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

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

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

Oh, and nuclear weapons: those dinosaurs.

The supernova stuff strikes me as a pure definition 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 in red, saying 186,287.

And let's not forget the Second Coming, also awaited, in quiet confidence. 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 I 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, in any kind of narrative, than someone vacillating oyer something you know they're going to do. I keep noticing it in the trash 1 watch and read. Will the spy come out of retirement for one last big mission. Will the gangster heed his wife's warnings or go for the clinching bank job. It's a nightmare sitting through that stuff. It's dead, dead.'

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

'Oh yes. Will the priest succumb to the Jezebel? Will the gypsy seduce the virgin? These are questions that deserve question marks. They are the story. With the other stuff there's no story until they're out of the way.'

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

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

Nicola was sitting opposite me, by the table and the telephone, in her white dressing-gown. The dressing-gown had been washed recently, and now it was the elderly wicker chair that looked used and intimate and Nicola-steeped. She folded her legs up beneath her.

She had sat curled that way for many, many hours of her life here: introspections, piercing boredoms, incensed outwaitings. But with 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 I had to say this too. For a moment 1 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 on the first date. The time he followed me home I could have managed that. But what do you think I'm after? A "senseless killing"? Anyway events are moving now. I just let the next thing happen.'

'Oh yeah. Nicola the determinist. "The next thing." Well how's it going 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 you all this?'

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

She did a fish mouth, and her eyes lengthened. 'Get you. Aren't you the one.'

I raised a hand.

'That isn't why,' she said. 'I'll tell you why.' She looked around the room 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 miles an 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 speedo on 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 goes a wheel. Only one outcome.

Bury my bones in London Fields. Where I was raised. That's where I 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

enough of her childhood had been spent in church to give Nicola an interest in religion.

She was interested in religion, in a way. (And it's a rare goodtime girl who waives all hope of Sugardaddy.) Nicola was certainly mighty keen on blasphemy. And so she often found herself imagining that she was going out with God.

Or not going out with Him — not any more. He had slept with her once, and once only: she did that to show Him what he would be missing for ever and ever. In bed Nicola had made Him do the act of doubledarkness: the doublebeast with only one back. Then nevei again. God cried in the street outside her apartment. He telephoned and telepathized. He followed her everywhere, His gaze imparting that fancy blue nimbus. God got Shakespeare and Dante working as a team to write her poems. He hired Parthenope, Ligeia and Leucosia to sing 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 All, Napoleon, Hemingway, the great Schwarzenegger, Burton Else. Preposterous flowers materialized on the stairs. Exhaustedly she flushed the innumerable diamonds down the toilet. God knew that she had always wanted her breasts to be very slightly larger and infinitesimally further apart: he offered to arrange it. He wanted to marry her and have her come and live at His place: in heaven. All this could be achieved at the speed of light. God said He would fix it so lived for ever.

Nicola told Him to get lost.

Of course, there was another man in her life. His name was the Devil. Nicola didn't see nearly as much of the Devil as - in a perfect world - she would have liked. Sometimes, when the mood took him, he called her late and got her round to his soul club after hours, and abused 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 the Devil in the end. Nicola only did it because it was good fun and it made 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 ecstatic volubility, with hearts tickling to hear and to tell, to know everything, to reveal everything, the shared reverence for the other's otherness, a feeling of solitude radiantly snapped by full contact - all that? Well, such interactions of energy are tiring enough when you're in love, or think you are. But let Nicola trumpet the assurance that they're much more tiring when you're not: when you're just pretending.

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 hugged her fur coat to her body (the day was helpfully cold) and spoke about her spiritual struggles at the convent, it was only the thought of the spangled garter-belt and cathouse panties, the riot of underwear she wore beneath, that prevented Nicola from flopping back on the bench with her feet apart and saying, 'Oh, I can't bear this stuff. I'm lying. Never mind." She had to maintain an actress's discipline: it was like the fifteenth rehearsal with some dud leading man who kept on flubbing his lines. Time and again Nicola nearly corpsed. Yes: it'll be all right on the night. She played for time (taking little rests) by staring in saintly silence at the water: the toy galleon with black sails, in whose wake... And when Guy was in full voice - on the Third World, 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 months ago. She would have seduced him that afternoon and sent him back to his wife with a graphic lovebite on either buttock. Suddenly he was talking about the subsidizing of thermal underwear for the elderly in winter; and Nicola suddenly felt she had done enough.

