'Look. Here comes Chick,' said Tony de Taunton. 'You got to like his style.'
A cream Rolls-Royce had pulled up in the carpark below. Two men climbed out slowly.
'Where are your guests, Keith?'
'Be along. Who's that with him?'
'Julian Neat.'
Julian Neat: agent to the darting stars. Agent to Steve Notice, to Dustin Jones.
'Yes. They say Chick's all signed up.’
Nick and Chick had come in through different doors but they made their entrances together, which was frankly ideal for television's Keith Talent, who, by this stage, felt he could do with a little support — felt, indeed, that he might die or go mad at any second. She pushed past the greeters and moved with hesitant hurry towards him. He had never seen her looking quite so beautiful.
'Oh my Keith.'
'Where you been, girl?'
'What happened? Did you lose your keys? I saw your darts clothes were still on the chair.'
'Where you been, girl?'
Imploringly she flattened herself up against him. 'I'll tell you about it later. Making arrangements. For us, Keith. We're going on a wonderful journey.'
'Break it up, you two,' cajoled Ned von Newton: Mr Darts. 'Come and be friendly.'
They went to join the others at the semicircular bar. Keith strolled over with some insouciance (he saw the way that Chick clocked Nick). She was holding his hand - gazing, with the demurely gratified eyes of love, at TV Keith.
Guy stood with his back to the building, facing the flatlands of demolition. Squares of concrete, isolated by chicken wire, in each of which a bonfire burned, baking the potatoes of the poor. Apparently cleansed by its experiences of the afternoon, the moon outshone these fires; even the flames cast shadows.
As he turned he saw a hooded figure by the doorway. He halted.
'They're in there,' it said.
Guy thought: it's a girl. He moved closer. One of Keith's women. The ruined blonde who —
'Keith,' said Trish Shirt. 'And . .. Nicky.' She sighed nauseously. 'Now they getting married like.'
'I hardly think so.'
'They are. It was on the telly.' She leaned forward and placed a hand on his arm. 'Say I'm waiting. Tell Keith. Forever in a day like. I'll always be waiting.'
When Guy got up to the lot he hung back by the door, able to linger, it seemed, in a frenzy of unobtrusiveness. At first all he felt was simple disappointment. He had hoped Nicola would be there, and she wasn't. Nicola wasn't there. He could see a girl in the group round the bar, under a bulb of light: she looked a lot like Nicola. She was Nicola, almost certainly. But she was somebody Guy didn't know.
He'd thought Trish seemed disembodied, in her hood, neutered, an it not a she — or just non-human. But the girl at the bar, unhooded, turned to the light, indeed fully opened out towards the world, was less human than the thing in the hood.
Nicola was laughing with her mouth as long and wide as it would go. The energy equation here could be represented as something like x=yz2, y being a certain magnitude of solitary female beauty, z being the number of men present, and x the Platonic gang-rape which, in certain possible futures, might harden into action. It had to be said that the men around her only frowned and smiled, as if chastened by her colour, her volume, her spin of ravenous risk. Where does the guest look when the host's little girl is doing her somersaults for him: it's so transparent? But this was no little girl. As she worked herself backwards on to her stool she gave a vivid flinch and turned to Keith like one confidently seeking forgiveness; and there was no way out of joining Nicola in her amusing struggles with the hem of her dress. Their indivisible attention: that's what she had.
Keith watched her proudly. And Chick watched her—Chick, Chick Purchase, large, delicate, deliberate, thick-haired, deep-voiced, and dangerous, with hardman or just criminal glow, like an actor, like a star, who accepts the role that the ordinary imagination assigns him. In his face you could see the associated pleasures of making love to women and of causing harm to men, or beyond that even, to the links between disseminating life and ending it. There was also something ridiculous, sinisterly ridiculous, in the way he looked: he dressed like a girl, he dressed like a chick. He filled the flow of his trousers with some of the lilt that a girl would, and his shirt had a flounce to it, the kind of flounce chicks like. But this was no little girl. There was no mistaking his sex. Chick? In the tight waist-to-thigh panels of his orange trousers, it was visible, and sinisterly ridiculous. A slobberer for skirt: that was how come he hadn't yet gone all the way, in crime or darts. Tonight, no roadshow hopeful or wet T-shirt at his side: only, in the cream Roller, Julian Neat, who looked like what he was, a successful middleman, in an exhausted culture.
