Keith and Clive made their way down the Portobello Road. As they passed Mecca, Keith slowed to a halt. Then he straightened his shoulders, and walked on. He wasn't going in there. No way. He wasn't going in there because he didn't have any money - because he had already been in there. A honk sounded: Thelonius flashing past, the girl's blonde hair scrabbling at the half-open side window. Keith waved, feeling the asceticism of him who strives along a quieter road, to a far greater prize. The spade lifestyle, though, he thought, as he turned down Elgin Crescent — it made a lot of good sense. Especially the way they dealt with their birds. When they took out their wallets and showed you their photos: after the blondes, after all the Pointer Sisters and Marvellettes and Supremes, there'd be one black bird with buck teeth and young eyes. And you'd say, 'That your cousin or something then, Wes?' And they'd shake their heads (they took your point) and say: 'Babymamma.' You see, that was the bird they had babies 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 a fortnight, on Giro day. Then you're back in the pub with the blonde and the child benefit. Now even the flashest white bloke didn't seem to be able to swing that. If Keith had been inclined to think in Darwinian terms, he might have said to himself that the additional blondes were pure gravy for the brothers, because they kept the black bird-pool high. Nevertheless, he understood, and nodded slowly. Ideal arrangement. Brilliant, really. And that way you got the enjoyment of having children (that lovely warm glow of pride) without them ever being around. Stay well clear, until they're older: football. No more nappies. When was that ? At two ? At nine ? The spades had their own traditions. Others, others of us chose to accept and duly shoulder our responsibilities. White man's burden. Civilization as such. His mood steeply worsening, Keith shoved himself through the CostCheck doors, gave the nod to Basim, leaned through the cage and borrowed a half 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 was when. 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 about time. Time was everywhere present, was massively operational, in the life Keith moved through. He saw how it strafed people (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 fresh new face - and after half a season it looked like an old one. In common with Leo Tolstoy, Keith Talent thought of time as moving past 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 what time was doing. Keith, who had gone through his midlife crisis at the age 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 Pepsi Hoolihan as she flitted like a butterfly from pub to pub along the Portobello 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 the back 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 this now. 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 change tack when she was getting on in years. You go where you're appreciated, and black blokes did love blondes. For a while, anyway. And then they got old even faster. A shocking sight, today, Pepsi Hoolihan in the Black Cross, whining for drinks from the dudes round the pool table with whiskers coming out of her ears. I mean, at twenty-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 in return 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 - always have been), if she had a bit of sense and looked after herself, she might 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 marches on. 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 sit down at the table and read your paper. I'll make you a nice spicy Bullshot. Believe me, it's the best thing.'
Keith did what he was told, pausing, as he sat, to wipe a tear from his eye, a tear of gratitude perhaps. On the other hand, the weather had turned again, and everyone's eyes were smarting in the dry mineral wind, a wind speckled with dust and spore, with invisible lamentation. A log fire, Keith noted, burned confidently in the hearth. Coming up the stairs Keith had been uneasily aware that he had nothing in his hands, no prop, no marker; his fingers missed the feel 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 fashion magazines. Elle. Women in Love. He looked up coolly every now and 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 was wearing 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 interesting drink near his bunched right hand. Then he raised his head. But she had moved past his back and was now standing in quarter-profile by the 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 the Bible said .. .'
Lovely moment really, he thought. I ought to savour it. She has a way of slowing everything down. She doesn't just plonk herself on a chair, like some. Yack yack yack. She lets you get your bearings. Why don't more birds do that? So fucking important to a man. Look at her 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 mind slid off down a gleaming arcade of rich mirrors, black velvet, ticking heels, stockinged ankles. The funny thing is, the really funny thing is: soon, one of these days (okay: her own speed), the woman over there is going to be sitting on the couch over there, by the TV, sitting on my lap, well fucked, and watching the darts.
'I've been watching the darts', she said,'— on television. Tell me something, Keith. Why do all the players drink lager? Only lager?'
'Intelligent question. Good talking point. It's like this. Your top darter is travelling the land, from pub to pub. Now beers vary. Some of them local brews, couple pints and you're well pissed. But lager . . .'
'Yes?'
'But lager's kegged. It's kegged. Standard. You know what you're getting. Now the darter has to drink. Has to. To loosen the throwing arm. Part of his job. But within reason. You know like you set yourself a limit. Like ten pints. Pacing it out over an evening.'
'I see.'
'Kegged. You know what you're getting.'
As a talking point, the part played by lager in the working life of a top darter seemed to be close to exhaustion. Bu
t then the telephone 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 talk to 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 his watery gaze strained over the clamp of his hand. Goes on a bit. And I don't like the sound of this Lawrence she'll be looking at with new eyes. Brush-off innit, he thought, with sadness, with puzzlement, even with anger. Jesus, might as well be off out of here and get to work. Hark at her.
'... how absolutely and unconditionally I mean that, I'll never forget you. Think of me sometimes. Goodbye.’
Nicola turned to Keith and slowly kissed the vertical forefinger she had raised to her lips.
He held silence until the receiver went down. Then he coughed long and heavingly. When Keith's vision cleared Nicola was standing there with her open and expectant face.
Lost for words, Keith said, 'Shame. So it didn't work out.' He coughed again, rather less searchingly, and added, 'All over, is it?'
'To tell you the truth, Keith, it hasn't really begun. For him the idea is 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 really seriously good news. She's a fucking miracle. Where she been all my life?
'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 own speed. Not very long at all. And really quite a lot of money.'
'Beluga,' said Keith. He nodded sideways at the telephone and went on admiringly, 'You're quite a little actress, aren't you Nick?'
'Nicola. Oh, literally so, Keith. Come and sit here. There's something I want to show you.'
