Dead babies, p.20
Dead Babies, page 20
‘. . . YEAH!’ roared Andy.
At once the girl lurched to her feet, struck the man forcefully across the cheek, and strode off the screen. The picture melted on a face all beaten up with lust.
Giles had frozen with a glass inches from his parted lips. Blood had suffused Whitehead’s visage, momentarily banishing its dull cadaverous sheen. The Villierses had clutched each other, and Diana and Lucy were glancing confusedly round the room.
‘She . . . she . . .’ Andy writhed in his chair. ‘She didn’t fuck him . . . she didn’t fuck him,’ he croaked.
Only the Americans had shown no reaction. They consulted one another cluelessly; and then Roxeanne spoke. ‘If that’s . . . Listen—’ She raised her voice to pierce the jerky chatter. ‘Listen. If something like that gets you up, why don’t we get something going right here.’
‘. . . hit him – just cos he . . .’
‘. . . almost made it. Thought he was gonna . . .’
‘. . . laid it on that bra . . . those fuckin stockings . . .’
Roxeanne looked threateningly at Marvell, who spread his hands and said, ‘Quent. Hey, Quentin! Listen, uh, we’re . . . Is just that Rox is all pissed off cos nothing’s happening.’
Quentin’s exquisite brow puckered. ‘What species of thing isn’t happening?’
‘Doesn’t anyone like to fuck around here?’ asked Roxeanne.
Andy climbed to his feet and gazed down giddily at his groin. ‘. . . my prong. I can hardly blink!’
‘Hey, Andy,’ called Marvell, ‘why don’t you start things rolling?’
‘Yeah,’ said Roxeanne, ‘now that you’ve got one.’
‘Mm?’ He looked up. ‘Nah. Nah, fuck all that. Do it yourself.’ He began to stagger towards the door. ‘I’m gonna have a wank. This is too good to waste. Awww, my snake,’ cried Andy brokenly as he tumbled from the room.
‘I’m beginning to see what’s the matter with you people,’ said Roxeanne. ‘You’re so fucked you can’t even— What have I got to do. Any of you. Let’s just get going. Let’s move.’
She looked at Quentin, at Giles, at Celia, at Diana, at Lucy, at Quentin again. ‘Any of you. Come on. Let’s just start with something.’
‘With me?’ asked Whitehead.
55 Don’t Be Disgusting
For the rest of his life Keith was to remember the divine comedy of that slow, andante ascent to the Rectory attic. One part of his mind, of course, was still anxiously trained on his immediate surrounds. The exit from the sitting-room, for instance – with what eery ease it had been conducted! Roxeanne had simply turned to him – had, then, actually, smiled – and walked coolly out of the door. Picking his way through a forest of embarrassment, Whitehead had followed, encountering neither laughter, protest nor spontaneous intervention from any member of the room. As he now scaled the thinning stair-carpet, a different area of his mind – though a no less self-conscious area – shook with hilarious awe. Another step. Watching Roxeanne’s strong legs lift in front of him, he felt that whatever happened, however pathetic and grotesque the scene turned out to be, he would have captured something of real and lasting value. Another step. He would have swerved his life alongside something not entirely ridiculous, would have completed a raid on the inarticulate, would have transcended this bad body, would have touched good skin. Another step. Foreboding flashed against him as they passed Andy’s creaking room. Another step. Safe. On the last flight he experienced a rush of sheer gratitude; he wanted to stop, to take her in his arms, to kiss her at length and with soft languor, and return in silence to his friends. Another step.
But things started speeding up.
She walk fast into room, turn, take off shirt, slip down she jeans, no pants, take she breast in she hand. On bed. ‘Come here.’ He go, he kneel, she mouth over he lip. She push he back on bed, climb up front of he to kneel across he shoulder grip he ear to press to she pubis. Straddle he lap then. Undo he shirt, shinny down he trousers next. He sit up sudden take off he boots, she lick he back and she lick he under arm. He lie down she climb on to he again for tug he hair, drive sheself up he face. She swivel full circle, bend forward. She draw he genital into she mouth and gimmick she perineum to he face so good. She urinate some. She climb down he body so lick he thigh. She get she finger, grind it to it root up he anus. He defecate some. She press she nail into he hip, drag breast up he leg, feed on he penis. He head stretch back in long silent scream.