The past is past,' Keith was saying. 'Let's forget any unpleasantness and shake on it. Fair enough, mate?’
'Okay,' said Chick deeply. 'Tell me something, Keith. What's a girl like this doing with a little coon like you?'
'Chick,' said Julian Neat.
'See?' said Keith.
'I think that's very unfair, Chick,' said Nicola earnestly. 'Keith's very good at darts.'
'Okay, break it up, you lot,' said Miles Fitzwilliam as he approached, pulling his headphones away from his ears. 'Pre-match interview.'
The two contestants slid ponderously from their stools.
Guy saw his chance. But his chance of what? For one thing, he seemed to have forgotten how to walk.
Nicola saw him: she smiled and waved with puppet animation. As he crossed the vault the hope gathered in him that she would become the woman he knew; but she just went on getting stranger. Stranger smile, and stranger eyes. When he was near enough he said experimentally,
'Hello.'
'Silence. Oil'
She pouted a kiss at him and prettily crossed her lips with a cautioning forefinger.
'Obviously,' Keith was saying to the camera, which was jack-knifed in fascination a foot from his face, 'hopefully'll the best man win. When we go out there.' He realized that more was expected of him. 'So let's hope the bloke, the guy with the, the superior technique will, will run out winner against, against the man with the . . . least good equipment. Dartwise. At the death.'
Nicola applauded silently; then her palms came to rest, as if in prayer.
'I'm confident, Miles,' Chick was chipping in. 'Got to be, with those averages. And — see, Keith and I go back a bit. And I know he's got this funny habit. Of bottling it. At the death. Frankly, I just hope it's not too one-sided. For darts' sake.'
'Thanks, lads. Five minutes, yeah?'
Nicola wiggled a finger and Guy moved closer. 'Darling,' said her hot breath, 'don't worry! - this is only a dream.'
Keith's heart leapt or jolted when he saw the new arrival: Kim
Twemlow, the ex-world number one, with his smile, his jewelled shirt, his white shoes. The guy was like a god to Keith, no matter about his orange-peel face. Let others dwell on that funny lump in his side, that walking-frame. He had a good head of hair, for thirty-eight. Just that some of us live so full, our flames burn so bright, that the years go past not singly but six or seven at a time, like the years of dogs.
As for Guy, Keith saw him and closed his eyes and reopened them elsewhere.
Julian Neat was telling another one.
Nicola was laughing with her mouth as long and wide as it would go, when Guy stepped forward.
'You're going back with me.'
They all turned.
'You're going back with me.'
They all stared. They all stared at this bit of unnecessary unpleasantness. The pale loiterer with his boiled eyes. Nicola's expression showed that although she always tried to see the amusing side of things, well, on this occasion she really was rather shocked.
Guy seized her wrist and she gave a practised shriek as her stool slewed. Round about now Keith was always going to be stepping in.
'It's over. Don't be a prick.'
'You're going back', said Guy, with imma
culate enunciation, as if perhaps she hadn't heard or understood, 'with me.'
She looked at him. Her upper lip hovered over her teeth. 'No I'm not. What for? To talk about love, and Enola Gay? No I'm not. I'm not going back with you.'
'Right,' said Keith to the nape of Guy's neck. 'She's going back with me. For more of what she got last night. She's going back with me.'
'No I'm not. No way. Innit. I'm not going back with you.'
They all waited.
'I'm going back with him,' she said, leaning forward and placing her hand on the penis of Chick Purchase.
Guy left, but Keith was going nowhere.
