'Do they? Yes of course, Keith.'
'Bollinger. Veuve Clicquot. Oh uh. Tomorrow night.'
Tomorrow night? What fresh hell was this? Guy opened his eyes as wide as they would go.
Keith's cigarette-bearing hand suddenly froze on its way to his lips. 'You forgotten,' he said with full menace.
'No no. I'll be there.' Where? Judging by the energy that Keith continued to trap in his stunned visage, Guy felt that the date must be of high significance, like a visit to the dogs or to the shrine of some sainted bookie.
'Onna darts,' said Keith at last.
The VW Estate was wedged tight into its bay, with perhaps three inches spare at front and rear; it took Guy a long time to work the car out into the street, and Keith was alv/ays there, directing matters like a policeman, beckoning, fending off, beckoning again, and finally raising the great bent thumb.
Be no good at fighting, decided Keith as he climbed the stairs. A total banana. When a man was called on to look to his fists - and his feet, and his knees, and his teeth, and his chisel and his tyre-iron and his beer bottle - Guy'd crap it. Hopeless! Keith saw the likes of Guy all the time (on TV): jeered from the bedroom, snivelling in their tweed suits. Aboard the Titanic he'd be one of the blokes that dressed up as birds, whereas Keith would meet his fate like a man. What though the cocktail bar be at forty-five degrees, Keith would be down there propping it up, and murdering the Scotch. On the second-floor landing he paused to catch his breath. He lit a cigarette and slumped back against the window sill. By the time he had stopped coughing the cigarette was down to its filter. So he lit another one. He had nothing to blow his nose on but found an old tit magazine in his stolen bag and did what he could with that. Plus there was the curtain. Then he staggered on up the third flight, wondering what Lady Muck had in store.
'We all have a dirty little secret, don't we, Keith?'
'Yeah?' said Keith, with slow hauteur, as if he didn't have a dirty little secret. In fact, of course, Keith had lots of dirty little secrets. He had dirty little secrets galore. To make no more than a brisk selection, to name but a few: Trish Shirt and his father and his darting doubts and the crate of ripped knicker brochures in the garage and his failure in the eyes of Chick Purchase and Debbee Kensit's birth certificate framed on her bedroom wall and an unshakable conviction of worthlessness and Kath-and-the-flat.
'It has always been a disappointment to me, a bitter disappointment, Keith, that literature — that art — has failed to own up to it. To the dirty little secret. Which is, of course . . .'
'That ain't no secret. I'm at it all the -'
'Oh, there's Larkin's "Love again: wanking at ten past three" and a few bursts of confessionalism from the Americans. But surely this is the responsibility of the novelist, who works with the quotidian, who must become the whole of boredom, among the just be just, among the filthy filthy too, Keith.'
'Yeah,' said Keith absently. 'Same difference.’
'You'd think that the twentieth century, unfastidious enough in every other respect, would go ahead and grasp the nettle, wouldn't you, Keith? But no.'
'I seen a film', said Keith, 'where a girl did it. The other day.'
'Which film was this?'
Keith cleared his throat. 'Miss Adventures in Megaboob Manor,' he said carefully.
'We'll get round to that in a minute, Keith.'
Two hundred and seventy-five quid.'
'I suppose one of the great things about masturbation is that nobody wants to be seen doing it. Generally, they don't want the news to get around. Why should people be staring at the ceiling with that kind of expression on their faces? Let me freshen that for you, Keith.'
'Er, thanks, Nick. Ola.'
Keith watched her pass: the soft shake of her dress. Employing the darting finger, he made an up-and-under feint at her white-flounced rump. The friction of underthings: quite noisy, that dress. Like the bird inside it. Keith sucked hard on a section of his upper lip. He considered himself to be thoroughly at ease, and nicely holding up his end of the sexual lecture or exchange or foretalk. He thought of the ecstasy aunts in the magazines, and of their certain approval. Breaking new grounds in frankness. An adult exchange of views innit. Mutual pleasure. We all have our needs. But both his legs were dead they were that tightly crossed. And his palms felt siltily viscid. Jesus, hang around here all night. This rate the Cavalier'll get a ticket. Or clamped. Fucking bastards . . .
