Dead Babies (11 page)

Whitehead would have answered if he could.

"Threes," Skip ponderously repeated. "You and two guys. You and a guy and a girl."

When his voice did appear Keith was, retrospectively, most impressed by its performance. It did not gurgle or whimper, neither did it jump octaves or turn into a corky burp of adrenalin—all things Keith couldn't have blamed it for doing. In fact, it sounded urbane, detached, almost bored.

"Well, you know, Skip, I haven't really got strong views on the subject, although of course I try to be tolerant about that

kind of thing."

"Mm-hm. You like getting head?" ". . . Sorry?”

"Head. Getting blown. Getting sucked off."

"Oh! Well, not
mad
about it. But again of course it's all part of the basic . . . Yes, I'm for it, on the whole."

"Mm-hm. You like to be fucked?"

". . . Well, as I say, it's not one of the things one customarily . . . but you naturally try to keep an open . . ."

"Mm-hm." Skip swayed languidly on his haunches. "Mm-hm."

"Look— Skip— I don't want to seem abrupt but do you think we could finish this chat another time?"

"Pardon me?"

"Another time. I am on the
toilet
here."

"Sure you are," Skip said reassuringly. But then he rolled his eyes so that his pupils disappeared upward, revealing two sacs of glistening blood at the base of either socket. "Oh, sure, man. Another time."

17: some
BUSH

"I must say, Roxeanne," Celia observed briskly, "you have got the most marvelous breasts."

"But they're so awfully big," said Roxeanne. "I think Diana's are so pretty? Really the perfect size."

At this Diana curled her lip slightly, as if to suggest that she had heard that line before. Celia resumed, "Yes, Diana's are pretty too. But yours are so enormous and so marvelously . . . solid. Look at mine. Yours seem to point upwards. They don't sag in the least."

Roxeanne shrugged, corroborating this. "Well," she said happily. "Hey, Quentin, is it cool if I take off my pants?"

As the afternoon sun had intensified, had seemed indeed to bear down on them with an invidious strength, Diana and Roxeanne had spent a lot of time—Diana shrewdly, Roxeanne vaguely—wondering which of them would be the first to remove her top. In almost any other company Diana would have had few reservations about taking the lead: her breasts, as Celia had pointed out, may not have been large but they were pretty; they covered a fetchingly disproportionate area

of her chest, were smoothly rounded, and rose to neat orange nipples which were soon tinted and hardened by the wind's
:
gentle ministry. Diana was, nevertheless, banking on Roxe-anne's being a good deal more punctured than they looked under her smock and had even assumed that she must, in the nature of things, be wearing a quarter or half-brassiere beneath it. As it was—having both muttered something about wanting to get a tan—the girls bared their treasures simultaneously. Except Marvell, who gazed on with complacence, and Giles, who was apparently unconscious, the fearsome glory of Roxeanne's breasts filled everyone present with utter consternation. They seemed to shoot upward out of her collar-bones (forming a ledge off which, had it occurred to her to do so, she could have not inconveniently dined), U-turned over symmetrical cupcake nipples, and repaired to the commodious launching pad of her rib cage without marking this junction by so much as a crease. Diana had looked at the vast tenement then back at her own diminutive cups with scarcely concealed incredulity, and only on the appearance of Celia's breasts—depressing items that flatly splayed in the direction of her armpits—did she begin to regain her equanimity.

"I beg your pardon, Roxeanne," said Quentin, "I didn't quite catch that."

"If I take off my pants?"

"Ah, a common ambiguity when colonials are of the company. Now, do you refer to your trousers or to your panties? Which?"

"How about both?"

Quentin glanced at his wife. "Well, old Oofie is in Kuwait, so far as I know. As long as you don't mind the odd wayfarer or rustic?" He laughed, holding out his hands. "By all means."