They said they'd put the sound on later, that inimitable pub bustle, the whoops, the laughter, the crack of glass, even the computerized thunks of dart meeting board. So the buzzers buzzed, and shifters fixed, and fixers shifted: each noisemaker made his noise. Also the steady belching of the cigarette-smoke simulator, sending its grey clouds out over the occluded oché. Laughter remained, but it wasn't pub laughter. It was the laughter of Julian Neat, Kim Twemlow, and Nicola Six.
'Keith . . ? Shame it didn't go your way, Keith,' said Malcolm McClandricade. 'But it's not the end of the world. Sorry, Dom?'
'They're saying they can't use it.'
'There you go, Keith! Spare your blushes down the Marquis. Well. That's a relief all round.'
'They're saying they're using it. Thought they had a ladies' semi but they ain't.'
'Sugar. How'll they fill it? All we got's ten minutes.'
'They going to bung in a pub song or something. A knees-up. And a raffle or something.'
'Jesus. Still, Keith. Not surprising you didn't do yourself justice. With that handful. Talk about trouble. Keith? Keith? Dry your eyes, old son.'
'He's okay?'
'What do you think?'
'Get a car round?'
'Keith?'
But Keith snapped out of it, out of his ruined dream, his trance of darts. He stood up and said with boyish directness, 'I could point to the finger injury I was nursing. But tonight's been a valuable experience for me. For my future preparation. Because how's your darts going to mature, Malcolm, if you don't learn?'
'That's the right attitude, Keith.'
'Because she's dead. Believe it. You know what she is, Malcolm? She's a fuckin organ-donor. Do that and live? No danger. She's history, mate. You hearing me?'
'Anything you say, Keith.'
Will be taken down and used ... He spun round the shaking cage of the spiral staircase. Every impact of his boot was louder, harsher, his force and mass growing with all that was neg and anti. Then he hit the cold night air, and saw the moon - redder, to his eyes, than the midday sun.
Keith ran low towards the heavy Cavalier.
I must go back to London Fields — but of course I'll never do it now. So far away. The time, the time, it never was the time. It is a far, far ... If I shut my eyes I can see the innocuous sky, afloat above the park of milky green. The traintrack, the slope, the trees, the stream: I played there with my brother as a child. So long ago.
The people in here, they're like London, they're like the streets of London, a long way from any shape I've tried to equip them with, strictly non-symmetrical, exactly lopsided — far from many things, and far from art.
There's this terrible suspicion. It isn't worth saving anyway. Things just won't work out.
Be gone now, for the last act.
Chapter 24: The Deadline
d
own the dead-end street the car was waiting. And so was I...
I'm here. I'm in it. And how strange it is in here, fish-grey, monkey-brown, all the surfaces moist and sticky, and the air no good to breathe. Already destroyed. And not worth saving.
The car was there on the other side of the dead-end street. When midnight struck or tolled I crossed the road and bent my body and looked in through the broken window, broken by my own hand, so long ago. The murderer turned toward me.
'Get out of the car, Guy. Get out of the car, Guy.'
He was crying. But so what? We're all crying now, from here on in.
It was Guy. Of course it was. After a thousand years of war and revolution, of thought and effort, and history, and the permanent millennium, and the promised end of mine and thine, Guy still had all the money, and all the strength. When Keith came running low across the carpark, Guy was waiting, with all that strength. They squared up to one another. And Keith lost. For the second time that night, Keith tasted defeat: obliterating defeat. He got driven into the ground like a tentpeg. Where was he now? Somewhere: cradled, perhaps, in the loving arms of Trish Shirt.
'Look what she's done to me.'
'Get out of the car, Guy.'
'Look what she's done to me.’
We closed our deal. As he walked away he hesitated, and turned with a wide wag of the head. 'Jesus, Sam, don't do this for me.' 'Isn't it always someone else? Who does it.' 'Don't do this for me.' But he kept on going.
The black cab has pulled away, unrecallably. Here she comes now on her heels, crying, shivering, through the smell of cordite. There are still fireworks in the sky, subsiding shockwaves, the memory of detonations, cheap gunfire, whistling decrescendo and the smoke of burnt guys. I can see marks on her face. Another hour with Chick and he might have saved us all the trouble. He might have saved us all the goddamned grief. I flicked on the lights and the car lumbered forward. It stopped and idled. I opened the passenger door. I said,
'Get in.'
