Dead Babies (15 page)

DIANA. YOU DON'T NEED ME TO TELL YOU WHAT'S GOING ON. OR DO YOU? HAVE YOU EVER THOUGHT, TURNING TO THE MIRROR OR CATCHING YOUR EYE IN A SHOP-WINDOW, WHAT YOUR FEATURES SAY? GOOD LOOKS, SEX, AFFLUENCE, SELF-PRESERVATION? OH NO. I SEE WHAT'S IN YOUR MIND, THE DISGUST IN YOUR MOUTH, YOUR EYES FULL OF BURNING PUS. CAN'T YOU SENSE THE LOATHING THAT PULSES AROUND YOU IN THE AIR? DON'T YOU KNOW HOW WE ALL FEEL? WE'D LIKE TO CARVE YOUR FAT THIGHS, CHOP OFF YOUR SPROUTING LITTLE TITS, GRIND SABRES UP YOUR ANUS, CHEW AT YOUR PERINEUM UNTIL YOU DIE,

AND GET THE DEVILS OUT. JOHNNY

While Andy read, Diana folded her arms across her naked breasts and started to cry with childish volume, making no attempt to conceal her snot and tears.

"Christ," said Andy. It was only the second time she had cried in his presence. "Take it easy, baby. I'm looking after

you. Nothing's going to happen." Andy patted her shoulder.

"Hang on, baby, nothing's going to happen."

Andy belted a towel round his waist and walked out onto
the landing. "JOHNNY!" he yelled.
"Johnny."
Appleseed Rectory again recessed into silence. "Who's he?" he heard Quentin say somewhere. A few seconds later Roxeanne came out of the sitting-room door.

"What's going on, man?"

On an impulse Andy skipped down the stairs and seized Roxeanne's shoulders. Tigerishly he slammed her up against the door and kissed her mouth with incurious violence; Roxeanne pumped her middle against his, whispered, "I want to drain you empty," pushed him against the banister, and walked regally upstairs.

Andy staggered off to find Lucy. One way or another he thought it was going to be quite an interesting weekend.

23: drunk space

Giles stands swimming in the center of his room. It is clear from his stalled face and dead posture that he is operating at drunk speed, a castaway in drunk space. His hands take interminably long to curl round the gin bottle and to train it on his mouth. While he swallows his eyes recede, as if only ten per cent of him were there. His face is a corpse's face, numb and luminous with a year of slow drunk hours.

Giles tilted away into his bathroom and steadied himself against the washbasin. The room was a real study. On a table by the basin stood two electric toothbrushes and seven manual ones of various rakes and texture, a waterpick, an economy tub of Selto, three sorts of toothpaste, four packets of Interdens, a serried rank of mouthwashes, a dentician's impression of Giles's teeth (which resembled a miniature mockup of a building site—pulleys, ladders, cranes)—and a white enamel tray of surgical instruments. Every sharp surface in the room, including the doorknob and toilet flush handle, was padded with sponge.

He bared his teeth at the mirror and jactitated feebly as a heifer ran toward him. On automatic, his hand crept out toward the gin decanter shelved to his left. He gazed with

more intentness at his face, leaning forward
gradatim.
He

watched himself for a full minute in puzzled accusation, and said, "You've got to stop
crying."
He closed his eyes and his
:
mind dropped back through a penny arcade of dental afternoons.

"Giles? Giles! It's me. Lucy."

". . . Lucy who?"

"Lucy."

"Oh, yes, sorry, Lucy, actually," said Giles, unbolting the door.

Lucy bustled into the room. Giles hugged the wall, like a spy, as if he were banking on Lucy passing him by unobserved. She had never been in Giles's room before but her far-flung senses quickly catalogued its contents. She opened the drinks cupboard and removed a liter of whiskey from it. To Giles's clogged nerves she was merely a spectral truss of clothes and color, and yet he felt also, more obscurely, that it stood for something he knew and could depend on. His mouth widened friendily as he tried to focus with more rigor on her loosening shape.

"Oh, hello, Lucy. Cheers, actually."

"What?"

"Actually. I mean . . . oh, God."

"Giles, honestly."

"I know."

She drew him to the bed and sat down beside him. She drank from the bottle, a rivulet of whiskey coursing down through the patchwork cosmetics on her cheek. Between them the air was motionless with a sense of dislocation, as if neither of them could believe what they had once meant to each other.

"Giles, why are we—"

But Lucy noticed a minute facial gesture, something instantly checking out in Giles's eyes. More cautiously, she said, "Why are we here with those baddies? Those awful Americans?"

"Yes," said Giles with abrupt animation, "they
are
awful, aren't they?"

"Awful. Real baddies. The worst people I've met for a very long time—for ages. Scum of the earth. That little Trog with the drugs,"

"Mm, Skip."

"No, Skip's the streak of piss who never says anything.

The bossy one. Marvell. Fucking stupid name. And that girl!" Lucy tensed her breasts and folded a hand sultrily over her mouth. " 'Oooh, Indy, kin I bite yrr cack aff ?' She looks like a horse. It's just not on to have a body like that. It's just not on."

Giles's expression grew wistful. "I think she's got—I've never seen ones like that before—I think she's got absolutely the most beautiful . . ."

"Forget it," said Lucy. "They can't be real. She
has
to be on two silicon boosts a day."

Giles had been going to say that Roxeanne had the most beautiful
teeth
he had ever seen, actually, but he brought his gaze down to the pillow and seemed to fall into a muse.

Her eyes absently quartering the room, Lucy lit a long cigarette. "Where am I supposed to be sleeping tonight? Any idea?"

