Dead Babies (21 page)

Keith knew this to be excellent advice, and he took it as soon as his unstable form could get him into the room, thawing on to the nearest chair. Giles gazed up at him with expressionless eyes.

Diana disapproved of Keith on account of the horrible way he looked, and surveyed him now with fatigued contempt. Celia disliked him too, but was insatiably compassionate when it came to physical suffering and actually asked Whitehead whether he would like a cup of coffee. Andy, also, half remembering that he had struck Keith the night before—and quarter remembering that he had struck him very hard indeed—solicitously observed that Keith never looked up to much anyway and that perhaps he was just a bit under the weather.

All this made Keith want to cry again. He normally counted himself a lucky man if he could get into a room without exciting open derision: being totally ignored was, for him, an imperial entrance. However formal or perfunctory, actual concern always made him wistful for the status he knew he would never enjoy. With what was in fact his very least attractive smile, Whitehead explained that he had slept poorly and was suffering from acute migraine.

(Giles was watching carefully as Keith spoke. He, for one, had never been able to understand the point of all the fuss about little Keith. Whitehead's teeth looked okay to him.)

"Well, what about it?" asked Celia, exuding personal as well as general wariness. "Breakfast?”

"Don't
call
it that," said Andy sharply. "Just call it
food.
Food. All right," he said, relenting, "we might as well give it a try."

35: Lagging time

Although the Appleseed Rectory kitchen was a large, square, farmerly apartment, its lowness of ceiling and its habit of containing a lot of vivid sunlight tended to make the room seem oppressively populous when more than four or five persons were gathered between its walls. It began to seem so now. The shuffling Appleseeders—all of whom, except Giles and Whitehead, were engaged in the cautious preparation of orange juice, coffee, and thin toast—were joined by Skip (in very filthy underpants), Marvell (in filthy underpants), Roxe-anne (in underpants), and by Lucy, dressed, lard-skinned, small-eyed, and coughing into the hot light. Between permutations of legs The Mandarin erectly strolled.

"Christ, that cat's bum," said Andy in a critical, almost painterly tone, his eyes on the pink anus revealed by the Persian's high tail. "Can't we do something
...?I
know. I'm going to get a gray magic marker and color its arse over. Aw
my
HEAD!"

No one was thinking about it, no one was thinking much about anything, when the room suddenly became a miasma of hangovers. Alcohol crapulence clogs perception, but drug crapulence flays it, and by now the kitchen was a noisome feast for peeled senses. The room appeared to change its shape. Voices scattered into piano mumbles. The cigarette smoke formed a shelf at shoulder height, above which sun-bright faces wafted like mad masks. They plugged in kettles, hawked, ran water, retched; the Americans swung open the fridge, picked with dirty fingernails at a staling loaf, scratched, burped, farted, snorted into the dregs of yesterday's liquor bottles . . . "This butter's like off chick . . .
Just sugar's safest . . .
My eyes, my eyes . . .
Eggs! The fuck . . .
Gangway! I'm gonna be sick . . .
Water
—
fight the dehydration . . .
Stop
breathing
like that . . .
Gag gag gag . . .
I'm flashing! I'm flashing! . . .
What's
—
the sizes are all wrong . . .
Strange heat, strange heat . . .
Don't be there, just don't BE therel”

I2O

Then came the lagging time. It came abruptly, flopped down like an immense and invisible jelly from the ceiling, swamping the air with marine languor and insect speeds
—
lagging time, with its numbness and disjunction, its inertia and automatism, its lost past and dead future. It was as if they were wandering through an endless, swarming, rotten, terminal marketplace after a year of unsleeping nights.

Now they were all moving to no effect—just moving, just switching things off and switching things on, just picking things up and putting things down and picking things up and stroking the cat and counting the mugs and fighting for air. It seemed that everything they did had already been done and done, and that everything they thought had already been thought and thought, and that this would never end.
Excuse me,
said panic to each of them in turn. They had no mouth and they had to scream.

Quentin forced his way across the room and gripped Giles by the shoulder. Giles looked up, apparently quite unaffected. His face cleared as if emerging from shadow into day. He stood up and opened the door. Time flooded in from the passage. The room stopped, and clicked back. They turned toward him.

"I think that, I think that what we all need is a drink."

They crowded into the corridor. They were out.

"Jesus I" said Andy on the way to the sitting room. "What in the fuck was
that?"

"Lagging time," said Quentin.

"Yeah," said Marvell, dabbing his cheeks with a red bandana. "Fuckin' lagging time."

"Jesus.
Never had that cocksucker before." Andy halted and turned toward them. "You know, my theory is that it was the food that did it." He started walking again. "To hell with this food gimmick. It's just not on any more, food. Fuck
food."

36: the real thing again

Under Giles's sleepy but telling supervision, champagne cocktails went into production—"After all, it's practically eleven o'clock," Andy had said. One-and-a-half-liter bottles of
1979 Moet & Chandon were removed by Quentin and Andy from the semi-deepfreeze in the washroom while crates of reinforcements were shipped in by Skip from the garage. Giles then entrusted Quentin with his doorkeys and commissioned him to go up and enter his room, locate and gain admittance to his drinks cupboard, and detach from it five, perhaps six, liters of Napoleon brandy. By this time people had revisited the bedrooms and had started to appear in less advanced stages of undress; in particular, Marvell and Skip were in their usual jean suits, and Roxeanne was wearing a black midriff stole and a fishnet body stocking.

