The Rachel Papers (29 page)

'The
police.
Mm, like hell. Who does she think she is? Doesn't she see that none of that's on any more? You're twenty, for fuck's sake, she can't —'

'I told you she was neurotic about some things. I think Daddy ...' Rachel knitted her fingers and looked down at her lap.

'What did you tell her?'

Told her the truth.'

'Couldn't you have sort of made up something ? No. I suppose not.'

She sank towards me, shaking and sniffing softly. I put my arm round her shoulders and finished my drink. I noticed that the street-lamps made the dust on the sitting-room windows golden, as if put there for decoration.

On our way downstairs the telephone rang.

'It might be Mummy,' Rachel said.

It wasn't.

'Bellamy here. Charles, is that you?' he asked in a drunken gurgle. 'I suppose you couldn't make it.'

'No. Sorry.'

'I see. Interview tomorrow, then. Well, bonne chance! Perhaps, mm, after it's ... you might - Charles, it would be nice to see you. I want to —'

'No. Sorry. Bye now.' I interrupted him with the dialling tone.

'Who was it?'

'Wrong number.'

You'd have thought that Rachel would be subdued that night, but she was all a-flutter when we got into bed. 'Make me feel safe,' she kept whispering in the dark, 'oh, please, make me feel safe.' Accordingly I furled my limbs about her in a complicated embrace. Yet she kept on whispering. 'Hang on,' I said.

The condom case was empty, of course, so I looked out the box of Sharpshooters. Who needs it, I thought. You'll be coming blood, if anything.

It, too, was empty.

'Damn. None left.'

'No,' said Rachel. There was one. I saw it this afternoon. There were two there.'

In a voice that could have been my younger brother's, I asked: 'Are you sure ?'

'Positive.'

I turned my back and pretended to fumble in the drawer. 'Ah yes. Here we are. - Whoops! Dropped it in the waste-paper basket! ... damn ...' My fingers curled round the Gloria-moistened trojan, flicked it aside, and burrowed deeper into the pool of tissue, banana skin and cigarette ash, until it found the one used that afternoon on Rachel herself. I have my standards, thank you. Excuse me, but I do have my principles. True, Gloria's would have been nicer, because Rachel's was much dirtier and danker and
colder
than hers. All the same, that would have been, well, vulgar - and an insult to a fine girl.

Luckily, I had the sort of erection that only familiarity can breed. Wide-eyed with horror, I forced it over the tip, and down.

There we are.'

Rachel opened the bed to let me in.

Twenty minutes later, next door, I stood gazing into the mirror above the basin. The face there seemed too hollow and disinterested to be my face. As I watched, its expressionless-ness became self-conscious, became a smirk, became a smile. Look, kid, the under-twenties do this sort of thing non-stop. Remember: you are only young once. Because the teenager is not designed for guilt but for canine lust; not for regret but for exultation; not for shame but for dismissive, ignorant cynicism. As you yourself have put it, in one of the more hay-fevered passages of 'Only the Serpent Smiles' :

Face full of goo. Annotating Fuck-lists, mating Smells honey-dew; Stoked-up heat-haze. That guiltless laughter in the bathroom : the dog days.

The true teenager is a marooned ego but his back is always turned to the new ships; he has a kind of gormless strength that can bear to live with itself. For her, every day, you have been selling your youth. Keep that in mind.

I gave me a wink and reached for the razor-blade. Now: to slit the condom's throat, so that it would flush down the lavatory; a delicate business, since in most moods the bathroom was big enough only for my prick or a cutting edge, not for both, and I was presently to juxtapose the two. Eyes shut, I groped for the teat - stretch it outwards, glance down, and lop the nozzle. It felt rather tight (contraction due to over-use?), but I elongated it (oddly painful), positioned the razor, and looked. Instead of elastic, pinched between finger and thumb, was my foreskin.

My first thought, as the blade tinkled to the floor, was how near I had come to auto-circumcision. My second was:
where had it all gone?

I found the rubber-band, half buried in hair, shrivelled round my root.

It had broken. Rachel was pregnant.

But the night was young, even if I wasn't.

Rachel sat propped up against the pillow, like a guy, smoking.

'Where've you been ?'

'Just freshening up.'

She made room for me.

'Rachel. Would you want me to tell you something that would really worry you even though there might turn out to be no need to worry? Even though it might be quite unnecessary?'

'Of course. And you'll have to tell me now, anyway.'

'Even though I could probably tell you later, when there'd be no need to worry?'

She kissed my cheek. 'Yes. Because I've got something I must tell you, too.'

'Really? What?'

'Tell me first, then I'll tell you.'

'No, you first. Go on. I promise I won't mind, whatever it is.' I couldn't keep the eagerness from my voice.

She drew on the cigarette. The smoke flowed from her mouth and nostrils as she said:

'You know all the things I've told you about my father. All lies. I've never seen him or spoken to him or heard from him in my life.'

I watched the ceiling. 'What, all the stuff about Paris... ?'

She shook her head.

'What, he never even used to telephone you or anything?'

'All lies.'

'Not even a letter?'

'Nothing. Ever.'

My legs stirred.

'Christ.'

She kissed me hurriedly. 'It's so silly, I always do it. I don't know why. I don't mean to.'

'Why do you?'

'I don't know. I just feel it makes me more ...'

'What ? More ... substantial ? More ...
definite
about yourself?'

'Suppose so. No. It's not that. It just makes me feel less pathetic.'

Her voice sounded altogether different.

'Less pathetic,' she said.

' ... oh, baby, come on, don't worry. I honestly couldn't care less.'

