'Now,' she said. 'Stop now.'' And she hadn't even heard the telephone ring.
'Okay,' said Keith cheerfully (with that cheerful little throat-clearance on the consonant).
He climbed up her body until she felt the scrawny sharpness of his knees on her shoulders.
'Shut your eyes and open your mouth.'
But Enola Gay, being Nicola Six — Enola shut her mouth and opened her eyes . . .
'. . . Hello? Darling? I was just thinking about you,' she said. 'And having a rather blinding little weep.'
'Jesus,' said Keith.
'. . . Nothing. Do I? I can't imagine I'll be getting much sleep tonight, so do call later if you like. I just can't sleep for thinking about you. Yes, you know I sometimes suspect I'm never going to sleep again.'
Settling on the pillows like, Keith ran a hand down her throat as such, and reached for the brandy bottle innit.
'. . . Come to me, my darling. Come to me. At the speed of love.'
Dust storms grounded the midnight Concorde. Guy was driven from Newark to New York, and spent a few pricy hours at the Gustave on Central Park South. He couldn't sleep. TV said real estate and wrestling and medical ads and fireside shopping and pulpit stuff and last-best-hope stuff and dial 1-800. As he was driven through the city, towards Kennedy and the rerouted morning flight, he thought what he always thought when he was in New York now. He thought: where have the poor gone? The places where the poor shop, the places where the poor feed: where have they gone?
At the speed of love ... He ran it through his head as he paced the VIP Lounge at five miles per hour. She can turn a phrase, that girl. Delightful. At the speed of ... Yes, really quite lovely.
I guess it looks like a cheap shot, the revelation, at this stage, that Richard is Guy's brother. But I can only duplicate my own astonishment. It was news to me too. I could always go back and fix it. Now is not the time, though. It is not the time. It never is. It just never is the time.
You could have knocked me over with a feather. Of course, if knocking me down with a feather were what anyone was interested in, I'd never get off the deck. They wouldn't even need the feather. I reach for a fresh sheet of paper and there's this splitcrack in my arm, as if some spore-coven or fat maggot has just detonated in the crimson innards of a log fire. Dying reminds me of something, something I'd just got over and successfully put behind me when, all of a sudden, I started dying. Middle age: that's what. Yes, it's perfectly okay, so long as you don't try anything too butch or sporty, like walking down the street for a pint of milk, or pulling the flush handle, or kicking off your shoes, or yawning, or reaching too sharply for the vitamin E, or lowering yourself with any suddenness into the herb-green bath. All that stuff is out. Like middle age, like my dreams, death is packed with information. At last you really find out the direction time's taking. Time's arrow. Time works! And, more than this, you are monstrous . . .
When middle age comes, you think you're dying all the time. Dying is like that too. But here, finally, all resemblance ends. All resemblance ends.
Nine-thirty, on the morning of November 5.
Nicola has already been with me for over three hours. She's next door... I can hear her, pacing. Fortunately she is not demanding my undivided attention. She has had the decency, for example, to let me finish Chapter zi. I keep her fuelled with coffee. She had a shower. Later, she had a bath; and she asked for dental floss. When she isn't walking up and down she sits on the sofa in one of Asprey's dressing-gowns, not even smoking: she just stares at the window — at the low sun, which has now reached its apogee and will stay that low all day long until the moon intercedes, coming between the sun and our eyes. Every now and then she goes all trancelike and I can tiptoe off to the study, and write. But how she fills the flat, how her presence fills the flat, like a rich smell, or like anger. She's switched the TV on again, looking, no doubt, for news from Washington or Bonn or Tel Aviv, news of the storms, the tides, the moon, the sun (the sky is falling!), but looking through all this for a correlative, the thing out there that might say yes to the thing in here. Events, and possible events—the world has to want it. Whereas for me it's easier: the TV itself is my correlative, pandar, hack, mediator, foot-in-the-door, vile paparazzo.
It's in the nature of an obsession, I suppose, that one will get to the bottom of whatever's available. One will tend to get to the bottom of it.
Next to Mark Asprey's baronial can there's a hip-high stack of assorted magazines. All they have in common is a certain amount of editorial matter about Mark Asprey: a profile, an interview, what he's pulling down, his favourite colour, who he's fucking. The mags get older and Mark gets younger as I work my way down the pile (the effect is speeded up by the increasing frequency of my visits). Until, last night, I find myself staring through tears of strain at paired photographs of Mark Asprey and Cornelia Constantine under the heading, did they or didn't they? She says they didn't. He says they did.