"Beat me, beat me," enthused Andy as the record player emitted sounds of what might have been a burning menagerie superimposed over a Sunday school choir practice. Windows were thrown open. Quentin marshaled the hash kits and amyl-nitrate poppers. Skip toured the room, his large hands cupping a pyramid of wide-spectrum amphetamines. Marvell issued depressants from the dinette-feature alcove. They were all talking.

"The thing is, actually," broke in Giles, keeping a sensible distance between himself and the waiting rank of champagne bottles, "I've always found that the thing is, actually, is to put
a hell of a lot
of brandy in them. About four or five times as much as anyone else ever puts in them—ever. At least half and half. At least. If in doubt, make believe the brandy is the champagne and the champagne is the brandy."

"Check," said Andy. "Check."

Celia accepted a tablet from Skip. She held it in the air between finger and thumb and said quizzically, "I don't know, darling, but shouldn't we be taking it a bit easy?"

"Relax, darling," purred Villiers.

"We can't feel any worse," said Diana, to Lucy's pale agreement.

"Hell, it's only a weekend," said Marvell. "The fuck."

"Keith! Get the liquor over here," bawled Andy, "—and I'm talking about now! I mean, what's a court dwarf
for
if he can't even . . . Christ, this is more like it, eh? The real thing again."

"
Wait!
" Giles held up his hands. "Wait a minute. Tell me before you start opening the champagne, okay? All those corks flying about, might catch me one right in the . . ."

"Is everyone . . . Look," said Andy, "go and lie down or
something, will you, Keith, okay? I can't cope with you in here looking like that. Right, is everyone ready? Then let's go!"

Within a quarter of an hour, things were pretty well back to normal.

37: Those conversations

Those conversations.

"That's what they did. In the seventies. That's what they achieved. They separated emotion and sex."

"Nonsense, Marvell," said Quentin. "They merely showed that they could be separable. In the last analysis, of course, they aren't separable at all."

Marvell looked in appeal toward Roxeanne and Skip, who were abstractedly stroking one another on the floor, then back again. "Let's—let's try seeing it historically." Marvell swallowed his drink. "Things happen faster in the States so perhaps the situation's not clear yet for you people. Sure, there was a kind of reaction to the Other Way in the States a few years ago, but—"

"Shut up," said Andy tonelessly, to no one in particular.

". . . but—but it was a reaction really to the
spinoffs
of the Way, not to its thinking as such—the beaver displays, the fuck shows, the sex emporia, stuff like the experimental prostitution thing in LA. Then all last year there's been a whole reaffirmation of the whole thing, of the fundamental thing. And I don't just mean the sex conventions and the fuck-ins. Everywhere you go now, you can see that it's happened. People're quiet about it. No need to shout. They just know."

"Yes," said Quentin, "and in another few years there'll be another reaction and eventually we'll be the way we were."

"The fuck, after a million years of denying your needs, you can't expect the change to come in a week. But it's here now." Marvell laughed. "Kids over there, they're fucking in the first grade. We thought we were smart getting laid when we were twelve. They're blowing each other in the fuckin' playpens over there. No, it's here now and it won't go away and it won't turn into anything else."

Andy came alive. "I think that's disgusting," he said.

:
"Little bastards. I didn't get fucked till I was nearly thirteen!"

"More importantly," Villiers resumed, "when are these promiscuous tots going to put in time on growing up? When will their sexual emotions have time to develop? When will their natures have time to absorb frustration, yearning, joy, surprise—?"

"Christ, Quentin," said Marvell, "you trying to reinstitute sex angst, or what? Know who you sound like? Fuckin' D. H. Lawrence! 'Sexual emotions'—fuck them. Sex is something your body does, like eating or shitting. Yeah, like shitting. Just something your body does."

An expression of weary decisiveness overcame Quentin's superb features. "Well, it's not something
my
body does for me. Nor Celia's, I should imagine. Nothing so brisk and heartless, thank God. Why do you suppose we got married?"

Marvell looked up at Quentin shyly, sneakily. "Come on, Quent, come on." He winked. "You did that, that was just some sort of gimmick, Quent, wasn't it?"

"No, it was marriage. And we got married to keep sex emotional."

"Christ. You're too much, Quent, truly. But look—it can't be done, man. Forget it. The iconography of desire's too pervasive now. The minute you're . . . the minute that you're fucking Celia here and you start to think about something else—some model or screen actress that's on every billboard and magazine you look at"—he snapped his fingers—"you'll know that's true. You'll know it."

"What you appear to be forgetting, Marvell," said Quentin, "is that Celia and I happen to be in love."

"Ugh," said Roxeanne.

Skip let out a low whistle.

"You know, Quentin," said Marvell seriously, "you can really be quite upsetting at times. I thought I might be able to get through my life without hearing that fuckin' word again, and now you come along, now here's a good friend of mine comes along and . . . Two years ago you wouldn't have—" Marvell looked up. An intense solar warning flashed in Quentin's green eyes. Marvell quickly dropped his head.

"Check," said Andy.

"You agree on this thing, Andy?" asked Roxeanne.