Dead babies, p.21
Dead Babies, page 21
‘. . . Andy . . .’
Andy spun towards the garage. It was an impossible sound, like an animal or a wounded baby.
‘Andy.’
It was inches away. Andy looked down suddenly – and saw him through the tiny window-slot of his room, his face lit by a crack of wan upstairs light.
‘Keith –?’
‘Andy, I’ve done it. I’m dying.’
Celia stood outside the sitting-room door. She was trembling with almost theatrical violence. ‘Quentin!’ she shouted. ‘Quentin!’
The door opened. ‘Darling . . . ?’
She seemed to collapse in his arms but then jarringly drew back. He reached out to her. ‘Darling, darling. Ah now, ah now.’
She backed away. ‘Come here,’ she said, leading him up the stairs. ‘There’s something you must see. There’s something you must know. Something everyone must know. Now.’
‘Darling, what is this? My dearest, you’re . . .’
She halted on the landing and held up her hands to silence him. ‘Listen. There’s – someone’s . . . there’s excrement in our bed. In our bed.’
‘How unutterably squalid.’
Celia shuddered and he moved closer. ‘Don’t. Just listen. It is not human excrement. There are . . . it’s got other things in it – the smell is quite foul – I don’t know what they are. It’s sort of alive.’
He followed her into their room. Celia walked to the bed, turned towards him and lifted the top sheet. He gagged softly through his raised palm. ‘Like essence of human being,’ he said. They gathered the sheet by its corners, folding it double, double again and double again.
‘You see, darling, don’t you,’ said Celia, ‘that it’s all changed now. That we must do something. If we don’t then nothing will mean anything any more. Everything will be mad if we don’t. If we go downstairs now and pretend this hasn’t happened – what’ll we be then?’
‘You’re right, of course, darling.’
‘We’ll just have to go down there and find out what’s going on.’
‘Yes.’
They embraced quickly. He picked up the folded sheet. They were about to move towards the door when sounds of clamour came from below. Then Andy’s voice rattled cheerfully up the stairs: ‘Hey, Quent! Better get along, mac. Little Keith’s dying on us here!’
Dropping the sheet into the laundry basket he hurried from the room. Celia watched him go with a hard face. She knew that she had lost then.
59 Something To Do
It was by no means the paradox it may at first appear that the news of Whitehead’s forthcoming death saw an infusion of coltish high spirits into Appleseed Rectory. It signalled, for one thing, the end of what Dr Marvell Buzhardt was later to call ‘the slipway factor’, which invariably obtained when the retro-drug took hold, and the Appleseeders’ vertiginous slide into their own insecurities was wonderfully lightened by the more graphic and spectacular sufferings of the dying boy, who now sat on the baronial sitting-room club armchair, with a full male audience gathered round his swilling dressing-gown. And was Keith himself going to throw a dampener on their good cheer? Not a bit of it. Whitehead had never felt better in his life.
‘O.K.,’ said Andy, rubbing his hands together. ‘Now the way I see it is: we got to keep the little bastard from having a fit or blacking out or whatever. Check?’
‘Obviously we can’t involve the authorities,’ murmured Villiers.
‘We could, we could make him throw up a lot,’ said Skip.
‘Yeah,’ said Marvell. ‘Dump him in the fuckin bath. Boiling water. Litre of gin. Make him drink fuckin all of it.’
‘I’ve done that myself,’ said Giles. ‘It makes you feel awful.’
‘I’m not pregnant you know,’ said Keith huffily, folding his arms. ‘I mean, not one of you has even asked me what I took yet.’
‘Oh yeah,’ said Andy with a snort of laughter. ‘That’s a point. O.K., Keith – wotcher take?’
‘The eighty downers you gave me yesterday morning.’
‘Gave . . . downer –? But they didn’t work.’
‘Oh yes they did. I tricked you.’
Andy sat back. ‘Fuck me,’ he said.
‘What were they, Andy?’ asked Marvell in a forensic tone, reaching for a ballpoint and pad. Stumblingly Andy told him. Marvell listened, nodded, and said to Keith,
‘Boy, you’re very nearly dead. In twenty minutes or so you’re gonna want to go to sleep; if you do, you’re fucked. We better get that stuff out of you. If we don’t you’re gonna be on your feet. All night. Rox, bring me the brandy – I’d better monkey with it. Cos we’re gonna be too.’
