'Yeah cheers.'
'Now you watch the show don't you Keith.'
'Consistently,' said Keith fiercely.
'Right. Now with finals and celebrity challenges we do a short docu on the participants. You've seen them. Couple of minutes each. So we want to do you, Keith.'
Keith smiled cannily, unfoolably.'. . . But that's TV,' he said.
'Right. Like they say. You know: your lifestyle.'
'Kind of like a lifestyle feature.'
'You've seen them. Where you live, where you work, hobbies, family, interests: all this. Your lifestyle.'
Keith looked up: the stinking ruin of the garage. Tony de Taunton asked if they could start tomorrow and Keith said that they could.
'Address?'
Keith gave it helplessly. The wife, the dog, the joke flat.
'Smashing. See you there then. Goodbye there.'
Keith's face was all poll tax and means test as he dialled Nicola with shimmering fingers.
'Don't worry. Wait a while, and then try again,' said Nicola, and replaced the receiver. Then she put her hand back where it was before. 'My God. It's harder than the telephone. That was a wrong number. Another wrong number. It is. Even through this rather heavy tweed, it's harder than the telephone. It is. This isn't in nature, surely.'
Guy's face was trying to look pleasant; but its expression was unmistakably strained.
'Do other men become as hard as this?'
'Oh I expect so," said Guy croakily. 'In the right circumstances.'
Takes a bit of getting used to. I've been consulting my fiction shelves, without much luck. It seems to be the nature of the subject that the writer assumes a general stock of knowledge and procedure from which his characters subtly diverge. In code, usually. No help to me, I'm afraid.'
'Well this, after all,' said Guy (his head was tilted slightly), 'is definitely non-fiction.'
'Now what? . . . The idea is, I suppose, to move the outer skin very gently against the inner. This tweed doesn't chafe you, does it? I imagine you've got pants on too or something?. . . And of course there are all these arrangements further down. Do they play a part? I suppose stroked or squeezed they might - Guy. Guy! What a ghastly face you just made!'
He tried to speak, reassuringly.
'What? Is it painful or something?'
'A little,' he mouthed.
'I don't understand. I thought it was meant to be nice.'
Guy did some explaining.
'Oh, darling! Sweetheart. You should have said. Oh it's too pathetic of me. Well let's ... I'll...' She reached for his belt buckle. Then her long fingers paused and she smiled up at him self-deprecatingly. 'I've just thought of something. It's - it's sort of a game. I think it'll do the trick. And I'll try something really daring. Guy?'
'Yes?'
'You couldn't just leave me alone for a little while first, could you? Half an hour or something.' Again the smile of childish challenge. 'To screw my courage to the sticking place?'
He said 'Of course' so sweetly that she had a mind to cup his narrow cheeks in her hands and tell him how many, many, many men had written their names in come all over her stomach and breasts and face and hair. What signing sessions. What autograph hounds . . . But all she said was, before she let him out, 'You know, you make me so happy sometimes that I think I must be going to die. As if just to go on living were really too much to ask . . .'
In the market street he kept seeing piles of shoes, piles of hats, vastly tumbled, piles of handbags, piles of belts. Woundedly he walked, with a thumping in the drool-damaged ear. Guess who'd been there, when Guy arrived at Nicola's? Keith. Keith was on his way out. Keith was just picking up his things: while he finished doing so, Guy had been obliged to wait on the porch, shielding his eyes as he searched for the Cavalier under the low sun. The two men passed at the front door; Keith was looking fantastically washed-out but otherwise seemed very pleased with himself, justifiably, some might say, after his recent efforts at the Marquis of Edenderry. It was as unlikely as anything could be, Guy thought: but if he was being deceived, well, then it was quite a deception; and if Nicola and Keith were lovers, then it was some love. Goats and monkeys! Now a San Marco of pigeons patterned the street like iron filings drawn by the little boy's magnet. At the crossroads one pigeon in particular was eating pizza, and wanting more pizza, and risking pizzafication itself as a lorry loomed near.