Of course. Marius Appleby is a pseudonym. It's Asprey. I knew it: I wasn't even surprised. It was almost bathetic. What else could explain the familiar taste, and the poundcake richness, of my love-hate for Crossbone Waters?
Digging deeper into the stack, I find additional earlier reports: scandal, accusation. She sued him; he settled out of court; doubts linger. 'The book is all lies,' say Cornelia and her lawyers. 'What happened happened,' Asprey insists.
Naturally I now root for Cornelia. But two puzzles remain. In all there are about a dozen photographs of her, including some swimwear poses, and physically she measures up, except in two particulars. First, it is clear that Cornelia is dramatically flat-chested. The second point has to do with her face, or her expression, which never changes, and which bespeaks (or so this reviewer feels) really helpless stupidity.
What actually happened? I guess the person to ask, if it's the truth you want, would be old Kwango.
Before I could even bring this up with Nicola she said abruptly, 'I hate it here.' 'Yes, it is a little rich for some tastes.' 'It's the acme of vulgarity. But it's not just that. The gowns, the baubles, the awards and everything. They're all fake.' 'No.' 'Look at that translation. It's gobbledegook. He has them printed up.' 'But he's, he's so —' 'He just writes schlock plays and cute journalism. Christ, why do you think you never heard of him?'
I said, Then why does he do it?'
'Why do you think? To impress the gullible.'
'Whoops,' I said. 'I do beg your pardon.'
Regrettably, disappointingly, altogether unacceptably, and like all the other dying people I've ever come across, I am suffering from eructation and its related embarrassments. If I extrapolate from the death of my father, the death of my brother, the death of Daniel Harter, and the death of Samson Young, then I may conclude that buying it is a pretty windy scene . . . I'm glad I no longer have to hang out in the Black Cross, where I've experienced many armpit-torching moments. Nobody recognizes me in there (every day is like the first day), and I have to stand around behaving 'characteristically'.
The baby cries, the baby cries and turns, in its awful struggle to be a baby. Its struggle is with all that is changeless and unworkable. She farts with the effort. Whoops. Maybe farts are frowned on for no other reason than their connexion with mortal weakness, with being a baby, with dying. To her, to Kim, evidently, or so I've read, the breasts, the penis — these mean life. And the stool, the piece of ordure, this means death. But she shows no natural aversion, and babies find nothing disgusting, and don't we all have to be trained quite hard to hate our shit? I am the father of Missy's baby. Or Sheridan Sick is. ('I suppose it's Side's.' 'Don't call him that.' 'It's his name, isn't it?') She flies over to England. To be by my side. Or for an abortion. I hear a ring on the bell and I go and answer and she's there ... I'd have no time for her, one way or the other. Only time to write it down.
Missy had to go. For reasons of balance. Reasons of space. She belongs to some other version. She preferred to run her own life. She didn't want artistic shape. She wanted
to be safe. Safe, in America, at the end of the millennium.
I still believe love has the power to bring in the loved one, to reel her in. You can send the line out halfway across the planet and it will bring the loved one in. But I don't even try and call her any more. Love failed, in me. It was sapped by something else.
She has her slot in my dreamlife, as if the dreams were vestiges of the love power. These dreams of Missy are like Missy's dreams, very logical and realistic — not like the nuclear sizzlings of my nightmares. We keep having this conversation. On the Cape. I say, 'Nurse me.' She says, 'What about your book?' I say, Til give it up. I want to give it up. It's a wicked book. It's a wicked thing I'm doing, Missy.'
Then she says, 'Watch the girl. Be careful. There's going to be a surprise ending. It isn't Keith. It's the other guy.'
When I let her in this morning around six-thirty she looked so transparently ruined and beat — and so transparent: ghostly, ghosted, as if the deed were already done and she had joined me on the other side. After a few showers, and several cups of laced coffee, she started telling me about it: the night of hate. At one point, quite early on, I looked up from my notes and said, 'That's outrageous. Oh, my poor readers. Shame on you, Nicola. Shame on you.' I asked why in Christ's name she hadn't kicked Keith out after the initial fiasco. So much better thematically. And a nice contrast with Guy. 'It would have meant that nobody really had you.' 'Only you.' 'This doesn't have anything to do with me . . .'