While Rachel cried on my shoulder I reviewed the fiction that was Jean-Paul d'Erlanger. There were one or two felicitous touches, certainly. I liked the irate telephone calls, for example. And it was impressive that she had covered her tracks so well: those finely gauged remarks about how tactful everyone was, how good they were at not bringing it up. Presumably DeForest was in the dark even now. But the Passionate Parisian Painter - and all that catchpenny nonsense about the Spanish Civil War: I mean ...
really,
I ask you.

With fresh curiosity, with a revived sense of the mysterious in her, I kissed the damp corners of Rachel's eyes. Because, come on, she must be mad, mustn't she. I lied and fantasized and deceived; my existence, too, was a prismatic web of mendacity - but for me it was far more - what? - far more ludic, literary, answering an intellectual rather than an emotional need. Yes, that was the difference. I hugged her again. What an unknown little thing she was. It felt like being in bed with someone else.

An hour later Rachel was pretty well won round to the opinion that I liked her and found her not entirely contemptible. She then asked:

'What was the thing you were going to tell me?'

Some of my mind must have been ticking over on this. When I spoke it was without any mental hesitation.

'Oh, that. Well - seems silly really. No. it's just that I think I've ... ballsed up my papers and won't get into Oxford. I feel I've misjudged it all, in a quite fundamental way.'

As Rachel gushed reassurances, the wind outside, which had been strong all evening, started to make cornily portentous noises, cooed from behind the cellar door, fidgeted with the window-frames.

Midnight: coming of age

So I am nineteen years old and don't usually know what I'm doing, snap my thoughts out of the printed page, get my looks from other eyes, do not overtake dotards and cripples in the street for fear I will depress them with my agility, love watching children and animals at play but wouldn't mind seeing a beggar kicked or a little girl run over because it's all experience, dislike myself and sneer at a world less nice and less intelligent than me. I take it this is fairly routine ?

Now I tap The Rachel Papers into a trim pile. The hands of the alarm-clock form a narrowing off-centre V-sign. In seven minutes they will be one.

Of course, I was absolutely delirious the next morning. (I feel the effects still, forty hours later; it occurs to me that exhaustion is the cheapest and most accessible drug on the market.)

Rachel, normally wide-awake at the slightest twitch from me, slept through my hot-lidded fumbling with clothes and Interview literature. At three o'clock, five hours earlier, I promised I would say goodbye before I left. But there seemed little point.

On an impulse, I decided to take The Rachel Papers with me, instead.

Norman sat alone in the kitchen, poring over the Sun glamour section. Jen had evidently ceased to concern herself with the propriety of my breakfast.

'When's your train ?'

'Nine five.'

(You went along to the college to find out the time of your interview. However, I was a mid-alphabet man and didn't reckon on it being before ten thirty.)

'Ages,' said Norman.

In silence we had some tea and bread-and-butter - again, coffee was the breakfast of queers, toast that of left-wingers. My tongue felt hirsute and my teeth itched.

Twenty to nine: 'Come on, let's go. You look fucking chronic in that suit. Where'd you get it? Army surplus? Here, there's a letter for you. Foreign.'

Norman revved his Lotus Cortina at the top of the square, blue serge jacket on the rear hook. The car smelled of oil, new plastic, see-through Bri-nylon shirts, and essence of old man's sweat. I glanced at the envelope and put it in my pocket. Coco.

'Ready?'

Five seconds of juddering wheel-spin and we catapulted down the hill.

'Jenny tired?' I
yelped, as Norman ground us into a four-wheel skidding turn up the Bayswater Road.

'Yeah.'
He decelerated from fifty to nought miles per hour at the traffic-lights. 'Shouldn't get up early now.'

At the first hint of amber Norman hurled the car forward, threading through the traffic like a skier.

'How long to go then?'

'Late May.'

'Pleased about it?'

He shrugged, crunched down into second gear, parped his horn (a fruity yob's Klaxon, which played the first four notes of 'Here Comes the Bride'), and screamed past a lorry on the left, causing a nearby pedestrian to drop humbly to his knees in our wake.

More lights.

'Why were you in two minds about having it?' Norman revved challengingly and murmured threats at the driver of an adjacent milkfloat. 'Didn't want to get tied down, or what?' We were off again, flattened into our seats by the
g's.

'Have you,
have you ever lucked a tart who's had a kid?'

'No.'
He didn't hear and turned to me, mouth ajar. I shook my head.

'Well I
—' he zig-zagged crazily, squeezed between a taxi and a newspaper van, and drifted two-wheeled up Queensway -
'well I fucking have. And it's no joke. Don't know you're there.'

Norman squalled to a roasted halt broadside a zebra-crossing, allowed a dumpy blonde to swank past, and whipped the car forward again, snicking the overcoat buttons and ironing the toecaps of two Siamese dotards.

'Like waving a flag in space.'

More lights. I wanted to ask Norman if he had read Swinburne, but he continued: Their guts flop too. Jen'll be okay for one, maybe more. No, fuck, I said she could adopt some, but - tarts
like having babies!
Their cunts', he flicked off the heater, 'turn to mush. Tits' - we pulled away -
'smell of bad milk. And they hang. Pancake tits.'

'Really?'

'Yur. Jungle tits. But I thought, fuck it. Jen's all right. Firm.
And I don't fuck her that much now. Drop you here. When'll you be back?'

'I don't know,' I said, sounding surprised. 'Probably tonight. Tell Rachel tonight. And thanks for the lift.'

The door-handle was wrenched from my fingers. I watched Norman accelerate determinedly, torso hunched over the wheel, as a checker-board of nuns streamed into the road ahead.