Perverse and unchallengeable hunger attacked him. He entered the first food outlet he could find, a potato restaurant called the Tate or Tatties or was it Potato Love? The queue or flock was populous but swiftly flowing. At its head sat a Spanish girl in a steel pen. She took the laden paper plates from the hatch behind her and split each spud with a dab of marge or cheddar or hexachlorophene. Then she passed it through the Microsecond: and that's how long it took - half a pulse. Guy knew that the device used TiredLight, that adaptable technology. The food just goes on cooking, on your plate, in your mouth, in your guts. Even beneath the streets.
'Thank you,' he said, and paid the amount that was asked.
The girl was coarsely beautiful. But she probably wouldn't be that way for very long. There was the evidence of the mother, operating out of the hatch and framed in it like someone on a primitive TV set. But this was no cookery programme. It was about what kitchens tended to do to the female idea. And the daughter would get there quicker than the mother had, because the modern devices saved time but also used it up - sucked time out of the very air ... Guy collected his plastic utensils and looked round for a stool. With difficulty he half-seated himself (that's better), and carefully parted the loose lips of his potato. Its core sizzled, smokelessly bubbling with TiredLight, but its surface was icy to the touch. He shuffled back to the penned girl.
'This potato', he said listlessly, 'is undernuked.'
Half a pulse later and it was dropped back on to his plate like a spent cartridge. Now it was overnuked. And suddenly ancient. Guy looked at the potato and then looked at the girl. With a pale smile he asked, 'Do you really expect me to eat this?' She just raised her eyebrows and inclined her head, as if to say that she had seen people eat worse. He left it there on the counter and walked back to Nicola. And on his way down the market street he kept seeing those heaps of gloves and hats and handbags, little shoes. And what was that supposed to remind you of? Guy thought he kept seeing heaps of glasses, heaps of hair.
'Now it's really a very simple game,' she began. 'And completely juvenile, of course. I learned it from some of the brassier girls at the children's home, years and years ago. It's called dare. It's also known as nervous. I believe it's played all over the world, as such things usually are. Playing nervous.'
'Don't know it. What happens?'
She laughed rosily. 'Not a great deal. You put your hand on my throat, say, and let it descend until I say nervous. Or on my knee. Or I put my hand on your tummy and move it slowly downwards.'
'Until I say nervous?'
'Or until / say nervous. Shall we play? I suppose,' she said, revealing the white strap of her brassiere beneath her shirt and producing a blush, 'I suppose it would be fairer if I took this off. Turn away.’
Guy turned away. Nicola stood, unbuttoning her shirt. Leaning forward, she unhooked herself and slowly released the brocaded cups. She gave a special smile.
Next door, wearing Y-fronts, earphones, and a frogged smoking-jacket she had recently bought him, Keith lay slumped on Nicola's bed. He was watching the proceedings on the small screen. His peepers bulged. His kisser furled into a collusive sneer. Nicola rebuttoned briskly, to the top, to the brim of the brimming throat. Keith was shocked. He had always suspected that when Guy and Nicola were alone together they just talked about poetry. Keith shrugged limply.
'Jesus, some mothers,' he murmured to himself.
And so they played nervous, nervous, nervous. Nicola played nervous, though she wasn't nervous (she was playing), and Guy played nervous, though he wasn't playing (he was nervous). 'Undo the top
button. And the next. Wait. . . Nervous. No, go on ... Not nervous. You can kiss them.' And there they were, so close together, in fearful symmetry. Guy dipped his lips to them. What could you say about this breast. Only that it was just like that breast. Why compare them to anything but each other?
Hello, boys, thought Keith. Nice bouncers she got. Pity a bit on the small side. Still you lose respect after a while for the bigger tit. Good laugh at first. Now Analiese . . . He wiped his sniffer.
With blips and bleeps and scans and sweeps their hands moved up their thighs. His fingers reached the stocking tops and their explosion of female flesh. ('Nervous!' she sang.) Hers were warm and heavy as they moved in beneath his belt.
'Nervous?' she asked.
'. . . No,' he said, though he was. 'But / am,' she said, though she wasn't. 'But I'm not,' he said, though he was.
Working him up to a fever pitch innit, thought Keith. He made a liquid sound with his gnashers. Nervous? He'll be a fucking nutter in a minute. Here —
'Does it feel as it should feel?' she was asking.
'Yes very much so.'