'Like so much else, Keith, it's all to do with time. How old are you?'
Twenty-nine.' Said boldly, as if his age were one of his less arguable virtues or qualifications.
'A child. A baby. You're reaching the age when, according to literature, you'll soon be putting all that behind you. You won't of course. Ever. They won't stop you stropping it, will they, Keith. Oh no. I look at you, and I see a man', she said, her face flooding with roguish admiration, 'who'd be proud to die with his Johnson in his hand.'
'Yeah cheers.'
'Cheers! But don't worry. We won't be watching. It's okay until you're about the same age as Christ was at Calvary. Thereafter, no one wants to know. Because it just gets sadder. Sadder ?nd sadder all the time.'
Keith shrugged. He could feel himself sinking into the privacy of his hangover — into the deep and settled privacy of how he felt. Here all the difficulties were undivulged. Oops. Oi. Hello. Oof. Jesus. Dear oh dear. But in silence. Whole'll. . . whole thing'll go up anyway. And Thelonius with his mangos and his weights. And Guy.
Now Nicola came and joined him on the sofa. The great layered spread of frock and petticoat. The legs folded seethingly underneath. Her face dipped but her eyes still sought his. 'You're clearly something of a connoisseur', she said softly, 'of pornography. What's your special taste? Be frank. I understand. As you know I — I'm quite "non-judgmental".'
Keith liked this word. To him it evoked a new dawn, a better world, one finally free of all juries and magistrates and QCs. He flexed his eyebrows and said, 'Same as the next man.' He knew — he even hoped - this was probably false (and felt the formation, across his upper lip, of a Zapata mustache of sweat). On average Keith spent between two and three hours a day in a largely fruitless quest for the sort of pornography he liked (i.e., pornography, whore-art, and not the sex-free sex films slipped his way by other cheats or the rubbish you get in the shops). But there was a time when pornography had played an altogether more central role in his life. When he was a bachelor, Keith had done pornography the way some people did heroin. Pornography pauperized Keith and made him fear for his sanity and his eyesight. Pornography was the main reason he had sought Kath's hand in marriage. Videos. From a towelhead — Abdelrazak - in Brixton. (Abdelrazak was nonjudgmental too. You could say that for him: 100 per cent nonjudgmental, was Abdelrazak.) Keith knew that he had no resistance to pornography. He had it on all the time, and even that wasn't enough for him. He wanted it on when he was asleep. He wanted it on when he wasn't there . . . 'Just nude birds,' said Keith. 'Basically. Obviously.'
'It's funny, isn't it. The dirty little secret may be neglected elsewhere. But here's a genre, starting as samizdat and ending up as a global industry, which is about nothing else. Women don't usually approve of pornography, do they, Keith. I shouldn't think, for instance, that your wife approves of it.'
Oi, thought Keith. What was the matter with all this? In his head, ideas wanted to be named, but remained nameless. Something to do with sinning singly, invisibly. You locked the door behind you. Only the porcelain saw, and the old towel. He felt the desire to speak and opened his mouth but there was nothing there.
'Women talk about the violence it does to them. But I don't know. Look at the most innocuous entertainment imaginable: a magic show. The assistant minces around in a bikini, and then lies down grinning her head off to get sawn in half. I think women don't like pornography because it excludes them. Women are there when pornography is made. Ruined sisters. But they're not there when pornography is used. That's men's work. They don't sha
re their little secret with women. They share it with pornography.'
She stood up. Look: she had the remote in her hand. The TV gave its electric crackle. She laughed musically (crazily) and said, 'Really, the Englishman's taste! Nurses and schoolmarms and traffic wardens. It's so sweet. I suppose it all comes from nannies and public schools and things. Though not in your case.'
'No danger,' said Keith (he was busy watching).
'Still, there are lots of randy plumbers and winking window-cleaners and so on.'
'Yeah cheers.'
'I'm going to have a bath. Would you unzip me, Keith? Thank you. I'll be in the tub, oh, for at least fifteen minutes. It's the little catch at the top. That's it. Thank you. There are some paper tissues on the table there. Let me know when you're done . .. It's all right, Keith. I understand.'