As Andy slipped down the stairs, Quentin loomed out of the passage shadows. Together they stole into the kitchen.
‘A good one?’
‘Fuckin marvellous,’ said Andy, dusting his palms. ‘I don’t know why people bother with anything else – I really don’t. I was practically bent double.’
‘Guess what’s happening?’
‘Lemme see. Skip’s fucking Mrs Tuckle.’
‘Wrong. Roxeanne is fucking little Keith!’
‘Quentin,’ said Andy, ‘call the police.’
‘To arrest Keith?’
‘To arrest Roxeanne. What kind of pervert can we have up there? Keith!’
‘No, it’s true.’
‘Don’t be disgusting, man. I mean, it’s not that I’m shocked; I just don’t happen to think it’s particularly funny is all.’
‘It’s true, Andy. No one else would so little Keith volunteered.’
Andy threw his head back in a roar of dark, anarchical laughter. ‘Keith! That shape!’
‘If shape it could be called that shape had none.’
‘Still, you know, you’ve got to give her credit. Come on, man, you have. Anyway, what difference does it make in the end? You get used to all kinds of shit.’ Andy wagged his head at the sitting-room door. ‘What gives in there?’
‘Not a great deal, as it happens. Skip’s trying to pull Lucy, who appears to be trying to pull, or at any rate solace, Giles. And – well – Marvell’s trying to pull Diana . . . I oughtn’t to have mentioned it. He’s having small success.’
‘I don’t give a pig’s rig. I talked to Diana this afternoon. We’re forgetting it.’
‘No, really?’
‘Yeah. I just fuckin told her, was all. No sweat.’
‘How did she take it?’
‘Well, it completely cracked her up. Course. But the fuck, you know? Hadda happen.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that, Andy.’
‘Relax.’
‘And tell me – what devilment are you planning now?’
‘Nah . . .’ Andy was about to shrug deprecatingly, but then his face cleared and became quizzical. ‘I . . .’
‘You’re feeling it, aren’t you?’
‘Yeah, I am, actually.’
‘It’s quite impossible to describe, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah. It is.’
56 It Started Strangely
It started strangely. Not with a rush or a jolt, but as if it had always been there. The rosewood of the kitchen table seemed to have faded into a weak pastel brown. The blue-and-yellow tiles on the ceiling had receded and blurred so that its pattern was no longer distinct. Even the plain white of the walls appeared to have become something more washy, more neutral. Colour had begun to drain from the house.
Andy had just sat himself down on the sofa and poured himself a sextuple Benedictine when Roxeanne came into the sitting-room. He banged down his drink and hurried towards her. Marvell and Skip got to their feet.
‘Well?’
‘Well what?’
‘Did it happen?’
‘Did what happen?’
Andy’s shoulders went slack. ‘O.K., I asked you nice. Now did you fuck him or didn’t you fuck him?’
‘I didn’t fuck him.’ Roxeanne nodded to Marvell and Skip. They moved towards the door. Skip was rolling up his right sleeve. Marvell’s fingers toyed with his belt-buckle.
Andy wheeled round. ‘What’s . . . ?’
Waving Skip and Marvell on, Roxeanne said to Andy, ‘He couldn’t get a hard-on. And he threw up. It’s not girls he likes.’
‘When we get in there,’ Marvell was telling Skip as they left the room, ‘– don’t fuck around. Just get his fuckin legs and—’
Andy gestured hesitantly at the closed door. He turned to Roxeanne. ‘What’s going on?’
Roxeanne sat down. She looked hot and very angry indeed, but her voice remained calm, even rather piano. ‘I’m getting some theories about this house. There’s no one in it knows how to fuck right.’ She sighed. ‘What they’re going to do, Andy, is: Marvell’s just going to screw him – O.K. – but Skip’s gonna fist-fuck him first. Got it?’
