most improbable places with some quite decent lifesavings under your arm. But the brightdream was fading. Mr and Mrs Poluck were as tough as old boots — and as cheap. Thelonius did everything with tears of imploring ragein his eyes. What a life, eh? The exertion, the inconvenience, the unpopularity you incurred, and nothing going right any of the time.Keith had to do a bit of judicious slapping and shaking and hair-tugging. He disliked the touch of old bodies and wondered if it wouldbe any better working with the very young. Looking round the roomhe felt something like bafflement or even sadness at the whole idea of human belongings: we get them in shops, then call them our own; weall had to have this precious stuff, like our own hairbrush each, ourown dressing-gown each, and how soon it all looked like junk — how soon it got trampled into trash. For their part, to be fair, the Polucksdid well, with no excessive complaint, seeming to regard the episode as largely routine. Keith met with, and longsufferingly endured, theirstares of deep recognition, which wasn't a matter of putting a name to a face but of looking into you and seeing exactly what you were.No fun. No jewellery either. In the end they came wheezing down thestairs with a fake fur coat, a damaged TV set, a broken alarm clockand a faulty electric kettle. Then the stony light of Keith's garage andthe bottle ofporno passed through the dust to settle the crime buzzand crime flop that played on their flesh like fever.


Those on the receiving end of violent crime feelviolated: injury hasbeen dealt out to them from the hidden chaos, which has shown itselfbriefly, and then returned to where it lives. Meanwhile, in chaos'shiding place, what happens? Rocks and shells catch and grate inneither sea nor shore, and nothing is clean or means anything, and nothingworks.


'I'm a piece of shit,' Keith whispered into his beercan. He thoughtof everybody else who never had to do this. Guy, Guy's wife, in endless mini-series. Shah of Iran. Tits. A rich bird: and then you'reoutof here.


The money came in four buff envelopes. They contained used fifties.Much-used fifties. Sitting in his office (with its Japanese furniture andsingle Visual Display Unit and clean desk), Guy offered up hisdelicate and increasingly emotional nostrils to a familiar experi­ence: the scurfy smell of old money. It always struck him, the fact that money stank, like the reminder of an insidious weakness inhimself. Of course, the poets and the novelists had always patientlyinsisted as much. Look at Chaucer's cock. Look at Dickens (Dick­ens was the perfect panning-bowl for myth): the old man up to his armpits in Thames sewage, searching for treasure; the symbolic names of Murdstone and of Merdle, the financier. But all that wasmyth and symbol, a way of saying that money could somehow be thought of as being smelly, of being scatological. It was frightfullyliteral-minded of money, he thought, to be actually stinking up theplace like this.Pecunia non oletwas dead wrong.Pecunia olet.Christ, heaven stops the nose at it...Guy sealed and stacked thepackets. He couldn't wait to get rid of them — all this hard evidence of deception. So far, no outright lies. He fancied he had been ratherclever with Richard, adopting the smug yet faintly rueful uncom-municativeness of someone settling a gambling debt. It had come naturally. But it seemed quite likely that men were just easier to deceive. Guy put the money into his briefcase and smoked half acigarette as he contemplated - in its physical aspects only - the drive across town.


Everything was going perfectly normally or acceptably but he wasfinding it impossible to meet her eye. He could point his face in theright direction, and try to will himself into her looming gaze. At onejuncture he made it as far as her bare shoulder before his visionwent veering off to some arbitrary point on the bookcase, thecarpet, his own huge shoes. Otherwise, Guy clung to the belief thathe was behaving with conviction and control. The tremendoussnaps of his briefcase locks seemed to underscore his worldliness,the briskness of all his dealings. This was certainly one way ofdoing it: you gave the money, as it were disinterestedly; and then the adult verdict. Guy laid out the envelopes on the low table, andmentioned one or two of the slight difficulties he had encountered. Directing a rictus smile towards the ceiling, he spoke, for instance, of the tenuous connexion between the endlessly malleable symbolson the display screen and the hard cash in one's hand, with all itsbulk and pungency.


'Will you do me the kindness', said Nicola Six, 'of looking at mewhen we're talking?’


'Yes of course,' said Guy, and steered his stare into the sun of herface. 'I do apologize. I — I'm not myself.'


'Aren't you?'


With a limp hand half-hooding his eyes (it was all right so long as he concentrated on the cleft between her chin and her lower lip), andwith his legs crossing and uncrossing and recrossing, Guy venturedto speak of the recent struggles of his son Marmaduke, of thesuccessive nights in hospital, the sleeplessness, the seriousthinking...By now Guy was staring at the bookcase again. As he began to outline the chief theme of all this serious thinking, Nicolasaid,


'I'm sorry to hear that your little boy's been ill. But I must say Ithink it's rather tactless of you to bring that up now. If not downrightcruel. Under the circumstances.'


This promised something inordinate, and Guy was duly alarmed.He couldn't help feeling the pathos of her formulations (how theatrically we speak when we're moved); at the same time, hecouldn't help feeling that her choice of outfit was perhaps a trifleunfortunate. Well, not 'choice': arriving several minutes early, he had caught her, she said, between her exercises and her shower.Hence the little tennis skirt or tutu or whatever it was, at the brim of her bare legs; hence the workout top, which was sleeveless. Alsobackless. The effect was altogether inappropriate, what with those girlish white socks she must have quickly slipped on. He looked her in the eye and said, 'Under the circumstances?'


Now it was her turn to look away. 'I see,' she said, withdeliberation, 'I see that once again I am a victim of my own inexperience. It's an awful handicap. You never know what otherpeople might reasonably have in mind.' She hugged herself, andgasped softly, and said, 'You want to go. Of course. You want to besafe again. Away from complication. I understand. May I. . . ?Before you go, may I say something?'


She stood up with her eyes closed. She came towards him, loose ofbody, with her eyes closed. She knelt, and folded her arms to make apillow for her cheek on his knees, with her eyes closed. The room darkened. Guy felt that intimacy could actually kill you — that you really could die from all this pressure on the heart.


'It's sad, and ridiculous, but I make no apologies, I suppose. Wecan't help wanting what we want. Can we. It may have sometimesseemed that I singled you out for a purpose. You were to take me out ofmy life. Take me to the other side. Through love. Through sexual love.But really my plan went deeper than that. I'm thirty-four. I'll be thirty-five next month. The body ticks. I...I wanted to bear your child.'


'But this is too much,' said Guy, sliding his knees out from underher and trying to clamber himself upright. 'I'm speechless. I can'tbreathe either! I think it -'


'No. Go. Go at once. And take your money with you.'


'It's yours. And good luck.'


'No. It's yours.'


'Please. Don't be silly.'


'Silly? Silly? I can't accept it.'


'Why?'


'Because it'stainted.'


How incredibly lucky that everyone was at the hospital. Let's hearit for hospitals. And for asthma, and for eczema, and for infantdistress. By the time he got home, Guy was in no condition todissimulate, to act normal, whatever that was. He was in hospitalshape himself, cottony, lint-like, as if his torso were just the bandageon an injured heart. In the second drawing-room he threw off his jacket and watched himself in the mirror as he raised the brandybottle to his lips. Then a cold shower, and the welcome coldness ofthe sheets . . .How, exactly, had the fight started? It started when shethrew something at him, something so small that he barely saw itspassage or felt its impact on his chest. Then she was on her feet andthrusting the envelopes at him, and he held her slender wrists, andthen the staggered collapse backwards on to the sofa — and there theywere, in clothed coition with their faces half an inch apart. For a moment Guy could feel the hard bobble at the centre of everything.


'What did you throw at me?' he said.


'A Valium.'


He snorted quietly. 'AValium?'


'A Valium,' she said.


With relief, almost with amusement, Guy readjusted his shockedbody; and even his peripheral vision managed to renounce all but thequickest glint of her leggy disarray. Soon he found himself lying onhis back with Nicola's head resting on his chest, his nostrils tickledby her hair as she wandered weepily on. Here she was giving him the detailed confession: how she had hoped to step with him into a worldof physical love; how they might, if he, the perfect man, agreed, and after 'a lot of practice', try to make a baby; how thereafter she wouldbe content if he looked in once a week, or perhaps twice, to play withhis little daughter and (the suggestion was) to play with his littledaughter's mother. This dream, of course, she now cancelled andcursed... 'A lot of practice': there was something pitiably callowabout the phrase. There was plainly something else about it too;callow or not so callow, the words entrained a physical reaction, onethat tended to undermine his murmured demurrals and tender mewings. Guy hoped she hadn't noticed the ignoble billyclub whichhad now established itself athwart his lap. And when she accidentallyrested her elbow on its base (turning to ask if this was all just sentimental tosh), Guy was glad he couldn't see his own archly agonized smile as he slid out from under her.


They parted. Yes, Guy and Nicola were to part. She stood. She stoodthere, corrected. She was mistress of herself once more. As Guy movedheavily towards the door he looked down at the velvet chair and sawthe Valium she had thrown at him: not much of a missile, not much of aweapon, a yellow tranquillizer the size of a shirtbutton, and partlyeroded by the sweat of her fist.


'I thought I might need it', she said, following his eyes (which weremisting over at this comic poem of female violence), 'for after you left.But then I lost my temper. I'm sorry. I'm absolutely all right now. Goto your son. Don't worry. Goodbye, my love. No. No. Oh, begone.'


Well he was gone now, and wouldn't be back. Guy was in his own bed, where he ought to be. He wouldn't be back — except perhaps incircumstances of great extremity. He found that the current situation,or the Crisis, had a way of prompting the most shameful fantasies —discrepant, egregious, almost laughably unforgivable. What if yousurvived into a world where nothing mattered, where everything was permitted? Guy lifted the single linen sheet. He had never thought ofhimself as being impressively endowed (and neither, he knew, hadHope). Who, then, was this little bodybuilder who had set up a gym inhis loins?...So in his own way Guy Clinch confronted the central question of his time, a question you saw being asked and answeredeverywhere you looked, in every headline and haircut: if, at anymoment, nothing might matter, then who said that nothing didn'tmatter already?


Just when you thought she was a complete innocent or 'natural' ormaybe even not quite right in the head (manic depression? in mild,


interesting and glamorous form ?), she came out with something really


devastating. How had it gone? Tainted. The money wastainted.


Certainly those fuming fifties had quite a genealogy: privatizedprisons under Pitt, human cargo from the Ivory Coast, sugarplantations in the Caribbean, the East India company, South Africanuranium mines. This was all true: sweatshops, sanctions-busting,slain rainforests, toxic dumping, and munitions, munitions, muni­tions. But none of it was news to Guy. As Nicola talked he had satthere listening to a kind of commentary on the last ten years of hislife: the horrified discoveries, the holding actions, the long war withhis father. For ten years he had been dealing with cruel greeds anddead clouds. Nowadays the company was a good deal cleaner. And awhole lot poorer. Hope's money stank too: everywhere, vast bitesout of the planet. Go back far enough and all money stinks, is dirty,roils the juices of the jaw. Was there any clean money on earth? Hadthere ever been any? No. Categorically. Even the money paid to the most passionate nurses, the dreamiest artists, freshly printed, verydry, and shallowly embossed to the fingertips, had its origins in somebastardy on the sweatshop floor. She'd taken it. Nicola had taken it.That put paid to another thought, also uncontrollable (and here thelinen sheet gave another jolt): her on a street corner and a manwalking past in white flares (hello sailor), and the woman on herknees in the alley, and the money dropped on to the wet concrete.


Guy thought he heard Marmaduke screaming and looked withterror at his watch. No panic: time to get up. Time to return to thesinister cheer of the Peter Pan Ward. He heard the sound again, from the street; but he was accustomed, by now, to the auditory trickvalvethat turned a fizzing pipe or a tortured gearbox - or even birdsong or Bach — into a brilliant imitation of his absent son's screams. As heclimbed from the bed Guy heard the thump, and felt the internal shockwave, of the slammed front door. Five seconds later he hadhopped into his trousers and was veering round the doorway with a whiplash of shirt-tails.


The child was home! The child was home, borne aloft, it seemed, on the shoulders of the crowd, the little hero returned from the war,and screaming himself black in the face. Guy skimpleskambled downthe stairs and ran high-kneed through the hall with his armsoutstretched. And as the child joyously launched himself into hisembrace, and, with the familiar, the inimitable avidity, plunged allhis teeth into his father's throat, Guy thought that he might havebeen precipitate, or inflexible, or at any rate none too kind.


A mile to the north, Keith Talent lit a cigarette with the remains of itspredecessor and then pressed the butt into an empty beer can. Two new televised conversations joined the surrounding symposium.Several types of whining were going on: the giant's dentistry in thestreet below, Mr Frost above who was mad and dying, Keith'sfridge, various strains of music, and Iqbala next door going on at her boyfriend about the clothes money he'd borrowed off her last weekand promised to refund on Wednesday. Keith listened closer:someone somewhere was actually shouting, 'Whine! . . . Whine!.. .Whine?Ah yes. Keith managed an indulgent leer. That would belittle Sue down below and to the left, calling to her son Wayne. Therecame another repeated shout: 'Sow!. . . Sow! . . . Sow!' That wouldbe Kev, calling to Sue. Keith leered again. He and Sue had once beenclose. Or was it twice? His place. Kath in hospital. Now Keith calledto his wife, who duly appeared in the doorway with Kim in her arms.


'Idea,' said the baby.


'Lager,' said Keith.


'Here,' said Kath.


'Adore,' said the baby.


'What's that?' said Keith, meaning the TV.


'Ordure,' said the baby.


'News. Nothing on the Crisis,' said Kath.


'I'll giveyou a crisis in a minute,' said Keith.


'Adieu,' said the baby.


'Lager,' said Keith.


'Adieu, adore, ordure, idea.'


The doorbell rang, or rattled faultily.


'Check it Kath,'he said in warning as she turned.


Keith sat up straight with long eyes and open mouth. If that wasKirk and/or Ashley and/or Lee, if that was the boys, then Keith hadmiscalculated, and seriously. Over the past week, with all this talkabout the breaking of his darting finger, Keith had had time to ponder, with many an elegiac sigh, the steady erosion of criminalprotocol. In the old days you kicked off by threatening someone'sfamily. None of this nonsense about starting in on a man's darting finger. How about Kath and Kim? Weren't they worth threatening?But maybe that was what Kirk and Ashley and Lee had decided to do: threaten his family. (They couldn't have come here for Keith, after all, or not directly: home was the last place they'd reckon on finding him.) In principle he might have approved. Still, threateninghis family wasn't any good if he happened to bewith his family at thetime. He could hardly hide under the bed. Hide under the bed?Keith? No way: there was ten years of darts magazines down there.


'It's all right. Just a woman,' said Kath.


Two beats later he heard the front door croak open, Kath'scautiousYes? and a foreign female voice saying,Good afternoon.I'm your new worker.Keith sank back.


Chronic innit, he thought (he was gorgeously relieved). Diabolicalas such. They come in here . . .Where's Mrs Ovens? Ah, well, I'mworking in conjunction with her. We'll liaise.Liaise. I'll liaise you ina minute. Keith thought of his probation officer, the absolute lustrelessness of her hair and skin and eyes and teeth, the verticallines that busily lanced her upper lip. Runs me ragged. All this abouttheCompensations. He had skipped their last five appointments:she'd have him reporting on Saturday afternoons, minimum, orswabbing out the Porchester Baths.And how is the little one? Yeah,that's it. Call it the little one because she can't remember its name. How's diddums? How's toddles? They come in here . . .And is your husband in employment at present? Power like. Stick their fuckingoar in. Got no kids or one family's not enough. Keith craned forward and saw one flat black shoe suspended in the air beneath the kitchen table and slowly rocking.


'And is your husband at home at the moment', he heard the voice ask, 'or is it you who's smoking all these cigarettes?'


At that Keith let out a savage and protracted belch, a belch thatsaid to all that he would never yield.


Clive barked. Kath said, 'He is, yes. He's not been well.'


'So it would appear. The child . . . You're aware, no doubt, of theharm caused by passive smoking?'


'I smoked passively every day of my life and it never did me anyharm.'


'Didn't it?'


Keith was now burping in varied and horrid volleys.


'I'm afraid I might have to see about a hygiene order.'


'Hygiene? Listen. 1 mean we haven't got what some have. We're justtrying, you know?'


'You tell her, Kath,' shouted Keith.


'I mean you come in here . . .'


'Speak your mind, girl,' shouted Keith.


Kath said, 'I'm starting to wonder about whatyou're doing andhowyou're feeling. There's nothing I wouldn't do for my baby.Nothing.'


'Except you haven't got anymoney, have you. You just haven't gotenoughmoney. My God, the smoke. And I can't say I like the look ofthat dog. Do you abuse your daughter, Mrs Talent?'


'Oi!'


Keith could stand for this no longer. His protective instincts werestirred. Loyalty: it was a question of loyalty. Nobody talked that wayabout Keith's dog - or about his cigarettes, which were superking- sized and had international standing. He was out of that bed by nowand struggling with the mangled length of his ginger dressing-gown.Heavily he appeared in the doorway - browngowned Keith, fag inmouth, one arm working at the flapping sleeve, in variegated whiteness of pants and vest and flesh - and looked into the eyes ofNicola Six.


What was she doing?


What was she doing?


If the intelligent eye could lift off and climb past eaves andskylights, and speed over rooftops, and settle as it liked where peoplethought they were alone — what on earth would it see?


Nicola backing towards her bed with a glass of champagne in onehand and the other raised and beckoning, in black elbow-lengthgloves and a cocktail dress the colour of jealousy, and on her face anunrecognizable smile. Now she sat, and placed the glass on thebedside table, with a languid stretch of her wings, and remained for a moment in perfect profile, facing the window: pensively. Then her black gloves began to take rapt interest in the presumably exquisitetexture of her dress — that bit that housed her breasts. Oh, the look ofyoung wonder! She shook back her hair and started to unclasp.


Who was watching? Who saw her stand and lower the dress to her feet and step out of the lillybed in her high heels? And turn, and lookup sleepily, and blow a little kiss, and wiggle a black finger. Nobody.Or nobody now. Just the single eye of the pistol-grip camera, placedon the chest by the door.


This would undoubtedly be for Keith.


'Jesus,' I asked her, 'what are you doing?'


'Oh, it's nice to get out and about. Look who's talking. Whatabout you and your crazed excursion?'


I held up an open palm at her.


'Your love-quest. . . I'm sorry. Are you very sad?'


'I'll live,' I said. Not the happiest choice of words. 'It wasn't meantto be.'


Nicola nodded and smiled. She was sitting opposite me, the lowerhalf of her body strongly curled into the lap of the wicker chair. Itwas about two a.m. When she spoke you could see deep darkness inher mouth. 'Your nerve went,' she said.


'Listen. We're not all puppetmasters like you. And even you needthe run of the play. You need accidents, coincidences. I happen toknow there's a nice little accident that'll help speed things up withGuy.'


'I do need real life. It's true. For instance, I need the class system. Ineed nuclear weapons. I need the eclipse.'


'You need the Crisis.'


Blinking steadily, she sipped red wine and lit another blackcigarette. A strand of tobacco stuck to her upper lip until hertongue removed it. With gusto she scratched her hair, and thenfrowned at her fingernails, each of which seemed to contain abouta quid deal of hashish. Yes, she certainly looked off-duty to­night. I'm the only one who ever sees her like this. She lets me. Shelikes me. I'm a hit with all the wrong chicks: Lizzyboo, Kim, Incarnacion.


'Nicola, I'm worried about you, as usual. And in a peculiar way,as usual. I'm worried they're going to say you're a male fantasyfigure.'


'Iam a male fantasy figure. I've been one for fifteen years. It reallytakes it out of a girl.'


'But they don't know that.'


'I'm sorry, I justam. You should see me in bed. I do all thegimmicks men read up on in the magazines and the hot books.'


'Nicola.'


'So they'll think you're just a sick dreamer. Who cares? You won'tbe around for that.'


'You neither. I was thinking. You're hard to categorize, even inthe male fantasy area. Maybe you're a mixture of genres. A mutant,'I went on (I love these typologies). 'You're not a Sexpot. Not dizzyenough. You're not a Hot Lay either, not quite. Too calculating.You're definitely something of a Sack Artist. Anda Mata Haritoo. And a Vamp. And a Ballbreaker. In the end, though, I'm fingeringyou for a Femme Fatale. I like it. Nice play on words. Semi-exotic.No, I like it. It's cute.'


'A Femme Fatale? I'm not a Femme Fatale. Listen, mister: FemmesFatalesare ten a penny compared to what I am.'


'What are you then?'


'Christ, you still don't get it, do you.'


I waited.


'I'm a Murderee.'


We went out walking. We can do this.Oh — what you see in London streets at three o'clock in the morning, with it trickling outto the eaves and flues, tousled water, ragged waste. Violence is nearand inexhaustible. Even death is near. But none of it can touchNicola and me. It knows better, and stays right out of our way. It can't touch us. It knows this. We're the dead.


My love-quest did something to me.Heathrow did something to me. I can still feel the burning vinyl on my cheek. What happens,when love-thoughts go out — and just meet vinyl?


Now I've had some bad airport experiences. I've been everywhereand long ago stopped getting much pleasure from the planet. In fact Iam that lousy thing: a citizen of the world. I've faced utterimpossibilities, outright no-can-dos, at Delhi, Sao Paulo, Beijing. But you wait, and the globe turns, and suddenly there is a crevicethat fits your shape. Heathrow provided no such fuel for optimism,or even for stoicism. Zeno himself would have despaired instantly.The queues, the queues, cross hatched by the extra-frantic, theextra-needing. Too many belongings. Too many people all wanting to do the same thing . . .


And now the dreams have come. Something happened to me. Ifell, down, down, tumbling end over end.


The dreams have come, right on schedule, as Dr Slizard warned.And if the dreams have come, then can the pain be far behind?


I always thought I was up to anything that dreams could throw atme: I'd just sleep right through them, and get some much-neededrest. But these dreams are different, as Slizard said they would be.After Incarnacion has been here the bed is plump and impeccably uniformed, and I repose trust in its square-shouldered pride, itsbursting chest! On most nights, though, it looks about ready for me, intricately coiled, waiting for the stripped creature on his handsand knees.


As Slizard foretold, the dreams are notrecuperableby memory,or not yet anyway, and this suits me right down to the ground. Ihave the impression that they deal with the very large and the verysmall — the unbearably large, the unbearably small. But I can'tremember them, and I'm glad. Bad news for me, these dreams turnout to be bad news for Lizzyboo, too. I always used to think howheavenly it would be — at least in the abstract — to wake up toher, to wake up to all that honeytone and health (the sun lightsthis scene gently: her back bears warm creases from the pressof her fanned hair; and then she turns). No longer. I'm not going to wake up to anybody ever again. I couldn't let Lizzyboo wake up to me, a gaunt zero, zilched by death. I can feel the unslepthours and the unremembered dreams queuing in waves above myhead.


Quaintly, Slizard advises me not to eat cheese. This from hisoffice in the Pan Am building in New York, the envy of the uni­verse. I heed his words. Cheese? No thank you. I stay right off thatshit. Don't grate no cheese on my pasta. Not a single Dairylea splitwith Kim. At the Black Cross, I take a pass on the cheese-and-onion crisps. Offered cocktails at the Clinches', I don't touch so much as acheese football. And yet when 1 sleep what reeking Stiltons, whatslobbering camemberts and farting gorgonzolas come and oozeacross my sleep.


Lizzyboo says she eats too much when she is unhappy. She tells methis, between mouthfuls, in the Clinch kitchen. She tells me more over her shoulder from the icebox or the cooker. It's a terrible thing with her. Always the kiddie stuff: fish fingers, milkshakes, bakedbeans, sticky buns. Her weight shoots up. Lizzyboo and her weight! Ididn't know? Yes, the slightest sidestep from her starvation diet -and grotesque obesity is at the door with its bags. I wonder if it can bethe force of suggestion, but over the past few days a quarter-moonseems to have formed beneath her chin, and an extra belt of flesharound her midriff. She takes her head out of the bread-bin to tell methat she doesn't know what she's going to do about it.


Although I could point a finger at the world situation, I'm clearlymeant to take the blame for this. For this disaster also I am obliged topocket the tab. 'Come on, honey,' I say to her. 'There are plenty offish in the sea.' Again, a poor choice of words, perhaps. Because therearen't plenty of fish in the sea, not any more. Lizzyboo shakes her head. She looks at the floor. She gets up and heads for the grill andsadly makes herself a cheese dream.


When entering America these days it is advisable to look yourbest. Wear a tuxedo, for instance, or a vicar outfit. Penguin suit,dog collar: take your pick. Me? I looked like a bum, in bum suit,under bum hair, on bum shoes, when I crept into a cab, twentymiles from Missy Harter. My eyes felt as red as cayenne pepper - asred as the digital dollars on the cabby's moneyclock. It was night.But I could see the cabby's signs as clear as day. Passengers wereasked to stow their own bags(driver handicapped) and, ofcourse, to refrain from smoking(driver allergic). pleasetalk loudwas a third notification of the cabby's many disabili­ties and cares. Even with three of the four lanes down we madegood speed into the city. Just enough moon to see the clouds by, clouds shaped like the tread of a gumboot, or a tyre, or a tank. Overthe sky's sandflats the gibbous moon seemed tipped slightlysideways and smiling like a tragic mask. Beneath, half-clearedrustbelt.sherato. texac. Even the big concerns losing theirletters. Then the city: life literalized, made concrete, concret­ized, massively concretized. Here it comes. And as we passed thePentagon, the biggest building on earth, visible from space, I saw thatevery last window was burning bright.


That was my American dream. America? All I did was dream her. Iwoke up and I was still in Heathrow Airport, with my cheek on thehot vinyl. For fifteen minutes I watched a middle-aged man chewinggum, the activity all between the teeth and the upper lip, like a rabbit.And then I just thought: Enough.


It was hard getting back into London: I nearly flunked even that. Even getting back into London took my very best shot (No danger.You won't get a cab here, pal. No way). Before, I never thought I'd beable to live with myself if I failed to get to Missy and America. But maybe I can. After all, it won't be for terribly long.


Thatdream...So dogged, so detailed - so literal. One of thosedreams where things happen at the same speed as they do in real life.It included a convincing four-hour wait in Reimmigration. MissyHarter used to dream like that, always; she used to lie by my side, andspend half the night in the Library of Congress or shopping atValducci's. Something tells me that I won't dream like that everagain. From now on, each night, it'll be special relativity —Einsteinian excruciation. So maybe the American dream was afarewell to dreams. And to much else.


What was I doing? The whole thing, the whole love-quest, thewhole idea: it was from another world. Forget it. Turn back. Back totry the art and dice with death and hate, and not fight for love in someunreal war .


Chapter 14: The Pinching Game


f we couldpass through her force field (and we can't quite dothis, force fields being strongest round the beautiful and the mad),we would know that her stomach wall hurt and weighed heavily,that she felt occasional drags and brakings of nausea, that all sorts ofsalmon were bouncing upwards against the stream. But here shecomes, the character, Nicola Six on the street, on the GolborneRoad, bringing a packet of light through all the random hesitation. Not that the street was without colour and definition on this day: itlooked shorn in the low sun, plucked and smarting, with a bristle ofgolden dust. But Nicola brought light through it, human light, even dressed as she was, for simple authority: black cord skirt and tightblack cashmere cardigan, white shirt with blue ribbon serving as bowtie, hair back (before the mirror, earlier, a daunting emphasis ofeyebrow). She was getting all the right kinds of look. Womenstraightened their necks at her; men glanced, and dipped their heads. Only one discordant cry, from the back of a truck, and fading: 'MissWorld! Miss World!' Everyone else seemed to be shifting sideways ordiagonally but Nicola was travelling dead ahead.


The entrance to Windsor House immediately extinguished all herlight. Nicola slowed for an instant, then kept going; she used amental trick she had of pretending not to be there. The steepedconcrete shone in the low sun, and even fumed slightly with the fiercetang of urine. It would have been a humiliation to approach them, soclearly were the lifts defunct — slaughtered, gone, dead these twentyyears. She peered up the vortex of the stone stairwell and felt-she wasunderneath a toilet weighing ten thousand tons.


'Want I mind your car?' said a passing four-year-old.


'I haven't got a car.'


'Die, bitch.'


She climbed up past scattered toilet-dwellers, non-schoolgoing schoolboys and schoolgirls, non-working men and women, past thenumb stares of the youthful and the aged. She faced them all strongly;she knew she looked enough like the government. She felt no fear.Walking naked up these steps (she told herself), with her bare feet onthe wet stone, Nicola would have felt no fear. That was part of it: nomore fear. She paused on the tenth floor and smoked half a cigarette, watching an old toiletman tearfully trying to uncap a damaged can ofPeculiar Brew.


Like everybody else, Nicola knew that council flats were small —controversially small. In a bold response to an earlier crisis, it was decided to double the number of council flats. They didn't build anynew council flats. They just halved all the old council flats. As shewalked along the ramp of the fifteenth storey, open to the search of thelow sun, Nicola could hardly fail to notice that the front doors alternated in colour, elderly green interspliced by a more recent buteven flakier dark orange. The front doors were also hilariously closetogether.


She halted. Faultily the bell sounded.


It was Nicola's view that she was performing very creditably,especially during the first two or three minutes, in that storm or panicof sense-impressions. To begin with there was the kaleidoscopicwheeling that her entry forced upon the kitchen, the chain ofrearrangements made necessary by the admission ofone more personinto the room. Then vertigo relaxed into claustrophobia — armpit-torching, heat-death claustrophobia. Distractedly her parched eyessearched for a living thing. There was a plastic pot on the minif ridge. Init, some kind of maimed gherkin was apparently prospering; it rose from the soil at an unforgivable angle. Then she had to confront thepallor and distress of the mother, and the surprising child on the floor(the intelligent valves of its watchful face), and the flummoxed dog. Christ, even the dog looked declassed. Even the dog was meant forbetter things. Next door to the left a man and a woman werequarrelling with infinite weariness. The room was split-levelled with cigarette smoke. Nicola pressed her thighs together to feel the goodsilk between her legs. She hadn't been anywhere this small since shewas five years old.


Still hidden from sight, Keith hardly went unnoticed. As theolfactory nerve-centre of this particular stall or cubicle, Keith hardlywent unnoticed. Although he remained at the far end of the flat, he was none the less only a few feet away. Keith was very close. Nicola couldhear a beercan pop, a lighter worked and sworn at, the severe intakesof air and smoke. Then the inhuman hostility of his eructations . . .Time to flush him out. Time, because the place could not be borne -was astonishingly unbearable, even for an expert, like her. Feeling youwere in Nigeria was one thing. In Nigeria, and trapped in Nigeria, andnot at the scene of a drought or a famine but of an industrialcatastrophe caused by greed. And there for your own advancement, tomake what you could of the suffering. The talk was two-way torture.She said,


'Except you haven't got anymoney, have you. You just haven't gotenoughmoney. Do you abuse your daughter, Mrs Talent?'


'Oi!'


They waited.


And Keith loomed, loomed large in the Keith-sized kitchen. He wasn't that big; but he was gigantic in here. When their eyes met hepaused heavily. Up from the depths of the brown dressing-gown camea sallow blush of shame or rage or both.


'I'm sorry,' said Nicola, with some haughtiness, 'but it seems to methat self-hatred is more or less forced on one in conditions like these.There'd be no way round it. Without self-hatred you wouldn't last fiveminutes.'


'Hey,' said Keith.'Hey. You.Fuck off out of it.'


Kath turned slowly to her husband, as if he were a wonderfuldoctor, as if he were a wonderful priest. She turned back to Nicola andsaid, 'Yes. Care? What kind of care do you get from an office? Andfrom someone like you, doing your hobby or whatever it is you're doing. Get out.'


Tell her, Kath,' said Keith calmly.


'Get out, you old witch. Get out. You vicious thing.'


'Well as I said before, 'said Nicola, gathering herself and looking up into Keith's considering sneer, inches from her eyes, 'it's nothing morenor less than a question of money.'


She swayed out on to the ramp. Violently yanked from inside, thedoor gave an agonized creak and then closed almost noiselessly.


Nicola found that she was short of breath and taking great bites out ofthe air. Now to get back and prepare for Keith's coming. As she turnedshe heard the voices from the toy house.


'Vicious. Purely vicious.'


'They can't touch you, girl. You are who you are. Don't ever forgetit. You are who you are, girl. You are who you are.'


So when he rangher bell, when he buzzed and blurted and camejinking up the last flight of stairs, Nicola was ready for this summitmeeting, ready to turn all the new energies her way. She had done Keith violence, but she wanted no violence done to her, not yet. Shewanted that violence violently stoppered. It was all right: she had the money. And any innocent or idiot could tell that a considerable sex-deflection would also be called for. Thinking this, Nicola hadbreathed in sharply and embraced herself, bristling - even her breastshad bristled. Love wouldn't do it. (Keith wasn't the type.) Sexwouldn't do it either, all by itself. Not even Nicola's sex, whose powerhad so often astonished even Nicola Six: the threats, the reckless bribes (money, marriage), the whimperings, the unmannings and unravellings, the bared teeth, the tendons of the neck so savagelystretched . . .


Keith entered. Nicola stood at the table in the darkened room,counting money under an angle lamp. She wore a black nightgown ofcandid vulgarity. With her hair freed and a third of each breastshowing and no smile on her business face, she hoped to resemble aMonaco madame after a hard week in her first tax year of semiretire-ment, or something like that, as seen on TV. She removed her darkglasses and looked into the shadows for him. He looked back into thelight. Silently, their force fields touched. And said:


Home was his secret. Nobody had ever been there before. Oh, therehad been ingress: rentmen and census people, the police, and cheatingelectricians and would-be plumbers and so on as well as real socialworkers and probation officers—but nobody he knew. Not ever. Only the dog, and the woman, and the child: the insiders. They, too, weresecrets. Home was his terrible secret. Home was his dirty little secret.And now the secret was out.


'Once upon a time,' saidNicola carefully, 'your wife must have beenvery lovely.'


'You shouldn't've fucking done it, Nick.'


'And the little girl is divine. What did you say your dog was called?’


'You shouldn't've fucking done it, Nick.'


'Such a noble beast. Keith, Iunderstand. You didn't want me toknow, did you, that you lived like a pig.'


'That's so...That's so out oforder.'


She had a bottle of whiskey and two long glasses ready. One of theglasses she filled with perhaps a quarter of a pint of neat spirit. She tooktwo swallows, and came round the table towards him.


'Have some of this.'


And he took two swallows.


Nicola could be taller than Keith when she wanted to be. She wascertainly taller than him now, in her four-inch high heels. Keeping herlegs straight she leant back on the table and dropped her head,murmuring, 'I took some of your money and spent it on new stockings and things. I hope you don't mind.' She looked up and said, 'You doknow why I'm doing this, don't you, Keith? You do know what this whole thing is really all about?' Nicola didn't feel like laughing. But she did think it was wonderfully funny.


'What?'


'It's your darts: listen.'


The speech went on for five or six minutes. She then took him by the hand and guided his leaden body towards the sofa, saying, 'I've made alittle tape for you, Keith, which in its curious way will help show youwhat I mean.'


. . . The black elbow-length gloves, the look of young wonder, thejealous dress, the blown kiss, the wiggling black finger, beckoning.


'Slow it,' moaned Keith, as the fade began. With a soft snarl hesnatched at the remote. Then Nicola's quarter-clad brown bodydashed backwards, and became a clockwork mannequin, then a livingstatue, as Keith froze the frame of choice.


'That,' said Keith, and sighed, not with yearning so much as withprofessional sincerity, 'that is the real thing.'


She gave him the money now, negligently tossing handful afterhandful into a tradenamed shopping-bag, and then led him into thepassage. Every now and again Keith tried to look shrewd anddeserving, but his lips kept scrolling into an adolescent leer. Standingabove him at the top of the stairs, she folded her arms and appeared to gaze downwards at herself. 'The eternal appeal of the cleavage, Keith.What is it, I wonder. The symmetry. The proximal tension.'


'Prestigious,' said Keith. 'Looks nice,'


'In the books, they say, rather wistfully, that men want to put theirfacesthere. Return to mother, Keith. But I don't agree. I don't think men want to put their faces there.'


Keith nodded his head, and then shook it.


'/ think they want to put their cocks there, Keith.I think they wantto fuck the tits. Ooh, I bet they do.'


'Yeah cheers,' said Keith.


This wasn't the real thing. Just a mannequin, on the remote.'Remember. Next time you see him: mention poetry. I don't care how.And meanwhile, masturbate about me, Keith. Beat off about me. As a form of training. A lot. All those things you wanted to do to girls andwere too shy to. Or they wouldn't let you. Do them to me. In yourhead.'


Keith's eyes seemed to be seeping upwards beneath his lids. 'Giveme a taste. Come on, doll. Give me a taste.'


She must touch him. With three long fingers she felt his hair: as dry as fire-hazard gorse. One spark and it would all go up. She took a gripnear the snagged parting line and pulled back slowly. Then, leaninginto his opened face—and already hearing the swill of mouthwash, thetwanging floss (it isn't me doing this: it's Enola, Enola Gay) - she gavehim the Jewish Princess.


The telephone was ringing. Nicola drank whiskey. She lifted thereceiver, heard the panicking pips, paused, and dialled six. 'I'm afraidI'm not here,' she said. And she even meant it, in a way. 'If you'd like toleave a message, please speak after the tone.'


Of course, there was no tone, and they both waited. Christ, howmany seconds?


'Hello? Hello, Nicola? . . . God, I'm completely soaked. It's soawkward, talking to a machine. Listen. I've been -'


She pressed down with a finger.


Carefully Guy ducked his head out of the telephone cubicle and turnedto face the street-wide wall of rain. Music was playing — it came andwent beneath the thunder-racetrack of the sky. The right music, too. Guy turned: an old black man in the corner with a sax and the fiercemelancholy of Coleman Hawkins. What was it? Yes. 'Yesterdays'.Guy would certainly be giving him money.


He stood in the steeped emptiness of the underground station onLadbroke Grove, barely half a mile from the house, where he hadrecently discovered a live telephone box - in a long rank of dead ones.Quite a find. Like seeing a pterodactyl, complacently perched on atelegraph wire among the sparrows and worn old crows. Foreverintensifying, the rain was now coming down so hard that even the cars seemed to be wading off home. Just buses, like lit fortifications, stalledin the wet night. That song: such complication, such grievous entan­glement. First you go through this, it was saying. Then you go throughthis.Then you go throughthis. Life, thought Guy. When at last theman was finished Guy went over and pressed a ten-pound note into hisstyrofoam cup. 'That was beautiful,' he said. No answer. Guy turnedand walked. And then the man called out: 'Hey buddy. Ilove you.'


Five long strides got him under the bus-stop shelter. Already he wasfarcically drenched. Rather than go straight home, where Marma-duke was in any case well-attended despite the nanny shortage (two night nurses until he was better again), Guy dreamed up reasons forbreaking the journey with a visit to the Black Cross: two hundredyards along Lancaster Road. He kept on waiting for the rain to slack­en. But it didn't. It kept on doing the other thing. It was lashing down,just like they said, whipstroke after whipstroke, in climbing anger.Extremity upon extremity, and then more extremity, and then more.


As Guy dodged and jumped towards the Portobello Road and itslow-strung lights he saw a figure splashing about like a stage-drunk inthe swollen gutter beneath the lamp.Keith. And he wasn't staggering.He was dancing, and laughing. And coughing.


'Keith?'


'. . . Yo!'


'My God, what are you doing?'


Keith sank backwards against the lamp-post, his head up, his gutsoftly shaking with laughter or exasperation -with laughter or defeat.He had a green carrier-bag, crushed to him beneath his crossed arms.'Oh, mate,' he said.'You tell me. What's it all about, eh? Because Idon't fucking get it.'


'Come on in. Look at us.'


'Because I don't fucking get it.'


'What?'


'Life.'


Now a tomato-red Jaguar jerked round the corner and came to anurgent halt beneath the lamp.


'Here comes summer.'


The back door opened and a voice said from the containeddarkness, 'Get in the car, Keith.'


'Cheers, lads.’


'Get in the fucking car, Keith.'


Guy straightened, showing all his height. Keith held up a dripping hand. 'It's okay,' he said. 'No, it's okay. Only messing.' Keith steppedforward, and stooped. Then he said casually over his shoulder, 'We'llhave a drink. Not in there. Inna Golgotha. I'll -' A hand came out ofthe shadow and Keith flopped suddenly into the back seat. 'Ten mimff.Oof!'


He shouted something else and sustained another blow but Guycouldn't hear in all the rain's swish and gloss.


Re-entering the Golgotha meant rejoining it, at heavy expense,because Guy hadn't brought his stencilled nametag and could donothing with the doorman's wordless stare. With some reluctance heordered aporno (in the context of the Golgotha, Keith frowned on allother drinks) and secured a table by the fruit-machines, some distancefrom the band. As he did so he marvelled at this new thinghe had: guts.Guy didn't even look around for another white face. For some reason the physical world was feeling more and more nugatory. He thoughtthat perhaps this was a consequence or side-effect of the time he wasliving through: the sudden eschatology of the streets; the tubedsaplings and their caged trash, marking the place where each humanbeing might be terribly interred; her leggy disarray and the bubble at the centre of everything . . . Keith came in; he held up a bent thumb,and then vanished, soon to reappear with a glass and an unopenedbottle ofporno - a litre bottle, too, or possibly even a magnum.


'Are you all right?'


Keith's grinning face looked hot and swollen, and one of his earswas a startling crimson, with the beginnings of a rip showing beneath the lobe. A patch of blood on his hair had had time to dry and then todeliquesce again in the rain. He kept looking at the middle finger of hisright hand as if it had a ring on it, which it didn't.


'Nah, load of nonsense. They're good as gold really. All forgottennow as such.'


His clothes were smoking. But so were Guy's. Everyone wassmoking in the Golgotha, and everyone's clothes were smoking too. This was what happened when water met with warmth; and the rain that fell on London now gave off smoke for reasons of its own.


After a few quick glasses Keith said, 'I'm going to treat meselftonight. Debbee Kensit. Debbee - she's special to me. You know what I mean? Not yet fully mature. And pure. Natural love. Not like some.Nothing dirty. No way.’


'Dirty?' said Guy.


'Yeah. You know. Like gobbling and that. Seen uh . . ?'


At once Guy raised a forefinger to his eyebrow. 'Not in a while.'


'I don't understand you, Guy Clinch. I don't. Know what she said tomethe other day? She said, "Keith?" I said, "Yeah?" She said,"Keith?" I said, "Don't start." She said, "Keith? You know, there'snothing -I wouldn't do - when I go a bundle on a bloke like that." There. That's what she said.'


Guy was staring at him in addled incredulity. 'Wait a minute. She . . . toldyou -'


'Or words to that effect,' said Keith quickly. 'Now hang on. Hangon. You're getting off on the wrong foot here, pal. She didn'tsay it.Obviously. Not in so many words.'


'So she said what?'


'It was like from thispoem or something,' said Keith, with whatcertainly seemed to be sincere disgust. 'Christ! How'm I supposed toknow. Eh? I'm just scum. Go on. Say it. I'm just scum.'


'You don't -'


'Jesus. Oh, excuse me, mate. No no. I'm not sitting through this. Icome in here. Relax. A few drinks. You try to bring two people together in this world.'


'Keith.'


'I expected better of you, Guy. I'm disappointed, mate. Verydisappointed.'


'Keith. It's not like that. Look. I really apologize.'


'Well then. And listen: I didn't mean no disrespect to her either.Neither.'


'Keith, of course you didn't.'


'Well then. Okay. Yeah cheers. I'm glad we... Because you andme, we . . .'


Guy suddenly felt that Keith might be on the verge of tears. He hadcertainly been punishing theporno. Something else told Guy that thewordlove was not too far away.


'Because you and me, we — we ought to look out for each other.Because we're in this together.'


'In what?' said Guy lightly.


Keith said, 'Life. In this life.'


They both sat up straight and cleared their throats at the same time.


'I didn't see you there Saturday.'


'You were there, were you?’


'You didn't -'


'No, I couldn't. What was it like?'


Keith dropped his head and peered up at Guy with an expression ofrich indulgence. He said, 'Obviously the visitors were keen to blood their new signing from north of the border, Jon Trexell. How wouldthe twenty-three-year-old make the transition from Ibrox Park to Loftus Road? At just under a million one of Rangers' more costly acquisitions in the modern era, no way was the young Scot about todisappoint. . .'


Twelve hours later Guy came down the stairs of his house inLansdowne Crescent, carrying the breakfast tray and hummingnon piъ andrai.He paused and fell silent outside the door of the maindrawing-room. He put two and two together. Hope was interviewing,or importuning, a new nanny. Guy listened for a while to the conjuringof large sums of money. Nanny auditions were a constant feature ofHope's daily life. There had been a standing ad inThe Lady ever since the week of Marmaduke's birth... He went on down to the kitchen,bidding good morning to a cleaning-lady, a maid, a nurse, two elderly decorators (the cornices?), and an outgoing nanny (Caroline?), whowas openly drinking cooking-sherry and taking deep breaths as shestared in wonder at the garden. Blindingly lit by the low sun, the near end of the room was still a slum of toys. Both the closed-circuit TVscreens were dead but Guy's attention was drawn by a portableintercom on the table. Its business end must have been in the roomabove, because you could hear Marmaduke in stereo. He wasevidently being quite good, as was often the case when a new nannywas in prospect. To hear him now, a stranger might have thought thatthe child had suffered nothing worse in the past few minutes than a savage and skilful beating. Abruptly everyone in the kitchen yelpedwith fright at an atrocious crash from the room above.


'No no,Melba,'Guy sang, heading off the maid as she went for the industrial vacuum-cleaner beneath the stairs. Til do it.' Present myselfto the new nanny: present the normal smile. One behaves as if that's allnannies could possibly want: normality.


'Melba!'yelled Hope as Guy came swerving into the room,grappling with nozzle and base. Marmaduke had somehow toppledthe full-length eighteenth-century wall mirror, and was now gamelystruggling to go and throw himself in its shards. Hope held him.Between the child's legs the cord of a lamp dangerously tautened. Guy stared into the Kristallnacht of fizzing glass.


'Melba'.'yelled Guy.


After a few minutes Guy helpedMelbafold the crackling binliner.He got up from his knees, brushed himself down — ouch! — and turnedas Hope was saying,


'. . . quite as hectic as this. Darling, don't. Please don't. This is myhusband, Mr Clinch, and I'm sorry, what did you say your name was ?'


'Enola. Enola Gay.'


You look for the loved one everywhere, of course, in passing cars, inhigh windows — even in that aeroplane overhead, that crucifix of theheavens. You always want the loved one tobe there, wherever. She isthe object of the self's most urgent quest, and you search for her sleeplessly, every night, in your dreams . . . Guy felt panic, andpleasure: she was here, she was closer, and how gentle she looked inpink. Obeying a lucky instinct, Guy came forward and kissed his wifegood morning. Whatever other effects this had it predictably causedMarmaduke to attack him. Left free for a moment to wander down theroom, the child saw the caress and ran back over to break it up. ThusGuy was busy pinning Marmaduke to the floor as he heard Hope say,


The money I think you'll agree is extremely generous. I've neverheard of anyone paying anything even approaching that. You canwear what you like. You'll have backup most of the day fromMelbaand Phoenix and whoever. You'll have the use of a car. You get adouble rate for any Saturdays you might like to do, and triple forSundays. You can ha ve all your meals here. You can move in. In fact —'


Melbaknocked and re-entered. Three builders or gardeners stood ominously in her wake.


'Do excuse me for a moment,' said Hope.


So then. Leeringly chaperoned by Marmaduke, Guy and Nicola satten feet apart, on facing sofas. Guy couldn't talk to her; he found, onceagain, that he couldn't even look at her.


But Marmaduke felt differently. He slid from his father's grip. Heput his hands in his pockets and sidled across the carpet. Checking outa new nanny — checking out her tits and weakspots: this was meat anddrink to Marmaduke.


'Hello then,' he heard her say. 'You're a cool customer, aren't you?Guy, I'm so sorry. I hoped you wouldn't be here. I had to do this-I hadto see. Ow! I say, that's quite a pinch. I got your message and I felt so—Isee. Well, two can play at that, young man. Come to me today. Youmust. It's called the Pinching Game.'


The door opened. Guy looked up: Hope was summoning him withher strictest face. He trudged from the room in his enormous shoes.Hope knew: it was soobvious. Guy felt as though a new force had beenintroduced into nature, like gravity but diagonal and outwards- acting: it might take the lid off everything, the room, the house.


'Well?' said Hope in the hall with her hands high on her hips.


'I . . .'


'We take her, right? We grab her. We gobble her up.'


He hesitated. 'Has she any qualifications?'


'I didn't ask.'


'Has she any references?'


'Who cares?'


'Wait,' said Guy. At his back he felt the glare of what he assumed tobe dramatic irony. 'Isn't she a bit goodlooking?'


'What? It's incredibly quiet in there.'


'You always said that the goodlooking ones weren't any use.'


'Who are we to be picky?'


Guy laughed briefly and quietly.


'I mean,' continued Hope in a loud whisper, 'he's worked his way through all the ugly ones.'


They heard a harsh moan from within. It was quite unlike any soundthey had heard Marmaduke make before. The parents hurried in,expecting the usual scene. Nanny hunched in a corner or diagnosingsome facial injury in the mirror. Marmaduke brandishing a lock ofhair or a torn bra strap. But it wasn't like that. Enola Gay was lookingup at them with unalloyed composure while Marmaduke Clinchbacked away, nursing his wrist, and with a new expression on his face,as if he had just learnt something (one of life's lessons), as if he hadnever known such outrage, such scandal.


The house was a masterpiece. How it scintillated, how itthrummed.So much canvas, and so much oil. How confidently it put forward itsnoble themes of continuity and repose, with everything beautifullyinterlinked. And Nicola's presence was like a fuse. Because she could make the whole thing go up.


Of course, the house wasn't art. It was life. And there were costs.Naturally, money was one of them. The house didn't eat money. Itscattered money. Money flew off it, like tenners fed to an open propeller. From miles around people came to scour and primp it, to doctor it for more use, more work. Scrubbers and swabbers on their knees, the quivering plimsolls of an electrician upended beneath thejoists, a plumber flat on his back, a mangled sweep slithering up thechimney, labourers, repairmen, staggering installers, guaranteecheckers, meter readers; and, of course, Marmaduke's many myrmid­ons. Sometimes Guy imagined it was all laid on for the child. The dinkyboy-drama of skip-removal. The spillikins of scaffolding. All the ruinand wreckage.