'You're worried about Guy, aren't you. You think he's the one. You think it's going to be him, don't you. It won't be. I swear. You love him, don't you.'
'I guess I do. In a way. He must have called me twenty times from the States. He says I'm his best friend. Me. Where are everyone's friends? Where's everyone's family? Where's Kath's family? Why isn't she smothered in sisters and mothers? You can rest up but I'm going to be tearing around all day. I can't handle this physically. The airport! How'll I get a cab? I can't bear these novels that end in mad activity. "Jane? Call June and tell Jean about Joan. Jeff - get Jim before Jack finds John." All this goddamned fetching and carrying. How're you supposed to do any writing? My leg hurts. Heathrow!' 'Easy. Calm down. It'll all work out. Here's what you do.' It didn't sound too bad, after she mapped out my schedule for me. And I was more relieved than intrigued, for instance, when she said I'd get a three-hour writing break between nine and midnight... I looked up at her. She had just brought me another cup of coffee and was standing beside me, carelessly stroking the back of my neck with the knuckles of her left hand.
'Mark Asprey might show up,' I said. 'I really hope there's no unfinished business between you two.'
'He won't be here until tomorrow,' she said. 'When I'll be gone.' Nicola was looking out, at the window, at the world. Her slender throat tautened, and her eyes filled with indignation or simple self-belief She had about her then the thing of hers that touched me most: as if she were surrounded, on every side, by tiny multitudes of clever enemies.
Just come in again. And must now go out again.
I write these words to keep my hand steady. And because nothing means anything unless I write it down. I can't go out there, not just this very second. But of course I'll go. I'll go. There is some kind of absolute obligation here.
The phone rang and the instant I picked it up I felt a breeze of awfulness whistling liplessly down the line. How could I get it so wrong? How could I not see? Everywhere there are things that I'm not seeing.
'Kath,' I said, 'what happened? Where are you?'
'Somewhere else. The baby — go and get the baby. I'm a wicked woman, Sam.'
'You . . . No you're not.'
'Then what is it? Tell me what it is.'
'It's just the situation.'
As I hung up, Nicola came out of the bathroom and I said,
'You're wearing that? Oh my God, look at us. And you know what the worst thing about everything is? About you. About the whole Story. About the world. About death. This: it's really happening.’
Chapter 22: Horrorday
t
he first three events - light, sound and impact- were all but instantaneous. First, the eye opened to the scalding bulb of the foundered standard lamp; next, the rushing report of some lofted cherrybomb or megabanger; and then the brisk descent of the crammed glass ashtray. This ashtray had been teetering for hours on the shelf above the bed: now it was dislodged - by the frenzied physics of everyday life. It fell at the usual rate of acceleration: thirty-two feet per second per second: thirty-two feet per second squared. And it flipped in mid-air. So Keith copped the lot. Impact, crushed butts, a shovelful of ash — right in the kisser. Right in the mush. This was the fifth of November. This was horrorday.
Keith spat and struggled and thrashed himself to his feet. She was gone. Where? With his eyes bobbing and rolling in their sockets, he focused on the horrorclock. No. He swore through a dry cloud of horrordust. In the spent tempest of the bedroom he sought out his clothes. When he pitched himself towards the toilet he barked a horrortoe on the bed's brass stanchion. Tearfully he mollified his incensed bladder. In the mirror Keith's reflection started getting dressed. A split horrornail kept snagging in the blur of fabrics, all of them synthetic: made by horrorman. On the wall Keith's shadow straightened and dived headlong from the room. He paused in the passage and roughly freed a segment of his scrotum, nastily snared in the seized teeth of his horrorzip.
Out on to the street he stumbled. He made for the car — for the heavy Cavalier. Builders' dust and builders' orange sand formed an orange mist at the level of his eyes, his agent-orange vision, which was itself engrained with motionless impurities, like a windscreen splattered with dead insects. In a ditch, in a bunker full of pipes and cables, a workman was giving his drill a horrid kneetrembler, louder than an act of God. Like me, myself, last night, with her. Underfoot the pavement crackled with horrorgrit. It went crackling right into the roots of Keith's horrorteeth.
