Dead Babies (27 page)

"It takes you back, doesn't it?" said Diana.

"Mm? Takes you back to what? Doesn't take me anywhere."

"I don't know. Christ, to when you carved this sort of thing on benches."

Andy shrugged. "I never did."

"Well, to when you could be bothered to think about things like that. When you had time to be bothered."

Andy shrugged. He took out his large, multipronged penknife and began to chip absentmindedly at
Peter L Anne.
"I've never had the time. It seems like I've always been like I am now, always lived like I live now. That's how it seems, anyway."

"You don't care about me any more, do you, baby?"

Andy kept his back turned. At first he had enjoyed her

calling him "baby." These days it made him shiver, as if in fear. He hesitated, then a listless determination came over
:
him. He dug the knife harder. "A bit. Not much. I don't know. What you feel about me?"

"I don't know. Something. Something or other. I've never stayed with anyone as long as I've stayed with you."

"Me neither."

"Do you want to forget it?"

Andy shrugged. "Up to you."

"No it is
not
up to me."

Andy shrugged. "I don't mind going on. See how it goes."

"Christ, isn't there more than that? What's going to happen to us all?"

"You just go on," said Andy, hardly able to believe his luck. He had never known Diana to be so dejected and un-aggressive, so unsure.

"Quentin and Celia have more."

"Yeah, well—hey, give me a, a . . ." he snapped a finger forgetfully, "fuck, a
cigarette.
Jesus. Quentin and Celia—it's just a question of going on till you get too pissed off to change. And you can't cope with being alone. And the street sadness and false memory get bad. When that happens you stick with whoever you're with then. I can't see that it matters a shit who."

"You don't fuck me any more. You don't even
hit
me."

Andy leaned harder on the knife. "Yeah, well, that's just what I mean about getting pissed off. You get pissed off with cunts."

"It's
my
cunt."

"Nothing personal, Diana. It's just cunts. I hardly want to fuck anyone these days. I've done all that now." He chipped the last of the wood away and sat up straight. "Maybe we'll end up together. Things are beginning to slow down for me now. I haven't got that far to go."

"I want more."

"More fucks?"

"No. Just more. Not much more, but more."

Andy shrugged.

Diana dropped her cigarette to the earth. Although she was crying a little her voice was firm. She looked at the fading

graffiti. "Don't you think we must have made a mistake a

long time ago to end up like this. That something went wrong and that's now why we're all so dead . . . Baby?”

Andy started.

"Can't we go back?"

"Go back? Oh, to the house. Oh, yeah. Check."

49: HELL OF A PLACE

Andy returned just in time to break up a talk about bisexu-ality. Marvell had that minute asked Whitehead what his leanings were, but of course little Keith fell silent when he saw Andy swank out onto the lawn.

"All that camp and unisex and crap," said Andy: "dead babies now. When I was a kid they were doing all that. All a bluff set up by the queers. It's a pain in the arse."

Marvell laughed uproariously. "Would you—would you honestly claim to be a 'heterosexual'?"

"There are two sorts of bisexual," said Quentin. "Homosexuals and ugly heterosexuals."

"Yeah, well I'm a fuckin' heterosexual," said Andy.

"Andy: by saying that you realize you're limiting your relationships to a mere half of the human race?"

"Babies, babies. That's hippie talk, boy."

"You truly
want
to limit yourself in this way?"

"Yeah," said Andy.

"Don't you remember what you were saying about the Conceptualists? Think about it, Andy. We agree, don't we, that sex isn't erotic any more. It's carnal—conceptualized— to do just with geometries and sensations?"

". . . Yeah."

"And that Other sex is to do with choice rather than urge?"

". . . Yeah."

"And that perversion is justified—no,
demanded
—by an environment that is now totally man-made, totally without a biology?"

". . . Yeah."

"Then why," concluded Marvell, "why negate yourself into a rationalist one-sex block?"

"I just don't like queers, is all," said Andy, deep in thought.

Marvell snorted a nostrilful of blood onto the grass, wiped his nose with the back of his hand, and laughed drunkenly.

"Heard about the Body Bar in Santa Barbara? No? Hell of
=
a fuckin' place. The waiters and waitresses are nude, natch— and you get fucked there for the cover charge. But you hear the gimmicks? You can have
cunt cubes
in your drinks. I mean it. And not just flavored with cunt. Real juice in the cubes. They got . . . yeah, they got tit soda, cock cocktails, pit popsicles ... Oh yeah, and ice cream that tastes of ass. Hell of a place."

Marvell snorted a nostrilful of blood onto the grass. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand. He laughed drunk-enly.

"It's arse, not ass," said Andy, rolling over. "Arse."

Those conversations.

Marvell stood swaying at the kitchen door. "Okay," he said, closing it noiselessly behind him and joining Skip by the cooker. Marvell handed Skip something small. At their feet The Mandarin purred stertorously as it worked its way through a large bowl of Kat.

"Right," said Marvell. "Dump it in its fuckin' food. Give it fuckin' all of it."