‘“It is imperative”,’ Lucy read out, ‘“that you notify me of your decision within the next twenty-four hours. Thank you. Yours sincerely, Keith (Whitehead)”.’
‘See what I mean?’ said Celia.
‘Mm. Pretty sexy stuff. Can really turn a phrase. Celia, it hardly compares with “Johnny’s” letter to Diana.’ She held up the second piece of paper. ‘What’s a “perineum”, by the way?’
‘The bit between your cunt and your bum,’ said Diana.
‘Ah.’
‘Listen,’ said Celia: ‘Keith’s been to an asylum; we also know he’s been very ill – something to do with his stomach, so he could have . . .’ She gestured sideways at the laundry basket . . . ‘And now this. He’s obviously in a desperate—’
‘Come on, Celia,’ Lucy said jovially, ‘don’t be so silly! If Keith was Johnny he wouldn’t . . . Keith just wouldn’t do things like that. Honestly! Poor little bugger – he was in my room half of last night wondering how to give me a goodnight kiss. He may be a bit loony – I mean, wouldn’t you be? – but he wouldn’t – you know.’
Lucy appealed to Diana. The three of them were sitting in Celia’s room, Lucy and Celia on the stripped bed, while Diana draped the adjacent sofa. All three were drinking liberally from the double-litre of tequila which Lucy had recently fetched from Giles’s (by now untended) alcoholic archives. As with the men, the new crisis seemed to have presented them with at least a handful of transient certainties, a focus for their loosening minds, something to do.
Celia said, ‘Diana thinks it’s Skip, I know. I thought it was Marvell for a bit, but I can’t see what possible—’
‘But, darling, it’s got to be,’ said Lucy. ‘It’s too frightening if it isn’t.’ She sipped her tequila, spluttering slightly as she remembered another thing to add. ‘Mm – and someone called Johnny did something nasty to Giles this afternoon. He wouldn’t tell me what but he was very jumpy and everything. He just came up and asked me which of the Yanks was called “Johnny”. He was quite flabbergasted that none of them was.’
‘But don’t you think,’ said Celia, ‘that Keith – I mean what those boys did to him. And Roxeanne and everything.’
‘Celia! You said yourself that you found it while Keith was upstairs.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. I just want it to be over.’ Celia’s eyes clouded and she reached for a paper tissue. ‘Can’t it just be over?’
‘If it was Keith it would be.’ Lucy moved to the window, drawn by the sounds from below. ‘Keith’s out of action now. No. It’s worse than Keith.’ She swivelled, hooking her elbows backwards on the sill. As she returned Celia’s gaze the two girls became aware that Diana had withdrawn from the conversation, had indeed withdrawn her presence from the room.
‘Diana?’ they both asked.
Diana tried to say something but the words were submerged. She sat up – no, she was slipping back, slipping back to . . . to cry again and please the black road as sad fireflies winking in dew and sleeping bags the starched chill of night fatigue every day lassitude and disgust from the pink retreat it’s brief and pleasureless being alone without knowing why in hanging-garden avenues the first of many summers the time it is hating everything time wondering Diana.
She exhaled heavily and her jaw went square. She said,
‘I think it’s Andy.’
LX Andy
Andy, on being asked his age, can reply with veracity and more or less without self-consciousness that he’s fucked if he knows. ‘Around twenty, I guess,’ it suits him to say, gesturing with a slack-wristed hand, ‘– give or take a year.’
He is twenty-four. Today is his birthday. As he sprawled in the adjacent meadow, as he counted the extinguishing stars and nuzzled close to the crying grass: so, twenty-four years earlier, a swarthy girl drew the wet sheet from her face and asked,
‘Ten little tiny fingers? Ten little tiny toes?’
‘He’s cool, I think,’ the baleful hippie said, running a sleeve over his beard. ‘I think he’s cool.’
He was cool. His mother moved on two weeks later and for the first years of his life Andy crawled the mattress-land of the dark, high-ceilinged, communal flat in Earls Court, hunter of the spare breasts, on the lookout for warmth, invader of unminded sleeping-bags, growing up on cereals and old fruit. He was the foster-child of a hundred post-natal waifs, the cosset of a dozen itinerant rhythm-guitarists, the darling of scores of provincial pushers, the minion of a thousand sick junkies.