The other thing the house used up wasorder. Each day thedoublefronted dishwasher, the water softener, the carrot peeler, thepasta patterner got closer and closer to machine death, hurtlingtowards chaos. Each day the cleaning-lady went home tireder, older,iller. A citadel of order, the house hurried along much entropyelsewhere. With so much needed to keep it together, the house must deep down be dying to collapse or fly apart. . . Feeling hunger, andthe desire to do something suddenly serious, Guy went downstairsagain, stepping over a carpet-layer and pausing on his way toexchange a few words withMelba,whose strength for years he hadbought and sapped . . .


His hands were steady as he poured milk and buttered bread.Now here was another conjugal secret: he pulled out the morningpaper from beneath a stack of Marmaduke's toy brochures, wherehe had earlier hidden it from Hope, and turned again to the op-edpage. There was the article or extract, unsigned, offered withoutcomment. Of course, in these days of gigawatt thunderstorms, multimegaton hurricanes and billion-acre bush fires, it was easy toforget that there were man-made devices — pushbutton, fingertip —which could cause equivalent havoc. But then all this stuff wasman-made, not acts of God but acts of man...So the first eventwould be light-speed. A world become white like a pale sun. I didn'tknow that. Didn't know the heat travelled at the speed of light. (Ofcourse: like solar rays.) Everything that faced the window would turn to fire: the checked curtains, this newspaper, Marmaduke'stailored dungarees. The next event would come rather faster than the speed of sound, faster than the noise, the strident thunder, the heavensplitting vociferation of fission. This would be blast over­pressure. Coming through the streets at the speed of Concorde, notin a wave exactly but surrounding the house and causing it to burstoutwards.The house, in effect, would become a bomb, and all its plaster and order, its glass and steel would be shrapnel, buckshot.No difference, in that outcome, between this house and any other.His house, the thrumming edifice of negative entropy, would beordinary chaos in an instant, would be just like wherever Keith lived,or Dean, or Shakespeare. Then everything would be allowed. Guyshut his eyes and helplessly watched himself running north throughlow flames and winds of soot; then her room, torn open to a sick sky,and an act of love performed among the splinters - forgivable, but with her beauty quite gone, and everything spoiled and sullen and dead.


Tvegot to stop,' he said with a sudden nod.


'Pardon?' came Melba's voice sweetly.


'Oh, I'm sorry,Melba.It's nothing.'


'The Effects of Thermonuclear Detonations', taken from some­thing they referred to as 'Glasstone & Dolan (1977,3rd edn)', amongthe editorials on deforestation and nurses' pay, next to a report aboutConcorde moving into overall profit by the end of the year, and above the astronomy column, which said that the Apollo object torn loose from the asteroid belt would miss the earth by a quarter of a millionmiles. Which sounded good. But that was where the moon was. Farewells were sounding on the intercom when Guy crushed thenewspaper into the bottom of the rubbish bin. He swallowed as he felther force field leaving the house.


And the house was still there.


Guy peered into the hall. By the sound of it, Marmaduke haddispersed — upstairs with Phoenix and Hjordis, no doubt. Now Guyabruptly cringed to the greeting of Dink Heckler.


'Hey,' said Dink, and pointed with an index finger.


'Dink. How are you?'


'Good.'


The South African number seven was of course in tenniswear. Hispressed shorts were candy-white against the scribbled slabs of histhighs. Encased in practically cuboid gyms, Dink's feet were plantedstupidly far apart.


'You're playing', said Guy, 'in this weather?'


'For sure.' Dink stared through the half-glass front door at thebright October morning, and then stared back at Guy with an expression of fastidious disquiet. 'What's the matter? You seesomething I don't?'


'It's just the — the low sun. Rather blinding.'


Hope now came skipping down the stairs saying, 'That's good.She's starting today. At one.'


'/s she,' said Guy.


Hope looked at Guy, at Dink, at Guy again. 'Are youokay?. . .Actually I'm encouraged. I thought she was amazing. Marmadukewas quite silent with her. He looked completely stunned. Shemust have this terrific authority. You know he's having anap upthere?'


'Amazing,' said Guy.


Then Hope said with finality, 'I'm playing with Dink.'


Under the buxom duvet, in the vestiges of his wife's sleepy body-scent, behind half-drawn curtains, Guy lay staring at the ceiling, itselfsignificantly charged with the milky illicit light of a bedroom still in useduring the hour before noon. The trouble with love, he thought, or thetrouble with this love anyway (it would seem), is that it's sototalitarian.In the realm of the intellect, how idle to look for theAnswer to Everything; idler still to find it. Yet with the emotions . . .what's the big idea? Love. Love is the Big Idea. With its dialectical imperatives, its rewrites, its thought police, its knock on the door atthree a.m. Love makes you use the blind man, makes you hope for death in Cambodia, makes you pleased that your own son writhes -deep in the Peter Pan Ward. Bring on the holocaust for a piece of ass.Because the loved one, this loved one, really could turn the house into a bomb.


He awoke around two. His mind was clear. He thought: it's over.It's passed on. And he tensed himself, listening for the first whisper ofrecurrence . . . Perfectly simple, then. He would tell Hope everything(though not about the money. Are youserious?) and submit to his atonement. How marvellous, how beautiful the truth was. Ever-present, and always waiting. Love must be an enemy of the truth. Itmust be. And it kept on making you like what was bad and hate what was good.


Footsteps passed his room and climbed the stairs.


And now life lent a hand.


Through the throttled wire of a stray intercom he heard noises,voices, laughter. Hope and Dink, upstairs, changing. Having played,they were now changing, changing. A yelp,I'm all sweaty, a comicalinterdiction,Check it out, a trickle of zip then a hot silence broken by agasp for air and her seriousQuit it!. . .


And Guy thought: My wife doesn't love me. My wife has betrayedme. How absolutely wonderful.


Soon she entered, wearing a dressing-gown, the hair released fromits grips, and with burning throat. 'Get up,' she said. 'He's sleepingnow but you're on duty when Phoenix leaves. We're nannyless for therest of the day. That bitch didn't show.'


In the next room along, Marmaduke, who had been up all night, laysprawled in a shattered nap. Toys were scattered about the cot likemunitions in a stalled war. The little prisoner, with his brutalScandinavian face, was shackled in his woollen blankets, in histumbling baby rope. Flattened with sweat was his duck-white hair . .. Even in sleep the child was not unmonitored, unmediated. Drinking acup of instant coffee, Phoenix watched over him from the kitchen, closing her long eyes for several seconds at each indication that hemight be about to stir.


Before losing consciousness Marmaduke had gazed at and proddedthe twin bruises on the back of his dimply fist. He regarded them withfear and admiration. Already he was forgetting the pain that had accompanied them, but something about the way they came to be there would live on gloriously in his mind. He wanted to do tosomeone else the thing that had been done to him. 'Nice,' he hadwhispered (as one might say 'nice' of a pretty girl in the street or of thestraight drive on the cricket field: saluting skill, talent), before rollingover to twist himself into sleep, hoping to dream of the PinchingGame.


The Pinching Game was good. It wasnice.


'Ow! I say, that's quite a pinch. Well, two can play at that, young man. It's called the Pinching Game.'


Marmaduke waited.


'Do you want to play?'


Marmaduke waited.


'Now first — you pinch me as hard as you like.'


Marmaduke pinched her as hard as he liked - which was as hard ashe could.


'Good. And now I pinchyou.'


Marmaduke watched, with stoned interest. Then his vision seepedthrough tears of pain.


'Now it's your turn again. You pinch me as hard as you like.'


Marmaduke reached out quickly. But then he hesitated. Firstlooking up for a moment with an uncertain smile, he carefully gave thetenderest tweak to the back of her hand.


'Good. And now I pinchyou.’


Although I don't eat much now 1 think I still have a good appetitefor love. But it doesn't work out.


In all I spent six nights sleeping rough at Heathrow. Not much sleeping. But plenty of rough. And I despaired. The other peoplethere were better at it than I was, stronger and quicker in the standby queue, with heftier bribes more heftily offered. I could see myselfbecoming, as the weeks unfolded, a kind of joke figure in theDeparture Lounge. Then a tragic figure. Then a ghoulish one,staggering from news hatch to cafeteria with bits falling off me.


I think I still have a good appetite for love. But there's nothing I caneat.


Incarnacion relates that Mark Asprey was hardly to be seen here atthe apartment. Her own eyes retreat and soften with a lover'sindulgence as she talks of the kind of demand in which her employerconstantly finds himself. This leads her on to explore one of life's enigmas: how some people are luckier than others, and richer, and handsomer, and so on.


Of course I'm wondering whether he took a stroll down the dead­end street.


In my new dreams I think I keep glimpsing Kim, and Missy, Missy,Kim. They're trying to be nice. But in my new dreams it just doesn'twork out.


I love Lizzyboo in my own way yet when I consider hersocio-sexualtraining or grounding I have the impression that there are onlyabout four or five things that could ever really happen between her and men.


He Refuses To Make A Commitment. She Has A Problem GivingHim The Space He Needs. He Is Too Focused On His Career At This Time. They Think They Love Each Other But Given Their Tempera­mental Differences How Will They Ever Connect?


She's much more importunate these days, or she is when she's noteating. The restraints are gone. It's as if she's falling. She's falling, and at the usual rate of acceleration, which is plenty fast: thirty-twofeet per second per second. Luckily, at least, with this fallingbusiness, it doesn't make any difference how heavy you are...Iguess I could tell her I'm plain old fashioned. 'I guess I'm just a child of my time, Lizzyboo,' I can hear myself saying as I daintily removeher hand from my knee. Alternatively, there are any number of debilitating but non-fatal diseases I could bashfully adduce. Last night she took my hand on the stairs and said, 'You want to foolaround?' Me? Fool around? Hasn't she heard that fooling around is on the decrease - though maybe it hasn't been, much, in her case, ornot until recently. Dink Heckler, for example, has the look of a stern taskmaster in the sack. But she won't be getting any of that nonsense from me. I'm a child of my time.


In the wild days of my hot youth no one wanted to risk it andneither did I. Remember how it used to go...Are you free any nightthis week? I thought we might step out together - to the hospital.That nice place on Seventh Avenue. If it makes you feel more relaxedabout it, bring your personal physician along. I'm bringing mine. I'llbe around to get you about half past eight. In an ambulance. Aw honey, don't be late.


It's not quite like that any more. Let's consider. The vaultingviruses, all those wowsers and doozies and lulus, are of courseincreasingly numerous but they seem to have simmered down a gooddeal. Purely out of self-interest, naturally. They're only parasites,after all, and the career guest and freebie-artist doesn't really want totear the whole place apart (except when unusually drunk). So thewisdom of evolution prevailed; they adopted astable strategy, with their own long-term interests held sensibly in view; and now they'rejust part of the dance. Besides, we all know we're not going to live forever. We do know that. We forgot it for a while. For a while, thelive-forever option looked to be worth trying. No longer. Even inCalifornia the workout parlours and singlet clinics are paint-parchedand gathering dust. Three score and ten is a tall order, even for the very rich, even for someone like Sheridan Sick. We subliminallyaccept that life has been revised downward, and once again we startsleeping with strangers. Or some of us do. The act of love takes place in a community of death. But not very often. Just as you won't findmuch corridor-creeping in the modern hospice, despite all the superbfacilities.


I met her eleven years ago. We felt safe. More than that. We feltsolved. We weresolved.


Now she won't talk to me. My name is muck at Hornig Ultrason.I'm not feeling very well, and Ihaven't got any money.


I find myself indulging in vulgar reveries of a movie sale.


There must be a dozen hot actresses who would kill for the part ofNicola Six. I can think of several bankable stalwarts who couldhandle Guy (the ones who do the Evelyn Waugh heroes: meek,puzzled, pointlessly handsome). As for Keith, you'd need a total-immersion expert, a dynamic literalist who'd live like a trog for twoor three years as part of his preparation for the role.


The only difficulty is Marmaduke. Typical Marmaduke. Maxi­mum difficulty. Always.


Maybe you could dispense with an infant star and go with a littlerobot or even some kind of high-tech cartoon. It's amazing what theycan do.


Or, because age and time have gone so wrong now, why not ayouthful dwarf, wearing diaper and baby mask?


It's all gone wrong. The old are trying to be young, as they alwayshave, as we all do, youth being the model. But the young are now trying to be old, and what is this saying? Grey-locked, resolutelypallid, halt in step and gesture, with panto-hag makeup, crutches, neck-braces, orthopaedic supports.


Then the next thing. You start fucking around with the way yourbabies look. First, you fuck around with the wayyou look (turnyourself into a bomb site or a protest poster), then, with thataccomplished, you start to fuck around with the way yourbabies look. Dumb hairstyles - lacquered spikes, a kind of walnut-whiskeffect. Magentas and maroons, wheat-and-swede combinations. Isaw a toddler in the park wearing an earring (pierced), and anotherwith a tattoo (bruised songbird). There are babies tricked out withwigs and eyeglasses and toy dentures. Wheeled in bathchairs.


Now I know the British Empire isn't in the shape it once was. But you wonder: what will thebabies' babies look like?


Lizzyboo and I go to the new milkbar on Kensington Park Road.Her treat. She insists. The place is called Fatty's, which strikes me asunfortunate, and bad for business. On the way Lizzyboo will eat anice-cream or a hot pretzel or a foot-long hotdog. Once there, once actually in Fatty's, she will start on the milkshakes, with perhaps a banana split or a fudge sundae. Over these dishes she will sketch inthe prospect of lifelong spinsterhood.


This afternoon, a blob of chocolate somehow attached itself to hernose. I kept assuming she would eventually notice it — would feel it,would see it. But she didn't. And I let too much time pass, too much nose time, too much chocolate time. It was a big relief when sheexcused herself and went to the bathroom. As she lifted herself fromthe chair I observed that the zipper on her skirt was warped withstrain. At least five minutes later she returned, and the blob of chocolate was still in place.


'Sweetheart,' I said, 'you have a blob of chocolate on your nose.'


She was mortified. 'How long has it been there?' she said tightly into her compact.


'Since way back. Since you had the eclair.'


'Why didn't youtell me?'


'I don't know. I'm sorry.'


Because to have done so earlier would have involved an admissionof intimacy. Because it suits me if she looks ridiculous. Because Ididn't know she had stopped looking in mirrors.


They both turn heads, these girls I squire. Lizzyboo by day. Nicolaby night. They both embody whatever it is that means menhave to look.


And what is it? One of the many messages that pulses off Lizzyboohas something to do with babies. It says: Big me. I'm big already butmake me bigger. Let the SSCs get to work. Give these breasts a job. Ilay it all before you, if you're the one. If you're the one, then I lay it allbefore you.


Interestingly, Nicola's appearance makes no mention of babies. All she has to say on that subject is Watertight Contraception. I'mnot going to lose my figure and get up in the middle of the night. Iwon't be time-processed, medianized — not byyou. It would have tobe something special, something unique, something immaculate.


Like the Virgin Mary: Nobodaddy's Babymamma.


It doesn't particularly matter that I'm going blind because I can'tread anyway. Five minutes withMacbeth on my lap and I'm in asenile panic of self-consciousness. Mark Asprey's many bookshelvesare shelved with books but there's nothing much to read. It's all stufflike Good Bad Taste or Bad Good Taste or Things You Love to Hateor Hate to Love or why it's Frivolous To Be Important or The OtherWay Around.


I get stuff from Nicola but who am I kidding. There are things I'mnot seeing, or not understanding. The only writer who gives me any unfeigned pleasure is P. G. Wodehouse. And even him I find a bitheavy. He takes a lot out of me. Scratching my hair, with soft whistles, with lips aquiver, I frown overSunset at Blandings.


Pretty soon I'll be obliged to ask Nicola to show me what she looks like in the nude. I find I'm looking forward to it. I can't imagine she will deny me this simple request. She knows how seriously I take mywork.


Chapter 15: Pure Instinct


 All right then,'said Nicola. 'Shall we start?''Yes,' said Guy. 'Let's.'


She gazed at him with an expression of sensitive expectancy.


He shifted position in his chair and said with a quavering voice, 'Ireally do find it quite extraordinary.'


'What?'


'Someone as beautiful as you. And never been kissed withpassion.'


'I suppose it is in a way. But 1 know you'll be terribly patient and gentle with me.'


'I'll do my best. Oh by the way. Before we start. What did you doto Marmaduke? He was absolutely angelic until tea-time.'


'A silly thing. The Pinching Game.' She explained, with thebriskness of impatience or even vexation (children: a delicate sub­ject hereabouts). 'A little lesson in adult injustice. Or arbitrariness.They give you a soft pinch and expect a soft pinch back. Not a hard pinch.'


Literalmindedly, Nicola was wearing white. A full white partyfrock with many a flounce and purfle. The dress was certainly notmeant to be provocative. Far from it: there was something forbidd­ingly juvenile in the way her arms emerged plumply from the puffedsleevelets and a special awkwardness conferred by the waist-thickening sash. She had also applied her makeup with excitableprodigality, as a twelve-year-old might prepare for her first big ball.


Nevertheless, Guy gazed at her dress, with its fringe of petticoat, andimagined the history of underwear being enacted within.


He said hoarsely, 'No attempts? Not even at parties or anything?Quite extraordinary.'


'Yes, my sexual life . . . just never happened. Perhaps it had to dowith my parents dying when they did. An only child. Thirteen. Mynature turning on its hinges. And I had seen what happened toEnola.'


'Oh yes.'


'I was curious, of course. I had longings.'


'You must have felt their interest. Men must have been intenselyinterested.'


'Do you know what I felt?'


'No?'


'I felt that my emotional — or sexual — being was like a little sister.A very spirited little sister. An inner sister. Whom I must alwaysprotect. I had to keep her in. Even though she yearned to come outand play.'


'It's almost tragic.'


'Though I've always suspected that my nature is in fact highlysensual. The way I respond to art tells me this. To poetry. To paintings.'


Guy had long been aware of a faint pulsing action in the middle ofhis lap. Now he noticed that with each passing second his teacup andsaucer had begun to click. He recrossed his legs and said uneasily. 'Iwonder what happens to all that - all that sap.'


Nicola straightened. She turned her face to one side. 'Does itcurdle, do you mean?'


'I'm sorry.'


'No no. It's quite all right. Does the moisture . . . does thejuice . . . ? It never felt like that. Perhaps it just wastes its sweetnesson the desert air.'


'Yes, born to blush unseen. Yes I've always thought', Guyenthused (and she smiled so bravely!), 'that Empson was quite rightabout that. The situation is stated as pathetic but it doesn't exactlyencourage you to change it. A jewel doesn't mind being in a cave, anda flower prefers not to be picked. If anything. You could —'


'There was a boy', said Nicola, 'with oil-black hair and themuscles of a panther. Pinto, the Corsican gardener's son. This was inAix-en-Provence. Every night we would meet in the warm gardenbehind the abandoned villa. He caressed me so thoroughly with histongue and his rough fingertips that I kept thinking I would unravel completely or fold myself inside out.'


'. . . When was this?'


'I was twelve.'


Twelve?'


Nicola gave Guy time to complete the following train of thought-that of driving out to the airport with his foot on the floor, taking the first plane to Marseille and running the wily Pinto to ground in someflyblown shadowland . . .


And give the blacktoothed brute the thrashing of his life. Guy triedto imagine Nicola at twelve and saw a brown belly, a collection of clefts and flexed sinews, and the same face he faced now. She wassmiling, and patting the cushion at her side.


'Come on then,' she said. 'We're not going to do much with yousitting all the way over there . . . Are you comfy? You're walking in afunny way. Okay then. Shall we start?'


'Yes. Let's.'


'What with?'


'With kissing, I suppose.'


'Right. Go on then.'


Twenty minutes later Guy whispered, 'This is heavenly. But do you think you could open your mouth a little bit?'


'I'm terribly sorry.'


'No it's all right. Or at least,' he said, 'at least don't shut it quite sotightly.'


Down in the street below Keith sat slumped in the Cavalier listening to a darts tape on the stolen Blankpunkt. They're taking their fuckingtime about it, he thought. He looked longsufferingly across the road at Guy's VW: on a meter. Still, he imagined there would be no greatbreach of decorum (he reviewed his instructions) if the Cavalier were to occupy the slot when Guy went on his way. Leave it here'll the carget a ticket. Or clamped. Fucking bastards . . .


What a difference a day makes. It was hard, in some ways, to creditthe change that had come over Keith in a scant twenty-four hours.He sat back. The low sun warmed him. Blinking through thewindscreen, whose fuzz and splat now subtly harmonized with thepond-mantle and the bobbing tadpoles of his tarnished vision, Keithrecalled that recent self, that self of rage and terror, coming up herstairs with murder in its soul — or at least with murder in its brow. Imight have taught her a lesson. Straight: I'd have swung for heryesterday. Happily hungover, Keith snorted (and coughed), andshook his head with a thickskinned smile. He comes into her loungeand it was all dark. Like a Danish sex club. No, not Danish. Er, Arab.With candles, and screens. She was wearing a black gown that was so— beautiful. No way here'll that not be an exquisite garment. Not cheap neither. Either. As for the woman it encased: you had to begiving her all kinds of credit for the nick she'd kept herself in. And allthe money on the table like, like TV as such.


'You shouldn't have fucking done it Nick!'


'Keith, Iunderstand. You didn't want me to know, did you, thatyou lived like a —'


His eyes opened, and flickered. He rubbed them, with hisknuckles, like a child. And then, after that, after something so - after saying something sowell out of order, she goes and changes my life,just like that. Magic. Because she understands me. She understandsme. She's the only one that really understands me. About mydarts . . . Keith sniffed and stirred, and wiped the tears from his eyeswith a mahogany thumbnail. Not ashamed to admit it... A wholenew life now. Keith's mind slid sideways: the last dart flying home(had to be a bull finish: had to be), and Keith turning to embrace thesporting shrug of his adversary; and then a pastel arcade of goodsand services. And pastel women. The night before, after the quart ofpornowith Guy, a visit to Debbee Kensit, and a final call paid onTrish Shirt, Keith had gone home and caught up with some of his viewing: American football, and the frame-by-frame analysis of thecheerleaders in their flickety white skirts. You had to hand it to the Yanks: they got the sport groupies all there, andin uniform.


How did it go again ? Your home life, Keith, is stifling your dartingtalents, and throwing a pall over your darting future. It's a questionof darting attitude — getting your darting head right for the big one. I see you, Keith, as a young boy in the street with your face crushed upagainst the glass. But it's not a shop window. It's a TV screen. We'retalking TV stardom here, Keith. Behind the screen is where you've got to get to. That's where all the other stuff is — all the stuff youwant. Let me take you there, Keith. Let me take you to the other side.


'Yeaeaeah,' said Keith as the darts tape achieved its climax. Hepunched the buttons. Meteorologist Dennis Car: HurricaneJuanita.Phone-in: money matters. Geopolitics: another scan for the Presi-dent's wife. Local news: police had made an arrest in the case of themurdered five-year-old in South London's Camberwell. Keithlooked indignant. Younever heard anything like that on the newsany more. Said it just encouraged it. Don't ask Keith why. Kill a kid,he thought. Get your name on the radio. Or TV.


And then that video. Jesus. Keith had been — and still was -profoundly moved. The lighting, the production values, the sheerprofessionalism. Not overly explicit, but top-quality work within itsown terms. In the past, Keith had done loads of videos with birds,and had taken it very seriously indeed. And to this day he felt puzzledby the monotonous squalor of his results. For with a video camera on his shoulder and a ladyfriend on the carpet or the couch - Keith wasall aesthete. He tried to make it beautiful, and it came out ugly; and the birds looked mad. And mad in the wrong way. So when NicolaSix, alluringly reduced to two dimensions, had climbed out of thedeep green dress and had gazed, in bra-and-panty set, so pensivelyout of the window, Keith had felt a tingle up his spine and a prickle ofthe hairs on the back of his neck. Had felt, in fact, that sense ofpregnant arrest which accompanies the firm handclasp of art.


Actress like. Real pro: knows what she's doing. The others:amateurs. Nor was this favourable impression in any way dispelledwhen she talked dirty to him on the stairs. The poetry of the cleavage.Nicolaseemed mad too, then, for a minute. But mad in the right way.And you expected a bit of that — indeed you looked for it— in the sex-genius sphere. To follow Keith's thoughts where they wouldn't quitego (and anyway he was thinking with his blood): onlyimbalancewould lead a woman to invest such a lot of herself in such anunreliable area. Take Analiese. 'Masturbate about me, Keith,'Nicola had said. And Keith had honoured her plea. 'All those thingsyou wanted to do to girls . . . Do them to me. In your head.' Keithconsidered. There wasn't anything, by now, that he had wanted to do to girls and hadn't gone ahead and done — as Trish Shirt, amongothers, could defeatedly attest. And he'd never raped Trish Shirt:he'd never seen the need. No, Keith did everything he wanted to do —except, occasionally, sexual intercourse, which had a habit of slipping his mind (fifteen minutes later, in the street, he would stopdead and snap his fingers), so busy was he with all his otherstunts . . . Oh yeah. Therewas one thing he had wanted to do to girlsand had never gone ahead and done. He had wanted to do it quitebadly and often, too (when they nagged and cried and that, orwouldn't let you do everything you wanted). He had never murderedany of them. He had never done that. And her kiss (Jesus), like fallinginto a swamp or quicksand . ..


Keith put a fresh darts tape into the Blankpunkt and resettledhimself in the hot Cavalier. That classic encounter at the Embassybetween Kim Twemlow and Nigel House. Such darts immersionwas, in Keith's view, the ideal preparation for his upcomingquarter-final at the George Washington on England Lane. He benthis head and looked up wincing at Nicola's high window. Hethought: they're taking their fucking time about it.


Guy felt a fiery crack on the side of his head. His neck jerkedbackwards into thin air, and gravity tugged him urgently to the floor.


After a moment of white flurry Nicola was kneeling by his side.


'On wo,' she said. 'Oh my darling, I'm so sorry.'


Guy raised three fingertips to his temple. He closed his eyes, and then blinked mechanically.


'Let's see. Ooh. That looks quite nasty. I'd better get you somemeat for it. I must have caught you with my ring. Oh God. Youshould have warned me about yourtongue.'


Guy half sat up. He called after her, unable, for the moment, tokeep the querulousness out of his voice, 'You saidPanchoorwhatever his name was used his tongue.'


With swollen eyes, and one hand clamped over her mouth, Nicoladropped to her haunches in front of the open refrigerator. Then herface cleared and straightened. 'In my ear,' she called back. 'Not in mymouth.He was just a dirty little gypsy or something.'


'Well how was I supposed to know?'


She returned. Guy noted her blush of contrition.


'Christ! What's that?'


'Pork liver. Anyway it's all I've got.'


The purple organ was dangling hideously close to Guy's eyeball. 'Idon't even know', he said, '— I don't even know what this wholebusiness with meatis. Do you?'


'I imagine it's meant to limit the swelling or something. I'm quite shocked at myself. It was pure instinct.'


'Oh I'm all right.'


'Mm. It certainly isn't working, this meat. It's coming up ratheralarmingly. You've got such delicate skin. Like a child's. Oh dear.Whatever will you tell your wife?’


'What, it's a proper black eye, is it?'


'I fear so.'


He held her gaze for a moment. 'Isn't there somethingJude like this? She throws a pig bladder at him or something? I mean, it's not thought to be terribly friendly.'


'It hasn't been a great success, has it. Our first session.'


'No, but..."Guy placed a fist on his heart.'In here.'


This surprised her, and softened her, and made her partly relent.Nicola's eyes moved meaningly across his face. After all, it would doKeith good to wait. 'I'll tell you what,' she said. 'Let me lead. I'll justuse my imagination. Close your eyes and I won't be so shy . .. Let me kiss it better. I'll just get rid of this disgusting meat.'


Without will, he sat back against the base of the sofa. As shemoved round him on the floor, all he felt were her lips, her fingertips,her breath on his face. He heard sighs and rustlings, and the sound ofhis own blood. At one point he felt a soft weight on his groin - thepressure, perhaps, of the gathered material of her dress or petticoat.»Anyway, it wasn't serious, because her next kiss had the shape of asmile.


She gave him the Rosebud, the Pouter, Youth, Cousins TouchingTongues, the Deliquescent Virgin, the Needer.


'Don't stop,' he whispered.


She gave him Anybody's, the Toothcount, Lady Macbeth, theGrand-A-Night Hooker, the Readied Pussy, the . . .


'Please,' he said, his eyes still closed but starting to struggle.'Please. No.'


Here we go: he's coming . . .now. Keith struggled into position. To make things 'look good', Keith had obtained, at Nicola's suggestion,a workmanlike prop: a stolen leather bag full of stolen tools - spirit-level, light hammer, chisel, tyre-iron. Doesn't see me. They can dothat: look right through you.


Guy was coming back down the garden path, and movingawkwardly, half doubled-up, and listing. He looked round in fearwith the ghost's eyes of the deceiver. Always this problem of re-entry.How the strands of duplicity tightened, like the veins on the surfaceof a sclerotic soul.Why did you come to the house? he had asked her.Toestablish something. Your wife doesn't love you. Poor Guy . . .Guy couldn't bear to believe this, Dink or no Dink. But in any case the duplicity was now all doubleknotted: one would have to go at itwith fingernails, with tweezers. He paused (winded, battered); he feltas if he had been flying for twenty-two hours in economy class, andthat the dead-end street, with its unstirring trees dust-feathered in the low sun, might just as well be Australia. Guy scanned the scene, notfor faces, not yet, but for figures with their inimitable weight and outline, as Giacometti might: Phoenix, Richard, Terry, Li/zyboo —Hope!


'Yo!'


Guy gave a stark yelp.


'Prestigious,' said Keith, shuffling stockily across the road with hisbag. 'Eurobank. Motorway contraflow. Intercool.'


'Keith.'


'Oi!'


'What?'


'Whew. That's a bit tasty.' Keith's scowl of concern now widenedinto a friendly sneer. 'You come on a bit rough, did you? Forced todefend her honour, was she?'


'No, I tripped on my way up the stairs.'


'Course you did. Listen.'


Keith reached up and put an arm round Guy's shoulder. Guyflinched but then quickly fell in with Keith's confidential amble. Wasit okay, asked Keith, if hetook his place. He'd nip in where Guy'djust been.


'I wait for you to go and then slot in after you. I'll ease in there. Nosweat.'


Guy looked down at the upturned rhomboid of Keith's nose, itsscored bridge, its tunnel-of-love nostrils.


'Because they fucking clamp you round here.'


'Do they? Yes of course, Keith.'


'Bollinger. Veuve Clicquot. Oh uh. Tomorrow night.'


Tomorrow night? What fresh hell was this? Guy opened his eyes aswide as they would go.


Keith's cigarette-bearing hand suddenly froze on its way to hislips. 'You forgotten,' he said with full menace.


'No no. I'll be there.' Where? Judging by the energy that Keithcontinued to trap in his stunned visage, Guy felt that the date must beof high significance, like a visit to the dogs or to the shrine of somesainted bookie.


'Onna darts,' said Keith at last.


The VW Estate was wedged tight into its bay, with perhaps threeinches spare at front and rear; it took Guy a long time to work the carout into the street, and Keith was alv/ays there, directing matters likea policeman, beckoning, fending off, beckoning again, and finally raising the great bent thumb.


Be no good at fighting, decided Keith as he climbed the stairs. Atotal banana. When a man was called on to look to his fists - and his feet, and his knees, and his teeth, and his chisel and his tyre-iron and his beer bottle - Guy'd crap it. Hopeless! Keith saw the likes of Guyall the time (on TV): jeered from the bedroom, snivelling in theirtweed suits. Aboard theTitanic he'd be one of the blokes that dressedup as birds, whereas Keith would meet his fate like a man. Whatthough the cocktail bar be at forty-five degrees, Keith would be down there propping it up, and murdering the Scotch. On the second-floorlanding he paused to catch his breath. He lit a cigarette and slumpedback against the window sill. By the time he had stopped coughingthe cigarette was down to its filter. So he lit another one. He had nothing to blow his nose on but found an old tit magazine in hisstolen bag and did what he could with that. Plus there was thecurtain. Then he staggered on up the third flight, wondering whatLady Muck had in store.


'We all have a dirty little secret, don't we, Keith?'


'Yeah?' said Keith, with slow hauteur, as if he didn't have a dirtylittle secret. In fact, of course, Keith had lots of dirty little secrets. Hehad dirty little secrets galore. To make no more than a briskselection, to name but a few: Trish Shirt and his father and hisdarting doubts and the crate of ripped knicker brochures in thegarage and his failure in the eyes of Chick Purchase and DebbeeKensit's birth certificate framed on her bedroom wall and anunshakable conviction of worthlessness and Kath-and-the-flat.


'It has always been a disappointment to me, a bitter disappoint­ment, Keith, that literature — that art — has failed to own up to it. Tothe dirty little secret. Which is, of course . . .'


'Thatain't no secret. I'm at it all the -'


'Oh, there's Larkin's "Love again: wanking at ten past three" anda few bursts of confessionalism from the Americans. But surely this isthe responsibility of the novelist, who works with the quotidian, whomust become the whole of boredom, among the just be just, amongthe filthy filthy too, Keith.'


'Yeah,' said Keith absently. 'Same difference.’


'You'd think that the twentieth century, unfastidious enough inevery other respect, would go ahead and grasp the nettle, wouldn'tyou, Keith? But no.'


'I seen a film', said Keith, 'where a girl did it. The other day.'


'Which film was this?'


Keith cleared his throat.'Miss Adventures in Megaboob Manor,'he said carefully.


'We'll get round to that in a minute, Keith.'


Two hundred and seventy-five quid.'


'I suppose one of the great things about masturbation is that nobody wants to be seen doing it. Generally, they don't want thenews to get around. Why should people be staring at the ceiling withthatkind of expression on their faces? Let me freshen that for you,Keith.'


'Er, thanks, Nick. Ola.'


Keith watched her pass: the soft shake of her dress. Employing thedarting finger, he made an up-and-under feint at her white-flouncedrump. The friction of underthings: quitenoisy, that dress. Like the bird inside it. Keith sucked hard on a section of his upper lip. Heconsidered himself to be thoroughly at ease, and nicely holding up his end of the sexual lecture or exchange or foretalk. He thought ofthe ecstasy aunts in the magazines, and of their certain approval. Breaking new grounds in frankness. An adult exchange of viewsinnit. Mutual pleasure. We all have our needs. But both his legs weredead they were that tightly crossed. And his palms felt siltily viscid.Jesus, hang around here all night. This rate the Cavalier'll get aticket. Or clamped. Fucking bastards . . .


'Like so much else, Keith, it's all to do with time. How old are you?'


Twenty-nine.' Said boldly, as if his age were one of his lessarguable virtues or qualifications.


'A child. A baby. You're reaching the age when, according toliterature, you'll soon be putting all that behind you. You won't ofcourse. Ever. They won't stop you stropping it, will they, Keith. Ohno. I look at you, and I see a man', she said, her face flooding with roguish admiration, 'who'd beproud to die with his Johnson in hishand.'


'Yeah cheers.'


'Cheers! But don't worry. We won't be watching. It's okay untilyou're about the same age as Christ was at Calvary. Thereafter, noone wants to know. Because it just gets sadder. Sadder ?nd sadder allthe time.'


Keith shrugged. He could feel himself sinking into the privacy ofhis hangover — into the deep and settled privacy of how he felt. Hereall the difficulties were undivulged. Oops. Oi. Hello. Oof. Jesus.Dear oh dear. But in silence. Whole'll. . . whole thing'll go upanyway. And Thelonius with his mangos and his weights. And Guy.


Now Nicola came and joined him on the sofa. The great layeredspread of frock and petticoat. The legs folded seethingly underneath.Her face dipped but her eyes still sought his. 'You're clearly something of a connoisseur', she said softly, 'of pornography.What's your special taste? Be frank. I understand. As you know I —I'm quite "non-judgmental".'


Keith liked this word. To him it evoked a new dawn, a betterworld, one finally free of all juries and magistrates and QCs. Heflexed his eyebrows and said, 'Same as the next man.' He knew — heeven hoped - this was probably false (and felt the formation, acrosshis upper lip, ofa Zapatamustache of sweat). On average Keithspent between two and three hours a day in a largely fruitless questfor the sort of pornography he liked (i.e., pornography, whore-art,and not the sex-free sex films slipped his way by othercheats or therubbish you get in the shops). But there was a time when porno­graphy had played an altogether more central role in his life. Whenhe was a bachelor, Keith had done pornography the way somepeople did heroin. Pornography pauperized Keith and made him fearfor his sanity and his eyesight. Pornography was the main reason hehad sought Kath's hand in marriage. Videos. From a towelhead — Abdelrazak - in Brixton. (Abdelrazak was nonjudgmental too. Youcould say that for him: 100 per cent nonjudgmental, was Abdelra­zak.) Keith knew that he had no resistance to pornography. He had iton all the time, and even that wasn't enough for him. He wanted it onwhen he was asleep. He wanted it onwhen he wasn't there . . . 'Justnude birds,' said Keith. 'Basically. Obviously.'


'It's funny, isn't it. The dirty little secret may be neglectedelsewhere. But here's a genre, starting assamizdat and ending up as aglobal industry, which is aboutnothing else. Women don't usuallyapprove of pornography, do they, Keith. I shouldn't think, forinstance, that yourwife approves of it.'


Oi, thought Keith. What was the matter with all this? In his head, ideas wanted to be named, but remained nameless. Something to dowith sinning singly, invisibly. You locked the door behind you. Onlythe porcelain saw, and the old towel. He felt the desire to speak andopened his mouth but there was nothing there.


'Women talk about the violence it does to them. But I don't know.Look at the most innocuous entertainment imaginable: a magicshow. The assistant minces around in a bikini, and then lies downgrinning her head off to get sawn in half. I think women don't likepornography because it excludes them. Women are there when pornography is made. Ruined sisters. But they're not there whenpornography is used. That's men's work. They don't share their littlesecret with women. They share it with pornography.'


She stood up. Look: she had the remote in her hand. The TV gaveits electric crackle. She laughed musically (crazily) and said, 'Really,the Englishman's taste! Nurses and schoolmarms and traffic war­dens. It's sosweet. I suppose it all comes from nannies and publicschools and things. Though not in your case.'


'No danger,' said Keith (he was busy watching).


'Still, thereare lots of randy plumbers and winking window-cleaners and so on.'


'Yeah cheers.'


'I'm going to have a bath. Would you unzip me, Keith? Thank you.I'll be in the tub, oh, for at least fifteen minutes. It's the little catch atthe top. That's it. Thank you. There are some paper tissues on thetable there. Let me know when you're done . .. It's all right, Keith. Iunderstand.'


She welcomed and applauded the death of just about anything. Itwas company. It meant you weren't quite alone. A dead flower, thedisobliging turbidity of dead water, slow to leave the jug. A dead carhalf-stripped at the side of the street, shot, busted, annulled,abashed. A dead cloud. The Death of the Novel. The Death ofAnimism, the Death of Naive Reality, the Death of the Argumentfrom Design, and (especially) the Death of the Principle of LeastAstonishment. The Death of the Planet. The Death of God. The death of love. It was company.


The death of physics, for example. Physics had died only the otherday. Poor physics. Perhaps fifty people on earth understood it fully, but physics was over, just in rime for the millennium. The rest was mopping up. The rest was funeral direction. They had found proton decay, at 1032years, uniting the strong and the weak atomic forces,giving the strongelectroweak. Then all they needed, for the GrandUnified Theory, for the Theory of Everything, was gravity. And thenthey got it. They got gravity.


She had read the cautious popularizations in the news magazines;and everyone agreed that the Theory made beautiful sense. The maths were beautiful. The whole death was beautiful. As sheunderstood it - well, it was very simple (it courted intuition) - thekey to Everything was this: time was a force as well as a dimension. Time was a force; but then ofcourse it was. Elementary. Six forces.And time was the sixth force, not just a measure but a motivatortoo. Time 'softened up' quanta for all the other interactions, savinga special intimacy for its workings with gravity; the tug didn't tug without the massage of time. Uranium felt time as a force easing itsjourney into lead. Yes. And human beings felt time that way too(how anthropomorphic the Theory was, how sentimental!), not just as a temporal arena, but as apower. Don't we feel time as a power,and doesn't it feel like gravity? When we rise from the bed to faceanother year. When we reach and bend, when we try to strainupwards. What is it that is always pulling us back down?


As for the death of love . . . Was it really coming? Was it alreadyhere? Naturally she had wondered, as all artists do, whether she wasjust arguing out from her own peculiarity. But now the news wasabroad and everybody was talking about it. And how to explain herred-throated anger and bitterness (she felt violated, plagiarized)when she first saw the phrase in print? The diagnosis was in on love,the diagnosis was coming in; and love was as weak as a kitten, and pitifully confused, and not nearly strong enough to be brave or evenunderstand. Dying, the human being can formulate a strategy fordeath, gentle or defiant; but then death moves in completely anddecides to run the show, at some point, near the end. Near the death. (She wasn't having any of that.She would be running things right upto the very last second.) And now the twentieth century had comealong and after several try-outs and test-drives it put together anastonishing new offer: death for everybody. Death for everybody, byhemlock or hardware. If you imaginedlove as a force, notestablished and not immutable, patched together by all best inten­tions, kindness, forgiveness — what does love do about death foreverybody? It throws up its hands, and gets weaker, and sickens. It is crowded out by its opposite. Love has at least two opposites. One ishate. One is death.


All her conscious life she had loved the dinosaurs (to this day sheoften imagined herself as a kind of moll tyrannosaurus, greedy, savage, faithless, yet still fought-over often and atrociously, and living for eighty million years). What killedthem? She had thetheories cold. An exploding star that drenched the globe in cosmicrays. A meteorite shower that kicked up a coating of dust. A new breed of baby stealers, oviraptors, velociraptors. Or, more bathetic-ally, and more hauntingly, the notion that evolutionary success, abillennium of good living, rendered them incapable of propagation. In other words (she put it), they got too fat to fuck. She played withthe idea, trying to combine it with the death of love, and imagined the heavy richness of a distempered paradise, where something was notquite right; and here the ancient creatures slowly sensed that their world had begun to fall away. They smelled the death-ubiquity. Itwasn't just that they were all too fat and generally out of shape. Theyweren'tin the mood. And so beyond the fuming purple of the mireand beneath the blood-boltered sky, in a forest full of snoozing teeth and spikes, still shattered and reeking from another day of chase andsnatch and chomp, on a low branch one lovebird turns to the otherand says (she translated from the pterodactylese): 'Leave me alone. The scales have fallen from my eyes. You're a monster. Leave mealone. I'm notin the mood.'


Their story was over. More than that, their reality was concluded.You can feel it coming. Women would of course be expected to soldier on a little longer, with their biological imperative and so on,and the gentle feeling for children would naturally be the last thing to disappear, but women would never get very far with lovelessness andthey too would weaken in the end. Nicola used to think (not often,and long ago) that even she might have been saved by love. Love wasPlan B. But it never happened. She could attract it, she could bring love in, modern love anyway: she could make a man feel he was atlast really living, she could give his world high colour — for a coupleof months. But she couldn't generate it, she couldn't send love out.Not even kitten love, curled and purring, with kitty smile. And if love was dead or gone then the self was just self, and had nothing to do allday but work on sex. Oh, and hate. And death.


Keith coughed outside the bathroom door. This cough of Keith'sstarted out as a butler's discreet reminder but quickly developed intoa ragged diphtheria of barks and snarls. While it raged, while itwrecked itself on the other side of the wall, Nicola had plenty of timeto take up the shower attachment and rinse her breasts, her belly, herdeep backside, to pat herself down with a wide volume of towel, totake up position by the door in her pink bathrobe, and wait. Hewouldn't want to face her. Sad animal, having sinned singly. Now hewas wishing that he hadn't done it. In ten minutes he would bewanting to do it again.


'Are you all right?'


Keith gave a cough like a full stop.


'Off you run then. There's a present for you. On the table there.'


'. . . This?'


'It's a briefcase.'


'Looks . . . It's more like kindofasatchel.'


'Never mind. It's full of money.'


She opened the door a single notch, no greater distance than itsown thickness. Just the lightest touch offeree fields, the white steamand pink towelling and rosy flesh escaping like draught into thegloom of the passage: not much solider, in fact, than their congress ofmoments before, with her electronic presence meeting whatever issued from Keith's eyes. But still he looked up now in temporaryterror from his nosebag of notes. His downturned face seemed adolescent, even childish. If she had yanked the door open and stepped out to confront him, he might have cringed, collapsed — he might have unravelled completely.


'Appreciate it,' he said. 'Genuinely appreciate it.'


'My pleasure.'


'And uh, loyal tape, Nicola. Quality. They ought to give you anOscar.'


She paused and said, 'What should we call it, Keith?'


'Uh. Hang about. "Bobby..." Uh. Wait. "Bobby..." It'scoming. "Bobby...on the Beat." There you are. "Bobby on theBeat."'


'Very good, Keith.'


'Orjust'Tithead".'


"Tithead", Keith?'


'It's what you call them. The hat.'


'I see.' The plastic hat had cost Ј3.50 from the toyshop inKensington Park Road. Everything else had come out of her actress trunk. How many other outfits could she find in there? Smoulderingbarrister. Lewd prison wardress. Had there ever been any lady executioners? A steaming Amazon, maybe, with liftedpanga.Shesaid, 'Always bring the satchel with you when you come to see me.Spend the money. There's lots more: it's all Guy's. Express yourselfwith it. Remember whatkind of money it is, Keith. Get some newclothes. Accessories for your car. Relax with a few drinks. Clear yourmind completely and concentrate on one thing. Which is?'


Keith nodded grimly. 'My darts.'


'Your darts.'


'Ton-forty,' said Keith. 'Maximum. Bull check-out. Sincerityfinishing.'


With satchel and toolbag Keith came carefully down the front steps. He halted. He adjusted his belt. He peered downwards at his zipper.He laughed loosely. Keith was in fact sustaining a mild attack ofesprit de I'escalier.'Filth', he thought. Yeah. Would have been best. Just call it 'Filth'. Blimey. He looked up, back over his shoulder: thehigh windows burning in the low sun. Keith made a face. The face ofa man recalling pain. But soon his violently buckled features resolvedthemselves into a forgiving sneer. Whistling, whistling piercingly (some sentimental ballad), Keith started forward, opened the gardengate, and headed for the heavy Cavalier.


Behind and to the right, flanked by flaking pillars in a doorway further up the dead-end street, Guy watched him go.


I receive a quite fantastically offensive letter from Mark Asprey. I've read it eight or nine times now and I still can't believe what he'strying to do to me. On Plaza notepaper:


My dear Sam:


I can't refrain from this hurried missive. Yesterday, after a rathergood lunch, I was musing and browsing at Barnes & Noble, downin the Village. How clean and airy the Village is now! Imagine, if you will, my elation on seeing a goodly stack ofMemoirs of aListener —by Samson Young. Well, naturally, I snapped one up.And seldom have I gained such pleasure from the outlay of a mere98 cents.


I paced the room. I paced the room on my newshtetl legs — mytwanging pool-cue legs. I tore at my hair.What hair? I phoned theHandicraft Press. Oh, the fearsome blast I would give Steve Stultifer.No answer. It was three a.m. over there. 'A poignant charm', Aspreygoes on,


is afforded by the helpless contortions of your prose. But why doyou think anyone wants to hear about a lot of decrepit old Jews? Still, I admire your nerve. An autobiography is, by definition, a success story. But when some pipsqueak takes up his pen as the evenings lengthen - well, full marks for gall! And the remainder shops do deserve our full support.

 




 Of course, I knew that sales of my book were modest. But this is asavage blow. And the reviews were good. Both of them. And theyprinted so few -I mean, they can't have soldany at all.


You should turn to fiction and the joys of the unfettered fancy. Ihad rather a hectic time in London, seeing friends old and new and clinching that book deal you might have read about. I gather youspent the entire week at Heathrow. Why didn't we link up? Youcould have treated me to 'a wad and char'. Or I could have smuggled you into the Concorde Lounge!


Yours ever,


Mark


P.S. Oh, yes. Always thinking of ways to amuse you, I have left afavourite of mine on the bedside table - Marius Appleby'sCrossbone Waters.Nowthat's non-fiction.


There goes my confidence. I could feel it leaving. I could evenhearit: it rushed out the door and whistled through the street. Until thismorning I was, as they say, up and down about this project of mine.Half the time I mentally polished my Pulitzer acceptance speech. Theother half I planned incendiary suicide withThe Murderee in my arms.


Let me soberly state that I don't think my book is reallyprizewinning material. Though the panel might feel differently aboutit if they knew it was true.


Christ, it's only just occurred to me: people are going to imaginethat I actually sat down and made all this stuff up.


For now I devote myself to the small concerns. I go where even Ifeel huge and godlike.


My new project: teaching Kim Talent to crawl. I am her crawling coach. Kim and I are really working on her crawling. Crawl, crawl,crawl. And it isn't easy, in Keith's joke pad. I wait until Kath is asleepor out pacing the walkways with the alcoholic housewives, thetranqued mums, the bingoid single parents. I shove at the squatarmchair until most of it is wedged into the hallway. Then I lay out a towel on the floor and plonk Kim down in the middle of it. I scatterrattles and squeaky toys at an inviting distance from her nose. In training shoes, in tracksuit bottoms (with my stopwatch and mysteroids), I cheer her on from the touchline. Come on, Kim. You cando it, baby. Get out there andcrawl.


With tiny grunts and pants, with sublime patience and resolve, shesquirms and edges and inches. The expression she wears is one ofdemure audacity. Do you really want to see something? Well watchthis! Watch that!I'll show you . . . On she shoves and shoulders. She licks her lips. On she inches and edges. And what happens? She justgoes backward. And not very far. How like life. How like writing. Allthat effort, and the result is just a small minus. She starts to frownand wince. She starts to see that it's a poor deal (and no one gave her fair warning). She starts to cry.


After some comfort, some juice, some deep breaths, she is ready togo again. She nods her head: she is ready. I cheer her on from themargin of the towel, as her frowning face recedes from the rattles, thesqueaky toys. As her face recedes from me. Next door, the mother rests. Teaching Kim to crawl.


Kath doesn't let me change her any more. I wonder why. Some Irish imperative, as the child's first birthday approaches? I keepthinking 1 see bruises, welts, in the shadowy cracks of her Babygro.


Yesterday I arrived on the walkway, and stood there fidgeting withthe key, wondering if I'd need it. 1 peered in through the window. Keith at the table, humped over his tabloid. Kath at the sink. AndKim on the floor, in her bouncer chair. But she wasn't bouncing. Andshe wasn't sleeping. Her shiny head was bowed; the shape of theshoulders...I thought of that terrible phrase. And I thought: Kimhas what Kath has, what Keith has. It is called failure to thrive.