The car looked funny. Keith scrunched up the parking tickets. Then he froze. The front window on the passenger side had been stove in! Keith's body throbbed from the sudden wound. He went round and unlocked and opened the door - and felt the horrorslide and horrortrickle of the crushed glass. The welded stereo had been scrabbled at, its dials torn off, but. . . Keith's library of darts tapes! It was okay: intact, entire. They hadn't stooped that low. For a while he stared at the faulty burglar alarm he had recently stolen. Without thinking he reached down and with his right hand brushed from the seat the jewelled horrorglass.
Fresh catastrophe: the stained tip of his middle finger had been sweetly pierced by the horrorshard. No pain: only mental anguish. A fat dome or bulb of horrorblood now pulsed above the yellow rind. It started dripping. On the car floor he found a crumpled pin-up with which he rudely dressed his damaged darting digit. And the digital on the dash — what was the horrortime? — remained garbled, made nonsense of, by the rays of the low sun, which had surely never been lower (he was on his way now), bouncing at bus height over the spines of traffic. Through the open window the sound of passing cars came like the zip and sniff of a boxer's feints and punches. Ten-twenty. His appointment with Mrs Ovens had been scheduled for 9.15. But there were always queues. As he drove, motes of the shattered glass, quarks of glassdust, seemed to tickle his scalp like particles of horrorlight.
He arrived at the tricky junction on the Great Western Road: familiar horrorspot, with zebra-crossing, bus station, and humpbacked bridge over the canal, all complicating access. Fifteen minutes later, he was still there. Timing their runs to split-second perfection, the launched horrorcars, the bowling horrorlorries successively denied the heavy Cavalier. Whenever a gap appeared, so would some contrary vehicle, seeming to pounce or spring into position. Either that, or, as Keith inched forward, the underground station would emit a resolute trainload on to the crossing before him. Keith pounded his fists on the steering-wheel's artificial leopard skin. At his rear he sensed the climbing volume of thwarted hurry:
how it groaned and squirmed ... In his face he felt the low sun like a lamp bent for interrogation. Now the road cleared but as Keith revved and shuddered, and yearned forwards, another watch of horrorsouls bobbed on to the zebra - the passing faces of the horrorsouls.
Finally he churned his way through with his bloodied hand on the horn. And into what? Driving was like a test film or a dramatization of the Highway Code, whatever that used to be, with every turn and furlong offering multiple choice, backing learner, swearing cyclist, peeking perambulator. Richly sectioned with doubleparkers and skip-collectors and clamp-removers, the roads became a kiddy-book of excavators, macadam-layers, streetlamp-changers, white-line painters, mobile libraries, armed-personnel-carriers, steamrollers, bulldozers, tanks, ditch-diggers, drain cleaners. For an extended period he was wedged behind a leaf-disposal truck. From its rear a vacuum tube slurped up the sear broomed roadside pyramids. He watched the suck, the feathery flip; sex re-entered his head and found no room there. Everything he had ever done to womankind he had done again ten times last night, with her. The whipped dance of the moistened leaves. Defoliated, deflowered, stripped of leaves and flowers, with trees sharp-lined like old human faces, and wringing their bare hands, London could still drown in all its horrorleaves.
At the civic building, at 10.55, a stroke of good fortune - or motoring knowhow. The back street was double, tripleparked, parked out, with cars parked beside, athwart, on top of. But as usual nobody had dared block the old dairy exit (which Keith knew to be disused) — or so it seemed, when he peered into the dusty fire of his rear window. Keith backed in smartly. This was horrorday, however. Therefore, a horrorbike was waiting there, leaning on its stick, and Keith heard the eager horrorcrunch. Worse, when Keith crept out to disensnare his bumper, the horrorbike's own horror-biker formidably appeared — one of that breed of men, giant miracles of facial hair and weight problem, who love the wind of the open road, and love the horrorbikes they straddle there. He hoisted Keith on to the boot of the Cavalier, and banged his head on it for a while, and then direly raised a gauntleted horrorfist. Keith whimpered his way out of that one, offering up a stolen credit card in earnest of his false address. He went and parked about three miles away and tear- fully sprinted back through the fuming jams and the incredible crowds of the horrormany.