'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 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. Til 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
e
nough 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 Sugar-daddy.) 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 never 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 AH, 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 she 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 Devi! 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 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 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 lunch time,' 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.'/ 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. I 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 debt.' 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 flatteringly 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 you 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 roll,' 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 — I got all your stuff fixed, uh, Nicola. It come out a bit dear in the 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.