1 hope I'm just imagining this. I'm waiting for the pain and it hasn'tcome. Slizard is amazed it hasn't come.


I'm wired for pain. My eyes are wired for pain.


Vladimir Nabokov, encouragingly, was a champion insomniac.He believed that this was the best way to divide people: those whoslept; those who didn't. The great line inTransparent Things, one ofthe saddest novels in English: 'Night is always a giant but this onewas especially terrible.'


Fee fie fo fum, goes the giant. How did VN ever slay the thing? Iwander. 1 write. I wring my hands. Insomnia has something to besaid for it, in my case. It beats dreaming.


God knows why but I've startedCrossbone Waters. Travel.Borneo. Handsome Marius Appleby and the glamorous photo-grapher who's been assigned to him, Cornelia Constandne. It's anawful little piece of shit. But there's the adventure, and the loveinterest, and I have to admit I'm hooked.


Now wait a minute. How did Asprey know about me holing upat Heathrow? I don't think I said anything to Incarnacion (withwhom he is in constant and sinister touch). I don't think I've eversaid anything to Incarnacion, except 'Really?' and 'You don'tsay?'


So who does that leave? Perhaps, in a sense, I'm being wise afterthe event —though 'wise'might be putting it a bit high. Just now I wassitting at his desk next door. I noticed, on the expanse of greenleather, some new displays of trinketry, the altered disposition of themailstacks. I imagined Asprey pottering here, with his plumed penand his calculator. Idly I reached out and tried the locked drawer. It opened smoothly to my jerk.


Notes, letters, cards. Photographs.


Well, there's no longer any very pressing need for me to ask Nicolato show me what she looks like in the nude. But I think I'll ask heranyway.


'It's too adorable,' said Nicola. 'And did you both have littleanimal nicknames?'


'You have to realize', I said, 'that I was a tremendous sweetiebefore all this started.'


'Let me guess. You were Daddy Bear, and she was your little cublet.' 'I'm not saying.' 'Little meals on trays. Warmed slippers.' 'Me correcting proofs. Her reading manuscripts. Happiness.' 'Andshe always did what Daddy Bear said?' 'Not at all. In fact she was onthe bossy side. I used to call them the Hitler Sisters. Her and Page. Another tomboy. They were always pouring with blood from somefight they'd just had. Like you and MA.' 'I'm getting the picture. Youwere Goody Two-Shoes. And she was little Miss Bossy Boots. Whatdid she look like? It's too adorable.'


I got to my feet and went and stood over her. I produced the walletphotograph, Missy eight years ago, brightly lit: the tidal drifts ofdown from temple to jawbone.


'Mmm,' she said. 'Still. You must have hardly dared to pinch eachother, in case you woke up. To the twentieth century.'


I couldn't resist it. I produced the second photograph and held itup to my face. 'What kind of camera did Mark Asprey use? One witha time delay? Or did you employ some sniggering third party?'


Nicola took a time delay before she said, Time delay.' And shesaid it softly.


I said, 'No dreaming here. Plenty of pinches. Fully awake.'


She flinched as I tossed it on to her lap. She straightened, and said,'I suppose you and Missy never went in for any of that.'


'Actually we did try spanking once. It hurt. My hand, I mean. Ieven said, "Ow."'


'I can see it does look rather ugly,' she said, and her long fingersbegan to tear. 'It was what he liked. And one will do things for . . .'


'Yes. Well you did say you were "stupid" for him.'


'For a genuine artist.'


'Come on. It's shit. Oh comeok.'


'I absolutely don't agree. There's a purity in his work that remindsone of Tolstoy.'


'Tolstoy?' I just couldn't take this. It was like the world. It was likefundamentalism. The planet was insane. The truth didn't matter. As1 picked up my coat I said, 'Did you see him? When he was here.'


She made no reply.


'It's over between you two. Isn't it?'


'Some things are never over.'


There is a woman who stands in the middle of the Tavistock Road,for an hour every evening, just after dusk, with her head up and herarms outstretched: cruciform.


Not old, not shabby, not stupid-looking, she stands right there in the middle of the street. She smiles fixedly at the oncoming cars,which slow down as they pass, and the drivers stare — but few shoutout. Actually, it is terrible, this smile of hers: martyred, trusting,admonitory. Why doesn't somebody come and drag her off some­where? One drunk is all it would take. When you drive by, andespecially if you approach her from the rear, you always think of carmetal meeting female flesh and blood, the forced and instantrearrangements of collision, with flesh and blood going where itsuddenly has to go. She's perfect for the book, but I can't think of anygood way of getting her in.


She's out there now. I can see her from the window. Why don't they come and take her away? Oh, why don't they come?


Chapter16: The Third Party

he next timeGuy saw Keith he looked utterly transformed.The Black Cross, at noon; down the length of Lancaster Road and in through the pub doors the low sun burned unpreventably .. .


'Cink paint,' said Keith. 'Rear final drive.'


First, and most obviously and graphically, the clothes. Keith wore a brown shirt of moire silk with raised stripes (its texture reminded Guy of pork crackling), hipster cream flares, and a new pair ofcoarse-furred ferret-like loafers (with a hint of the scaramouch or the harem-creeper in their curled tips).


'Intake manifold,' said Keith. 'Central differential.'


The cream flares had a striking arrangement at the fly. Boot­strap or bodice effects Guy was familiar with (Antonio, the rudeventa,so long ago), but he had never seen anything quite likeKeith's crotch.


'Underbody sealant,' said Keith. 'Wheel housing liners. Flangedesign.'


Individual loops, each tied in a bow, and tasselled with fringe and pom-pom; and the trousers were so dramatically, so disconcertinglylow on the hip that there was only room for two or three of them. The trousers held Keith's substantial rump as reverently as a Grecian urnholds its essence. Guy, who found the outfit ridiculous and evenalarming, none the less envied Keith that pert rear-end, having often thought that his own life had been quite poisoned by his want of real buttock. Their occupant seemed well pleased with the new trousers,and especially the fly, whose bows and bobbles he would occasion­ally run a hand over.


'Joint trapezium arm rear axle,' said Keith. 'Cataphoretic dippriming. Galvannealed zincrometal.'


Keith was, today, in particularly baronial mood, his mannersuggesting an unpierceable detachment from the froward concerns of pub life. The reason for this was not hard to fathom, was indeedwell known and still being talked about: at theochйof the GeorgeWashington, in England Lane, on Thursday night, Keith had tastedvictory. He thus took his place in the semi-finals of the DuoshareSparrow Masters.


'A shame you uh . . . let us down Thursday,' said Keith. He wasnow cleaning his fingernails with a dart. Guy looked again: Keithhad been manicured! Gone were the frayed cuticles, the scabs ofkippered nicotine. 'There was... it caused considerable disappoint­ment.'


'No I feel very bad about that,' said Guy. 'But the boy was sickagain. And at the moment we haven't got any — any choice. I was upall night with him.'


Keith looked puzzled. 'Your wife okay is she?'


'Sorry?'


'Still walking is she?'


'I'm sorry?'


Keith no longer looked puzzled. He just looked mildly surprised,and mildly displeased. Turning an inch or two, he jerked hiseyebrows atPongo,who smartly refilled his tankard. Then Keithpointed his darting finger at Guy until Guy said,


'Oh I'll have the same.'


Now Keith looked away. He seemed to be unhurriedly probing histeeth with his tongue. He began to whistle — just three casual notes ona rising scale. He ran a hand through his hair, which had beenrecently cut, and moussed, and extravagantly blow-dried.


'I'm sorry I missed it,' said Guy. 'Anyway welldone, Keith.' Hereached out a hand towards Keith's shoulder, towards his streamingbrown shirt, but then thought better of it. 'I hear you really —'


'Keith? Carphone!'


'Er, excuse me for a minute, would you, Guy?'


Guy stood there tensely with his drink, every now and thenreaching to scratch the back of his neck. Time passed. He turned andlooked (the angle of his head feeling vaguely craven) as Keith steppedback in from the radiance of the street and paused by the door tohave words with Fucker and Zbig One. 'Jesus,' Keith was saying in his deepest voice. These birds. No peace. Relax. Few drinks.' Guy looked away again.


Now with full gravity and silent promise of discretion Keith drewGuy to the fruit-machine, into which he began to insert a series ofone-pound coins, and along with whose repertoire of electronicditties and jingles he would confidently sing.


'I'm glad you're seeing Nicky again,' said Keith. 'Derdle erdleoom pom. Unrecognizable.'


'Sorry?'


'No comparison innit. Derdle erdle oom pom. Meemawmeemaw-meemaw. None of this moping around, what's the point, nopoint. What's the point. She's transformed.'


'Ah yes, you went round there to . . .'


The boiler.'


'Ah yes.'


To look at the boiler. Puckapuckapuckapucka. Bah bar deebirdie dee bom: ploomp! A, an exceptional woman, that. Notoverly versed, though, in the, in the ways of the world. You agree?'


'- Yeah,' said Guy.


Keith shook his head and smiled with affectionate self-reproach.'First time I went round there I thought she was one of them -Derdle erdle ooom pom. One of them birds that's really, well, youknow.'


Guy nodded suddenly.


'Meemawmeemawmeemaw. Oozing for it. You know. Drippingfor it. Sliding all over the floor. You're in there five minutes,minding your own business, and suddenly — Bah bar dee birdie deebom: ploomp!'


'I know the sort.'


'Not been in there five minutes and she's smacking your cods allover the park. Puckapuckapuckapucka. You come through thedoor, you take off your coat, you look down. She's got your gun inher gob. Derdleerdle oom pom. Bah bar dee birdie dee bom:ploomp! . . . Derdle erdle oom pom. Derdle erdle oom pom.Derdle -'


'Yes,' said Guy.


'Yeah well. Not a bit of it. Her? No way. Keeps herselfto herself.The real article: a lady.Look at this fucking thing.’


After several shoves and slaps Keith left the fruit-machine rockingsteadily on its base and led Guy back to their drinks. Keith positionedhimself comfortably, inclining backwards with his elbows on thebar.


'Yes,' said Guy, who seemed somewhat calmer, 'she's quite naive in some ways.'


'Doesn't surprise me.'


'Almost otherworldly.'


'Same difference.'


'That's right.' Guy's face cleared further. He even began on asmile.


'She's not. . .' The angle at which Keith was leaning afforded hima rare glimpse of his waist. He appeared to become absorbed by thetasselledloopingsof his groin, weighing each bobble in turn with hisclean fingers. For a moment a look of amusement or fond memorycrossed his face. But then his solemnity returned. He raised his hand to his hair, and looked upwards at the ceiling. He said, 'She's not just some fucking old slag like some.'


Out on the street Guy groped his way into a lamp-post and stood fora moment with his forehead pressed to the damp rust. He keptcasting his mind back . . . No, his mind kept going there under its own power, with great sudden backward vaults through time. Guykept thinking of his very first visit to her flat. Keith coming down thestairs — Hello, mate — and Nicola lingering (or recovering) in herbedroom; and then emerging (he glimpsed the tousled linen in themirror), walking awkwardly, bowlegged and bent in the middle, with her lewd and feverish face - It's sohot - and a welt or graze onher temple, as if, perhaps, in their rough passion . . . 'Oh my dear,' Guy found himself whispering (to whom?), with an incomprehens­ible smile on his lips. 'Such repulsive thought. Cannot be. Simply cannot be.' He moved off, but soon paused again, and paused again,and always with fingertips poised near his eyes.


And so Guy headed home, into the low sun. Quite uncanny, thesun's new trajectory, and getting lower all the time. Seen from therear, I must look exactly like I feel: a silhouette, staggering blind intothe photosphere of an amber star . . . And just as the sun burns offmist from the warming land, so the cumulus and thunderheads gaveway, as Guy walked, to cores of silver, and even spots of blue, in the sky of his mind. The only evidence: Keith's face. The face of KeithTalent, on the steps (with his toted toolbags). That unmistakablecontortion of gross lechery, and of lecheryin some way gratified. Butlook at it from another angle; and bear in mind that, for all his betterpoints, and through no real fault of his own, Keith remained anunbelievable berk. He might have a spyhole somewhere and peep on her in the bedroom or the bathroom. Window-cleaner wiles, keyholecunning. Perhaps he steals or at least inspects her underwear: quite easy to imagine Keith with his whole head in the laundry basket.Possibly he has contrived a way to exploit her innocence - some littleprocedure, insignificant to her, significant to him. Builders andplumbers are always manoeuvring women into close contact. Remember Hope complaining about it. Get you into the airingcupboard. He might ask her to bend down so that she can - she canlook at a pipe or something. Even I couldn't avoid seeing her breastswhen she leaned over that afternoon. So brown. So close together.Or he gets her to go up a ladder. As she strained to reach the skylightor whatever it was, her buttocks, in their white panties, would be locked together, and muscularly tensed, and sweetly unaware . . .


By the time Guy approached his front garden the adolescent chaos of his thoughts had in fact disqualified him from returning home. Hewas unpresentable. And he didn't even notice until he reached for hiskey and found that he could hardly get his hand into his trouserpocket. Guy swivelled, and dropped his head, and walked awayfastening all three buttons of his long tweed jacket. A brisk jog up thesteep bit of Ladbroke Grove, and a five-minute reverie about PepsiHoolihan, proved to be of little help. In the end Guy fashioned a kindof splint with his belt and ducked fast through the front door straightinto the lavatory beneath the stairs. He could hear women's voices downstairs until they were drowned by the rush of the cold tap.


'So how's Room Service?' asked Lizzyboo, who had just beencrying, and was now eating.


'WhatRoom Service?' said Hope. 'He's willing enough, some­times, but the orders come out wrong. He brings me tea with sugar. He brings me coffee with milk. I hate milk.'


'What do you think's up?'


'With Room Service? I have two theories. Either he's flipped. Youknow, that was always possible.'


'Or?'


'Or he's dying.'


'. . . I don't think he's dying,' said Lizzyboo.


'I don't either,' said Hope. 'Of course there's a third possibility.He's in love.'


'Room Service?'


'Like he was with you.'


'He was neverin love with me.'


'Sure he was. I found him snivelling over your dress, remember?'


'What dress?'


'The ballet dress. Flo-Flo's ballet dress. The blue one.'


'It wasn't blue.'


'Yes it was.'


'It was white.'


'No it wasn't.'


With his big feet Guy now started coming down the stairs. Hopestood up and started clearing away. Lizzyboo went on eatingShreddies.


'Hi,' he said.


'Hi,' said Lizzyboo.


'You get in any good fights today?' said Hope. 'Have you shownLizzyboo your black eye?'


'Wow,' said Lizzyboo,


'It's clearing up now,' said Guy.


'Yeah,' said Hope. 'It only looks like someone just spat a badoyster in your face.'


'Hope!' said Lizzyboo.


'Where's Marmaduke?'


'Out with Terry somewhere.'


Terry was back. Terry was back, and at rock-star wages. But not for long. The Clinches were passing through the nanny choke-point of autumn: several new ones would be starting over the next couple of weeks. Terry found it easier, or at any rate practicable, if he tookMarmaduke off somewhere. Hope permitted it, so long as Marma­duke was in the open air for no longer than thirty minutes, or at most forty-five. They had stopped asking where Terry took him. The ToyMuseum. Some snooker hall. Marmaduke would be back, soonenough.


'Have you eaten?' asked Lizzyboo with her mouth full.


'Yes. No. Anyway I'm not hungry. Feeling rather weird, actually. Ithink I'll just go and lie down for a bit.'


And up the stairs he went on his big feet.


The sisters stayed silent for quite a time.


'Flipped,' said Lizzyboo.'Dying,' said Hope.


These, then, were the terms in which Keith encapsulated hisThursday-night victory at the George Washington on England Lane:'In the final analysis' - and Keith had said this often by now, leaningbackwards on the bar of the Black Cross, the shrewd sweep of his eyesincluding Dean, Norvis, Bogdan, Fucker, Curtly, Netharius, Shakes­peare, Zbig One - 'the senior player could find no answer to thefluency of my release.'


In truth there were other things that the senior player could find noanswer to the fluency of: namely, the whispered taunts and threats with which Keith had regaled him immediately before the match,during the announcements, and in between every leg and set (while thetwo darters stood solemnly side by side, marshalling their thoughts).This was a questionableploy, and Keith was always loth to resort to it:I mean, you tell your opponent you 're going to rip his ear off and flob inthe hole, then you step up there, breathing hellfire, lose yourconcentration - and throw 26!Rebounds on you. Defeating its ownpurpose. But when Keith laid eyes on Martin Permane, the fifty-five-year-old ex-county thrower, with his exophthalmic stare, his warysmile and his village-idiotphysique (not to mention the dartingmedalson his breast: had some phenomenal averages in his classic seasons),well, he decided to give it a try. Although Martin Permane showed noresponse to the white-lipped cataract - hormone pills, prostateoperations, walking frames, hearing aids and coffin prices were someof the themes Keith played on — his darts definitely suffered. Lethimself down, did the senior slinger. Failed to throw to his fullpotential. And when, after the match, Keith ordered octuple SouthernComforts for himself, Dean and Fucker, and proceeded there andelsewhere to get unfathomably drunk, the older man merely frownedinto his consolation shandy, observing that darting styles hadprogressed a bit since he was a lad, and falling silent altogether as Keithlurched over to pound him on the back.


No matter. All that was in thepast: you take each match as it comes.Keith now girded himself for the future, getting his darting head rightfor the big one.


He threw himself into his darts. Darts was in his blood (his onlypatrimony, except for the darts pouch itself and the Ronsoncigarette-lighter). The darts in his blood coursed through him, feedinghis darts brain. A darts brain, that's what he had: darts nerve, dartssinew. A darts heart. A darts soul. Darts. 158? Two treble 20s,double 19. Or two treble 18s, bull. Darts. 149? Treble 20, treble 19,double 16(the best double on the fucking board). Darts. 120?Youjust shanghai the 20: treble zo, big 20, double 20. Tops. Darts.Darts, darts, darts. Darts.Darts. Keith Talent: Mr Checkout. KeithTalent — the man they call the Finisher.


When not actually practising his darts (brief breaks for aporno ortwo, and a ruminative smoke, as opposed to all the non-ruminativesmokes he had while actually practising), Keith pored over hisdarting bible:MTD: Master the Discipline: Darts:


If your opponent does a bad shot, like z6, punish him, capitalize, kick him when he is down with a maximum or a ton plus. If you do that no way will he get back in.


Yeah, thought Keith. You capitalize.


Never ask about an opponent. You play the darts not the man.


Never ask about an opponent, thought Keith. You play the darts not the man.


Those Pilgrim Fathers are said to have thrown darts while sailingto America in 1620 on the so-called Mayflower.


1620! thought Keith.


Christ knows how they managed it as they only had a small boatas they were tossed about on the 'Atlantic' Ocean. King Arthur was also said to have played a form of darts.


'Heritage,' Keith murmured. Following an unwonted but enticingtrain of thought, Keith saw himself as a key figure at the court of KingArthur, hailed initially for his darting skills, but going on to winmore general acclamation for his dirty jokes, his ability to hold hisale, his frenzied wenching. Not King Keith, granted (no way), but SirKeith, possibly. Tall-backed chairs, and a great pile of Clives by the fire. Had enough, sleep there if you like. Once a simple country lad.Of humble extraction. Sings for his supper as such. And then untilthe wonderful lady, with her hanky, and her fan, and her heavingbosom, takes his hand and leads him up, up, to the great tower . . . All this the girl in the dead-end street was making possible. Keithrealized, as he stood there in the dusty garage, his right toe on thechalk line, exactly 7ft 9 1/4 ins (2.37 metres) from the board, with hisdarts in his hand - Keith realized that his entire face was covered intears. Gratefully, exaltedly, he raised the cigarette to his lips: a fallingteardrop - here was more marksmanship - landed on its smokingcoal. But by puffing hard Keith succeeded in keeping the fire alive.


Tears at the dartboard, lachrymae at theochй:this was Keith'spersonal vision of male heroism and transcendence, of male grace under pressure. He remembered Kim Twemlow in the semi of lastyear's World Championship. The guy was in agony up there (and nowKeith flinched as he saw again the teartracks on that trex-white face),trailing four sets to nil and two legs down in the fifth. No one, not evenKeith, had given him a fucking prayer. A burst gastric ulcer, they saidlater, brought on by a few curries and a late night out. But what does the guy do? Calls a ten-minute medical delay, sinks a few Scotches,wipes away his tears, picks up his darts - and he throws. And hethrows . . .Five-four it was in the end. And the next night he only goesout there and butchers Johnny Kentish in the big one.Seven-fucking-nil. INNIT.


Kim and Keith: they were men. Men, mate. Men. All right? Men. They wept when they wept, and knew the softnesses of women, andrelished their beer with laughter in their eyes, and went out there whenit mattered to do what had to be done with the darts. Take them for allin all. That was what the Guy Clinches of this world would neverunderstand. Keith had often wondered why Nicola Six was doing himall these favours. And the thing or area known as hischaracter was thelast place he had looked for an answer. But now (the tears, the darts, the sawdust) it all seemed possible. We're talking success. And I canhandle it. A guy like Keith — and she must have sensed this — there wasnothing he couldn't do, there was nothing beyond him. A guy likeKeith could go all the way.


The baby saw the father in his usual chair. She made towards him.After a while she was no nearer. After a while she was no nearer. Keithstepped over her from the living-room to the bedroom. The baby wheeled around, or she tried. Keith just got further off-centre. Hestepped over her from the bedroom to the bathroom. The babywheeled again. She pressed down on her hands and looked up andinquired of him. Keith bent and picked up the heavy life (and theyareheavy, even the slightest of them, the possibilities, the potentiae, alldensely packed) and took a single stride into the middle of the kitchen.


His wife stood there in her tired light. Wordlessly Keith offered herthe smiling child. Without moving his feet he leaned back on thedoorjamb and watched critically as Kath prepared the bottle,fumbling and staggering every now and then, little Kim hookedawkwardly over her thin shoulder. Keith sighed. Kath turned to himwith a pale flicker in her face: a request for leniency, perhaps even asmile. Well, dream husband innit, thought Keith. Loads of moneysuddenly. Cheerful round the house. And all this was true, except forthe bit about being cheerful round the house. Keith was in a constantand unprecedented fury round the house. Everything round the houseprodded and goaded him.


He sat down and began on his Boeuf Stroganoff and Four IndividualMilford Flapjacks. Keith's mouth was full, and he had been drinkingall afternoon, and all morning, at the Black Cross, so he seemed to say,


'You got yourboeuf statificate on you?'


'Got my what?' asked Kath cautiously. Could it be that Keith wasnow complaining about her cooking, something he had never donebefore? She gave him what he wanted. Her hotpots and fondly spicedIrish stews had ceased unremarked about three days into their marriage.


'The bit of paper that says how old you are.'


'Not on me, no, Keith.'


He straightened a fork at her. 'When was you born then?'


'. . . Born?' said Kath, and named the year.


He stopped chewing. 'But that means you ain't even twenty-twoyet! Got to be some mistake, love. Got to be... You know what it'slike ? It's like an horror film. You know, where the bird's okay until thelast five minutes. Then she's just this boiler. Suddenly she's just ash andsmoke. Ash and smoke.'


Keith completed his meal in silence, with a couple of breaks forcigarettes. Then he said, 'Come on, Clive. Up you get, mate.'


The great dog climbed stiffly to its feet, one back leg raised andshivering.


'Come on, my son. Don't sit around here in this fuckin old folks'home, do we.'


Grimly, his long head resting on an invisible block, like anexecutionee, Clive stood facing the front door.


'No way. We're off.' He looked at his wife and said, 'Where? Work.In the correct environment.' He extended an indulgent knuckle to thebaby's cheek, and then added, with perhaps inordinate bitterness,'You just don't comprehend aboutmy darts, do you. What my dartsmeans to me. No conception.' His eyebrows rose. His gaze fell. He shook his head slowly as he turned. 'No . . .conception.'


'Keith?'


Keith froze as he opened the door.


'Would you give her a bottle when you come in?'


The shoulders of Keith's silver leather jacket flexed once, flexed twice. 'Ask me no questions,' he said, 'and I'll tell you no lies.'


Down on the street Clive lent his lumpy cooperation as Keithhauled him into the front passenger seat of the heavy Cavalier. Sothey weren't walking, not tonight. The dog could already taste themoist carpet of the loved pub, his aromatic lair in the corner beneaththe table, the place that smelled of many things but mostly his own archaeological deposits, his drooling growls, his whimpering sleep,his maturity, his manhood, the distant fluxes of his distant dog days.Clive had spent about two years of his life in this agreeable spot: dog years, too, seven times longer, or quicker, than the human reckoning. Now, before they got there, Clive had reconciled himself to a chilly wait of ten or fifteen minutes, alone, on the front seat. But he couldhandle it.


Like a dog itself the car lumbered through the lampless streets, on snuffling treads, with yellow eyes, heading for Trish Shirt's.


While Keith drove, Guy showered. With costly inerrancy thebubbled pillar of water exploded on his crown; below, supplemen­tary waist-high jets also sluiced his thighs, his insubstantial backside; and his great feet slapped about in the twirling wash. It's the Coriolisforce that makes water spin like that; in the southern hemisphere itspins the other way, clockwise; and on the equator it doesn't spin atall. Guy looked down through the tempest, through the privatizedprisms: yes, the bodybuilder was back. Like Terry. It had returned,recurred,craning into being, dumb and hopeful. The sheep look up.He had had this tumescence now, it seemed to him, for almost amonth. And it was thesame tumescence, not a series of new ones. Inthis respect it resembled Marmaduke's tantrums or screaming fits,which could be seen as essentially thesame tantrum or screaming fit:twenty months old and beginning on the day he was born.Tumescence and tantrum alike spoke eloquently of mysterious pain.It hurt now, for example. Just as Marmaduke hurt now (hear himholler). It hurt a lot all the rime. For the past few days Guy's groinhad entertained an ache of steady severity; it seemed to drift or cruiseabout in his lower systems, variously snagging itself in his spine, hisscrotum, his guts. Chainmailed in money, in health (he felt fine), incaution, Guy had never had much to do withpain. Except thatshiner: pure instinct- the dear fist. How could pain ever find him? Soin a way he welcomed and honoured it, the pain. It was like the painin his heart, in his throat; it was love, it was life. He didn't want totouch it, the pain, didn't want to disturb or molest it. No. You wouldn't want to touch it.


And now it juddered before him like a vacated diving-board as hestrode from the shower to the billowcloud of the Turkish towel, andhe tented it tenderly in white cotton shorts, and dressed the painquickly, and looked for a way out of the house on his taut leash, past the quiet wall of his wife's contempt — a contempt not doubled but squared or cubed by the presence of the sister, silently eating.


'Is the milk on?' said Hope.


By averting her eyes a quarter of a degree, Hope might have seenfor herself that the child's bottle was indeed warming, like a missile in the silo of its Milton. But this was an expression of her higher responsibility (she was measuring medicines): so might the brainsurgeon tell the lab char to give her mop a good squeeze.


'Yes,' said Guy. 'The milk's on.'


On the steps, the doublefronted house looked down on him,proudly - the masterpiece, the swelling arsenal of neg-entropy. Allaround the pressure was gathering, in pounds per square inch.


Nicola Six had just got Enola Gay out of Phu Quoc and was in theprocess of ferrying her to Kampot when Guy said suddenly,


'So really you see quite a lot of Keith.'


'. . . Yes. He's in and out a good deal.'


'The boiler and so on.'


'The boiler. And the pipes,' said Nicola (who in truth knew even less about this kind of thing than did Keith Talent).


'Do you ever — does he ever have you go up ladders or anything likethat?'


Guy crossed his legs and realigned his buttocks. He was, herealized, succumbing to a reckless agitation. Not that the evening had - on paper anyway - provided much excitement so far: a two-hour one-man play, translated from the Norwegian and performedin a Totteridge coffee-bar, about the demise of the reindeers; then asimplethough no doubt perfectly nutritious meal in a vegetarianBangladeshi restaurant in Kilburn. There had certainly been noanxiety about running into anyone he knew. But Nicola at night was a novelty, and a revelation (and in the City money was moving instrange ways and Guy felt again that the time was short. Short, shortwas the time) . . . The sun does many things but it's far too busy to flatter the human being with its light. Human beings do that, withtheir light. Guy didn't quite say it to himself, but human light made Nicola look experienced: the thinness or fineness of the skin roundthe hollows of jaw and cheekbone; the dark breadth of the mouth.And how incontrovertibly illicit were the shadows of the apartment, the folds of her silver-grey cashmere dress, the glaze of her legs. Ateleven o'clock at night — at her place — love was no allegory.


'Let me think. Does he have me go up ladders. No.He goes upladders.'


'He doesn't get you in corners. By the sink or something.'


'In corners . . . No 1 don't think so.'


'How does Keith strike you? Generally, I mean.'


She shrugged minutely and said, 'I suppose he's rather anattractive character.'


'Of course you know', Guy heard himself saying, 'that in someways he's little better than a common criminal. Or worse.'


'Or worse? Guy, I'm shocked. I think it's so unkind to judge peopleby hearsay. Or by their backgrounds.'


'Just so long as you know. I mean, you haven't found anythingmissing. Cash. Jewellery. Clothes.'


'Clothes?'


'Scarves. Belts. He might give them to his girlfriends. He's got lotsof girlfriends, you know. Underwear.'


'Whatever would Keith want with my underwear?'


'These questions will seem quite pointless to you. But has he evergot you in the airing-cupboard.'


Nicola did a slow frown and said, 'It's funny you should mentionthe airing-cupboard.'


Guy sat back. He stretched his neck and looked along his nose ather.


The other day there was some sort of problem to do with theairing-cupboard. Some . . . pipe thing. Well it's awfully cramped and


stuffy in there, And I was wearing my short blue thing 1 do my


exercises in.’


'Go on,' said Guy regally.


'Well he told me to read the nipple gadget on the stopcock. Are yousure you want to — it's all rather shaming. I had to strain upwards tosee the dial. I had one foot on the chair. And one on the towel rack.Rather an undignified sight. And very uncomfortable, with my legs stretched apart like that. And then . . .' She gave a secretive smile.


'What?'


'You'll never guess.'


'I think I can. Keith did something. Didn't he.'


'No no. Keith was in there, in the bathroom, testing thetemperature level in the bidet. No. The towel rack slipped and Itumbled to the floor with all the sheets and everything coming downon top of me!'


Guy smiled palely.


'Fortunately I was able to collect myself completely by the time hehurried along to help. No, the real reason I need him here so much —and you're not to be cross or tease me. The real reason...is the littleone.'


'I'm sorry?'


'Oh. If at the other end of a great chain of ifs and buts, and far inthe future and everything, if there is a future, and only when youwant to, we do decide to have a baby daughter, then there are allsorts of things I might as well get done now. And if we're going tomake any progress this evening then do please come and sit over here. I'm dying to do some kissing.'


Guy left about an hour later, soon after midnight. And somethinghappened, just before he left, something dramatic, something painful — though Guy would later derive much complicated comfort fromthe incident. First he had paid a stooped visit to the bathroom, where, gasping and wincing, he had rearranged himself with the aidof his belt and the vibrant elastic of his boxer shorts. In the hall he joined Nicola, who stood in profile with her arms folded. This', shesaid, 'is the famous airing-cupboard.' In they peered. 'Come on,' she said, and stepped inside. Sober Guy suddenly felt rather drunk: thepine racks of bedding, the polythene puff of the heater, the narrowspace where a man and a woman might very well contend withcertain harassing proximities. 'You can just imagine me up there,' she said, as she turned to him, 'with one leg here and one leg there.Careful.'...As had been the case before, their farewell kisses, beingemblems of their own termination, were by far the most liquid anddistendedof the evening; and the heat in there was so furtive, sofeminine . . .Not that their bodies were actually touching or anythinglike that; but Guy could feel the ghosts of various contours, ofpromising pendencies, or perhaps just the electric field, the cashmerenimbus, of her dress. To further this delicious calibration he slightlybent and parted his legs, urging himself forward half a famishedmillimetre. At one point, as she breathed thickly into his ear, his hand moved from her shoulderblade to the surprising bounty of her armpit,and then hovered and fell (he thought he heard a moan of assent) onher waiting breast.


Later,Guy could never finally decide whether he had in fact lostconsciousness, though Nicola would always regretfully assert that hehad. When the world's lineaments returned, in any event, he was lying in the foetal position with his head on thepassage carpet and with bothhands cupped and trembling over his groin. The colour of his face(Nicola would remark) had some interesting affinities with the colour of his healing black eye: grey on a background of pale green. She wascalling his name as if through rain and from a considerable distance.


'Guy? Guy? Guy! Guy...I can't bear it. I did it again. Just pureinstinct. Terrifying how dramatic it was. You went down like a ton of bricks. Have you been ill? Ooh. Does ithurt dreadfully? Come on . . .oof. I suppose we can look on the encouraging side. My breasts wereburstingand when you touched me there was this great convulsionright through my body. Can you drive? Can you walk? Can youspeak?Say something. Guy? Guy? Ah I can'tbear this. Why is it that Ialways seem to be causing you pain?'


After Guy left, Keith called. Nicola stared at the seething booze in herglass as she heard the pips of the payphone, the bearpit clamour ofsawdust and bloodlust. ..


Now this was a little bit naughty of Keith to call so late like this. Buthe wanted to see another one of those videos, being incorrigible as he was. And, quite frankly, after the kind of eveningshe'd had(that play!that meal!), well, where was the harm in a little bit of fun?


Nicola poured more brandy. She giggled uglily: ugly giggling. Sheknew the giggling was ugly but that only made her giggle all the uglier.She went to her dressing-room, taking the glass, and the bottle.


D'you knowsomething? She was really in the mood. She was. Keith,he did love her to wear her frillies. Said it made him feel dead fruity.Nowthis . . .is a lovely garment. Dirty great brute like him but they'reall just little boys really when they see you in your scanties. (Andtheydo like a spiky shoe.) All the pound notes Guy gave her she would spend on wondrous frillies and costliest scanties. For him!For Keith!


She unbuttoned her dress and slipped out of it. She let her hairdown. Ugly giggling.


Guy parked the car in Lansdowne Crescent and sat waiting for thepain to go away. Seventy-five minutes later Guy was still there. But then so was the pain. With his lips as far apart as they had ever beenasked to stretch he slid across the seat and out into the night.


The great house swam towards him, darkly streaming. Hesearched its face: no dreaded yellows of emergency or vigil. Was itpossible that his return might coincide with Marmaduke's tortured small-hour drowse? The front door admitted him. His bones creak­ed and split and popped into the hall. With reckless swiftness hetiptoed towards the kitchen stairs.


Under surgical lights, surrounded by washers and driers andstacks of nappies, Guy inspected himself, unkindly, like an armydoctor. His animal parts looked hard-done-by, traduced, but nomore unprepossessing than usual. It was his face that seemedaltered, shrunken, livid - his fool-for-love face, terrified by thebright mirror. Among Marmaduke's innumerable talcs and salvesthere was nothing for what ailed him.


As he came out of the washroom adjusting his trousers, a bolt offear traversed the kitchen: a spectral nightdress in a mouth of whitelight. Not Hope — Lizzyboo. Raiding the icebox.


'Marmaduke quiet?' he asked.


'Mm-hm. As of ten minutes.'


He thought of their one embrace, the embrace Hope never knewabout, in the bathroom, in Italy, the not-so-little little sister,flattered, foregrounded, breathlessly promoted. How big she wasnow. And how other. Poor Lizzyboo.


'Goodnight.'


She chewed and swallowed. 'Goodnight,' she said.


Guy stole upstairs, falling quieter on every step, and undressed inthe dark of the visitor's room. Naked, he stole across the passage onthe balls of his feet. The furious physics of the door fought himevery inch of the way: its croaks and twinges, its rasp against thecarpet's nap. When you're trying to be quiet, you see that every-thing is dying to be noisy. And Guy twanging there with the physicsof everyday h'fe. Hope lay in the darkness, curved like an ess or a zed,or a query.


Wehn Kieth got back that. . . When Kieth . . . Wehn Keith got backthat nite, okay. Eezy does it. Where's the lite? Okay. No way wasthem lastpomostoo cJever. Ditto going again to Shirt Trish again.But Nik siad OK to drink waht felt okay. Dim matter. Siad it dimmatter. Man is the hunter . . .


He sJammed the front door behind him. He stood at the sink anddrank a Jot of warm water. Then he felt better. Then he fell over.Suddenly, and in no particular order, Keith burped the wife, took thebaby outside for a pee, and fucked the dog.


Kim Twemlow's lifestyle.' Still strolling about in his white shoes. Even up here on the ceiling there were lights of cars. The house, thecircular drive, and selected guests for luncheon. Why, Cymphia.Amphea! Generally find a glass of chapmange quite refreshing at thishour. Smampha. Corimphia.'My dear Aramimpha?. . . Keith? Youcould have the Jot, mate. Yeah, you cuold. You colud do it son. Youculod. Yeah you fucking cloud . . .


What was it? Driving back like that - what was it? in the car, andClive sleeping. The moon. And London like it used to be. Many moons of the street-lamps, many moons ago. TV. Jesus. Coming upon me now. Felt yung innit. Uh-oh. What goes down must - oop.Whoop. Yeah that was the phing. Yooph, mate, yooph.’


I must go to London Fields, before it's too late.


If I shut my eyes or even if I keep them open I can see the parklandand the sloped bank of the railway line. The foliage is tropical andinnocuous, the sky is crystalline and innocuous. In fact the entire vista has a kiddie-book feel. There in his van putts Postman Pat: Postman Pat and his black-and-white cat. It is all outside history.Vicars, spinsters, parkies, gardeners, widows so old, so long-widowed, that they have reverted to a state of virginity. The onlyhard evidence of sex is the children - and, in the distance (and not sohard), soft hills in the shape of breasts.


There was a stream, fordable, jumpable, not dangerous, perfectlyscaled for five-year-olds, for boys, for my brother and me. David! Sam! Oh boys, you are heartbreaking and mysterious. The way you cock your weak bodies — to essay something, to dare something.Your love of war. Look! Watch! Oh, boys, why do you have to dothis?


But boys have to do this.


I must go back. I mustn't leave it too late.


One can only assume that Missy has a thing for men and weapons— for arms and the man.


Look at me: pre-nuked and dead-already.


Look at Sheridan Sick. That time I met him. High up over Du PontCircle, a party in the boardroom of Hornig Ultrason (HornigUltrason: a beacon for everything bad). I asked him to explain thenew phenomenon of superbolt lightning. Missy stood at his side, atmy side. I knew nothing.


'Solar supergranulation,' said Sick. 'Sam? imagine soup boiling ina pan 20,000 miles across. Even when it gets here the flare wind is still travelling at 400 miles per second. Then it hits a ghost basin inthe magnetosphere. Bingo. Superbolt.'


Quite unenlightened, I said, 'You give the impression that you know a lot about these things.'


'I'm learning, Sam. We're working more and more with theQuietWall community.'


'Well, stop. And don't do it again.'


'That's funny,' he said. With a really disgraceful smile. On hisreally disgraceful face.


Sheridan Sick: a smart cookie. Yeah, a biscuit, with a haircut ontop, powered by a certain je-ne-sais-quoi. It takes all kinds to make aworld. It takes only one kind to unmake it. My father was of thelatter school, though in an unrecognizably younger world, caught upin fresher historical forces. And not doing it for the money.


Of all the forces, love is the strangest.


Keith looks like love (though I'm sure he doesn't feel it. And givenhe's Keith). The spring in the step, like Johnny Head-in-Air.


And Guy looks like death.


Love can make a woman pick up a bus, or it can crush a man underthe weight of a feather. Or it just lets everything go on as it wasyesterday and will be tomorrow. That's the kind of force love is.


God knows why I persist withCrossbone Waters. I guess itemboldens me: that stuff like this gets published. It's an awful littlepiece of shit.


In his skiff or whatever, with his sweaty fatigues and his trustyguide Kwango, Marius Appleby retraces the old pirate routes offestering Borneo. Many long descriptions of celebrated pillagingsand rapes. Especially rapes. Marius often seems to wish he were backthere in the old days, and that the pirates were taking on new hands.


But the good bits are all about the photographer assigned to him by the colour magazine, Cornelia Constantine: five feet twelve,twenty-seven, octaroon complexion. Her eyes areas black as ebonyand she hasflaming waist-length red hair. He meets her at theairport. She's one of those natural blue-bloods, disdainful,self-sufficient, dedicated to the art of taking photographs. ButMarius is posh too (he lets it be known), and handsome, and nostranger to the love of women. Cornelia's previous boyfriendsinclude a world-famous sculptor, an EEC Prime Minister and a deadracing-driver. When she alights from the jeep, even thebustlingstreets of Samarinda go into freeze frame, like on Keith's TV.


They hire old Kwango and set off in the skiff, which is calledAphrodite.Invoking the deity, Marius vows to possess Cornelia. Hischances don't look good, but you find yourself rooting for him somehow. As he awakes on the first morning he sees her standingnaked in the cerise lagoon, her flaming hair perched on the crux ofher muscular buttocks. On her way out, after her swim, she faces thetravel writer boldly, without shame, as noble beauties will. And he raptly notes that her breasts areproud and her hair-colournatural.


Oh yeah. A story of natural love. The whole thing is like this: athesaurus of miserableclichйs.It's anawful little piece of shit. But Iguess I'll keep going. The thing is, I really want to know how Mariusmakes out with Cornelia.


Like my heroine or villainness, like my murderee, Lizzyboo, too,has a strategy for getting to the end of men. Her strategy is this:Weigh Two Hundred Pounds.


There is a major obstacle in her journey towards two hundredpounds: food poisoning. Common sense: if you eat more food, thenyou eat more poison. I think this works in my favour, all in all. She's in bed now, sick, too sick to eat much or to feel like getting fresh.


Imagine the miraculous expansion of Missy Harter's girth. I keepgetting the wild idea that if we could buy babies in stores or go look at them in zoos and theme parks, and they never grew up but stayedat fifteen months for say six or seven years, yes, we'd still beinterested, some of us, we'd go look at them and maybe buy a couple and keep them under the ping-pong table in the basement and bringthem out to show our friends.


Every day the sun is getting lower in the sky.


The pain hasn't come yet. Slizard is amazed. But I still have thisstrontium sting or plute ache in my ankles. I find the roads are gettinglonger, the hills steeper. I use the car.


Now - the streets, the traffic. We know that traffic reflects thetemperaments of the great capitals (and here in a farewell flourish I invoke my world citizenship): the unsmiling triumphalism of Paris,the fury and despair of old New York, the cat-and-mouse audacityof Rome, the ragged murder of Cairo, the showboat longevity of Los Angeles, the industrial durance of Bombay or Delhi, where,four times a day, the cars lash the city in immovable chains. Buthere, in London — I just don't get it.


They adore doubleparking. They do. This is true love - a lovewhose month is ever May. They park in the middle of the goddam­ned street. I turned into the All Saints Road - and it wasn't a roadany longer. It was a lot, a doubleparking lot. The traffic lights arebarely more than decoration, like Christmas lights. You hit a red at the crossroads but you inch forward anyway, into the lock, into theheadlock. You may even decide the time is ripe to get out and runan errand. Why? Why not? Everybody else does it. It seems clear tome, after five seconds' thought, that if everybody does it thennobody gets around, nobody gets anywhere. But everybody does itbecause everybody does it. And here's the other thing: hardlyanyone seems to mind. At the crossroads the drunken youth dropsout of his van and waddles into GoodFicks or Potato Love or theButchers Arms, and the cars don't mind. They just nudge and shoveeach other, the old heaps, and not angrily, in this intimacy of metal and rust and not getting anywhere.


That was more or less how it was ten years ago. That was moreor less how it was ten days ago. Now, in the last little packet oftime, it's all changed. We have moved from purgatory to fullinferno. And suddenly everybody minds. Even the gentler sex. And if plump mums scream over thegrizzle of their strapped kids, if oldladies in old Morrises parturate with venom and smack freckledfists on the horn, then how are themen taking it? Four times in thelast few days I have sat tight in the car, gridlocked under the lowsun, with no way out, while jagged figures discover what the hardmachine can do to the soft: what the hood of the car can do to thehuman nose and mouth, what the tyre-iron can do to the back of the human head. Traffic is a contest of human desire, a waitinggai.ie of human desire. You want to go there. I want to go here. And, just recently, something has gone wrong with traffic. Some­thing has gone wrong with human desire.


I don't get it. No - I do! Suddenly I do, though there's no realreason (is there?) why anybody else should. In traffic, now, we areusing up each other's time, each other's lives. We are using up each other's lives.


Cornelia's morning swims have become a ritual. Marius will now stand on the deck with bronzed arms akimbo and openly admire heras she wades toward the shore. Her breasts, apparently, are -


A package, delivered by uniformed courier. I was expecting, with very little enthusiasm, the medication promised by Slizard. This wasfrom Hornig Ultrason, however.


It contains the first chapters of my typescript. And the outline. Anda check. Option-money. I don't know how she worked it. Butthis . . .


I'm aware that art can be sweet, and love sweeter, the recognitionand forgiveness in the eyes, the hand and its needed touch, the mind-body problem so sweetly solved. But this, this (the money quivers in my fingers),this is true felicity.


The turbulence of my joy was such that I didn't notice, for amoment, that the pain had come.


And now the pipes are starting up again. The pain - the inorganicagony.


Jesus, the whole apartment is writhing and twisting with it.


Is it ever going to stop? Is it ever going to stop with that stuff?


Notnow. But when? When's a good time for it — for pipes, forpain? It never is, it just never is, it justnever is the time.


Chapter 17: Cupid's College


lovejuice.  ungovernable passion.The earth moved innit.'


'Hello, Keith. How are you?'


'Give herself utterly. The consummation of their bliss. One up theKhyber.'


'How are things?'


'Mutual body pleasure. The importance of sufficient foreplay. Afull but firm figure. Consenting adults.'


When he was with her, Guy's trust was absolute and entire.Although Nicola's kisses sometimes shocked him - with theirliquidity, their penetration, their hunger — her inhibition wasunassailable, without blindspots, and impressively intransigent.How her whole body seemed to lock or jam whenever his handentered the force field surrounding her breasts, her thighs, herheartbreaking belly. Elaborately conditioned by her sensitivity (andby the two powerful blows he had recently sustained), Guy wasalmost as tentative, as virginally hairtriggered, as Nicola herself. Itwas a relief for them both to be elsewhere, in all the places wherenothing could happen. Sometimes, in the afternoons, they visited obscure museums or earnest cinemas. They went for walks, makingthe most of the clear weather: Guy relished a good tramp, and Nicolasaid she liked it too. The further out the better, Guy in his big wetshoes, Nicola in her dark-green wellies, her patched blue jeans: theyheld hands, and walked with their joined arms swinging. Just northof Barnet they found a wood they both adored. The muffled rustling,the way the trees husbanded moisture. Of course, there were littletricks and japes. She would knock his hat off into a puddle, then run and hide. Guy would scamper after her. She once wrote I Love You with a stick in the phlegmy mud of a dried stream. There were manydelicious kisses under the branches of the tinkling trees. Birds stirredand damply flapped but they saw no animals, no small woodland creatures, not even a squirrel or a rabbit: only the animal fawns of the light cast by the low sun. Nicola said that these moments wereespecially precious, away from the city and its sense of approachingcatastrophe.


When they got back to her flat Nicola would serve tea, on a tray,usually with biscuits. And for a while they would carefully neck on the sitting-room sofa. Yet when the time came for him to leave, and the kisses at the top of the stairs became kisses of farewell they alsobecame wanton, and she would now squirm with vivid appetite in hisarms. Smaller than him, and shoeless by this stage, Nicola would seem to be climbing up his body with the aid of various points ofsuction. Now, as he went on his way, his chest bore the fudgyimprints of her breasts, his belly was embossed by her culverts and contours. Further down, all was muscle memory: the tilt and camberof her excruciating pith. And she would soon be braver, she said. 'Soon I'll be braver,' she whispered hotly into his humming ear.


Still, Guy counted himself pretty lucky if he managed to get in and out of there without bumping into Keith. As Guy staggered down thestairs, bent, breathless, coated with electricity, Keith would bestaggering up them. Alternatively, when Guy rang the buzzer on theporch, it would be Keith who personally yanked open the front door,looking glazed, lordly, propitiated. Something like this happenedslightly more often than not. And once it happened twice: on the wayinand on the way out — as if Keith was just politely and brieflyvacating the eminence that was rightfully his. There were also othervisits, Guy knew. Sometimes, when he was passing by or at any ratein the general neighbourhood, or when he had nothing better to do (asurprisingly capacious timeframe), Guy would haunt her dead-endstreet. On one occasion he saw Keith pull up and stolidly hoist satchel and toolbag from the boot of the heavy Cavalier. On another- and this was more or less pure accident - Guy's Volkswagen wasinvolved in a minor delay, close to the significant junction; the delaywas caused by Keith, who at some risk to himself and others wasbacking out into the main road; a few minutes later Keith drove past, sneering volubly into his new earphone.


In the early mornings Guy would lie in bed next to the shape of hissleeping wife (so distorted, now, in all his feelings about her, by theweight of what she didn't know) and stare at disgusting tableauxvivants, coarse grey travesties of potting shed and parkie hut, ofelderly nurseries, with Keith saying, 'The doctor told me I have to do it once a day. Just lie down there,' or, more coaxingly, 'You just put itin your mouth until - it's just a funny game really.' Stealthily Guydrained himself from the bed. Next door he sat on the edge of thebath and moaned and shouted into the towel's cumulus. Then helooked down at his own loins with amazement and humiliation: there was the farcical animal, the winking elf. Godlike and archaic, he rose and began to cover the wound. In the mirror a pale warrior,vizor-boned, bodkin-browed — the starved lips! The two corners ofhis jawline had grown sharp rivets. His hipbones stuck out like thehandles of a cooking urn. An urn that contained? The stew of all hisstewed love.


And the century so close to its ending. The thing was, the troublewas, what it came down to was . .. No. Guy never dared think it. Set free, the thought would have gone like this. You could imagine Nicola, someone like Nicola, someone in her position, someone soplaced, so cloistered, at the end of the nineteenth century or at theend of the eighteenth century or any other century that had anumber. But not the twentieth century, which must leave its markon everyone. Not the twentieth century. Not looking like shelooked.


Keith said, 'What do you do with Guy then?'


'What do you think I do?' said Nicola. 'I tease his fucking cockoff.'


