Read Online London Fields by Martin Amis - Free Book Online Page B

can't enter unless I'm asked in over the threshold. Once there, though, I stick around.
    And come back whenever I like.
    Now here's a pleasing symmetry. All three characters have given me something they've written. Keith's brochure, Nicola's diaries, Guy's fiction. Things written for different reasons: self-aggrandizement, self-communion, self-expression. One offered freely, one abandoned to chance, one coaxingly procured.
    Documentary evidence. Is that what I'm writing? A documentary? As for artistic talent, as for the imaginative patterning of life, Nicola wins. She outwrites us all.
    I must get into their houses. Keith will be tricky here, as in every other area. Probably, and probably rightly, he is ashamed of where he lives. He will have a rule about it – Keith, with his tenacities, his berk protocols, his criminal codes, his fierce and tearful brand-loyalties. Keith will naturally be tricky.
    With the murderee I have a bold idea. It would be a truthful move, and I must have the truth. Guy is reasonably trustworthy; I can allow for his dreamy overvaluations, his selective blindnesses. But Keith is a liar, and I'll have to doublecheck, or triangulate, everything he tells me. I must have the truth. There just isn't time to settle for anything less than the truth.
    I must get inside their houses. I must get inside their heads. I must go deeper – oh, deeper.
    We have all known days of sun and storm that make us feel what it is to live on a planet. But the recent convulsions have taken this further. They make us feel what it is to live in a solar system, a galaxy. They make us feel – and I'm on the edge of nausea as I write these words – what it is to live in a universe.
    Particularly the winds. They tear through the city, they tear through the island, as if softening it up for an exponentially greater violence. In the last week the winds have killed nineteen people, and thirty-three million trees.
    And now, at dusk, outside my window, the trees shake their heads like disco dancers in the strobe lights of nightlife long ago.

Chapter 4: The Dead-End Street
    'D REAMING OF IT. Begging for it. Praying for it.'
    Keith pushed his way out of the Black Cross and girded himself there on the stone step, beneath the sign. TV AND DARTS. He looked right, he looked left; he grunted. There she was. There was Nicola Six. She stood out clearly like a rivulet of black ink against the rummagings and barter pastels of the market street. Past the stalls she moved wanderingly, erring, erring. If it had occurred to Keith that Nicola was waiting for him or leading him on, that he was included in any design of hers, he would have dismissed the idea. But there was pressing invitation in the idleness with which she wandered, the slow shifts of weight in the tight black skirt. For a brief passage of time Keith had the odd idea that Nicola was watching him; and that couldn't be right, because Keith was watching Nicola, and Nicola hadn't turned. Something tugged him. She's leading me on, he thought, and started following her. Beauty, extreme yet ambiguously available : this, very roughly, was what Nicola's entrance into the Black Cross had said to Keith. But he didn't know the nature – he didn't know the brand – of the availability. Keith burped hotly. He was going to find out.
    Now Nicola paused in profile, and bent to inspect the cheap china of a covered barrow. Raising her face she had words with the barrow's owner, a cheat Keith knew well. She raised her veil . . . When she'd raised her veil in the pub Keith had looked at her with sharp interest, certainly, but not with desire. No, not exactly desire; the point of the dart in his foot precluded desire, hurt too much for desire. Nicola was tall – taller than Keith in her heels – and, it would seem, delicately made, the curve of the ankle answering to the curve of the throat. She looked like a model, but not the kind of model Keith generally preferred. She looked like a fashion model,