London Fields by Martin Amis Read Free Book Online Page B

if the cock were finally heralding the entrance of some imperial superrooster), Hope jerked upright, swore fluently and foully, applied valium and eyemask, and bunched herself down again with her face pressed to her knees. Guy smiled weakly. There was a time when he could read love in the shape of his sleeping wife; even in the contours of the blankets he used to be able to read it. . .
    He went outside, into the yard. The cock, the grotesque gallo, stood in its coop – yes, inches from their pillows – and stared at him with unchallengeable pomp. Guy stared back, shaking his head slowly. Hens were in attendance, quietly and unquestioningly supportive, among all the dust and rubbish. As for the two pigs, they were yahoos even by the standards of the yard. A dark half-grown Alsatian dozed in the hollow of an old oildrum. Sensing a presence, the dog jerked upright, waking sudden and crumpled, with sand dried into the long trap of the jaw, and moved towards him with compulsive friendliness. It's a girl, he thought: tethered, too. As he went to pet the animal they became entangled, entangled, it seemed, by the very amiability of the dog, by its bouncing, twisting amiability.
    In pastel daubings the new prosperity lay to east and west but this place was kept poor by wind. Wind bled and beggared it. Like the cock, the wind just did its wind thing, not caring wherefore. Hot air rises, cool air fills the space: hence, somehow, the tearing and tugging, the frenzied unzippings of this sandpaper shore. In his tennis shorts Guy stepped off the porch and walked past the car (the car avoided his gaze) on to the tattered croisette. A motorbike, an anguished donkey shackled to its cart – nothing else. The sky also was empty, blown clean, an unblinking Africa of blue. Down on the beach the wind went for his calves like an industrial cleanser; Guy gained the hardened rump of damp sand and contemplated the wrinkly sea. It opened inhospitably to him. Feeling neither vigour nor its opposite, feeling no closer to life than to death, feeling thirty-five, Guy pressed on, hardly blinking as he crossed the scrotum barrier; and it was the water that seemed to cringe and start back, repelled by this human touch, as he barged his way down the incline, breathed deep, and pitched himself forward in the swimmer's embrace of the sea . . . Twenty minutes later, as he strode back up the beach, the wind threw everything it had at him, and with fierce joy the sand sought his eyes and teeth, the hairless tray of his chest. A hundred yards from the road Guy paused, and imagined surrendering to it (I may be gone some time), dropping to his knees and folding sideways under the icy buckshot of the air.
    He queued for coffee in the awakening venta. The daughters of the establishment were mopping up; two men boldly conversed across the length of the dark room. Guy stood straight, barefoot, his skin and hair minutely spangled by the sand. An interested woman, had she been monitoring him with half an eye, might have found Guy Clinch well made, classical, above all healthy; but there was something pointless or needless in his good looks; they seemed wasted on him. Guy knew this. Stocky mat-shouldered Antonio, leaning against the pillar by the door, one hand limp on his round belly –and thinking with complacence of his own blood-red loincloth, with the good shoelace-and-tassel effect down there on the crotch – registered Guy not at all, not at all. And the poling daughters had thoughts only for Antonio, careless, drunken, donkey-flogging Antonio and his crimson bullybag . . . Guy drank the excellent coffee, and ate bread moistened with olive oil, out on the banging porch. He then took a tray into Hope, who ripped off her mask but lay there with her eyes closed.
    'Have you achieved anything yet?'
    'I've been swimming,' he said. 'It's my birthday.'
    '. . . Many happy returns.'
    'Young Antonio here is apparently pretty handy with a spanner.'
    'Oh yes? The car's dead,