Keith nodded slowly at her, with genuine affection. Then hestretched. 'Yeah. You know...he went to the university. Okay. Buthe done know fucking nothing.'


'It's a paradox, isn't it, Keith.'


'Nothing.'


'Whereas yourself, Keith, a student at the university of life . . . ?'


'Up the hard way. Street-smart as such. No, okay: he was borninto a life of wealth and privilege like.' Keith lifted a finger. 'But henever lifted a finger for it. For me - for me, that's like unbelievable.Half the time he must think he's fuckingdreaming.'


'Keith? May I demur? Happiness isn't relative, any more thansuffering is. No one's going to feel grateful that his life isn't anyworse. There's always enough pain, Keith. And the rich baby cries aslustily as the poor.'


'Yeah cheers.'


Keith was lying on Nicola's pretty bed, in his trousers and vest:thoroughly relaxed. His plump feet seemed to quiver lightly in theirbrown socks. Beside him rested the silver tray, the dregs of the devilish espresso, the saucer frilled with cigarette ends. Talentedly,Nicola was wearing a charcoal business suit and a white silk shirt fastened at the throat with an antique brooch of high formality. Hernails were varnished ovals; her linked bracelet stirred and settledwith delicate distinctness. She sat on a straightbacked chair, insimple and streamlined authority. She corporate, he corporeal: the power breakfast.


Til leave you alone for a little while,' she said, standing andsmoothing herself down. 'It's a rather glossy little piece I've preparedfor you this morning.' She handed him the remote control, andreached for the tray. 'You'd never guess what these lady executivesget up to in their offices. On a warm day, perhaps. After seeing somehandsome window-cleaner going about his rough work. Oh, Keith: how discreet are you being these days?'


'Cross my heart and hope to die.'


'Yes yes. But how discreet are you being? It doesn't really matter.Of course, you don't say a word to Guy. But otherwise just do what comes naturally. He'll just think you're lying, anyway. Let me knowwhen you're done.'


She drifted into the body of the flat, the sitting-room, the kitchen.She placed the silver tray on the wooden draining-board. She madeanother cup of coffee and smoked another cigarette and readTime magazine . . . This week's cover story was about the weather. Asusual. It was hard to believe thatthe weather had until quite recently been a synonym for small talk. Because nowadays the weather wasbig talk. The weather made headlines all over the world. Every day. On TV a full reversal had taken place: the handsomest newscastersand the brainiest pundits were all weathermen now; and thewhimsical tweed-suited eunuchs, who used to point rulers at chartsand apologize about the rain, came on at the end to give the othernews, or what was left of it. Meteorologists were the new war-correspondents: after John on hurricanes, and Don on glaciers, yougot Ron on tropospherics. Rhythmically flicking the nails of herthumb and forefinger, Nicola read about the low sun, and the latestexplanations. The change of angle was apparently caused by an unprecedented combination of three familiar effects:perihelion(when the earth is at its shortest distance from the sun),perigee(when the moon is at its shortest distance from the earth) andsyzygy(when the earth, sun, and moon are anyway most closely aligned).The confluence made gravity put on weight, slowing the planet's spinand alsoslowing time, so that earth days and nights were nowfractionally but measurably longer. 'Yeah cheers,' murmuredNicola, who had only twenty days and nights on earth to go. ShetossedTime over her shoulder and arrived at her own explanation.Love made the world go round. And the world was slowing up. Theworld wasn't going round.


Still, the earth's new tilt meant that London would get the fulleclipse. London would witness 'totality' on November 5. Andalready there were boys on the street with their guys, begging. 'Pennyfor the guy?' The guys themselves were insultingly perfunctory: solittle thought had gone into them, so little care, so little love. Theyweren'tworth a penny. And a penny was worth nothing.


After a long limbo (neglect, oblivion), she knocked on thebedroom door. Normally he alerted her with a confidential cough.But Keith's urbane throat-clearings, once begun, could rage on for over an hour. 'Yeah?' he said thickly. The moment she entered shewas angrily aware that Keith had not availed himself of his solitarytreat. Quickly she followed his gaze to the television screen: herself,freeze-framed, at her desk next door (and with one leg up on it), thecharcoal suit in fascinating disarray. Nicola looked at him again, andshut her eyes as part of the effort of not laughing. For Keith was in tears. Warmly they had flowed; their tracks were yellowish on hisporous cheeks. How she had underestimated her Keith! Porno­graphy awakened all his finer responses. It wasn't just the sex. He really did think it was beautiful.


'I expect,' said Nicola, with relief, with amusement, with genero­sity (though not all the anger had been purged from her voice), 'Iexpect that after you visit me, you go off and see some girl, don't youKeith. Some little cracker. You do, don't you, Keith.'


Keith kept his counsel.


That's good. I approve. Then you do to her all the things you wantto do to me. All the things youwill do to me, very soon. Ooh, I betyou do. You do, don't you, Keith.'


Keith kept his counsel.


'I just want you to do what feels right foryou,' said Nicola. Afterthe yob art, she thought she might as well throw in some yob love, onthe off chance that it might make any difference to anything. 'Oh, Idon't expect to hold you, Keith, not now or later, a man such asyourself. That's why I'm spinning things out like this. Especially notlater. The girls will all be after you, and who can blame them? But I'llalways be pushing for you, Keith, even when I'm just one of yourmemories. You won't have to let me know when the big one comes along: I'llbe there for you, Keith. When you're throwing your darts for the Embassy, for the number-one spot, I'll be somewhere in thecrowd, Keith, cheering you on.'


Keith sat up straight and put his feet on the floor. As he lookedabout for his shoes he said, 'Notfor the Embassy.At the Embassy.Notfor. At.'


She ducked into the bathroom, to change into her jeans and wellies for the next act. But first she threw on all the taps, pulled the lavatory flush, buried her face in a towel and almost killed herself laughing. Itwas a warm and timid little face that peeped through the crack in thedoor as Keith moodily took his leave.


'Guy,' said Keith, with his head down. 'What you tell him I comehere for? Tell him I what? Fix the toilet? Lie on the kitchen floor withme tongue up a funnel?'


'. . . Something like that,' said Nicola.


Success has not changed me, thought Keith as he came down thestairs. Success, and recognition. Obviously it's nice to enjoy the fruits of stardom. Obviously. The money and the — the adulation like. Thegoods and services. I worked like a - like a dog for my crown. Nodanger I'll relinquish it in a hurry. But obviously basically I'llhopefully be the same Keith Talent I always was.'


Keith wiped the additional tears from his eyes and opened the front door. That sticklebrick of pallor, money, invented pain andgood teeth - known as Guy Clinch - was feeding coins into a parkingmeter. His smile flickered up at Keith, who stood on the steps withhis legs apart, shrugging into position the strap of his stolen toolbag.


'Good morning,' said Guy defeatedly.


But Keith moved past him with just a glazed wipe of the eyes andcrossed the road for the heavy Cavalier.


Nicola was right. After he visited her, Keith went to see aladyfriend. Moreover, Keith visited a ladyfriendbefore he visited her. Only certain unrepealable physical laws stopped him going tosee a ladyfriendwhile he visited her. Nicola was right again. The girls were all after him, or at least they weren't getting out of his way. AndKeith was really putting himself about, with an urgency, a cartwheel­ing canine frenzy he had never known before. Was someone puttingsomething in his lager? It couldn't be healthy (even Keith was sure of this), and he genuinely feared for his darts, not to mention his sanity.Compulsive behaviour innit. But the birds were as bad. Indeed, overthe great city, or in those flues and runnels where Keith scamperedand paused, his whiskers working, a sewery fever seemed to be abroad, all wastepipes and floodgates and gargoyles, rat-borne. For Keith it was sharp and brackish, like the ever-present smell of urinein the streets. Of course, you had to be persistent, and having nothing to do all day unquestionably helped. After he'd fetched her milk forthe ninth morning running, Iqbala consented, once again, to turn thetelly up loud. Popping in on Petronella Jones with a series of high-octane gifts to celebrate her recent marriage to the oilrigger, Keithhad found that one thing led to another. Since Thelonius's arrest,Keith had been doing the right thing, making regular and glad-handed visits to Lilette and the kids, and he could all too easily see himself developing an obligation there (Lilette okay for a baby-mamma, and not pregnant, or not very pregnant, just now: give the kids a tenner get lost for twenty minutes). It was getting so bad hehardly had time to hang around for hours on end relaxing over a few drinks with his colleagues in the Black Cross. While he performed -in bed, on the couch or the carpet, up against the radiator - while hejerked and stabbed and fought for breath, his thoughts, his desperatepresentiments, were all of money, transformation, Nicola and, forthe first time in his life, his own death. And here was one final proofthat all was not well. He'd stumble in at Christ knows when, afterdoing Christ knows what to Christ knows who all day, followed by nine hours of darts and rounding it all off at Trish Shirt's - and findhimself elbowing Kath awake at four in the morning! Now why would he go and do a thing like that? Kath.Kath, in whose body hehad long lost all but a reflexive, Friday-night interest. It was like thattime in the middle of the pregnancy, when Keith had been brieflystirred to find himself alongside this cool newfat chick with the big titsand the beer gut. I don't know what's got into me, he now thought, ashe pressed her shaking shoulders down the bed. Really and truly Idon't.


Keith pulled off in the heavy Cavalier. Being a professional, hedrove with some sedateness, keeping his concentration, and his temper, as you had to do. The thick fingers depressed the indicator,and flashed the lights, in warning, in sufferance. The meat of the handcame down on the horn in brute denial, or tapped it tw;ce, to sayhitoacheator make a woman swivel and show her face . . .Mind you, Keithwasn't complaining. Complain? Keith? Not the type. Got on with it.Just as he imagined the world being held together by blind and hidden forces, so everything generally rested easy in his reptile mind. Andguess what: Analiese Furnish had moved back into town. Keith accelerated, then braked, then traumatized a Learner with shout ofhorn and glare of lights. What theydoing on the roads. Analiese, withher poems, her crushed flowers, her newspaper clippings(our secret love), her Caramac hair, her bountiful summer dresses.Tired of Slough, tired of mildly scandalizing the blighted dormitory estate, Analiese had dropped her Heathrow baggage-handler, packedher many suitcases, and dramatically appeared on the White Citydoorstep of the unemployed violinist in whose love she knew she couldalways trust. 'After you, darling,' said Keith. 'Come on. Come on. Come on. Comeon. Jesus. COME ON.' Yeah. Picked up sticks andmoved back into town. I don't know how he wears it. Ah, but Analieseunquestionably had a knack or a power when it came to love — to loveof a certain kind. With her scrapbooks, her costume jewellery, and herfat legs, Analiese had always been able to find a certain kind of man(fuddled, failed in art and love, patient, tender, older), who wouldhouse her, listen to her, worship her, and vow to keep his hands off her.'What's this? Jesus, look at that stupidbastard.' Move it.'Move it.' Yeah. You heard: never lets him lay a finger on her. Before longAnaliese was to be found in all her old haunts — the stage doors of theNational Theatre, the carpark of the BBC, the van outside RonnieScott's—while Basil stopped home, scratching his beard, rereading her diary, and genuflecting in front of the laundry hamper. Basil's little flat in White City was dead convenient for Keith.


Now he wound down the window and stuck his head out of it.'Don't fuckin say phankyou, whoah ya!' Christ, the manners of theroad. Not that he was entirely happy with the situation. The postmanalways rings twice as such. For instance, Keith liked to show up onimpulse, going at things freestyle like, in his own way. And everytime he sauntered whistling down the basement, with a sixpack of Peculiar Brews in one hand and his belt buckle in the other — therehe'd be, mister misery. Get back. 'Get back, you little bitch.' Itcramped a man's style. Where was the spontaneity.Cheers, Baz,Keith would say menacingly, and plonk himself down for a wait.Analiese just stared at Basil through the silence. As often as not she'd have to tell him. Honour my privacy, Basil. Respect my space, Basil. All this. And then with a shudder he'd rear up, fling on a mack and,Keith assumed, slope off down the drinker. Not ideal. But what could Keith do? That's it: block the whole fucking road. He couldn'tentertain her at the garage - his lair of darts: even Trish Shirt used tobalk at that, the way the grit got worked into the back of her dress.And Dean's flat was a tip. And so was Dean's van. Maybe if he put it the right way to Lilette, or Petronella, or Iqbala. Or Kath. Take your time, pal. I'm only here for my health.'Cunt!' In theory, now that hehad a couple of bob he could always take her to a nice little hotel. But there weren't any nice little hotels. There were only nasty little hotels.And the big ones frightened him. Anyway you don't want to liearound all day hearing her banging on about safe sex or religion. Gotto be quick. Cavalier'll get a ticket. Or clamped. Fucking bastards.Isthe Vodafone better than the Celmate, with improved specifications? Fucker'll know. '11 ask Fucker.


The traffic thinned, and Keith gratefully dropped into second gear.He had travelled perhaps five hundred yards. 'Freedom.' Besides, he needed his spare cash. For Debbee Kensit. Her mum had only uppedthe rates again. What with the petrol going all the way out there anda couple of quid for the gift he religiously took along, Debbee beingspecial, you were talking almost a ton a visit. Keith maintained aconsidered silence about it but with Debs turning sixteen this monthfor sheer nerve it took your breath away. Hello. Give her a little beep.Now what have we —


A Krakatoa of truck horn atomized Keith's thoughts. For a suddeninstant his windscreen was all chrome ribcage and scorching lights.Then the massed frequencies all fled past him in a deep scoop of air.Keith had straightened rigid in his seat: now he sank back, anddecelerated, and pulled over - or at any rate he quenched the car of motion. For several minutes he sat there, doubleparked, rubbing hisface with his hands. He lit a cigarette and exhaled vehemently. Seewhat I mean ? he thought, and felt brief love for the truckdriver and hisskills. Another couple of feet. Another couple of feet and they'd behosing me off the bonnet. See what I mean ? It can't be healthy. And a calculated risk, that one: saw the truck coming and knew it was goingto be tight. But I had to look, didn't I. Rarity value. Couldn't let thatone walk on by, no way. Because you don't often see that. You don't.Had to look. An old woman not fat with really big tits.


Keith pulled out again, and proceeded to Ladbroke Grove andTrish Shirt's.


'I don't know how he does be doing it,' said Norvis, with honestbafflement as well as envious admiration. 'He here, he there. Heeverywhere.'


'Yes,' said Guy.


'No one approach he for energy. No one have he staying power.Soon as he finish, he off, looking for more.'


'So they say.'


'It have no one like Keith when it come to the chicks.'


Guy looked furtively along the bar. Keith was down at the darkerand more fashionable end of it, with Dean and Curtly, near themicrowave, the poppadam-warmer, the pie-nuker. Now Keith wasdelighting his friends with an anecdote, vigorously delivered: he wasmaking a horn-squeezing gesture with his right hand, which thendropped only to rise again suddenly, darting finger first. The froth onDean's beer exploded in mirth . . . Guy looked about himself,through the spore-filled air. Just when it seemed that Keith's pubprestige could rise no higher, it had yet jumped a palpable notch. ButGuy himself, no less clearly, had been intolerably demoted. Here he stood, gratefully conversing with Norvis — comfortably the least celebrated of the Black Cross brothers (being unathletic, ill-favoured and hard-working) — fine-sprayed with spittle and obscenities andpork-pie crumblets, and transfixed by the hairless coccyx of an albino builder. Guy scratched himself with all ten fingernails. Thereappeared to have been a complementary revision of his status atLansdowne Crescent. Guy's laundry, once discarded, no longer tangily rematerialized in his walnut chest of drawers. This morninghe had wedged his shirt into the laundry basket and then, a minute or so later, tugged it out again.


'As I say, it beat me how he does be doing it.'


'Excuse me for a moment, Norvis, would you?’


With his head up, impelled by nothing more than inevitability,Guy squeezed and sidled his way forward, deeper into the pub's horn and hide and boiling fangs. Finally he gained the little clearing wh'chalways formed near where Keith relaxed with his favourites of thehour. Keith now stood in conference with Dean and Curtly: thetabloid was stretched open in his grip as he proudly showed the ladswhat Hurricane Keith hadjust done to Philadelphia. Sea surge anddevil wind: one of the worst in history — even inrecent history. Thatmorning Guy had himself read up on Hurricane Keith's depreda­tions. Seven feet of water dumped from the sky in twenty-four hours:a day when all the weather gods rush for the bathroom . . . Dean andCurtly straightened slightly on Guy's approach. Keith offered themboth a last glance of silent facetiousness and then assembled his mostsolemn stare, like a sergeant turning from his corporals to face the gawky lieutenant.


'Morning, Keith. How have you been?'


Keith stared on. He made no answer. Dean and Curtly lookedelsewhere — outwards, downwards.


'All set then', said Guy, with an archness that he had already begunto regret and revile, 'for the big push?'


Keith's expression slowly changed, or filmed over, the lidshooding Guy off. What was it? The eyes were in their pre-fight glaze,their search for animal severity. No. They looked like they lookedafter some stunning feat at theochй.Airless concentration, self-love,a darts trance. Keith's trance of darts!


'Bidding fair for the semi-finals,' said Guy, half-raising a palethumb and turning jerkily to the bar. Here he facedPongo.Guyindicated his empty tankard, whichPongoregistered withoutinterest, finding other instructions to attend to while Guy continuedwith his musicalexcusemes.


'Ride comfort,' said Keith in a low voice. 'Anti-knock rating.'


Guy couldn't tell where the words were going, so quickly did heabort his turn of head and stricken smile. Maybe Keith was talking tothe pub itself, its smoke, its dust.


'Aeroback. Her sobs of pleasure. Higher take-up. A veritable wildcat. Anti-perforation warranty. Lovejuice . . .'


There was some delay getting out, caused by an altercation nearthe front door. Things seemed to settle down; but then a blood-striped figure lurched up again off the floor, and it all began again. Atthis point Guy re-encountered Norvis, who shouted,'He got another one now!'


'Sorry?'


'He got another one now!'


'Really?'


'Yeh. Oh yeh. She rich. Just round the corner. He go round thereevery morning and does be doing she arse off. And she make shevideos. For he. Dark bitch. They the worse.'


Zbig Two, who was standing near by, abandoned or otherwisebrought to an end a joke he was telling Manjeet (one that featured, asdid all Zbig Two's jokes, a prostitute, a policeman and a purulent mackerel), and turned round and enthused, 'The first time he goneround there she came on like Lady Muck. But Keith's smart.'


'He patient.'


'Next time - bingo.'


'Yeh. Oh yeh. Frankly it get me how he does be doing it.'


'And this onepays him for it.'


'He she toy boy.'


'Payshim for it.'


They sounded ready to go on like this indefinitely, the informationbeing so fresh in their minds. It seemed that Keith had just held apress conference on the subject, here in the Black Cross. Guy couldimagine him: the tabloid rolled and raised . . . Another questionfrom the back there .. . I'm glad you asked that.Yes. She .. . Grinning at the floor Guy listened on: her own penthouse, tall, wellturned out, legs on the skinny side but good bum, tits so closetogether you could —


'What's her name?' said Guy hilariously.


Norvis and Zbig Two looked at each other, two experts, teeteringquiz-contestants, stumped by the obvious. It's. Hang on. She call.Wait a bit. It have so many. Nita. Nelly, Nancy. With his mouth openGuy blinked and waited. The depth of their frowns, the temple- banging, the ecstasy of thwarted recall. He wondered if he coulddecently ask them to exert themselves so.


'Nicky! That's it.'


'Nicky. Yeh. Oh yeh.'


'Nicky. That's it: Nicky.'


'Nicky. That's it. Nicky.Nicky.'


The compact opened and Nicola's enlarged face filled the roundmirror. It stared back at its mistress. It bared its teeth and licked itslips. With a sweep of wall and dimity and velvet the mirror closedagain.


She looked up. 'There you are,' she said softly, and got to her feet.'Are you all right? You sounded rather miffed on the telephone. Let'stake off your mack.'


'No, I'd rather not, actually.'


Nicola backed into the sitting-room. As Guy followed her shelooked up at him with humility and concern. 'Darling, what is it?' shewhispered. 'Sit down. Can I get you anything?'


Guy shook his head; but he did avail himself of the low armchair. He raised his hand in a gesture of placation, a request for silence, for time. Then gently he rested the palm against his right ear, and closedhis eyes . . . That morning, as he lay in bed, and as Marmaduke priedat his clenched lids, Guy felt an odd sensation, inappropriate, balmy,sensual: in fact, a trail of Marmaduke's hot drool was gathering inhis ear. It hadn't bothered him at first, but now half his head was blocked and pulsing. Some glutinous - or possibly sulphurous -property of the child's spittle had done its maleficent work, deep inthe coiled drum. The room tilted, then swayed. Maybe everything isso mad now, he thought.


'There's something I must ask you.'


She looked at him with unbounded willingness.


'I'm probably a complete idiot,' he went on, for her house, her windows, her curtains, had seemed so blameless from the outside.'But there's something you ought to know too. Now you mustpromise in advance to forgive me if I — '


Guy hesitated. Quite clearly he could hear the sound of a toiletflushing nearby. Too near to be anywhere else. Then Keith came outof the bathroom. He had a silver leather jacket held over his shoulderand was saying, 'That was my favourite, that was. I like them whenyou —'


'Ah, Keith,' said Nicola lightly. 'I'd almost forgotten you were stillhere.'


Freeze-framed, italicized, caught absolutely redhanded, Keith'sfigure began to inch back into life, to move and breathe again — and to shrink, to shrink to nothing, as Guy rose reflexively to his feet.


'Hello, mate -'


The leather jacket, held a moment ago insouciantly shoulder-high,Keith now gathered into his hands where he could crease andcrumple it. A strong interaction was taking place between the men:the power of class, at its strongest over short distances. Guy lookedat Keith with contempt. And this was the Knight of the Black Cross.


'I expect you'll want tobe on your way,' said Nicola, 'here's your—case. I put something in it for you.'


A coughing fit seemed about to free Keith indefinitely from theobligation of speech; but then he gulped suddenly with a thickeningof the neck and said, 'Appreciate it.'


'Oh and Keith? You couldn't bear to have another go with thegrinder, could you? It's there. It packed up again, I'm afraid.'


'Willco,' said Keith, gathering his things.


'Same time tomorrow?'


Keith looked at Nicola, at Guy, at Nicola. 'Er, yeah!' He nodded,and tubed his lips, and shuffled sideways towards the door.


'Goodbye, Keith,' she called, and turned to Guy. 'I'm sorry. Whatwere you saying?'


He waited. Keith's strained whistle started up and retreated down the stairs. 'Is he,' asked Guy, sitting, and looking around, 'is he hereall the time?


'I'm sorry?'


Guy said reedily, 'I mean, if he's not actually in here it's quite ararity if I don't see him on the stairs.'


'Keith?'


'I mean, what does hedo here day in and day out?'


'Does he say anything to you?'


'What? On the stairs? No, he just says "Cheers" or "Innit" orsomething,' said Guy, as his hand sought his brow.


'I mean generally. He hasn't told you our little secret?'


'Whose little secret?'


'Keith's and my little secret,' Nicola smiled at Guy with rueful mischief. 'Oh well. I suppose it's got to come out. I'm afraid I've deceived you rather.'


'I see,' said Guy, and raised his chin.


'He'd be horrified if you knew,' she said, and looked closely intoGuy's crippled face. Its weakness she identified for the hundredthtime as something predetermined, already etched, something madefor a specific purpose, but too long ago. 'And of course he's veryworried that his wife will find out about it.'


'I think,' said Guy, 'I think you'd really better tell me.'


Well, in a minute, she thought. A few more choice ambiguities,perhaps. No - all right. Okay:one more. 'I mean, what does it matterif he's only a common working lad?' she asked. Then she widened her mouth and tented the lines on her brow and said with martyred calm: 'Iteach him.'


'Keith? I don't understand.'


'Of course he's only just literate and a complete dunce in all sortsof ways but the desire is there, as it so often is. You'd be surprised. Ilearned that with my work in remedial reading.'


'When did all this start?'


'Oh, ages ago.' She frowned, seeming to remember. 'I gave him acopy ofWuthering Heights. I didn't know how serious he was but he persisted. And now we're doing it properly. We've just started on theRomantics. Look.' And she held up her Longman'sKeats. 'I'm wondering if it's wise to start him off on the Odes. Today we had a quick look at "Lamia". The story helps. I was thinking perhaps "La Belle Dame Sans Merci". Or "Bright Star". It's a favourite of mine.Do you know it? "Bright Star! Would I were steadfast as thou art" ?'


'Nicola. Has he done anything to you?'


Even she had her doubts about the look of radiant puzzlement shenow gave him — doubts about its supportability, in any scheme ofthings. 'I'm sorry?'


'Has he ever tried to make love to you?'


Slowly it formed, the pure incredulity. After a moment she put ahand over her mouth to catch a silent hiccup; then the hand moved upwards to her eyes.


Guy got to his feet and came forward. In no uncertain terms, andwith his mind half-remembering some analogous recital, someprevious exercise in illusion-shattering (when? how long ago? whatabout?), he told her what Keith and his kind were really like, how they thought of women as chunks of meat, their dreams of violence and defilement. Why, only today in a rough tavern Keith had been blustering about the uses he had put her to — yes, her name sharedand smeared in gross fantasies of enslavement, humiliation, appetite,murder.


Nicola looked up. He was standing over her with his feet apart.


She said, 'Oh — does it mean that much? They believe in each other's lies just like they believe in television . . . What's that?'


'. . . What?'


She drained her face of all experience and raised it towards him. Then her head levelled again and she pointed with a finger.'That.'


'Oh, that.’


'Yes. What is it?'


'Whatis it?'


'Yes.'


'You must know, you must have read . . .'


'Yes, but why is it so - so protuberant?'


'I don't know. Desire .. .'


'May I? It's like rock. No. Like that stuff that some dead stars are made of. Where every thimbleful weighs a trillion tons.'


'Neutronium.'


'That's right. Neutronium. Would I bleed?'


'I don't know. You've gone on horses and things.'


'And this bit under here is important too, is it? Oops! Sorry. Thisis fascinating. And in some circumstances a woman will take this inher mouth?'


'Yes.'


'And suck?'


'Yes.'


'I suppose the idea would be to suck absolutely as hard as one could. What a strange thing to want to do.'


'Yes.'


'So regressive,' she said, and briskly stroked and patted him, asone might dismiss a friendly but unfamiliar animal. 'Though I can see it might be fun for you.' She was smiling up at him, her mouthlike a split fruit. 'What's the line in "Lamia"? "As though inCupid's college she had spent sweet days"? That really is the worstthing in all Keats. So vulgar. But Cupid's college is where you'dbetter send me for a while, until I know all the tricks.'


He left about an hour and a half later.


His ear was worse. At least three-quarters of his face wasunrecallably numb, and heavy, too, to the muscles of the cheek.That was Marmaduke's work. But his good ear had also received alot of attention, from Nicola's lips and tongue; as he came downthe stairs, stepping from carpet to bare board, Guy realized that hewas in fact clinically deaf. Outside made his lips feel raw andchapped from kissing — and these kisses so wolvish all of a sudden,especially when he felt her breasts which he was now permitted todo (from without only), and the breasts themselves so responsiveand distended and seeming to link up with all the complications of his own low wound.


Across the street he rode, on his rogue boner. Pale rider. Under thefantastic clarity of the evening sky. He looked up. The mooncertainly did look closer than usual, but beautifully close, and not yetshining, like the crown of a skull or a Goth helmet; and not just a mask or a shell but a body, with mass and depth, a heavenly body.And the only one we ever really see, the planets too small, the starstoo distant, and the sun too vast and near for human eyes.


Dead cloud. Just then — awful sight. Just then he saw that a deadcloud was lurking above the near rooftops. Awful sight. What did itthink it was doing there, so out of kilter? They were always lost, deadclouds, lost in the lower sky, trembling drunkenly down through thethermals, always looking in the wrong place for their brothers andtheir sisters.


Guy pogoed on. The world had never looked so good . . . Brightstar! And with so much doubt gone he could reproach himself in fullmeasure.


Well might Guy curse himself for a brute and a swine. Histhoughts were all crosspurposed, while hers were all of truth andbeauty, beauty, truth.


Isaw a dead cloud not long ago. I mean right up close. This wasNew York, mid-town, mid-August, the Pan Am building (you could feel its monstrous efforts to stay cool), the best piece of real estate inthe known universe. How could some dump of a white dwarf orinnocently hurtling quasar stand up to this golden edifice onheliographic Park Avenue? I was in Dr Slizard's office, just below therestaurant, the revolving carvery or whatever they have up therenow. The dead cloud came and oozed and slurped itself against thewindow. God's foul window rag. Its heart looked multicellular. I thought of fishing-nets under incomprehensible volumes of water,or the motes of a dead TV.


'Science', said Slizard, in his epigrammatic style (his good colour,his busy eyes, his accountant's beard), 'is getting very good at explaining how it killed you. How it killed things. But we still don'tunderstand dead clouds.'


Luckily I've known Slizard all my life. How else could I affordhim? I always enjoyed his company, until I got sick. My father taughtSlizard at NYU before he switched subjects. He used to come to the house one or two nights a week. He had long hair then. Now he hasno hair at all. Only the talking beard.


Marius Appleby lives for the ritual of those morning swims, and sodo I. Cornelia's breasts, apparently, aremagnificent, splendid,awesome, majestic -and all the other words that mean 'big'. Andwe're only on page fifty-nine.


Cornelia has Afghani blood. She rides a horse like a crazed ghazi.She shaves her legs with a Bowie knife. Marius has yet to win a smilefrom her, a civil word. Old Kwango (bent, pocked, muttering),himself deeply roused by her, for all his years, suggests the time-honoured and locally popular strategy ofrape, where a man mustroughly take what he claims to be his. Marius demurs. He's watched her with her bullwhip. But he also sees the need for something butch— some act of manly valour. Oh, it's tough, with Cornelia stridingabout so proudly and nobly the entire time. And she seldom has a stitch on.


The weight of her head and the plumpness of her cheeks causeKim to pout while she sleeps. Her arms are arranged in one of herSpanish-dancer positions. If you could take twenty snaps of thesleeping child and flick them in a booklet, she would perform themovements of the castanet artist, one hand aloft and curved, onehand lowered and curved also, and always symmetrical.


She stirred. Every time, now, I'm frightened she won't recognize me. People don't. People I haven't seen for three days look rightthrough me. I myself keep going to the mirror for an update . . . Her breath was deeply charged with sleep; and she looked momentarilydisgraceful, as babies can look, her face puffed, and latticed with the ephemeral scars of sleep. She focused on me, and pounded her legs -but almost at once her face formed an appeal, as if straining to tell mesomething, something likeyou wouldn't guess what's been donewhile you've been gone.Of course, as babies inch toward speech,and their expressions so intelligently silent, you expect the firstwords to penetrate, to tell you something you never knew. And whatyou get is stuff likefloor orcat orbus. But then with a bent finger Kim pointed at a lesion on my arm and said, with clarity and conviction:


'Ouch.'


I was astounded. 'Ouch? Kim. My God. So you can talk now, canyou?'


The baby had no more to add. Not for the time being. I carried herinto the kitchen. Kath was elsewhere (in the bedroom). I made theformula and put a slow teat on the bottle. She cried when she saw it. She cried because she wanted it and crying was all she had. I fed herwith frequent burp-stops and burp-outs. She wiggled a leg as shedrank. For of course if a leg is dangling attractively, then a baby mustwiggle it, must never miss the chance to wiggle it. Toward the end of the bottle I felt the warm seep-swell of her diaper. So I put the mat onthe table and got ready to change her.


Then Kath intervened, appearing suddenly. 'Ah there,' she said.She took the child from my arms and the Huggy from my hand. Some mick rule here — a chill of priestcraft?


She went with the child into the living-room. I watched the baby'srolling face as it bobbed on Kath's shoulder. The astonished eyes.


'Ouch,' the baby said to me, before Kath shut the door.'Ouch.'


' "For Galen knew that from that day forth he would always dreamof she who had come to him that night in Toledo, and tousled himawake with a lover's impatience." There.' Nicola said nothing.'Comeon. It's so obviously terrible. It's not even literate. "Ofshe who." Ofher who, for Christ's sake.' Nicola said nothing. 'Thesentiment is repulsive enough. But I guess he didn't botheryou with sentiment. Too busy climbing into his Beelzebub outfit.' Nicola saidnothing. 'It's funny he's so bad at women. All powder-puffed andair-brushed. Without physical functions. He places them in thatgolden age, now alas long past. You know the one: before women went to the toilet.'


Nicola spoke. She looked at me mistily and said, 'You're wrong.His work speaks very directly to women because he idealized them sopassionately. Isn't this a great theme - the struggle of the man, the warlike creature, to accommodate gentleness? Asprey is surelyLawrentian here.'


'. . . This shatters me, Nicola.' This shatters me. Because itdiscredits, it explodes her artistic sense. And her artistic sense is all Ihave to go on. 'Oh well. You must be a theatre-lover. Moreperversity. There's nothing there, in English anyway. Just Shake­speare, and that's that. Which is some kind of cosmic joke. As ifTitian was a scene painter, or Mozart wrote movie scores. As ifGod just directed rep.'


I was now being a little too glib — or a little too something — for theenigmatic Miss Six. (These last sentences were in fact direct quotes from a long letter I was writing to Mark Asprey.) She left her chairand went to the table. She poured out and drank eight swallows ofbrandy. She looked at the black window. 'I go out walking,' she sang, 'after midnight, in the moonlight, just like we used to do. I'm alwayswalking, after midnight. Searching for you.’


'. . . Your voice is pretty nice. I guess you sang when you didpantomime. But it's kind of a cold voice. Holds something back.'


When she sank down on the sofa beside me her legs went up aboutthree feet in the air. Her gaze also had the caloricity of liquor. I felt I was fending it off.


'To work,' I said, and took out my notepad. 'Let me have some more on these nature rambles you take Guy on. These little loveparodies — they're among the worst things you do.'


'You only have to write them up. I have to go on them. I hatewalking. 1 mean,where to? It's like being in an ad. An ad for mentholcigarettes - remember? In the days of threepenny bits?" She thoughtfor a moment and said, 'No, it's like being in an ad for love. An ad for love.'


'I still don't get it. The Guy-torture. But I'm expecting some cooltwist. Oh yeah. It's about time I saw one of these videos. One of theseads for sex.'


'There aren't any. I don't keep them. I hate them.'


'How very disappointing. I take it Asprey's snaps are a little out of date. How disappointing. How am I meant to describe the delights ofyour body?'


She reached for her top button and said, 'I'll take all my clothesoff.' She paused. She leaned closer. 'Don't you feel we could belike terrible little cousins and show each other everything. All thesticky smelly bits. Look at you. You don't fancy it, do you, in fleshand blood. Listen. I have a confession to make. I have this shame­ful habit. Every day I go to a bad place and do a bad thing. Well, some days I manage not to — but then the next day I might do ittwice. I go to the toilet. Come on, Sam. Help me beat this thing. You be my bathroom buddy. Every day, just after breakfast, whenI feel the temptation — I can call you up and you can talk me down.'


'Nicola,' I said. I got to my feet. 'At least tell me this terrible thingyou did. To Asprey. It might cheer me up.'


'I put a brick through his windscreen. A big un, too.'


'Oh, sure. Come on. That would be no more than routine.'


'I'm not saying.'


'Why?'


'Why? Why? Why do you think? Because it's toopainful.'


She's right in a way. There is no language for pain. Except badlanguage. Except swearing. There's no language for it. Ouch, ow,oof, gah. Jesus. Pain is its own language.


The pain-kit arrived in good time. It came by courier, mid-afternoon, so I was able to call Slizard immediately. 'It's beautiful,' I croaked. 'Like a box of liqueurs. Or a chemistry set.'He knew I'd likeall the labels: when it comes to pain-classification, he said, we'reback in the middle ages, or the nursery. Suddenly I asked him, 'Hugo,what's happening? Worldwide I mean. I called some contacts in Washington. It's all leak and spin. Where's theinformation? Howare you seeing it?'


'. . . It's serious.'


'How so?'


'It's like this. The pressure is coming from two directions. Do yougo in now, and take the chance, or let the system degrade further. The Pentagon is for going in; State would prefer to ride it out; the NSC istorn. There is hypertension, also dyspnoea. There may be embol­isms. Me, I'm for ride-out. They must get past the millennium. Theycan't risk it now.'


'Hugo, what are we talking about here?'


He sounded surprised. 'Faith,' he said.


'Excuseme?'


The President's wife.'


Our world of pain, as here arrayed and classified: how like life it is,how like childhood and love and war and art. Shooting, Stabbing, Burning, Splitting. Tugging, Throbbing, Flashing, Jumping. Dull,Heavy, Tiring, Sickening. Cruel, Vicious, Punishing, Killing.


'The single pill in the black bottle,' I said. 'With the modern skull-and-crossbones..."


'That's for when the living will envy the dead. That's for the most painful condition of all. Life, my friend.'


OnAphrodite, Cornelia continues to disdain all congeniality. Andall clothing. It's driving Marius and Kwango crazy.


It occurs to me that certain themes - the ubiquitization of violence, for example, and the delegation of cruelty — are united in the personof Incarnacion. There is, I believe, something sadistic in herdiscourses, impeccably hackneyed though they remain. I wonder ifMark Asprey pays her extra to torment me.


She has been giving me a particularly terrible time about the stolenashtray and lighter. And I'm often too beat to get out of her way.


Endlessly, deracinatingly reiterated, her drift is this. Some objectshaveface value. Other objects havesentimental value. Sometimes theface valueis relatively small, but thesentimental value is high. In the case of the missing ashtray and lighter, theface value is relativelysmall (for one of Mark Asprey's means), but thesentimental value is high (the gifts of an obscure but definitely first-echelon playmate).Being of highsentimental value, these objects are irreplaceable,despite their relatively lowface value. Because it's not just themoney.


Do you hear her? Do you get the picture? It takes me half a day torecover from one of these drubbings. I am reminded of the bit inDonQuixotewhenSanchohas spent about fifteen pages saying nothingbut look before you leap and waste not want not and a stitch in timesaves nine, and Quixote bursts out (I paraphrase freely, but I really understand): Enough of thine adages! For an hour thou hast beencoining them, and each one hath been like a dagger through my verysoul.


Chapter 18: This Is Only a Test


keith frowned, andsipped on his cigarette, and read thesewords:


It is a definite historical fact that Boadicea played a form of darts.Quite a warrior for a woman, she was thought to have honed herskills, by playing darts. Little good it did the Queen of the AncientBritons in the end, for she was defeated by the Romans andperished by her own hand in the year 'AD' 61.


' AD' 61! thought Keith.


Early dartboards have definitely been recovered from ancientlocations. It is not known for definite what form of darts Boadiceaplayed. Probably not 501, which shapes the modern game but some other form of darts.


Pensively Keith removed his darts from their purple pouch. Then,with the aid of this same pouch, he dabbed away his tears. A cigarette later, he sat with his pad, his darting diary, on his lap and a biro in hishand. The biroholding hand waved in the air for a while like a sketcher's. Then he wrote:


Eazy on the drink.A cigarette later, he added:


The trouble with darts they are no good when you are pist.


He resumed his practice session, his darting workout at theochй.The darts thunked into the board. He retrieved them. He threw again.He retrieved them. He threw again. He retrieved them. He threwagain . . . Eight cigarettes later, he sat down and wrote:


Get the basics right. Lean on front foot, nice eazy follow thrugh. Indoors you just get moaned-at. Sap's a mans ability to concentrate completely on his darts.


The darts were thrown, retrieved, thrown again (they thunked into the board), retrieved, and thrown again, and again. The six cigaretteswere torched, consumed, ground out on the crackling floor. He threw2.6 four times running. A wave of self-pity went through him. No oneoutside the sport realized just how tragicallyhard it was to throw a dart 5ft 9 1/4 ins, with clinicism. He paused, and sat, and wrote:


Keep throwing fucking '2,6'. Better Tomorrow. Don't reckonNicksskeem scecm skeem.


'Good morning to you, Keith.'


Scheme, thought Keith. TV had not prepared him for anything likethis. Or scam. 'Good morning ah... Miss Six,' said Keith. Load of nonsense.


'Nicola, please! Now just sit in your normal place and I'll be with you in a minute. Coffee?'


Basically, Michael, I'm just the sort of guy who just likes to meet upwith his mates down the pisser. Down the drinker. Down the pub.Basically I just drink to relax. To relax? Torelax? thought Keith, andsaw himself (last night, 3 a.m.) on his knees in the garage with a bottleof pornoin either hand. Gracelessly Keith sat himself down on the sofa(he was thoroughly out of sorts). Earlier instructed by Nicola not tolook at the camera, he looked at it anyway, through his low lids: on thelittle bookcase there, its twin red lights unkindly glowing. Keithrocked with the pulse of a contained cough or burp or retch, then lit acigarette. Here she comes. Nicola wore a checked grey suit, squarelycut, and flat black shoes; her hair was swept up from her lightlypainted face, the bun rich and grained and gordian. Looks the part allright, you could say (there was even an apple on the table).Schoolmarm outfit innit.


'Why don't we begin', she said, 'with Keats's "Bright Star"?'


'Yeah cheers.'


'Page eighty-six. It is five lumps, isn't it, Keith.’


86, thought Keith. Treble 18, double 16. Or you could go bull,double18. Darts.


'Now.' Nicola settled herself erectly at his side. Hummingsomewhere just beneath their hearing threshhold, the video camera was positioned to Nicola's rear, over her shoulder, catching Keith in profile as he turned towards her grimly. She didn't really look like aschoolmarm. At that moment Nicola crossed her legs with a lift ofthe skirt and briefly shivered her rump into the cushion. On TV more like a Mother Superior who gets up to things. Or the dog in the officein the touching romantic comedy: take her glasses off and she's a goer. The skirt had a slit in it, or a fold, like a kilt.


'Keith? Why don't you take us through it.'


'You what?'


'Read it out loud. Use mine. Come a little closer.'


'Bright,' said Keith, 'bright - star!' He jolted, apparently rathertaken aback by the exclamation mark. 'Would...I would I were -'


'Would I were steadfast,' whispered Nicola.


'As . ..'


Thou.'


'Art.' Keith wiped his toiling brow. 'Not in lone, not in lonesplendour.' He coughed: a single bark from the dog within. 'Pardon. Splendour hung aloft the night — and watching, with, witheternallids, apart, like —'


'You seem to be reading one word at a time. As if you're lassoing itwith your tongue. When was it you learned to read?"


Keith's open mouth went square. 'Yonks,' he said.


'Go on.'


'Er, like nature's . . . patient, sleepless . . .'


'Eremite. Hermit. Recluse. And 'patient' has the sense ofdevout,Keith.'


'The moving. Jesus. At their . . .'


'At their priestlike task of pure ablution round earth's humanshores,' said Nicola; and as she read on she opened up her skirt to thewaist (and Keith could see the sheer of the stockings, the interestingbrown flesh, the white silken prow):


'Or gazing on the new soft-fallen maskOf snow upon the mountains and the moors; No - yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,To feel for ever its soft fall and swell, Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever - or else swoon to death.


.. . Well, Keith?'


'Yeah?'


'So what does it mean? Take your time.'


Keith read the poem again. Two vertical worms of concentration formed in the centre of his forehead. The letters on the page seemed as unanswerable, as crammed with silent quiddity, as the impurities in his own eyes. Keith moved through an awful dream of missedconnexions, sudden disappearances, horrendous voids. He won­dered if he had ever suffered so. Three or four minutes later, when he thought he might actually be about to lose consciousness, Keith felt words fighting their way to the surface and the air.


'There's this star,' Keith began.


'Yes?'


'And', Keith concluded, 'he's with this bird.'


'Well that's more or less the size of it. But what is the poet trying tosay?'


And Keith might have put an end to everything, right then andthere. But now Nicola turned the page: Keith's eyes were presented with an index card with writing on it — her corpulent, generous, feminine hand.


'Now I may not be an educated man,' read Keith, with only a littledifficulty. It sounded halting, honest. It sounded good. 'But it seems to me to go against common sense to ask what the poet is "trying tosay". The poem isn't a code for something easily understood. Thepoem is what he is trying to say.'


'Bravo, Keith.'


'The lover looks to the star as an image of, of constancy. WhatKeith — what Keats is expressing here is a yearning to be outside time.Suspended with his fair love. But I think the uh, movement of thepoem gives a little twist to that reading. The star is identified withpurity. The clean waters. The newly fallen snow. Yet the lover mustbe bold. He must come down from the heavens, and enter time.'


'Exactly, Keith. The lover knows he cannot escape the human


sphere, with all its ecstasy and risk, "Swoon to death": for the


Romantics, Keith, death and orgasm are equivalent.’


'Yeah, well, same difference.'


'The first eight lines really are quite beautiful, but I can't helpfeeling that the sestet is terrible tosh. What now? The Odes? I thinknot. Let's look at "Lamia" again. It's one of your favourites, isn't it,Keith.' She placed the book on her lap; she talked and read; sheturned the pages with long fingers which then trailed across her bare thighs in negligent indication or caress. 'Some demon's mistress, orthe demon's self. . . Real are the dreams of Gods .. . Cupid'scollege . . . Subtle fluid . .. Weird syrups . . . Dear me: all thismelting and blushing and fainting and swooning. That purple-lined palace of sweet sin.' Here they encountered another index card, andshe smiled at him encouragingly.


'It would seem that Keats,' said Keith, more confidently, 'for all hiscelebrations of the physical, is not a little coy and uh, evasive, even inthe safety of his enchanted forest.'


'A little fearful too. His maiden is a snake in disguise.'


'Exactly,' Keith improvised.


For a while Nicola talked of the life, theLetters, the neglect, theearly death. Keith started to enjoy his weighty contributions, hisvoice becoming deeper, richer, with the imagined power of suddenlytalking like this, feeling like this, thinking like this. He even began folding his arms in an authoritative way, and scratching his temple with what remained of the fingernail on his right pinkie.


The story ends in Rome, in i8zo.'


1820! thought Keith.


'He was twenty-six.'


Double 13, thought Keith. Not nice. You got three darts better go 10, double 8.


'The son of a rude stablehand, he died in a bitterer obscurity."Here lies one whose name was writ in water" were the words hewanted engraved on his tomb.'


'It's tragic to reflect,' read Keith huskily, 'that Keats will never knowhow he lived on in the hearts of his many admirers. Admirers from such different walks of life. Now someone like Guy', Keith went onwith a thick and sudden frown, 'clearly has something of the, of the poetic spirit in him. And I honour it. But I myself, in my, in myunschooled way, have also found my life enriched . . .'The index cardhere said, simply, 'by John Keats'. But Keith felt at this stage that hecould do a little better than that. 'Enriched', he said, 'by the plucky little...by the . . . talented Romantic whose . . . whose untimely -’


'By John Keats,' said Nicola. The skirt was straightened, the booksnapped shut - and, with it, Keith's wordhoard. 'I think that'senough for today, don't you? One final quote, Keith:


Who alive can say,


"Thou art no poet; may'st not tell thy dreams"?Since every man whose soul is not a clodHath visions, and would speak, if he had loved And been well nurtured in his mother tongue.


And I think you've shown again today, Keith, the truth of thoselines.'


Keith took a breath, and longed to soar and sing. But all wassilence in his huddled mind. He nodded soberly, and said, 'Yeahcheers.'


She saw him out. On her return she walked through the sitting-room, across the narrow passage and into the bedroom. Guy wassitting primly on the bed, the broad hands palm upwards on his lap.Nicola kissed him on the mouth and held him at arm's length.


'Noware you satisfied?'


Guy smiled wanly at the television screen, which showed the sofa'sback, the empty room. 'Revelation,' he said. 'I'm sorry. Feelingrather ridiculous and ashamed. I did say it wasn't really necessary.Quite amazing, though. I could hardly believe it. The judgment. Thenatural critical sense.'


'I told you he was keen.'


'You are good, Nicola.'


Yeah cheers, she almost said, as she took off her coat. 'One has todo what one can.' Tipping her head, she started to unbutton herblouse. 'A funny reason to enter a lady's bedroom for the first time. Idon't think I'm quite ready, yet, to swoon to death. But as for yourfair love's ripening breast. . . Ripening, indeed. Feel for ever its softfall and swell. Ooh. I hope your hands are nice and warm.'


'These warm scribes, my hands. Just one thing. I thought you wereterribly cruel', he said in a clogged voice, and smiling, 'to poor old Keats.'


John Keith, thought Keith, as he drove away. Top wordsmith, andbig in pharmaceuticals. Books: one way to make a fast quid.Breakfast by the pool. Wife in good nick. 'Really, dahling, I got tOstop writing them Hollywood scripts and get down to seriouswriting.' Fucking great study full of leather. Snooker! Jesus. LadyMuck with the schoolmarm skirt round her waist. Wasn't bad. No.In the end I thoroughly enjoyed it. Showed Guy. But an awful oldload of old balls. Keith wondered, parenthetically, if Keats had everplayed a form of darts.


He moved out into the main road. As he did so he felt a witheredagitation in his gut, like the last wing-flickers of a damaged bird. Oi.He felt it in his throat and lungs too — waste, consumption. During one of several long delays Keith picked up the Vodafone and calledPetronella. Line disconnected? Hard to tell: he couldn't even hearhimself swear for the mind-ripping clamour of a nearby skip-remover. He felt again the coppery friction in his abdomen. Itoccurred to Keith that he ought to be under the doctor. This wasn'tthe welcome satyromania of old. It was like a panic attack. Andalthough the spirit was willing — was ravenous, was desperate — the flesh was inexplicably weak. It was taking him ages, every time. Hefelt sore and ticklish: he thought with a wince of the snails he hadkilled with salt as a child.


This doubleparking! Keith queued and edged and weaved his wayto Ladbroke Grove, and doubleparked in Oxford Gardens. Hestrolled into CostCheck, nodding to Manjeet. Past dairy products,past toiletries, past videos he whistled his way: an affecting ballad, Spanish, called 'Los Sentimentados'. He stepped aside as a fight gotgoing between an attendant and some kid by the Alkool display,hopping backwards in a practised veronica when a bottle broke,fearful for his flares. Down in the storeroom Keith looked through the split in the hardwood door. Trish Shirt was lying on the groundwith one leg hooked up on the cot: the exact-same position in which Keith had left her ten hours ago. Keith's teeth contrived a censorioussqueak as saliva moved from lips to tongue. It would take half anhour to slap any sense into her, easy. Another considerationobtained: much earlier that day, as he wrenched off her crammedpanties, Keith had been influentially reminded of his dartboard down in the garage, the bit near the treble zo where there was a bigfringed lump due to darting overuse. The modern dartboard,however, whilst known as the bristle board, is not made from animal hair but from vegetable matter; sisal, prepared from the spiny leavesof the agave plant, is imported from Africa, compressed into therequisite shape, backed by chipboard, and finished by screen-colouring and wiring. Innit. The resemblance had excited Keith atthe time, but not for long enough; soon, thoughts of power scoring —the ton-forties, the unanswerablemбximums- had wrecked hisconcentration. Now Keith looked at his watch. He went backupstairs, bought a six-pack of Peculiar Brews, and climbed into theCavalier for the ninety-minute mile to White City and Analiese Furnish, in no mood for any nonsense from Basil.


