Dead Babies (23 page)

And indeed, as each toothpaste Whitehead squeezes into the Morris, the chassis drops two inches on its flattened tires, and when Frank himself gets in behind the wheel, the whole car seems to sink imploringly to its knees.

"Flora, close that sodding door," Frank tells his wife.

"I can't, Frank. Some of my leg is still out there."

A crowd has gathered on the pavement. Neighbors lean with folded arms on half-washed cars. Curtains part along the terraced street.

"Oh, God," says Whitehead, Sr., "they're all watching now. Keith! Give your mother a hand with her leg."

Keith squats forward and fights his mother's thigh up into the car, while Frank leans sideways and tugs at the far door
strap with one hand and a fistful of Mrs. Whitehead's hip with the other. Aggie, Keith's sister, sits crying with shame in the back seat; she sees her family conflate into one pulsing balloon of flesh.

"Come on—nearly home."

"No!" shrieks Flora. "There's still a bit of arm hanging out!"

"Got it," pants Keith.

The door closes noiselessly and to ironic cheers from the crowd the four grumpy pigs chug out into the street.

"Get your arse off the gear lever, woman," Frank demands as they pull up at the lights. "How'm I expected to drive with arse all over the gear lever? Keith! Move over, can't you, you fat little sod. You're weighing down the right rear wheel. I can feel her listing to the right."

"Ah, shut up, you fat old turd. How can I move with Aggie all over the place back here? It's
you
who's weighing it down, you great fat old fool."

"I happen to have reduced considerably of late. And there's no cause for
you
to be so heavy—you're only four foot and a fart."

"Ah, shut up. You fat old bugger. You fat old cunt."

"Keith," said his mother, "don't talk to your father like that."

"Ah, shut up. You fat old bitch. You fat old slag."

"Keith," said Aggie.

"Ah, shut up."

"This can't go on," says Mr. Whitehead as the car wobbles down through the motorway heat haze. "Starvation diet, all of us, all next week. You too, Keith. All next week. Starvation diet. This can't go on."

One hour later they sit in silence round a sea-front coffee shop table, paw-like hands dipping occasionally into a dome of cream, jam, and custard slices. Warm sugary tea runs down their chins.

The four Whiteheads are ninety stone, heavier than the average rugby pack, a crazily overglanded brood, their house a billowing cartoon world of sunken sofas, hammock-like beds, and winded armchairs. They shuffle about it snarling and swearing at one another with the sheer thyrotoxic strain of keeping their bodies afloat.

:
Whitehead, Sr.( for instance, is a fabulously obese human being, better than thirty-five stone. As he trundles down the street school parties are floored by his myriad stray fists of flab; bus platforms snap off should he climb on board; lifts whinny, shudder, and stay where they are when he presses the
UP
button and plummet terrifyingly whether or not he is so foolish as to depress the
DOWN;
chairs splinter beneath him; tables somersault at a touch from his elbow; joists crack and floorboards powder. Frank's weight problem endangered, too, his position as cook at the bus terminus cafeteria: he would bend down in front of the cooker and— why—his behind had swiped a shelf of pans off the opposite wall; he would turn round from the sink to find that his paunch had cleared the table; loaves, half-dozen cartons of margarine, even sides of beef would get lost for days in the fleshly gowns of his stomach. (Old Whitehead had been known also to eat the cafeteria bare while the manager went to the lavatory.) When it became quite impossible for Frank to enter the kitchen without some of him being automatically—by definition—either on the hot plate, under the grill, in the oven, or down the toaster, he was invited to pick up his cards. Frank had been a worthless cook anyway, hardly able to prepare an egg.

To make up the loss in income Mr. Whitehead decided to expand the ailing family sweetshop. By compelling his wife to model eighteen hours a day at the Hornsey, Wimbledon, and Baron's Court Art Polytechnics, he saved enough money to gut the sitting room and have installed some bright steel ovens, a fablon-decked counter, and a sign saying
White head's Takaway Fish and Chips.
The concern prospered, and eventually the sweetshop was phased out.

The turning point was the turning point also of little Keith's life.

He well remembered the transition. Keith would come home from school, a crimson-faced four-foot box in his sixth-form blazer, be refused a chocolate bar, snap at his father, then change into his white overalls. (He hated changing into these because they made him look appreciably more horrible than his school clothes did.) In hostile silence he and his father would serve the remaining children from the adjacent primary school—there would be more of them than usual because of the many white-stocks-last bargains featured in the closing-
down
sale.
At 5:15 or so Frank's knuckleless fingers were curling round a Mars Bar or a Turkish Delight. Keith would wait a few seconds, then remove a few peppermint creams from the high glass case. With slightly more hurried movements Frank might reach for a sachet of Poppets and Keith for a box of Maltesers. Now Frank whips his thumbnail down a carton of Savoy Truffles and upends it into his mouth; Keith's head fizzes with imploding sherbert lemons. Bubbles of Caramac pop on Mr. Whitehead's lips; his son is lockjawed with fudge and Newberry Fruits. Frank skillfully flips a tray of violet creams onto the counter and laps them up like a dog. A runaway train of Toblerone shunts down the tunnel of little Keith's throat. By six-thirty they are engaged in a lurching, slow-motion alligator race to the downstairs lavatory-vomitorium. By seven, their batter-moist mouths gape beneath the fish-shop chip chutes.

The family gained a hundredweight in five weeks.

Shortly afterward, Keith went mad for a time.