‘Fist-fu . . . You mean – right up the . . . ?’
Roxeanne placed her straight right hand on the inside crook of her left elbow. ‘Fist-fuck,’ she said.
‘All that? Up the . . . right in his . . . ?’ Andy placed his arm obliquely across his stomach. It went from his hipbone to his solar plexus. He stared at Lucy and Diana. ‘But it can’t. He’s only little. It’ll go right up to his – it’ll fuck him all up.’
Roxeanne reached for the liquor bottle. ‘Skip told me that after the initial tightness it goes all sort of hollow,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘It’s all sort of . . . gives, you know? It does no permanent damage. It’s amazing what people can get away with these days.’
Andy stared flinching at the door. A thin, insect scream had joined the sounds of violent struggle from above.
‘That fat little fuck,’ said Roxeanne.
Marvell bent down to zip up his boot. ‘That bastard Archie,’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ said Skip, pulling a T-shirt over his head. ‘What was he trying to pull?’
‘Last time I go to that shit-eater. He can’t do that to me, he knows that. It’ll finish him. Time to retire.’
‘Maybe,’ droned Skip as he buckled his belt, ‘maybe it was some kinda, like a joke. I mean, the other movies, they were O.K.’
‘Maybe fuck. It was a hundred, same as the rest. That cocksucker. Shirley Temple I want I go to the movie library.’
Skip leant in front of a suitcase. Suddenly he let out a roar of consternation and outrage. Marvell shivered. Then he remembered that the letter from Skip’s father was safely in Quentin’s keeping.
‘What is it?’
‘A motherfuckin . . . Come here, Mar. Take a fuckin look at that.’
Marvell crossed the room, straightening the collar of his shirt. Skip motioned limply at the suitcase. Among a knot of tightly-packed clothes was a spilt bottle of yellow nail-varnish.
‘At least it’s colourless,’ said Marvell.
‘How many, how many times? I fuckin told her.’
Marvell clicked his tongue. ‘Yeah, well don’t tangle with her right now about it. I know Rox and I know when she’s getting impatient.’
Skip turned. ‘Yeah? Any ideas for next?’
‘Some.’ Marvell drove his hands through his hair. ‘Some. How’s the drug doing?’
‘Kinda scary. I like it.’
‘C’mon. Let’s go.’
At the far end of the room, between the bed and the wardrobe, was a pile of blankets, sheets and clothes. Inside it was a motionless lump. That was Whitehead.
57 Old Dreads
During the Americans’ twenty-minute absence from the sitting-room Celia joined in her husband’s wholly successful attempt to restore calm to the room, to moderate Roxeanne’s rebarbativeness to the odd aside, to reduce Andy’s climbing temper to a rubble of imprecation. Nor was it Villiers’ superb diplomatic skills alone that softened the atmosphere. The mood of the room was one of growing introspection, of cold solipsism, and things were passing them by.
Celia herself was having a good time. In gradual, succulent stages, she was re-experiencing all the joy and security of her recent months with Quentin – the farcically beautiful Hamlet beside her – reliving each declension of the tender and exquisite deliverance his love had been. But it was also going, all this; she was falling away, too – tumbling slowly from the present, the present that Quentin so notably adorned – falling away to the isolation and contingency of a life without him. Celia thought she saw something out of the corner of her eye. She swivelled to meet it but her mind kept slipping back to . . . to I do beach him straightaway but didn’t get free used up The Mandarin best to be good friends told her grapefruit what money could do and their bodies with bastards pricks shits eat a lot and be alone and you’re Celia.
She turned to the man next to her on the sofa and he could have been anyone; he had lost the lineaments of Quentin Villiers. Even when he turned to her, meeting her troubled eyes with a smile that completely defined her troubled thoughts and fears, she was unable to suppress a shiver.
Celia excused herself and climbed the stairs to her room, confused but unterrified. She had found the old strengths along with the old dreads. She closed the door behind her, reassured that all was quiet now above. The solidity of the familiar objects – her make-up, her shoes, his books, his hair-drier – steadied her further. The present was there all right, then, even if it was leaving her for a short time. What were those phrases she had heard? They weren’t from her mind.