They called him Andy, on account of the unnatural size of his hands. He called himself Adorno, after the German Marxist philosopher whose death had brought so much despondence to the commune in the summer of 1972, when Andy was just a boy. Andy Adorno – it was the most exquisite name he had ever heard.
In the course of a routine raid by the local Hygiene and Sanitation Board operatives, the young Adorno’s existence became known to the authorities. Mr Derek Midwinter, the inspector under whose care Andy fell, is on record as describing his dealings with the boy as ‘a complete bloody nightmare’. Originally proposing to remove Andy from the flat, register him with the censors, enroll him at a Child Care Unit and get his education underway, Midwinter ended up paying Andy £5.50 a week to leave him alone. (Adorno continued to hold sway over many representatives of authority with a trick-or-treat system he had devised; it featured complicated sexual blackmail and brute force.) When he was good and ready – in his own fucking sweet time – Andy dawdled up to Holland Park Comprehensive and asked to speak to its principal. After a five-minute interview Andy was talking to girls in the playground while a pallid headmistress back-dated his entrance-forms. It was understood that he would study nothing but the Modern American Novel, and also that this specialization would not necessarily be reflected in his examination results. That afternoon Andy was voted form-captain.
Earls Court was his country.
A twenty-four-hour land. At nine, huge panting coaches were voiding 4,000 aliens a day into its dusty squares. Drainpipe-latticed houses like foreign-legion garrisons, their porches loud with penniless Greeks and tubercular Turks. Men in vests gazed from behind stagnant windows. By night half a million youths spilled from the electric pubs; dirty girls paraded and dirty boys cruised along the jagged strip, the darkness hot with curry smells from the neon delicatessens. Tramps dozed behind nude-mag vendors’ stalls. Dying Pakistanis hawked into dimly-lit shop-windows. At five in the morning, a windy threadbare silence would lapse on the spent districts. Food-boxes and cigarette-packets spun end-over-end among the fruit-skins and beer-cans. Hairnets of doped flies mantled the puddles and dogshit. From between railings old cats stared. Ramshackle buildings of rubbish lolled against the dark shopfronts, like collapsed dreams of the city’s sleep. Through the air came the whisper of the quickening town, plaintive music over choppy water.
By day and during the early evenings Andy supervised his drugs consortia, looked after his fringe business-concerns, bought records, played music, saw films, kicked dogs, watched TV, read, drank, ate, fucked. He was everywhere, a familiar and revered figure in the crowded landscape.
Late at night, just before the stillness came, he scaled condemned fire escapes and explored roofs and skylights, lay on the sooty grass behind the Underground station, sat on swings and sang, climbed trees in the dark squares, screamed until the dawn went misty with tears, raced like an animal through the dying streets.
A radically telescoped résumé of Andy’s sex-life.
An early developer, he started not sleeping with girls at the age of seventeen. Intense, confusing, sudden, strange – it was a revelation to him. ‘She was a casual girl, too,’ Andy broods. Looking in at Life on Mars for a nightcap one autumn evening, he had selected and duly approached a girl to take home. ‘Round eighteen, long blonde hair, Dutch or something, nice face, good fig. All over me, quivering like a blender. Had to slap her down a bit, as I recall. There you are – I can even remember her name. Irma – something like that. Wilma. No. Norma. No. Hang about . . .’ He escorted her to his door and preceded her up the cabbage-damp stairs. He led the way into his room, pitched himself on to the double mattress, and advised her to take off her clothes and join him. ‘Well. We’re sort of talking and stuff. I get the scotch out and so on. She’s nude, I’m nude, she’s practically sitting on my face, and – you know – we’re starting to get friendly. And then, well, Christ, it just sort of . . . happened. I didn’t fuck her.’
Hard-on trouble, Andy? ‘Nah. Onna contrary. The prong I had on me – I could of mugged an eight-foot boogie with it. I tell you, when I went to the bathroom to lose the scotch, I hadda practically stand on my head if I wanted to piss in the can and not up my own fuckin nose. Nah. Wasn’t anything at all to do with that. Listen, anyhow. I can tell something awful’s gonna happen, but I sort of give it a go. I mean, you have to, don’t you? You do. It’s only polite. She’s practically got both my legs in her mouth by this time anyway, and I don’t want to seem like some sort of pervert or fuckin sex-maniac – lean over and say “Sorry, kid, I don’t feel like it.” Fuck that. So I gave it a go. Christ. It was . . . I don’t know what it was. It was . . .’
