London Fields by Martin Amis Page A

his arm, open on the racing page. With a glass of medium-sweet white wine he moved to the pinball table, an old Gottlieb, with Arabian-Nights artwork (temptress, devil, hero, maiden) – Eye of the Tiger. Eye of the Tiger . . . A decrepit Irish youth stood inches away whispering who's the boss who's the boss into Guy's ear for as long as he seemed to need to do that. Whenever Guy looked up a dreadful veteran of the pub, his face twanging in the canned rock, stared at him bitterly, like the old man you stop for at the zebra who crosses slowly, with undiminished suspicion: no forgiveness there, not ever. The inprehensible accusations of a sweat-soaked black girl were finally silenced by a five-pound note. Guy stayed for half an hour, and got out. He took so much fear away with him that there had to be less of it each time he returned. But going there at night was another entry.
    Keith was the key: Keith, and his pub charisma. Keith was the pub champ. The loudest, the most booming in his shouts for more drink, the most violent in his abuse of the fruit machine, the best at darts – a darts force in the Black Cross . . . Now plainly Keith had to do something about Guy, who was far too anomalous to be let alone, with his pub anticharisma. Keith had to ban him, befriend him, beat him up. Kill him. So he pouched his darts one day and walked the length of the bar (regulars were wondering when it would happen), leaned over the pinball table with an eyebrow raised and his tongue between his teeth: and bought Guy a drink. The hip pocket, the furled tenners. Keith's house had many mansions. The whole pub shook with silent applause.
    Cheers, Keith! After that, Guy belonged. He sailed in there almost with a swagger and summoned the barmen by name: God, or Pongo. After that, he stopped having to buy drinks for the black girls, and stopped having to buy drugs from the black boys. The heroin, the cut coke, the Temazepam, the dihydrocodeine he had always refused, fobbing them off with small purchases of dope. He used to take the hash and grass home and flush it down the waste-disposer; he didn't drop it in the gutter for fear that a child or a dog might get hold of it, a needless precaution, because the hash wasn't hash and the grass was just grass . . . Now Guy could sit in a damp pocket of pub warmth, and watch. Really the thing about life here was its incredible rapidity, with people growing up and getting old in the space of a single week. Like the planet in the twentieth century, with its fantastic coup de vieux. Here, in the Black Cross, time was a tube train with the driver slumped heavy over the lever, flashing through station after station. Guy always thought it was life he was looking for. But it must have been death – or death awareness. Death candour. I've found it, he thought. It is mean, it is serious, it is beautiful, it is poor; it fully earns every compliment, every adjective, you care to name.
    So when Nicola Six came into the Black Cross on a day of thunder and stood at the bar and raised her veil – Guy was ready. He was wide open.
    'Bitch, ' said Keith, as he dropped his third dart.
    Being a dart, a little missile of plastic and tungsten, it combined with gravity and efficiently plunged towards the centre of the earth. What halted its progress was Keith's left foot, which was protected only by the frayed webbing of a cheap running-shoe: you could see the little bullseye of blood. But there was another arrowman or darter in the Black Cross that day; perhaps this smiling putto lurked in the artwork of the pinball table, among its sinbads and sirens, its goblins and genies. Eye of the Tiger! When he saw her green eyes, and the breadth of her mouth, Guy gripped the flanks of the machine for comfort or support. The ball scuttled into the gutter. Then silence.
    She cleared her throat and inquired of Godfrey the barman, who cocked his head doubtfully.
    As she turned to go Keith stepped in, or he limped in, anyway, moving down