As they parted on the Bayswatcr 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 into bed still wearing her high heels. When she awoke around midnight she bathed and then compulsively cooked herself a bushel of pasta and sat eating it and watching television and drinking nearly two bottles 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 tomorrow lunchtime,' he said, 'if you still can and want to?... The Wallace Collection - do you know it? Off Baker Street. It's always soothing, I find. Or the Soane Museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields. Extraordinary little place, rather melancholy, but in a pleasant kind of way. Or we could 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. She simply named a restaurant of world-historical costliness in St James'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 tie spoke to Nicola of an insufficiently examined self, or an insufficiently critical 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. The name just popped out.' Speaking sideways Nicola ordered a Tanqueray 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. 7 am. As you've gathered 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 enjoy our talk in the park.' 'I think I went on a bit.'

'No. No. In the modern world it's not often... But today I must be 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 of municipal mortification) Nicola had befriended a little Cambodian girl - beautiful, abandoned, with hurt four-lidded eyes. Like partners in a concentration camp where the enemy wasn't cold or hunger or outright torture but lovelessness, lovelessness, they kept each other going — indeed, the tiny pals exalted themselves with the intensity of their secret and their bond. When she was twelve Nicola went on to the 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 the headmaster'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 or Elastoplast found its way through to her. Mother and child were variously sighted in a refugee camp in Thailand, a resettlement facility 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. 1 feel so desperately incomplete without her. I think that's why I never... but that's another story. I must bring them back. I'll never feel whole until 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 debj.' She smiled fondly. 'Little Boy was always known simply as Little Boy, though he's almost a man now. Her name is En Lah Gai. I called her Enola. Enola Gay.'

She checked Guy's face. Nothing. And a little knowledge might have helped him here. A little knowledge might even have saved him... With a crisp fingertip Nicola directed the waiter to replenish her glass with the Chardonnay she had picked. She watched Guy's uplifted face as it filled with purpose.

Then she squeezed lemon on to her eleventh oyster, and waited before adding the Tabasco. It flinched 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. How romantic. Well done.'

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

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

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

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

Additional wine, and two glasses of Calvados, had got her through a deadly hour during which Guy, in innocent and meandering style, had sought to convey certain information about his heart: that it was a good one; that it was in the right place; that it would seem to belong to another; and that it was true. The alcohol and the conversation combined to assist Nicola in her next project, which was to start crying. 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 that her one sure path to tears lay through memories of irritation and above 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 to

Guy distractedly, her head was full of missing buttons, passport queues, 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 her seat. 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 to visit on him. But this was how it was, when (among other consider­ations) you had really got to the end of men.

Paradoxically, or at any rate surprisingly, Nicola Six disapproved of bikinis. She execrated bikinis. For twenty years and all over the world she had been ricking necks on fashionable beaches: the double doubletake. A modern beuty in a racing one-piece? The men stared, and so did the women. The girl's belly, though enviably contoured, for some reason had no interest in being seen. Ditto the breasts (for toplessness, too, she held in contempt). Women some­times thoughtfully covered themselves for a while after Nicola strode by. Here was a person who didn't want her body familiar­ized. Looking down at their own torsos, bared alike to sun and eyes, the women resentfully sensed this prideful gamble. And the men: they knew that if they ever magicked themselves into the hotel room, the quiet villa, the cabin, the changing-hut, they would see something 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 of vulgarity (and how the lines demarcated the godlike thorax, making polyps of the breasts); nevertheless, a bikini was what she was wearing when Keith Talent jacked himself out on to the roof that day, and stood there blinking in the blaze... She had bought it that morning; and it was exceptionally vulgar, Nicola's bikini, cutely skimpy with cutaway thighs, and bright white against her Persian flesh. At first, Keith clearly thought - as he was meant to -that she was sunbathing in her underwear: he looked away for a moment, 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 vou know the etymology of bikini, 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 weapons tests in 1946 and 1954. First, atomic bombs. Then, in the Fifties, the Super: the hydrogen bomb.' She laughed ruefully, and continued: 'I still don't see how this inevitably leads to a "scanty two-piece beach garment 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 bikini and what it framed. She rightly imagined that he was doing likewise. The interproximate breasts, concavities of throat and belly, white pyramid, the racing legs. Keith did not know, could not have guessed, 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 the beholder. Which is fun for the beholder; but what about the owner, the tenant? Nicola wondered whether she'd ever had a minute's pleasure from it. Even at sixteen, when you're excitedly realizing what you've got (and imagining it will last for ever), you're still noticing what you haven't got, and will never get. Beauty's hand is ever at its lips, bidding adieu. Yes, but bidding adieu in the mirror.