Keith returned to Windsor House just after six. He stood in thekitchen, as frazzled as London traffic. Invaluable hours of pricelesspractice had been lost — so many thunks, so many precious retrievals. You couldn't blame Basil: he had absented himself smartly enough,after Keith had taken him aside, man to man, and given him a clip round the ear. It wasn't Analiese's fault either: she had given of her best, and hadn't complained, and Keith had seen for himself thetortured tendons of her jaw. Nah: murder getting home, with the streets full of personnel and Shepherds Bush cordoned off again ...Kath appeared, holding the baby like a magic shield against him. Keith looked at her expressionlessly, at her tired light. Tomorrow: the Semis. And a considerable dilemma. The match itself Keithregarded, or thought he regarded, with titanic equanimity. Whatworried him was his choice of guest. In the normal course of things, no problem: Debbee Kensit or Analiese Furnish, showing a cleavage you could park your bike in. But this was a high-profile fixture,prestigious as such. Trish Shirt had got wind of it. And Nicky said shewanted to be there. And even Kath had mumbled something about itif you please.


'Where's my meal.'


'Would you come and look at this, Keith?'


'Jesus. What?'


'It's the TV.'


Keith pushed past her and stopped dead on the brink of the lounge.


'It's the same on every channel.'


Keith peered forwards with his lips moving. The screen said:


This is only a test of the Emergency BroadcastSystem. If this had been a Real Emergency,this would show you which channel to turn tofor the Latest Information.

But this is only a Test.


'You know something?' said Keith to Kath. 'You scared thefucking life out of me then. Thought the TV was down.' He waggedhis head at the screen. 'That's all right. Look. Look! It's back on again now. Where's my meal?'


As Keith contemplated, with relish, his Mexican Chilli and Four Apricot Madeleines, Kath said,


'I went to the library. There's no newspapers.'


He took the tabloid from his armpit. 'What's this then. You gone blind or summing.'


'But they -'


Keith was now staring at his empty teacup. Kath stood, childishlyerect, and went next door to put the baby down. She came back andreached across him for the shrouded pot.


'That's not a newspaper.'


His eyes swelled at her warningly.


'There's nothing in it. About the Crisis.'


'Fuck off,' said Keith conversationally. 'They, there's always something about it.' Over the past month Keith had kept himselfabreast of the Crisis by sometimes reading the filler that his tabloidsometimes ran at the foot of page fourteen. The little headline varied.yanks:&@*! orred NYET or GRRSKI! Or, once, in unusuallysmall type:towelhead deadlock. Keith now turned to pagefourteen with a flourish. There was an article by the Slimming Editor on the health of the President's wife. But no filler.


'Nah well. Can't be anything happening then.'


'You think not.'


Keith fell silent. He was immersed in an item about the movie starBurton Else. Burton's aides utterly refuted the rumour that Burtonwas bisexual. Since the mysterious death of his young wife, Burtonhad been entirely occupied in his attempts to make contact with Liana beyond the grave. By way of illustration there were twophotographs, one of Burton, one of Liana, both topless.


'They say they'll -'


Keith dashed his knife and fork on to the tabletop and got to his feet. 'Look mind your own fuckin business okay? Jesus, you callyourself a wife 1 got a fuckin semi-final tomorrow night and you're giving me this crap? Sticking your fuckin oar in. Come on Clive, nopoint staying in here. Get to work. Come on Clive. Come on me oldmate.Jesus.'


The baby was awake. But she wasn't crying. Her eyes glittered.


At nine o'clock in the Black Cross, Keith downed his darts anddowned his drink and went out the back to the phone. It took ages forManjeet to get Trish to come to the stockroom.


'Been cancelled,' said Keith perfunctorily.


'Why?'


'Question-mark over me fitness innit.'


'What?'


'Sidelined with a finger injury innit.'


'What happened? She cross her legs?'


'Shut it.'


'I'm coming anyway.'


'Free country innit,' said Keith, more or less truthfully for once.


'You coming round later?'


Keith hung up without saying maybe. Back in the bar he saw Guy.


'Cheers, Keith.'


'Hello, mate.'


Keith felt something he didn't feel often: embarrassment. Or ratherhe would have felt it-embarrassment-if he'd had the leisure. In truthKeith was seldom bothered by embarrassment: a book calledKeithand Embarrassment would be a short book, trailing off after two orthree pages . . . He looked up. Guy was gazing at him with an expression of pitying fondness.


'Demands,' said Keith. 'You got commitments. All these demands.On your time . . .'


Guy was nodding.


The big occasion,' said Keith, flexing his darting finger. 'You digdeep.'


Guy kept on nodding. He seemed ready to accede to anyproposition Keith might put forward.


The big occasion.That's what I respond to. You coming tomorrownight? Course you are. Yeah well could you do me a favour, mate?'


'Sure.'


'See: I can't. Bring Nicky.'


'Sure.'


'Nicola. See: I can't.'


They leaned back for a moment with their elbows on the bar, likeequals. Then Keith said absently, 'I'm up to here in minge.'


The bent copper, John Dark, came over. John Dark - the iffy filth.Keith bought the drinks: he owed Dark some money for settling theThelonius business. More nonsense. Thelonius's name had poppedout of the DN A computer smartly enough. But then, so had Keith's.Careless work: saliva on the pork pie crumbs. Keith would do a lotfor pork pies, Keith would do a lot in the name of pork pies; but going to prison for them, he reckoned, was well beyond the call. . .The three men spent half an hour calking about the difficultiesRangers were having in asserting themselves up front and translatingtheir aerial superiority into goals. Then the conversation moved onto the depressing attendance figures for the early months of theseason. Dark said, with his permanent cheerfulness,


'It breaks your heart. And it could get worse. This morning, what comes up on the screens? Contingency plans. Partial evacuation ofCentral London.'


Keith looked sideways. Guy looked downwards.


'Where would Rangers be then, eh?' Dark laughed. 'This lot? Shiftthis little lot? They must be fuckingdreaming.'


Shakespeare put his head through the door and gestured. Keithmade his excuses. Outside, Big Dread was standing under the lamp­post, with Truth. They all huddled round as he unfolded a section ofnewspaper and bore its contents to the light.


'That them?' said Keith.


That them all right,' said Truth.


'They the right kind?'


'From the gym,' said Big Dread. 'Anabolic innit.'


'It won't give me tits or nothing?'


'Never,' said Truth. 'Enhance your darts innit.'


'How much each?'


It was, of course, his darts he had in mind. But Keith took onesteroid there and then (saving the other two for the followingmorning, on Truth's non-committal instructions), and went off totry it out on Trish Shirt.


Just before noon the next day Guy left Lizzyboo in the kitchen, whereshe was wordlessly eating corn on the cob, and wandered up the stairs and into the hall, nodding, now and then to a half-familiar nanny or au-pair. In the second drawing-room he went and stared without avidity at the whisky and brandy in their crystal tantalus. Next door, in the first drawing-room, so broad, so under-used, hetried music, something unstrenuous, something he knew well (theConcern Grossi), and decided, after a few minutes, and to hisamazement, that the piece no longer interested him. On his way upthe stairs he saw another new nanny, dark-skinned, exotic, serenelyslovenly. There had been a tacit relaxation of the rule about pretty nannies. Indeed, when the heat was up and the low sun filled thewindows, the place had an air of luxurious ill fame: languid, ante­bellum. These nannies had come on the market suddenly over the last two or three weeks, and Hope had snapped them all up. At a time like this, Guy thought (but there had never been a time like this), younggirls might feel an atavistic urge to get inside a big house. Inside a bigcave.


Hope was in the bedroom, at the dressing-table, brushing her hair.Every time he encountered her now he saw their past life together flash by, as if their marriage were a person fatally drowning. He managed to take a little low comfort in the spectacle of her tennis gear. Dink had not been as much around as one might have liked.


'You're playing?' he said. 'With Dink?'


'No courts until six. What's the matter with everyone? Why aren'tthey working?'


'No one's working. Have you noticed? Building sites and every­thing...Is Lizzyboo pregnant?'


She turned to him: an intelligent oval in which indignation andcoldness were equally represented.


'I only wondered. Not just her size but the way she eats. Cravings. She's eating corn on the cob down there. She had about nine in threeminutes. I was put in mind of an electric typewriter.'


'It's just her way of dealing with it. Eating's okay, you know. Youshould try it.'


Guy was leaning against the doorpost with his hands in his pockets. He looked down the corridor. 'Did he have a nap last night ? Anyway.He's stirring,' said Guy, unnecessarily, because you could hearMarmaduke's unfaltering roar and the ever-surprising violence ofhis rocking cot. 'Has he been out today? I thought I might stroll him.'


'The girls will take him out back.'


'I'd like to. What? No, I would.' This was of course a grotesqueuntruth. But Guy had need of a telephone. Not to call Nicola, whomhe was seeing that night (he would squire her to the darts). No: to callRichard at the office. He had spoken to Richard at length and withurgency three times already that day and didn't want to alarm the household further. That was another thing about deception: your black lies made your white lies darker. Your stars were all dimmingin heaven.


'Do you think it's really safe out there?'


'Oh, it's all right.'


He was now faced with the task of equipping Marmaduke for the outside world - of dressing him entirely, from soup to nuts, with thechild throwing all he had at him every inch of the way. In the nurseryGuy took off Marmaduke's nappy and despairingly wedged him intothe potty. 'Are you going to make a present for daddy?' he asked, againquite hopelessly. Twenty minutes later, following Marmaduke's reliable failure to make a present for daddy, Guy wrestled him intonappy-liner, nappy, nappy pants, vest, shirt, trousers, socks, shoes,jumper and, downstairs, anorak, gloves, face mask, bobble hat, scarf.As he was dragging him towards the front door and reaching out tofree the doublelock, Marmaduke 'went supervoid', in the local phrase(the phenomenon usually marked the end of Marmaduke's experi­ ments in week-long, white-lipped constipation). The child, in otherwords, had swamped himself in ordure. When Guy unravelledMarmaduke's scarf he saw that some of it was even peeping over thecollar of his shirt. In the nursery again Guy wrestled him out of bobblehat, face mask, gloves, anorak, jumper, shoes, socks, trousen, shirt,vest, nappy pants, nappy and nappy-liner, waved away the game butgagging nannies, hosed Marmaduke down in the master bathroom,and wrestled him back into nappy-liner, nappy, nappy pants, vest, shirt, trousers, socks, shoes, jumper, anorak, gloves, face mask,bobble hat and scarf. During these struggles, Marmaduke's lifelongenthusiasm for hurting his father- and, within that, his specializationin hurting his father's genitals — was given play only twice. A flyingheadbutt to the testicles, and an unrestrained blow with a bluntinstrument (a toy grenade-launcher) to the sensitive tip. The new painsjoined and reinforced and starred in all the ensemble pains that werethere already. This time, he actually got the front door open before Marmaduke was noisily and copiously sick.


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


'There's a good boy.'


'Nnno!. . . Ant mummy.'


'Come on, darling,'


'Antcadjew.’


'Oh all right.'


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


Royal prisoners, Guy thought:that's their status. Babies are royalprisoners, imperial internees, little Napoleons, tiny Hirohitos. Ouch!Must clip his nails. Passive resistance — well, within certainconventions 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 isyour problem. And just as you think the old boyis coming along quietly for once — 'Not in the eyes' — there'll be somefrazzled lurch for the door, some fumbled sabotage. Or a last, heroicself-fouling. Ow. Ouch. Right up the nose with that one. Whose war isit ? Aren't we their friends, their enemies' enemies ? Of course, you cannever treat the royal prisoners cruelly or harshly, because they're royaland must be seen to be perfect when hostilities end. . . Before he was afather Guy didn't realize just how many babies and children therealways were about the place. But now — he was entering LadbrokeGrove with its shops and pubs and bus-stops - Guy saw that the royalprisoners 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 mortarof the street had an emollient effect on Marmaduke, who was perhapshoping to pick up some tips for use elsewhere. Presiding over the carhorns and engine surges, and the turning wheels of ordinarycommerce, small concerns, and the permanent smash and scuffle atthe pubs' lantern jaws, came the dead notes of six or seven burglar alarms exasperatedly sounding. The post-office, whose floor stayedwet in any weather, was a skating rink of drunks and supplicants andlong-lost temper—and self-injury, Guy thought, noticinghow nobodynoticed the woman in the corner rhythmically beating her head against the join in the wall. He queued for a callbox, or milled for acallbox, 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 goodtime for the millennium. Even Marmaduke Seemed somewhatdaunted by the swirl. Guy was thinking of trying his luck at Conchita'sor Hosni's or possibly the Black Cross when a booth became clear andno one serious interposed. He called Richard, who forthrightlyconfirmed what they had both suspected: all American money wasleaving 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, towhat he felt was inevitable. The American retreat was in any case farless significant than the rollover it might entrain. And his own holdingposition was probably sound. But he suddenly felt a universal steepening. Guy held the child, but wants and needs now flailed outfrom him, basic, cheap, ordinary, the stuff we have to have. It occurredto him that he was perfectly free to call Nicola, and this he did. Sleepilyshe revealed that she was lying on her bed, after a bath, and that he wasmuch 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 endof the street like a nuclear detonation. And Guy knew that the sunshouldn't be doing this. No, the sun really shouldn't be doing this. Thesun shouldn't be coming in low at us like this, filling windows andwindscreens with rosy wreaths of dust, setting the horizon on fire likethis, burning so aslant like this, at this terrible angle, makingeverything 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 sizzlingin its pan. The sun turns slums into crystal battlements. But the sunshouldn't be doing this, it really shouldn't be doing this, branding ourminds 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 ona garden wall and tried to embrace him. Into the eager flurry of smallfists he bent his face, his searching lips. He had just seen himself in thefuture: he was with Marmaduke, at the zoo in Regent's Park — thezooworld of annulment, dissolution, visiting rights, half-orphan­hood. Thecafйs,the concourses were sparsely scattered with otherdivorced fathers, other sundered children. But the cages were empty,


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


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


Countries go insane like people go insane; and all over the worldcountries reclined on couches or sat in darkened rooms chewingdihydrocodeine and Temazepam or lay in boiling baths or twisted instraitjackets or stood there banging their heads against the paddedwalls. Some had been insane all their lives, and some had gone insaneand then gotten better again and then gone insane again. America:America had had her neuroses before, like when she tried giving updrink, like when she started finding enemies within, like when shethought she could rule the world; but she had always gotten betteragain. But now she was going insane, and that was the necessarycondition.


In a way she was never like anywhere else. Most places just aresomething, but America had to mean something too, hence her vulnerability - to make-believe, to false memory, false destiny. Andfinally 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 handand talking about all the rewards of the cloistered life. How very different from the sleeping arrangements and general atmosphereaboardAphrodite, where Marius swelters in the port cabin, listeningto Cornelia's insomnias of stoppered longing in her Starboardbunk . . .


There was a time when I thought I could read the streets ofLondon. 1 thought I could peer into the ramps and passages, into the smoky dispositions, and make some sense of things. But now I don'tthink I can. Either I'm losing it, or the streets are getting harder toread. 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 tobe hard - metal-lined, reinforced, massively concrete. And gettingharder, 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 circleeveryone else, everyone else we can get in range, looking for theother, 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 mightbecome too strong and troubled. What's that line inearly Updike -in innocent, amorous Rabbitland? America is beyond power: sheacts 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 tobe 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 intohurt feelings. Feelings 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 likeTime magazine.


I call her everywhere and nothing happens.


Keith asked me if he could bring Analiese Furnish to theapartment. As he filed this request, and sensed some of my unease, hegave 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 Keithcarriesaround with him, and physically she measured up. All in all sheseemed (i) a little less pretty (ii) quite a lot more crazy (iii) about fiveyears older and (iv) about nine inches shorter than the image formedby my typewriter.


I made ready to leave but they insisted I stuck around. Long silencefrom the bedroom. Then the sound of what I can only describe asintense mutual difficulty. Then a dozen furious cowboys finally hitSanta 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 thepark.'


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 herclub-like ankles, cringing under the floral print of her dress, seemed toknow when I was looking at them. Christ: the expansion of mind, thecommunications 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 yourheart, as all human beings do. I watched her, an older man, failed in artand love. Fat ankles. Dear flesh.


And now in the same park but in different weather I stand with Basilside by side. Nothing divides us — just a screen of rain. You'd call usstuffed men but even the stuffing has been knocked out of us. We hugourselves to hold what warmth remains and because no one we lovewill. Basil, the weeping violinist. And no good at that either. You andme, 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 herand 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, inonly a cartridge belt, Cornelia pushes him aside (her magnificentbreasts areheaving) and blows its head off. She reminds me of someone. I know: Burton Else.


And, like Burton Else, likeeveryone else, Cornelia has her softerside. 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 doomedracing-driver - his flashing smile, his lustrous quiff. Here is a womanwho will not give herself lightly to any man. But when she does,Marius figures, she gives herselfutterly.


Nevertheless the sands of time are running out: he only has aboutfifty 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 vampiremovie, when the cowgirl or barmaid comes too close with her whitethroat, 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 Ido. 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 arefreshing 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 goout 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 thenmore 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 theyear 1899 (and in all the years between: the millennium is apermanent 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, aftertaking 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 isstanding on tiptoe, head cracked back on his neck, with only nostrils,pouting lips and a lump of straining forehead visible above the risingtide. 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 ahuman face - aman's face, because men did it. Can you see himthrough the smoke and heat-wobble? His scalp churns with boils and baldspots and surgeon's scars. What hair is left is worried white. Theface beneath is saying: I know I shouldn't have tried that stuff. I know Ishouldn't have messed with all that stuff. I really want to change andstraighten out but I think I went and left it a little too late. I get an awfulfeeling that this is stuff you can't recover from. Look what it's done tome. Look what it'sdone to me...


In a sinister reversal I am now established as Keith's darts coach. Hedoesn'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 Ican't help him with the tactical side of it (there isn't any), but I can helphim with the psychological side of it, and there's apparently plenty ofthat. Everything depends on the savagery of your desire to get that dartto go where you throw it. Afterward, eerily, the money still changeshands 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 supremeaccolade), 'Darts, Keith'. Every now and then we get into reconditestuff about muscle memory and the destiny of the shaft and so on, but mostly I just stand there saying things like 'Be accurate, Keith'. 'Beaccurate, Keith': what kind of advice is that? What does it cost me tosay 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 andall that tiring stuff. There is a tab. Light bleeds out of the other things.


Last night, around eleven, something happened to Keith thatshould never happen to acheat: he ran out of cigarettes. Flabbergas­ted, he searched the garage for his spare few dozen cartons — andcouldn't find a single pack. That shows you just how long he has beenneglecting 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 fora leisurely look at his notebook, his darting diary. And among the littlehomilies about the wayward third arrow, the illiterate fantasies ofsudden 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

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, wassuch a quality contest being staged at the Black Cross. On this nightKeith looked to a far more prestigious venue: Acton's the MarquisoнEdenderry.That was the drinker Keith had always represented - thefoaming tankard, the purple arrowpouch, the clinical finishing. No way would you catch Keith throwing for the Black Cross, whosedrunken troupe of cosmopolitan stylists had never come close toSuperleague, had never, in fact, been known to win a darts match.Your more cultured arrowman was always going to be turningelsewhere for his sport. Basically it was to a more dart-orientatedboozer that Keith was obliged to gravitate, where you found thedarting dedication. The Marquis of Edenderry: its terraces ofbrothelly red velvet and tinkling chandeliers, the barman in braces,striped shirts and porkchop side burns, the barmaids with theirmilkmaid outfits, wenchy cleavages and sound knowledge of dartsaverages and lore. Magnificent facilities, with eight boards all in aline, and then, for the big occasions, the raisedochйcomplete withmimic target and digitalized scoring. Kath helped dress him: theburnished Cubans, the toreador flares, the black shirt short-sleevedfor flowing throwing with its silver-scripted admonition:keith talent —the finisher. Then the bat-winged darting cape...Inthe damp shadows of the Black Cross the figure Keith cut couldoccasionally seem taciturn and remote; but put him in a class pisserlike the Marquis of Edenderry and, well, the guy just came alive. Keith loved the Marquis of Edenderry. He sometimes came over allfunny about the Marquis of Edenderry, and would tearfully beat up anyone who spoke slightingly of the place.


'Yes. This is it,' said Guy. He gave a sideways smile of encourage­ment and asked, 'Are you all right?'


Nicola smiled back at him without opening her mouth. 'I think so.'She took his hand. 'It's just that I'm not a great one for pubs,' saidNicola, who in truth had always preferred expensive cocktail barsand violent speakeasies.


'We met in a pub.'


'Well then. They can't be all bad.'


He got out and moved round quickly to her door. A handappeared. He raised her up into the night.


'You look splendid,' he said, and added in a louder voice: 'I'm justwondering whether we oughtn't to leave your coat in the car.'


Nicola looked like a million dollars. Or a million pounds, anyway.Over the V-neck jacket and rear-split skirt of a black velvet suit wasflung a blond mink coat ('It's fake,' she had lied); court shoes, sheerstockings, diamonds on her ears and on her throat at the end of a finegold chain, and a gold watch, and a gold clasp on the black leatherbag.


'I mean,' said Guy, 'they won't know it's not real.' When, earlier,as planned, she had come straight down the stairs in response to hisbuzz, Guy had been seriously alarmed (and, of course, seriously touched) by the guileless opulence of her dress. How hard, and withwhat intelligent success, she had tried to look sophisticated. Andthey were only going to the pub to watch the darts and root for Keith,who perhaps had told her that the place was rather grand.


'Who won't?'


'The people in the pub.'


They'll try and steal it, do you mean? But you'll protect me. Anyway they wouldn't dare.'


Guy smiled palely. All he had meant was that the coat might causeill feeling, in the Marquis of Edenderry. But of course he kept this tohimself.


They entered the pub and its loud world of primitive desires,desires owned up to and hotly pursued and regularly gratified. Dailyfears having been put aside for the night: that was the idea. Thedesiderata included goods and services, sex and fights, money andmore TV, and, above all, in fateful synergy, drink and darts. A shiftingtabletop caught Guy an early and awkward blow, flooding his visionwith a familiar distress; so he just squeezed his way through after her,after Nicola, for whom the heavy press seemed to part as far as the tipsof her coat's bristles. Hell will be noisy and crowded, he thought. Hellwill bebusy. Now they reached the body of the Marquis of Edenderry,and here was air, and space - and tables, and chairs. The pub wassimply too big to be slaked by mere human beings. They sat, and wereimmediately attended by a uniformed waiter whose erectness and impatience declared that tonight would be high efficiency, highturnover, the managerial team having no doubt set their sights on anepic profit. There were also alert sweepers with longhandled brushes and dustpans, to tackle the upended ashtrays and the shattered glass. And when a fight broke out near by — surprisingly vigorous andsanguinary for so early in the evening — two ageing bouncers cruisedalong and floored the likely victor with crisp punches to the nose; theythen administered some exemplary stomping with cross looks cast about. Guy hummed and hawed and twice apologized to the waiter before deciding on a beer, Nicola having asked, with an air of considerable timidity, for a cognac, which is what she had beendrinking all afternoon. The waiter stiffened, wiring himself stilltighter, and moved off. Guy was pleased, or at any rate looked pleased, to see some of the same old faces from the Black Cross. They nowregarded Nicola with an admiration that expressed itself in frowns ofpain, of grave disappointment. The sexual slanders, the lies told in the Black Cross, Guy felt, were somehow active here in the Marquis ofEdenderry; but they could never really touch her. He gazed at Nicola, serious and inviolate, in her glad rags. He didn't know that her mindwas working like silicon with incredible calculations as it might be the trajectory of the last dart bisecting the angle of his erection: arcs,tangents, targets.


'1 hope Keith wins,' he said.


'Oh he'll win,' she said. Guy smiled at her with his head tipped, as ifquestioning her certainty. She could have told him what she believedto be true, that she felt it in her tits; 1 feel it in my tits. But of course shekept this to herself.


At 7.4 5 precisely North Kensington's Keith Talent pushed open thedouble doors of the Marquis of Edenderry and stood there removinghis car gloves while all the heads turned. Stay cool but don't tighten up.


He lifted his chin, surveying his immediate responsibilities. Therewere some shouts from further back. Heavy support. Don't askabout an opponent. You play the board, not the man. Mike Frame,the landlord. And Terry Linex and Keith Carburton from RarePerfumes: a nice gesture. Appreciate it. Now Mike Frame stepped forward and placed a serious hand on Keith's shoulder, urging himon to the cleared stretch of barspace. Two men in suits, sponsorsfrom Duoshare. And Tony de Taunton from DTV. DTV. TV.With intense formality Keith was offered a selection of select wines,a choice of choice spirits. No way. Lager. Lager's kegged. It'skegged.


'I understand you usually throw number three for the pub, Keith.'


'Third gun. That's correct, Tony.' Keith explained that the pub'stwo top darters, Duane Kensal and Alex O'Boye, had both been unavailable when the Duoshare came round this year. Absently headded that such things were always unpredictable, where matters ofparole and remand were concerned. 'No, I'm the underdog tonight,' said Keith. Lower expectations. 'Suits me down to the ground.'


'Well good luck.'


'Thanks, Tony. Yeah cheers.'


7.50 and the double doors swung open again, meaningly: theclatter faltered, and there was a schoolyard sound from within,whoops, harsh laughter. Keith turned. Not too quick. And faced theentrance with his ready sneer. Four Japanese.That one! Paul Go!Seen him down the Artesian! Fucking maniac on the treble twenties!Did two ten-darters in half an hour! Came out of his trap with amaximum! Never smiles! Did the 170 finish! . . . Don't ask about anopponent. Keith sipped his lager. So Paul Go beat Teddy Zipper. The fast-throwing oriental had what it took to put one over on the SouthLondon drayman. Keith parked his sneer at the bar while theexclusive huddle opened out to include his adversary. Then heturned, looked for a moment into the unknowable ferocity of Paul Go's lidless stare, nodded his farewells, circled his tongue round hisright cheek, and slowly unmoored himself into the smoke and thenoise — and the pub's waves of love.


'He's coming over,' said Guy. 'I think he's coming over. Hecertainly looks . . . ready for anything.'


'Doesn't he,' said Nicola. 'I love the stingray outfit.'


'I think we might need more chairs. If he joins us we might needmore chairs.’


Still some distance off, Keith was now walking the gauntlet of hisfriends and fans. Handclasps and handsmacks, savage and farcical winking, the great dry head jerking in recognition and acknow­ledgment. Playfully he slapped the drinks from offering hands,and tossed spare cigarettes over his shoulder, like Henry VIII withhis chicken legs. Laughing faces filled Keith's wake.


'He looks like the Pied Piper,' said Nicola.


'He looks . . .' said Guy, with doubt, but so raptly that it cameout anyway. He couldn't imagine ever feeling superior to Keith again: the male principle, so positively charged. 'He looks', said Guy, 'like Marmaduke.'


Finally he was nearing their table, back first, and windmilling hisarms - at Curtly, Dean, Fucker, Zbigs One and Two, Bogdan, Piotr, Norvis, Shakespeare.


'Best of luck, Keith,' called Guy, his glass raised, but much too early, for Keith was still craning to heed some chant or goad.


'Best of luck, Keith.'


'Yes, good luck, Keith,' said Nicola.


He was now looking beyond them and flapping his hands inauthoritative summons.


'I think we might need more chairs,' said Guy.


'Right then,' said Keith, and gave a courtly sniff. 'Guy, Nick:Debbee. This is Debbee. Debbee? This is Analiese. Analiese? Pet-ronella. Petronella? Say hello to Iqbala. Iqbala? Meet. . . meet. . .meet. . .'


'Keith!'


'Sorry, darling . . .'


'Sutra!' said Sutra.


'Sutra,' said Keith, who had not known Sutra long.


'1 think we might need more chairs.'


'Right then. What's it going to be? Glass of milk for you is itDebs?'


'Keith!'


'Jesus,' said Keith, closing his eyes in the greatest disgust. 'Here comes summer. Look what the fuckin cat's dragged in. Look what'sjust crawled out from under its fuckin stone.'


Guy and Nicola both turned and looked up: behind them stood a faded blonde, or a blonde's ghost. She stared at Keith with what appeared to be numb yearning.


'I'll get another chair.’


'Guy? Don't move a muscle. She's pissed, innit,' said Keith, goingover Guy's head. 'You. Fuck off out of it.'


'No. Uh, I think Ishall get another chair.'


Guy was travelling ever further afield for his chairs; when he returned, having tugged and wiggled another one loose from thesurrounding stockades of noise and need, he found Keith inmellower mood, hospitably waving a hand in the air.


'Irish like,' said Keith as Trish slowly sat. 'Pint of vodka, is it?Bucket of mephs?' And he started to order drinks, at no point and inno wise neglecting the flurry of ogreish winks and pouts and thumb-upping and triple-ringing with which he primed the hopes andassuaged the fears of the innumerable followers and disciples and other Keith Talent-addicts who had filled the place as thoroughly, itseemed, as they would have filled his own apartment. A home fixture: Keith was playing at home.


'Blimey. We'll haveKath in here in a minute. I'm like You fuckyNefner that's who I'm like. I have, I have never made no secret of my, my admiration of the, the female charms. Look at this,' said Keith,turning on Debbee with the hot wind of his stare. 'Miss Debbee Kensit. Sixteen today. On your feet, girl.'


Debbee rose. The black net T-shirt with its lively catch of breasts;the loose white knickers worn, fashionably, outside the tight blackshorts; then the two bands of stark flesh before the thick pink tubingof her legwarmers. Debbee's round face was pleasant, more thanpleasant, until it fully smiled. The smile did a lot for Debbee: it didthings like halving her IQ. And it took you, if you would follow, into a world of gum and bone, of dismay, and childish deals to do withlove and pain (though only Keith knew the touch of the terrible tenners left trembling on sideboard and mantelpiece). Guy, who found himself taking comfort from the vivid sprawl of Keith's commitments, had always believed that you had to be thirty-five orforty before you got the face that you deserved. Debbee showed thatyou could get that face on your sixteenth birthday. Butdeserved didn't come into it; no, not at all.


'Sixteen as such,' Keith was going on. 'Pure as soft-fallen snow. Avirgin innit, saving herself for the man of her dreams. Me I never laid a finger on her. No danger. Because she's special. Special. Special tome.'


'How is your finger, Keith?' said Trish. 'How's your poorfinger?'


'Not thy expect any you old slags to appreciate something likethat. Hey! Now now, girls,' he said with a priestly look. 'Now now,ladies.' Around the Marquis of Edenderry loudspeakers were clearingtheir throats. 'Best behaviour, all right? Don't do it for me. I'm notasking you to do it for me. Do it for darts. Okay? Do it for darts.'


Apart from feeling that she might, at any second, black out fromneglect, or even die of it and save everyone the trouble, Nicolaconsidered herself to be usefully placed for the time being, and wellprepared, like an athlete or an artist, for a necessary audacity in theplay. She sat sunk down into the shape of her chair and her coat withher shoulders combatively flexed, her legs crossed, and one shoe bobbing patiently. Looking from face to face - Debbee, Analiese,Sutra, Petronella, Iqbala, Trish - she felt no jealousy; but rivalry had always roused her. Only Petronella, she had incidentally concluded,would give her any trouble in a fight. Petronella was tall and thin but powerfully well-balanced in the thighs and, most crucially, would behugely and astonishingly dirty, would go nuclear, in the very first instant. Nicola had always been both gratified and alarmed by how good she was at fighting with women, on the rare occasions when ithad come up. She liked women, and women liked her, despite everything. In the past she had had many close girl friends, and oneclose girlfriend. But in the end there was nothing you coulddo towomen (and there was nothing they could do to you). Except youcouldscratch and bite them, you could mark and twist their softness, ifthe need arose, and Nicola was good at fighting women. She hadlearned how in a much heavier league, fighting with men...It was Keith who worried her. Keith, she decided, was not at his best. Shedidn't at all mind his talk, his gruesome presence, his antigallantry. The trouble with Keith, tonight, in the Marquis of Edenderry, aselsewhere and at other times, was that he was formless — he had no form. He had gathered women round him or up against him to makean island ofnonor neg terror, for terrornight. And it hadn't workedout. He was terrified. She could see that he was terrified, pitiably brittle, with a disgraceful bad-stomach recalcitrance in the constantflicker of his face. So Nicola was now looking for a hook (knowingthat a hook would be there), to get them through it, something to givehim courage and lend form to his chaos. She wasn't going to let him bethe louser-up of her reality. However, she didn't feel like talking yet, and was glad when Guy showed he had his uses by asking, with a frown of interest,


'Keith, who are you up against tonight?’


'Never ask about an opponent. You play the board, not the man.It's a thing between you and the darts . . . Paul Go.'


'Is he Japanese?'


'I got respect for every man I play.'


'A very determined people.'


'Fucking loansharks,' said Keith, assaying, for once, a racial slur.He could think of nothing worse to say about them, having, for example, barely heard of World War II. Keith's father, who hadcertainly heard of World War II, and had successfully deserted from it, might have asked if everyone knew the terrible things they did tosome of our boys back then; but Keith was reduced to a few half- remembered grumbles from the fillers in his tabloid.


They got a big yen for big yen. Tokyo Joe, he'll be stuffing hispockets.'


'Yes well they do have their critics.'


'So do I, mate! Oh yeah. I've heard them. They doubt my power. Question mark over my temperament - all this. I'm just a jammybastard, according to some.' There came the spit and crackle ofanother announcement, and again Keith's face flickered huntedly. 'Well the shoe'll be on the other foot. I'm going out there to silencethe knockers once and for all.'


But Keith stayed where he was, as time kept passing, and despitethe general lurch the pub gave towards the streetward side of the arena. The women looked at him from their accustomed state when out on the town with their men: that of more or less frowzy silence. Trish had already gone off and faded away somewhere.


'Better be going to the dressing-room,' said Keith irresolutely.'Compose my thoughts.' He smashed a palm into his chest andquickly staggered to his feet. A heart attack? No: Keith was feelingfor his darts pouch. Brutally he yanked it out. 'It's not a dressing-room, not as such,' he went on, with a shy smile. 'The Gents. Theyclear the lot of them out. To allow the two contestants to — to compose their thoughts. Okay ladies! Wish me luck!'


The ladies wished him luck, all except Nicola, who excused herselfand disappeared in search of the Ladies.


Where does a lady go, in a pullulating pub, if she wants to meet agent, and enjoy a bit of privacy? Nicola knew the answer. Not theLadies: you can't have a gent in there. The ladies wouldn't like it. Notthe Ladies. The Gents, the Gents — the gents being so much moretolerant and fun-loving in this regard. Ladies aren't supposed to go inthe Gents. Only gents are. But this was no lady. Unless she be - unlessshe be Lady Muckbeth . . .


At first Nicola lingered near the entrance, by the machines. Whatwould they be dispensing these days? Not just cigarettes andcondoms, not in here: also hairpieces and prostate-kits andpacemakers. After one last hopeless shout through the doorway the man in the frilly shirt moved off — and Nicola walked in, into theworld of white testosterone.


She did so proprietorially. The big youth who came fast out of thestall looked at her and hesitated on his way out, thinking better ofwashing his hands. She lit a cigarette with detailed calm, and raisedher chin for the first inhalation. There were three men in the men's room: Keith, who looked up from dabbing his face at the basin andfrowned softly as he caught her eye in the mirror; a haggard milkmanbent over the white pouch of a urinal, his forehead pressed to thetiles, weeping and faintly whinnying with pain as he micturated; and Paul Go. It was over to him in his corner she sauntered, to Paul Go,expressionlessly tending his darts, aligning flights, barrels, shafts, points. She stood so close to him that in the end he had to look up.


'Do you speak English?'


He gave a sudden nod.


'And where are you from? Japan, yes - but Honshu, Kyushu,Shikoku?'


'Honshu.'


Tokyo, Kyoto, Nagoya, Yokohama, Nagasaki?'


'Utsonomiya.'


'What?'


'Utsonomiya.'


'Been with us long, have you Paul? Tell me. Do you know what Imean by Enola Gay?'


He gave a sudden nod.


She stared for a while at the black fluff on his upper lip and thenturned her blond fur on him, and said to Keith, 'It's funny, isn't it,darling?'


Keith seemed ready to agree.


'People are always saying that the Japanese are different from us.From you and me. More different. More different than the black.More different than the Jew. More different, even, than that littlecreature over there.' She indicated the micturating milkman, whowasn't at all offended. Still entirely caught up in his lone drama ofself-injury, he had lifted a hand to his tear-stained face, and altered his stance to that of one about to seat himself on a high stool. 'We should surely be able to address the matter in a liberal and inquiringframe of mind. I mean, when all is said and done, just how different from us, spiritually, humanly,' she said, and turned again,'are these fucking monkeys?'


Paul Go waited. Then he smiled.


'And now you're showing those teeth that nobody understands.'


The last words were said into a surprising silence, as some freshdisposition established itself in the hall beyond. The man with thefrilly shirt had reappeared; and there were other onlookers. Losing no time now, Nicola clicked back across the floor, opening her handbag. She gave Keith a kiss, the Wounded Bird, and carefully wiped his mouth with a paper tissue. Standing back, she consideredthe whole man, with eyes of love.


'Keith, your shirt! It must have got a little creased in the car!'


She bent to straighten the ridged rayon. She bent lower.


'. . . On your knees, girl,' said Keith calmly.


So that was the necessary: the diaphanous stockings, meeting the other shine on the toilet floor. Nicola knelt. She tugged downwardson the shirt's hem, and wetted a finger to collect some fluff from the vertical stripe of the trousers. She said,


'Win, Keith. Dispose of the challenge of the — thehibakusha. Cometo me tomorrow. I'll have more money for you . . . You're my god.'


'On your feet, girl.'


Paul Go moved past them. Even the old milkman levered himselffree of the urinal and set his course for the door. Keith stayed for awhile and looked at her, nodding his head. But she was the last toleave.


Guy patrolled the Marquis of Edenderry, his questing nose out front,the indeterminate mouth with its wince-smile and flinch-grin. Thepub, the entire cavern of leather and glass, had been tipped sideways,its contents toppling towards the street, towards the raised dart-board, the trampledochй.All you could see up there was a man in apurple dinner jacket, above the crowd; his voice might not have been the worst voice of all time, but it was certainly, the worst voice yet (anightmare of fruity pomp); with this voice he was saying, 'So I'd liketo thank you for kindly thanking us for bringing you this contest heretonight. . .'Guy could see Debbee and-was it?-Petronella standingtogether on a table, a few feet from the swaying rampart of heads andshoulders. He was afraid he had been rather a dub with Keith's harem;most awkward; they had seemed to look right through him, to lookright through his well-enunciated questions about where they livedand what they did; though he did manage to exchange some words with Analiese about the theatre. He craned and flinched and felt theneed for Nicola: a childish need, like being lost on some market street,and desperate for one of the bustling mannequins to slow and softeninto the kind shape of the loved one. She must be still in the Ladies, Guythought, as he went to use the Gents.


He couldn't imagine that Nicola would want to watch the wholething, or even any part of it, so he returned to their table to wait for herthere. Others, too, were sitting it out, busy drinking or petting orfighting. He emptied his glass and blinked at the crowd. Then he felt alight touch on his shoulder, and with a forgiving smile he turned to facethe authentic ruin of Trish Shirt.


'Whoops! Are you all right?'


She stared into nothing, as he helped her sit; she stared into nothing—or she stared, perhaps, at her own thoughts, at her own insides. Herewas a blonde to whom everything that could happen to a blonde hadgone ahead and happened. As the darts crowd, the arrowshower,steadily grew in its growling, Trish Shirt said, with infinite difficulty,


'I don't know ... I don't know what the world's . . .going to.'


This remark seemed to Guy about as shocking as any he had everheard. He watched her carefully. To attempt so little in the way of speech, of response, of expression: and then to fuckthat up.


'In thetoilet,' she said.


Guy waited.


'He comes round my owce. Eel bring me...booze and that. To myowce. And use me like a toilet.'


'Oh I'm sure not,' said Guy, reflecting that even the wordowce wasan exalted epithet for where Trish lived, if of course Keith'sunsympathetic descriptions of the place were to be trusted.


'Keep meself got up like a titmag. In my owce. Case he wants tocome round and lam the yell out of me. In me ohnous. Where's therespect? Where's the appreciation. Does he...does hetalk aboutme?'


'Keith?'


'Keith.’


She had asked the question with such total abjectness that Guy wasat a loss for the right reply. He thought of straw: was this the kind youclutched at, or the kind that broke your back? Keith did in fact talk about Trish frequently, even routinely, as a way of advertizing his movements around town; and he backed up these mentions with asmuch violent detail as he had inclination or time to transmit. Guy said,


'He talks about you often, and fondly.'


'Keith?'


'Keith.'


'Oh I love him dearly with all my heart,' she said. 'Truly I do.' Herface softened further: a mother watching over a sleeping child. Amother who had been away some time, in an institution. A crackedmother. A mother — alas! — that you wouldn't wantyour child near,with her wrong type of love. 'Go on. What's he say?'


'He says,' said Guy, helplessly but rightly concluding that Trishwould believe anything, 'he says that his feeling for you is based ondeep affection. And trust.'


'Why then? Why, Keith, why? Why's he rub my nose in it? Withher. In thetoilet.'


'What,here? . . . Yes, well, he does behave impulsively at times.'


'On her knees.'


Guy looked up. What he saw made his shins shiver, like theanticipation and recoil he felt at the instant of Marmaduke's half-hourly injuries. Nicola was standing alone on the bar, her arms folded, her shoes held in her right hand, her blond fur coat like a low sun, andsupervizing the contest with an expression of inexplicable coldness.


Trish was crying now and Guy took her hand.


'Everything,' she said through her tears, and again with infinitedifficulty, 'everything's coming...to the dogs.'


And while Trish stared - stared, as it now seemed, into her owneyes — Guy held her hand and watched the crowd: how it bled colourfrom the enormous room and drew all energy towards itself, formingone triumphal being; how it trembled, then burst or came or died,releasing individuality; and how the champion was borne along onits subsidence, his back slapped, his hair tousled, mimed by female hands and laughing, like the god of mobs.


'So: the fairytale continues,' said Royal Oak's Keith Talent, draininghis glass and wiping his mouth with his sleeve. 'Basically thecomplexion of the match changed in the second leg of the third set.


Recovering from his wayward start, when nothing would go right forthe fast-throwing oriental, the little guy from the east was permittedthree clear darts at the double 16, the board's prime double. Thebigger man could only stand and watch. But his fears proved fleeting,for the young Jap crapped it. Relishing the home fixture, the North Kensington chucker went from strength to strength, stepping in topunish the smaller man, who never recovered from the blow. Yes, the slip cost him dear. After that, no way could he stave off defeat.'


So saying, Keith closed his eyes and yawned. Secretly he was amazedby his voice. Instead of not working at all, which would have been fairenough, his voice was working phenomenally well (though even hewas shocked by how deep it had become since the last few drinks). Butwhat authority, what rolling fluency! Keith yawned again: the inhalation, the ragged wail. It was so late now that the Marquis ofEdenderry had in fact been shut for almost half an hour; but the partylingered on behind bolted doors, their glasses proudly rebrimmed bythe manager, Mike Frame. Keith yawned again. Perhaps he wascatching these yawns from his companions (who had had nearly fivehours of his post-match analysis). They moaned suddenly and unanimously as Keith said,


'Going for a considerable finish in the nailbiting fourth set, the . . .'


Keith stopped, or paused. He noticed that Trish was asleep, or atany rate not conscious. The women all had their heads bowed, infatigue, or in the piety of love. Keith felt so happy and proud that hismouth dropped open and these words emerged, as his right hand (witherect darting finger) counted from girl to girl: Debbee, Analiese, Trish,Nicky, Sutra, Petronella, Iqbala . . .


'Eeny meeny miney —'


Nicola sat upright. And Guy stirred. And in the general flurry ofmissed clues, ungot jokes, Trish Shirt came to with a shout. She left herchair but she didn't straighten: she stood there cocked in a haggard crouch and pointing with her whole arm at Nicola Six.


'You! It's you! Ooh, I saw you. In the Gents. She was down on herfuckin knees in the Gents! For Keith. She was down on her knees in theGentssucking his -'


Keith stepped masterfully forward and hit Trish once on thecheekbone with his closed fist. He stood above her, panting, but thebody didn't move. In the near background Mike Frame waitedindulgently, jinking his keys.


'A chapter', said Nicola in the car, 'of epic squalor.'


'Yes. Surprisingly dreadful.'


'When I get home I shall have a scalding shower.'


'Hideous business. I'm sorry. We should have left straight after thematch and let them get on with it.'


'You know, when Keith hit the madwoman, that was his idea ofbeing gallant. To me. Like laying his jacket over a puddle.'


'You think?'


'Curious how madness and obscenity go together. Like madness and anti-Semitism. Shakespeare was right. Ophelia . . .'


'Oh yes. A rather sorry Ophelia, I'm afraid.' Guy was still awashwith adrenalin and anger, and with confusion about his ownresponse to the Talent enormity. He had felt no fear, only paralysis,as if everything he believed in had been wiped out of existence. NowGuy added to himself, 'Hard to see what to do . . .'


A little later she said, 'I love your tongue. All this kissing.'


'You're frightfully good at it.'


'Beginner's luck.'


They were parked in her dead-end street. She now gave him aseries of literary kisses, Maud, and Geraldine, and Eve in the Garden,and (a happy creation) Ophelia Before and After the Death of Polonius. Then she threw in the Grand-a-Night Hooker. She didenough, in any case, she confidently imagined, to rebrim his sobbingboner. Then she reached for her handbag with the last of many sighs.


He said abruptly, 'Your stockings. The knees are both torn.'


'I know. I can't see the point of stockings when they're this sheer.Of course, a pair of good hardy tights is what one really wants.Watch me to the door. Don't get out.'


She climbed from the car and walked to the garden gate. But thenshe turned and walked back — walking as she would on anothernight, very soon, to another man in another car. She approached andbent before the driver's window, which Guy smartly lowered. Nicola put her head into the car and gave him the Jewish Princess.


When it was over, Guy involuntarily raised a hand to his mouth.That-that was . . .'


'Unforgivable?' said Nicola mysteriously. 'By the way. I'm goingto stop teaching Keith.'


'Really?' said Guy lovingly.


'One tries to do what one can. But I've finally put my finger onwhat 1 can't bear about him.’


Which is?' said Guy, even more lovingly.'He's so working-class.'


Working-class or not, Ken-Chel's Keith Talent was still abroad. Thenight was young. Though of humble extraction - the son of a simple criminal - Keith Talent was still very much at large.


He had made, in the heavy Cavalier, a magisterial tour of Greater London: Plaistow for Petronella, Arnos Grove for Sutra, Slough forAnaliese (Basil was behaving strangely), then to Ickenham, to getlittle Debbee home safe and sound. And for a while he sat in her semi,drinking instant coffee and passing the time with her perfectly fanciable mother, who had heard of Keith's victory on the TV (it came in the form of a newsflash, in the middle of a darts match shewas already watching) and had stayed up to congratulate him and, ofcourse, to ensure that her little Debbee didn't give Keith one on the house. In no way had Keith neglected his responsibilities to Trish Shirt, personally helping Mike Frame to shove her into the minicaband himself standing there with the cocked twenty, giving the driver full instructions. Nor had he forgotten Iqbala, whom he had left untillast, her being a neighbour, and who was now fast asleep (he'd checked) in the boot of the car.


The instant coffee was drunk, the cigarettes smoked, the timepassed. A new Keith Talent. The taste of victory is sweet. In the olddays Keith and Debs would have slipped away at some point for theirlittle cuddle, Keith later settling with Mrs K. Or he might have waitedin the Cavalier, smoking more cigarettes and listening to darts tapes, until Debbee threw a key down from her window, and he'd pop backin for a freebie. But tonight? Well, it was a new Keith Talent theywere looking at. And Debbee was special. She cost Ј85. And hefound that he wasn't really bothered one way or the other, now thatshe was sixteen, a good deal of the magic having gone out of it. No.He gave Mrs Kensit a kiss and a squeeze, and Debbee an even chastergoodnight on the doorstep, and was on his way. In the car hesmacked a darts tape into the stereo (the Obbs-Twemlow final: evergreen) and drove to Trish Shirt's.


Twenty minutes later he sat in his garage and smoked twenty cigarettes and drank a bottleof porno. Tsk, tsk: bloodstains on hiscollar. In long but regular intervals, tears of pride dropped on to hislap. Another bockle? Already bit tiggly. That bull finish: right in themiggle. No diggling, but give Debs a lickle cuggle. Quick piggle.


From time to time he would stare up at the swimming beauty of thedartboard: the kaleidoscope of every hope and dream. She did it.Nicky did it. Old Nick. Then home, to the chores of love. He walkedthe wife, burped the dog, and . . . Semiconscious, then, also semi-literate and not even semiskilled, Double-U Eleven's Keith Talent rested his head against the semipermanent cork wall, and thought of semiprecious Nicola, beneath the cold black sky of seminight.


And now under the low sun I go to Kim Talent with a lover's impatience, with a lover's tearing impatience, fearful that the worldwill die before I meet the searching blaze of her eyes. On the way inthe quiet riot of Golborne Road I see three young women walkingalong together, licking and sucking their fingers. Why? Whatprofane novelty .. . But yes of course. They've been eating frenchfries, eating chips from the open bag covered in vinegar and salt. Andnow licking their fingers. Long may they do so. Long may they havethe freedom, the fingers, and the lips. With a lover's impatience Ishall unbutton her Babygro. With a lover's impatience I shall tear at the sticky tabs of her diaper.


Kim was sleeping. So was Keith, at three in the afternoon. He'dtried getting up; he'd tried the bracing stroll to the Black Cross. Andhe'd come right back again. His tortured snoring filled the flat. AndKim's sleep too was restless, pain-jabbed, caught up in the baby'spassionate, eternal and largely obscure struggle not just to getthrough being a baby, an infant, a child, a young one, but to deal rawly with the knots and tricks of being. Even a baby knows thatdeath isn't one idea: it is the complex symbol. Baby, what is yourproblem? Daddy, it's this: the mind-body problem. I asked Kath whyshe didn't take the chance to go to the shops. I said it forcefully orfrantically. The resolute colourlessness of her face told me no, no; but then her eyes closed, and something was decided, something important was decided. And she left us.


