The Rachel Papers (25 page)

'Has anyone been using the telephone in my bedroom?'

'Me,' I said.

•Well, you left it off the hook.'

'Oh. Sorry.' But she was gone.

'See what I mean?' said Norman. 'Bitch bitch bitch.'

'I know. But you've got to do it in the end. You have to end up with somebody.'

'Woy?'

'Because otherwise,' I found myself saying, 'you go mad, or you start worrying about going mad, which is even worse. You can't go on sleeping alone ... Sorry, I'm pissed.'

'Are you now.' He looked at me curiously.

'Anyway, I asked Jenny if it was okay.'

'What she say?'

'Oh, fine.' I folded on a straight. 'Fuck these cards.' I put a fresh ten-pence piece on the table. 'No, it's just that Jennifer seems pretty depressed nowadays. She was always moody, mind. Used to be worse than she is now, in fact. Likes brooding. No, I just wondered whether there was anything in particular she was worrying
about.
Although, knowing her ...'

'Yes ? Knowing her, what ? Cos if you want to know I'll tell you.'

'Well, I mean, don't tell me if you don't want to.'

'
I
don't give a fuck. Just don't start—'

We heard something fall down the stairs. Tom limped into the room.

'You're looking good,' I said.

'Where's Geoff?' Tom asked.

'Puking downstairs.'

'Sorry, man, I can't make it. I'm going to split.'

'Wait. Hang on. I'll get him.' I stood up.

'No, I'm gonna fade.'

I followed Tom as he backed away unhappily into the passage.

There's nothing to worry about,' I said. 'I'll get him.'

He gestured with his hands, like a comedian quelling applause.

'It's cool,' Tom claimed.

Norman brushed past us as we stood in the hall. He called out: 'Jenny!'

I knelt on the bathroom floor. Geoffrey fluttered his fingertips at me in shy recognition.

'Christ, I'm a drag,' he said.

'No,' I said, helping him into my room. 'It's good to see you.'

'Where's Tom?'

'He buggered off. What did you give him?'

'Half a Mandie, a Seconal - I can't remember - and two Mogadon, I think. Is he gonna be okay ?'

'Yeah.' I sat him on my bed. 'How's Sheila?'

'That's the point. She cooled me. The night before last.' He shook his head in disbelief. 'Cooled me. Isn't it a scene?'

'Do you want an apple?'

Apparently what happened was this. Sheila returned from work (she was a sec in an alternative weekly) to find Geoffrey supine on the bedroom floor, a gramophone speaker propped up against either ear, a joint gone out in one hand, an overturned glass quite near the other, tinted saliva oozing from the corners of his mouth. He had been on plonk since breakfast. He had been on plonk since breakfast since September. On rising, Geoffrey found an envelope under his chin. In it was a precis of this state of affairs and a five-pound note.

'And I'm sure I didn't fuck her enough.'

'What makes you think that?'

Too smashed all the time.' He prodded the ashtray with his cigarette. Put it wouldn't go out.

'No hard-ons?'

'No hard-ons. And I kept puking in the bed.'

'How of ten?'

'More often than not.' He shook his head. 'How're you making out with that Jewish chick?'

I wanted to tell him about it, only I felt this might dash him. 'She wasn't Jewish in the end.'

'Fuck her?'

'Oh yeah. You know, it's not bad, bit boring. You know. Nothing special.'

I'm afraid the next two-and-a-half weeks are rather a blur. The days soon cease to be distinguishable. In my diary several sheets are quite blank, and The Rachel Papers, at this point, are a sorry jumble of cold facts and free-associative prose. However, this prompts me to take a structural view of things -always the very best view of things to take, in my opinion. The dates are there, so are most of my significant thoughts and feelings. And we've only half an hour left. I sip my wine. I turn the page.

Things start well.