Skip crouched, chuckling.

"Is it eating it?"

"It. . . Sure," said Skip.

"Fuckin' cats. Kick the shit out of them one minute, feed them the next, they think you're fuckin' God. Okay?"

"Okay."

"Right. C'mon. Let's go watch the preview."

"Whose cat was it, Mar? D'you know?"

"Leave the door open. So it can get out. Celia's, I think. Yeah, it—I think it belonged to Celia."

L:
celia

When Celia Evanston was seventeen her stepmother, Lady Aramintha Leitch, drew her into a frescoed alcove of her Roman apartment and offered her stepdaughter a new Jaguar, a flat in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, and 10,000k. per annum on the condition that Celia didn't make a pass at the water-ski instructor Lady Leitch was currently drunkening on the patio sundeck. Spottily Celia blinked into her stepmother's over-tanned face, slipping both hands into her jean pockets.

"What makes you think I want him?"

"Darling, it's just that Giovanni and I should like to be alone together."

"What makes you think he wants me?"

"God knows, but I do think it." Lady Leitch poked a cigarette under her top lip; it wobbled as she asked why Celia didn't do something about her complexion, her poise, and above all her hair. "And why are you so fat?"

"I eat a lot. And what does it matter about Giovanni, if I'm so hideous?"

"You're sixteen. It's not that he wants to but that he knows he can."

"And what about you?"

"No. Come on. Off with you. Off. Off. Off."

For two years Celia threw in her lot with the decadent London young, gave parties for shits in satin plus-fours and bitches in neon camisoles, ate at Tastes and Casa Ari beside pricks with powder-puffed hair and tarts in three-piece pinstripe suits, went to Serena's and Poor on the arms of bastards in high-heeled gambados and slags in tapestry body stockings. She awoke at eleven, exhumed whatever ponce or pimp happened to be in her bed, dressed with the care of the not-quite-pretty, would be drinking Bloody Marys with fat hairdressers and scum-of-the-earth antique dealers in an underlit Chelsea restaurant by twelve-thirty, on to the conservatory cool of the chosen lunch venue with trashy photographers and one-hundred-word models, stupid middle-aged fashion designers and vicious pop-group managers. In the afternoons she cruised the Fulham Road for minors, the street markets and coffee shops, a sampler of public schoolboys in their first velvet suits, suburban tikes with bouffant hair-dos, incipient queers in see-through strides. She dined on the park or by the river with the same cast of crooks, fools, and whores, before submerging into the heavy, soundless, crypt-like opulence of a preselected nightclub, where vile aliens trade in old models for new and shrewd prostitutes keep a few inches between the toilet seat and their bodies. Cocaine until three, some kind of

sex until four.

How foreign this was to her compliant and shockable nature Celia never realized until Quentin swept into her life. She had had no clue but her money, and this existence was
:
launched and kept afloat by money, was described and identified by money, was all about what money could do.

Celia didn't know her stepmother was in town until she rang from the Connaught. Aramintha had flown in from Rome to finalize her divorce, having a month before surprised Giovanni in bed with the bellboy and screwed a broken Fanta bottle into his startled face. She was now going under the name of Lady Aramintha Gormez.

"Darling, come to lunch," were Lady Gormez's opening words, as if Celia had dined with her the night before. Celia said she would and replaced the telephone on the bedside table. She gazed at the wall of clothes in the fitted closet opposite, wondering what to wear and whether her stepmother had changed much in two years.

"I'm never going back to Rome. And it's Barces up your Arces too," said Lady Gormez, referring to her Barcelona penthouse. "I just can't stand those honking little dagos. Franz and I rather think Switzerland. I must say, darling," Lady Gormez told her grapefruit, "you have improved enormously." She looked up. "You're not as fat as you were . . . your skin's improved, and your hair is really, really quite lustrous. London life must suit you."

Celia turned away. She thought that she probably didn't want to see her stepmother again.

An oblique glimpse, then, at Celia's sex life.

The day before she met Quentin Celia threw a small soiree at her Cheyne Walk flat: two actresses (good friends of hers), a personable interior decorator, and the loutish, sidling bass guitarist of a successfully retrograde pop-group. And so Celia straightens clumsily from the cushions, declines a joint from the interior decorator, takes the bass guitarist's hand, and says, "Are you going to come to my room for a little while?"

Jeff gets up and stumbles after her.

It is clear that Celia is naked beneath her smock, so old Jeff simply folds her onto the bed, hitching the material up

with his own body. Their lips joggle scummily. Then, with sharply flexed elbows, Celia pressures Jeffs head down over her breasts, stomach, until it lodges between her thighs. This is where she likes his head best to be.

Two minutes pass.

Downstairs, the interior decorator starts like a cat that has heard a distant meow in the night. Jeff rocks down the stairs, rubbing his mouth with his jean jacket sleeve.

"Christ,
man, what am I
doing?"
He stops in the middle of the room and clamps his face between his hands. "Why'd you let me
do
it, man, plating a girl like that. My head must be really . . . really
scrambled."