It was all electrifying, every second of it. Every frame of it. Keith watched the screen in a seizure of fascination. In fact he was almost sickened by this collision or swirl of vying realities: the woman on the couch whose hair he could smell, and the girl inside the television, the girl on the tape. It might have overloaded him entirely if the electric 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 Nicola had aged, or aged in the sense he knew, become gruesomely witchified, like Pepsi, or just faded, nearly faded from sight, like Kath. 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 actually Cleopatra but one of her handmaidens, in Shakespeare. Then the finale: the pre-credits sequence of a feature film (her debut, her swansong), a striptease in the back room of a gentleman's club full of sweating young stockbrokers, and Nicola up on a table wearing a metal showercap and, at first, the usual seven veils, dancing with minimal movements but with fierce address of eyes and mouth until, just before she vanished in the smoke and the shadow, you saw all her 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 but because he thought she would want to hear it, 'you haven't changed a bit.'
'Oh I'm much 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't overdo 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. She was better. When you see photos and that of them young, you think they're going to be as good as they are now, only newer. But it wasn't like that, not with Nick. Only the eyes, only the pupils, looked as though they'd been around. What was it ? Class skirt — and some foreign skirt too — they needed time for the flesh to get interesting. They pour oil on themselves. Massage. TV. Idle rich innit. . . Class skirt, he thought: but she wasn't wearing a skirt. Them baggy trousers (not cheap), so puffy there you had 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 me something. To keep me warm at night. Show me you care.'
'Nicola. Of course,' she said, and leant forward, and showed him she 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, was a poster from the long run at Brighton, Nicola full length in tunic and black tights with her hair up, hands on hips and looking over her shoulder, 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 books in Keith Talent's apartment. There weren't many books in his garage, either. But there were some.
There were six: the A - D, the E - K, the L - R, the S - Z (the modern cheat being heavily and exasperatedly reliant on the telephone), Darts: Master the Discipline, and a red pad which had no title apart from Students Note Book - Ref. 138 - Punched for filing and which, perhaps, could be notionally christened A Darter's Diary or, more simply, The Keith Talent Story. Here it was that Keith logged 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 baord religiously. You can have all the power in the world but its no good if you can not finish.
Or:
Tedn Tendnen Keep drifting to the left on the third dart, all them fuckign treble fives.
Rereading this last gobbet, Keith made the tsuh sound. He reached for his dart-shaped biro and crossed out fuckign. Letting out a brief grunt of satisfaction, and dotting the i with a flourish, he wrote in fucking. Keith wiped a tear from his eye: he was in a strange mood.
The conversation with Guy Clinch, completed earlier that day in the Black Cross, had developed naturally enough. Keith could at least 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. 'You don't look too clever.'
'Yes I know.’
Keith peered closer with a wary sneer. 'No. You definitely do not look 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 Guy wasn't rubbing his hands together and grinning his head off all the hours there were. But oh no: not him. Keith was habitually impatient with Guy's habitual expression, one of temporary and precarious serenity, the face raised and slightly tilted, and the eyes wanly blinking. Today, though, his head was down and he seemed to have lost his colour and his money glow. Like every other male Caucasian in the pub, Guy was being shot in black and white. He was war footage, like everybody else.
'It must be going round,' said Keith. 'I tell you who else ain't in the best of health: that Nicola.'
Guy's head dropped another inch.
'Yeah. I went round there. You know I got all that stuff mended for her? Well they all went wrong again, you know, like they do.' This was true enough; but when Keith quietly offered to go another mile with GoodFicks, Nicola just shrugged and said it wasn't worth it. 'Anyway she's definitely under the weather. Know what it looked like 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 that Pepsi 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 at her now. She looks like fucking Nosferatu. Cheer up, pal. Here. I got one for you.'
And then, after Guy had crept off and Keith was standing there thinking how nice and simple life could be sometimes, God and Pongo took him aside and told him, in accents of grim apology, about the visit to the Black Cross of Kirk Stockist, Lee Crook and Ashley Royle . . .
This news shouldn't have surprised Keith, and it didn't surprise him. It merely frightened him a very great deal. Ah, money, always the money. As noted earlier, Keith was not in the healthiest shape, financially. His position as regards rent, rates, utilities, police fines and Compensations, hire purchase, and so on and so forth, was an inch from disaster. But it was always an inch from disaster ... In the garage there Keith's dusty face hardened as he spat on to the floor and reached for the bottle of stolen vodka. This was the thing: he had been borrowing money on the street, more particularly on Paradine Street, in the East End. He had been borrowing money from a loanshark called Kirk Stockist. Unable to repay Kirk Stockist, he needed money for the heavy interest—the vig, the vig, the vertiginous vigesimal. To pay the vig, he had been borrowing money from another 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 to pay the vig on the loan from Lee Crook. Through it all Keith had hoped and expected everything to come good at Mecca. And it hadn't. And nothing else had either. His own business interests had recently unravelled in a chaos of no-shows on the part of other cheats - catastrophic welshings and skankings that caused low whistles even among Keith's acquaintance, among poolroom hoodlums, touchy car thieves, embittered granny-jumpers. Now Keith thought venomously of his betrayal at the hands of that fucking old fraud Lady 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 that Lady B's psychopathic boiler had eventually blown its top; the roof of the house looked like Reactor No. 4 at Chernobyl - or Reactor No. 6, at Thierry. Oh, how Keith longed to forget his cares and throw himself into his darts! Darts it was that had caused him to neglect his cheating: the hours of practice, and also the days of celebration, when that practice bore fruit at the oché. And there was Nicola: time-consuming too in her way, and promising uncertain rewards. Old Nick: does it at her own speed like. Keith's jaw dropped open affectionately as he thought of their session in front of the 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. . .