London Fields by Martin Amis Page B

no tomorrow – for a time. But they all paid the price – on the stake. And when they did, pseudo-pseudo-Fredericks and pseudo-pseudo-Baldwins sprang up to replace them, quickly risen from the dead. Then they got torched too.
    Even the Old Testament expected the Apocalypse 'shortly'. In times of mass disorientation and anxiety . . . But I am trying to ignore the world situation. I am hoping it will go away. Not the world. The situation. I want time to get on with this little piece of harmless escapism. I want time to go to London Fields.
    Sometimes I wonder whether I can keep the world situation out of the novel: the crisis, now sometimes called the Crisis (they can't be serious). Maybe it's like the weather. Maybe you can't keep it out.
    Will it reach the conclusion it appears to crave – will the Crisis reach the Conclusion? Is it just the nature of the beast? We'll see. I certainly hope not. I would lose many potential readers, and all my work would have been in vain. And that would be a real bitch.

Chapter 5: The Event Horizon
    L IKE THE FLOWERS on a grave bearing the mother of a sentimental hoodlum, Keith's bouquet leaned and loitered in its bowl on the round table. Nicola always beheld these flowers with disbelief. The colours spoke to her of custard, of blancmange – a leaden meat tea served on pastel plates, the desiccation of a proletarian wake for some tyrant grandad, or some pub parrot of a granny, mad these thirty years.
    She found that, far from brightening the place up, as Keith had predicted they would, the flowers rendered her flat more or less uninhabitable. In India (where Nicola had once been) certain colours are associated with the colours of certain castes. These were low-caste flowers, casteless flowers, untouchable flowers. But Nicola didn't throw them away. She didn't touch them (you wouldn't want to touch them). Keith Talent was expected, and the flowers would remain. Nicola didn't yet know that Keith's blue eyes were completely flower-blind or flower-proof. He wouldn't see the flowers, and he wouldn't see their absence. Just as a vampire (another class of creature that cannot cross your threshold uninvited) gives no reflection in glass or mirrors, so flowers, except in the common-noun sense (he knew birds liked them, as did bees), sent no message to Keith's blue eyes.
    He telephoned on time, the day the flowers died. Even as she picked up the receiver she felt – she felt how you feel when the doorbell goes off like an alarm in the middle of the night. An unpleasant mistake, or really bad news. She steadied herself. After the repeated pips, themselves punctuated by Keith's ragged obscenities, she could hear the squawkings and garrottings of the Black Cross at a quarter past three. Even though pubs were now open more or less round the clock (there was one near the entrance to the dead-end street), they still exploded at the old closing times: coded memories deep in the genes of pubs . . . Keith's tone was mawkishly pally, seeming to offer the commiserations due to a shared burden (faulty household appliances; shoddy workmanship; life, life), as if they had known each other for years – which, in a sense, she thought, they almost had.
    'Tell you what then darling,' he said with that lugubrious lilt, 'yeah, I'll be right over.'
    'Sweet,' he added when Nicola said yes.
    She arranged herself for Keith's visit with considerable care.
    When Nicola was just a little girl she had a little friend called Enola Gay. Enola shared in all Nicola's schemes and feints, her tantrums and hunger-strikes, in all her domestic terrorism. She too had the knack or gift of always knowing how things would unfold. Enola didn't exist. Nicola invented her. When adolescence came Enola went and did a terrible thing. Thereafter she kept a terrible secret. Enola had borne a terrible child, a little boy called Little Boy.
    'Enola,' Nicola would whisper in the dark. 'What have you done, you wicked girl? Enola! Enola Gay . . .