London fields by Martin Amis

Author:Martin Amis [Amis, Martin]
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Unread
ISBN: 9780679730347
Publisher: Vintage Books
Published: 1991-02-14T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13: Little Did They Know

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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.

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