Got to stop hurting K.With a lover's impatience I woke her. Nogood fust takeing it out on the Baby.She cried in confusion andsadness as I unbuttoned her on the living-room floor. With a singlewrench I pulled off her diaper . . .What kind of planet is it where youfeel relief, where you feel surprise, that a nought-year-old girl is still a virgin? Then I turned her over.


On the right buttock, a bruise, perfectly round and shockingly dark,and grainy, like an X-ray, shining black light on the internal world ofcells. On the left buttock, three cigarette burns, in a triangle.


I got up so suddenly that I banged into the standard lamp and if theroom had been any bigger I would have fallen over backward right on to the deck. The wall held me up with a blow to the cranium. Showingeffort and eagerness, Kim turned herself over, a new skill of hers, andlooked up at me from the floor.


'He's been hurting you, hasn't he?'


'. . . Mm. Urs,' she said.


'It's daddy, isn't it.'


'. . . Earse.'


I went down on my knees and said through the sound of hiswindow-rattling snore, 'I'll -I don't know what I'll do. But I'll protectyou. Please don't worry. Please. My darling.'


'Please,' I said. 'Do this one big last thing for me. Please.'


Nicola pushed her face forward. 'Christ, I saidokay.'


'But what good is your guarantee? You're alone. On what can youswear? You don't love anything or anybody.'


'Well you'll just have to take my word for it, won't you. I was goingto do something like this anyway. What's the big deal?'


'Just bear with me,' I said. I had toothache in my knee and legache inmy mouth and earache in my ass. I nodded. 'Good. So. You'll haveKeith move in. Or spend a lot of time here. And make him happy. Untilthe big night.'


'I won't wake up with him. That's out of the question and is never going to happen. And you realize it'll mean sending Guy away for awhile.'


'There go my unities.'


'I rather thought America.'


'America ?' I sighed heavily. But we all have to make sacrifices. I tooka breath and said, 'Outstanding work, by the way, at the Marquis ofEdenderry. You got us out of a tricky situation.' I was there, of course,at the Marquis of Edenderry. I was there. But am I anywhere ? I look atmy outstretched hand and expect it to disappear, to begin its slow wipefrom the screen. I move in and out of things. I am an onlooker in myown dream. I am my own ghost, kissing its fingertips.


Indulgently she said, 'Have you finished your letter to Mark?'


'No. And it's about eight thousand words long.'


'Don't finish it. Or don't post it. Here's a better idea. Post it toyourself. Do you know the Borges story, "The Aleph " ? It's very funnyabout literary envy.' She finished her drink and dashed the empty glassinto the fireplace. Typical.


'Is it now?'


Here they come again, the pains. Gather about me, my little ones.


Exquisitetristesse on finishingCrossbone Waters. I can't thinkwhy. It's an awful little piece of shit.


Marius returns from a crepuscular soul-ramble to find Kwangopacking his meagre possessions. Ridiculous conversation. Kwangosays he will be gone for three moons. Why,OKwango? The woman isready. She waits. How,OKwango, do you know this? How do youknow this,Ogreat Kwango? The birds whisper it. I smell it in thewaters.


Nor does Kwango speak with forked tongue. Marius hastens toCornelia's cabin, and gets the lot...


Or you infer that he does. Marius goes all posh and manly at thisjuncture ('Towards morning, I took her again'), with much Kwan-goan rambling about water, femininity, ebbings, fluxes. I expectedherto be manly. I expected her to really strap Marius on. But no: she's asimpering sonnet in the sack.


At any rate the seventy-two-hour debauch concludes with Kwan-go's return and a brisk voyage back to Samarinda, where Cornelia'sseaplane is already bobbing in the harbour. No promises. No regrets.Just one last kiss . . .


I'm devastated. I reallyam falling apart. Why the sighs, why thetears, why the rich and wistful frowns ? It's anawful little piece of shit.


My last act of love took place ninety days ago.


I ambushed and ravished her. I was frictionless and inexorable.How could she possibly resist me? Burton Else couldn't have handledit better. Kwango himself would have wept with pride.


It was a precision raid. Everything was sweet. On the appointed dayI unsmilingly flew fromLa Guardiato Logan. Then the six-seater tothe Cape: how aerodynamically carefree it was, how the baby planewas whisked up on the thermals, out over the boatless water. I lookedback with a shrewd glance: Boston at dusk with the sun behind it -heaven's red-light district. We landed with extreme delicacy, as did theold open-prop stratocruiser that was coming down alongside, like acorpulent but thin-shanked lady, skirts raised to toe the moist tarmac.Onward.


Sand spills had closed the thruway. In my hired jeep I ruggedly drovethrough battened Provincetown, then on past the sign that says CapeCod Light, and into the woods. Many times I climbed out to untangle the drag of queer growths, the grasp of nameless vines made bitter bytheir own ugliness, taloned briars, sharp-knuckled twigs, all under astorm of blackfly. Then at last the camp, the unlocked screen door, and Missy Harter on the piano stool, clasping her coffee cup in both hands.


She had come for remembrance, as she did every year: her father, whom she loved, whom I loved, Dan Harter, with his old-guy jeans,his Jim Beam and his Tom Paine. She was perfect for me.


I cried. I laced her coffee with bourbon. I told her I was dying too. Iwent down on my knees.


How could she possibly resist me?


Last night, as I entered, Nicola gave me her most exalted andveridical smile and said,


Tvereached a decision. God, it's all so clear now. I'm calling the whole thing off.'


'You're what?'


'I'll go away somewhere. Perhaps with Mark. It's simple. Plan B. I'lllive.'


'You'll what?'


She laughed musically. 'The look on your face. Oh don't worry. I'mall talk. I'm just a big tease. It's still Plan A. Don't worry. I was just kidding. I was just playing nervous.'


Last night was our last night, in a sense. We both felt it. The worldwas coming into everything. The room where we now talked, Nicola'shabitat, would soon be altered, compromised, as would Keith's, aswould Guy's. These places would never be the same again. I said,


'I'm going to miss our talks.'


'There's another thing I've been teasing you about. Of all my recentdeceptions, this was the hardest. Technically. I mean keeping astraight face. Pretending to be a virgin is a breeze Ўn comparison. MarkAsprey.’


'Oh yes?'


'His work. His writing.'


'It's . . ?'


'It'sshit,' she said.


'.. . My heart soars like a hawk.'


What was she wearing? I can't remember. No outfit or disguise ofinnocence or depravity. Justclothes. And she wasn't made-up either;and she wasn't drunk, and she wasn't mad. Very much herself,whatever that was, herself, fraying but shiny like worn velvet, ex­treme, aromatic, nervous, subtle.


She said, 'How do you feel about me? The truth.'


The truth?' I got to my feet saying, 'You're a bad dream, baby. Ikeep thinking I'm going to wake up' — here I snapped my fingersweakly - 'and you'll disappear. You're a nightmare.'


She stood and came toward me. The way her head was inclinedmade me say at once:


'I can't.'


'You must know that it has to happen.'


'You've come across this. When men can't.'


'Only by design. It's easy: you make yourself leaden. Don't worry.I'll fix it. I'll do it all. Don't even try and think about love. Think about- think about the other thing.'


Later, she said, 'I'm sorry if you're angry with me. Or with yourself.''I'm not angry.' 'I suppose you've never done that before.' 'Yes, I didthink I might get through life without it.' 'You may surprise yourselffurther. As Keith says, it's never over until —' 'Until the last dart strikes home.' 'Anyway,' she said, 'this will only happen once.' 'Anyway,' Isaid, 'I'm mostly grateful. It's made me ready to die.' 'That was myhope.' 'With Mark, what was the—?' 'Hush now . . .'


We put our clothes back on and went out walking, in the dripping alleys, the dark chambers of the elaborately suffering city. We're thedead. Amazing that we can do this. More amazing that we want to. Hand in hand and arm in arm we totter, through communal fantasy and sorrow, through London fields. We're the dead. Above, the sky has a pink tinge to it, the cunning opposite of health, like somethingbad, something high. As if through a screen of stage smoke you can justmake out God's morse or shorthand, the stars arranged in triangles, and saying therefore and because, therefore and because. We're the dead.


Chapter 20: Playing Nervous


lthough for himpersonally the future looked bright, Keithwas in chronic trouble, ascheats and suchlike always were, withhis Compensations.


His caseworker, a Mrs Ovens, was coming down on Keith hard.Increasingly riskily, he had skipped their last seven appointments;and the eighth, scheduled for the day after his historic victory at theMarquis of Edenderry, he had noisily slept through. Now, if he wasn't careful, he'd be looking at a court appearance and at least thethreat of a mandatory prison term. Keith rang Mrs O. the next day on his carfone and ate shit in his poshest voice. For a consideration,John Dark, the iffy filth, would also vouch for Keith's goodcharacter. She gave him one last chance: on the morning of the Finalof the Duoshare Sparrow Masters, if you please. And Keith hatedthis like a deformity because it was part of the failure he would soon be gone from: turbid queues, and the office breath of afternoons, and a press of difficulty, made of signs and symbols, that never began to go away.


Keith's Compensations. They really were a torment. Oh, thethings he went through, the suffering he endured. For some people, itseemed, a fiver a week (split sixteen or seventeen ways) just wasn'tgood enough . . . Keith's Compensations represented the money hepaid, or owed, for the injuries he'd meted out during a career that spanned almost two decades. You'd think that being a child prodigyin the violence sphere would have its upside Compensationswise,since some of the people you damaged and hurt (and naturally youwere always going to be concentrating on the elderly) would be dyingoff anyway. But oh no: now you had to pay their relatives, or even theirmates, so only the lonely forgave their debts, some of them going backtwenty years, a crushed nosebridge here, a mangled earhole there,every one of them linked to double-digit inflation and continued-distress upgrade and spiralling medical costs and no end of a fuckingpain all round.


'Is it your Compensations, Keith?' said Kath, as Keith replaced thecarfone.


'I'll give you a Compensation in a minute.'


Thoroughly out of sorts, Keith was taking Kath to the hospital for her tube trouble, the ambulance service having been discontinued intheir area for the foreseeable future. It was the first time since their marriage that Kath had been in Keith's car.


'What's that noise?' Kath asked, and looked more closely at thesleeping baby on her lap. 'Whimpering.'


Keith wrenched his head round to check on Clive; but the great dogwas silent.


'And banging.'


Now Keith remembered—and scolded himself for not rememberingsooner. Quickly he thumped a darts tape into the stereo and turned itup loud. 'It's thenext car,'he said. They were in a traffic jam, and therewere certainly plenty of other cars near by, and no shortage of bangingand whimpering. 'All thiscongestion,' said Keith.


He dropped Kath and the baby at the gates of St Mary's. Then hedrove round the first corner, pulled up, and got out. Preparing himselffor yet more reproaches from the female end of things (even Trishwould be ha ving a go at him later), Keith longsufferingly let Iqbala outof the boot of the car.


'Lady Barnaby,' said Hope. 'Oh that's awful.'


'What?'


'She's dead.'


'How did you -?' said Guy, lengthening his neck towards her.


'There's an invite here to her funeral or whatever.'


'How frightful,' said Guy.


They were having a late breakfast in the kitchen. Also present wereMelba,Phoenix, Maria, Hjordis,Auxiliadora,Dominique andMarie-Claire. Also Lizzyboo, bent over her muffins. Also Marma-duke: having spent a lot of time noisily daubing his breakfast all overthe table, he was now quietly eating his paint set.


'Oh I suppose we can get out of it,' said Hope.


'I think we ought to go.'


'What for? We don't care about her friends and relatives, supposingshe has any. We never cared about her, much, and now she's dead.'


'Show respect.' Guy finished his bowl of Humanfhit and said, 'Ithought I might go in.' He meant the office, the City. Or that's what hewould have meant if he hadn't been lying.


'Trading has resumed?'


'Not yet,' he said. 'But Richard says it looks hopeful.' This was alsountrue. On the contrary, Richard had said that it didn't look hopefulat all . . .Guy felt that he had just about reached the end of his capacityto inquire into contemporary history, into What Was Going On. Hekept postponing that call to his contact at Index, somehow, to askwhat the chances were that this time next week he would be folding hisonly child into a binliner. People were avoiding, avoiding. He cast aneye over Hope's mail: the goodbye to Lady Barnaby was all that wasbeing offered in the way of social life, on which there seemed to be amerciful moratorium. But Richard, unmarried, childless - he lovednobody—was a mine of unspeakable information. That at the momentof full eclipse on November 5, as the Chancellor made his speech inBonn, two very big and very dirty nuclear weapons would bedetonated, one over the Palace of Culture in Warsaw, one over Marble Arch. That until the cease of the flow of fissionable materials from Baghdad, the Israelis would be targeting Kiev. That the President'swife was already dead. That the confluence of perihelion and syzygywould levitate the oceans. That the sky was falling —


Guy got up to go. As he drained his coffee cup he allowed himself adisbelieving stare at Lizzyboo, who was now addressing herself to theremains of Marmaduke's porridge. The bent head, and the motionlessbulk of the shoulders beneath the dark blue smock, sent out acontradictory message: the self within was shrinking, even as the bodybillowed. And not long ago, only the other day, in her tennis wear . . .


Hope said, 'Before you go would you do the garbage and bring thewood in, and do the water-softener, and check the tank. And bring thewine down. And call the glazier. And the garage.'


The telephone rang. Guy crossed the room and picked it up. Abrutish silence, followed by a brutish phoneme-some exotic greetingor Christian name, perhaps. Then the dialling tone.


'Wrong number.'


'All these wrong numbers,' said Hope. 'I've neverknown therebesomany wrong numbers. From all over the world. We live in a time', shesaid, 'of wrong numbers.'


Nicola, who loved nobody, who was always alone, stared at thewashing-up thatlay there formlessly, awaiting resuscitation, awaitingform; dead and dirty now, the cups and saucers and glasses neededclean water, green liquid, brush, rag, and her gloved fingers, and thentheir pretty redeployment on the dresser's shelves. Excitingly, it was getting to the point where a teacup, say, could be used and put aside,unwashed (or thrown away, or shattered) — used for the very last time.Items of clothing could be similarly discarded. No more shampooneed be purchased now, no more soap, no more tampons. Of courseshe had plenty of money for luxuries and non-essentials; she had plenty of disposable income. And, in these last days, she wouldcertainly give her credit cards a fearful ratcheting. The week before, her dentist and gynaecologist, or their secretaries, had coincidentallycalled, to confirm routine appointments, for scaling, smearing. She had fixed the dates but made no move for her diary . . . Now Nicolarolled up her sleeves and did the dishes for the last rime.


Soon afterwards, as she was changing, the telephone rang. Nicolahad had several such calls: a loan company, wanting to help her withher lease, which had just expired. She didn't care because she had a month's grace; and a month's grace was more grace than she would ever need. She heard the man out. Her lease could be renewed, withtheir help, he said, for up to a thousand years.


A thousand years. The loan company was ready, was eager, to underwrite a millennium. Hitlerian hubris. From what she knewabout events in the Middle East, from what she gathered from whatremained of the independent press (contorted comment, specula­tion), it seemed possible to argue that Hitler was still running thecentury — Hitler, the great bereaver. Although they were enteringNovember now, there was still time for him to reap exponentialmurder. Because what he had done you could do a thousandfold in the space of half an afternoon.


Was she nervous? Without question it would be disagreeable, at this late date, to be upstaged by a holocaust. If history, if currentaffairs were to reach a climax on November 5 during the full eclipse,then her own little drama, scheduled for the early minutes of thefollowing day, would have no bite, no content — and absolutely noform. And no audience. No undivided attention. On the other hand,you wouldn't want to miss that either, the big event. I identify with theplanet, thought Nicola, with a nod, as she started getting dressed. Iknow just how it feels. They say that everything wants to persist in itsbeing. You know: even sand wants to go on being sand. I don't believethat. Some things want to live, and some things don't.


As she clothed them she consulted her breasts, which told her thatthe big event wouldn't happen, and that the little one would.


'It is thought by some', read Keith,


that the secret of Stonehenge lies in darts. The circular stone ruinsare shaped in a circle, like a dartboard. This may explain a mysterythat has puzzled historians for literally ages. For Stonehenge goesback to 1500BC.


1500BC! thought Keith.


What is a definite historical fact is that early English cavemenplayed a form of darts. This is definite from certain markings on thecave walls, thought to resemble a dartboard. Many top dartersbelieve that darts skill goes back to cavemen times. The topcaveman would be the guy who brought back the meat every time,employing his darts skills. So in a way, everything goes back to darts. If you think about it, the whole world is darts.


No matter how many times he pondered it, this passage never failedto bring a tear to Keith's eye. It entirely vindicated him. And Keith'splump teardrop might have contained tenderness as well as pride. The whole world was darts: well, maybe. But the whole world—on certainscreens, in certain contingency plans - was definitely a dartboard. Keith bent open his notebook and slowly wrote:


Remember you are a machine. Delivring the dart the same wayevery time.


While he was actually plagiarizing an earlier passage fromDarts: Master the Discipline, Keith was also originating it in his inimitableway.


Clear ideas from your head. You do'nt want nothing in yourfukcing head.


Now he contemplated that last sentence with the stern eye of thetrue perfectionist. He crossed outfukcing and put infucking. Anobserver might have wondered why Keith took the trouble to makethese deletions and insertions. Why correct,OKeith, when the words are for your eyes only? But someone watches over us when we write.Mother. Teacher. Shakespeare. God.


Oy! Ooh. That itch again. That abdominal vacuum. Chronic, innit.And suddenly, in one fell swoop, all his women had disappeared: justlike that. Petronella had gone to Southend with her husband, Clint, ontheir honeymoon. Analiese was back in Slough (and the M4trafficyou just wouldn't believe). Debbee was sixteen. Iqbala, following hermisadventure in the Cavalier, wasn't talking to Keith, or indeed toanybody else. And Sutra (Sutra!) had levered herself back into theworld from which she had so surprisingly emerged: hurry, hunger,seen through window and windscreen — other women, more women,women found and unfound, and Keith up above, multiform, like amurder of crows, sayingcaw, caw, caw . . . Which left Trish. And hewasn 't going roundthere again, no danger, after this morning and thestate she was in. About an hour ago, at noon, he had popped intoNick's for a video. But Nick's videos, Keith decided, were like Chinesemeals. As for Nicola herself, on this side of the screen, Nicola in the flesh, the mysterious flesh, with dark-adapted eye and unaccustomed lips, and the way she filled her dresses, Keith was neither patient norimpatient: even sitting next to you with thighs touching she was bothnear and far, like TV.


The telephone rang. As Keith crossed the garage to answer it, he wasfirmly of the opinion that success had not changed him.


'Keith Talent? Hello there. Good afternoon there. Tony deTaunton, executive producer.Dartworld.'


Oh yeah: Marquis of Edenderry . . .Dartworld? Dartworldl


'Congratulations,' said Tony de Taunton. 'Sterling effort there theother night. Smashing effort. Tight thing.' With terrible candour hewent on, 'You were all over the shop there for a while. And with Paul Gowell out of form I thought, Hello. Dear oh dear. Blimey. It's goingto be one of those nights. But you seemed to take heart there, withlikkle Paulie throwing such crap. In the end, it was your character gotyou through.'


'Yeah cheers.'


'Now you watch the show don't you Keith.'


'Consistently,' said Keith fiercely.


'Right. Now with finals and celebrity challenges we do a short docu on the participants. You've seen them. Couple of minutes each. So wewant to do you, Keith.'


Keith smiled cannily, unfoolably.'. . . But that's TV,' he said.


'Right. Like they say. You know: your lifestyle.'


'Kind of like a lifestyle feature.'


'You've seen them. Where you live, where you work, hobbies,family, interests: all this. Your lifestyle.'


Keith looked up: the stinking ruin of the garage. Tony de Tauntonasked if they could start tomorrow and Keith said that they could.


'Address?'


Keith gave it helplessly. The wife, the dog, the joke flat.


'Smashing. See you there then. Goodbye there.'


Keith's face was all poll tax and means test as he dialled Nicola withshimmering fingers.


'Don't worry. Wait a while, and then try again,' said Nicola, andreplaced the receiver. Then she put her hand back where it was before.'My God. It's harder than the telephone. That was a wrong number.Another wrong number. It is. Even through this rather heavy tweed,it's harder than the telephone. It is. This isn't in nature, surely.'


Guy's face was trying to look pleasant; but its expression was unmistakably strained.


'Do other men become as hard as this?'


'Oh I expect so," said Guy croakily. 'In the right circumstances.'


Takes a bit of getting used to. I've been consulting my fictionshelves, without much luck. It seems to be the nature of the subject thatthe writer assumes a general stock of knowledge and procedure from which his characters subtly diverge. In code, usually. No help to me,I'm afraid.'


'Well this, after all,' said Guy (his head was tilted slightly), 'is definitely non-fiction.'


'Now what? . . . The idea is, I suppose, to move the outer skin verygently against the inner. This tweed doesn't chafe you, does it? I imagine you've got pants on too or something?. . . And of coursethere are all these arrangements further down. Do they play a part? I suppose stroked or squeezed they might - Guy. Guy! What a ghastlyface you just made!'


He tried to speak, reassuringly.


'What? Is it painful or something?'


'A little,' he mouthed.


'I don't understand. I thought it was meant to benice.'


Guy did some explaining.


'Oh, darling! Sweetheart. You should havesaid. Oh it's too patheticof me. Well let's...I'll...'She reached for his belt buckle. Then her long fingers paused and she smiled up at him self-deprecatingly. 'I'vejust thought of something. It's - it's sort of a game. I think it'll do thetrick. And I'll try something really daring. Guy?'


'Yes?'


'You couldn't just leave me alone for a little while first, could you?Half an hour or something.' Again the smile of childish challenge. 'Toscrew my courage to the sticking place?'


He said 'Of course' so sweetly that she had a mind to cup his narrowcheeks in her hands and tell him how many, many, many men hadwritten their names in come all over her stomach and breasts and faceand hair. What signing sessions. What autograph hounds . . . But allshe said was, before she let him out, 'You know, you make me sohappy sometimes that I think I must be going to die. As if just to go onliving were really too much to ask . . .'


In the market street he kept seeing piles of shoes, piles of hats, vastlytumbled, piles of handbags, piles of belts. Woundedly he walked, witha thumping in the drool-damaged ear. Guess who'd been there, when Guy arrived at Nicola's? Keith. Keith was on his way out. Keith wasjust picking up his things: while he finished doing so, Guy had beenobliged to wait on the porch, shielding his eyes as he searched for theCavalier under the low sun. The two men passed at the front door;Keith was looking fantastically washed-out but otherwise seemedvery pleased with himself, justifiably, some might say, after his recentefforts at the Marquis of Edenderry. It was as unlikely as anythingcould be, Guy thought: but if he was being deceived, well, then it wasquite a deception; and if Nicola and Keith were lovers, then it wassome love. Goats and monkeys! Now a San Marco of pigeons pattern­ed the street like iron filings drawn by the little boy's magnet. At thecrossroads one pigeon in particular was eating pizza, and wanting more pizza, and risking pizzafication itself as a lorry loomed near.


Perverse and unchallengeable hunger attacked him. He entered thefirst food outlet he could find, a potato restaurant called the Tate orTatties or was it Potato Love? The queue or flock was populous butswiftly flowing. At its head sat a Spanish girl in a steel pen. She took theladen paper plates from the hatch behind her and split each spud with adab of marge or cheddar or hexachlorophene. Then she passed itthrough the Microsecond: and that's how long it took - half a pulse.Guy knew that the device used TiredLight, that adaptable technology.The food just goes on cooking, on your plate, in your mouth, in your guts. Even beneath the streets.


'Thank you,' he said, and paid the amount that was asked.


The girl was coarsely beautiful. But she probably wouldn't be thatway for very long. There was the evidence of the mother, operating outof the hatch and framed in it like someone on a primitive TV set. Butthis was no cookery programme. It was about what kitchens tended todo to the female idea. And the daughter would get there quicker thanthe mother had, because the modern devices saved time but also used itup - sucked time out of the very air...Guy collected his plasticutensils and looked round for a stool. With difficulty he half-seatedhimself (that's better), and carefully parted the loose lips of his potato. Its core sizzled, smokelessly bubbling with TiredLight, but its surface was icy to the touch. He shuffled back to the penned girl.


'This potato', he said listlessly, 'is undernuked.'


Half a pulse later and it was dropped back on to his plate like a spentcartridge. Now it was overnuked. And suddenly ancient. Guy lookedat the potato and then looked at the girl. With a pale smile he asked,'Do you really expect me to eat this?' She just raised her eyebrows andinclined her head, as if to say that she had seen people eat worse. He leftit there on the counter and walked back to Nicola. And on his waydown the market street he kept seeing those heaps of gloves and hatsand handbags, little shoes. And what was that supposed to remind you of? Guy thought he kept seeing heaps of glasses, heaps of hair.


'Now it's really a very simple game,' she began. 'And completelyjuvenile, of course. I learned it from some of the brassier girls at thechildren's home, years and years ago. It's calleddare. It's also known asnervous. I believe it's played all over the world, as such things usually are. Playingnervous.'


'Don't know it. What happens?'


She laughed rosily. 'Not a great deal. You put your hand on mythroat, say, and let it descend until I saynervous. Or on my knee. Or Iput my hand on your tummy and move it slowly downwards.'


'Until I saynervous?'


'Or until / saynervous. Shall we play? I suppose,' she said, revealingthe white strap of her brassiere beneath her shirt and producing a blush, 'I suppose it would be fairer if I took this off. Turn away.’


Guy turned away. Nicola stood, unbuttoning her shirt. Leaningforward, she unhooked herself and slowly released the brocaded cups. She gave a special smile.


Next door, wearing Y-fronts, earphones, and a froggedsmoking-jacket she had recently bought him, Keith lay slumped on Nicola's bed. He was watching the proceedings on the small screen. His peepers bulged. His kisser furled into a collusive sneer. Nicolarebuttoned briskly, to the top, to the brim of the brimming throat.Keith was shocked. He had always suspected that when Guy and Nicola were alone together they just talked about poetry. Keithshrugged limply.


'Jesus, some mothers,' he murmured to himself.


And so they playednervous, nervous, nervous. Nicola playednervous,though she wasn't nervous (she was playing), and Guyplayednervous, though he wasn't playing (he was nervous). 'Undo thetop button. And the next. Wait. . .Nervous. No, go on...Notnervous.You can kiss them.' And there they were, so close together, infearful symmetry. Guy dipped his lips to them. What could you sayaboutthis breast. Only that it was just likethat breast. Why comparethem to anything but each other?


Hello, boys, thought Keith. Nice bouncers she got. Pity a bit on the small side. Still you lose respect after a while for the bigger tit. Goodlaugh at first. Now Analiese . . . He wiped his sniffer.


With blips and bleeps and scans and sweeps their hands moved uptheir thighs. His fingers reached the stocking tops and their explosion of female flesh.('Nervous!' she sang.) Hers were warm and heavy asthey moved in beneath his belt.


'Nervous?'she asked.


'. . . No,' he said, though he was. 'But / am,' she said, though shewasn't. 'But I'm not,' he said, though he was.


Working him up to a fever pitch innit, thought Keith. He made aliquid sound with his gnashers. Nervous? He'll be a fucking nutter in aminute. Here —


'Does it feel as it should feel?' she was asking.


'Yes very much so.'


Keith felt the soft arrival of sweat on the palms of his feelers. Helooked away for a moment, as if in pain. Then he felt a lash of panic that almost flipped him on to the floor as Nicola said,


'Quick. Let's go to the bedroom.'


With a great jerk Keith struggled himself upright. He paused: it'sokay. He lay back again, listening to his steadying ticker and Nicolasaying,


'No — here — now. Stand up. All these buttons. It seems to ... I'llhave to..."


'Oof,' said Keith, He whistled hoarsely, and those blue gawpersfilled with all their light. Blimey. No, you don't - you don't do that.Not. To a guy. You don't, he thought, as his flipper reached down forhis chopper. You don't do that to a guy.


'Lie down. And close your eyes.'


So Keith saw it all and Guy saw nothing. But Guy felt it. Guy didall the feeling. He felt the hands, the odd trail of hair, the hot and recklessly expert sluicings of the mouth. And other strange matters.A suspicion (a fleeting treachery) that now, after this, he could be free and safe and home, the fever passed, and her forgotten, and thelong life waiting with child and Hope. But then too there wereconsequences: immediate consequences (the male animal, never lostfrom thought). Soon, and with embarrassing copiousness...hemight drown her. He might drown them both. Physical fear wasnever wholly absent in his intimate dealings here down the dead­ end street, down the dead-end street with the mad beauty, when shewas taken by sexual surprise. He held her head. The world wasdying anyway. Towards the end, which never came, he said help­lessly,


'I'm . . . I'm . . .'


Then something happened — something tiny in the layered swell­ings.'Enough,' he said, and pulled her clear from the struggle, and atlast was lost from thought.


She was kissing his eyes. He blinked out at her.


'You sort of fainted,' she said. 'Are you all right? You sort offainted.'


He looked down. It was all right. He hadn't made a mess of things.


'You sort of fainted,' she said again. 'Oh, I see I've made anothermess of things.'


'No no — it was heavenly.'


As she was showing him out, or, rather, helping him to the stairs (hehad an eczema seminar to attend), she held him back and said,


'You know, you needn't have stopped. I was prepared — for yourswoon to death,' she quoted prettily, though she thought she hadtimed it beautifully — that tiny reminder of her teeth. 'I mean the other swoon. In fact 1 was longing for you to fill my mouth. Because I'm prepared for everything now. I want you to make me,' she said, andgave him the Grand-A-Night Hooker. 'There's only one thing you'llhave to do first.'


Guy wiped his dripping chin and said, 'What's that? Leave mywife?'


She started back. How could he be so wide of the mark? How couldyou! Guy had begun to apologize for his flippancy when she said,


'Oh no. I don't want you to leave her. What kind of person do youthink I am ?' And this was asked, not in reproach, but in a spirit of pureinquiry. 'I don't want you to leave her. I just want you to tell her.'


In the bedroom Keith was taking the liberty of savouring a well-earnedcigarette. Technically, smoking was banned in the bedroom, althoughNicola, a heavy smoker, smoked heavily in the bedroom all the time.Now she stood leaning on the door frame with her arms folded.


'Smoking-jacket innit.'


She gave him a slow appraisal, one of fascinated, inch-by-inchdetestation, from the feet (red-soled and faintly quivering) to the face,which looked ruminative, grand, prime-ministerial.


That smoking-jacket looks great on you, Keith. And you lookgreat init.'


'Yeah cheers.'


'I do hope you're not going to be spooked by this TV business,' shesaid, and watched his face instantly collapse. Keith's tongue nowseemed to be trying to sort things out inside his mouth. 'Isn't thiswhat you've worked for? What we've worked for? Well, Keith?'


'Invasion of privacy like.'


'Or darts stardom . . . TV isn't true, Keith, as you've just seen. Or not necessarily so. Darling, you must put all this out of your mindand leave everything to me. Let me translate you. I'll not fail you,Keith. You know that.'


'I appreciate it.'


'I've made a new video for you. But in a sense you've already seenone. And I can tell by the mischievous expression on your face thatyou - that you did it already.'


'Yeah,' said Keith perplexedly, averting his eyes. '1 did it already.'


Keith came down the passage and out through the front door whistling 'Welcome to My World'. As he passed he happened toglance at her name on the bell. 6: six. Six. 6! thought Keith. Double3! . . . Nasty, that. Worst double on the board. Never go near it less you've fucked double12and then come inside on double 6. Murder.


3 's the double all the darters dread. Right down the bottom like that, atsix o'clock, you're sort ofdropping it in. And if you come inside it's 1,double 1. Pressure darts. Old Nick. Double 3.6.6.6. Nasty, that. Verynasty. Ooh wicked . . .


An old woman with hair like coconut fibre limped past whipping herself with a home-made switch. For a moment Keith stood therelistening to or at any rate hearing the cries of the city, like the cries ofdogs or babies, answering, pre-verbal, the inheritors of the millen­nium, awaiting their inheritance.


In tortoiseshell spectacles and grey silk dressing-gown Guy kneltpoised over the Novae, his long back curved in a perfect semicircle,like a protractor, his curious nose inches from the board (this difficultposition seemed to ease his nether pain, his tubed heart, which hurt alot all the time): six moves in and he was only one pawn down, andhalf-expecting to survive into what used to be called the middle game.He wanted to survive as long as possible, because when he lost hewould have to go to Hope with the truth.


Every few minutes without turning round Guy would take awrapped toy from the straw tub and toss it back over his shoulder toMarmaduke. Thus, before he could wreck it, Marmaduke first had tounwrap it, and this took him a little while. Guy could hear his snarledbreathing and the tear of paper; then the grunts of effort as the toy began to snap and give.


One of the troubles was that chess was over, chess was dead. TheWorld Champion would now have no chance against Guy's Novae,which cost Ј145. As a human construct chess had challengedcomputers for a creditable period; but not any more. Once a usefulsparring partner, chess now jumped off the stool, snorting and ducking in its trunks, and was explosively decked in the very firstround. Gamesbetween the computers were unfollowably oblique and long-armed, a knight's jump away from human understanding,with all the pieces continually realigning on the first rank (as if therewere an infinity of previous ranks, the minus one, the minus two, the minus nth rank), invariably drawing through elaborate move-repetition after many days, with hardly a piece being captured. When programmed for win-only the computers played like sui­cides . . . Guy's nose twitched as he saw that one of Novae'sbishops was unprotected. This wasn't unusual: it was always lobbing minor pieces at him, and even the computer Queen wasregularlyen prise. He could capture, but then what? He captured.Novae replied sharply.


'Yes. Brilliant,' Guy whispered.


Four moves later (how pitiless the silicon was) he stared blinking athis wedged king. At that moment Marmaduke, who must have heldhis breath as he approached, sank his teeth into the Achilles tendon ofGuy's right heel. And by the time his wits returned the child had forcedthe busby end of a toy guardsman down his own throat and was turning an ominous colour as he fell backwards on to a bulkypersonnel-carrier. LuckilyPetrawas near by, as well as Hjordis, and together they were able (Marie-Claire was also at hand) to straightenthings out with Paquita's help and the ever-calming presence ofMelbaand Phoenix.


Guy showered, and swabbed and dressed his heel. Later, in thekitchen, he inspected the guarantees on the lamb cutlets - thestaggered dates, the fine print - and readied them for the grill. 'It mustbe true, all that,' he said to the room in general, 'you know, about foodand love. Have you come across the idea?' He waited, with his backturned.'When food gets too far from love . . .The preparation of food has to do with love. Mother's milk. And when food gets too far from love there's a breakdown, like a breakdown in communication. Andwe all get sick. When it gets too far from love.' He looked over hisshoulder. The sisters were listening, Lizzyboo with full attention (shehad even stopped eating), Hope with patient suspicion. As Guy addressed himself to the cooker he felt his wife's eyes busyingthemselves on the breadth of his back, on his hair, on the very pricklesof his neck. How strong were their scrutiny and grip ? What held them ?With a few bags of pitta bread and an institutional tub of taramasalata, Lizzyboo repaired to her room. Now was the time: thetime was now. Guy felt powers move in him but his face, with its rinsed blue eyes, looked especially weak—the weakness that was inevitable inhim, the weakness he weakly cleaved to. How beautiful the truth is, hewas thinking. Because it never goes away. Because it's always there, just the same, whatever you try to do to it. Hope was talking to himintermittently about various chores he hadn't done (domestic, social, fiscal); during her next breather he said intelligently, with his back aimed at her,


'I've got something to say.' And already he was on the other side.'It'll sound more dramatic than it really is, I expect. I think you've gotsomething to say too.' Here he turned. Here, of course, he was about tointroducethegravamenthat Nicola herself had recently stressed: thefact that Hope had, 'rather sordidly', taken a lover in Dink. But onelook at the solar hatred in Hope's eyes and Guy thought: poor Dink! He's gone - he was never here. He's been unpersoned. He isn't evenhistory. 'I mean, for quite a long time it seems to me there's been a needto.. .redefine our . . .All I'm proposing really is an adjustment. And Ido think it's important, very important, vital, really, to be as honest as one can be. And I don't see why we can't just work this out like tworeasonable human beings. With the minimum of disruptions allround. There's someone else.'


Guy experienced a certain amount of difficulty, as he checked into thehotel on the Bayswater Road. It was the fifth hotel he had tried.Although the injuries to his face would turn out to be mainlysuperficial, he must have cut an unreassuring (and unprosperous)figure at the reception desk, with his fat lip, swelling eye, and thedramatic lateral gash across his forehead. Then, too, the top fivebuttons of his steaming, rain-soaked shirt were missing; and all he had in the way of luggage was a plastic bag with a bit of wet Y-fronthanging over the brim of it. But finally his osmium credit cardprevailed.


In his room he cleaned himself up and called Nicola. There was noanswer. He unpacked his belongings — two shirts and the fewundergarments he had managed to pick up off the front lawn - and tried again. No answer: not even her disembodied voice, on the softmachine. He went out and plunged through the cabless streets,through the diagonal arrowshowers of reeking rain, through the desperate maelstroms of Queensway and Westbourne Grove: theinspired hordes of the poor. He splashed his way up the dead-endstreet and climbed her porch and rang her bell and then leaned on it. There was no answer. In the bright heat of the Black Cross he drankbrandy, and talked to Dean and Fucker, who informed him that Keithwas on the town up west with his sugarmummy, a dark bitch calledNick who gave him cash gifts and who, moreover to recommend her,could suck a lawnmower through thirty feet of garden hose. Guy heard them out with heavily rattled scepticism, and returned to her door, where he remained for the next two hours.


. . . On his way back to the hotel he went past Lansdowne Crescent. It seemed to him that the house, his house, was already unbearably lit,from within, like a house of death, a house where a child had chillinglydied. On the other hand he found two drenched pairs of socks in therosebed, and all his silk ties. He stopped in Queensway and purchased toiletries at the all-night chemist. Again he had some pleading to do at the reception desk before they delivered up his key. He called her, andwent on calling, in between trips to the minibar. No answer. Andthere's nothing to be done when people can't be reached. When there isno answer, no answer.


Bright and early next morning (you got to be quick) Keith stoodflapping his arms on the stone stairway to Windsor House.


Jesus, talk about a night out: dinner at the Pink Tuxedo, drinks inthe Hilton, the special club with the models up on the ramp, and thenback to her place for a couple of videos, to round the evening off. Keithspared a bitter thought for Guy, who had tarnished this last chapter with his incessant phoning. Still. Now Keith removed the souvenirmenu from his inside pocket: he'd hadfaisбna la mode de champagneor some such nonsense. Refused the wine, mind, and stuck with lager.Can't go far wrong with lager. Lager'skegged. All the same, Keith wasn't fully convinced that rich food agreed with him; his suspicionrested on the five-hour visit he had made to the bathroom on hisreturn. At such times you really felt the inconvenience of so compact an apartment. In that kind of spot, in that kind of groaning extremity,the last thing a man wants to hear is the wife and kid scuttling about and creating all night long.


A chauffeur-driven two-door saloon pulled up, followed by a vanmarked with the famed darts logo. Slightly dizzy from his firstcigarette of the day enjoyed in an upright posture, Keith steppedforward to greet Tony de Taunton, executive producer, and Ned von Newton, the man with the mike himself. Shaking his head, Keith contemplated Ned von Newton, for a moment unable to believe hiseyes. Ned von Newton. Mr Darts.


'A true honour,' said Keith. 'Listen, lads: slight change of plan.'


'We got the address right, didn't we Keith ?' asked Tony de Taunton, lifting his rippled face to the tower block, which burned in the low sunas if at every moment all its glass were being hammered out of the clearsky.


'Moved, innit. Why don't I lead the way in the Cavalier?’


We can't stop. She can't stop.


Oh the dolorology of my face, with pains moving into positionslike sentries, like soldiers who hate my life. This nuked feeling, thekind of ache you get from a vaccination — when the syringe is six feet long. And not in the arm or the ass. In the head, the head. The paincan't stop.


Christ, even that prick of a wasp prospecting for dust on the glass of the half-open window...It waddles up the pane, then drops andheavily hovers, then climbs again, and won't fly clear. Getting in andout of windows ought to be one of its main skills. What else is it anygood at, apart from stinging people when it's scared? Just as thepigeon that Guy saw, that I saw, that we all see, faces a narrowrepertoire of decisions: to go for pizzanow, and risk becoming pizzaitself, or flap uglily in the air for a second or two and go for the pizzathen.


I find I have spent the last ten minutes looking out of the window,watching a twelve-year-old boy wearily stealing a car. While heaccomplished this, a very old man limped by in running-shoes. It wasn't my car. It wasn't Mark's car, He phones me to say that he iscoming over for a party on Guy Fawkes Night, or Bonfire Night as he calls it. He is full of praise for the Concorde. I'm not to worry - he'llfind a warm bed elsewhere; but maybe we'll meet. After last night, Idon't hate him any more. I can feel some new emotion waiting toform. What? Asprey asks if I enjoyedCrossbone Waters. I lied, andsaid I didn't. The book gave rise to some enjoyable scandal, he tellsme: there's something about it among the magazines on his bathroom floor . . . This morning, Incarnacion came. Rather than sit around listening to her, rather than sit about listening to Incarnacion murdering the human experience, I went out. But I soon came back.Too many people denying themselves the pleasure, or sparing themselves the bother, of beating me up. When I see the fights I resolve to be incredibly polite to big young strong people. Incarna­cion was in the study. She seemed to be looking at my notebook.Another thing. The toaster-like photocopier — I thought it didn'twork, but there it was with its light on. It hummed warmly .. .Sometimes (I don't know) I take a knight's jump out of my head and Ithink I'm in a book written by somebody else.


The wasp is gone. But not out the window. I can hear it bumpinginto things. It'll be back. It will turn toward me. Insects and death always turn toward you. Gesture them away, and they turn towardyou. All the awful things in the end turn toward you.


Now here's a revelation.


Dink doesn't do it. Lizzy boo told me. I wormed it out of her atFatty's. I plied her with fudge sundaes and cremebrulйesuntil shefinally came across. The food is sweet like chainstore romance, likehappy-ever-after. The food is yuck. She hates what she's doing toherself but she can't stop, can't stop. (Nobody can. I can't.) Tears rundown her cheek - sauce runs down her chin. We must have looked like the couple in the postcard joke. In the seasidecafй.Jack Spratwould eat no fat. Which is the cruel one?


Dink doesn't do it. Dink didn't do it to Lizzyboo and he hasn'tdone it to Hope either: so Hope's clean, more or less (though I won'tuse it. I don't need it). Dink'll roll around and everything, and neckand pet. You can see him in the nude if you really insist. But he doesn't do it. He fears for his tennis — his rollover backhands, hiswhorfing smashes. Dink hasn't come for thirteen years. And the hairy bastard is still only the world ninety-nine.


There's also the fatal-disease consideration. If Dink caught one ofthem,he'd stop being the world ninety-nine. And start being theworld five-and-a-half billion. Dink's smart. Dink's hip. He knowsthat dead men don't play tennis. That's how come he has this rule.


The poor sisters, surrounded by these dud males with these dudrules. Even masturbation is too many for them. Guy, Dink; and nowI'm at it. Yes, I've quit too. Actually I have nothing against theactivity. I always thought I'd babywalk into the bathroom with mypants around my anklesmaybe just one more time. But recently, withthese new lesions on my hands and everything, I've put all thatbehind me. I'm frightened of catching a venereal disease from myself.Is this a first? And why doI care?


Kath claims that Keith is cheerful around the house, when he's there. But not quite cheerful enough, evidently, to refrain from giving her anew bruise on her chin. All the women in the street suddenly seemblack and blue and scarlet — violet eyes, crimson lip.,. Some of thesecruelty instructions come from upstairs. Cruelty is being delegated.


E=mc2is a nice equation. But what is the theodicy ofuranium? Ferocious physics. And the everyday medium-sized New­tonian stuff, the deckchair and map-folding and meter-feedingphysics of ordinary life: all that has it in for you too. Babies arefinding out about physics the whole time (how they slip and stagger)in their school of hard knocks.


A new bruise also on the little ass with its precocious nobility ofcurve, and three new cigarette burns, again in a triangle. The leftbuttock saidtherefore; the right buttock saysbecause. I try, but Ican't see Keith doing this. His eyes lit by the cigarette's coal.


It must be like an addiction, and addiction I can understand — as Isurf on the crest of something irresistible and unholy. The heavycalm the ungratified addict feels, awaking to the sound of the voice that says today will be the day: the day of indulgence and an end tostruggle — pleasureday. And the morning will pass so sweetly, withsin so secure.


'Nor her choo.'


I moaned with fright: the baby was awake, and staring, and naked.From the floor came Clive's growl, ticking over in warning.


'Nor her choo.'


'What?' I said (I was astonished). 'No. Not hurt you. Not hurt you.No, of course not, my darling.'


Is there someone else coming in here I don't know about? A socialworker like Nicola in disguise? A smiling uncle, like me, myself. Is itme? I rub my face. Outside, the hell, the torment, the murder of thelow sun, and its cruel hilarity. I say nothing. Kath says nothing. And Kim can't tell me. Kim can't tell. And somebody can't stop.


The life isn't over, not quite. But the love life is. I might as well getthe love stuff wrapped up. 'Please. My darling,' I said, ninety-somedays ago now, elsewhere. 'Do this one big last thing for me. Do it,Missy. Not here. Christ, no. We'll take an attractive little condosomewhere — say in Palm Springs, or Aspen. Do it, Missy. I'll be thedream patient. I promise. Do this one big last thing for me.'


Even nature was telling me I'd lost, that love had lost. She washating everything, herself, me, contemporary circumstances. Thesecond and final act of love had taken place that morning, and I hadheard or felt (I believed) the fateful pop or pang of conception. Shewas hating everything, but most of all she was hating nature, thetrees in their postures of injury and recoil, the spongy froth along theshore, that log on the path in the shape of a seal tragically or just pathetically overturned in death. She had loved it here.


I hid in plain sight. I took the boat out on the water. At first, the skylooked like one of Darwin's warm little pools, sugary blue, where lifewould ineluctably form; but the pond itself was tired. It didn't have too long to go now, with the ocean smashing at the dunes to the eastand getting yards closer every week. The oars slid through the surface tracery of dead waterskaters. I gave a shout as I saw that theclan of snapping-turtles was still in occupation, huddled up among the reeds. In their heyday, when they had discipline and esprit, theylooked like the ranked helmets of Korean riot police. Now these survivalists wallowed loose and exhausted: soiled bowls in the soupkitchen. And myself the old kitchen stiff with his sleeves rolled up.For an hour the sky was Cape Cod true blue, with solid cloudsgrandly gleaming like statuary. After that, just heat, with the sun and the sky slowly turning the same colour.


Nothing much was said. Nature continued to do most of thetalking. The LimoRover came for her at dusk. It was driven by one ofSick's sidekicks, Mirv Lensor, another kind of Washington wretch.'Mirv Lensor: Expediter', said the card he flicked out of the windowat me when I disobeyed orders and staggered out on to the drive — inpreposterous defiance. Sheridan Sick has a ventilation system in hisapartment which removes all nitrates from the air he and Missy breathe. The ageing process is thus measurably retarded. Time goes slower there, slower than it goes with me.


After she'd gone, night fell, and I worked on the fire. I spent theevening staring at the lamplit back window. It held me, it includedme, it said everything: my reflected face, and then, a couple ofmillimetres beyond, the outer surface like a glass-bottomed boat,only deep-sea, heavy-water, with all kinds of terrible little creations out there, tendrilled, dumbbelled, gravity-warped; or like a prepara­tion for the crazy scientist's microscope, disgraceful cultures incompound opposition, the ambitious maggot with its antennaerolling like radar sweeps, the gangly moth briefly clearing the deckswith its continental wing-frenzy, the no-account midges, thehaunchy ants and grimly ambling spiders, the occasional innocuous white butterfly fainting away from the glass, all of them seeking theatomic brightness, the nuclear sun of the lamp's bulb. And all thewrong things prosper.


It's happening.


At last, late at night, the cries of the city are coming together andturning into something, with the eclipse so close now — the city isfinally finding its voice, like the thud of a sullen heart, saying, 'No . ..No . . . No . . .' It can't stop. And a mile from my window someoneelse is listening. And she can't stop saying, 'Yes . . . Yes . . . Yes . . .'


I'm helpless against these forces. You can't stop them — the centurysays you can't stop them. I must become the tubercular toreador,whom Hemingway knew. The bull weighs half a ton. You let him have the strength.


Manolito, was it? Dead in the sawdust of Madrid.


Chapter 21: At theSpeed of Love


uy got hisnight with Nicola. Guy Clinch reached the finalswith Nicola Six. And got his night of love.


It happened, after a fashion, in its own way. The love force thatswathes the planet, like weather, found a messenger or an agent,that night, in Guy, who had never felt so fully elemental. He didn'tknow that she was just a weatherwoman, with stick and chart. Forhim it was the real thing. He didn't know that it was just an ad.


First, though, she had to account for the asphyxiating vacuum of her absence: not just for that one night of rain, when Guy's houseblew up in his face, but for the further thirty-six hours which she hadselflessly devoted to Keith Talent and his needs. Helping her Keith.Oh, how she lived for others . . .


'I went', said Nicola, 'to visit my parents' graves. In Shropshire.'


Guy frowned. Nicola's men, and their vermicular frowns. 'Ithought you said you knew nothing of your parents.'


'That', said Nicola, who had half-forgotten a lot of this early stuffby now, 'was a deliberate untruth. In fact long ago I bribed a nurse atthe orphanage and she told me where they were buried.' Sheshrugged and looked away. 'It's not much, is it - just their graves?'


'. . . Poor mouse.'


'Goodness, the trains. Like Russia during the purges and thefamines. I felt like Nadezhda Mandelstam. It's a pretty littlecemetery, though. Tombstones. Yews.' If he had asked where she'dstayed, she might have hazarded, 'In a rude tavern.' But it didn'tcome up. After all, he was dreadfully pleased to see her. 'I shouldhave told you, I know. I was in a strange state. Strangely inspired.'


'Well. You're back safe and sound.'