'Bang!'said Keith.

'What American men did there - one of the greatest crimes in

human history. If you got the world's most talented shits and cruelty experts together, they couldn't come up with anything worse than Bikini. And how do we commemorate the crime, Keith?' She indicated the two small pieces of her two-piece. 'Certain women go about wearing this trash. It's very twentieth-century, don't you

think?'

'Yeah. Diabolical.'

'You know those coral lagoons will be contaminated for hundreds

of years?'

Keith shrugged. 'Chronic, innit.'

'... You're looking very pleased with yourself, Keith,' said Nicola - affectionately, as it might be. 'And that's quite an outfit.' 'Yeah well I'm on a roil,' he said. 'I'm playing tonight.' His head

Dropped 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 oozing confidence.'

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 responded with a certain rough eloquence.

i know the knockers take the piss, but there's considerable prestige in the sport these days. Considerable. The final's televised. If I taste victory there I go on to play Kim Twemlow, the world number one, 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 -1 got all your stuff fixed, uh, Nicola. It come out a bit dear in che end.' He took the invoice — or the piece of paper with figures written on 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 their shoulders almost touching they looked out over the steamy roof-scape, life's top floor, its attic or maid's room, with washing, flower boxes, skylights and groundsheets, huts and tents and sleeping-bags, and then the lone steeple of the tower block, like the severed leg of a titanic robot.

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

'Like birds playing in a pool, Keith?"

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

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

They entered a world of blackness, and moved heavily through the heat from room to room. One by one they activated coffee-grinder, vacuum-trleaner, flat-iron. All worked — all were renewed.

All would break down again, of course, as they both knew, within a few hours. For the backroom boys at GoodFicks were destiny artists, were reality tinkerers, also, in a way, bending the future to serve theit own ends.

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

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

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

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

'Children?'

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

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

'Yeah. Absolutely.'

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

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

'All right,' she said sternly. 'Unimaginable treats await you, Keith. Forget about everything you've had before.

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

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

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

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

'Yeah.'

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

'Uh... yeah.'

'Here.'

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

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

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

When she arranged this meeting with Guy, over the telephone, Nicola stressed the need for commando or bank-caper synchrony ('Unpunctuality throws me utterly. It's tiresome, I know. The orphanage, perhaps... but this didn't stop her keeping him waiting for a good fifteen minutes ('Please sit down!' she called from the bedroom, I do apologize'). She needed fifteen minutes. One to envelope her bikini in a plain white cotton dress. Another to give the bedclothes a fantastic worrying. What was the delightful phrase in Lolita: the guilty disarray of hotel linen suggesting an ex-convict's saturnalia with a couple of fat old whores? The rest of the time Nicola needed for makeup. Out came the actress palette; on went the actress bulbs. A profound and turbulent postcoital flush was the effect she was after. She even cobbled together the imprint of a punch

or a hefty slap on her right cheekbone. (This was surely going too far; but then that was the idea, wasn't it, to go too far?) Her hair she vigorously tousled. It was ironic, sweetly ironic: because in fifteen minutes she could have straightened hair and bedding, had they needed straightening, and powderpuffed away the very plumes and blotches with which she now lewdly and firily daubed her face. But that's art. Always the simulacrum, never the real thing. That's art.

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

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

'Fairly interested,' said Nicola.

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

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

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

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

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

Guy's face now showed concern. 'He had a book with him,' he murmured to himself. He heard her exhale, and added, 'I'm sorry. You're tired. And my news isn't terribly encouraging. Would you rather 1 came back another time?'

Waving a hand at him she flopped on to the sofa. She didn't listen fifteen minutes (no berk protocols here) on how it went with Kath the other night. On top of all this he makes no secret of his heroics in the handjob realm. And on his diet I'm amazed he even gets around.

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

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

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

The moment I set eyes on him I thought Keith Talent was an anachronistic kind of character. 1 thought that time and inflation and the new demographics would have mopped him up by now or sent him somewhere else: to the North, or at least to the suburbs. Not so. The streets are full of jokers, dodgers, jack-the-lads and willie-the-dips - whole crews of Keiths... Of course, hardly any of them will make it, will win through to the Cavalier, the printed brochure, the dreams of darts. They will stay out there on the street until whenever, in dumb hats and seam-busted zootsuits, looking fantastically greedy and devious, and fooling no one.

