Dead Babies (2 page)

The more clothes you took off him, the more traumatic the spectacle became. His (equally fat but better proportioned) sister went into hysterics when she once surprised him in the bath. As he entered the Wimbledon municipal swimming pool two teenage girls spontaneously vomited into the shallow end (on being questioned, they said it was the quiffs on the nipples of Keith's D-cup breasts that had done the trick—Whitehead was subsequently banned from the
baths). At school physical checkups, doctors habitually refused to lay a finger on him, and the PT master threatened to hand in his notice should Keith ever set foot in his gymnasium again. As if in reply to these bodily shortcomings, Keith's nature is one utterly lacking in wit, generosity, and charm. Whitehead is, moreover, keenly appreciative of this state of affairs, well aware that by almost anyone's standards he would be better off dead.

He reviewed it now, as he extracted himself from between the blankets and sat rocking on the bunk in his pungent pajamas, waking for the hundredth time in this house full of tall and affluent people. Keith was hungry; his stomach was rumbling so loudly that he kept yelling at it to shut up. It was eight o'clock. Probably the others weren't up yet and the kitchen would be his. He got to his feet and, after some consideration, put on his dressing gown, a tweedy brown horror that his parents had bought him the minute they were sure he wasn't going to grow out of it. Mr. and Mrs. Whitehead had allowed for, indeed banked on, their son growing a few more inches; this had turned out to be a needless precaution, and the heavy material now swilled amply in his wake. But Keith was hungry, and he was even more appalled by his clothes, grubby little items that he knew he was too fat for, than he was appalled by the risk of being found short-arsing round the house without his high-heeled boots on. In slippers, then, Keith Whitehead opened his "bedroom" door and crept across the garage into the house.

2: routine

And so when Giles Coldstream came into the kitchen White-head was already there. They looked at each other in momentary alarm. Keith sat flushed and breathless at the table, having just finished beating up The Mandarin, Celia's bronchitic Persian cat.

"Hello," said Giles, struck not for the first time by the relative adequacy of Whitehead's teeth.

"Hi," Keith gasped.

Giles sat down carefully next to Keith at the table and looked into his face for a few seconds; then he looked away. "I had my really heavy recurring dream last night, actually,”

said Giles. Giles said this with some surprise; he had never mentioned his dreams to anyone before. Why, then, had he told little Keith? It wasn't as if the morning so far had been anything but humdrumly routine. Giles had simply woken, sent his tongue slithering like a fish round his mouth, checked off his teeth in the bedside shaving mirror, and raced across the room to the huge, shuddering fridge where his early morning jug of Bloody Mary awaited him. Giles decided that he 'should have drunk more before venturing downstairs. Sobriety always made him indiscreet.

"What happened?" asked Keith, ". . . in your recurring dream?"

"Oh. All my teeth fell out again."

Whitehead frowned pleasantly. "I believe that's to do with fear of sexual failure. It's a sex dream—when all your teeth fall out."

"No, it isn't," grumbled Giles. "Not with me."

"What's it about with you then?"

"It's about all my teeth falling out."

"Ah. How do you know?"

"Because that's all they ever do."

"What?"

"Fall out."

Giles got up and walked across the kitchen to the draining board, which he clutched with both hands. He glazed over.

"Oh. I see," said Keith.

Giles shivered briefly. "But let's just not ever talk about it," he said. "Ever again. If that's all right by you."

Keith shrugged. "Fine," he said. "Fine by me."

The electric kettle began to come to the boil. Giles slowly backed away as the steam condensed on his arm.

"Ah. There goes my coffee," said Keith Whitehead.

Keith had been rinsing out a coffee cup when The Mandarin prowled grandly up to him. Whitehead sighed as he heard its friendly meow. He knew that all The Mandarin was thinking about was Jellymeat Kat. Disdainfully Keith polished the mug with a dishcloth. He was fucked if he was going to feed Celia's pet.

It was then that The Mandarin made her terrible mistake. With a chesty purr she nosed in under Keith's tweed truss
and started to flow in figure-eight patterns round his feet, sending wispy fur tickling up his legs.

Whitehead's armpits came to life. "Right," he said.

Gently trapping The Mandarin between his thick white calves, Keith looped the dishcloth and held its end under the running tap. Next, he parted his gown, The Mandarin peered up at him with moist, affectionate eyes, and Keith caught her a good one right on the nose. From then on it was a scramble. As The Mandarin slithered out in terror from the tweed wigwam, Keith pivoted, kicked her into the corner, and came in with his waterlogged rag swinging. Two minutes later, having clouted and dribbled The Mandarin round the kitchen, Keith hoisted her out of the door on the end of his slipper, too winded to continue.

"Are you going to have anything, Giles?" asked Keith.

Giles played with the idea of having a lightly boiled egg. The idea did not attract him. He was off solids at the moment. "No, what I came down for, actually, was a
lime."
Giles intended, rather, to use this fruit in the preparation of some Gin Rickeys, a new drink he had read about.

Keith was going to have something. He thought it likely that he would die if he did not. He hadn't eaten for three days and the timpanist inside his stomach grew more importunate by the second.

"There's a lot of bacon," Keith coaxed. "It says on the packet that it's due to go bad tomorrow, so we might as well finish it. Want any?"