Laughing also, Roxeanne said, "They're very welcome," lay back, hooked her thumbs into the waistband of her jeans and eased her seemingly infinite legs out of them. Her (anyway otiose) panties followed. "Okay," she concluded, "no smart-ass remarks about natural redheads."

"Certainly not," said Quentin sincerely.

Diana stared hard at Andy as he rolled over, propped his

head up on his palms for a few seconds, his face perhaps six

inches from Roxeanne's alabaster midriff, and reassumed his original position. "Christ," he mused softly. "Some bush.”

18: OH NO

Oh no, surely they can't all be at it already, can they?

Whitehead posed this question to himself while emerging from the thicket and beginning to make his way up the incline toward the picnickers, all by now in varying stages of deshabille. From his vantage, the sections of bare, mottled flesh lost their outlines in the dusty summer air; as he traipsed toward them their bodies seemed to shimmer and merge, to resolve and separate, to flow together and then to cease. Twenty yards away, quite suddenly, they regained their distinctness, becoming again immobile and discreet. Whitehead slowed with relief.

Then—more—he came to a halt, still unnoticed by the eight further up the slope, and sank, without emphasis and without any sense of irony, to his knees, a tubby supplicant of the warming wind. The keen anxiety he always felt on approaching any group of people now quietly allied itself to a deeper, more settled foreboding. Keith had once, when tran-quilized, told a friendly dietician that he hadn't minded discovering that he was small, fat, and ugly half as much as he had minded discovering that he would always be those things, that all of it could never change now. Would it ever—just a bit? Although Whitehead didn't consider himself a highly sexed person—his masturbatory career, for instance, he had come to regard as an increasingly disturbing and ghostly adventure—he felt it highly likely that if he failed to have a definite sexual experience this weekend he would make some sort of attempt to kill himself. It was not release he craved, far less pleasure, merely a token withdrawal of the insult of ugliness. Little Keith picked up a blade of grass and twirled it in his fingers. The action returned blood and self-consciousness to his features, steadying him somewhat. He smiled furtively as he recalled the incident with Skip. Christ. There really wasn't anything people wouldn't do any more. Being, so far as he could ascertain, a heterosexual, Whitehead had found the approach dramatically unsexy, but it was quite flattering all the same, and it went to show that a lot was in the air. The weekend would, in any case, be unlike any other.

On rejoining his friends Keith's anticipations were strengthened and elaborated. If he looked to his right, he
: 6l

could see—for what they were worth—the breasts of the square-faced girl called Celia, wife to the gorgeous Villiers; if he turned to his left he could admire Diana Parry's dinky navel and compact stomach; practically under his nose was a square foot of tawny pubic hair. Keith didn't dare look at anything, of course. He had never had so much sex in his life. But as the newly returned Skip smilingly caught his eye, a whole range of sexual possibilities couldn't help opening itself up for little Keith Whitehead.

And, both less and more straightforwardly, a whole range of them opens itself up for us, too. We could—let's see—we could have Diana take his hand and shoo him off to the woods, have Celia lean over and tenderly unbuckle his thin plastic belt, have Roxeanne shinny beneath him there and then. Of course, we can bring this about any time we like— but
Keith
can't, oh no.

19: COLLAPSING BALLOON

"Look," said Andy, "there's some cows over there. How casual."

"Yeah. Coming on pretty authentic," said Marvell.

Giles, who had shown no sign of life whatever for the past ninety minutes, lifted his head and narrowed his eyes over the lip of his gin bottle. "How do you know they're not bulls?"

"Because," said Andy, "bulls have horns and cows have tits. They've got tits."

"No," said Skip slowly. "That's not so."

"How come?" Andy asked.

"Some cows don't have tits. Some bulls don't have horns."

"Oh yeah?"

"That's right. For example, a cow might not have had calves yet."

"Is that a fact?"

"Sure."

Andy sank back. "Well what the fuck difference does it make anyway?"