Keith felt the soft arrival of sweat on the palms of his feelers. He looked away for a moment, as if in pain. Then he felt a lash of panic that almost flipped him on to the floor as Nicola said,
'Quick. Let's go to the bedroom.'
With a great jerk Keith struggled himself upright. He paused: it's okay. He lay back again, listening to his steadying ticker and Nicola saying,
'No — here — now. Stand up. All these buttons. It seems to ... I'll have to ..."
'Oof,' said Keith, He whistled hoarsely, and those blue gawpers filled with all their light. Blimey. No, you don't - you don't do that. Not. To a guy. You don't, he thought, as his flipper reached down for his chopper. You don't do that to a guy.
'Lie down. And close your eyes.'
So Keith saw it all and Guy saw nothing. But Guy felt it. Guy did all the feeling. He felt the hands, the odd trail of hair, the hot and recklessly expert sluicings of the mouth. And other strange matters. A suspicion (a fleeting treachery) that now, after this, he could be free and safe and home, the fever passed, and her forgotten, and the long life waiting with child and Hope. But then too there were consequences: immediate consequences (the male animal, never lost from thought). Soon, and with embarrassing copiousness ... he might drown her. He might drown them both. Physical fear was never wholly absent in his intimate dealings here down the deadend street, down the dead-end street with the mad beauty, when she was taken by sexual surprise. He held her head. The world was dying anyway. Towards the end, which never came, he said helplessly,
'I'm . . . I'm . . .'
Then something happened — something tiny in the layered swellings. 'Enough,' he said, and pulled her clear from the struggle, and at last was lost from thought.
She was kissing his eyes. He blinked out at her.
'You sort of fainted,' she said. 'Are you all right? You sort of fainted.'
He looked down. It was all right. He hadn't made a mess of things.
'You sort of fainted,' she said again. 'Oh, I see I've made another mess of things.'
'No no — it was heavenly.'
As she was showing him out, or, rather, helping him to the stairs (he had an eczema seminar to attend), she held him back and said,
'You know, you needn't have stopped. I was prepared — for your swoon to death,' she quoted prettily, though she thought she had timed it beautifully — that tiny reminder of her teeth. 'I mean the other swoon. In fact 1 was longing for you to fill my mouth. Because I'm prepared for everything now. I want you to make me,' she said, and gave him the Grand-A-Night Hooker. 'There's only one thing you'll have to do first.'
Guy wiped his dripping chin and said, 'What's that? Leave my wife?'
She started back. How could he be so wide of the mark? How could you! Guy had begun to apologize for his flippancy when she said,
'Oh no. I don't want you to leave her. What kind of person do you think I am ?' And this was asked, not in reproach, but in a spirit of pure inquiry. 'I don't want you to leave her. I just want you to tell her.'
In the bedroom Keith was taking the liberty of savouring a well-earned cigarette. Technically, smoking was banned in the bedroom, although Nicola, a heavy smoker, smoked heavily in the bedroom all the time. Now she stood leaning on the door frame with her arms folded.
'Smoking-jacket innit.'
She gave him a slow appraisal, one of fascinated, inch-by-inch detestation, from the feet (red-soled and faintly quivering) to the face, which looked ruminative, grand, prime-ministerial.
That smoking-jacket looks great on you, Keith. And you look great in it.'
'Yeah cheers.'
'I do hope you're not going to be spooked by this TV business,' she said, and watched his face instantly collapse. Keith's tongue now seemed to be trying to sort things out inside his mouth. 'Isn't this what you've worked for? What we've worked for? Well, Keith?'
'Invasion of privacy like.'
'Or darts stardom . . . TV isn't true, Keith, as you've just seen. Or not necessarily so. Darling, you must put all this out of your mind and leave everything to me. Let me translate you. I'll not fail you, Keith. You know that.'
'I appreciate it.'
'I've made a new video for you. But in a sense you've already seen one. And I can tell by the mischievous expression on your face that you - that you did it already.'
'Yeah,' said Keith perplexedly, averting his eyes. '1 did it already.'
Keith came down the passage and out through the front door whistling 'Welcome to My World'. As he passed he happened to glance at her name on the bell. 6: six. Six. 6! thought Keith. Double 3! . . . Nasty, that. Worst double on the board. Never go near it less you've fucked double 12 and then come inside on double 6. Murder.
3 's the double all the darters dread. Right down the bottom like that, at six o'clock, you're sort of dropping it in. And if you come inside it's 1, double 1. Pressure darts. Old Nick. Double 3.6.6.6. Nasty, that. Very nasty. Ooh wicked . . .
An old woman with hair like coconut fibre limped past whipping herself with a home-made switch. For a moment Keith stood there listening to or at any rate hearing the cries of the city, like the cries of dogs or babies, answering, pre-verbal, the inheritors of the millennium, awaiting their inheritance.
In tortoiseshell spectacles and grey silk dressing-gown Guy knelt poised over the Novae, his long back curved in a perfect semicircle, like a protractor, his curious nose inches from the board (this difficult position seemed to ease his nether pain, his tubed heart, which hurt a lot all the time): six moves in and he was only one pawn down, and half-expecting to survive into what used to be called the middle game. He wanted to survive as long as possible, because when he lost he would have to go to Hope with the truth.
Every few minutes without turning round Guy would take a wrapped toy from the straw tub and toss it back over his shoulder to Marmaduke. Thus, before he could wreck it, Marmaduke first had to unwrap it, and this took him a little while. Guy could hear his snarled breathing and the tear of paper; then the grunts of effort as the toy began to snap and give.
One of the troubles was that chess was over, chess was dead. The World Champion would now have no chance against Guy's Novae, which cost £145. As a human construct chess had challenged computers for a creditable period; but not any more. Once a useful sparring partner, chess now jumped off the stool, snorting and ducking in its trunks, and was explosively decked in the very first round. Games between the computers were unfollowably oblique and long-armed, a knight's jump away from human understanding, with all the pieces continually realigning on the first rank (as if there were an infinity of previous ranks, the minus one, the minus two, the minus nth rank), invariably drawing through elaborate move-repetition after many days, with hardly a piece being captured. When programmed for win-only the computers played like suicides . . . Guy's nose twitched as he saw that one of Novae's bishops was unprot
ected. This wasn't unusual: it was always lobbing minor pieces at him, and even the computer Queen was regularly en prise. He could capture, but then what? He captured. Novae replied sharply.
'Yes. Brilliant,' Guy whispered.
Four moves later (how pitiless the silicon was) he stared blinking at his wedged king. At that moment Marmaduke, who must have held his breath as he approached, sank his teeth into the Achilles tendon of Guy's right heel. And by the time his wits returned the child had forced the busby end of a toy guardsman down his own throat and was turning an ominous colour as he fell backwards on to a bulky personnel-carrier. Luckily Petra was near by, as well as Hjordis, and together they were able (Marie-Claire was also at hand) to straighten things out with Paquita's help and the ever-calming presence of Melba and Phoenix.
Guy showered, and swabbed and dressed his heel. Later, in the kitchen, he inspected the guarantees on the lamb cutlets - the staggered dates, the fine print - and readied them for the grill. 'It must be true, all that,' he said to the room in general, 'you know, about food and love. Have you come across the idea?' He waited, with his back turned.'When food gets too far from love . . .The preparation of food has to do with love. Mother's milk. And when food gets too far from love there's a breakdown, like a breakdown in communication. And we all get sick. When it gets too far from love.' He looked over his shoulder. The sisters were listening, Lizzyboo with full attention (she had even stopped eating), Hope with patient suspicion. As Guy addressed himself to the cooker he felt his wife's eyes busying themselves on the breadth of his back, on his hair, on the very prickles of his neck. How strong were their scrutiny and grip ? What held them ? With a few bags of pitta bread and an institutional tub of taramasalata, Lizzyboo repaired to her room. Now was the time: the time was now. Guy felt powers move in him but his face, with its rinsed blue eyes, looked especially weak—the weakness that was inevitable in him, the weakness he weakly cleaved to. How beautiful the truth is, he was thinking. Because it never goes away. Because it's always there, just the same, whatever you try to do to it. Hope was talking to him intermittently about various chores he hadn't done (domestic, social, fiscal); during her next breather he said intelligently, with his back aimed at her,