It was cancelled sex. It was a feeling of vast but theoretical weariness combined with acute and local foreboding, petty irritation arm in arm with cosmic disgust, vexed fussiness married to apocalyptic fear. How did she fit in? What were these her breasts, her ankles, her hair – her eyes? What was her role and what were he and his body for? He felt like a bit-player in some far-flung organization, the servile motor of another’s body.
The girl was making a lot of noise now. The boy turned her on to her back and knelt between her spread legs. The girl closed her eyes as his broad hands smoothed and kneaded her thorax. The boy twitched. The girl glanced up to see that an expression of almost preposterous loathing had come over his face. He fell brokenly on to his side, retching and shivering in the grey sheets. She inched away from him, crying silent tears.
Looking past her, Andy glimpsed a third body on the mattress : a young, athletic, olive-skinned figure in sawn-off jeans and white shirt, reclining on striped pillows, two beer-cans resting on his stomach: a long-ago Andy. Thirteen years old, lithe and predatory, he waits smiling in the quarter-light as one by one they appear and kneel for a moment at his side. A melancholy girl with distant eyes, an older woman with deep, maternal breasts, someone his age with impossibly tiny shoulders, witch-like hippies, black-leather blondes, nervy urchins, schoolgirls, widows, shop-assistants, divorcees, traffic wardens, bus conductresses, policewomen, girls from Tehran, Dorking, Massachusetts, Slough, Montego Bay, the Earls Court Road, spicks, frogs, huns, sprouts, boogies, the one with damp hair that smelled of nutmeg, the one that kept her shirt on although her tits were casual, the one from downstairs, the one that bit his rig, the one from upstairs, the very pregnant one, the not-so-pregnant one, the twelve-year-old, the fifty-seven-year-old, the one that liked him beating her up, the one that hated him beating her up, the tall Pakki that had no snatch hairs, the short Geordie that had no hair, the one that gave him four kinds of venereal disease, the one he’d given four (different) kinds of venereal disease, the one with the ear-to-ear gobbler’s mouth, the blind one, the one that screamed the house down, the bald one, the one with the six-foot legs, the fucking fat one, the one with breasts like airships, the one with the turn-off dog-end nips, the one that wouldn’t go down on him, the one with the flash bum, the melancholy girl with distant eyes . . . : they’re all forgotten now, as their memory turns on the changing boy.
‘Course, it comes and goes, this gimmick. I’ve only ever had the fuckin thing about twenty times, really. Maybe thirty times. The way you handle it is – the minute it starts, just pretend it’s a drug. Oh look – I’m sweating, I’m weak as a chick, my heart’s like a fuckin tom-tom, and I feel like Frank’s monster. Then it passes, is all. If you want, ten minutes later you can even fuck.
‘You know, sometimes I think I was born just in time. I mean, I’m fuckin glad I’m not younger than I am, born later. Some of the kids I knew at the flat . . . kids around fourteen or fifteen. Yeah – they get hard-on troubles same as the next guy, and they get things we get like false memory and street sadness. Night fatigue, things like that. Course. But they get this cancelled sex thing the whole time. They get the shudders inna cot when they try and fuck. I tell you, they’ll all be cock-choppers by the time they’re eighteen. I’m just glad I got out before it could all catch up on me. Born in the middle, just right – when you don’t go mad but still get lots of fucks. I suppose that’s basically why I’ll always vote Conservative. I don’t know, mind, how the next lot of guys are going to make out, the lot that come after me. I’m just glad I’m not one of them, is all. Check?’
61 Into the Middle-Air
He took eight swallows of Hine, wiped his mouth and offered the flagon to little Keith. ‘How you feeling, kid?’ Andy asked.
Even as Marvell protested that an intake of brandy was hardly Keith’s top priority, the soapy dwarf shook his head, or at any rate permitted his eyes to roll slightly. He was finding all movement more complicated than usual – i.e., very complicated indeed, unbelievably difficult, quite extraordinarily recondite – but he was still entirely compos mentis. Whitehead was in fact congratulating himself once again for electing such a civilized and agreeable way to die. He shut his eyes softly – and his body disappeared! Never in his life had he felt so light, free, however illusorily, from that heaving, viscous, fudgy torso, with its cumbrousness, its demands, its noises and its smells. He completed a tactile reconnaissance of his body. Nothing. He had finally escaped into the middle-air.