Giles started back, as if from a physical threat.
Bacon
was one of the foods he disapproved of most—not only for its toughness but also for its texture: those little knots of gristle and hide which could so easily be mistaken for escaping crowns, caps, bridges, or (who knows?) actual teeth. No. Giles liked to know what was going on in his mouth, thank you. We're sorry, but Giles had swallowed a cap or two in his time and wasn't about to let it happen again. (Once, stranded in Blackfriars on a rainy March afternoon, ravenous and without his credit cards, Giles had stolen into Trims, a health-food cafeteria, where it took him an hour and three-quarters to eat an almond rissole, sorting and grading each item with his tongue before letting it pass down his throat.)
"No I
won't,"
he said. "No, I really don't feel like anything."

"Well, I'd better have some then," Keith said fatly.

"Now where would one find ... a
lime."

"I'm not sure." Whitehead peeled five strips of bacon onto the grill. "Giles—have you any idea who's supposed to be coming for the weekend?"

"No. I didn't know anyone was coming. Besides, what day is it today?"

"It's Friday. Yes," Keith went on, "some friends of Quentin's. American, I believe. And also . . . Lucy Littlejohn."

Giles was under the dresser, burrowing among the wooden boxes. "Oh, really?"

"Apparently," said Keith. "I don't know anything about the Americans. Do you, do you know Lucy Littlejohn?"

"Mm, a bit," Giles muttered.

Keith jabbed at the bacon with a fork. "I hear she's . . . Quentin and Andy tell me—"

"Look, here's The Mandarin!" said Giles, turning on his haunches and running a hand along the Persian's arched, silvery back. "How are
you,
Mandarin. Have you fed her, Keith?"

"Yes."

"Oh. No, you've
been
fed, Mandarin. Yes, Keith's already
fed
you."

Whitehead shifted his weight from one foot to the other. "Because Quentin and Andy say Lucy's really something. She's really . . . quite a nympho."

"What do you mean exactly?"

Keith coughed, "lust that she'll fuck anyone."

"Ooh, I don't know about 'anyone,'" said Giles, dubiously, having fucked her himself.

"Andy's fucked her, Quentin's fucked her—"

"—
I've
fucked her," Giles weighed in.

"Brian Hall and all that lot have fucked her."

"Bob Henderson and all that lot have fucked her," said Giles. "Yes, I suppose she does fuck quite a lot of people. Cy Harling and all that lot have fucked her."

Whitehead, who had hardly fucked anyone, hadn't fucked her, and it was his dream to do so this very weekend. Thus, he said abruptly, "I hear she's got some sort of venereal
thing"—a wheeze of his to put Giles off fucking her himself.

"Is that so?" Giles asked mildly, his head still invisible beneath the dresser. Normally this intelligence would have caused him considerable retrospective alarm. But he found that he was losing interest in sex these days.

"So they say," said Keith.

"Well," asked Giles, straightening up, "who hasn't nowadays?"

At length, Giles found his lime and Keith cooked his bacon. As they shuffled past each other Giles halted on his way to the door and looked the tiny Whitehead up and down.

"Hey," Giles pointed out ingenuously, nodding his head, "you're really a lot smaller without your boots on." Giles looked him up and down again, seemingly impressed by his own powers of observation. "Fatter, too. You know, I never really realized," he said, as if telling Keith something he would be intrigued with and grateful to learn, "just how small and fat you actually were."

When Giles was gone Keith smacked his plate down on the table, kicked the attentive Mandarin, closed his eyes, and, lips flapping, let out a long, frowsy sigh.

3: sounds funny

Celia sat up suddenly in bed, hugged her knees to her breasts, tilted her head to one side, and asked, "What shall we do with them when they arrive?"

Quentin Villiers rearranged the sheets to cover the lower half of his body. He did this rather fussily, but his voice remained genial and melodious. "I should prefer to wait and see what sort of state they're in. They'll have been driving all night and will doubtless be racked with amphetamines."

"I think I'll make them a cooked breakfast," said Celia.

"A cooked breakfast? A 'cooked'
breakfast?
My sweet, sometimes you are too deliciously
outre.
Eating a cooked breakfast—it would be like going to bed in pajamas, or reading an English novel."

"Darling, you're not to tease me."

"Well, my dearest,
really.
No. I rather thought a picnic. It might amuse them. . . ." Quentin opened a hand toward the light that was gathering behind the bedroom curtains. "It
promises to be a fine day and, besides, I should like some air myself."

Celia flopped back to her husband's side and nuzzled his neck with her large bruised lips. "You've been up all night, haven't you?"

Quentin released a mouthful of smoke and nodded slowly.

"What doing?"

"Cultivating the life of the mind."

"You hardly ever sleep now, do you?"

Quentin drew in a mouthful of smoke and shook his head slowly. "I do try to avoid it. It bores me so."

"Quentin?"

"Celia."

"Is it true that the three of them have scenes together?"

"Naturally. Why, haven't you ever joined in a threesome— or what I believe they call 'a troy'?"

"Never," said Celia. "Not even in my dissolute days. Have you?"

"No, I haven't either, curiously enough. They're sure to try to enlist us, by the way."

"But we won't, will we," said Celia, cuddling nearer.