My face was barred in darkness. But she could see the car-tool on my lap.
'Get in:
She leaned forward. 'You,' she said, with intense recognition. 'Always you .. .'
'Get in.'
And in she climbed.
There are one or two things left to write.
That pill went down easily enough. I have about an hour. All told. For now I feel great luxury. I was seven when I learned the facts of life. I learned the facts of death even earlier. Not since then, I realize, not once, have I felt such certainty that the world will keep on going for another sixty minutes.
She outwrote me. Her story worked. And mine didn't. There's really nothing more to say. Always me: from the first moment in the Black Cross she looked my way with eyes of recognition. She knew that she had found him: her murderer. 1 wonder if she knew there'd be a queue . . . 'I've found him. On the Portobello Road, in a place called the Black Cross, I found him.' Imagination failed me. And all else. I should have understood that a cross has four points. Not three.
I've just taken a casual glance at the beginning - who knows, with a little work, it might somehow accommodate a new ending. And what do I see? Chapter 1: The Murderer. 'Keith Talent was a bad guy . . . You might even say that he was the worst guy.' No. I was the worst guy. I was the worst and last beast. Nicola destroyed my book. She must have felt a vandal's pleasure. Of course, I could have let Guy go ahead and settled for the 'surprise' ending. But she knew I wouldn't. Flatteringly, she knew I wasn't quite unregenerate. She knew I wouldn't find it worth saving, this wicked thing, this wicked book I tried to write, plagiarized from real life.
Originally I'd planned to do a final chapter, in the old style: Where Are They Now? It hardly seems appropriate. But still, in life's book a little I can read. Pale Guy will go home, on his hands and knees. We made a deal. Keith's fate is of course more uncertain — Keith, with his cultured skills, his educated release. But he will be linked to Guy, through the child. I made Guy swear. To do what's right. In the end, he delegated cruelty. I, kindness, or paternalism, or money. It was the best I could do.
And Nicola. Necropolitan Nicola, in her crimson shoes. Poor Nicola - she was so cold. It made it easier: even that she planned. 'I'm so cold,' she kept saying. 'I'm so cold.' And: 'Please. It's all right to do it... It's all right.' And after the first blow she gave a moan of visceral assent, as if at last she was beginning to get warm.
Yesterday, in the hour before dawn and her arrival, I had a prophetic dream.
I know it was prophetic because it's now come true. Yesterday I dreamt I ate my teeth. That's what murder feels like. I failed, in art and love. I wonder if there's time to wash all this blood off my hands.
Endpapers
Letter to Mark Asprey
You return, I fear, to a scene of some confusion. I will be lying on your bed, quite neatly, I hope, eyes open to the mirrored ceiling, but with a stoical smile on my face. In the car on the ledge, under a sheet, lies another body, rather less peacefully composed.
On your desk in the study you will find a full confession. That's all it is now. Perhaps it is also an elegy to the memory of an unfortunate lady, whom you knew. But I can't justify any of it and am indifferent to its destiny. I die intestate, and without close family. Be my literary executor: throw everything out. If an American publisher called Missy Harter makes inquiries, do me the courtesy of delivering a final message. Send her my love.
Even the dream tenant should always sign off by apologizing for the mess — the confusions, the violations, the unwanted fingerprints. This I do. You will encounter the usual pitiful vestiges of an existence. The usual mess. I'm sorry I'm not around to help you put everything into shape.
PS: If you have an hour or two, you might care to look at a little something I left on the drawing-room table: a brief critique of the Drama.
PPS: You didn't set me up. Did you? Letter to Kim Talent
I find I am thinking of the words of the exemplary War Poet: 'It seemed that out of battle I escaped . ..' The poem is a vision or a premonition of death (accurate, alas: his death was days away), in which the war poet - himself a forced collision, himself a strange meeting-joins his counterpart, his semblance, from the other side: 'I am the enemy you killed, my friend: