Chapter 13: Little Did They Know

haped like A topheavy and lopsided stingray, elderly, oil-streaked, semi-transparent, and trailing its coil of feathery brown vapour, a dead cloud dropped out of the haze and made its way, with every appearance of effort, into the dark stadium of the west. Guy Clinch had looked up. Now he looked down. To him, clouds had always been the summary of everything that could reasonably be hoped for from the planet; they moved him more than paintings, more than exciting seas. So dead clouds, when he saw them, brought a strong response also (it was much worse since fatherhood). Dead clouds made you hate your father. Dead clouds made love hard. They made you want and need it, though: love. They made you have to have it.

This was how things stood with Guy. Or this was how they swayed and wavered. On the night of the Wounded Bird — the kiss, when his lips had strained to meet or shun the lips of Nicola Six — Guy had checked into hospital a little after ten.

He felt fine himself. If anyone had asked him how he felt, he would have said that he 'felt fine'. Apart from an itchy left eye, a sore throat, his mild mono and controllable colic (all of which fell within the ever-roomier parameters of feeling fine), plus his more or less permanent height-related lower back pain and the numerous rumours of whatever else was in store for him mortally, Guy felt fine. Marmaduke's asthma attack, on the other hand (it developed suddenly that evening), had every appearance of seventy. The doctor came, and admired from a distance the desperate inflations of Marmaduke's belly. It's not that they can't get air in; they can't get air out. Many telephone calls were made - lights sent probing into the nooks and crannies of the health system. Now of course Guy and Hope had a system too. If the best care available was private, then Hope went in with the child; if non-private, then Guy did. Such an arrangement, said Hope, answered to his egalitarian convictions, his interest in 'life', as she called it, with all due contempt. By eleven o'clock, at any rate, Guy had his pyjamas and toothbrush ready in a briefcase and was soon backing the car out into the street.

Guy went in the next night too, straight after he finished at the office, relieving Hope, who pulled aside the surgeon's mask she was wearing long enough to inform him that inch-high eczema, had broken out across Marmaduke's chest and was heading, at a speed almost visible to the human eye, for his neck and face. With a gesture of quiet challenge she lifted the sheet. Guy stared down in wonder at the jewelled child.

Even more strangely and frighteningly, Marmaduke lay perfectly still, and was quite silent. During past hospitalizations, when Guy had arrived with his flowers, his bananas, his toys and cuddly animals, his overnight bag, Marmaduke had reliably climbed out of even the deepest troughs of weakness and disorientation to give his father a weary swipe. But today — not the smallest gob of spit. Not so much as a snarl! Marmaduke's red-smudged eyes stared up in bafflement and appeal. When the child suffered like this, it was as if Guy himself, or Guy's little ghost, were hawking and writhing, somewhere lost, in an alternate world. Looking down on him now, Guy felt the familiar equidistance between tears and nausea. The latter impulse he managed to resist. But then Hope wept. And then Guy wept. They embraced each other. And together, and very carefully, they embraced the child.

That night Guy thought about Nicola a good deal, but unwillingly, and without pleasure. And he cleaned his teeth with some violence, abolishing from his mouth the last memory of her lips. As he lay on the campbed in the sweltering cubicle, and jerked to his feet every few minutes to review the red rubies which fantasticated the surface of Marmaduke's drugged sleep, her image flapped in on him in little coronaries of self-hatred and dismay. That stolen hour: Keith and his cigarettes: if Hope knew - her anger, rightful and limitless. The connexion between the illicit kiss and the child's sufferings was perhaps as tenuous as the smoke that issued from the crafty burn of Keith's brief vigil; but he felt it as a certainty. This is the girl that kissed the man that asked the friend that smoked the fag to mind the kid that lived in the house that Hope built. .. Better just to wash my hands of the whole thing. It will be bearable. It won't kill me. I'll give her the money and that'll be the end of it. This vow, repeatedly uttered, felt calming, ascetic and renunciatory. At four he smoothed Marmaduke's forehead for the last time and collapsed into sleep moments before the first nurse strode into the room.

In the morning, Marmaduke looked unbelievable, and sounded as if... Well, if you'd shut your eyes, you would have quickly imagined two lumberjacks stooped over the handles of their doublesaw, and patiently felling some titan of the woodlands. And yet the child was widely pronounced to be stabilizing. The cutaneous vesicles, for instance, had already started to weep. Guy stared at the face on the bloodstained pillow and was unable to imagine that this was anything even a child could really recover from. But Marmaduke would recover from it. And Guy would recover from it. Actually he knew, to his shame, that recovery was near, because Nicola's face was back, and no longer half-averted; it was candid and aroused and voluptuously innocent. Being in a hospital anyway, Guy felt the urge to ask around, to find somebody who could get this face (this image, like the sun's imprint, but never fading) surgically removed. Of course, doctoring hadn't worked for the Macbeths; and it wouldn't work for him. When Hope arrived at half past ten with Phoenix and Melba and the odd au pair, Guy slipped away and called the office, and got Richard, who said he could go for the money at noon. He returned just as the doctor, the in-house asthma expert, was taking his leave.

Guy asked, 'What did he say?'

'Him?' said Hope. 'I don't know. Part allergenic, part reactive.'

'When he's better,' said Guy, who was thinking, Not too far: anyway she could meet me at the station, 'we'll move out of London.'

'Oh yeah? Where to, Guy? The moon? Haven't you heard? Everywhere's a toilet.'

'Well we'll see.'

'You can go now.'

But he stayed for a while, the good father, and watched the child. My God (Guy thought), he looks like lo. He looks like lo, Jupiter's molten moon, covered in frosty lava, from cold volcanoes. lo's volcanoes, caused by sulphur dioxide boiling at many degrees below zero in contact with sulphur . . . Just then, Hope unbuttoned her shirt and bared a breast, and offered it to the boy, for comfort. Of course, lo is connected to the mother planet by a kind of navel string. A 'flux tube' of electrical energy. Ten million amperes.

Later, as he bent to kiss Marmaduke's lips (the only part of his face unaffected by the popping swamp of the inflammation), the child flinched and gave a definite sneer. Pretty feeble by his standards; but Guy was heartened, and emboldened, to find his son capable of even such a spiritless grimace. He was wearing plastic handcuffs, to stop him scratching.

A mile to the west, Keith Talent lit a cigarette with the remains of its predecessor and then pressed the butt into an empty beer can. In this way did he scorn the ormolu ashtray and the onyx cigarette lighter, two recent acquisitions, which lay near by. He reached for a full beer can, tussling with the six-pack's elastic yoke. He swore. He coughed. He straightened up in bed. He burped astonishingly.

The noise that burp made was doubly disproportionate, disproportionate to his bulk, disproportionate to the podlike restriction of the room he lay in. Even Keith was slightly taken aback by it. A horror-film burp, a burp that cried out for at least two exorcists. Perhaps one of hell's top burp people was plying his trade in Keith's body. But Keith didn't care. He burped again, voluntarily, defiantly. From the kitchen the dog barked back. 'Keith,' called Kath. And even little Kim filed the possibility of protest. Keith gave them another.

Lying there among the knouts and nooses of cheap sheets and damp blankets, in his pink-tinged Y—fronts, with the beercan on his gut and the fizzing snout in his fingers, Keith had a fairly accurate idea of who and what he was. He could taste his own essence. The sourness of locker rooms, municipal duckboards, dormitories, prisons.

Things were bad. On the phone: 'Keith? It's Ashley. I'm going to have to hurt you, mate. All right? I'm going to hurt you.' Keith Talent, who had done a lot of hurting in his time, who knew about hurting from both points of view, Keith Talent understood. 'I understand.' It wasn't TV, hurting. It was real. It didn't come much realer: finger-cracking reality. Yeah, and kicked senseless and left upside down in a fucking dustbin somewhere.

Have the fucking bailiffs round here anyway in a minute. Characteristically you were sent two fat guys, with ginger beards, murmuring - money's janitors (they didn't want any trouble). Everything you owned got priced. Then you really found out how little you were worth. At this moment Keith himself felt like a coin

(he could taste it in his mouth), nicked and grimy, and of low denomination. In three nights' time he was meant to be throwing in the Duoshare. Quarterfinals. 'Nationwide sponsorship,' said Keith. He stared with his mouth open at the middle finger of his right hand. Prestigious endorsements. No help from that lying cow either. Was the darts dream about to end? Was the whole darts bubble about to burst?

Keith? What's the matter? The truth was that in addition to his usual woes Keith happened to be suffering from the after-effects of violent crime. You can almost hear him saying it, in moody explanation: 'I happen to be suffering from the after-effects of violent crime.' There are after-effects of violent crime, and they are onerous. We can be sure of that. Look: even Keith was capable of feeling the worse for them. The after-effects of violent crime have to be considerable, to get through to people like Keith who are always feeling lousy anyway. Now he burped again and the dog barked back and he burped back again - 'Keith,' called Kath - and it all felt as ragged as that, trying to outburp an old dog under a blanket of fagsmoke in the low sun.

By his participation in violent crime, Keith had worked a little gamble. In at least three or four senses, Keith had worked a little gamble with time. He had ploughed many days' worth of the stuff into the intensity of a scant forty-five minutes; and now those gambled hours were being subtracted from the present. A gambling man, Keith had gambled those hours; and he had lost them. He had lost. Not everything, because he reckoned he'd got away with it okay and wouldn't be doing the kind of time you measure in years. But he hadn't won. Those gambled hours, where had they gone?

The whole thing was a farce from the start. Never work with our coloured brethren, Keith said to himself. It should be pointed out that the injunction had little bigotry in it. ^t was like saying: Never drive down the Golborne Road on Friday or Saturday afternoons. Rubbish trucks innit. Occasioning pronounced congestion. You nip up Lancaster Road instead. Common sense. Keith wasn't prejudiced. No danger. Keith had lots of foreign mates, believing that it took all sorts to make a world. Look at horse-toothed Yaroslav, of Polish extraction. Look at Fucker Burke, pure bog-and-spud Irish. And Pongo was a Cornishman. No, Keith liked all sorts, all sorts of men, just as he liked all sorts of women, all colours, all creeds. Look at Balkish and Mango and Leeza and Iqbala. Look at Thelonius. In the end, though, he felt the wisdom of the traditional view: that when it came to work, your average bongo'll be as much use as an ashtray on a motorbike. Same difference with the black darter. All the sincerity in the world. But no clinicism.

Their plan was deceptively simple. Thelonius's babymamma Lilette worked as a cleaning-lady - but never for very long. As soon as any household felt the time was right to entrust her with a doorkey, Lilette felt the time was right to entrust it to Thelonius (who had it copied) and then quit the following day. The following night Thelonius would be stopping by in the small hours . . . Thelonius seemed offended by Keith's mild hint that the filth would soon put two and two together.

'Filth don't know shit,' he said. 'This is the big one. It have long bread, man.'

'Bingo,' said Keith.

As planned, Keith showed up at the Golgotha shortly after nine. Thelonius was there, as planned. Quite untypically, and not very encouragingly, Thelonius was drunk. 'Sdoveo,' said Thelonius. 'Svodeo.' He was trying to say 'Videos'. Another stretch of time passed while Thelonius tried to say 'Digital'. Well, in for a penny, thought Keith (prophetically enough). Outside, Thelonius opened a trembling palm in presentation of his new car - a souped-up, low-slung maroon Mini, with rallying lights, customized chrome fenders and celebrity windows. Not discreet, thought Keith, as he bent to climb into it.

'We won't be getting too many digital videos in here, mate,' said Keith, pleased, at least, to be sparing the Cavalier from such a mission. 'What happened to the BMW?'

'Had to let it go, man. Had to let it go.'

Keith nodded. That's how it went. Thelonius had committed every last fiver of his most recent windfall to the purchase of the BMW. He had bought the BMW off a cheat. A couple of days later he was without the means to buy the car a litre of petrol, let alone the repairs and spare parts (item: new engine) that the BMW cried out for. So he had sold it back to the cheat -at a heavy loss. And what does he do with such funds as remain? Gets this eyecatching minge-wagon, plus a new fur coat. The new fur coat would already be gathering oil in the Mini's boot, and Thelonius would be without the means to get it cleaned. That's how it went.

'Fifteen minutes,' Thelonius was saying sleepily, 'and we be back inna Black Cross, rich men. Sonofabitch!'

'What?'

The car contained no petrol.

And neither of them had any money.

So it was upon the Cavalier that they relied to take them to the dark corner off Tavistock Road. On the way Thelonius rehearsed his dreams of early retirement: the tickertaped, blonde-flanked return to St Lucia, land of his fathers; the ranch-style villa, the private beach, the burnished helipad. No moon, no streetlamps, and a low ceiling of cloud. The lock gave slickly to Thelonius's key.

'Bingo,' said Keith.

Little did they know that the place they were about to burgle - the shop, and the flat above it—had already been burgled the week before: yes, and the week before that. And the week before that. It was all burgled out. Indeed, burgling, when viewed in Darwinian terms, was clearly approaching a crisis. Burglars were finding that almost everywhere had been burgled. Burglars were forever bumping into one another, stepping on the toes of other burglars. There were burglar jams on rooftops and stairways, on groaning fire-escapes. Burglars were being burgled by fellow burglars, and were doing the same thing back. Burgled goods jigged from flat to flat. Returning from burgling, burglars would discover that they had been burgled, sometimes by the very burglar that they themselves had just burgled! How would this crisis in burgling be resolved? It would be resolved when enough burglars found burgling a waste of time, and stopped doing it. Then, for a while, burgling would become worth doing again. But burglars had plenty of time to waste—it was all they had plenty of, and there was nothing else to do with it—so they just went on burgling.

'Sonofabitch!' said Thelonius.

'What?'

'Torch onna blink!'

They thrashed around for a while by the light of Keith's Ronson. Thelonius found the till, smashed it open and triumphantly wrenched out a fistful of luncheon vouchers.

'LVs, man. Sonofabitch LVs.’

'Wait a minute,' said Keith, with a sweep of his dark-adapted eyes. 'I know this place. It's just a fucking corner shop. There's no videos. All they got here's a load of fuckim porp pies!'

Thelonius had hoped or predicted or at any rate affirmed that the owners would not be there when they called - would, in fact, be enjoying a late holiday on the west coast of England. How was it, then, that they could hear footsteps on the floor above, and the sounds of exasperated protest? The owners, of course, had gone nowhere: much impoverished by recent burglaries, they were stopping home. Thelonius looked up. 'Joolery, man,' he said, with the sudden calm of deep inspiration. 'She dripping with joolery.' He ducked into the back room and climbed the stairs with long silent bounds. Acting on pure instinct, Keith slowly filled his pockets with cigarettes. He went to the front door and opened it, wondering what he was feeling. Down All Saints, outside the Apollo, great numbers streamed against the light. Keith stuck his head out and had a look at the shop sign. Yeah, that's right. N. Poluck, the sign said grimly. Cornish Dairy. Confectioner & Newsagent. Yeah: tabloids, packet cakes, and milk cartons. Old Polish couple ran it, with an air of great depression and disobligingness. Typical corner shop: never had anything that anybody might ever want. Long live CostCheck and BestSave. Keith shut the door. Then, having checked the Eat-By date on the cellophane, he ruminatively consumed a pork pie.

In the upstairs bedroom Thelonius was rattling through the oddments on the dressing-table with truly unbearable agitation. Keith had never watched Thelonius at work before. A grave disappointment, with none of that relaxed concentration you're always hoping to see. He looked around for Mr and Mrs Poluck and soon picked them out, under a heap of clothes and upended drawers, and not stirring overmuch. Thus he also ascertained that there was nothing semi-violent about this particular crime. With a clear conscience, then, Keith strode up to the trembling figure of Thelonius and did two things. He tousled Thelonius's hair; he put a cigarette in Thelonius's mouth and lit it. Thelonius took one distracted drag before jerking his head back: enough. Keith left the butt on the dressing-table, among the specks of hair-dust. Bingo, thought Keith: DNA innit. Now Mr Poluck groaned; Thelonius shouted 'Where?' and thumped a gleaming gym-shoe down into his cheek. 'You don't do it like that, mate,' said Keith, peering about for something you could carry water in. 'You get them both sitting up and hurt one till the other . . . You know.'

Keith had been hopeful at first. Nobody trusted banks any longer, thank God; and you could stroll out of the most improbable places with some quite decent lifesavings under your arm. But the bright dream was fading. Mr and Mrs Poluck were as tough as old boots — and as cheap. Thelonius did everything with tears of imploring rage in his eyes. What a life, eh? The exertion, the inconvenience, the unpopularity you incurred, and nothing going right any of the time. Keith had to do a bit of judicious slapping and shaking and hair-tugging. He disliked the touch of old bodies and wondered if it would be any better working with the very young. Looking round the room he felt something like bafflement or even sadness at the whole idea of human belongings: we get them in shops, then call them our own; we all had to have this precious stuff, like our own hairbrush each, our own dressing-gown each, and how soon it all looked like junk — how soon it got trampled into trash. For their part, to be fair, the Polucks did well, with no excessive complaint, seeming to regard the episode as largely routine. Keith met with, and longsufferingly endured, their stares of deep recognition, which wasn't a matter of putting a name to a face but of looking into you and seeing exactly what you were. No fun. No jewellery either. In the end they came wheezing down the stairs with a fake fur coat, a damaged TV set, a broken alarm clock and a faulty electric kettle. Then the stony light of Keith's garage and the bottle of porno passed through the dust to settle the crime buzz and crime flop that played on their flesh like fever.

Those on the receiving end of violent crime feel violated: injury has been dealt out to them from the hidden chaos, which has shown itself briefly, and then returned to where it lives. Meanwhile, in chaos's hiding place, what happens? Rocks and shells catch and grate in neither sea nor shore, and nothing is clean or means anything, and nothing works.

'I'm a piece of shit,' Keith whispered into his beercan. He thought of everybody else who never had to do this. Guy, Guy's wife, in endless mini-series. Shah of Iran. Tits. A rich bird: and then you're out of here.

The money came in four buff envelopes. They contained used fifties. Much-used fifties. Sitting in his office (with its Japanese furniture and single Visual Display Unit and clean desk), Guy offered up his delicate and increasingly emotional nostrils to a familiar experience: the scurfy smell of old money. It always struck him, the fact that money stank, like the reminder of an insidious weakness in himself. Of course, the poets and the novelists had always patiently insisted as much. Look at Chaucer's cock. Look at Dickens (Dickens was the perfect panning-bowl for myth): the old man up to his armpits in Thames sewage, searching for treasure; the symbolic names of Murdstone and of Merdle, the financier. But all that was myth and symbol, a way of saying that money could somehow be thought of as being smelly, of being scatological. It was frightfully literal-minded of money, he thought, to be actually stinking up the place like this. Pecunia non olet was dead wrong. Pecunia olet. Christ, heaven stops the nose at it... Guy sealed and stacked the packets. He couldn't wait to get rid of them — all this hard evidence of deception. So far, no outright lies. He fancied he had been rather clever with Richard, adopting the smug yet faintly rueful uncom-municativeness of someone settling a gambling debt. It had come naturally. But it seemed quite likely that men were just easier to deceive. Guy put the money into his briefcase and smoked half a cigarette as he contemplated - in its physical aspects only - the drive across town.

Everything was going perfectly normally or acceptably but he was finding it impossible to meet her eye. He could point his face in the right direction, and try to will himself into her looming gaze. At one juncture he made it as far as her bare shoulder before his vision went veering off to some arbitrary point on the bookcase, the carpet, his own huge shoes. Otherwise, Guy clung to the belief that he was behaving with conviction and control. The tremendous snaps of his briefcase locks seemed to underscore his worldliness, the briskness of all his dealings. This was certainly one way of doing it: you gave the money, as it were disinterestedly; and then the adult verdict. Guy laid out the envelopes on the low table, and mentioned one or two of the slight difficulties he had encountered. Directing a rictus smile towards the ceiling, he spoke, for instance, of the tenuous connexion between the endlessly malleable symbols on the display screen and the hard cash in one's hand, with all its bulk and pungency.

'Will you do me the kindness', said Nicola Six, 'of looking at me when we're talking?’

'Yes of course,' said Guy, and steered his stare into the sun of her face. 'I do apologize. I — I'm not myself.'

'Aren't you?'

With a limp hand half-hooding his eyes (it was all right so long as he concentrated on the cleft between her chin and her lower lip), and with his legs crossing and uncrossing and recrossing, Guy ventured to speak of the recent struggles of his son Marmaduke, of the successive nights in hospital, the sleeplessness, the serious thinking ... By now Guy was staring at the bookcase again. As he began to outline the chief theme of all this serious thinking, Nicola said,

'I'm sorry to hear that your little boy's been ill. But I must say I think it's rather tactless of you to bring that up now. If not downright cruel. Under the circumstances.'

This promised something inordinate, and Guy was duly alarmed. He couldn't help feeling the pathos of her formulations (how theatrically we speak when we're moved); at the same time, he couldn't help feeling that her choice of outfit was perhaps a trifle unfortunate. Well, not 'choice': arriving several minutes early, he had caught her, she said, between her exercises and her shower. Hence the little tennis skirt or tutu or whatever it was, at the brim of her bare legs; hence the workout top, which was sleeveless. Also backless. The effect was altogether inappropriate, what with those girlish white socks she must have quickly slipped on. He looked her in the eye and said, 'Under the circumstances?'

Now it was her turn to look away. 'I see,' she said, with deliberation, 'I see that once again I am a victim of my own inexperience. It's an awful handicap. You never know what other people might reasonably have in mind.' She hugged herself, and gasped softly, and said, 'You want to go. Of course. You want to be safe again. Away from complication. I understand. May I. . . ? Before you go, may I say something?'

She stood up with her eyes closed. She came towards him, loose of body, with her eyes closed. She knelt, and folded her arms to make a pillow for her cheek on his knees, with her eyes closed. The room darkened. Guy felt that intimacy could actually kill you — that you really could die from all this pressure on the heart.

'It's sad, and ridiculous, but I make no apologies, I suppose. We can't help wanting what we want. Can we. It may have sometimes seemed that I singled you out for a purpose. You were to take me out of my life. Take me to the other side. Through love. Through sexual love. But really my plan went deeper than that. I'm thirty-four. I'll be thirty-five next month. The body ticks. I... I wanted to bear your child.'

'But this is too much,' said Guy, sliding his knees out from under her and trying to clamber himself upright. 'I'm speechless. I can't breathe either! I think it -'

'No. Go. Go at once. And take your money with you.'

'It's yours. And good luck.'

'No. It's yours.'

'Please. Don't be silly.'

'Silly? Silly? I can't accept it.'

'Why?'

'Because it's tainted.'

How incredibly lucky that everyone was at the hospital. Let's hear it for hospitals. And for asthma, and for eczema, and for infant distress. By the time he got home, Guy was in no condition to dissimulate, to act normal, whatever that was. He was in hospital shape himself, cottony, lint-like, as if his torso were just the bandage on an injured heart. In the second drawing-room he threw off his jacket and watched himself in the mirror as he raised the brandy bottle to his lips. Then a cold shower, and the welcome coldness of the sheets . . .How, exactly, had the fight started? It started when she threw something at him, something so small that he barely saw its passage or felt its impact on his chest. Then she was on her feet and thrusting the envelopes at him, and he held her slender wrists, and then the staggered collapse backwards on to the sofa — and there they were, in clothed coition with their faces half an inch apart. For a moment Guy could feel the hard bobble at the centre of everything.

'What did you throw at me?' he said.

'A Valium.'

He snorted quietly. 'A Valium?'

'A Valium,' she said.

With relief, almost with amusement, Guy readjusted his shocked body; and even his peripheral vision managed to renounce all but the quickest glint of her leggy disarray. Soon he found himself lying on his back with Nicola's head resting on his chest, his nostrils tickled by her hair as she wandered weepily on. Here she was giving him the detailed confession: how she had hoped to step with him into a world of physical love; how they might, if he, the perfect man, agreed, and after 'a lot of practice', try to make a baby; how thereafter she would be content if he looked in once a week, or perhaps twice, to play with his little daughter and (the suggestion was) to play with his little daughter's mother. This dream, of course, she now cancelled and cursed ... 'A lot of practice': there was something pitiably callow about the phrase. There was plainly something else about it too; callow or not so callow, the words entrained a physical reaction, one that tended to undermine his murmured demurrals and tender mewings. Guy hoped she hadn't noticed the ignoble billyclub which had now established itself athwart his lap. And when she accidentally rested her elbow on its base (turning to ask if this was all just sentimental tosh), Guy was glad he couldn't see his own archly agonized smile as he slid out from under her.

They parted. Yes, Guy and Nicola were to part. She stood. She stood there, corrected. She was mistress of herself once more. As Guy moved heavily towards the door he looked down at the velvet chair and saw the Valium she had thrown at him: not much of a missile, not much of a weapon, a yellow tranquillizer the size of a shirtbutton, and partly eroded by the sweat of her fist.

'I thought I might need it', she said, following his eyes (which were misting over at this comic poem of female violence), 'for after you left. But then I lost my temper. I'm sorry. I'm absolutely all right now. Go to your son. Don't worry. Goodbye, my love. No. No. Oh, be gone.'

Well he was gone now, and wouldn't be back. Guy was in his own bed, where he ought to be. He wouldn't be back — except perhaps in circumstances of great extremity. He found that the current situation, or the Crisis, had a way of prompting the most shameful fantasies — discrepant, egregious, almost laughably unforgivable. What if you survived into a world where nothing mattered, where everything was permitted? Guy lifted the single linen sheet. He had never thought of himself as being impressively endowed (and neither, he knew, had Hope). Who, then, was this little bodybuilder who had set up a gym in his loins? ... So in his own way Guy Clinch confronted the central question of his time, a question you saw being asked and answered everywhere you looked, in every headline and haircut: if, at any moment, nothing might matter, then who said that nothing didn't matter already?

Just when you thought she was a complete innocent or 'natural' or maybe even not quite right in the head (manic depression? in mild,

interesting and glamorous form ?), she came out with something really

devastating. How had it gone? Tainted. The money was tainted.

Certainly those fuming fifties had quite a genealogy: privatized prisons under Pitt, human cargo from the Ivory Coast, sugar plantations in the Caribbean, the East India company, South African uranium mines. This was all true: sweatshops, sanctions-busting, slain rainforests, toxic dumping, and munitions, munitions, munitions. But none of it was news to Guy. As Nicola talked he had sat there listening to a kind of commentary on the last ten years of his life: the horrified discoveries, the holding actions, the long war with his father. For ten years he had been dealing with cruel greeds and dead clouds. Nowadays the company was a good deal cleaner. And a whole lot poorer. Hope's money stank too: everywhere, vast bites out of the planet. Go back far enough and all money stinks, is dirty, roils the juices of the jaw. Was there any clean money on earth? Had there ever been any? No. Categorically. Even the money paid to the most passionate nurses, the dreamiest artists, freshly printed, very dry, and shallowly embossed to the fingertips, had its origins in some bastardy on the sweatshop floor. She'd taken it. Nicola had taken it. That put paid to another thought, also uncontrollable (and here the linen sheet gave another jolt): her on a street corner and a man walking past in white flares (hello sailor), and the woman on her knees in the alley, and the money dropped on to the wet concrete.

Guy thought he heard Marmaduke screaming and looked with terror at his watch. No panic: time to get up. Time to return to the sinister cheer of the Peter Pan Ward. He heard the sound again, from the street; but he was accustomed, by now, to the auditory trickvalve that turned a fizzing pipe or a tortured gearbox - or even birdsong or Bach — into a brilliant imitation of his absent son's screams. As he climbed from the bed Guy heard the thump, and felt the internal shockwave, of the slammed front door. Five seconds later he had hopped into his trousers and was veering round the doorway with a whiplash of shirt-tails.

The child was home! The child was home, borne aloft, it seemed, on the shoulders of the crowd, the little hero returned from the war, and screaming himself black in the face. Guy skimpleskambled down the stairs and ran high-kneed through the hall with his arms outstretched. And as the child joyously launched himself into his embrace, and, with the familiar, the inimitable avidity, plunged all his teeth into his father's throat, Guy thought that he might have been precipitate, or inflexible, or at any rate none too kind.

A mile to the north, Keith Talent lit a cigarette with the remains of its predecessor and then pressed the butt into an empty beer can. Two new televised conversations joined the surrounding symposium. Several types of whining were going on: the giant's dentistry in the street below, Mr Frost above who was mad and dying, Keith's fridge, various strains of music, and Iqbala next door going on at her boyfriend about the clothes money he'd borrowed off her last week and promised to refund on Wednesday. Keith listened closer: someone somewhere was actually shouting, 'Whine! . . . Whine!.. . Whine? Ah yes. Keith managed an indulgent leer. That would be little Sue down below and to the left, calling to her son Wayne. There came another repeated shout: 'Sow!. . . Sow! . . . Sow!' That would be Kev, calling to Sue. Keith leered again. He and Sue had once been close. Or was it twice? His place. Kath in hospital. Now Keith called to his wife, who duly appeared in the doorway with Kim in her arms.

'Idea,' said the baby.

'Lager,' said Keith.

'Here,' said Kath.

'Adore,' said the baby.

'What's that?' said Keith, meaning the TV.

'Ordure,' said the baby.

'News. Nothing on the Crisis,' said Kath.

'I'll give you a crisis in a minute,' said Keith.

'Adieu,' said the baby.

'Lager,' said Keith.

'Adieu, adore, ordure, idea.'

The doorbell rang, or rattled faultily.

'Check it Kath,' he said in warning as she turned.

Keith sat up straight with long eyes and open mouth. If that was Kirk and/or Ashley and/or Lee, if that was the boys, then Keith had miscalculated, and seriously. Over the past week, with all this talk about the breaking of his darting finger, Keith had had time to ponder, with many an elegiac sigh, the steady erosion of criminal protocol. In the old days you kicked off by threatening someone's family. None of this nonsense about starting in on a man's darting finger. How about Kath and Kim? Weren't they worth threatening? But maybe that was what Kirk and Ashley and Lee had decided to do: threaten his family. (They couldn't have come here for Keith, after all, or not directly: home was the last place they'd reckon on finding him.) In principle he might have approved. Still, threatening his family wasn't any good if he happened to be with his family at the time. He could hardly hide under the bed. Hide under the bed? Keith? No way: there was ten years of darts magazines down there.

'It's all right. Just a woman,' said Kath.

Two beats later he heard the front door croak open, Kath's cautious Yes? and a foreign female voice saying, Good afternoon. I'm your new worker. Keith sank back.

Chronic innit, he thought (he was gorgeously relieved). Diabolical as such. They come in here . . . Where's Mrs Ovens? Ah, well, I'm working in conjunction with her. We'll liaise. Liaise. I'll liaise you in a minute. Keith thought of his probation officer, the absolute lustrelessness of her hair and skin and eyes and teeth, the vertical lines that busily lanced her upper lip. Runs me ragged. All this about the Compensations. He had skipped their last five appointments: she'd have him reporting on Saturday afternoons, minimum, or swabbing out the Porchester Baths. And how is the little one? Yeah, that's it. Call it the little one because she can't remember its name. How's diddums? How's toddles? They come in here . . . And is your husband in employment at present? Power like. Stick their fucking oar in. Got no kids or one family's not enough. Keith craned forward and saw one flat black shoe suspended in the air beneath the kitchen table and slowly rocking.

'And is your husband at home at the moment', he heard the voice ask, 'or is it you who's smoking all these cigarettes?'

At that Keith let out a savage and protracted belch, a belch that said to all that he would never yield.

Clive barked. Kath said, 'He is, yes. He's not been well.'

'So it would appear. The child . . . You're aware, no doubt, of the harm caused by passive smoking?'

'I smoked passively every day of my life and it never did me any harm.'

'Didn't it?'

Keith was now burping in varied and horrid volleys.

'I'm afraid I might have to see about a hygiene order.'

'Hygiene? Listen. 1 mean we haven't got what some have. We're just trying, you know?'

'You tell her, Kath,' shouted Keith.

'I mean you come in here . . .'

'Speak your mind, girl,' shouted Keith.

Kath said, 'I'm starting to wonder about what you're doing and how you're feeling. There's nothing I wouldn't do for my baby. Nothing.'

'Except you haven't got any money, have you. You just haven't got enough money. My God, the smoke. And I can't say I like the look of that dog. Do you abuse your daughter, Mrs Talent?'

'Oi!'

Keith could stand for this no longer. His protective instincts were stirred. Loyalty: it was a question of loyalty. Nobody talked that way about Keith's dog - or about his cigarettes, which were superking-sized and had international standing. He was out of that bed by now and struggling with the mangled length of his ginger dressing-gown. Heavily he appeared in the doorway - browngowned Keith, fag in mouth, one arm working at the flapping sleeve, in variegated whiteness of pants and vest and flesh - and looked into the eyes of Nicola Six.

What was she doing?

What was she doing?

If the intelligent eye could lift off and climb past eaves and skylights, and speed over rooftops, and settle as it liked where people thought they were alone — what on earth would it see?

Nicola backing towards her bed with a glass of champagne in one hand and the other raised and beckoning, in black elbow-length gloves and a cocktail dress the colour of jealousy, and on her face an unrecognizable smile. Now she sat, and placed the glass on the bedside table, with a languid stretch of her wings, and remained for a moment in perfect profile, facing the window: pensively. Then her black gloves began to take rapt interest in the presumably exquisite texture of her dress — that bit that housed her breasts. Oh, the look of young wonder! She shook back her hair and started to unclasp.

Who was watching? Who saw her stand and lower the dress to her feet and step out of the lillybed in her high heels? And turn, and look up sleepily, and blow a little kiss, and wiggle a black finger. Nobody. Or nobody now. Just the single eye of the pistol-grip camera, placed on the chest by the door.

This would undoubtedly be for Keith.

'Jesus,' I asked her, 'what are you doing?'

'Oh, it's nice to get out and about. Look who's talking. What about you and your crazed excursion?'

I held up an open palm at her.

'Your love-quest. . . I'm sorry. Are you very sad?'

'I'll live,' I said. Not the happiest choice of words. 'It wasn't meant to be.'

Nicola nodded and smiled. She was sitting opposite me, the lower half of her body strongly curled into the lap of the wicker chair. It was about two a.m. When she spoke you could see deep darkness in her mouth. 'Your nerve went,' she said.

'Listen. We're not all puppetmasters like you. And even you need the run of the play. You need accidents, coincidences. I happen to know there's a nice little accident that'll help speed things up with Guy.'

'I do need real life. It's true. For instance, I need the class system. I need nuclear weapons. I need the eclipse.'

'You need the Crisis.'

Blinking steadily, she sipped red wine and lit another black cigarette. A strand of tobacco stuck to her upper lip until her tongue removed it. With gusto she scratched her hair, and then frowned at her fingernails, each of which seemed to contain about a quid deal of hashish. Yes, she certainly looked off-duty tonight. I'm the only one who ever sees her like this. She lets me. She likes me. I'm a hit with all the wrong chicks: Lizzyboo, Kim, Incarnacion.

'Nicola, I'm worried about you, as usual. And in a peculiar way, as usual. I'm worried they're going to say you're a male fantasy figure.'

'I am a male fantasy figure. I've been one for fifteen years. It really takes it out of a girl.'

'But they don't know that.'

'I'm sorry, I just am. You should see me in bed. I do all the gimmicks men read up on in the magazines and the hot books.'

'Nicola.'

'So they'll think you're just a sick dreamer. Who cares? You won't be around for that.'

'You neither. I was thinking. You're hard to categorize, even in the male fantasy area. Maybe you're a mixture of genres. A mutant,' I went on (I love these typologies). 'You're not a Sexpot. Not dizzy enough. You're not a Hot Lay either, not quite. Too calculating. You're definitely something of a Sack Artist. And a Mata Hari too. And a Vamp. And a Ballbreaker. In the end, though, I'm fingering you for a Femme Fatale. I like it. Nice play on words. Semi-exotic. No, I like it. It's cute.'

'A Femme Fatale? I'm not a Femme Fatale. Listen, mister: Femmes Fatales are ten a penny compared to what I am.'

'What are you then?'

'Christ, you still don't get it, do you.'

I waited.

'I'm a Murderee.'

We went out walking. We can do this. Oh — what you see in London streets at three o'clock in the morning, with it trickling out to the eaves and flues, tousled water, ragged waste. Violence is near and inexhaustible. Even death is near. But none of it can touch Nicola and me. It knows better, and stays right out of our way. It can't touch us. It knows this. We're the dead.

My love-quest did something to me. Heathrow did something to me. I can still feel the burning vinyl on my cheek. What happens, when love-thoughts go out — and just meet vinyl?

Now I've had some bad airport experiences. I've been everywhere and long ago stopped getting much pleasure from the planet. In fact I am that lousy thing: a citizen of the world. I've faced utter impossibilities, outright no-can-dos, at Delhi, Sao Paulo, Beijing. But you wait, and the globe turns, and suddenly there is a crevice that fits your shape. Heathrow provided no such fuel for optimism, or even for stoicism. Zeno himself would have despaired instantly. The queues, the queues, cross hatched by the extra-frantic, the extra-needing. Too many belongings. Too many people all wanting to do the same thing . . .

And now the dreams have come. Something happened to me. I fell, down, down, tumbling end over end.

The dreams have come, right on schedule, as Dr Slizard warned. And if the dreams have come, then can the pain be far behind?

I always thought I was up to anything that dreams could throw at me: I'd just sleep right through them, and get some much-needed rest. But these dreams are different, as Slizard said they would be. After Incarnacion has been here the bed is plump and impeccably uniformed, and I repose trust in its square-shouldered pride, its bursting chest! On most nights, though, it looks about ready for me, intricately coiled, waiting for the stripped creature on his hands and knees.

As Slizard foretold, the dreams are not recuperable by memory, or not yet anyway, and this suits me right down to the ground. I have the impression that they deal with the very large and the very small — the unbearably large, the unbearably small. But I can't remember them, and I'm glad. Bad news for me, these dreams turn out to be bad news for Lizzyboo, too. I always used to think how heavenly it would be — at least in the abstract — to wake up to her, to wake up to all that honeytone and health (the sun lights this scene gently: her back bears warm creases from the press of her fanned hair; and then she turns). No longer. I'm not going to wake up to anybody ever again. I couldn't let Lizzyboo wake up to me, a gaunt zero, zilched by death. I can feel the unslept hours and the unremembered dreams queuing in waves above my head.

Quaintly, Slizard advises me not to eat cheese. This from his office in the Pan Am building in New York, the envy of the universe. I heed his words. Cheese? No thank you. I stay right off that shit. Don't grate no cheese on my pasta. Not a single Dairylea split with Kim. At the Black Cross, I take a pass on the cheese-and-onion crisps. Offered cocktails at the Clinches', I don't touch so much as a cheese football. And yet when 1 sleep what reeking Stiltons, what slobbering camemberts and farting gorgonzolas come and ooze across my sleep.

Lizzyboo says she eats too much when she is unhappy. She tells me this, between mouthfuls, in the Clinch kitchen. She tells me more over her shoulder from the icebox or the cooker. It's a terrible thing with her. Always the kiddie stuff: fish fingers, milkshakes, baked beans, sticky buns. Her weight shoots up. Lizzyboo and her weight! I didn't know? Yes, the slightest sidestep from her starvation diet -and grotesque obesity is at the door with its bags. I wonder if it can be the force of suggestion, but over the past few days a quarter-moon seems to have formed beneath her chin, and an extra belt of flesh around her midriff. She takes her head out of the bread-bin to tell me that she doesn't know what she's going to do about it.

Although I could point a finger at the world situation, I'm clearly meant to take the blame for this. For this disaster also I am obliged to pocket the tab. 'Come on, honey,' I say to her. 'There are plenty of fish in the sea.' Again, a poor choice of words, perhaps. Because there aren't plenty of fish in the sea, not any more. Lizzyboo shakes her head. She looks at the floor. She gets up and heads for the grill and sadly makes herself a cheese dream.

When entering America these days it is advisable to look your best. Wear a tuxedo, for instance, or a vicar outfit. Penguin suit, dog collar: take your pick. Me? I looked like a bum, in bum suit, under bum hair, on bum shoes, when I crept into a cab, twenty miles from Missy Harter. My eyes felt as red as cayenne pepper - as red as the digital dollars on the cabby's moneyclock. It was night. But I could see the cabby's signs as clear as day. Passengers were asked to stow their own bags (driver handicapped) and, of course, to refrain from smoking (driver allergic). please talk loud was a third notification of the cabby's many disabilities and cares. Even with three of the four lanes down we made good speed into the city. Just enough moon to see the clouds by, clouds shaped like the tread of a gumboot, or a tyre, or a tank. Over the sky's sandflats the gibbous moon seemed tipped slightly sideways and smiling like a tragic mask. Beneath, half-cleared rustbelt. sherato. texac. Even the big concerns losing their letters. Then the city: life literalized, made concrete, concretized, massively concretized. Here it comes. And as we passed the Pentagon, the biggest building on earth, visible from space, I saw that every last window was burning bright.

That was my American dream. America? All I did was dream her. I woke up and I was still in Heathrow Airport, with my cheek on the hot vinyl. For fifteen minutes I watched a middle-aged man chewing gum, the activity all between the teeth and the upper lip, like a rabbit. And then I just thought: Enough.

It was hard getting back into London: I nearly flunked even that. Even getting back into London took my very best shot (No danger. You won't get a cab here, pal. No way). Before, I never thought I'd be able to live with myself if I failed to get to Missy and America. But maybe I can. After all, it won't be for terribly long.

That dream ... So dogged, so detailed - so literal. One of those dreams where things happen at the same speed as they do in real life. It included a convincing four-hour wait in Reimmigration. Missy Harter used to dream like that, always; she used to lie by my side, and spend half the night in the Library of Congress or shopping at Valducci's. Something tells me that I won't dream like that ever again. From now on, each night, it'll be special relativity — Einsteinian excruciation. So maybe the American dream was a farewell to dreams. And to much else.

What was I doing? The whole thing, the whole love-quest, the whole idea: it was from another world. Forget it. Turn back. Back to try the art and dice with death and hate, and not fight for love in some unreal war .

Chapter 14: The Pinching Game

f we could pass through her force field (and we can't quite do this, force fields being strongest round the beautiful and the mad), we would know that her stomach wall hurt and weighed heavily, that she felt occasional drags and brakings of nausea, that all sorts of salmon were bouncing upwards against the stream. But here she comes, the character, Nicola Six on the street, on the Golborne Road, bringing a packet of light through all the random hesitation. Not that the street was without colour and definition on this day: it looked shorn in the low sun, plucked and smarting, with a bristle of golden dust. But Nicola brought light through it, human light, even dressed as she was, for simple authority: black cord skirt and tight black cashmere cardigan, white shirt with blue ribbon serving as bowtie, hair back (before the mirror, earlier, a daunting emphasis of eyebrow). She was getting all the right kinds of look. Women straightened their necks at her; men glanced, and dipped their heads. Only one discordant cry, from the back of a truck, and fading: 'Miss World! Miss World!' Everyone else seemed to be shifting sideways or diagonally but Nicola was travelling dead ahead.

The entrance to Windsor House immediately extinguished all her light. Nicola slowed for an instant, then kept going; she used a mental trick she had of pretending not to be there. The steeped concrete shone in the low sun, and even fumed slightly with the fierce tang of urine. It would have been a humiliation to approach them, so clearly were the lifts defunct — slaughtered, gone, dead these twenty years. She peered up the vortex of the stone stairwell and felt-she was underneath a toilet weighing ten thousand tons.

'Want I mind your car?' said a passing four-year-old.

'I haven't got a car.'

'Die, bitch.'

She climbed up past scattered toilet-dwellers, non-schoolgoing schoolboys and schoolgirls, non-working men and women, past the numb stares of the youthful and the aged. She faced them all strongly; she knew she looked enough like the government. She felt no fear. Walking naked up these steps (she told herself), with her bare feet on the wet stone, Nicola would have felt no fear. That was part of it: no more fear. She paused on the tenth floor and smoked half a cigarette, watching an old toiletman tearfully trying to uncap a damaged can of Peculiar Brew.

Like everybody else, Nicola knew that council flats were small — controversially small. In a bold response to an earlier crisis, it was decided to double the number of council flats. They didn't build any new council flats. They just halved all the old council flats. As she walked along the ramp of the fifteenth storey, open to the search of the low sun, Nicola could hardly fail to notice that the front doors alternated in colour, elderly green interspliced by a more recent but even flakier dark orange. The front doors were also hilariously close together.

She halted. Faultily the bell sounded.

It was Nicola's view that she was performing very creditably, especially during the first two or three minutes, in that storm or panic of sense-impressions. To begin with there was the kaleidoscopic wheeling that her entry forced upon the kitchen, the chain of rearrangements made necessary by the admission of one more person into the room. Then vertigo relaxed into claustrophobia — armpit-torching, heat-death claustrophobia. Distractedly her parched eyes searched for a living thing. There was a plastic pot on the minif ridge. In it, some kind of maimed gherkin was apparently prospering; it rose from the soil at an unforgivable angle. Then she had to confront the pallor and distress of the mother, and the surprising child on the floor (the intelligent valves of its watchful face), and the flummoxed dog. Christ, even the dog looked declassed. Even the dog was meant for better things. Next door to the left a man and a woman were quarrelling with infinite weariness. The room was split-levelled with cigarette smoke. Nicola pressed her thighs together to feel the good silk between her legs. She hadn't been anywhere this small since she was five years old.

Still hidden from sight, Keith hardly went unnoticed. As the olfactory nerve-centre of this particular stall or cubicle, Keith hardly went unnoticed. Although he remained at the far end of the flat, he was none the less only a few feet away. Keith was very close. Nicola could hear a beercan pop, a lighter worked and sworn at, the severe intakes of air and smoke. Then the inhuman hostility of his eructations . . . Time to flush him out. Time, because the place could not be borne -was astonishingly unbearable, even for an expert, like her. Feeling you were in Nigeria was one thing. In Nigeria, and trapped in Nigeria, and not at the scene of a drought or a famine but of an industrial catastrophe caused by greed. And there for your own advancement, to make what you could of the suffering. The talk was two-way torture. She said,

'Except you haven't got any money, have you. You just haven't got enough money. Do you abuse your daughter, Mrs Talent?'

'Oi!'

They waited.

And Keith loomed, loomed large in the Keith-sized kitchen. He wasn't that big; but he was gigantic in here. When their eyes met he paused heavily. Up from the depths of the brown dressing-gown came a sallow blush of shame or rage or both.

'I'm sorry,' said Nicola, with some haughtiness, 'but it seems to me that self-hatred is more or less forced on one in conditions like these. There'd be no way round it. Without self-hatred you wouldn't last five minutes.'

'Hey,' said Keith. 'Hey. You. Fuck off out of it.'

Kath turned slowly to her husband, as if he were a wonderful doctor, as if he were a wonderful priest. She turned back to Nicola and said, 'Yes. Care? What kind of care do you get from an office? And from someone like you, doing your hobby or whatever it is you're doing. Get out.'

Tell her, Kath,' said Keith calmly.

'Get out, you old witch. Get out. You vicious thing.'

'Well as I said before, 'said Nicola, gathering herself and looking up into Keith's considering sneer, inches from her eyes, 'it's nothing more nor less than a question of money.'

She swayed out on to the ramp. Violently yanked from inside, the door gave an agonized creak and then closed almost noiselessly.

Nicola found that she was short of breath and taking great bites out of the air. Now to get back and prepare for Keith's coming. As she turned she heard the voices from the toy house.

'Vicious. Purely vicious.'

'They can't touch you, girl. You are who you are. Don't ever forget it. You are who you are, girl. You are who you are.'

So when he rang her bell, when he buzzed and blurted and came jinking up the last flight of stairs, Nicola was ready for this summit meeting, ready to turn all the new energies her way. She had done Keith violence, but she wanted no violence done to her, not yet. She wanted that violence violently stoppered. It was all right: she had the money. And any innocent or idiot could tell that a considerable sex-deflection would also be called for. Thinking this, Nicola had breathed in sharply and embraced herself, bristling - even her breasts had bristled. Love wouldn't do it. (Keith wasn't the type.) Sex wouldn't do it either, all by itself. Not even Nicola's sex, whose power had so often astonished even Nicola Six: the threats, the reckless bribes (money, marriage), the whimperings, the unmannings and unravellings, the bared teeth, the tendons of the neck so savagely stretched . . .

Keith entered. Nicola stood at the table in the darkened room, counting money under an angle lamp. She wore a black nightgown of candid vulgarity. With her hair freed and a third of each breast showing and no smile on her business face, she hoped to resemble a Monaco madame after a hard week in her first tax year of semiretire-ment, or something like that, as seen on TV. She removed her dark glasses and looked into the shadows for him. He looked back into the light. Silently, their force fields touched. And said:

Home was his secret. Nobody had ever been there before. Oh, there had been ingress: rentmen and census people, the police, and cheating electricians and would-be plumbers and so on as well as real social workers and probation officers—but nobody he knew. Not ever. Only the dog, and the woman, and the child: the insiders. They, too, were secrets. Home was his terrible secret. Home was his dirty little secret. And now the secret was out.

'Once upon a time,' saidNicola carefully, 'your wife must have been very lovely.'

'You shouldn't've fucking done it, Nick.'

'And the little girl is divine. What did you say your dog was called?’

'You shouldn't've fucking done it, Nick.'

'Such a noble beast. Keith, I understand. You didn't want me to know, did you, that you lived like a pig.'

'That's so ... That's so out of order.'

She had a bottle of whiskey and two long glasses ready. One of the glasses she filled with perhaps a quarter of a pint of neat spirit. She took two swallows, and came round the table towards him.

'Have some of this.'

And he took two swallows.

Nicola could be taller than Keith when she wanted to be. She was certainly taller than him now, in her four-inch high heels. Keeping her legs straight she leant back on the table and dropped her head, murmuring, 'I took some of your money and spent it on new stockings and things. I hope you don't mind.' She looked up and said, 'You do know why I'm doing this, don't you, Keith? You do know what this whole thing is really all about?' Nicola didn't feel like laughing. But she did think it was wonderfully funny.

'What?'

'It's your darts: listen.'

The speech went on for five or six minutes. She then took him by the hand and guided his leaden body towards the sofa, saying, 'I've made a little tape for you, Keith, which in its curious way will help show you what I mean.'

. . . The black elbow-length gloves, the look of young wonder, the jealous dress, the blown kiss, the wiggling black finger, beckoning.

'Slow it,' moaned Keith, as the fade began. With a soft snarl he snatched at the remote. Then Nicola's quarter-clad brown body dashed backwards, and became a clockwork mannequin, then a living statue, as Keith froze the frame of choice.

'That,' said Keith, and sighed, not with yearning so much as with professional sincerity, 'that is the real thing.'

She gave him the money now, negligently tossing handful after handful into a tradenamed shopping-bag, and then led him into the passage. Every now and again Keith tried to look shrewd and deserving, but his lips kept scrolling into an adolescent leer. Standing above him at the top of the stairs, she folded her arms and appeared to gaze downwards at herself. 'The eternal appeal of the cleavage, Keith. What is it, I wonder. The symmetry. The proximal tension.'

'Prestigious,' said Keith. 'Looks nice,'

'In the books, they say, rather wistfully, that men want to put their faces there. Return to mother, Keith. But I don't agree. I don't think men want to put their faces there.'

Keith nodded his head, and then shook it.

'/ think they want to put their cocks there, Keith. I think they want to fuck the tits. Ooh, I bet they do.'

'Yeah cheers,' said Keith.

This wasn't the real thing. Just a mannequin, on the remote. 'Remember. Next time you see him: mention poetry. I don't care how. And meanwhile, masturbate about me, Keith. Beat off about me. As a form of training. A lot. All those things you wanted to do to girls and were too shy to. Or they wouldn't let you. Do them to me. In your head.'

Keith's eyes seemed to be seeping upwards beneath his lids. 'Give me a taste. Come on, doll. Give me a taste.'

She must touch him. With three long fingers she felt his hair: as dry as fire-hazard gorse. One spark and it would all go up. She took a grip near the snagged parting line and pulled back slowly. Then, leaning into his opened face—and already hearing the swill of mouthwash, the twanging floss (it isn't me doing this: it's Enola, Enola Gay) - she gave him the Jewish Princess.

The telephone was ringing. Nicola drank whiskey. She lifted the receiver, heard the panicking pips, paused, and dialled six. 'I'm afraid I'm not here,' she said. And she even meant it, in a way. 'If you'd like to leave a message, please speak after the tone.'

Of course, there was no tone, and they both waited. Christ, how many seconds?

'Hello? Hello, Nicola? . . . God, I'm completely soaked. It's so awkward, talking to a machine. Listen. I've been -'

She pressed down with a finger.

Carefully Guy ducked his head out of the telephone cubicle and turned to face the street-wide wall of rain. Music was playing — it came and went beneath the thunder-racetrack of the sky. The right music, too. Guy turned: an old black man in the corner with a sax and the fierce melancholy of Coleman Hawkins. What was it? Yes. 'Yesterdays'. Guy would certainly be giving him money.

He stood in the steeped emptiness of the underground station on Ladbroke Grove, barely half a mile from the house, where he had recently discovered a live telephone box - in a long rank of dead ones. Quite a find. Like seeing a pterodactyl, complacently perched on a telegraph wire among the sparrows and worn old crows. Forever intensifying, the rain was now coming down so hard that even the cars seemed to be wading off home. Just buses, like lit fortifications, stalled in the wet night. That song: such complication, such grievous entanglement. First you go through this, it was saying. Then you go through this. Then you go through this. Life, thought Guy. When at last the man was finished Guy went over and pressed a ten-pound note into his styrofoam cup. 'That was beautiful,' he said. No answer. Guy turned and walked. And then the man called out: 'Hey buddy. I love you.'

Five long strides got him under the bus-stop shelter. Already he was farcically drenched. Rather than go straight home, where Marma-duke was in any case well-attended despite the nanny shortage (two night nurses until he was better again), Guy dreamed up reasons for breaking the journey with a visit to the Black Cross: two hundred yards along Lancaster Road. He kept on waiting for the rain to slacken. But it didn't. It kept on doing the other thing. It was lashing down, just like they said, whipstroke after whipstroke, in climbing anger. Extremity upon extremity, and then more extremity, and then more.

As Guy dodged and jumped towards the Portobello Road and its low-strung lights he saw a figure splashing about like a stage-drunk in the swollen gutter beneath the lamp. Keith. And he wasn't staggering. He was dancing, and laughing. And coughing.

'Keith?'

'. . . Yo!'

'My God, what are you doing?'

Keith sank backwards against the lamp-post, his head up, his gut softly shaking with laughter or exasperation -with laughter or defeat. He had a green carrier-bag, crushed to him beneath his crossed arms. 'Oh, mate,' he said. 'You tell me. What's it all about, eh? Because I don't fucking get it.'

'Come on in. Look at us.'

'Because I don't fucking get it.'

'What?'

'Life.'

Now a tomato-red Jaguar jerked round the corner and came to an urgent halt beneath the lamp.

'Here comes summer.'

The back door opened and a voice said from the contained darkness, 'Get in the car, Keith.'

'Cheers, lads.’

'Get in the fucking car, Keith.'

Guy straightened, showing all his height. Keith held up a dripping hand. 'It's okay,' he said. 'No, it's okay. Only messing.' Keith stepped forward, and stooped. Then he said casually over his shoulder, 'We'll have a drink. Not in there. Inna Golgotha. I'll -' A hand came out of the shadow and Keith flopped suddenly into the back seat. 'Ten mimff. Oof!'

He shouted something else and sustained another blow but Guy couldn't hear in all the rain's swish and gloss.

Re-entering the Golgotha meant rejoining it, at heavy expense, because Guy hadn't brought his stencilled nametag and could do nothing with the doorman's wordless stare. With some reluctance he ordered a porno (in the context of the Golgotha, Keith frowned on all other drinks) and secured a table by the fruit-machines, some distance from the band. As he did so he marvelled at this new thinghe had: guts. Guy didn't even look around for another white face. For some reason the physical world was feeling more and more nugatory. He thought that perhaps this was a consequence or side-effect of the time he was living through: the sudden eschatology of the streets; the tubed saplings and their caged trash, marking the place where each human being might be terribly interred; her leggy disarray and the bubble at the centre of everything . . . Keith came in; he held up a bent thumb, and then vanished, soon to reappear with a glass and an unopened bottle of porno - a litre bottle, too, or possibly even a magnum.

'Are you all right?'

Keith's grinning face looked hot and swollen, and one of his ears was a startling crimson, with the beginnings of a rip showing beneath the lobe. A patch of blood on his hair had had time to dry and then to deliquesce again in the rain. He kept looking at the middle finger of his right hand as if it had a ring on it, which it didn't.

'Nah, load of nonsense. They're good as gold really. All forgotten now as such.'

His clothes were smoking. But so were Guy's. Everyone was smoking in the Golgotha, and everyone's clothes were smoking too. This was what happened when water met with warmth; and the rain that fell on London now gave off smoke for reasons of its own.

After a few quick glasses Keith said, 'I'm going to treat meself tonight. Debbee Kensit. Debbee - she's special to me. You know what I mean? Not yet fully mature. And pure. Natural love. Not like some. Nothing dirty. No way.’

'Dirty?' said Guy.

'Yeah. You know. Like gobbling and that. Seen uh . . ?'

At once Guy raised a forefinger to his eyebrow. 'Not in a while.'

'I don't understand you, Guy Clinch. I don't. Know what she said to me the other day? She said, "Keith?" I said, "Yeah?" She said, "Keith?" I said, "Don't start." She said, "Keith? You know, there's nothing -I wouldn't do - when I go a bundle on a bloke like that." There. That's what she said.'

Guy was staring at him in addled incredulity. 'Wait a minute. She . . . told you -'

'Or words to that effect,' said Keith quickly. 'Now hang on. Hang on. You're getting off on the wrong foot here, pal. She didn't say it. Obviously. Not in so many words.'

'So she said what?'

'It was like from this poem or something,' said Keith, with what certainly seemed to be sincere disgust. 'Christ! How'm I supposed to know. Eh? I'm just scum. Go on. Say it. I'm just scum.'

'You don't -'

'Jesus. Oh, excuse me, mate. No no. I'm not sitting through this. I come in here. Relax. A few drinks. You try to bring two people together in this world.'

'Keith.'

'I expected better of you, Guy. I'm disappointed, mate. Very disappointed.'

'Keith. It's not like that. Look. I really apologize.'

'Well then. And listen: I didn't mean no disrespect to her either. Neither.'

'Keith, of course you didn't.'

'Well then. Okay. Yeah cheers. I'm glad we ... Because you and me, we . . .'

Guy suddenly felt that Keith might be on the verge of tears. He had certainly been punishing the porno. Something else told Guy that the word love was not too far away.

'Because you and me, we — we ought to look out for each other. Because we're in this together.'

'In what?' said Guy lightly.

Keith said, 'Life. In this life.'

They both sat up straight and cleared their throats at the same time.

'I didn't see you there Saturday.'

'You were there, were you?’

'You didn't -'

'No, I couldn't. What was it like?'

Keith dropped his head and peered up at Guy with an expression of rich indulgence. He said, 'Obviously the visitors were keen to blood their new signing from north of the border, Jon Trexell. How would the twenty-three-year-old make the transition from Ibrox Park to Loftus Road? At just under a million one of Rangers' more costly acquisitions in the modern era, no way was the young Scot about to disappoint. . .'

Twelve hours later Guy came down the stairs of his house in Lansdowne Crescent, carrying the breakfast tray and humming non piú andrai. He paused and fell silent outside the door of the main drawing-room. He put two and two together. Hope was interviewing, or importuning, a new nanny. Guy listened for a while to the conjuring of large sums of money. Nanny auditions were a constant feature of Hope's daily life. There had been a standing ad in The Lady ever since the week of Marmaduke's birth ... He went on down to the kitchen, bidding good morning to a cleaning-lady, a maid, a nurse, two elderly decorators (the cornices?), and an outgoing nanny (Caroline?), who was openly drinking cooking-sherry and taking deep breaths as she stared in wonder at the garden. Blindingly lit by the low sun, the near end of the room was still a slum of toys. Both the closed-circuit TV screens were dead but Guy's attention was drawn by a portable intercom on the table. Its business end must have been in the room above, because you could hear Marmaduke in stereo. He was evidently being quite good, as was often the case when a new nanny was in prospect. To hear him now, a stranger might have thought that the child had suffered nothing worse in the past few minutes than a savage and skilful beating. Abruptly everyone in the kitchen yelped with fright at an atrocious crash from the room above.

'No no, Melba,' Guy sang, heading off the maid as she went for the industrial vacuum-cleaner beneath the stairs. Til do it.' Present myself to the new nanny: present the normal smile. One behaves as if that's all nannies could possibly want: normality.

'Melba!' yelled Hope as Guy came swerving into the room, grappling with nozzle and base. Marmaduke had somehow toppled the full-length eighteenth-century wall mirror, and was now gamely struggling to go and throw himself in its shards. Hope held him. Between the child's legs the cord of a lamp dangerously tautened. Guy stared into the Kristallnacht of fizzing glass.

'Melba'.' yelled Guy.

After a few minutes Guy helped Melba fold the crackling binliner. He got up from his knees, brushed himself down — ouch! — and turned as Hope was saying,

'. . . quite as hectic as this. Darling, don't. Please don't. This is my husband, Mr Clinch, and I'm sorry, what did you say your name was ?'

'Enola. Enola Gay.'

You look for the loved one everywhere, of course, in passing cars, in high windows — even in that aeroplane overhead, that crucifix of the heavens. You always want the loved one to be there, wherever. She is the object of the self's most urgent quest, and you search for her sleeplessly, every night, in your dreams . . . Guy felt panic, and pleasure: she was here, she was closer, and how gentle she looked in pink. Obeying a lucky instinct, Guy came forward and kissed his wife good morning. Whatever other effects this had it predictably caused Marmaduke to attack him. Left free for a moment to wander down the room, the child saw the caress and ran back over to break it up. Thus Guy was busy pinning Marmaduke to the floor as he heard Hope say,

The money I think you'll agree is extremely generous. I've never heard of anyone paying anything even approaching that. You can wear what you like. You'll have backup most of the day from Melba and Phoenix and whoever. You'll have the use of a car. You get a double rate for any Saturdays you might like to do, and triple for Sundays. You can ha ve all your meals here. You can move in. In fact —'

Melba knocked and re-entered. Three builders or gardeners stood ominously in her wake.

'Do excuse me for a moment,' said Hope.

So then. Leeringly chaperoned by Marmaduke, Guy and Nicola sat ten feet apart, on facing sofas. Guy couldn't talk to her; he found, once again, that he couldn't even look at her.

But Marmaduke felt differently. He slid from his father's grip. He put his hands in his pockets and sidled across the carpet. Checking out a new nanny — checking out her tits and weakspots: this was meat and drink to Marmaduke.

'Hello then,' he heard her say. 'You're a cool customer, aren't you? Guy, I'm so sorry. I hoped you wouldn't be here. I had to do this-I had to see. Ow! I say, that's quite a pinch. I got your message and I felt so—I see. Well, two can play at that, young man. Come to me today. You must. It's called the Pinching Game.'

The door opened. Guy looked up: Hope was summoning him with her strictest face. He trudged from the room in his enormous shoes. Hope knew: it was so obvious. Guy felt as though a new force had been introduced into nature, like gravity but diagonal and outwards-acting: it might take the lid off everything, the room, the house.

'Well?' said Hope in the hall with her hands high on her hips.

'I . . .'

'We take her, right? We grab her. We gobble her up.'

He hesitated. 'Has she any qualifications?'

'I didn't ask.'

'Has she any references?'

'Who cares?'

'Wait,' said Guy. At his back he felt the glare of what he assumed to be dramatic irony. 'Isn't she a bit goodlooking?'

'What? It's incredibly quiet in there.'

'You always said that the goodlooking ones weren't any use.'

'Who are we to be picky?'

Guy laughed briefly and quietly.

'I mean,' continued Hope in a loud whisper, 'he's worked his way through all the ugly ones.'

They heard a harsh moan from within. It was quite unlike any sound they had heard Marmaduke make before. The parents hurried in, expecting the usual scene. Nanny hunched in a corner or diagnosing some facial injury in the mirror. Marmaduke brandishing a lock of hair or a torn bra strap. But it wasn't like that. Enola Gay was looking up at them with unalloyed composure while Marmaduke Clinch backed away, nursing his wrist, and with a new expression on his face, as if he had just learnt something (one of life's lessons), as if he had never known such outrage, such scandal.

The house was a masterpiece. How it scintillated, how it thrummed. So much canvas, and so much oil. How confidently it put forward its noble themes of continuity and repose, with everything beautifully interlinked. And Nicola's presence was like a fuse. Because she could make the whole thing go up.

Of course, the house wasn't art. It was life. And there were costs. Naturally, money was one of them. The house didn't eat money. It scattered money. Money flew off it, like tenners fed to an open propeller. From miles around people came to scour and primp it, to doctor it for more use, more work. Scrubbers and swabbers on their knees, the quivering plimsolls of an electrician upended beneath the joists, a plumber flat on his back, a mangled sweep slithering up the chimney, labourers, repairmen, staggering installers, guarantee checkers, meter readers; and, of course, Marmaduke's many myrmidons. Sometimes Guy imagined it was all laid on for the child. The dinky boy-drama of skip-removal. The spillikins of scaffolding. All the ruin and wreckage.

The other thing the house used up was order. Each day the doublefronted dishwasher, the water softener, the carrot peeler, the pasta patterner got closer and closer to machine death, hurtling towards chaos. Each day the cleaning-lady went home tireder, older, iller. A citadel of order, the house hurried along much entropy elsewhere. With so much needed to keep it together, the house must deep down be dying to collapse or fly apart. . . Feeling hunger, and the desire to do something suddenly serious, Guy went downstairs again, stepping over a carpet-layer and pausing on his way to exchange a few words with Melba, whose strength for years he had bought and sapped . . .

His hands were steady as he poured milk and buttered bread. Now here was another conjugal secret: he pulled out the morning paper from beneath a stack of Marmaduke's toy brochures, where he had earlier hidden it from Hope, and turned again to the op-ed page. There was the article or extract, unsigned, offered without comment. Of course, in these days of gigawatt thunderstorms, multimegaton hurricanes and billion-acre bush fires, it was easy to forget that there were man-made devices — pushbutton, fingertip — which could cause equivalent havoc. But then all this stuff was man-made, not acts of God but acts of man ... So the first event would be light-speed. A world become white like a pale sun. I didn't know that. Didn't know the heat travelled at the speed of light. (Of course: like solar rays.) Everything that faced the window would turn to fire: the checked curtains, this newspaper, Marmaduke's tailored dungarees. The next event would come rather faster than the speed of sound, faster than the noise, the strident thunder, the heavensplitting vociferation of fission. This would be blast overpressure. Coming through the streets at the speed of Concorde, not in a wave exactly but surrounding the house and causing it to burst outwards. The house, in effect, would become a bomb, and all its plaster and order, its glass and steel would be shrapnel, buckshot. No difference, in that outcome, between this house and any other. His house, the thrumming edifice of negative entropy, would be ordinary chaos in an instant, would be just like wherever Keith lived, or Dean, or Shakespeare. Then everything would be allowed. Guy shut his eyes and helplessly watched himself running north through low flames and winds of soot; then her room, torn open to a sick sky, and an act of love performed among the splinters - forgivable, but with her beauty quite gone, and everything spoiled and sullen and dead.

Tve got to stop,' he said with a sudden nod.

'Pardon?' came Melba's voice sweetly.

'Oh, I'm sorry, Melba. It's nothing.'

'The Effects of Thermonuclear Detonations', taken from something they referred to as 'Glasstone & Dolan (1977,3rd edn)', among the editorials on deforestation and nurses' pay, next to a report about Concorde moving into overall profit by the end of the year, and above the astronomy column, which said that the Apollo object torn loose from the asteroid belt would miss the earth by a quarter of a million miles. Which sounded good. But that was where the moon was. Farewells were sounding on the intercom when Guy crushed the newspaper into the bottom of the rubbish bin. He swallowed as he felt her force field leaving the house.

And the house was still there.

Guy peered into the hall. By the sound of it, Marmaduke had dispersed — upstairs with Phoenix and Hjordis, no doubt. Now Guy abruptly cringed to the greeting of Dink Heckler.

'Hey,' said Dink, and pointed with an index finger.

'Dink. How are you?'

'Good.'

The South African number seven was of course in tenniswear. His pressed shorts were candy-white against the scribbled slabs of his thighs. Encased in practically cuboid gyms, Dink's feet were planted stupidly far apart.

'You're playing', said Guy, 'in this weather?'

'For sure.' Dink stared through the half-glass front door at the bright October morning, and then stared back at Guy with an expression of fastidious disquiet. 'What's the matter? You see something I don't?'

'It's just the — the low sun. Rather blinding.'

Hope now came skipping down the stairs saying, 'That's good. She's starting today. At one.'

'/s she,' said Guy.

Hope looked at Guy, at Dink, at Guy again. 'Are you okay?. . . Actually I'm encouraged. I thought she was amazing. Marmaduke was quite silent with her. He looked completely stunned. She must have this terrific authority. You know he's having a nap up there?'

'Amazing,' said Guy.

Then Hope said with finality, 'I'm playing with Dink.'

Under the buxom duvet, in the vestiges of his wife's sleepy body-scent, behind half-drawn curtains, Guy lay staring at the ceiling, itself significantly charged with the milky illicit light of a bedroom still in use during the hour before noon. The trouble with love, he thought, or the trouble with this love anyway (it would seem), is that it's so totalitarian. In the realm of the intellect, how idle to look for the Answer to Everything; idler still to find it. Yet with the emotions . . . what's the big idea? Love. Love is the Big Idea. With its dialectical imperatives, its rewrites, its thought police, its knock on the door at three a.m. Love makes you use the blind man, makes you hope for death in Cambodia, makes you pleased that your own son writhes -deep in the Peter Pan Ward. Bring on the holocaust for a piece of ass. Because the loved one, this loved one, really could turn the house into a bomb.

He awoke around two. His mind was clear. He thought: it's over. It's passed on. And he tensed himself, listening for the first whisper of recurrence . . . Perfectly simple, then. He would tell Hope everything (though not about the money. Are you serious?) and submit to his atonement. How marvellous, how beautiful the truth was. Ever-present, and always waiting. Love must be an enemy of the truth. It must be. And it kept on making you like what was bad and hate what was good.

Footsteps passed his room and climbed the stairs.

And now life lent a hand.

Through the throttled wire of a stray intercom he heard noises, voices, laughter. Hope and Dink, upstairs, changing. Having played, they were now changing, changing. A yelp, I'm all sweaty, a comical interdiction, Check it out, a trickle of zip then a hot silence broken by a gasp for air and her serious Quit it!. . .

And Guy thought: My wife doesn't love me. My wife has betrayed me. How absolutely wonderful.

Soon she entered, wearing a dressing-gown, the hair released from its grips, and with burning throat. 'Get up,' she said. 'He's sleeping now but you're on duty when Phoenix leaves. We're nannyless for the rest of the day. That bitch didn't show.'

In the next room along, Marmaduke, who had been up all night, lay sprawled in a shattered nap. Toys were scattered about the cot like munitions in a stalled war. The little prisoner, with his brutal Scandinavian face, was shackled in his woollen blankets, in his tumbling baby rope. Flattened with sweat was his duck-white hair . .. Even in sleep the child was not unmonitored, unmediated. Drinking a cup of instant coffee, Phoenix watched over him from the kitchen, closing her long eyes for several seconds at each indication that he might be about to stir.

Before losing consciousness Marmaduke had gazed at and prodded the twin bruises on the back of his dimply fist. He regarded them with fear and admiration. Already he was forgetting the pain that had accompanied them, but something about the way they came to be there would live on gloriously in his mind. He wanted to do to someone else the thing that had been done to him. 'Nice,' he had whispered (as one might say 'nice' of a pretty girl in the street or of the straight drive on the cricket field: saluting skill, talent), before rolling over to twist himself into sleep, hoping to dream of the Pinching Game.

The Pinching Game was good. It was nice.

'Ow! I say, that's quite a pinch. Well, two can play at that, young man. It's called the Pinching Game.'

Marmaduke waited.

'Do you want to play?'

Marmaduke waited.

'Now first — you pinch me as hard as you like.'

Marmaduke pinched her as hard as he liked - which was as hard as he could.

'Good. And now I pinch you.'

Marmaduke watched, with stoned interest. Then his vision seeped through tears of pain.

'Now it's your turn again. You pinch me as hard as you like.'

Marmaduke reached out quickly. But then he hesitated. First looking up for a moment with an uncertain smile, he carefully gave the tenderest tweak to the back of her hand.

'Good. And now I pinch you.’

Although I don't eat much now 1 think I still have a good appetite for love. But it doesn't work out.

In all I spent six nights sleeping rough at Heathrow. Not much sleeping. But plenty of rough. And I despaired. The other people there were better at it than I was, stronger and quicker in the standby queue, with heftier bribes more heftily offered. I could see myself becoming, as the weeks unfolded, a kind of joke figure in the Departure Lounge. Then a tragic figure. Then a ghoulish one, staggering from news hatch to cafeteria with bits falling off me.

I think I still have a good appetite for love. But there's nothing I can eat.

Incarnacion relates that Mark Asprey was hardly to be seen here at the apartment. Her own eyes retreat and soften with a lover's indulgence as she talks of the kind of demand in which her employer constantly finds himself. This leads her on to explore one of life's enigmas: how some people are luckier than others, and richer, and handsomer, and so on.

Of course I'm wondering whether he took a stroll down the deadend street.

In my new dreams I think I keep glimpsing Kim, and Missy, Missy, Kim. They're trying to be nice. But in my new dreams it just doesn't work out.

I love Lizzyboo in my own way yet when I consider her socio-sexual training or grounding I have the impression that there are only about four or five things that could ever really happen between her and men.

He Refuses To Make A Commitment. She Has A Problem Giving Him The Space He Needs. He Is Too Focused On His Career At This Time. They Think They Love Each Other But Given Their Temperamental Differences How Will They Ever Connect?

She's much more importunate these days, or she is when she's not eating. The restraints are gone. It's as if she's falling. She's falling, and at the usual rate of acceleration, which is plenty fast: thirty-two feet per second per second. Luckily, at least, with this falling business, it doesn't make any difference how heavy you are ... I guess I could tell her I'm plain old fashioned. 'I guess I'm just a child of my time, Lizzyboo,' I can hear myself saying as I daintily remove her hand from my knee. Alternatively, there are any number of debilitating but non-fatal diseases I could bashfully adduce. Last night she took my hand on the stairs and said, 'You want to fool around?' Me? Fool around? Hasn't she heard that fooling around is on the decrease - though maybe it hasn't been, much, in her case, or not until recently. Dink Heckler, for example, has the look of a stern taskmaster in the sack. But she won't be getting any of that nonsense from me. I'm a child of my time.

In the wild days of my hot youth no one wanted to risk it and neither did I. Remember how it used to go ... Are you free any night this week? I thought we might step out together - to the hospital. That nice place on Seventh Avenue. If it makes you feel more relaxed about it, bring your personal physician along. I'm bringing mine. I'll be around to get you about half past eight. In an ambulance. Aw honey, don't be late.

It's not quite like that any more. Let's consider. The vaulting viruses, all those wowsers and doozies and lulus, are of course increasingly numerous but they seem to have simmered down a good deal. Purely out of self-interest, naturally. They're only parasites, after all, and the career guest and freebie-artist doesn't really want to tear the whole place apart (except when unusually drunk). So the wisdom of evolution prevailed; they adopted a stable strategy, with their own long-term interests held sensibly in view; and now they're just part of the dance. Besides, we all know we're not going to live for ever. We do know that. We forgot it for a while. For a while, the live-forever option looked to be worth trying. No longer. Even in California the workout parlours and singlet clinics are paint-parched and gathering dust. Three score and ten is a tall order, even for the very rich, even for someone like Sheridan Sick. We subliminally accept that life has been revised downward, and once again we start sleeping with strangers. Or some of us do. The act of love takes place in a community of death. But not very often. Just as you won't find much corridor-creeping in the modern hospice, despite all the superb facilities.

I met her eleven years ago. We felt safe. More than that. We felt solved. We were solved.

Now she won't talk to me. My name is muck at Hornig Ultrason. I'm not feeling very well, and I haven't got any money.

I find myself indulging in vulgar reveries of a movie sale.

There must be a dozen hot actresses who would kill for the part of Nicola Six. I can think of several bankable stalwarts who could handle Guy (the ones who do the Evelyn Waugh heroes: meek, puzzled, pointlessly handsome). As for Keith, you'd need a total-immersion expert, a dynamic literalist who'd live like a trog for two or three years as part of his preparation for the role.

The only difficulty is Marmaduke. Typical Marmaduke. Maximum difficulty. Always.

Maybe you could dispense with an infant star and go with a little robot or even some kind of high-tech cartoon. It's amazing what they can do.

Or, because age and time have gone so wrong now, why not a youthful dwarf, wearing diaper and baby mask?

It's all gone wrong. The old are trying to be young, as they always have, as we all do, youth being the model. But the young are now trying to be old, and what is this saying? Grey-locked, resolutely pallid, halt in step and gesture, with panto-hag makeup, crutches, neck-braces, orthopaedic supports.

Then the next thing. You start fucking around with the way your babies look. First, you fuck around with the way you look (turn yourself into a bomb site or a protest poster), then, with that accomplished, you start to fuck around with the way your babies look. Dumb hairstyles - lacquered spikes, a kind of walnut-whisk effect. Magentas and maroons, wheat-and-swede combinations. I saw a toddler in the park wearing an earring (pierced), and another with a tattoo (bruised songbird). There are babies tricked out with wigs and eyeglasses and toy dentures. Wheeled in bathchairs.

Now I know the British Empire isn't in the shape it once was. But you wonder: what will the babies' babies look like?

Lizzyboo and I go to the new milkbar on Kensington Park Road. Her treat. She insists. The place is called Fatty's, which strikes me as unfortunate, and bad for business. On the way Lizzyboo will eat an ice-cream or a hot pretzel or a foot-long hotdog. Once there, once actually in Fatty's, she will start on the milkshakes, with perhaps a banana split or a fudge sundae. Over these dishes she will sketch in the prospect of lifelong spinsterhood.

This afternoon, a blob of chocolate somehow attached itself to her nose. I kept assuming she would eventually notice it — would feel it, would see it. But she didn't. And I let too much time pass, too much nose time, too much chocolate time. It was a big relief when she excused herself and went to the bathroom. As she lifted herself from the chair I observed that the zipper on her skirt was warped with strain. At least five minutes later she returned, and the blob of chocolate was still in place.

'Sweetheart,' I said, 'you have a blob of chocolate on your nose.'

She was mortified. 'How long has it been there?' she said tightly into her compact.

'Since way back. Since you had the eclair.'

'Why didn't you tell me?'

'I don't know. I'm sorry.'

Because to have done so earlier would have involved an admission of intimacy. Because it suits me if she looks ridiculous. Because I didn't know she had stopped looking in mirrors.

They both turn heads, these girls I squire. Lizzyboo by day. Nicola by night. They both embody whatever it is that means men have to look.

And what is it? One of the many messages that pulses off Lizzyboo has something to do with babies. It says: Big me. I'm big already but make me bigger. Let the SSCs get to work. Give these breasts a job. I lay it all before you, if you're the one. If you're the one, then I lay it all before you.

Interestingly, Nicola's appearance makes no mention of babies. All she has to say on that subject is Watertight Contraception. I'm not going to lose my figure and get up in the middle of the night. I won't be time-processed, medianized — not by you. It would have to be something special, something unique, something immaculate.

Like the Virgin Mary: Nobodaddy's Babymamma.

It doesn't particularly matter that I'm going blind because I can't read anyway. Five minutes with Macbeth on my lap and I'm in a senile panic of self-consciousness. Mark Asprey's many bookshelves are shelved with books but there's nothing much to read. It's all stuff like Good Bad Taste or Bad Good Taste or Things You Love to Hate or Hate to Love or why it's Frivolous To Be Important or The Other Way Around.

I get stuff from Nicola but who am I kidding. There are things I'm not seeing, or not understanding. The only writer who gives me any unfeigned pleasure is P. G. Wodehouse. And even him I find a bit heavy. He takes a lot out of me. Scratching my hair, with soft whistles, with lips aquiver, I frown over Sunset at Blandings.

Pretty soon I'll be obliged to ask Nicola to show me what she looks like in the nude. I find I'm looking forward to it. I can't imagine she will deny me this simple request. She knows how seriously I take my work.