By now all Appleseed eyes were on Roxeanne and a tingling silence had gathered over the table, enclosing the alcove from the rest of the bay. She bit her lip ticklishly as she unsnapped the lugubrious boogie’s thin brown belt and sought for the catch of his fly-zip with bent forefinger and sharp thumb. She straightened the toggle and pulled it downwards, evenly unmeshing the silver treads to disclose a widening triangle of greyish rayon. The lugubrious boogie sighed in a baffled, plaintive way and made to paw at Roxeanne’s wrists. She didn’t seem to need to take any notice. Her right-hand fingertips dipped into the moist area of his perineal divide while she introduced her left down the loose front band under his navel. Roxeanne wettened her mouth as the light-brown prepuce was hoisted clear of the gauzy underpants. He contemplated his slack organ with a curiosity no less dazed and intent than that of his table-mates. Then, like a jerking second hand, the penis craned abruptly and the lugubrious boogie leant forward into painful, heaving, tubercular tears.

  Roxeanne stood up. She smiled. And they left him there with his elbows on the table, his face held in damp hands.

  27 The Old Cops

  In the concrete avenue Marvell looked around the semicircle of faces. ‘What now, Quent?’

  Twenty feet away a cruising drophead M.G.E. slowed in the narrow vehicle-lane. It contained two swarthy persons in the front buckets and another perched up on the rumble seat; the third passenger wasn’t good-looking enough to do that kind of thing, and he knew it. After a few seconds the car accelerated away.

  ‘Hey, Quentin. What now?’

  For the first time in the year Celia had known him, Quentin Villiers was showing less than his normally perfect serenity. He pinched the base of his nose with gloved fingers and blinked.

  ‘Darling?’ said his wife.

  ‘I just want to . . . find the cars,’ he muttered.

  ‘What about – what was it? – The Gerry Show, place you mentioned,’ said Marvell. ‘Where those freaks and oldsters strip and fuck and stuff like that?’

  ‘Really . . . I somehow . . .’

  ‘Or The Blow-Shop, get your . . . Or the Hetero-Club, dump where queers can’t get fucked. Or the—’

  ‘– Marvell, I don’t think . . .’

  ‘Darling?’

  ‘One moment,’ Quentin folded his arms and stared down at his crossed wrists. When he looked up his features had recovered their poise. ‘Roxeanne,’ he said, ‘why on earth did you do that?’

  ‘Do what? Look, what is this?’ Roxeanne demanded. ‘What’s with you people anyway?’

  ‘Christ,’ said Lucy.

  ‘Roxeanne: understand that I’m not asking you in accusation but in simple wonderment. What was the—?’

  ‘To show him who the pigs are.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I . . .’

  ‘Roxeanne,’ began Celia, ‘you really don’t—’

  ‘Don’t what?’

  ‘I told her to stop it, didn’t I,’ said Andy. ‘I tipped the boogie to deep six.’

  ‘You enjoyed it as much as I did,’ said Diana – which was broadly true.

  ‘And what is all this shit anyway?’ asked Marvell.

  ‘Children children children – this will get us nowhere.’ Quentin consulted his spangled wristwatch. ‘It’s past two. I don’t think there’s much point in going on anywhere now. Clash of cultural norms, no? Why don’t we—?’

  – As if he were operating on a different oral threshold from the others, Giles’s voice heaved clear of his strained throat. ‘I’m getting street sadness!’ he cried, mouth open, hands over ears, neck bent. ‘I’m getting the street sadness!’

  Lucy held his shoulders.

  ‘Street sadness . . .’ whispered Quentin to a frowning Marvell.

  ‘I’m getting the street sadness!’

  ‘The fuck, Giles,’ said Andy, still flappable, ‘sometimes you’re like a fuckin chick. Like a fuckin chick.’

  ‘Make the grey go away!’ said Giles. ‘Make it, make it!’

  ‘Give him something. Quickly,’ said Lucy.

  ‘Here,’ said Marvell. ‘Try this.’

  When the Appleseeders entered the underground car-park the old cops were leaning on the Chevrolet’s heavy hood.

  ‘Popeye,’ said Skip, hanging back.

  ‘Take it easy,’ said Quentin, guiding him on.

  As the youngsters approached and took up awkward formation round their cars, the old cops regarded them amicably. Their faces looked creased and shadowy in the expanse of the overlit vault.

