London Fields, Page 3

  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. The car 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. And then, incredibly (even Nicola was consternated), they showed live film of the scattered wreckage, and the bodybags lined up on fields of France. In the VIP Lounge there were scenes of protest and violent rejection. One old man kept distractedly offering money to a uniformed 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 this time, and had Jong left home. Potently, magically, uncontrollably attractive, Nicola was not yet beautiful. But already she was an ill wind, blowing no good.

  Considered more generally - when you looked at the human wreckage she left in her slipstream, the nervous collapses, the shattered careers, the suicide bids, the blighted marriages (and rottener 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. The typical Nicola romance would end, near the doorway of her attic flat, with the man of the moment sprinting down the passage, his trousers round his knees, a ripped jacket thrown over his ripped shirt, and hotly followed by Nicola herself (now in a nightdress, now in underwear, now naked beneath a half-furled towel), either to speed him on his way with a blood libel and a skilfully hurled ashtray, or else 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 leave at 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, or pressing an ice-cube to her lip (or a lump of meat to her eye), Nicola would look at herself in the mirror, would look at what remained and think how strange — how strange, that she had been right all along. 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 of mornings a month, stiff with pride, deafened with aspirin (and reckless with Bloody Marys), Nicola would adumbrate serious reform: for example, only two colossal cocktails before dinner, a broad maximum of half a bottle of wine with her meal, and then just the one whisky or digestíf before bedtime. She would frequently stick to the new regime right up to and certainly including the whisky or digestif before bedtime the following day. By then, bedtime looked a long way off. There was always a lot of shouting and fistfighting to do before bedtime. And what about after bedtime, or after the first bedtime, with several bouts of one thing or the other still to go? So she always failed. She could see herself failing (there she was, clearly failing), and so she failed. Did Nicola Six drink alone? Yes, she drank alone. You bet. And why did she drink alone? Because she was alone. And she was alone, now, at night, more than formerly. What could never be endured, it turned out, was the last swathe of time before sleep came, the path from larger day to huger night, a little death when the mind was still alive and fluttering. Thus the glass banged down on the round table; the supposedly odourless ashtray gave its last 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 existed in the future was now growing in size as she moved forward to confront or greet it. Where would she see the murderer, where would she find him — in the park, the library, in the sad café, or walking past her in the street half-naked with a plank over his shoulder? The murder had a place, and a date, even a time: some minutes after midnight, on her thirty-fifth birthday. Nicola would click through the darkness of the dead-end street. Then the car, the grunt of its brakes, the door swinging open and the murderer (his face in shadow, 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 would she summon him? On the important morning she awoke wet with the usual nightmares. She went straight to her bath and lay there for a long time, round-eyed, with her hair pinned up. On important days she always felt herself to be the object of scrutiny, lewd and furious scrutiny. 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 reaching for the towel. Then she stood naked in the middle of the warm room. Her mouth was full, and unusually wide. Her mother had always said 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 the cheeks of the pornographic clowngirl would be painted white, whiter than the teeth. Nicola's face was always dark, and her teeth had a shadowy lustre, slanting inwards, as if to balance the breadth of the lips, or just through the suction of the devouring soul. Her eyes changed colour readily, eagerly, in different lights, but their firm state was a vehement green. She had this idea about the death of love. . .

  The funeral, the cremation she was due to attend that day was not a significant one. Nicola Six, who hardly knew or remembered the dead woman, had been obliged to put in a tedious half an hour on the telephone before she managed to get herself asked along. The dead woman 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 doing that. This was always the way with Nicola's more recent jobs, of which there had, for a while, been a fair number. She did the job, and then, after an escalating and finally overlapping series of late mornings, four-hour lunches, and early departures, she was consid­ered to have let everyone down (she wasn't there ever), and stopped going in. Nicola always knew when this moment had come, and chose that day to stop going in. The fact that Nicola knew things would 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 cocktail waitress, a telephonist, a croupier, a tourist operative, a model, a librarian, a kissogram girl, an archivist, and an actress. An actress — she had gone quite far with that. In her early twenties she had done rep, Royal Shakespeare, panto, a few television plays. She still had a trunk full of outfits and some videotapes (poor little rich girl, spry newlywed, naked houri maddeningly glimpsed through fogsmoke and veils). Acting was therapeutic, though dramatic roles confused her further. She was happiest with comedy, farce, custard-pie. The steadiest time of her adult life had been the year in Brighton, taking the lead in Jack and the Beanstalk. Playing a man seemed to help. She did Jack in short blazer and black tights, and with her hair up. A million 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 a theatrical memento, with its proscenium of brutal bulbs. Again she felt unfriendly eyes playing on her back. She went at her face like an artist, funeral colours, black, beige, blood red. Rising, she turned to the bed and reviewed her burial c
lothes and their unqualified sable. Even her elaborate underwear was black; even the clips on her garter belt 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 a moment. As she sat on the bed and tipped herself for the first black stocking, mind-body memories took her back to earlier ablutions, self-inspections, intimate preparations. A weekend out of town with some new man of the moment. Sitting in the car on the Friday afternoon, after the heavy lunch, as they dragged through Swiss Cottage to the motorway, or through the curling systems of Clapham 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 pressure in those best panties of hers, as it were the opposite of sex, like the stirring of a new hymen being pinkly formed. By the time they reached Totteridge or Tooting, Nicola was a virgin again. With what perplexity would she turn to the voluble disappointment, the babbling mistake, at her side with his hands on the wheel. After a glimpse of the trees in the dusk, a church, a dumbfounded sheep, Nicola would drink little at the hotel or the borrowed cottage and would sleep inviolate with her hands crossed over her heart like a saint. Sulky in slumber, the man of the moment would nevertheless awake to find that practically half his entire torso was inside Nicola's mouth; and Saturday lunchtime was always a debauch on every front. She hardly ever made it to Sunday. The weekend would end that evening: a stunned and wordless return down the motorway, a single-passenger minicab drive of ghostly length and costliness, or Nicola 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 the contemporary mould have some notion of these privileges and magics. During their pomp and optimum, however brief and relative, they occupy the erotic centre. Some feel lost, some surrounded or crowded, but there they are, in a China-sized woodland of teak-hard worship. And with Nicola Six the gender yearning was translated, was fantastically heightened: it came at her 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 home in case she called. Family men abandoned sick children to wait in the rain 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 (what was it with her?), the thing with her was that she had to receive this love and send it back in opposite 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 and drank two cups of black coffee and tasted with hunger the black tobacco of a French cigarette.