Nothing seemed to precipitate it. One moment he was toddling out of the Mod. Lit. Library in Milton Avenue, London NW20; the next moment he was toddling into the Gregory Blishner Institute, Potter's Bar, London NW36. What had happened in the interim was a rush of terror and confusion as solidly chemical as adrenalin, a telephone call, and a bus ride.

Not that the preceding week had been entirely uneventful. For one thing it had included his inaugural few days at Wolf-son College, London—days that had opened up whole new eras of ostracism, mortification, and self-loathing. But Keith had been banking on that, and by and large he was agreeably surprised by the cordiality of his reception. On top of this, though, he had been independently menaced on the Monday by a traffic warden, an old man on the underground and a floor sweeper in a local pub. Keith had offered them no provocation and had accepted their threats and denunciations with respectful apologies. On the Tuesday he was denied service in a cafeteria —no reason given—and badly stoned by little boys in the park. The next day he crouched in his bedsitter drinking quarts of instant coffee. On the Thursday an entire Wool-worth's shop counter went into hysterics when he tried to buy a comb, a poker-faced conductor barred his entry onto an
: uncrowded bus, he found and removed a sheet on the lodge notice board which read
KEITH WHITEHEAD IS
A
HORROR-SHOW,
his tutor advised him—for personal reasons which he would as soon not disclose—to change subjects, and his father rang to say that he spoke for the whole family in asking Keith never to contact them again. A more or less average week, you'd have thought. But on the Friday White-head started to be insane.

For an hour he sat waiting in the Institute's arc-lit vestibule. He beguiled it in an examination of the back of his hand, trying hard not to look down the endless yellow corridor where mad persons now groped and slunk along the walls as wraith-like male nurses swept past them with throbbing steel cylinders. "Whitehead? This way."

"How are you feeling?" the doctor asked.

"Sad and frightened."

The doctor knitted his fingers together over the desk and leaned forward. "How long, would you say, you have felt this way?"

Keith looked at his watch. "An hour and twenty minutes."

The doctor, a slow-talking Ceylonese, went on to ask Keith about his background, in a patient but unimaginative attempt to reveal traumas, blocks, repressions, and so forth. Although Keith answered all the doctor's questions with grim candor it soon became clear that his life had been quite devoid of emotional incident.

"Look," said Keith after a while, "you don't have to do all this. I know what the trouble is. It's quite straightforward."

The doctor sighed. "Okay. What is it?"

"No. I'm not telling you. You'll just think I've got paranoia."

"No, I won't."

"Yes, you will."

"No, I
won't."

The doctor had already seen twenty-one male university students that morning. Six had complained of impotence, five of canceled sex, four of bedwetting, three of false memory, two of insomnia, and one of somnolence. The doctor had prescribed Contentules to every student except the one complaining of somnolence, whom he had instructed to go away.

"All right then," said Keith. "Well, as I told you, it's quite straightforward. No one likes me—actually most people
dislike me instinctively, including my family—I'm not much good at my work, I've never had a girlfriend or a friend of any kind, I've got very little imagination, nothing makes me laugh, I'm fat, poor, bald, I've got a horrible spotty face, constipation, BO, bad breath, no prick, and I'm one inch tall. That's why I'm mad now. Fair enough?" "Yes," said the doctor.

Every life has its holiday, and Keith's month in the Institute was assuredly his. To begin with, he didn't go any madder. The panic and confusion receded at once, becoming a faint accusatory gibber at the nape of his neck. He found too that within a suspended community his sense of isolation could be turned to good account. He grew to think more coldly and shrewdly about his personal shortcomings. He found out what the average weight was for a five-foot man; he worked his way through the reading-room magazines, appreciatively noting down all instances of deformity and privation more acute than his own; a study of "The Human Body" section of the
Guinness Book of Records
assured him how puny his problems really were. In time, the feeling he had carried round with him since the age of six or seven, the feeling that he ought to be dead, gradually began to fade.

And with every day that passed little Keith took solace and grateful encouragement from his fellow inmates, watching the old teddyboys who yawned and sniveled in front of the common-room television, the fat forty-year-old infants who lay staked out with depressants in the wards, the mumbling bitches who leaned slumped like rubbish bags along the corridors, the sparrow-like girls kneeling nervously on the lawn. Airy with barbiturates, Keith would rove the Institute grounds, every now and then his face folding into a sneer or lightening with a thrill of relish as his colleagues made their twitching way past him. He had overheard it said that you always went madder at the Institute because "there was nothing to relate to." But Keith didn't want to relate to anything; he felt only hatred and contempt for the mutants around him, and if ever he wished to remind himself of the true direction of his life he simply gazed at the high Institute walls, visualized the road that went to London, and listened with pleasant detachment to the sounds of buses and high
:
heels in the street outside. The month did wonders for his confidence. Heck, he even got a girl.

Whitehead's sex life?

Eighteen years old, with £25 in the pocket of his tightest trousers, Keith had paced the clotted streets of Soho one mid-August evening, to cries of "Having a night out, Shorty?" "Isn't it past your bedtime, darling?" and "Hope it's bigger than you are, baby," until a frowning Negro beckoned him down the steps of a cafe basement. The Negro spread out his arms to introduce Keith to three sirens who perched on stools round a dirty hot-drinks machine.

"Well, well," said the center blonde. "Come on, then, big boy. How much you got?"

"Fifteen," said Keith.

The whore turned to the Negro. "Look, Mr. Boogie-Woogie, who the fuck do you think we are? You bring two-foot wonders down here with fifteen bloody—"