Giles cast his mind torpidly through the house, filling rooms, allotting bed partners. "In ... At ... With . . ." Realizing that his was the only obviously eligible room, Giles turned to Lucy in dawning trepidation. For a moment his eyes became guarded and quiescent, like those of a weak animal in the presence of another species.

"Giles, whatever's the matter with you these days." It was not a question.

"I don't know either, really." He blinked and sighed. "Lucy, would you very kindly mix me a . . ."

Lucy stood up. "And tonic?"

"Yes, please, actually."

"Big one?"

"Yes please."

She quickly took his hand. "Don't worry, baby, I'll catch a sofa or something."

Folding up on the bed, Giles wedged a pillow between his face and the wall. His tongue patrolled the inner ridges of his gums as Lucy's shape deliquesced before him. Almost weightless now, his mind backed off into random, punctured sleep.

24: Heavy water

Look!

Here comes Whitehead, toppling out of his room, stilted on heelless boots which he has stuffed with toilet paper up to the
: calves and in which his crushed, unsocked feet now groan and rot. The resultant blockage of his sweat pores will soon give Keith the impression that a rubber plunger has been attached to his scalp, initiating a corpuscle-dash to his head. In fact, little Keith's face is worryingly white, like morning snow, and his legs are big with blood pools, putting extra strain on the sawn-off Whitehead Senior bags that he has hurriedly tapered with a stapling machine. Further sartorial attractions include a paisley nylon scarf with which he conceals the rope of fat encircling his neck and a blue cheesecloth shirt so coarse in texture that it has already reduced his nipples to blood puddings. Vilely, Keith pauses by the garage exit, his hand scouting his crown for bald patches. "What are you doing?" he asks himself out loud. "What makes you think you can pull this off?" But the drug prods him somewhere in the spine and he feels a surge not so much of confidence as of fuddled resignation. Wobbling queasily on his tight-packed shoes, Whitehead spills out into Brobding-nag.

Upstairs, in agreeable contrast, The Hon. Quentin Villiers leaned backward stiffly in order that Celia might clip up the collar of his frilled taffeta blouse.

"How do I look?"

In his violet suede suit, the half-length trousers tucked into alligator-skin thigh boots, and with his silver-blond flyaway hair curled playfully up from his forehead, Quentin looked blindingly beautiful, rather Chattertonian, and definitively upper class. It gave Celia a sweet toothache pang just to be near him.

"You look absolutely extraordinary. Like a sex cubicle. God, how I wish I had your complexion," said Celia, reclaiming her own with a palmful of thick brown paste. "My loathsome spots are bound to start
gleaming
through."

"Drivel, my sweet. It distresses me to hear you talk in that vein." Quentin leaned forward, no less stiffly, and smoothed his lips over Celia's half-open mouth.

She looked up at him, heavy water gathering in her eyes. The wave of sick disbelief passed as Quentin placed his dry hands on her cheeks.

"I love you," he said gravely.

"Thank you," she said. "I love you.”

Quentin cruised away to stand before the full-length wardrobe mirror, teasing his hair with long fingers.

"Darling," said Celia, "can you feel any of those strange drugs you chose? You're not getting a sadness or anything, are you?"

"Nothing whatever. Not a murmur. And you?"

"Yes, my hands are in gear already." Celia stood up, her square face uncertain and amused. "Do I look not too bad?"

"You look
very touching."

Celia smiled gummily—and for a moment she did indeed look just that. "Darling, have you decided on the itinerary yet?"

"I've given the matter some thought, yes. To begin with we could do much worse than look in at—"

25: THE PSYCHOLOGIC REVUE

The Psychologic Revue was held fortnightly at a semiderelict 1920s cinema in what used to be Kilburn High Road, now a jangling caravan grouped here and there beween the northern motorway access routes. The Chevrolet and the Jaguar swung together off the flyover and moaned down through the darkness toward the Universal, a sooty Gothic structure which hovered massively over the secondhand car showrooms and ramshackle eateries that littered its surroundings. The shadowy caves nestling between the motorway caissons, route-indicator stanchions, and overpass columns held a companionable gloom, secret and unmenacing. Overhead, the beams of a million streetlamps joined in a shaft of neutral, watery sodium which filtered off into the sky like an abandoned gateway to the night.

"Some set," murmured Marvell, as the Chevrolet approached.

"I tell you," said Andy from the back seat, "if any of those fuckin' little tramps gives anybody any trouble just let me know and he's going to be one sick junkie, is all."

Twenty yards away, scattered about the dim foyer steps, a score of down-and-outs looked on fearfully as the Apple-seeders poured from the cars and moved toward them. "Ah, the vanity of travel," said Quentin. Andy raced on ahead to
kick a gangway through the crowd—saying "Get out of here" and "Get some cash," occasionally boxing a protuberant head or stomping on a tardy hand. The tramps crawled away without protest or comment. "LEAVE HER ALONE, YOU FUCKIN' BUM!" bellowed Andy as a coughing hobo was slow to roll out of Diana's queenly path. Andy's heavy-duty boot eased his transit across the steps.

"Christ," summed up Andy, straightening his combat jacket when they had gained the foyer. "Try and take in a show around here and what you got to do? Beat your way through a mess of bums. Giles—pay the gentleman and let's get inside."

The interior decor of the Universal was not so much pretentious as straightforwardly apocalyptic: a distant channeled ceiling which receded in a succession of
trompe l'oeil
false summits, hundredweights of dank purple curtain, 3-D brass frescoes, deep-ribbed walls and stucco cornices. The building had been condemned, most emphatically and categorically, in the late 1960s—thereby vastly increasing its popularity as a decadent venue—but in the tinged red light it seemed to possess a certain monolithic solidity. The Apple-seeders made their way down the aisle on the sticky carpet, appraising the small and opulent audience concentrated in the first few rows before the semicircular stage.