Celia shrugged, and smiled at the unmade bed, leaning over to kiss the aromatic pillow where her husband’s face had recently lain. Then she noticed a slip of paper pinned to the head-rest. Thinking that it was one of Quentin’s aphorisms or epigrammatic love poems, she knelt on the bed to examine it. There was a crudely drawn arrow directing her under the blankets, and a caption reading: Johnny’s left it all down there. Intending to make the bed anyway, Celia pulled off the quilt and exposed the bottom sheet. A wild noise gushed from her hanging mouth.
Keith awoke from a shallow, hurtful sleep. Sensing the shag of the blankets and the heat of the close darkness, he thought at first that he was in his room. He was, he noticed, in tears, and his nose was running freely, but then again he quite often woke up like that. As he snuggled closer to himself, wondering how much night there was to go, a sick wave of memory dragged over him.
Keith sat up, throwing off the sticking clothes. The light jogged his eyes – he was naked suddenly. A shaft of hollowness in his stomach burned the way to his numb backside. He looked down and saw that he had at some point ejaculated. This made him start crying again.
He hobbled and rocked round the room assembling his clothes. His puffed skin, at once babyish and corpse-like, dappled unhealthily in the swinging light. From time to time he fell over, or gasped in breathless grief. His madras shirt was torn; the staples on his trouser-seat had been wrenched apart and there was an irreparable split down the inside thigh. He got into their remains and grafted on his boiling boots. He thought what to do.
Keith’s first, and only, instinct was to hide. ‘Hide,’ he said. He felt no self-pity about what had happened, none at all. He felt shame merely. What he wanted now was not to be seen. He would forgive them anything but their talk and their eyes.
He knew where to go. There could be nowhere else now. Keith opened the door and stood tensed in his ragged clothes. With alarming speed he darted down into the shadowy stairs.
58 Everything Will Be Mad
Andy had been wondering on and off how much of a storm to kick up when Marvell and Skip finally reappeared, but as their absence continued the possibility of a fertile, visionary brawl was getting more and more abstract. In a curiously gentle manner of which he was only half aware, his body seemed to be melting, rendering down to a weaker and less robust version of himself. He kept staring gravely at Diana and Lucy as they sat conversing on the divan. He thought how pleasantly asexual they were in appearance, how talkative and inconsequential. What he wanted to do, really, was to go over and lie down in between them both. He wouldn’t disturb them. For once in his life he just wanted not to be minded.
The door welled open. Skip and Marvell came into the room.
Andy made as if to stand up. ‘O.K. – what have you done with him – you fuckers?’
Skip eased himself into the dining alcove while Marvell sauntered across and sat on the arm of Roxeanne’s chair.
‘Hey, you fuckin fags . . .’ Andy’s mind jolted. All along the room had been silent, expectant – but no one was hearing him. With an appalling effort Andy sat up straight. ‘Marvell,’ dragged his voice, ‘you fuckin little . . .’
‘Hey,’ said Marvell lightly. ‘What’s with Andy?’
‘Andy,’ called Quentin from the end of the world – ‘what’s happening to you?’
‘I . . .’
Andy fell from his seat. He was treading air in the middle of the room. He saw the french windows and moved numbly towards them. Hands jutted out to assist or prevent him, but he fought them away and burst through into the colourful night.
His mind was flashing with tremendous activity – not thought, not thought: the phrases in his brain had been there long before he had; they were ready-made. For the last time he tried to shout but his mind kept slipping back, slipping back to . . . to come after me and don’t go mad you’re born just in time her distant eyes see a long-ago Andy with no far-flung cancelled sex but to hear the choppy water of the city’s sleep with sick junkies on the lookout for warmth in a dark mattress-land of crying grass and Andy.
Some minutes later Andy was picking himself off the lawn. Cold tears had evaporated from his cheeks. He had been back. And to what? To nothing and a tickling heart.
‘Bastards,’ he said. ‘Deaf, dumb, blind fuckin bastards.’ He turned and began to stride towards the house.