  ‘Good evening to you, officers – Sergeant, Constable,’ sang Quentin.

  ‘Good evening, sirs, ladies,’ said the Sergeant. ‘Is this your car, sir, may I ask?’

  ‘Certainly you may. No, it’s my friends’. This is, however,’ said Quentin nodding at the Jaguar.

  ‘What is the Chevvy, sir,‘ 79?’

  ‘’78,’ said Skip.

  ‘How’d you get it over here?’

  ‘One of the Airlift Cargoes.’

  ‘Must’ve cost you.’

  ‘Yeah, it cost us.’

  ‘Very nice. Very nice.’ The Constable took a tobacco-pouch from his breast pocket and began to assemble a cigarette. ‘Very nice. You young people had a good time?’

  ‘An excellent time, thank you awfully, Constable,’ replied Quentin dismissively.

  The old cops’ eyes conferred as Villiers unlocked the Jaguar and as Celia, Diana, Lucy – and Whitehead – milled round its four doors.

  ‘Yours too. Well well.’ The Sergeant placed a boot on the Chevrolet fender, straightened his hat and rested an elbow conspiratorially on the bonnet. ‘Where’d you go tonight, kids?’ he asked Roxeanne and the remaining boys. His tone was not hostile or interrogative; on the contrary he seemed if anything to be on the point of falling asleep.

  The moment Quentin closed the Jaguar door behind him he saw his mistake. Andy was looking morose, Giles annihilated utterly, but Marvell, Skip and Roxeanne were staring at one another in candid alarm. The old cops’ slothful, obsequious patter, Quentin realized, would be indistinguishable from the gloating sarcasm of their American counterparts. Furthermore, everyone was carrying drugs.

  Quentin lowered his window. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said in his most princely tone, ‘I’m well aware that you’ve got nothing better to do than lounge about improving your public image, but if you’ll excuse us we ought to be making our way home.’

  The old cops’ eyes conferred again. The Sergeant strolled over to the Jaguar and began to bounce his wrist-cosh on the wheel-mounting. ‘Know how long I’d have to work to get a car like this?’

  ‘No. Nor do I care. A very long time indeed, I should imagine. Sergeant, I don’t think this is . . .’

  ‘You young people make me sick sometimes,’ he said in a hurt and angry voice, as if he would far sooner think highly of them. ‘Literally sick.’ He spun round and wiggled the cosh under Giles’s nose. ‘How long do you expect—’

  Giles wheeled away from him, his whole body swimming. The Sergeant seized his shoulder.

  ‘Look at me when I’m talking to you, you little bastard! You’re not home yet. You think we can’t touch you – scum like you.’ He held the club up to Giles’s mouth as if it were a microphone. ‘We still do it, you know, oh yes, but you just—’ Giles retched loudly into the Sergeant’s face. ‘Christ, for nothing I’d put you up against that wall and smash your bloody tee—’

  Before the jet of vomit struck the man’s chest, Quentin was out of the car – had stayed the old cop’s raised right hand, had directed Giles’s collapse into the arms of Skip and Marvell, had prodded a £20 note into the Sergeant’s breast pocket, was brushing his jacket down with a silk handkerchief – and it was over, the untenable moment had opened and closed like a vent in another time.

  The cars sighed up the diagonal ramp. In the Chevrolet, Giles had been laid out on the back seat. Skip drove fast through the exhausted precincts. In the Jaguar, the leather seats shone nervously under the silver motorway lights. A mile from home, Lucy fell asleep and her head dropped carelessly on to Keith’s waiting shoulder. As Appleseed Rectory surged up at them through the night, tiny tears glistening beneath the lids of his closed eyes.

  28 Yanked

  There was – inevitably, we suppose – a certain amount of coming and going that night.

  As soon as Diana’s breathing had steadied and she had completed her repertoire of quiet, subliminal shrugs, the wakeful Andy said her name out loud, got no reply, slid out from between the sheets, furled a towel round his waist and crept downstairs.

  ‘What do you want?’ said Lucy.

  Kneeling at the head of the sitting-room sofa, Andy lowered his head and kissed Lucy judiciously on her mouth, which remained slack.

  ‘What do you want?’