  In Golders Green she dismissed the taxi, and it pulled away for ever. She knew she'd get a lift back: you always did, from funerals. The sky above the redbrick lodge she entered was certainly dull enough 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. With no attempt at self-muffling she walked evenly to the back and slipped into an empty aisle, of which there was no shortage. The dead woman was not being populously farewelled. So this was all you got: the zooty sideburns and masturbator's pallor of an old Ted in a black suit, and the secular obsequies. Nicola longed equally for a cigarette and the lines you sometimes heard: a short time to live, full of misery. She was always especially stirred — this was why she came — by the spectacle of the bereaved elderly, particularly the women. The poor sheep, 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. Everything around her said school, the busts and plaques, and all the panels with their use of wood to quell and dampen. She hardly noticed the discreet trundling of the coffin, knowing it was empty and the body already vaporized by fire.

  Afterwards, in the Dispersal Area (a heavy blackbird was flying low and at an angle over the sopping grass), Nicola Six, looking and sounding very very good, explained to various interested parties who she was and what she was doing there. It solaced the old to see such piety in the relatively young. She reviewed the company with eyes of premonitory 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. Prettily Nicola said her goodbyes to him and his family, extending a gloved hand and receiving their thanks and praise for her attendance. She could hear them long after the car had pulled away, as she stood on the street readjusting her veil. Such a nice girl. So good of her to come. That skin! What hair! All the way back Nicola had been thinking how good a cigarette would look, white and round between her black fingers. But she was out of cigarettes, having almost gassed herself with tobacco on the way to Golders Green. She now progressed along the Portobello Road, and saw a pub whose name she took a liking to. 'tv and darts' was the further recommenda­tion of a painted sign on its door, to which a piece of cardboard had been affixed, saying, 'and pimball'. All the skies of London seemed to be gathering directly overhead, with thunder ready to drop its plunger . . .

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

  When at last she returned to the flat Nicola laid out her diaries on the round table. She made an entry, unusually crisp and detailed: the final entry. The notebooks she used were Italian, their covers embellished with Latin script. . . Now they had served their purpose and 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 .. . Tve found him. On the Portobello Road, in a place called the Black Cross, I found him.’

  I think it was Montherlant who said that happiness writes white: it doesn't show up on the page. We all know this. The letter with the foreign postmark that tells of good weather, pleasant food and comfortable accommodation isn't nearly as much fun to read, or to write, as the letter that tells of rotting chalets, dysentery and drizzle. 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 his third dart. And swore. The 32-gram tungsten trebler had pierced his big toe ... I thought I might be able to make a nice play on words here. 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 the background. Of course I had no idea what was taking shape in front of me. No idea? Well, an inkling, maybe. This moment in the public house, this pub moment, I'm going to have to keep on coming back to 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: he had to step forward 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, in the name of class. 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 in it. Crawling through the iodized shithouse that used to be England, people would still be brooding about accents and cocked pinkies, about maiden names and settee or sofa, about the proper way to eat a roach 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 never worried him. It would surprise Keith a lot if you told him it was class that poisoned his every waking moment. At any rate, subliminally or otherwise, it was class that made Keith enlist a third actor in his dealings with Nicola Six. It was class that made Keith enlist Guy Clinch. 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, same as the other two.

  I left the Black Cross around four. It was my third visit. 1 needed the company, hair-raising though much of it was, and I was doing all right there, under Keith's tutelage. He introduced me to the Polacks and 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 figure wedged into the doorway to the Gents; Keith then returned to the bar, took a pull of beer, and returned to kick some more. It transpired that the culprit had been messing with Dean's darts. After the ambulance came and went Keith calmed down. 'Not with a man's darts,' Keith kept saying almost tearfully, shaking his head. People were bringing him brandies. 'You don't... not with his darts.’