She welcomed and applauded the death of just about anything. It was company. It meant you weren't quite alone. A dead flower, the disobliging turbidity of dead water, slow to leave the jug. A dead car half-stripped at the side of the street, shot, busted, annulled, abashed. A dead cloud. The Death of the Novel. The Death of Animism, the Death of Naive Reality, the Death of the Argument from Design, and (especially) the Death of the Principle of Least Astonishment. The Death of the Planet. The Death of God. The death of love. It was company.
The death of physics, for example. Physics had died only the other day. Poor physics. Perhaps fifty people on earth understood it fully, but physics was over, just in rime for the millennium. The rest was mopping up. The rest was funeral direction. They had found proton decay, at 1032 years, uniting the strong and the weak atomic forces, giving the strongelectroweak. Then all they needed, for the Grand Unified Theory, for the Theory of Everything, was gravity. And then they got it. They got gravity.
She had read the cautious popularizations in the news magazines; and everyone agreed that the Theory made beautiful sense. The maths were beautiful. The whole death was beautiful. As she understood it - well, it was very simple (it courted intuition) - the key to Everything was this: time was a force as well as a dimension. Time was a force; but then of course it was. Elementary. Six forces. And time was the sixth force, not just a measure but a motivator too. Time 'softened up' quanta for all the other interactions, saving a special intimacy for its workings with gravity; the tug didn't tug without the massage of time. Uranium felt time as a force easing its journey into lead. Yes. And human beings felt time that way too (how anthropomorphic the Theory was, how sentimental!), not just as a temporal arena, but as a power. Don't we feel time as a power, and doesn't it feel like gravity? When we rise from the bed to face another year. When we reach and bend, when we try to strain upwards. What is it that is always pulling us back down?
As for the death of love . . . Was it really coming? Was it already here? Naturally she had wondered, as all artists do, whether she was just arguing out from her own peculiarity. But now the news was abroad and everybody was talking about it. And how to explain her red-throated anger and bitterness (she felt violated, plagiarized) when she first saw the phrase in print? The diagnosis was in on love, the diagnosis was coming in; and love was as weak as a kitten, and pitifully confused, and not nearly strong enough to be brave or even understand. Dying, the human being can formulate a strategy for death, gentle or defiant; but then death moves in completely and decides to run the show, at some point, near the end. Near the death. (She wasn't having any of that. She would be running things right up to the very last second.) And now the twentieth century had come along and after several try-outs and test-drives it put together an astonishing new offer: death for everybody. Death for everybody, by hemlock or hardware. If you imagined love as a force, not established and not immutable, patched together by all best intentions, kindness, forgiveness — what does love do about death for everybody? It throws up its hands, and gets weaker, and sickens. It is crowded out by its opposite. Love has at least two opposites. One is hate. One is death.
All her conscious life she had loved the dinosaurs (to this day she often imagined herself as a kind of moll tyrannosaurus, greedy, savage, faithless, yet still fought-over often and atrociously, and living for eighty million years). What killed them? She had the theories cold. An exploding star that drenched the globe in cosmic rays. A meteorite shower that kicked up a coating of dust. A new breed of baby stealers, oviraptors, velociraptors. Or, more bathetic-ally, and more hauntingly, the notion that evolutionary success, a billennium of good living, rendered them incapable of propagation. In other words (she put it), they got too fat to fuck. She played with the idea, trying to combine it with the death of love, and imagined the heavy richness of a distempered paradise, where something was not quite right; and here the ancient creatures slowly sensed that their world had begun to fall away. They smelled the death-ubiquity. It wasn't just that they were all too fat and generally out of shape. They weren't in the mood. And so beyond the fuming purple of the mire and beneath the blood-boltered sky, in a forest full of snoozing teeth and spikes, still shattered and reeking from another day of chase and snatch and chomp, on a low branch one lovebird turns to the other and says (she translated from the pterodactylese): 'Leave me alone. The scales have fallen from my eyes. You're a monster. Leave me alone. I'm not in the mood.'