  Tracing soft patterns on her ear with his left hand, Andy’s right felt for the familiar knot of Lucy’s nightdress, which, when tweaked, would render her naked to the waist.

  ‘What do you want?’

  Dipping his wettened lips to her breasts, Andy introduced cool fingers beneath the blankets, which burrowed surely through the warm folds.

  ‘Look, stop it. Get off. What do you want?’

  ‘Yawn!’ said Andy. ‘Stop talking. How can you talk at a moment like this?’

  ‘A moment like what?’

  ‘Jesus – at a moment that starts getting fuckin embarrassing when you start talking about it.’

  ‘But why?’

  Andy untwisted the loop of his towel. It fell away to the floor. ‘Some snake,’ he said simply.

  ‘Enormous deal. What’s that supposed to do – get me going?’

  ‘Yawn,’ he said.

  ‘Well then, tell me – get off – what you want?’

  Andy persevered.

  Down the kitchen passage Keith Whitehead fried on his hot mattress. He was burping terribly every few seconds. They were the very worst sort of burps to which he was subject, like hardboiled eggs imploding at the back of his throat. ‘Mouth farts’ was what Keith had once called them.

  Whitehead’s legs still throbbed, in a way remote from himself, like – Christ – like glutted anacondas; he moved them about as if they were sections of another body. His stomach was gurgling to such effect that Keith punched it repeatedly with his fists; he kept shouting at it too, of course, with the impotent exasperation with which one shouts at hairtrigger alarm clocks, fizzy radios, banging shutters, some baby crying in a distant place. His frightened penis had retracted to the point of invisibility. The room itself was a 180-cubic-feet pool of wicked and unbelievable smells.

  Little Keith was crying a good deal while he thought about his recent attempts to slim down for the Lucy weekend. Whitehead’s programme: twelve fluid ounces of water per day, jogging two hours a night round the garden, ear-bending aperients, 2,000 shin-touching exercises every morning, no food whatever. His body’s reply: nitric indigestion (what, Keith would ask himself, was he failing to digest?), paint-bubbling halitosis, 100 per cent constipation, a negligible increase in weight, and mouth farts.

  ‘Thanks a lot,’ he said out loud.

  What, then, were Whitehead’s sex-plans? They were as follows. A harrowing session in the upstairs bathroom – third-degree shower, industrial scrub, gargle with . . . Saniflush? Then Lucy. Kneeling on the bed, he established through his box window that the bathroom light had been extinguished. All was quiet inside the house. Ponderous with insincerity, little Keith stood up and dragged his dressing-gown from the hook.

  Whitehead was just deciding that he wouldn’t, after all, knock on the sitting-room door when it whipped open and the half-naked majesty of Adorno was glowering above him. Andy stepped back in startled amusement.

  ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘Just . . . I . . .’

  Andy crouched. ‘Yeah, well, go easy on her, kid, O.K.?’ he said, before straightening up and walking quickly up the stairs.

  This, in any event, was more than enough for Keith. He was about to scurry quietly back to his box when a light came on inside the room and Lucy said,

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Keith,’ he said weakly. ‘Sorry to disturb you, Lucy – just going to the bathroom.’

  ‘That’s O.K.’

  The light stayed on. Whitehead found himself peering round the door. Instead of the replete, engorged, spread-eagled figure he had expected, Lucy was sitting on the sofa, evidently in some disarray, dabbing her cheeks with an old paper-tissue.

  ‘Anything the matter, Lucy?’

  ‘Just Andy.’ She blew her nose. ‘He always makes me cry.’

  Andy swung round the corner of the stairs and halted abruptly. Dressed in a thin white T-dress, spreading her hennaed hair with firm hands, Roxeanne sat facing him on the landing.

  Andy snapped his fingers, jabbed one of them at her, and spun round. ‘Right,’ he said, starting down the stairs again, ‘let’s fuck.’

  Did Andy even bother to check whether Roxeanne was following him as he strode to the kitchen-passage garden door? No way. But when he had slid the bolt and she was half way past him, he snatched at her hair and yanked her face back towards his own. ‘I’m going to fuck your brains out,’ he then told her.

  They hardly noticed the premonitory sheen over the horizon, the soft moisture in the air, the bluish grass that ran away from them to the garden wall, the low moon.