Kneeing impedimenta into the kitchen. Rachel and I were met by Norman and Jenny. They had taken up formal positions before the window; each held a bottle of champagne, and a third stood by on the coffee-table, surrounded by half a dozen Guinnesses for Norman to dilute his with. I was embarrassed to find how much this moved me. But what I felt even more strongly - looking at Rachel's smiles, her adult handbag and dinky suitcases - was a sense of her independence and separateness. Rachel had her own identity, you see - here saluted by Jenny and Norm - her own belongings and her own autonomy. She wasn't just a sum total of my obsessions; she simply chose to be with me.

With fizzy noses we sang 'Happy Birthday To Rachel'.

Champagne: more than a drink, a drug. It seems curious in retrospect, too teenage somehow: like cornering the fat girl after school behind the pavilion, fingertips on navy knickers for me, palmful of inconclusive breast for you, flattering and degrading for her (but who is she to be critical ?); or like the friend's elder sister (or mother) glimpsed naked coming from the bathroom; or like the parties knee-deep in duffle-coats and corduroy, beery mouths and sagging bodies conjoin like slow-motion road accidents; or, most obviously, like the endless foursomes of adolescence, when I've got a hand down her shirt, but then again you've got a hand up her skirt, but then again yours is struggling more, who's first? At least, that's how it felt to me, the only teenager in the room, more alive to incongruities.

On all other occasions we had paired off homosexually. Now we have Mr and Mrs Entwistle forming a diagonal truss on the sofa, and Charles Highway with Rachel Noyes across his lap sideways: necking, shouting, laughing, drunk as skunks. Then the shouting and laughing stops. I notice that Norman's hand has started to ride the white billows of Jenny's breasts, and Jenny quails before the all-inclusiveness of Norman's body, the greed of his huge-mouthed kisses. A loud ping follows as Norman frees the top clip of her dress. Jenny, hollow-faced, was being levered on to the floor.

Rachel and I exited.

For a full half an hour after Rachel and I had finished making love directly below, we could hear Norman's bovine heaves and Jenny's cock-a-doodle-doos. Then the joists fell silent.

'Christ,' I said, respectfully.

'Well, it was the first time in nearly a month.'

'Oh, really?'

Some of our pale sobriety disappeared.

'That's what she said.'

'Oh, of course. You're both girls. I keep forgetting. Of course she'd tell you. I suppose she told you why?'

'Ha ha. No, she was going to, actually. But he came in.'

'Could you tell who was doing the withholding?'

'Not really. Him, I think.'

'Seems more likely. Fascinating business. Do you mind, my arm's gone dead.'

'All right?'

That's better.'

I made love to her again, not to be outdone. She was twenty, after all. I had got my Older Woman.

One good thing about the first week.

I learned the pleasures of cleanliness (Rachel bathed at least twice a day so I had to at least once) and not only of having but actually wanting to have clean clothes and a tidy room. I saw then that I had used to enjoy my disarray; whether - an inference the Low corroborates - this was an attempt to symbolize my internal disorders I wasn't sure. One way or another I spent a fair amount of time in bed, and found that I rested quite well with the brown bundle in my arms. The spanking state of her torso seemed to transmit itself to mine, and, what with the reprieve my chest had given me (demanding only one midnight visit to the bathroom thus far), I received intimations of what it might be to have a body you could look in the eye.

Two not so good things, which (I'll be honest) didn't worry me much at the time.

No frankness. I thought that after I had slept with Rachel, after my sacramental exertions of The Pull, I'd be able to totter up to her and say:

Right then. You're okay, but you're callow and vain and you simper too much and your personality is little more than an aggregate of junior affectations, all charming, only without weight, without
substance.
For example: you wouldn't lie to DeForest about the Blake thing, yet you lied to your mother about the Nanny thing. Fair enough. But does this urge you to restructure your moral thinking ? I don't think I need answer that question. Life, dear Rachel, is more of an empirical or
tactical
business than you would perhaps concede.