Their story was over. More than that, their reality was concluded. You can feel it coming. Women would of course be expected to soldier on a little longer, with their biological imperative and so on, and the gentle feeling for children would naturally be the last thing to disappear, but women would never get very far with lovelessness and they too would weaken in the end. Nicola used to think (not often, and long ago) that even she might have been saved by love. Love was Plan B. But it never happened. She could attract it, she could bring love in, modern love anyway: she could make a man feel he was at last really living, she could give his world high colour — for a couple of months. But she couldn't generate it, she couldn't send love out. Not even kitten love, curled and purring, with kitty smile. And if love was dead or gone then the self was just self, and had nothing to do all day but work on sex. Oh, and hate. And death.
Keith coughed outside the bathroom door. This cough of Keith's started out as a butler's discreet reminder but quickly developed into a ragged diphtheria of barks and snarls. While it raged, while it wrecked itself on the other side of the wall, Nicola had plenty of time to take up the shower attachment and rinse her breasts, her belly, her deep backside, to pat herself down with a wide volume of towel, to take up position by the door in her pink bathrobe, and wait. He wouldn't want to face her. Sad animal, having sinned singly. Now he was wishing that he hadn't done it. In ten minutes he would be wanting to do it again.
'Are you all right?'
Keith gave a cough like a full stop.
'Off you run then. There's a present for you. On the table there.'
'. . . This?'
'It's a briefcase.'
'Looks . . . It's more like kind of a satchel.'
'Never mind. It's full of money.'
She opened the door a single notch, no greater distance than its own thickness. Just the lightest touch offeree fields, the white steam and pink towelling and rosy flesh escaping like draught into the gloom of the passage: not much solider, in fact, than their congress of moments before, with her electronic presence meeting whatever issued from Keith's eyes. But still he looked up now in temporary terror from his nosebag of notes. His downturned face seemed adolescent, even childish. If she had yanked the door open and stepped out to confront him, he might have cringed, collapsed — he might have unravelled completely.
'Appreciate it,' he said. 'Genuinely appreciate it.'
'My pleasure.'
'And uh, loyal tape, Nicola. Quality. They ought to give you an Oscar.'
She paused and said, 'What should we call it, Keith?'
'Uh. Hang about. "Bobby..." Uh. Wait. "Bobby..." It's coming. "Bobby ... on the Beat." There you are. "Bobby on the Beat."'
'Very good, K
eith.'
'Orjust'Tithead".'
"Tithead", Keith?'
'It's what you call them. The hat.'
'I see.' The plastic hat had cost £3.50 from the toyshop in Kensington Park Road. Everything else had come out of her actress trunk. How many other outfits could she find in there? Smouldering barrister. Lewd prison wardress. Had there ever been any lady executioners? A steaming Amazon, maybe, with lifted panga. She said, 'Always bring the satchel with you when you come to see me. Spend the money. There's lots more: it's all Guy's. Express yourself with it. Remember what kind of money it is, Keith. Get some new clothes. Accessories for your car. Relax with a few drinks. Clear your mind completely and concentrate on one thing. Which is?'
Keith nodded grimly. 'My darts.'
'Your darts.'
'Ton-forty,' said Keith. 'Maximum. Bull check-out. Sincerity finishing.'
With satchel and toolbag Keith came carefully down the front steps. He halted. He adjusted his belt. He peered downwards at his zipper. He laughed loosely. Keith was in fact sustaining a mild attack of esprit de I'escalier. 'Filth', he thought. Yeah. Would have been best. Just call it 'Filth'. Blimey. He looked up, back over his shoulder: the high windows burning in the low sun. Keith made a face. The face of a man recalling pain. But soon his violently buckled features resolved themselves into a forgiving sneer. Whistling, whistling piercingly (some sentimental ballad), Keith started forward, opened the garden gate, and headed for the heavy Cavalier.
Behind and to the right, flanked by flaking pillars in a doorway further up the dead-end street, Guy watched him go.
I receive a quite fantastically offensive letter from Mark Asprey. I've read it eight or nine times now and I still can't believe what he's trying to do to me. On Plaza notepaper:
My dear Sam:
I can't refrain from this hurried missive. Yesterday, after a rather good lunch, I was musing and browsing at Barnes & Noble, down in the Village. How clean and airy the Village is now! Imagine, if you will, my elation on seeing a goodly stack of Memoirs of a Listener — by Samson Young. Well, naturally, I snapped one up. And seldom have I gained such pleasure from the outlay of a mere 98 cents.