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

Only force fields.

Keith is anachronistic, too, in this matter of his libido. He's not in ^N the satyromaniac league (and the satyromaniacs, I guess, will always /be with us). He's an obsessional tailchaser of the type that was meant to have died out years ago. He drools and slurps at everything remotely bim-like on the street; he regales the entire pub with the things he does to Analiese Furnish and Trish Shirt; he'll even give you

To the movies with Lizzvboo Broadener. Lizzvboo: Hope's little sister, taller, blonder, rounder faced, fuller figured. Lizzyboo's breasts are a family joke. Ah, those family jokes. Ah, those secondary sexual characteristics - those SSCs! This is the big question about

.Lizzyboo's breasts: where did they come from? No other Broadener, jjast or present, has got Lizzyboo's breasts. Hope hasn't got Lizzyboo's breasts. She makes do with Hope's instead, which are a whole lot smaller. It was felt (the family joke continues) that Marmaduke might give Hope Lizzyboo's breasts, or at least make Hope's bigger. But there's Marmaduke for you — disobliging to the last. When Marmaduke was done with Hope's breasts, they were mauled and drained and chewed and tugged all right, but no bigger. A lot sorer 1- but no bigger. And there's childless Lizzyboo (thirty-one, and just starting to worry) with her beautiful twins. It's very hot still, and she wears just a sleeveless T-shirt on the way to the flick. The clear lineaments of her embarrassing perfection spread agony on

.the street. The guys can't take it. She makes Keiths of us all - or everyone except me, everyone except the man at her side, who doesn't dare look. The SSCs on her. Will you look at those SSCs.

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

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

She likes me. She digs me. Why? 1 have one or two ideas on this. Mainly she likes me because Hope does too. 1 detect considerable sexual influence, or sexual plagiarism, between these sisters. Lizzy-boo may be the kind of girl who isn't quite sure who she likes until prompted by a larger approval. I felt this approval, even as we walked to the movie, the image of Guy and Hope looming in the air behind us (smiling encouragingly, her hand resting on his shoulder), like parents. Secondly, of course, I am generally retiring with the ladies, and this has a lulling effect, especially on very pretty blondes with big SSCs, accustomed as they are to living in a garrison of hard-on and hairtrigger. I have never screwed around (why not, God damn it?) and I have never minded not screwing around (until now), and I think it shows. I'm certainly unlikely to have any of those unpleasant diseases. Thirdly - or maybe this is just point 2(b) - I'm not interested. Which is always a come-on. Genuine lack of interest is bound to work in your favour. And when you're dying (I find), you really have no problem playing it cool.

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

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

*

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

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 lousy novel 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. Talent himself is rarely at home when I call. He is out cheating. He is at the Black Cross. He is in his garage, in his cave of darts. When I do run into him on these occasions he wears a hostile leer. Kath blinks up at me 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 way of making you forget what the other stuff is like, which is probably just as well, from misery's point of view, or you wouldn't put up with it. 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 me wordlessly at the door).

'Oh, Sam.' She stood up - she paused. The aftermath of Keith's heavy breakfast still crowded the small table (which in turn filled the small kitchen): fat mug of cold tea, grease-furrowed plate, V-sign of cigarette butts in the dollop of brown sauce. Crazily Kath surveyed all 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 to me very quickly. I smoothtalked her into it. She came across. I have this 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 and drunks. 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 - now this is not a popular kind of guy. In slum-and-plutocrat Great Britain, so close to the millennium, he isn't popular, he is doubly unpopular; no one's behind him. Sentences reflect this. It's not worth it, 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 powerof the baby'sface — the power. It is knit tight, like a tautly prominent navel, chockful of possibilities, tumescent with potentiae, as if the million things that could happen to her, the essences of the million Kims there might one day be out there, are concentrated in this powerful face... But I wonder. Nicola's face is powerful too. The very thinness of the skin that coats her closed eyes is powerful. Perhaps with her the effect is reversed or diametrical. Because Nicola's face, Nicola's life, contains only one future, fully shaped, fully designed, toward which she now moves at steadily climbing speed.

So the municipal gardens, the harijan flowers, the pastel totems of the playground (how do we interpret them?), the untouchable youths in their spikes, the meteorology of the sky, the casteless old wedged into benches, and the baby with her sweet breath and faceted roundnesses, as tender as an eyeball. You wouldn't want to touch her. You wouldn't want anything to touch her.

Дата добавления: 2015-09-29