They were having a candle-lit supper on the floor of her sitting-room, in front of the open fire. Firelight and candlelight paid theircompliments to her full pink dress (in reply you could hear the whisper of petticoats, the faint gossip of gauze) and to the artless pink ribbons in her disorderly hair. How simple and sustaining:bread, cheese, tomatoes, a smooth but unpretentiousvin depays . . .Nicola had in fact peeled off the labels to disguise the thickclaret she'd chosen, a Margaux of intensely fashionable vintage.


'This may sound fanciful,' she said wanly, 'but I felt I had tosquareit with them. You.'


Guy nodded and sipped, and sipped, and nodded. His palate,his tutored papillae, continued to savour the fruit, the flowers, thefull body (stout, plummy, barrelly, tart) of the examined life, thelife of thought and feeling so languidly combined. He was rich inunderstanding. He was also, by now, a rather poorly paramour: a sick man, in fact, and thoroughly distempered. The cold he hadcaught in the unwholesome rain soon developed into an arcticfever. Thrice he had called down to demand the complete replen­ishment of his minibar, on which he had depended for a diet ofpretzels, cashew nuts, Swiss chocolate and every potable from brown ale to sweet sherry. Apart from bloodying his chewedfingertips on the telephone dial, he had been incapable of action,or of thought. In his dreams, when he wasn't escorting disfiguredchildren through empty zoos, he was attracting many varieties ofunwelcome attention, in moral nudity, and priapic disgrace . . .Now he was full of understanding, full of weakness — and whatelse? Such vigour as remained seemed to be packed into thelogjam of his underpants. Visiting the bathroom soon after hisarrival at Nicola's flat, he had been obliged to try a kind of hand­stand before eventually backing up to the toilet seat with his facealmost brushing the carpet.


'I suppose 1 have some sort of obsession,' she said, now tastingthe sensation of risk, 'with the sanctity of the parental role.Certainly for the great rites of passage. Like losing one's . . . likeone's first act of love.'


So in a sense Guy got everything.


First, starting at around 10.45, on the rug, before the fire, thestroking of hair, and the gazing into one another's faces, anddelicious avowals, and solemn kisses.


At midnight he was led by the hand to the bedroom. Left alone (shewouldn't be long), he unbuttoned his shirt with a battered smile, andtenderly winced as he sat to remove his shoes, and then with grateful fatalism entered naked the weird coolness of someone else's linen. At 12.20 he disobeyed her order to close his eyes as she ran through thedoorway and jumped into bed in her flesh-coloured training bra andworsted tights, slipped on, perhaps, in a last whim of modesty . . .


It took her an absolute age to get warm! What playful stops andstarts they had before she was fully enfolded in his robust caloricity.He never dreamed there would be so much laughter, so muchchildish gaiety. Adorable little sulks and grumps, too, and suddenfailures of nerve and syrupy successes. At 1.15 the thick bra was undipped. For the first time he felt the liquid coldness of her breastson his sternum. At 2.05 the fizzy tights came crackling off. When hehad got it really toasty he was allowed to run his hand down theshining power of her inner thighs.


Meanwhile and throughout, the hot compacts of kisses tasting of sleeplessness and fever and the intimate dismissal of tomorrow morning or any future. There was the sheer of light sweat every­where, and, for him, the jabs and volts of the uncovenanted caressespaid to his exterior heart. Her panties, innocently unfeminine intexture (their lateral elastic even suggesting some medical exigency),were last seen at 3.20.


The room had changed colour many times that night but it was fullof the pallor of dawn, and of the unslept hours they had loggedtogether, when at last he loomed above her, at 4.55. By now her flesh,too, had a sore transparency; the tracings of blue in her breastsappeared to rhyme with the queries of damp hair on her neck andthroat.


'Yes. My darling.'


It seemed to push all the breath out of her.


'How it hurts. Oh, how it burns . ..'


He had entered on tiptoe; but by 5.40 he was fully and hugely established in the purple-lined palace of sweet sin. For an hour, hersharp inhalations, her arias of exalted distress, were the guides to his diminishing caution. By 7.15, with five toes on either shoulder, fourfingertips in his buttock, a light palm weighing his scrotum, and mostof his face in her mouth, Guy was swinging back and forth in themystic give and take of a negro spiritual, hymned by all the choirgirlsand choirboys of love.


'Now,' she said. 'Stopnow.'


He stopped. She applied her little finger to his chest. And then shewas gone, and Guy was falling down through thin air.


'I've just realized what is wrong. What's so terribly wrong.'


Guy blinked into the pillow.


'It would be awful. Quite inexpiable.'


Guy lay there, waiting.


'You have to tell your parents. And your wife's too, of course.'


Already, as if after a lucky escape, she was putting on her panties. They really did look like Elastoplast, there in the morning light. Guy laughed strangely and said, 'I've only got a father. And she's only gota mother. And tell them what?'


'Just square them.'


'I'll call them.'


'Callthem?'


At 7.2.0, when they had finished discussing it, Nicola said, 'Thengo to New York. Go to New England. Go to New London.'


Go to London Fields.


Keith was displeased.'So there you was, basically,' he said to Kath as she served him a


late breakfast, 'sticking your oar in again. With your questions. Eh?


Eh?'He stared out at her from the clogged seclusion of his hangover.


Given a night off by Nick while she sorted it with Guy, Keith had


ventured out to the Black Cross, and to the Golgotha, where, as the


night progressed, he had so convinced himself with drink . .. Kath


returned to the washing-up. She said,'He volunteered the information.''I'll volunteer you in a minute. Tony de Taunton?''He just said they were making this little programme. About you.'Wagging his head about, Keith said, 'And you goes "He's my


husband" and all this.' He wagged his head about again. ' "We got


little girl. "All this.''I didn't say nothing.'She offered this lightly. Keith seemed mollified - though it


remained clear that he was thoroughly out of sorts. He dropped his


knife and fork on to the plate as Kath asked,'When's it on then?'


'What?'


'The TV programme."


'Never you mind. Business, innit. Darts. It's not..."Keith paused.He was actually in great difficulty here. Himself on TV: he couldn't work out how the two worlds overlapped. Try as he might, bringingall his powers to bear, he just couldn't work it out. He straightened his darting finger at her. 'Like the news. You don't want to believe everything on TV. No way to carry on.'


'You can believe the darts, surely to God.'


'Yeah but. . . This thing. It's - it's noton TV,' he said.'Obviously.'


'What isn't? The TV programme?'


'Jesus.'


Keith thought it prudent to change the subject. So he startedtalking about how ugly Kath was now and how depressed he became(he swore it broke his fucking heart) every time he looked at her.


'You know what I'm talking?' he concluded, much more moder­ately. 'Success. And I happen to be able to handle it. It's a lifestyle youcouldn't conceive. It's out there, girl. It wants me. And I'm gone.'


The baby gave notice of waking: the labour of baby consciousnesswould soon resume. Soon, the baby would be rippling with grids andcircuits. And Kath herself gave a jerk as she reflexively moved for thedoor. Keith's blue eyes filled with everything he could no longerendure: his lips tightened, then whitened, and then vanished inwardsas he said, with unbounded venom,


'I intend to complete my preparation elsewhere.'


Sourly handsome Richard was present at the office to let Guy in, asarranged. For a while they stood there amid the Japanese furniture, conversationally revising their holding positions. The world theyreferred to now comprised about half a percentage point of Guy'sreality; to Richard, it had always been everything.


'I see no alternative to riding it out,' Richard said. 'It's sheer cuckooland, of course.'


'Agreed.' Every time their eyes met Richard seemed to lean afurther inch backwards, as if to put more distance between himselfand Guy's impermissible disarray. I suppose (Guy thought), Isuppose I must look . . . 'Agreed,' he said again.


'You know the new buzz word over there?Cathartic war.’


'Really.'


'Poor old deterrence is in bad shape, so you give it a little jolt. Twocities. It's good, isn't it. We'd all feel so much better after a catharticwar.'


Richard laughed, and Guy laughed too, with real amusement. Ofcourse, it suited him, up to a point, if nothing whatever mattered. Butthen such generalized hilarity might be considered a necessarycondition for nothing mattering. About a year ago he had at lastfinished Martin Gilbert'sThe Holocaust, and had sombrely decidedthat this thousand-page work could also be read as a treasury ofGerman humour . . . Guy went to his desk and called his father on the direct line. He was connected quickly but he still had to get pastall the staff: lessening densities of Hispanic bafflement giving way tothe forensic interceptions of stewards, secretaries, lawyers, game­keepers. 'It's nothing to do with the office,' he kept telling a Mr Tulkinghorn. 'It's personal. And rather urgent.' Eventually his fatherlurched exhaustedly on to the line, as if the receiver itself were some new burden he was being asked to shoulder.


'What's it about?'


'I can't discuss it now. It's far too delicate.'


'But what's it about?'


Guy told him what it was about.


'Well, there's nothing much more to say, is there. You have my. . .my "okay". All the best, dear boy. I'm glad we talked.'


A few seconds later Richard knocked and entered.


'You're absolutely right,' said Guy. 'It's pure fantasy. It'll blowover.'


Guy hadn't come to the office to talk to Richard. He had come forhis passport and travel cards — and for that spare cane which heelatedly glimpsed leaning against the wall by the door. As he movedacross the room to get it, Richard, who was Guy's younger brother, said, 'Then why are you going to New York? Have you got a hernia or something? I was listening in. It sounds as though you've cocked things up nicely. Youtit.'


Guy looked at the floor: Richard wouldn't understand, of course, but he had never felt happier in his life. Guy looked at the ceiling.'You wouldn't understand,' he said, 'but I've never felt happier in mylife.'


'Youtit,' said Richard.


He took the tube to the Strand, where he bought a travel bag andlots of new stuff to put in it. In the golden silence of the departmentstore he went from men's wear to women's, in search of a silk scarf for Hope's mother, and one for Nicola, while he was there. The vaults andgalleries of female clothing, their catholicity of cut and colour,surprised and impressed him. Compared to all this, men went aroundin uniform. But then . . . But then, just now (and in a sense it had beenthis way for half a century): we are all in uniform. Not volunteerseither, but pressed men and women, weeping conscripts. The children in anaconda file on the zebra-crossing are in uniform. The old ladyover there dithering from hat to hat is in uniform. Our babies are born,not in their birthday suits, but in uniform — in little sailor suits. Hardfor love. Hard for love, with everyone being in the army like this. Lovegot hard to do.


Now the revolving doors delivered him on to the street (the brass-topped cane really did make a difference). Above, the low sun painted the shape of an eagle on to the cirrus haze. Today an eagle, with eagleeye; tomorrow a vulture, perhaps, flexed over London carrion.Looking down, he saw a pretty cat behind the bars of a basementwindow; it yawned and stretched, outside history. An old man walkedpast; he was shyly stifling a smile as he remembered something fond orfunny. Preserve this! Yes, certainly! Guy stopped a cab and reachedquick agreement with the driver in his beefeater outfit. He climbed in.He was no longer afraid. On the way to Heathrow he looked at the books she had given him for his transatlantic reading and glancedagain at the inscriptions. Towards the west, like madlady's hair, thethin clouds sucked him into the completion of his reality. He was nolonger afraid; and he no longer feared for love. Partly it was her showof principle, so bravely self-sufficient, when you thought about it,with the eclipse only days away. Partly it was the recession of Keith'simage in his mind: the only bane here was the recently revealed talentfor literary criticism (what other charms and skills might Keith acquire?). But mainly, he admitted to himself, it was those panties.Guy smiled, and went on giving smiles of pain at every bump the cabtook on its way. Quite a fright. Unpleasant to the touch, too (and hisfingertips had explored their every atom). Exactly the sort of thing you'd expect a virgin to wear, at thirty-four.


Double17, thought Keith. Bad one. Come inside, you're looking at 1, double 8. But she don't even look thirty. Not nice either. Better go 10,double 10. Moisturizers innit.


'Now where are my keys,' she said.


Keith stared moodily at her stocking-tops as she led him up thestairs. She paused and turned and said,


'When you had two darts for the66 pick-off. I thought you'd go16, bull. But no. You went bull, double 8. Magic. That's finishing, Keith.'


'Yeah cheers.'


'And the 125! Everyone was expecting triple 19, big 18, bull. But you goouter bull, triple 20, tops. Brilliant kill. . . Keith! What's thematter? Why are you looking at me like that?'


'It'streble. Not triple. Treble.'


Nicola climbed the last flight with her head at a penitent angle. In the sitting-room she said cautiously,


'Darling what do you think? We could go and eat quite soon, or doyou want to relax here for a bit first?'


'Never do that,' said Keith with a wipe of his palm. 'Not when Ijust come through the door. I get my bearings, okay?'


'Forgive me. Would you like to take your coat off and try it out?'she said, referring to the new dartboard of which she had takendelivery that afternoon. 'Whilst I go and get you your lager?'


'All in good time.'


'Do you like it?'


'No it's smart.' Keith took off his jacket and reached masterfullyfor his purple pouch. 'Wood-grained wall cabinet. Of maturemahogany.'


Nicola hurried to the refrigerator, where the cans of lager were stacked like bombs in their bay. He hadn't actuallysaid she couldfetch him a drink, and she did hope she was doing the right thing. Shehesitated, listening for the thunk of his darts.


Over the next few days she took him (Keith) to illustrious old-stylerestaurants in whose velvet and candlelight he fuzzily shone with class dissonance, with villainy, with anticharisma; he sat with thetasselled menus and heard Nicola translate. She translated him(Keith) to sanctums of terrible strictness, accusatory linen andtaunting tureens, where he always had what she had. She bought him(Keith) the dinky black waistcoats and black trimmed trousers thathe loved; as a result, when he returned from the toilet to their table,hands would go up all over the room, like in class, when the pretty teacher asked an easy question. He never talked (Keith). He never talked. At first she assumed that he was in the grip of an inscrutablerage. Was he still brooding on her solecism with thetriple? Hadsomeone spoken ill of the Marquis of Edenderry ? Then she realized:he thought you didn't. He thought you didn't talk. Though othersdid. He sat there, chewing (Keith), with caution, without zest, deepin his dreams of darts. Or perhaps he was wondering why, in thefantasy, you felt at home in places like these, whereas of course younever did, and never would. With the waiters, Keith was as a fly towanton boys; the lightest glance of the maitre d' could harrow up hissoul. Nicola supposed that this explained the proletarian predilec­tion for Indian food - and Indian waiters. Who's afraid of thosebrown-faced elfs? He once tried a glass of Mouton Rothschild(Keith) and spat it out into his napkin. She paid, ostentatiously,always querying the bill, while Keith turned a pensive stare on the chandeliers. He knew the required demeanour of the man shedding humble origins: you act as if you feel it's all your due. But he washaving a job feeling that, these days, and a job acting it. When the godlike greeter talked to her in what was presumably French, whenhe advised and beseeched, wringing his hands, Keith always thoughtthey were asking her what she was doing, going out with someonelike him. Like him. (Keith.)


At home, though, in her flat, Keith wasit. He came in at around tenor eleven and looked at her through the shards, the swirlingparquetry, of his shuffled hungers. She dressed wealthily for him, towin that admiring sneer. Before he started on his lagers or hisLucozades he was served croissants, and devilish espresso, and onceor twice she coaxed him into humour with a Tequila Sunrise, wheresomething sweet fought the heavy tug of the booze. Then he threwdarts all day, pausing only to acknowledge receipt of an exquisitesnack, for example, and a lager served in the engraved pewtertankard she had bought him, or to relish a new video; with Keithnow needing four or five of these a day, Nicola was far from idle! Tobegin with he desisted from his darts when the telephone rang and itturned out to be Guy, shouting through the ambient clatter of someairport or gas station; but after a while, such was his local suzerainty, he practised right through the calls. On one occasion Guy rang froma deserted motel and remarked on the background noise: Nicola said that it was probably a monitor or money meter, thus covering for the slow triple thunks of Keith's tungstens. When she talked to Guy shesounded like Keats. For Keith, this was all low heaven. He loved heras he would his own manager, in the big time. You sensed it theinstant you stepped in off the street: the whole house stank ofpornography and darts.


On the eve of Bonfire Night, of Final Night, a couple of hoursbefore the TV teaser - Keith's docu-drama - was about to bescreened, Nicola decided to spare him the usual gauntlet of tuxedtorturers and took Keith for a light supper at 192., the mediarestaurant in Kensington Park Road. He sat there with his orangejuice, warily awaiting the sushi she had suggested he try.


'A penny for them, Keith?' said Nicola gently.


He said nothing.


192. The best thing with that is: smack in a maximum. Psycho­logical body blow. Leaving12. But if you come inside, leaves6. 6.Double 3. Murder. Avoid it. Here's another way it can happen.You're on 57 and go for 17 to leave tops - and hit the treble. 51.Leaves 6. Or you're going for double 14 and hit double11. Leaves 6. Wrong bed. Or you're on double 9, pull one, and hit 12. Leaves6. OrGod forbid you're on double11and you hit double 8! Wrong bed.Leaves 6. Wrong bed. Nasty, that. Fucking wicked. Murder.


A fourteen-hour wait in the VIP Lounge at Heathrow; the Mach IIto Newark; the helicopter to Kennedy; the 727 to Middletown; thelimousine to New London. America moved past him behind treatedglass. The pain had now spread downwards as far as his calves and upwards as far as his nipples. Every tick of the second hand on hiswatch administered an exquisite squeeze to the trauma of his being.He looked out at the cordoned, the sweated fields of New England,and at the woodlands, also brutally worked, but still holding theirtwiggy, ribboned, Thanksgiving light. Impossible even to imaginethat Mohawk and Mahican had once wandered here - yes, and Wampanoag, Narraganset, Pequot, Penobscot, Passamaquoddy,Abnaki, Malecite, Micmac. He had a sense, as you were bound tohave in America now, of how a whole continent had been devoured, used up, chewed up.


The night before he had tarried in Middletown, at a recentlyopened airport hotel called the Founding Fathers. Again he had run into indefinable difficulties as he tried to persuade the managerial staff that he was neither poor nor mad nor ill. One of the troublesseemed to centre on his new habit of giggling silently to himself.Perhaps he looked like one of the first English sailors, panting withscurvy, his turn-ups swinging round his calves. In any case hisiridiumand titanium credit-cards prevailed. After a shower he made asecond successful call to the retirement home and confirmed theappointment with his mother-in-law. After a Virgin Mary in theMayflower Room, he had an early dinner in the Puritan Lounge. By hisplate lay the two books she had given him: one for the way out, one forthe way home. It was over Stendhal'sLove that he now frowned andchuckled and mused . . .In his room he made the last call of the day toNicola, who despite the late hour and the bad line (the metronomicthunks of the money meter) gave him an extraordinary fifteen minuteson her plans for his return. This complicated his next action: amanoeuvre of long-delayed self-inspection, achieved naked, with onefoot up on the writing-desk before the mirror. Mm, quite bad. Possibly rather serious. It really was the sort of sight that would have the nursesscampering from the Delivery Room. There were some tangy tints of green in there, and the surface was rippled as if in a sharp breeze; but overall his flesh was almost picturesquely blue. The blue, perhaps, ofthe blue lagoon. He fell asleep wondering what would happen if youtransposed the heroines ofMacbeth andOthello. With a ScottishDesdemona there would be no story, no plot, no slain kings. But with aMediterranean Lady Macbeth you might have got a stranger tale, and a bloodier one, because such a woman would never have looked sokindly on Cassio's cares, and might have headed straight forlago. . .Now he rode on to New London.Love nestled on his lap, also thesecond book, as yet unopened, something calledThe Light of ManySuns.Guy wasn't reading: the migraine in his groin had somehowestablished connexions with the blinding ballsache in his eyes. He watched the news on the limousine's TV, as it were reluctantly andaskance, in the same way that the chauffeur watched his unreassuring passenger, with stolen glances in the rearview mirror. The Presidenthad made his decision. They were going in. They had decided to operate on the President's wife.


The ninety-second biodoc on Keith Talent was watched by 27 1/2million people — in the UK, in Scandinavia, in the Netherlands, in therockabilly states of America, in Canada, in the Far East and in Australia. It was watched by dartslovers everywhere, and then shot out into space at the speed of light.


It was watched by Nicola Six, perched on Keith's knee.


Go-getting Keith Talent is an upcoming merchandizer operatingout of London's West Kensington.


To the hectic tumbles of a xylophone solo, Keith was seen noddingshrewdly into an intercom. Between his finger and thumb he rolled abiro shaped like a dart.


In the elegant West London flat where Keith lives and works, thecalls come winging in from Munich and LA. In business as in darts, no way does Keith play to come in second best. Winning is what it's all about is Keith's byword. Never far from Keith's side is his trusty girl Friday Nicky with a helping hand.


Assistant Nicky, in T-shirt and jeans and dark glasses, appearedbehind her boss with several sheets of paper, which Keith started nodding shrewdly at before they were in front of his face. One handrested on his shoulder as she pointed with the other. Now anestablishing shot of the Marquis of Edenderry, and then Keith'semotional face filling the screen.


''I'm basically the sort of guy who likes to relax with a few drinkswith the guys. Here. With the bestf- with the bestf- with the bestsupport of any pub in London.'


Nicky was sitting beside him. He seemed to have her in a kind ofheadlock. The xylophone solo had given way to Hawaiian guitar. Keith drew near-tearfully on his cigarette.


Dartwise, Keith is known for his clinical big finishes. The 170s, the167s, the 164s, the 161s. 'The 160s.'(This was Keith, pitilesslyoffhand.)'The 158s. The 157s. The 156s. That's correct. The 155 s.Some question my power. But come Friday I intend to silence thecritics.'


Keith and Nicky strolled out into the carpark, hand in hand, theirlinked arms swinging.


A bachelor, Keith and Nicky have as yet no plans to wed. But onething is certain.


There was a fish-eye rearview shot of the Cavalier, and the sound of heavy-metal, and then the car fired off into the distorted street.


Keith Talent is going a long, long way.


'. . .But Keith,' said Nicola in a stunned voice, during thecommercial break. 'You were quite amazing. A true natural. The TVcameraloves you, Keith.'


Keith nodded, rather sternly.


'I only wonder slightly what your wife will make of it.'


He looked at her with qualified hostility, as if unsure whether or not he was being trifled with. Nicola was aware that Keith was in astate of near-psychotic confusion on this point. And she didn't knowthe half of it. In fact he was still clinging to the notion that thebiodoc would be screened only at those locations where it had been filmed: her flat, and, of course, the Marquis of Edenderry. But evenKeith found the notion tenuous; growing doubts about it hadtempted him to tamper with the TV at Windsor House, in the onlyway he knew how, by switching it off and putting his boot through it. In the end he shrank from such sacrilege, and just went on tellingKath that — although reason declared that there wasn't much pointin the TV biodoc unless it was on TV - the TV biodoc wasn'ton TV.


'Still,' she said, 'who stands behind you now? Who is it whoreally understands about your darts?'


'Shut it,' said Keith, who in a sense was feeling more and more athome down the dead-end street. A commercial break had justended and before another one had the chance to begin a voice wassaying,


. . .a little look at Keith's opponent for the big one, and KimTwentlow will be saying why he thinks it's going to be a little bitspecial. After this.


Now although Keith never asked about an opponent, he'd natur­ally been keeping up with events (by means of half-hourly tele­phone calls). The second semi-final of the Duoshare SparrowMasters was to have been disputed by Keith's old enemy, ChickPurchase, and the young unknown from Totteridge, Marlon Frift.But there'd been a problem, and a postponement. Following a nightout, Marlon had had a heart attack; and there were still doubts about his fitness.


Nicola waited for the start of the organ solo and then said, 'Whois it, Keith?'


'Never ask about an opponent. Immaterial as such. You play theboard not the — jammy bitch's bastard.'


. . .due to the very sad Marlon Frift tragedy. By a walkover.


On screen, big Chick patrolled his coin-op store, appeared at the races in morning-suit and topper, was seen on horseback himself, then fishing at some blighted canal. Chick down the gym, with thechest-flexer, in the plunge pool, all chest gloss in the solarium —Chick, big Chick, with his ponies, his birds, his pitbull . . . And then Kim Twemlow, the ex-world number one, with his white shoes, his white belt, his shot face, saying, 'Look at the averages and it's got tobe big Chick, by a mile. All credit to Keith for progressing as he has.


Must have got his head beautiful for the big occasion and that. But oncurrent form he's not fit to empty Chick's ashtrays . . .'


After a while Keith said hoarsely, 'So be it.'


'Who is thisChick person?'


He gave a taciturn version of the dispute with his old businessassociate. Of the rape of Chick's sister, and Keith's subsequenthospitalization, the smaller man had this to say: 'We came to blowsover this bird, the big fella coming out second best. And nowtomorrow night him and I have a rendezvous. To sort out who'snumber one once and for all.'


'Good, Keith. This could work for us. Now I expect you'd like toforget the pressures with a nice video. It's something a little bit special.On a Halloween theme. We're a few days late, but whatof that, Keith.'


'Horror like?'


'In the old calendar it used to be the last night of the year. When allthe witches and warlocks were abroad.'


As Keith trudged into the bedroom, Guy's limousine entered thegrounds of the institution. The little TV screen within was nowshowing a colour-coded diagram of the uterus of the President's wife.The President's wife, so young, so blonde . . . Guy asked the driver if he wouldn't mind pulling over for a moment. The driver minded, butpulled over anyway. Guy bent his long body and out he climbed.


He made to straighten up — and nothing happened. The driver watched in settled distaste as Guy grunted, first with surprise, thenwith effort, and remained in a jagged crouch on the verge. After asecond attempt, and a second failure, he backed himself on to awooden bench. Here he rested with his fingers folded over the handleof the cane in soft support of his chin. Now he saw the L-shaped Tudor-type mansion, the slated roof and leaded windows, the pondlike a silver coin pitched on to the front lawn; and he saw too the sizeand nature of the task ahead of him. Before, it was just something to begot out of the way as he sped towards something else - towards inevitability. But now of course it filled the sky. And the sky wasfalling.


The physics felt strange, the physics felt fierce. Gravity was pushingdown on him, but ifGuy pushed down, hard enough, on the cane,then, slowly, he went up, up.


As Guy straightened, Keith reclined, and made himself comfortableon Nicola's bed: a lengthy procedure. She plumped his pillows andpulled off his boots; Keith also suffered her to bring him a fresh canof lager from the fridge. Now he looked about with an inconveni­ enced expression for the box of paper tissues.


'Wait, darling,' she said. 'These might be more fun.' She opened a drawer and started browsing through it. 'All the good stuff seems to be in the wash. From the videos, Keith. Wait.' She turned, and bentforward, and reached up into her dress with both thumbs. 'Use these.We'll put them on your head until you need them. You can watchthrough the legholes. Might look rather comic on anyone but you, Keith.'


The black gusset puffed out for a moment as Keith said, 'Yeahcheers.'


She left him there, sprawled on the covers in his frilly gasmask.Then re-entered, in electronic form. On screen, she came into thebedroom slowly in black cape and thigh-high boots and witch's pointy hat. And as she turned and the black cape swirled you could see, within, the simple ways the simple shape (legs, hips, haunch,waist) can be made to shine on the reptile eye, and burn on the reptilebrain. The glamour: charms, rhombs, wishbones, magic rings -gramarye, sortilege, demonifuge . . .


Keith was doing handsome.


Then she came into the bedroom slowly in black cape and thigh-high boots and witch's pointy hat.


Keith was doing handsome. Then the real thing —the necromancer— came into the bedroom.


It would go beautifully.


Guy muffled his delight when the matron or health-operative or death-concessionaire informed him that Mrs Broadener's conditionwas far advanced. She wouldn't understand what he said to her. Andshe wouldn't respond. With any luck. It would go beautifully. Hopedisliked her mother, of course, and her mother disliked Hope; Guyhad not seen Mrs Broadener for seven or eight years. The only thing he knew about this place, her last refuge, was a detail that Lizzyboohad let slip. Although no old lady would ever walk out of here, each old lady had to be able to walk in: company policy. Mrs Broadenerhad walked in; she wouldn't walk out. Now Guy moved throughproliferating parlours: waiting-rooms, in various degrees of disguise.There appeared to be no other visitors.


Triscilla?' he said, when they were alone.


He stared down. At what? Something caught up in the more or lessdisgraceful struggle at the end of existence: the process from whichso little can be salvaged. He took this person's hand and sat besideher.


'You remember me, don't you,' he began. 'Guy? Hope's husband? You're looking well. Thank you for seeing me. Uh — I bring... Ibring good news! Everyone is well. Hope's wonderfully well.Marmaduke, your little grandson, is in tremendous form. A handful,as always, but. . .'


She watched him as he spoke, or she seemed to. Her face minutelybobbled on its spindle; the eyes swam in their huge new pools, butnever blinked. Priscilla's hands were tightly clasped or fastened.


'Lizzyboo is full of beans. She's put on some weight recently butthat's not the end of the world, is it? No, everyone's well and theysend their love. It's wonderful, isn't it, it's so absolutely marvellous, Ido think, when a family is really close, and everyone loves one another,' he said, and hesitated as he realized how quickly his facehad covered itself in tears, 'and they, no matter what, they protecteach other. And it's for ever.'


Suddenly she spoke. She just said: 'It's all —'


Guy waited. Nothing followed. 'Well. I suppose I'd better bethinking about going. Goodbye. Thank you for seeing me.'


'Shit,' she said.


He waited. 'Goodbye, Priscilla.'


Nicola and Keith were sitting up in bed together, smoking. Theydrew huskily on their cigarettes. Nicola raised her chin as sheexhaled. She said,


'You're not to reproach yourself, Keith. It happens to everyone.'


'. . . Oh yeah? Well it ain't never happened to me before. Noway.'


'Really? Never?'


'No danger. Me — I'm in there. Boof. Ain't never happened tomebefore.'


In fact, of course, ithad happened to Keith before. It happened toKeith, on average, about five times a week. But it also didn't happen to him pretty regularly too. And in this case he felt he was entitled to a certain amount of bafflement, and anger. What was it? Her skinnyankles, maybe. All thetalking. Or the way that, despite her evidentlitheness, she had felt so heavy — as heavy as an automobile, as heavyas the heavy Cavalier. It was like parking a pantechnicon, just tryingto turn her over.


'I should imagine it even happens', she said, 'to Chick Purchase.Every now and then.'


'Way he treats minge he ought to be locked up,' said Keith soberly.He further reflected that Chick Purchasewas locked up, prettyoften, on bird-related matters, as well as in the normal course ofbusiness.


'You're a very sensitive man, Keith. As well as an incredible tykeand everything, with your rugged ways. You should give yourselfcredit for that.'


Keith flexed his eyebrows. Come to think of it, he was wonderingwhy he didn't feel more angry. But anger didn't come. Self-pity came.Not the usual kind, which looked and sounded just like anger. Adifferent kind: self-pity of a far nobler strain. 'Pressures of darts,' hesaid.


'Yes. And a little difficulty switching from one medium to another.That's what this whole thing is really about.'


'Yeah. Well.'


She saw that Keith's eyes were starting to pick out articles of hisown clothing, flattened on the floor: the grovelling trousers, for instance, trampled, twisted-out-of.


'Early night and that. Compose myself for the big one. See how Clive's doing.'


'Oh Keith. Before you go.'


She picked up her black dressing-gown and left the room,returning almost at once with a silver tray: an imposingly expensive-looking bottle and two glasses, and some sort of device like a foreignlantern with tubes.


'This is as old as the century. Try some.This', she said, 'is practically newborn, and just in from Teheran. I went to sometrouble to get it.'


'Yeah I smoke a little keef,' said Keith. 'Now and again. Relax.'


'It may interest you to know, Keith, that the word "assassin"comes fromhashish. Assassins — killers by treachery and violence. They used to give the men a good blast of this before they went out todo their stuff. And if they died in action, they were promised an immediate heaven. Of wine, women and song, Keith, And hash, nodoubt.' A little later she said, 'But that's enough etymology for now.


I'm beginning to sound like a schoolteacher. Why don't you just lieback and let me find out what makes this cock tick?'


Guy linked up again with his courier or expeditor at the airport inNew London. Here he was told that, if he wished, he could get an air-taxi straight to Newark. With luck he might catch an earlierConcorde and shave perhaps half a day off his journey. The couriersmiled and twinkled potently; everything was possible; his was themaximum-morale specialism of deeply expensive travel. At this point he paid off the chauffeur, whose disaffection remained secureagainst Guy's reckless tip. Outside in the warm dusk the light was thecolour of a grinning pumpkin, Halloween light, promising trick ortreat.


Before he retired to the Celebrity Lounge (there would be a slightdelay) Guy wandered the concourses, full of love's promiscuousinterest, among pantssuit and stretchslack America. Even thoughthere was said to be less of it now, the human variety on display, withits dramatic ratios of size and colouring, still impressed and affected him. It was true that you did see signs of uniformity (one nation), allthe people wearing off-white smocks and pink, gymkhana-sized rosettes, like that family over there, four of them, in perfect-familyformation, man and woman and boy and girl, each with the squeamish smile of the future . . . Guy threw away his painkillers -their tubes and sachets. Everywhere young women looked at himwith kindness. But of course there was only one woman who could really kill his pain. The eyes of certain faces, children's faces, madehim wonder whether this whole adventure of his, so agitated andinspired, and so climactic, wasn't just a way of evading the twentiethcentury or the planet or what the one had done to the other.


Because love . . . But wasn't nature constantly asking you what allthe fuss was about? It was hard to shirk this question when you sawthem trouped together like that, the old ladies, walking downpassages at five yards an hour, or humped on chairs in parlours, their heads trembling in anger and negation, insisting, saying never, never,never. All of them had been adored and wept over, presumably, atone point, prayed to, genuflected in front of, stroked, kissed, licked;and now the bald unanimity of disappointment, of compound grief and grievance. It was written on their mouths, on their lips, markedin notches like the years of a sentence. In their heads only thethoughts that just wouldn't go away, cold and stewed, in their littleteapot heads, still brewing beneath frilled cozies of old-lady hair . . .Whatever it was women wanted, few of them ended up getting it.


He advanced into the Celebrity Lounge, where there were compli­mentary coffee and free telephones, and where he hoped to finishLove.


'Now,' she said. 'Stopnow.'' And she hadn't even heard the telephonering.


'Okay,' said Keith cheerfully (with that cheerful little throat-clearance on the consonant).


He climbed up her body until she felt the scrawny sharpness of hisknees on her shoulders.


'Shut your eyes and open your mouth.'


But Enola Gay, being Nicola Six — Enola shut her mouth and opened her eyes . . .


'. . . Hello? Darling? I was just thinking about you,' she said. 'Andhaving a rather blinding little weep.'


'Jesus,' said Keith.


'. . . Nothing. Do I? I can't imagine I'll be getting much sleeptonight, so do call later if you like. I just can't sleep for thinking aboutyou. Yes, you know I sometimes suspect I'm never going to sleepagain.'


Settling on the pillows like, Keith ran a hand down her throat as such, and reached for the brandy bottle innit.


'. . . Come to me, my darling. Come to me. At the speed of love.'


Dust storms grounded the midnight Concorde. Guy was driven from Newark to New York, and spent a few pricy hours at the Gustave onCentral Park South. He couldn't sleep. TV said real estate andwrestling and medical ads and fireside shopping and pulpit stuff andlast-best-hope stuff and dial 1-800. As he was driven through thecity, towards Kennedy and the rerouted morning flight, he thoughtwhat he always thought when he was in New York now. He thought:where have the poor gone? The places where the poor shop, theplaces where the poor feed: where have they gone?


At the speed of love...He ran it through his head as he paced theVIP Lounge at five miles per hour. She can turn a phrase, that girl.Delightful. At the speed of...Yes, really quite lovely.


I guess it looks like a cheap shot, the revelation, at this stage, thatRichard is Guy's brother. But I can only duplicate my own astonish­ment. It was news to me too. I could always go back and fix it. Now isnot the time, though. It is not the time. It never is. It just never isthetime.


You could have knocked me over with a feather. Of course, ifknocking me down with a feather were what anyone was interested in, I'd never get off the deck. They wouldn't even need the feather. I reach for a fresh sheet of paper and there's this splitcrack in my arm, as ifsome spore-coven or fat maggot has just detonated in the crimson in­nards of a log fire. Dying reminds me of something, something I'd justgot over and successfully put behind me when, all of a sudden, I starteddying. Middle age: that's what. Yes, it's perfectly okay, so long as youdon't try anything too butch or sporty, like walking down the streetfor a pint of milk, or pulling the flush handle, or kicking off your shoes,or yawning, or reaching too sharply for the vitamin E, or loweringyourself with any suddenness into the herb-green bath. All that stuff isout. Like middle age, like my dreams, death is packed with informa­tion. At last you really find out the direction time's taking. Time'sarrow. Time works! And, more than this, you are monstrous . . .


When middle age comes, you think you're dying all the time. Dyingis like that too. But here, finally, all resemblance ends. All resemblanceends.


Nine-thirty, on the morning of November 5.


Nicola has already been with me for over three hours. She's next door...I can hear her, pacing. Fortunately she is not demanding myundivided attention. She has had the decency, for example, to let mefinish Chapter zi. I keep her fuelled with coffee. She had a shower. Later, she had a bath; and she asked for dental floss. When she isn'twalking up and down she sits on the sofa in one of Asprey's dressing-gowns, not even smoking: she just stares at the window — at the lowsun, which has now reached its apogee and will stay that low all daylong until the moon intercedes, coming between the sun and our eyes.Every now and then she goes all trancelike and I can tiptoe off to the study, and write. But how she fills the flat, how her presence fills the flat, like a rich smell, or like anger. She's switched the TV on again, looking, no doubt, for news from Washington or Bonn or Tel Aviv,news of the storms, the tides, the moon, the sun (the sky is falling!), butlooking through all this for a correlative, the thing out there that mightsay yes to the thing in here. Events, and possible events—the world hastowant it. Whereas for me it's easier: the TV itself is my correlative,pandar,hack, mediator, foot-in-the-door, vilepaparazzo.


It's in the nature of an obsession, I suppose, that one will get to the bottom of whatever's available. One will tend to get to the bottom ofit.


Next to Mark Asprey's baronial can there's a hip-high stack ofassorted magazines. All they have in common is a certain amount ofeditorial matter about Mark Asprey: a profile, an interview, what he'spulling down, his favourite colour, who he's fucking. The mags get older and Mark gets younger as I work my way down the pile (theeffect is speeded up by the increasing frequency of my visits). Until, lastnight, I find myself staring through tears of strain at paired photo­graphs of Mark Asprey and Cornelia Constantine under the heading,did they or didn't they?She says they didn't. He says they did.


Ofcourse. Marius Appleby is a pseudonym. It's Asprey. I knew it: I wasn't even surprised. It was almost bathetic. What else could explainthe familiar taste, and the poundcake richness, of my love-hate forCrossbone Waters?


Digging deeper into the stack, I find additional earlier reports: scandal, accusation. She sued him; he settled out of court; doubtslinger. 'The book is all lies,' say Cornelia and her lawyers. 'Whathappened happened,' Asprey insists.


Naturally I now root for Cornelia. But two puzzles remain. In allthere are about a dozen photographs of her, including someswimwear poses, and physically she measures up, except in twoparticulars. First, it is clear that Cornelia is dramatically flat-chested.The second point has to do with her face, or her expression, whichnever changes, and which bespeaks (or so this reviewer feels) really helpless stupidity.


What actually happened? I guess the person to ask, if it's the truthyou want, would be old Kwango.


Before I could even bring this up with Nicola she said abruptly, 'Ihate it here.' 'Yes, it is a little rich for some tastes.' 'It's the acme ofvulgarity. But it's not just that. The gowns, the baubles, the awards and everything. They're all fake.' 'No.' 'Look at that translation. It'sgobbledegook. He has them printed up.' 'But he's, he's so —' 'He just writes schlock plays and cute journalism. Christ, why do you think you never heard of him?'


I said, Then why does he do it?'


'Why do you think? To impress the gullible.'


'Whoops,' I said. 'I do beg your pardon.'


Regrettably, disappointingly, altogether unacceptably, and like allthe other dying people I've ever come across, I am suffering from eructation and its related embarrassments. If I extrapolate from thedeath of my father, the death of my brother, the death of Daniel Harter, and the death of Samson Young, then I may conclude thatbuying it is a pretty windy scene . . . I'm glad I no longer have to hangout in the Black Cross, where I've experienced many armpit-torchingmoments. Nobody recognizes me in there (every day is like the firstday), and I have to stand around behaving 'characteristically'.


The baby cries, the baby cries and turns, in its awful struggle to bea baby. Its struggle is with all that is changeless and unworkable. Shefarts with the effort. Whoops. Maybe farts are frowned on for noother reason than their connexion with mortal weakness, with beinga baby, with dying. To her, to Kim, evidently, or so I've read, thebreasts, the penis — these mean life. And the stool, the piece of ordure,this means death. But she shows no natural aversion, and babies find nothing disgusting, and don't we all have to be trained quite hard to hate our shit?I am the father of Missy's baby. Or Sheridan Sick is. ('I suppose it'sSide's.' 'Don'tcall him that.' 'It's hisname, isn't it?') She flies over toEngland. To be by my side. Or for an abortion. I hear a ring on thebell and I go and answer and she's there...I'd have no time for her,one way or the other. Only time to write it down.


Missy had to go. For reasons of balance. Reasons of space. Shebelongs to some other version. She preferred to run her own life. Shedidn't want artistic shape. She wanted to be safe. Safe, in America, atthe end of the millennium.


I still believe love has the power to bring in the loved one, to reelher in. You can send the line out halfway across the planet and it willbring the loved one in. But I don't even try and call her any more.Love failed, in me. It was sapped by something else.


She has her slot in my dreamlife, as if the dreams were vestiges ofthe love power. These dreams of Missy are like Missy's dreams, verylogical and realistic — not like the nuclear sizzlings of my nightmares.We keep having this conversation. On the Cape. I say, 'Nurse me.'She says, 'What about your book?' I say, Til give it up. I want to giveit up. It's a wicked book. It's a wicked thing I'm doing, Missy.'


Then she says, 'Watch the girl. Be careful. There's going to be a surprise ending. It isn't Keith. It's the other guy.'


When I let her in this morning around six-thirty she looked sotransparently ruined and beat — and so transparent: ghostly,ghosted, as if the deed were already done and she had joined me onthe other side. After a few showers, and several cups of laced coffee,she started telling me about it: the night of hate. At one point, quiteearly on, I looked up from my notes and said, 'That's outrageous.Oh, my poor readers. Shame on you, Nicola. Shame on you.' I askedwhy in Christ's name she hadn't kicked Keith out after the initialfiasco. So much better thematically. And a nice contrast with Guy. 'Itwould have meant that nobody really had you.' 'Only you.' 'Thisdoesn't have anything to do with me . . .'


'You're worried about Guy, aren't you. You think he's the one.You think it's going to be him, don't you. It won't be. I swear. Youlove him, don't you.'


'I guess I do. In a way. He must have called me twenty times fromthe States. He says I'm his best friend.Me. Whereare everyone's friends? Where's everyone's family? Where's Kath's family? Whyisn't she smothered in sisters and mothers? You can rest up but I'mgoing to be tearing around all day. I can't handle this physically. Theairport! How'll I get a cab? I can't bear these novels that end in madactivity. "Jane? Call June and tell Jean about Joan. Jeff - get Jimbefore Jack finds John." All this goddamned fetching and carrying. How're you supposed to do anywriting? My leg hurts. Heathrow!''Easy.Calm down. It'll all work out. Here's what you do.'It didn't sound too bad, after she mapped out my schedule for me. And I was more relieved than intrigued, for instance, when she saidI'd get a three-hour writing break between nine and midnight...I looked up at her. She had just brought me another cup of coffee andwas standing beside me, carelessly stroking the back of my neck with the knuckles of her left hand.


'Mark Asprey might show up,' I said. 'I really hope there's nounfinished business between you two.'


'He won't be here until tomorrow,' she said. 'When I'll be gone.' Nicola was looking out, at the window, at the world. Her slenderthroat tautened, and her eyes filled with indignation or simple self-belief She had about her then the thing of hers that touched me most: as if she were surrounded, on every side, by tiny multitudes of cleverenemies.


Just come in again. And must now go out again.


I write these words to keep my hand steady. And because nothingmeans anything unless I write it down. I can't go out there, not just this very second. But of course I'll go. I'll go. There is some kind ofabsolute obligation here.


The phone rang and the instant I picked it up I felt a breeze of awfulness whistling liplessly down the line. How could I get it so wrong? How could I not see? Everywhere there are things that I'mnot seeing.


'Kath,' I said, 'what happened? Where are you?'


'Somewhere else. The baby — go and get the baby. I'm a wickedwoman, Sam.'


'You . . . No you're not.'


'Then what is it? Tell me what it is.'


'It's just the situation.'


As I hung up, Nicola came out of the bathroom and I said,


'You're wearingthat? Oh my God, look at us. And you know whatthe worst thing about everything is? About you. About the wholeStory. About the world. About death. This: it'sreally happening.’


Chapter 22: Horrorday


he first threeevents - light, sound and impact- were all butinstantaneous. First, the eye opened to the scalding bulb of thefoundered standard lamp; next, the rushing report of some lofted cherrybomb or megabanger; and then the brisk descent of thecrammed glass ashtray. This ashtray had been teetering for hours onthe shelf above the bed: now it was dislodged - by the frenziedphysics of everyday life. It fell at the usual rate of acceleration:thirty-two feet per second per second: thirty-two feet per second squared. And it flipped in mid-air. So Keith copped the lot. Impact,crushed butts, a shovelful of ash — right in the kisser. Right in the mush. This was the fifth of November. This was horrorday.


Keith spat and struggled and thrashed himself to his feet. She was gone. Where? With his eyes bobbing and rolling in their sockets, hefocused on the horrorclock. No. He swore through a dry cloud ofhorrordust. In the spent tempest of the bedroom he sought out hisclothes. When he pitched himself towards the toilet he barked ahorrortoe on the bed's brass stanchion. Tearfully he mollified hisincensed bladder. In the mirror Keith's reflection started gettingdressed. A split horrornail kept snagging in the blur of fabrics, all ofthem synthetic: made by horrorman. On the wall Keith's shadow straightened and dived headlong from the room. He paused in thepassage and roughly freed a segment of his scrotum, nastily snared in the seized teeth of his horrorzip.


Out on to the street he stumbled. He made for the car — for theheavy Cavalier. Builders' dust and builders' orange sand formed an orange mist at the level of his eyes, his agent-orange vision, which was itself engrained with motionless impurities, like a windscreensplattered with dead insects. In a ditch, in a bunker full of pipes and cables, a workman was giving his drill a horrid kneetrembler, louder than an act of God. Like me, myself, last night, with her. Underfootthe pavement crackled with horrorgrit. It went crackling right intothe roots of Keith's horrorteeth.


The carlooked funny. Keith scrunched up the parking tickets.Then he froze. The front window on the passenger side had beenstove in! Keith's body throbbed from the sudden wound. He wentround and unlocked and opened the door - and felt the horrorslideand horrortrickle of the crushed glass. The welded stereo had beenscrabbled at, its dials torn off, but. . . Keith's library of darts tapes! Itwas okay: intact, entire. They hadn't stooped that low. For a while he stared at the faulty burglar alarm he had recently stolen. Without thinking he reached down and with his right hand brushed from the seat the jewelled horrorglass.


Fresh catastrophe: the stained tip of his middle finger had beensweetly pierced by the horrorshard. No pain: only mental anguish. Afat dome or bulb of horrorblood now pulsed above the yellow rind. Itstarted dripping. On the car floor he found a crumpled pin-up withwhich he rudely dressed his damaged darting digit. And the digital onthe dash — what was the horrortime? — remained garbled, made nonsense of, by the rays of the low sun, which had surely never beenlower (he was on his way now), bouncing at bus height over thespines of traffic. Through the open window the sound of passing carscame like the zip and sniff of a boxer's feints and punches. Ten-twenty. His appointment with Mrs Ovens had been scheduled for9.15. But there were always queues. As he drove, motes of the shattered glass, quarks of glassdust, seemed to tickle his scalp likeparticles of horrorlight.


He arrived at the tricky junction on the Great Western Road: familiar horrorspot, with zebra-crossing, bus station, and hump­backed bridge over the canal, all complicating access. Fifteenminutes later, he was still there. Timing their runs to split-secondperfection, the launched horrorcars, the bowling horrorlorriessuccessively denied the heavy Cavalier. Whenever a gap appeared, sowould some contrary vehicle, seeming to pounce or spring intoposition. Either that, or, as Keith inched forward, the undergroundstation would emit a resolute trainload on to the crossing before him. Keith pounded his fists on the steering-wheel's artificial leopard skin.At his rear he sensed the climbing volume of thwarted hurry: how itgroaned and squirmed...In his face he felt the low sun like a lamp bent for interrogation. Now the road cleared but as Keith revved andshuddered, and yearned forwards, another watch of horrorsoulsbobbed on to the zebra - the passing faces of the horrorsouls.


Finally he churned his way through with his bloodied hand on the horn. And into what? Driving was like a test film or a dramatizationof the Highway Code, whateverthat used to be, with every turn and furlong offering multiple choice, backing learner, swearing cyclist,peeking perambulator. Richly sectioned with doubleparkers andskip-collectors and clamp-removers, the roads became a kiddy-bookof excavators, macadam-layers, streetlamp-changers, white-linepainters, mobile libraries, armed-personnel-carriers, steamrollers,bulldozers, tanks, ditch-diggers, drain cleaners. For an extended period he was wedged behind a leaf-disposal truck. From its rear avacuum tube slurped up the sear broomed roadside pyramids. Hewatched the suck, the feathery flip; sex re-entered his head andfound no room there. Everything he had ever done to womankind he had done again ten times last night, with her. The whipped dance ofthe moistened leaves. Defoliated, deflowered, stripped of leaves andflowers, with trees sharp-lined like old human faces, and wringing their bare hands, London could still drown in all its horrorleaves.


At the civic building, at 10.55, a stroke of good fortune - ormotoring knowhow. The back street was double, tripleparked,parked out, with cars parked beside, athwart, on top of. But as usual nobody had dared block the old dairy exit (which Keith knew to bedisused) — or so it seemed, when he peered into the dusty fire of hisrear window. Keith backed in smartly. This was horrorday,however. Therefore, a horrorbike was waiting there, leaning on its stick, and Keith heard the eager horrorcrunch. Worse, when Keithcrept out to disensnare his bumper, the horrorbike's own horror-biker formidably appeared — one of that breed of men, giant miraclesof facial hair and weight problem, who love the wind of the open road, and love the horrorbikes they straddle there. He hoisted Keithon to the boot of the Cavalier, and banged his head on it for a while, and then direly raised a gauntleted horrorfist. Keith whimpered his way out of that one, offering up a stolen credit card in earnest of his false address. He went and parked about three miles away and tear-fully sprinted back through the fuming jams and the incrediblecrowds of the horrormany.