  ‘I’m going to fuck you,’ Andy pursued, making for the gate to the neighbouring field, ‘and, kid, I’m talking about really fucking you, till you think you’re gonna fall apart right down the middle. Baby’ (he said) ‘I’m gonna fuck you till you die. You’re never gonna be fucked like you’re gonna be fucked tonight. Christ am I gonna fuck you. Kid, I tell you, you’re in big trouble, cos the way I’m gonna lay it on you’s gonna be . . .’

  Andy slowed in a gentle hollow on the far side of the field, perhaps two hundred yards from the house. He turned round and sneered sexily at Roxeanne, whose hair lay undisturbed by the warm wind. Our excellent Adorno was wondering whether to slap her about a bit first, or rip her T-dress off, or kick her legs out from underneath her – something casual like that – but suddenly Roxeanne skipped backwards and in one double-armed action had pulled off her nightdress and was naked.

  ‘Yawn. No – c’mon – no, nothing lyrical, nothing like that. Come the fuck over here before I really beat up on you.’

  ‘Just look at me first.’

  Andy sighingly reviewed her meaty, impossible body. ‘Yeah yeah yeah. Incredible, too much. Now lie down, girl. One more word and I’ll break your arm.’

  ‘I want to see you first.’

  ‘Slow, baby, slow,’ Andy facetiously assured her. ‘You’ll be feeling it up your gut.’ He stepped forward.

  ‘No hard-on?’ she asked lightly.

  Andy’s foot was suspended in mid-air as he saw the peculiar relevance of Roxeanne’s question. He didn’t have one. Throughout his interview with Lucy it had been plugged into his navel and he had naturally assumed that it was still there. His sense-agents flooded to his groin, whence they returned despondent messages. No hard-on.

  Now how’s this gonna look? Andy asked himself.

  Squaring blankly up to a long S/M session, a rugged humiliation session, a bestiality session, a session of haughty pretence that his failure to tumesce was yet another means of asserting himself, Andy flexed his shoulders.

  But then Roxeanne dropped to the earth. She lay down, placed her hands behind her knees and guided her legs up until her ankles were hooked on either side of her neck. ‘See red?’ she asked.

  Blinking, Andy stumbled towards her.

  ‘Oh, yes, baby. Ah God, you were – you really meant it. Towards the end I was . . . God, you were beautiful.’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Andy.

  Andy felt like crying. He rolled on to his back to face the lightening sky. ‘Leave me alone. Get out of here.’

  ‘So that’s how it is to have your brains fucked out. Now – now I really know.’

  ‘Shut up. Get out of here. Get out of the house. And take those queers, too. It was that pill fuckin Marvell gave me.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Well maybe it’s just that I don’t like you. I don’t like you. Maybe it’s that.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with fucking? You’d like me fine if you could’ve gotten a jack.’

  ‘Shut up. Get out of here.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am. Couldn’t take that twice in a night.’

  She picked up her T-dress, waving it in the air as she walked naked across the field.

  He looked on as she glided down through the windy grass. He sniffed. ‘Bitch,’ he said. Andy lay back and watched the stars begin to go out, his body sunk deep in the first dew.

  29 Silence and Day

  ‘. . . and I still saw him but then it was all really over by then, or at least I don’t think it was for him any more than it really was for me, but he seemed to want to pretend to think that if we went on not doing what we pretended to think were the most important things for us not to not do, then things wouldn’t sort of . . .’

  Etc, etc, thought Whitehead.

  Keith could scarcely keep his little red eyes open. It was 5.30, and he had long relinquished any intention of – you had to laugh – ‘making a pass’ at the white-haired girl in the bed over which he leaned. Unversed though he was in these matters, little Keith supposed he was right in thinking that a two-hour analysis of a past affair would not have been the gambit of a woman keen to go to bed with him. In addition, only her pillow-propped head was visible and she hadn’t taken her eyes off the ceiling for better than ninety minutes.

  ‘. . . and so we decided that if we just took it easy for a while and didn’t try and hide the things that weren’t mattering anyway, and so guess what, we—’

  Whitehead started. ‘– What?’

  ‘Oh, Keith, I’m sorry. I’m speeding, and I always go on when I speed.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Maybe we’d better go to sleep now.’

  Perfunctorily Whitehead fluttered his eyelashes.

  ‘Thanks for letting me bore you.’

 

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