London Fields by Martin Amis

Guy.'
    Moments earlier, out on the banging porch, a ridiculous thing had happened. Hearing a rhythmical whimpering in the middle distance, Guy had raised his hands to his temples, as if to freeze-frame the thought that was winding through his head (and he wasn't given to them. He wasn't given to pornographic thoughts). The thought was this: Hope splayed and naked, being roughly used by an intent Antonio . . . Guy had then taken his last piece of bread into the yard and offered it to the tinned dog. (He also took another incredulous look at the cock, the stupid gallo.) The dog was whimpering rhythmically, but showed no appetite. Dirty and gentle-faced, the bitch just wanted to play, to romp, to fraternize, and just kept tripping on her tether. The length of filthy rope – six feet of it – saddened Guy in a way that Spanish cruelty or carelessness had never saddened him before. Down in the yard here, on a wind-frazzled stretch of empty shore, when the only thing that came free and plentiful was space and distance – the dog was given none of it. So poor, and then poor again, doubly, triply, exponentially poor. I've found it, thought Guy (though the word wouldn't come, not yet). It is . . . I've found it and it's . . . It is –
    'So?'
    'Why don't we stay here? For a few days? The sea's nice,' he said, 'once you're in. Until we get the car fixed. It's interesting.'
    Hope's impressive bite-radius now readied itself over the first section of grilled bread. She paused. 'I can't bear it. You aren't going dreamy on me, are you Guy? Listen, we're out of here. We are gone. '
    And so it became the kind of day where you call airlines and consulates and car-hire people in a dreary dream of bad connexions and bad Spanish: that evening, on the helipad at Algeciras, Hope favoured Guy with her first smile in twenty-four hours. Actually nearly all of this was achieved (between meals and drinks and swims) from the control tower of a six-star hotel further down the coast, a place full of rich old Germans, whose heavy playfulness and charmless appearance (Guy had to admit) powerfully reminded him of Marmaduke.
    Thereafter it was all quite easy: not clear and not purposeful, but not difficult. Guy Clinch looked round his life for a dimension through which some new force might propagate. And his life, he found, was sewn-up, was wall-to-wall. It was closed. To the subtle and silent modulations of Hope's disgust, he started to open it. Guy had a job. He worked for the family business. This meant sitting about in a bijou flatlet in Cheapside, trying to keep tabs on the proliferating, the pullulating hydra of Clinch money. (It, too, was like Marmaduke: what would it get up to next?) Increasingly, Guy stopped going in and just walked the streets instead.
    Fear was his guide. Like all the others on the crescent Guy's house stood aloof from the road, which was all very well, which was all very fine and large; but fear had him go where the shops and flats jostled fascinatedly over the street like a crowd round a bearpit, with slot-game parlours, disastrous beaneries, soup queues, army hostels, with life set out on barrows, on pingpong tables, on decapitated Portakabins – the voodoo and the hunger, the dreadlocks and dreadnoughts, the Keiths and Kaths of the Portobello Road. Naturally Guy had been here before, in search of a corn-fed chicken or a bag of Nicaraguan coffee. But now he was looking for the thing itself.
    TV AND DARTS, said the sign. AND PIMBALL. The first time Guy entered the Black Cross he was a man pushing through the black door of his fear . . . He survived. He lived. The place was ruined and innocuous in its northern light: a clutch of dudes and Rastas playing pool over the damp swipe of the baize, the pewtery sickliness of the whites (they looked like war footage), the twittering fruit-machines, the fuming pie-warmer. Guy asked for a drink in the only voice he had: he didn't tousle his hair or his accent; he carried no tabloid under