As if in answer to this query a black heifer detached

itself from the ambling herd, trotted up the dip in the field,

paused, arrived at some sort of decision, and came bowling

down the slope toward the picnickers in a firm-legged gallop.

Approximately four seconds later they were lying in a
bloody, groaning heap on the other side of the barbed-wire fence. In an electric, hair-triggered scramble they had climbed, jumped, dived over, under, and between the barbs—clawing one another out of the way, springing from flattened torsos, pulling each other's hair for leverage—to subside like a collapsing balloon of flesh in the adjacent field. Whispered obscenities broke the silence as the wheezing tangle of limbs gradually came apart and a dazed cataloguing of injuries began.

All three girls bled not very profusely from abrasions sustained on their shoulders and bare breasts. Skip had a vent of skin flapping on his wrist, Andy a deep and dirty gash on his cheek. Only Quentin was entirely unscathed.

Keith, who was still severely winded, having been used as a trampoline by everyone else, had a cut nose and lip and a four-inch stripe running across his forehead like a second mouth. More material to his desire, though, was the fact that his only good trousers were irreparably torn and that the six-inch heel of one of his boots was nowhere to be found. Giles squatted with his back to the carnage; one hand held a pocket mirror to his mouth, whose interior the other frenetically enumerated; the cap on his left incisor came away without any fuss between his fingers; with a distracted cry he flopped twiching to the earth.

"Jesus," said Marvell, "we've got our ancestors to thank for that."

Skip leapt to his feet. "Eat shit, eat shit!" he roared, his mouth whitening.

The heifer now stood a few feet from the fence, staring at the disarray in companionable wonder. Its instincts had programmed it to run up to the picnic in that fashion, but they had programmed it also to swerve away at the last moment and trot off wondering what to do next.

"Motherfuck, motherfuck," said Skip. He uprooted a brick from the base of the fence and moved along the wire calling out softly, waving his hand.

As the animal frowned, dipped its head and moved forward, Skip brought the brick down on its pate with a long-armed swing. There was a dull crunch.

The heifer remained motionless, then jerked backward. It turned, skipped into the field, ran about in untidy decreasing circles, and keeled over onto the grass.

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There was a silence.

"You've killed it," said Andy. "It's all fucked up."

"It does seem to be totally buggered," agreed Quentin.

"I'm gonna go kick it some," said Skip, stepping forward.

Female voices were raised in protest. Andy stood in Skip's path and a halfhearted scuffle took place before Quentin lent his support. Whereas Andy restrained Skip with dislike, and because he didn't particularly want him to kick the heifer, Quentin restrained Skip considerably, in the spirit of a wise man preventing a fellow Jew from attacking a platoon of Nazis, with due respect for Skip's wrath. At length Skip relaxed.

"Just get the whiskey, man," said Quentin.

"Yeah," said Andy. "Let's get
drunk."

"Yeah.
Yeah!"
screamed Giles.

Within half an hour the nine were re-established on the near side of the barbed-wire fence. Nobody's injuries had proved to be more serious than anything handkerchiefs and saliva wouldn't relieve—except Andy's ripped cheek, which he claimed to have "cooled" by emptying a bottle of Glenfyddich over it. This move exhausted the supply of spirits and the wine was therefore started on in earnest. Weightwatchers Celia, Diana, and Whitehead didn't object to the switch, having been on Pouilly Fume all along, but there was loud complaint from the others about the inability of wine to do much for them these days. (Giles, face downward at the corner of the blanket, had made no response to demands for his bottle of gin.) "I guess this'll keep us up till we get back," said Marvell, boredly unwrapping his hash kit. The food, also, was partaken of gingerly: pieces of meat were picked up between finger and thumb and held aloft like live worms before being quickly dispatched; offending portions of salad and cheese were disgustedly spat out on the grass; water biscuits, apples, celery, and radishes enjoyed fair popularity, but little truck was had with such greasy and malodorous dishes as sardines, liver sausage, and anchovies. The company snorted when bananas were mentioned and actually