Guy Clinch was heading towards London at twice the speed of sound, one of half a dozen passengers on the hurled dart of theConcorde. He had missed the earlier flight by ten minutes and hadspent three hours trying to sleep, in a kind of capsule hotel atKennedy, before taking off, smoothly but dramatically, in the still centre of Hurricane Lulu. Now he was in another capsule, his eyes rinsed by the coldly beautiful blue of the troposphere. Through hisporthole Guy could also see both sun and moon, the formerdiscreetly filtered by the treated plastic. Because of the elevation andvelocity of this particular observer, the two bodies seemed to bemoving towards each other with uncelestial haste. Below, theturning planet fell through its curve of spacetime, innocent (thoughmuch traduced) in its blond fur coat. Beyond, inanely vast, theinanity of space.


Two glamorous, multilingual stewardesses exhaustively pam­pered him; he had recently relished a plateful of scrambled eggs andsmoked salmon; and he was readingLove. Even so, Guy happened tobe in dramatic discomfort. Bending to refill his cup with the excellentcoffee (a mixed roast, he would guess), one of his stewardesses hadnoticed the odd tilt of the meal tray: she had given it a careful nudgeand then, suddenly, leaned on it quite hard with the full weight of hershoulder. When Guy reopened his eyes, probably about ninety seconds later, he was confronted by the frown of the cabin steward,solicitously crouched in the aisle. The stewardess was hanging backwith the knuckle of her forefinger pressed against her teeth. Guyapologized to them and eventually they went away. But the painwent nowhere.


The last chapter ofLove was called 'Concerning Fiascos': ' "Thewhole realm of love is full of tragic stories," said Madame deSйvignй,relating her son's misfortunes with the celebrated Champ-meslй.Montaigne handles so scabrous a subject with great aplomb.'Guy finished the chapter, wonderingly, and then flipped through thecopious appendices. It would be a relief to be done withLove: thisfamished sampling of erotic thought would never ease his hungerpains.Concerning Courts of Love. Guy smiled modestly as hethought of that last telephone call and the delightful carnality heseemed to have awakened in her. 'The plea of marriage is not alegitimate defence against love.' No doubt she would meet himhalfway up the stairs, with all that colour in her face. 'A lover shall,on the death of the other lover, remain unattached for two years.' Asthey kissed, he would place both palms on the back of her thighs,beneath what might well be that black cashmere dress with thebuttons, and almost lift her whole body on to him. 'Success too easilywon soon strips love of its charm; obstacles enhance its value. Every lover grows pale at the sight of the beloved.' As they moved throughthe sitting-room her breath would be sweet and hot (andhers:everything would behers); teardrops, too, perhaps, rather delici-ously. 'Suspicion and the jealousy which derives from it aggravatethe condition called love.' It didn't matter what happened in thebedroom and in a way one feared for the loss of individuality (in theblinding rapture and so on); yet how strange her face would look from that angle, when, as she had laughingly promised, she knelt to remove his trousers and undershorts. 'A person in love is unremitt­ingly and uninterruptedly occupied with the image of the beloved.' So brown, so close together. 'Nothing forbids a woman to be loved by two men . . .'


Guy putLove aside and took up the second book,The Light ofMany Suns.For a moment he vaguely wondered what Keith was up to; but then his eyes fell on Nicola's inscription, over which he had already done some puzzling:


Thou art the grave where buried love doth live,Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone,Who all their parts of me to thee did give, That due of many now is thine alone:Their images I loved I view in thee, And thou - all they — hast all the all of me.


One of the Sonnets, of course (and Guy knew the Sonnets tolerablywell); a complete sestet. How did it. .. ? Ah yes: Thy bosom .. . Thy bosom is endeared with all the hearts . . . Rather a knotty one, this.Addressed by the man to the woman. The past lovers aren't just'gone': they're dead. But people died earlier in those days. Wish I hada copy. And there reigns Love, and all Love's loving parts. Absolutelyfascinating.


'That leaves four hundred', said Mrs Ovens, 'for the nose.''Nose? What nose? There weren't nonose.’


'Same incident, Keith.'


'That was an earhole.'


'You can'tfracture an ear, Keith. And we're coming to that. Thetorn ear.'


'Bitten,' said Keith firmly. 'Bitten.'


'Which reminds me: the tooth'll be twelve-fifty.'


'Twelve-fifty! Blimey . .. Gone up again, has it?'


'The seven-fifty's for a molar. This is an incisor. Canines areseventeen-twenty-five.'


'Jesus. I mean, I'm just a workingman.'


'It's what the law considers fair, Keith.'


'Capitalism innit,' said Keith. 'Just bloodsuckers as such.' Hesighed longsufferingly.


'And then there's the split tongue.'


Keith now raised a dissenting forefinger. 'When there was all this,'he said carefully, 'I,I was hospitalized on thirteen occasions.Sustaining permanent injury to me chest. We don't hear nothingabout that. No danger.'


'Yes, but what were youdoing at the time, Keith?'


Trying, in my own way, to establish a small business. Escape thepoverty trap. That's it. Go on. Laugh.'


'The split tongue, Keith.'


'Jesus.'


In the end Keith agreed to up his weekly payment from Ј5 toЈ6.50. On top of that, to show good will, he committed himself toforty-eight hours of community service. Consisting as it did ofstealing odds and ends from very old people, community service wasnowhere near as bad as it sounded. Community service, in Keith'sjudgment, had been much maligned. But on a day such as this aman's thoughts should surely be with his darts. Not haggling herewith some old hippie about the price of horrornose, of horrortooth,of horrortongue.


Keith drove to the garage in Rifle Lane. Fortunately Fucker was onshift.


'Who didthis fucker?' asked Fucker. 'It'll be a rough job. Butyou'll have security.'


Gratefully Keith relaxed on a winded carseat in the back room. Heread the ripped mags: nude skirt. Peace at last. Beside him in a largecardboard box an even larger cat lay dying. Cruelly cramped, it struggled and sneezed and sighed. It began weeping rhythmically.


Keith was used to noise, incessant and unwelcome noise. Most of hislife was played out to a soundtrack of sadistic decibelage. Noise,noise — noise on the brink of bearability. He was used to unwelcomenearnesses, also, to stinging proximities; but did the bald cat'ssneezes really have to bubble and dampen the very thigh of histrouserleg? It wept in rhythm. Sounds almost like . . . The nude birds in the book. Nothing on Nick. She'd show them. He closed his eyesand saw himself naked and twanging back and forth with incompre­hensible violence and speed, as if in controlled preparation forspaceflight. There she was, just a G-spot in a G-string. And there was Keith in his G-suit, ready to take on gravity...A new noise, a newnearness, a new order of alarm: Keith was staring at the horrorcat.


'Gone, has she? It's a rough job,' said Fucker.


They stood there inspecting the Cavalier's warped windowframe, the mauled glass, smothered in fingerprints.


'But you've got security.'


'Appreciate it.'


And Keith bent into his pocket and parted with the money:endlessly, horrornote after horrornote.


With the low sun like a prickly sweater gently pressed into hisunshaven face, Keith drove to the Black Cross, for his breakfast. The backslaps and the fagsmoke, the lagers and the Scotch eggs, did notcombine well. A pork pie, Keith decided, was what he really fancied.Then you feel twice the price. Shakespeare staggered over and fiercely tousled Keith's hair for at least a minute. When he hadstopped doing that, Keith looked down at the bar: a new soft-fallen mask of dandruff now salted his food, and melted into the lager's horrorhead. At that moment his teeth lanced a spectacular impurity among the knotted gristle inside his mouth. Keith, who took hischances and ate a great many pork pies, was no stranger to impurity;but he had never encountered anything so throatfloodingly gangre­nous as this. Without interrupting the conversation he was havingwith somebody else,Pongohanded him the bottle of green mouth-wash kept under the bar, and Keith loped off to the Gents. Half anhour later, when the tortured gagging had subsided, to the relief of everyone in the building, Keith returned and drank the complimen­tary Scotches and dabbed at his eyes with a piece of newspapertenderly torn byPongofrom his own tabloid. Keith nodded as he studied the pork-pie wrapping: the eat-by-date was placed well into the next millennium. He had a few more Scotches and was cheeringup enough to make a start on telling the lads about his night withNick. His stomach still bubbled and spat, still noisily rueing thathorrorpie.


When everything began to go dark.


'Look!'


Through the stained glass they stared, or some of them did, as inperfect parallax the two white balls conjoined like somethingunanswerable under the microscope, and the moon began to burnlike a little sun.


'It's eclipse . . . Eclipse! . . . What fucking clips? . . . Fuckingpower-cut. .. It's the fucking eclipse . . . Put the fucking lightson...Eclipse, innit. . . It's the fucking eclipse ...'


Keith turned away, in horror. To his left a dartsman waited at thedimmedochйwith his arrows, head dropped in a martyrdom ofimpatience. Someone pitched a coin on to the counter. It clattered onits rim, noisily, like a cold car just before it fires. And the coin went onwobbling, clattering, faster, tighter. That was him last night, himself, twirling to the very end of his band . . . Shivering Shakespeare stoodten feet away with his face between the double doors of the Black Cross. Today was the day when, in Shakespeare's scheme of things,he was due to lead his chosen people to the mountains of Eritrea: thepromised land. As he looked round the Black Cross that morning, though, it didn't look terribly likely . . . Outside, he had sensed the cold, the eclipse wind, the silenced pigeons. Four hundred milesacross, the point of a dark cone of shadow a quarter of a millionmiles long was heading towards him at two thousand miles per hour.Next came the presentiment of change, like the arrival of weather- front or thunderhead, with the light glimmering - but getting fierier.Then a shade being drawn across the sky. Totality. Shakespeare wascrying. He knew that something awful had to happen, whenhorrorday was horrornight, when horrorsun was horrormoon.


Up above also (if anybody had been able to find her), and lookingher very best in the sudden twilight, proudly shone Venus, daughterof Jupiter, wife of Vulcan, lover of Mars, and never brighter thanwhen the darkness of totality played across the earth.


Where was Nicola Six?


Nobody knew.


The Light of Many Sunsturned out to be a war memoir: ratherremarkable in its way. Guy finished hisfaisanаla mode dechampagneand shamefacedly went on drinking the claret, which hesuspected would have a restaurant price of about three times theminimum weekly wage. Group Captain Leonard Cheshire, VC,OM, DSO, DFC, the author, a Catholic and obviously a good egg,was one of the two British observers of the atom-bombing of Hiroshima.


Guy looked out of the porthole. The 'second contact', or the first moment of full eclipse, had occurred twenty minutes earlier. Thepilot of the Concorde, an eclipse-enthusiast and member of theThousand Second Club, had announced his intention of stayingwithin the eastward-moving umbra until he began his descent over Ireland. Thus totality was lasting far longer than its terrestrial three minutes. When it came, Guy had tensed, as if for an impact. Or hehad tried to. But he realized then that he couldn't get any tenser thanhe was already. Just as his phallus couldn't get any harder. At the moment that the moon's shape fully covered the sun, then with fantastic simultaneity the solar corona bathed the circumferencewith unforgettable fire. Guy was amazed, harrowed, by the tightnessof the fit. Surely only the divinely privileged observer would be blessed with this full-true billiards shot, straight, dead straight, forninety million miles. Perhaps that was the necessary condition ofplanetary life: your sun must fit your moon. The umbra began to overtake the plane; the pilot came on again and with emotioncommanded his few passengers to admire the 'diamond-ring' effect of the 'third contact', when the leading slice of the sun re-emerged. Yes, yes, yes: just like a sparkler on its band. Like a ring for her,perhaps. Heavenly engagement.


The descent began. Guy picked upThe Light of Many Suns. On page forty-six he dropped the book to the floor. He reached for his paper bag and opened it in front of his mouth. He waited. Perhapsthere was an explanation. Perhaps, after all, it was something quiteinnocent...


'Enola Gay' was the plane that flew the mission to Hiroshima. The pilot named the aircraft after his mother. He was once her little boy.


But Little Boy was the name of the atom bomb. It killed 50,000people in 120 seconds.


Keith stood on her stoop, fumbling weepily with his great ring ofkeys - Keith's keys, his gaoler's keys, keys for Debbee, Trish andAnaliese, keys for flat, for car, for go-down and lock-up. But keys forNicola? He rang the bell again; he tried all the keys again. Now Keithwas close to panic, to cursing, rattling panic. He wanted to see hervery badly, not for the act of love and hate, which, to his surprise,and so far as he could tell, he wanted never to perform again withanybody. No: he wanted her for her belief in him, because she wasthe other world, and if she said that Keith was real then the otherworld would say it too. But hang on. Suppose she's under a bus some­where? His darts boots, his darts strides, his darts shirt, his very - ! Keith clapped a hand to his horrorchest. Then his knees gave withrelief. All is not lost. His darts pouch remained in its rightful place, in the pocket closest to his heart. He buzzed the buzzer again; he triedall the keys again. Throughout he was aware of eyes on his back.Today, even the dead-end street was crowded, and sharply chargedin voice and gesture: a sense of population shift. Keith turned. A lonepoliceman was watching him from the pavement, motionless againstthe plunging figures beyond. Just a kid. In a uniform. Fuckingtithead. Keith was fairly confident that the policeman wouldn't try nothing here, or he'd get lynched. But now he was coming forward,his shoulders interestedly inclined, and — okay — maybe it didn't looktoo good, unkempt Keith crooked over his keys. So he did a great mime of casually patting his pockets, then swivelled, shaking hishead. He sauntered down the path and, with a bit of the oldinsouciance (the Scotches and supplementarypornos were abouttheir work), hopped into the heavy Cavalier. Keith started off withan unintended bound, just missing an unattended pram, andmonitoring in his rearview mirror the shape of the taperinghorrorfilth.


With the low sun playfully tickling the hairs in his nostrils, Keithdrove to Windsor House. Nick'd show up later: call her from there.And, besides, he wanted to see how Clive was doing. The radioworked all right. As he drove home he listened irritatedly to thenews, the dissolution of the Crisis, the improving condition of thePresident's wife, the delegations leaving simultaneously for Paris andPrague (not a summit: more like twin peaks), and wondered if thisexplained the pronounced congestion he encountered in Ladbroke Grove. He doubleparked outside Maharajah Wines. On the way tothe lift his gait changed from its accustomed boxy shuffle to thesudden dance of a paddler entering a cold sea. His right foot, deep in horrorturd. Luckily, on the other hand, the lift was working, more orless. It came all the way down in answer to his punched summons.


But it didn't get very far up. Sitting on the floor, waiting the twentyminutes for the next power surge, Keith took a matchstick to the slender grids of his tarnished sole. One mercy: the dog responsiblefor such a dropping was by now almost certainly dead. His thoughtswere all with horrordog and horrorcat as, after a sickening drop, heshuddered his way tormentedly upwards, wedged in the pungenthorrorlift.


On the narrow walkstrip Keith attacked the lock, which was oftenrecalcitrant. But today was horrorday. He stared down at the singlegnarled key. On the outer mat were four horrorletters: twohorrorbills, a horrorsummons, and a horrororder of distraint. Keithhad had enough with all this locks and keys: he took a step back anddetonated himself against the door. Normally it would have givenlike a dunked biscuit. But the devices Keith himself had sometimesdeployed were evidently in place: the bars and braces used by him tokeep out bailiffs, bad-debt buyers, repo men, cheated horrorcheats.


'Kath,' he said in a low voice.


He flinched at the misted glass. A warning shape moved away,then reappeared, like a figure glimpsed in church.


'I saw you,' it whispered.


'Fuck off,' coaxed Keith. 'What? When? Come on, darling.'


'On the telly.'


'. . . That weren't nothing. Just for the telly like. Load of nonsense.For the telly.'


'You told the world,' she said. 'On the telly.'


And Keith had no answer.


Even the old Metrocab coming in from Heathrow had its own slantabout forms of torture. For one thing, the vibration, the cauldron-bubble beneath the seat, appeared to whet the pain in Guy's groin,assuming that any kind of increase was possible down there. But it wasstranger than that. The driver treated his cab as a peasant might treathis horse or ass, with numb and proprietorial cruelty. The bursts of acceleration were like long-toothed, lip-flapping exhalations; thencame the looping whinny of the brakes. It was diversion of a kind tolisten to the grades of neigh and whinny, of anger and submission, thatthe driver thrashed out of his livelihood, the black machine.


As he paid, a passing child tossed a jumping-jack in through thewindow, and paused to watch it raise hell in the back of a cab - its headbanging ecstasy of entrapment.


'Bombfire night,' said the driver, listlessly.


Guy walked on down the dead-end street; he had called her fromthe airport, without success; he didn't expect her to be home. Norwas she. He let himself in at the front door and climbed the stairs.The second key opened up an olfactory world that Guy remembered from his schooldays: duckboards and lockers, the lavatory where thesmokers went. He saw the dartboard, the pewter tankard engravedto him, to Keith. Next door, through the thin passage, he saw theruin of the bed, the upended ashtray on the pillow and its droppingson the sheets. Scattered about the floor were shiny puddles of exotic underwear. He saw the three empty brandy bottles, the hookah pipe.On the chair, as if laid out ready for school, brocaded trousers andthe red shirt saying,keith talent -the finisher.


Next door again he found an envelope markedGuy, unpromin-ently displayed among the fashion and darts magazines on hercrowded bureau. The note said: 'Gone to the darts.' There was a passor ticket attached. The telephone rang. He waited before picking itup.


'Where the fuck a you been?' said a voice Guy knew well.


'. . . Guy here.'


'. . . Oh, hello, mate. I uh, I had some stuff I was picking up. Shethere is she?'


'No, she's not here.'


'Know when she be back?'


'No, I don't know.'


'Minge,' said Keith indulgently. 'Never around when you wantthem. Always there when you don't. I couldn't, I couldn't pop — Nah.Yeah well cheers.'


Guy waited.


'Okay. See you later then, pal.' He added monotonously, 'Yeahwell she said you'd want to be there. As my virtual sponsor. Helpingwith the funding like.'


'No doubt.'


'Onna darts.'


No joy there then, thought Keith. He can't be feeling too brill neither.Either. But this is it,it, success in this life always going to the guywho . . . The dartboard in Keith'sgarage looked on as he finished hisporno,removed his clothes, and, jogging lightly on the cold floor,washed himself, horribly, in the horrorsink. Keith's lifestyle. Scepti-cally he connected the electric kettle he had recently stolen. Ithummed faultily for several seconds, and Keith's hopes soared. Butthen the machine gave a scorching fizz and pooped the blackenedplug from its horrorrear. He shaved in lukewarm water before the mirror's acne. Next, with the jellied shampoo, colder still, hishorrorhair. He donned his number-three darting shirt, so damp andcreased. It said:keith talent -the pickoff king. He dried hishair with some old horrorrag.


A sudden orange cockroach rushed past and Keith stamped on it,urbanely, out of grooved urban habit. But the glazed and tendrilledbody of the cockroach, even as it collapsed inwards, sent Keith areminder that his foot was unshod, unsocked. Just a horrorfoot.Keith yanked his whole leg up with a senile yodel of disgust. So hewas still capable of disgust; and he didn't go all the way through withthat skilful stomp of his. The look he gave the half-crushed roachmight even have been mistaken for appalled concern. The vermin laythere, half-turned; its various appendages were all moving atdifferent speeds - but none of them were human speeds. Me, myself,only hours ago, thought Keith, with intense lassitude . . . He put on his left shoe. After many unsatisfactory minutes with a scrubbing-brush, he put on his right shoe. Reckon I get there early, in good time.Soak up the atmosphere. He got to his feet. Blimey. You just decideyou're going to enjoy every minute of it. Wouldn't miss it for the world. Never ask about...He zipped up his windcheater. Relax, few drinks. Take the opportunity of using the celebrity practiceboards. And generally compose myself, Tony. It's fortunate, Ned,that I seem to respond to the big occasion. On his way out he took alast look at the hate-filled face of the flickering horrorroach.


Guy had gone home.


Or he had gone to Lansdowne Crescent. His housekeys were still in his pocket, but manners - and caution - demanded that he ring thebell. Through the half-glass door and its steel curlicues a redoubtablefigure loomed. Guy thought it might be Doris — the one who couldn'tclimb stairs. Because of her knees. The one who feared and hated allstairs.


The door opened. It was Lizzyboo. He couldn't help staring. And he couldn't help thinking of the helium blimp he had seen that day,effortfully hovering over Terminal Four.


'Isn't it wonderful? Isn't itwonderful.’


She said this joyfully. And as Guy listened he clearly saw the otherLizzyboo, the one he had loved for a month, the one he had kissedand touched among the trembling porcelain. The other Lizzyboowas still there all right, hiding within; and now it was safe to comeout.


'Everything's okay again.'


Of course this was neither here nor there to Guy, because she onlymeant the planet. 'How's Hope? How's the boy?'


'You'd better go on up.'


He went on up. As he turned the corner of the stairs he wasdisquieted by the sight of a silhouette in the passage, near thebedroom door. Something about the waiting shape was admonitory,ritualized, ecclesiastical. As he approached he saw that it was a little boy, in full armour.


'Who is it?' came a voice. 'Darling?'


Guy was about to frame a grateful reply. But the little boyanswered sooner. 'A man,' he said.


'Whatman?'


'. . . Daddy.'


Marmaduke stepped aside, with some formality, and Guy enteredthe room. The little boy followed, and then moved quietly past hisfather to the side of the bed, where Hope lay, on her barge of pillows.


'Where is everyone?' said Guy, for the house was eerily stairless.


'All gone. There's no need. He's different now.'


'What happened?'


'It was quite sudden. The day after.'


As they spoke, Marmaduke was undressing, or unbucklinghimself. He laid down sword, dagger, pike and shield, neatly, on thechair. He freed his breastplate. Finger by finger he loosened his gauntlets.


'And you?' said Guy.


Her face expressed, in terms of time and distance, the kind ofjourney he would have to undertake if he were ever to return. It was along journey. Perhaps even the earth wasn't big enough to containit...One by one Marmaduke removed his shin-guards, then thelittle chainmail slippers. Next, his authentic-looking tights weremeticulously unpeeled.


'No nappy!' said Guy.


Marmaduke stood there in his underpants. These too he stepped out of. He climbed into bed. 'Mummy?’


'Yes, darling?'


'Mummy? Don't love Daddy.'


'I won't. I certainly won't.'


'Good.'


'. . . Byebye, Daddy.'


Guy came out into the fading afternoon. He looked at the pass orticket she had left for him and wondered how he would ever kill all that time. Bent with his bag, he stood by the garden gate. He lookedup. Already the sky was dotted with firebursts, rocket-trails: itsproxy war. Soon, all over London, a thousand, a million guys wouldbe burning, burning.


It's weird: you pull the sunguard down and it don't - the sun's stillthere, like Hawaii. Keith motored to the studio, which was veryconvenient, being amongst the refurbished warehouses down by theold canal. Once there, he availed himself, as instructed, of the privatecarpark. A janitor came hurdling out from behind the dustbins and told Keith, in no uncertain terms, to park elsewhere. On Keithproducing ID, the janitor huddled over his faulty walkie-talkie.Keith listened to denial, to horrorfizz and horrorsquawk, and endlessdenial. When the clearance eventually came through Keith sniffedand realigned his jacket, and decisively shoved the car door shut withthe flat of his hand. The window on the passenger side explodedoutwards. Firmly the janitor brought him dustpan and horrorbrush.Celebrity practice boards?What fucking celebrity practiceboards? He was taken through the canteen and into a stockroom that happened to have a dartboard in it. Incredibly the sun sought him outeven here. What was the sun made of? Coal? Oxyacetylene? Glo-logs? What was the matter with it? Why didn't it go away? Whydidn't it goout?No: it went on funnelling its heat into hisexhaustedly hooded eyes. He blinked into the numbered orb of the board, itself like a low sun, the vortex of all his hopes and dreams.His head bowed in its horrorglare. With the purple pouch in his hand(how very worn and soiled it looked) Keith paced out the distance,turned, sniffed, coughed and straightened himself. The sun vanished.The first dart was flying through the horrornight.


I return from my latest mission to find a note from Mark Asprey onthe mat. Hand-delivered. Out of the Connaught. Now wait aminute. . .


Dear Sam:So glad you toiled your way to the crux of the CorneliaConstantine business. She was telling the truth when she said thatCrossbone Waterswas 'all lies'. There was no cerise lagoon, no rabid dog, no tears by the campfire beneath the throbbing stars. There was, above all, no marathon seduction. In fact, in truth, Ihad the idiot in hysterics on the very first day, after lunch, at the hotel — a location from which, during the entire fortnight, weseldom strayed.


No doubt you're wondering about those 'magnificent breasts'of hers. Those also I created with two deft dabs of my facile fancy:they had no more reality, alas, than the courtly Kwango. Youknow the type — great fat arse but racing tits. And so stupid. Witha peculiar habit of-


There follow three or four hundred words of the grossestpornography. The letter concludes:


You don't understand, do you, my talentless friend? Even as youdie and rot with envy. It doesn't matter what anyone writes anymore. The time for it mattering has passed. The truth doesn'tmatter any more andis not wanted.


'Wait a minute,' I said. Nicola was coming out of the bathroom. I looked up at her. 'My God, you won't get fifty yards. It's grotesque.'


She had noticed the letter, with her intelligent eyes. She said, 'Areyou ready to hear the bad thing I did to him? It might perk you up. Come in here. I want to keep doing my hair. Actually it has certain affinities with your own case. He wrote this novel,' she said, as Ifollowed her into the bedroom. 'He'd been trying to write it for years.He showed it to me. It was in longhand, in a big exercise book. And ithad something. It wasn't the usual trex he writes. It was from theheart.'


'And?'


'I destroyed it. I locked him in the bedroom and fed it to the fire. Pageby page. Taunting him a lot and everything.'


'Hey, not bad.'


She was watching the way my eyes moved. 'Don't worry. I haven'tdestroyed yours.'


'Thanks. Why not? What came over you?'


'No need.'


'I don't understand you, Nicola.'


'That's right. You look terrible. Aren't thereany pills you can take?'She sighed and said, 'Tell me about the child.'


Pain travels through diffuse interconnexions, through prolixnetworks of fibres, past trigger zones, along branches, throughthickets . . .You want it to be over. Over! Butfear isall about wantingit to be over. This might be its defining characteristic. The immediatephysical symptoms are mild, and not distracting, as pain is.


I felt the baby's fear when I entered. A sudden pall of mid-afternoon,and silence, and no Keith and no Kath: just Kim, the squirming bagelat my feet on the kitchen floor. She seemed unhurt, only soaked and crying — and afraid. And that was enough, too much, should neverhappen. Oh I know when the babies come how we patter and creep like mice through the dark tunnels, to tend them, anticipate them, topick them up and give them comfort. But it must be like that. It mustalways be like that. Because when we're not there, their worlds beginto fall away. On every side the horizon climbs until it pushes out thesky. The. walls come in. Pain they can take, maybe. Pain is close and they know where it comes from. Not fear, though. Keep them fromfear. Jesus, if they only knew what wasout there. And that's why theymust never be left alone like this.


Or not quite alone. When I knelt down to take her I heard awarning growl - from Clive, sitting erect in the Clive-sized squarebetween the four joke rooms. 'It's all right,' I said. 'I'm good. I love her. I'm not bad. Good dog.' You can apparently tell this to a dog: adog will believe it. He came forward; with sigh and half-leap he hadhis front paws up on the sink, watching for Kath or Keith; from therear he looked like a trained gunman, ready, knees bent, weapon up. When the child was calmer I noticed on the table a box of matches, and a single cigarette. This was Kath's note to me.


Because I'd gotten everything wrong. And life is always forcingyou into yet stranger positions.Got to stop hurting K, Keith had written.Just takeing it out on the Baby. ButK wasn't Kim.K wasKath. But Keith couldn't stop. And Kath couldn't stop.


I had only one idea. I dressed her. When I changed the diaper I sawwithout surprise that there were no new marks. Kath had resisted theforce of her own powerlessness, this time. I left a note, and a number,and I might have written there and then that some people get othersto perform their greatest cruelties. They get others to do it for them.


And then this.


With her bobbing, rolling face on my shoulder I carried the childthrough the streets - and through a sudden carnival: an outbreak of human vigour and relief, with balloons and steel bands, loudspeak­ers propped on window-sills, pubs turned inside out. We werecaught up in the beat of it and jounced along through the swiftly gathering crowds. One of those moments when everybody wants tobe black, lithe, hellraising; and against their dark brilliance, thewhite faces, shyly smiling, ashamed to go out in the light, to be seenat all. The streets were infantile and drunken. There the donnishindulgent stroll of the policemen. There a black lady dancing in a bobby's hat. There a child's rapt uplifted face.


Life! Like the warm life in my arms. But then there can suddenly betoo much of it, too much life, and different breathlessness, differentdanger...A tight intersection on the Portobello Road, and lifepressing in from all four directions, more headcounts everywhere, like stacks of cannonballs, and the mysterious arrival of panic, witharms now windmilling as they fought their way to the edge. And therewas no edge, only life, more life. I held Kim above my head,right up there among the screams. And the crowd, the large creatureof which we formed a cell, started to topple centipedically, and (I thought) only one outcome, as you must fall or trample or do both.


Then it was over and we were on the other side. I used thebasement door at Lansdowne Crescent. Lizzyboo could do it. Shewas all healed and clear. I said that Kath would call. I said I knew shewould do what was right. I said she had all my trust.


'It's all right for you. You just had a whole chapter off. I've been dicing with death out there.' 'Yes, so you claim.' 'I swear I wasthatclose.''I too have been far from idle.' 'Putting your warpaint on.' 'Yes. And reading.'


I waited, and watched her brow.


'You made me ridiculous. How did youdare? I thought I wasmeant to be tragic. At least a bit. And all this stuff as if I wasn't incontrol.Every second.'


'I'm sorry,' I said. 'I don't see you that way.'


Then she said something I didn't quite catch. And didn't want her to repeat. I started getting ready to leave.


'Do you think this dress is sufficiently disgusting?' she called out.'I'd better tell you something I'm going to do on the way there.'


She told me.'Nicola.'


'You'd be surprised how eloquent a bit of dirt can be. Carefullyapplied.'


'I've just thought. I'll see you at the studio and everything- but thisis goodbye.'


'Take my flat key. Get there early and you'll have a good view.'


I looked for challenge in her coldness. I said coldly, 'You're goingto be gone from nine to twelve, right? I can't imagine how you'regoing to work it.'


'The story of your life. Off you go. Kiss.'


'Let's stop it. Let's abort. . . Oh, wear a coat, Nicola. It's notworking. It's not working out. I'm losing it, Nicola. There are things I'm not seeing.'


I'm going.


I'm back.


It seems for the time being that Nicola has confounded us all.


Chapter 23: You're GoingBack With Me


he black cabwill move away, unrecallably and for ever, its driver paid, and handsomely tipped, by the murderee. Disgust­ingly attired (howcould she?), she'll click on her heels down thedead-end street. The heavy car will be waiting; its lights will come onas it lumbers towards her. It will stop, and idle, as the passenger doorswings open.


His face will be barred in darkness, but she will see cracked glasson the passenger window-frame and the car-tool ready on his lap.


'Get in.'


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


'Getin .'


And in she'll climb . . .


Disgustingly attired: howcould she? In white thinstrapped tanktop picodress, cauterized at the waist, promoting all the volume of thesecondary sexual characteristics, and so tight below that the outlined panties give a nappy-puff to the rounded rear; and bare-legged, withscarlet satin shoes, the heels unforgivably long, heels that would looklonger still (the suggestion was) when their shadows played on thebacks of berks! Her hair was sprayed with glitter, and savagelytousled. As she made her way to the studio she selected a good brick wall, steeped in London smoke and moisture, and went and pressedher rump against it. The dress was man-made, drulon, trexcett,man-made in every sense, made by men with men in mind. Shewanted to walk the whole way there, to test her nerve and tautenher breasts.


She shimmied her rump against the moist brick wall. Of course, there was no mirror, and she couldn't really check; but the contactfelt just right.


Keith said, 'Where's the pub then?'


'Pub? What pub?' Tony de Taunton looked at Keith curiously.


'The venue. The —' Keith snapped his darting finger — 'the Chuckling Sparrow.'


'There's nopub. Don't you think we have enough grief already,Keith. Without wheeling a couple of hundred pissers in and out of here four nights a week.' As he spoke, Tony de Taunton gave Keitha glass of low-ale and led him by the arm to the window. 'No no,friend. All those jolly butchers and smiling grannies - that's librarystuff. We use cutaways and dub the pub later.'


'Common sense,' said Keith. They were standing in a cavernous lot, full of hidden noise. Shifters and fixers moved stoically aboutwith planks under their arms. All were expert noisemakers. Sheetsof silver cardboard imparted the spectral light of watery dreams.On the wall was a sign bearing the saddest words Keith had everread:no smoking. Also a mirror, in which he made out a funny-looking bloke in a wrinkled red shirt: TV's Keith. Therewas a bar,though, with four or five stools you could perch on. But none ofthat fog and gurgling clamour that he had come to think of as his darting lifeblood. Where the pub parrot, effing and blinding on itssoiled hook? Where the pub dogs, whinnying in nightmare beneaththe round tables?


'Look. Here comes Chick,' said Tony de Taunton. 'You got tolike his style.'


A cream Rolls-Royce had pulled up in the carpark below. Twomen climbed out slowly.


'Where areyour guests, Keith?'


'Be along. Who's that with him?'


'Julian Neat.'


Julian Neat: agent to the darting stars. Agent to Steve Notice, toDustin Jones.


'Yes. They say Chick's all signed up.’


Nick and Chick had come in through different doors but they madetheir entrances together, which was frankly ideal for television'sKeith Talent, who, by this stage, felt he could do with a little support— felt, indeed, that he might die or go mad at any second. She pushedpast the greeters and moved with hesitant hurry towards him. Hehad never seen her looking quite so beautiful.


'Oh my Keith.'


'Where youbeen, girl?'


'What happened? Did you lose your keys? I saw your darts clotheswere still on the chair.'


'Where youbeen, girl?'


Imploringly she flattened herself up against him. 'I'll tell you aboutit later. Making arrangements. For us, Keith. We're going on awonderful journey.'


'Break it up, you two,' cajoled Ned von Newton: Mr Darts. 'Comeand be friendly.'


They went to join the others at the semicircular bar. Keith strolledover with some insouciance (he saw the way that Chick clockedNick). She was holding his hand - gazing, with the demurelygratified eyes of love, at TV Keith.


Guy stood with his back to the building, facing the flatlands ofdemolition. Squares of concrete, isolated by chicken wire, in each ofwhich a bonfire burned, baking the potatoes of the poor. Apparentlycleansed by its experiences of the afternoon, the moon outshonethese fires; even the flames cast shadows.


As he turned he saw a hooded figure by the doorway. He halted.


'They're in there,' it said.


Guy thought: it's a girl. He moved closer. One of Keith's women.The ruined blonde who —


'Keith,' said Trish Shirt. 'And . .. Nicky.' She sighed nauseously.'Now they getting married like.'


'I hardly think so.'


'They are. It was on the telly.' She leaned forward and placed ahand on his arm. 'Say I'm waiting. Tell Keith. Forever in a day like.I'll always be waiting.'


When Guy got up to the lot he hung back by the door, able tolinger, it seemed, in a frenzy of unobtrusiveness. At first all he felt wassimple disappointment. He had hoped Nicola would be there, andshe wasn't. Nicola wasn't there. He could see a girl in the grouproundthe bar, under a bulb of light: she looked a lot like Nicola. ShewasNicola, almost certainly. But she was somebody Guy didn'tknow.


He'd thought Trish seemed disembodied, in her hood, neutered, anitnot a she — or just non-human. But the girl at the bar, unhooded,turned to the light, indeed fully opened out towards the world, was lesshuman than the thing in the hood.


Nicola was laughing with her mouth as long and wide as it would go.The energy equation here could be represented as something likex=yz2,ybeing a certain magnitude of solitary female beauty,z beingthe number of men present, andx the Platonic gang-rape which, incertain possible futures, might harden into action. It had to be said thatthe men around her only frowned and smiled, as if chastened by her colour, her volume, her spin of ravenous risk. Where does the guestlook when the host's little girl is doing her somersaults for him: it's sotransparent? But this was no little girl. As she worked herselfbackwards on to her stool she gave a vivid flinch and turned to Keithlike one confidently seeking forgiveness; and there was no way out of joining Nicola in her amusing struggles with the hem of her dress.Their indivisible attention: that's what she had.


Keith watched her proudly. And Chick watched her—Chick, ChickPurchase, large, delicate, deliberate, thick-haired, deep-voiced, anddangerous, with hardman or just criminal glow, like an actor, like astar, who accepts the role that the ordinary imagination assigns him. In his face you could see the associated pleasures of making love towomen and of causing harm to men, or beyond that even, to the links between disseminating life and ending it. There was also somethingridiculous, sinisterly ridiculous, in the way he looked: he dressed like agirl, he dressed like a chick. He filled the flow of his trousers with someof the lilt that a girl would, and his shirt had a flounce to it, the kind of flounce chicks like. But this was no little girl. There was no mistakinghis sex. Chick? In the tight waist-to-thigh panels of his orangetrousers, it was visible, and sinisterly ridiculous. A slobberer for skirt: that was how come he hadn't yet gone all the way, in crime or darts. Tonight, no roadshow hopeful or wet T-shirt at his side: only, in thecream Roller, Julian Neat, who looked like what he was, a successfulmiddleman, in an exhausted culture.


The past is past,' Keith was saying. 'Let's forget any unpleasantnessand shake on it. Fair enough, mate?’


'Okay,' said Chick deeply. 'Tell me something, Keith. What's a girllike this doing with a little coon like you?'


'Chick,' said Julian Neat.


'See?' said Keith.


'I think that's very unfair, Chick,' said Nicola earnestly. 'Keith'svery good at darts.'


'Okay, break it up, you lot,' said Miles Fitzwilliam as heapproached, pulling his headphones away from his ears. 'Pre-matchinterview.'


The two contestants slid ponderously from their stools.


Guy saw his chance. But his chance of what? For one thing, heseemed to have forgotten how to walk.


Nicola saw him: she smiled and waved with puppet animation. As he crossed the vault the hope gathered in him that she would becomethe woman he knew; but she just went on getting stranger. Strangersmile, and stranger eyes. When he was near enough he saidexperimentally,


'Hello.'


'Silence. Oil'


She pouted a kiss at him and prettily crossed her lips with acautioning forefinger.


'Obviously,' Keith was saying to the camera, which was jack-knifed in fascination a foot from his face, 'hopefully'll the best manwin. When we go out there.' He realized that more was expected ofhim. 'So let's hope the bloke, the guy with the, the superior techniquewill, will run out winner against, against the man with the . . . leastgood equipment. Dartwise. At the death.'


Nicola applauded silently; then her palms came to rest, as if inprayer.


'I'm confident, Miles,' Chick was chipping in. 'Got to be, withthose averages. And — see, Keith and I go back a bit. And I know he'sgot this funny habit. Of bottling it. At the death. Frankly, I just hopeit's not too one-sided. For darts' sake.'


'Thanks, lads. Five minutes, yeah?'


Nicola wiggled a finger and Guy moved closer. 'Darling,' said herhot breath, 'don't worry! - this is only a dream.'


Keith's heart leapt or jolted when he saw the new arrival: Kim


Twemlow, the ex-world number one, with his smile, his jewelledshirt, his white shoes. The guy was like a god to Keith, no matterabout his orange-peel face. Let others dwell on that funny lump in hisside, that walking-frame. He had a good head of hair, for thirty-eight. Just that some of us live so full, our flames burn so bright, thatthe years go past not singly but six or seven at a time, like the years of dogs.


As for Guy, Keith saw him and closed his eyes and reopened them elsewhere.


Julian Neat was telling another one.


Nicola was laughing with her mouth as long and wide as it wouldgo, when Guy stepped forward.


'You're going back with me.'


They all turned.


'You're going back with me.'


They all stared. They all stared at this bit of unnecessaryunpleasantness. The pale loiterer with his boiled eyes. Nicola'sexpression showed that although she always tried to see the amusingside of things, well, on this occasion she reallywas rather shocked.


Guy seized her wrist and she gave a practised shriek as her stoolslewed. Round about now Keith was always going to be stepping in.


'It's over. Don't be a prick.'


'You're going back', said Guy, with immaculate enunciation, as ifperhaps she hadn't heard or understood, 'withme.'


She looked at him. Her upper lip hovered over her teeth. 'No I'mnot. What for? To talk about love, and Enola Gay? No I'm not. I'mnot going back withyou.'


'Right,' said Keith to the nape of Guy's neck. 'She's going backwith me. For more of what she got last night. She's going back with me.'


'No I'm not. No way. Innit. I'm not going back withyou.'


They all waited.


'I'm going back withhim,' she said, leaning forward and placingher hand on the penis of Chick Purchase.


Guy left, but Keith was going nowhere.


They said they'd put the sound on later, that inimitable pub bustle,the whoops, the laughter, the crack of glass, even the computerized thunks of dart meeting board. So the buzzers buzzed, and shiftersfixed, and fixers shifted: each noisemaker made his noise. Also thesteady belching of the cigarette-smoke simulator, sending its greyclouds out over the occludedochй.Laughter remained, but it wasn'tpub laughter. It was the laughter of Julian Neat, Kim Twemlow, andNicola Six.


'Keith . . ? Shame it didn't go your way, Keith,' said MalcolmMcClandricade. 'But it's not the end of the world. Sorry, Dom?'


'They're saying they can't use it.'


'There you go, Keith! Spare your blushes down the Marquis. Well.That's a relief all round.'


'They're saying they're using it. Thought they had a ladies' semibut they ain't.'


'Sugar. How'll they fill it? All we got's ten minutes.'


'They going to bung in a pub song or something. A knees-up. Anda raffle or something.'


'Jesus. Still, Keith. Not surprising you didn't do yourself justice.With that handful. Talk about trouble. Keith? Keith? Dry your eyes,old son.'


'He's okay?'


'What do you think?'


'Get a car round?'


'Keith?'


But Keith snapped out of it, out of his ruined dream, his trance ofdarts. He stood up and said with boyish directness, 'I could point tothe finger injury I was nursing. But tonight's been a valuableexperience for me. For my future preparation. Because how's yourdarts going to mature, Malcolm, if you don't learn?'


'That's the right attitude, Keith.'


'Because she's dead. Believe it. You know what she is, Malcolm?She's a fuckin organ-donor. Do that and live? No danger. She'shistory, mate. You hearing me?'


'Anything you say, Keith.'


Will be taken down and used... He spun round the shaking cage of the spiral staircase. Every impact of his boot was louder, harsher, his force and mass growing with all that was neg and anti. Then hehit the cold night air, and saw the moon - redder, to his eyes, than the midday sun.


Keith ran low towards the heavy Cavalier.


I must go back to London Fields — but of course I'll never do itnow. So far away. The time, the time, it neverwas the time. It is a far,far...If I shut my eyes I can see the innocuous sky, afloat above thepark of milky green. The traintrack, the slope, the trees, the stream: I played there with my brother as a child. So long ago.


The people in here, they're like London, they're like the streets ofLondon, a long way from any shape I've tried to equip them with,strictly non-symmetrical, exactly lopsided — far from many things,and far from art.


There's this terrible suspicion. It isn't worth saving anyway.Things just won't work out.


Be gone now, for the last act.


Chapter 24: The Deadline


own the dead-endstreet the car was waiting. And so wasI...


I'm here. I'm in it. And howstrange it is in here, fish-grey,monkey-brown, all the surfaces moist and sticky, and the air no goodto breathe. Already destroyed. And not worth saving.


The car was there on the other side of the dead-end street. Whenmidnight struck or tolled I crossed the road and bent my body andlooked in through the broken window, broken by my own hand, so long ago. The murderer turned toward me.


'Get out of the car, Guy. Get out of thecar, Guy.'


He was crying. But so what? We're all crying now, from here onin.


It was Guy. Of course it was. After a thousand years of war andrevolution, of thought and effort, and history, and the permanentmillennium, and the promised end of mine and thine, Guy still had allthe money, and all the strength. When Keith came running lowacross the carpark, Guy was waiting, with all that strength. Theysquared up to one another. And Keith lost. For the second time thatnight, Keith tasted defeat: obliterating defeat. He got driven into theground like a tentpeg. Where was he now? Somewhere: cradled, perhaps, in the loving arms of Trish Shirt.


'Look what she's done to me.'


'Get out of the car, Guy.'


'Look what she'sdone to me.’


We closed our deal. As he walked away he hesitated, and turnedwith a wide wag of the head.'Jesus, Sam, don't do this for me.' 'Isn't it always someone else? Who does it.''Don't do this for me.'But he kept on going.


The black cab has pulled away, unrecallably. Here she comes now onher heels, crying, shivering, through the smell of cordite. There arestill fireworks in the sky, subsiding shockwaves, the memory ofdetonations, cheap gunfire, whistlingdecrescendoand the smoke ofburnt guys. I can see marks on her face. Another hour with Chick and he might have saved us all the trouble. He might have saved us all thegoddamned grief. I flicked on the lights and the car lumberedforward. It stopped and idled. I opened the passenger door. I said,


'Get in.'


My face was barred in darkness. But she could see the car-tool onmy lap.


'Getin:


She leaned forward. 'You,' she said, with intense recognition.'Always you .. .'


'Get in.'


And in she climbed.


There are one or two things left to write.


That pill went down easily enough. I have about an hour. All told.For now I feel great luxury. I was seven when I learned the facts oflife. I learned the facts of death even earlier. Not since then, I realize,not once, have I felt such certainty that the world will keep on goingfor another sixty minutes.


She outwrote me. Her story worked. And mine didn't. There'sreally nothing more to say. Always me: from the first moment in the Black Cross she looked my way with eyes of recognition. She knewthat she had found him: her murderer. 1 wonder if she knew there'd be a queue . . . 'I've found him. On the Portobello Road, in a placecalled the Black Cross, I found him.' Imagination failed me. And allelse. I should have understood that a cross has four points. Not three.


I've just taken a casual glance at the beginning - who knows, witha little work, it might somehow accommodate a new ending. Andwhat do I see? Chapter 1: The Murderer. 'Keith Talent was a badguy . . . You might even say that he was the worst guy.' No. I was the worst guy. I was the worst and last beast. Nicola destroyed my book.She must have felt a vandal's pleasure. Of course, I could have letGuy go ahead and settled for the 'surprise' ending. But she knew Iwouldn't. Flatteringly, she knew I wasn't quite unregenerate. Sheknew I wouldn't find it worth saving, this wicked thing, this wicked book I tried to write, plagiarized from real life.


Originally I'd planned to do a final chapter, in the old style: Where Are They Now? It hardly seems appropriate. But still, in life's book alittle I can read. Pale Guy will go home, on his hands and knees. Wemade a deal. Keith's fate is of course more uncertain — Keith, with hiscultured skills, his educated release. But he will be linked to Guy,through the child. I made Guy swear. To dowhat's right. In the end,he delegated cruelty. I, kindness, or paternalism, or money. It was thebest I could do.


And Nicola. Necropolitan Nicola, in her crimson shoes. PoorNicola - she was socold. It made it easier: even that she planned. 'I'm so cold,' she kept saying. 'I'm so cold.' And: 'Please. It's all right to doit...It's all right.' And after the first blow she gave a moan ofvisceral assent, as if at last she was beginning to get warm.


Yesterday, in the hour before dawn and her arrival, I had aprophetic dream. I know it was prophetic because it's now cometrue. Yesterday I dreamt I ate my teeth.That's what murder feels like. I failed, in art and love. I wonder if there's time to wash all this bloodoff my hands.


Endpapers


Letter to Mark Asprey


You return, I fear, to a scene of some confusion. I will be lying onyour bed, quite neatly, I hope, eyes open to the mirrored ceiling, butwith a stoical smile on my face. In the car on the ledge, under a sheet, lies another body, rather less peacefully composed.


On your desk in the study you will find a full confession. That's all it is now. Perhaps it is also an elegy to the memory of an unfortunatelady, whom you knew. But I can't justify any of it and am indifferentto its destiny. I die intestate, and without close family. Be my literaryexecutor: throw everything out. If an American publisher called Missy Harter makes inquiries, do me the courtesy of delivering afinal message. Send her my love.


Even the dream tenant should always sign off by apologizing forthe mess — the confusions, the violations, the unwanted fingerprints.This I do. You will encounter the usual pitiful vestiges of anexistence. The usual mess. I'm sorry I'm not around to help you put everything into shape.


PS: If you have an hour or two, you might care to look at a little something I left on the drawing-room table: a brief critique of theDrama.


PPS: You didn't set me up. Did you?Letter to Kim Talent


I find I am thinking of the words of the exemplary War Poet: 'It seemed that out of battle I escaped . ..' The poem is a vision or apremonition of death (accurate, alas: his death was days away), in which the war poet - himself a forced collision, himself a strangemeeting-joins his counterpart, his semblance, from the other side: 'Iam the enemy you killed, my friend:


I knew you in this dark: for so you frownedYesterday 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 strangecollision. He was young; and the young aren't meant — the youngaren't scheduled - to understand death. But he understood.


Also I am haunted by the speech of surrender of the Indian ChiefJoseph, leader of the NezPercй:subjugated, and then defeated inbattle (and then routinely dispossessed):


I am tired of fighting...I want to have time to look for mychildren and see how many I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead . . . From where the sun now stands, I will fightno more forever.


Even when we don't have any, we all want time to do this, time tolook for our children and see how many we can find. With fingers alloily from being rubbed together, in ingratiation, vigil, glee, fear,nerves, I cling to certain hopes: hopes of you. I hope that you are withyour mother and that you two are provided for. I hope your father isaround 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: Isaw my little brother dead. I know from the look on his face thatnothing can survive the death of the body. Nothing can survive a devastation so thorough. Children survive their parents. Works ofart survive their makers. I failed, in art and love. Nevertheless, I askyou 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 usedeverybody, 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'tcare.


Dawn is coming. Today, I think, the sun will start to climb a littlehigher 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 bycity 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 juston the edge of the possible. And things create impressions on babies.It really is the case. Everything created impressions on you. The exactcrenellations of a carpet on your thigh; the afterglow of myfingerprints on your shoulders; the faithful representation of the gripof your clothes. A bit of sock elastic could turn sections of your calvesinto Roman pillars. Not to mention hurts, like the bevel of somepiece of furniture, clearly gauged on your responsive brow.


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


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