Me? Me, I'm devious, calculating, self-obsessed - very nearly mad, in fact. I'm at the other extreme: I will not be placed at the mercy of my spontaneous self. You trust to the twitches and shrugs of the ego; I seek to arrange these. Doubtless we have much to learn from one another. We're in love; we're good-natured types, you and I, not moody or spiteful. We'll get by.

Maybe that would come later. Maybe I could swing it when I was twenty, too.

Meanwhile, it was frantic avowals and wordy mutual praise. We never contradicted or satirized each other. (Once, I affectionately mimicked her pout; she veered away in pained bewilderment, so I changed it to an imitation of rubber-lipped Norman, claiming I had heard him on the stairs.) Neither of us defecated, spat, had bogeys or arses. (I wondered how she was going to explain away her first period, overdue already.) We were beautiful and brilliant and would have doubly beautiful and brilliant children. Our bodies functioned only in orgasm.

Which brings me to my second point.

We weren't all
that
inhibited in bed, though Rachel never went much beyond lying in it and looking nice. Indeed, she was so taken aback by pleasure that it would have seemed ungracious to expect her to do anything more. Her legs went where I put them, her arms flapped about on my back. She toyed with my prick every now and then, certainly, but only toyed with it, nothing positive. Sex was Disneyland to her: an allotment of organized wonders and legal mischief. Highly emotional, for all that: yet emotions of only one kind. Though - come on - did I really want to show her the other side, my place ? Dionysian bathroom sex: troop in, tug back the covers, go through the gaping routine, do everything either of you can conceivably think of doing, again, lurch lick squat squirt squelch, again, until it's all over, again. No. And she probably wouldn't let me.

Three important events. One. Monday morning, five days later. Rachel intended to go and see Nanny before school, in order to maintain her complicity in the tissue of lies I had woven. (Of course, she played it for maximum mawk-value anyhow.) Rachel rose at about three, giving her time to bath and make up, but she brought me a cup of tea and parted the curtains before kissing me goodbye. So for half an hour I stretched in nubile enjoyment of the bed's warmth and emptiness. Climbing out of it at eight thirty or thereabouts, I noticed a stray pair of panties under the armchair. As I lit the fire I picked them up to kiss and sniff at.

After I had been kissing and sniffing at them for a while I turned them inside out. I saw: (i) three commas of pencil-thick pubic hair, and (ii) a stripe of suede-brown shit, as big as my finger.

'Fair's fair, for Christ's sake,' I said out loud. 'They do it too.'

But all day I fed a perverse desire to confront her with them when she got back. 'Ah,
Rachel.
Come in, please.' (I am sitting in the armchair, arms folded. Exhibit A is pinned out on the desk like a vivisected fieldmouse.) 'Come over here, if you would, and tell me what you see. Now: at approximately eight thirty-five this morning ... Have you anything to say ? Come come, there's no use denying it; the proof's before you. You ...
shit.'

With what a ridiculous sense of grief and loss did I drop them into the laundry basket, and with what morose reluctance did I meet her eye when she returned that afternoon. Then I performed a teenage sulk.

It was most illuminating. Our relationship until that moment had been so straightforward and idealized, so utterly without
candour,
that when the first case of honest, rotten moodiness turned up, I (and Rachel, also) discovered that we had no machinery for breaking through it.

That evening, Rachel was too terrified to breathe. I don't think I'll ever forget her face when I said 'Oh really' and returned to my book midway through her how-Nanny-was and how-sweet-of-me-to-love-her-still speech. A fearful and startled face, as if someone had screamed in the distance or whispered a ghostly obscenity in her ear. I winced at the desk with a thrill of furtive power. To look at my face then, you'd have thought I was expecting Rachel to run up from behind and bash me on the head - or tickle me. A very strange expression; most unpleasant, too, I should imagine.

And, at midnight, when Rachel got falteringly into bed beside me, I said 'So tired,' and
turned over.
This would have been the first night we hadn't made love (at least twice). I had a huge erection, of course, and felt quite like it actually. But I had to test my nerve. Stiff five minutes. Then, gradually and painfully, she started to cry.