Dead Babies (17 page)

"Don't matter," said Skip.

"Pigs."

"Look—hey—boogie," shouted Andy, "better get the fuck out of here, boy, okay? You're all fucked up and got nothing to say."

"We're not like that," said Roxeanne; "he doesn't mean it," she told the lugubrious boogie, pressing his hand against her hard breasts.

"Oh yes I do," said Andy. "Beat it, boogie, and I mean now."

" 'Boogie'?" queried Marvell. "Jesus, this guy talks more American than I do. Haven't heard "boogie" for a time. Say that in New York, Andy, and you'll get your head kicked off."

"I don't give a rat's arse. Because I
wouldn't
say it in New York. I respect and admire the American black. They fight. But over here they're just boogies far as I'm concerned."

A rank of nearby blacks straightened their heads, as if they might take issue with Andy on this point. Andy glared happily at them.

"You know," mused Giles to nobody in particular, "I thought I wasn't going to enjoy tonight, but I quite am, actually. Not
once
have I thought about my . . ." (Villiers extended a hand to refill Giles's beaker.)

Whitehead sat close to Lucy, achingly, illegally close. He noticed, with what he felt to be some impertinence, that her breasts were rather long and tubular beneath her virile white shirt— nothing like the trim conclavities of Diana's breasts nor the global fury of Roxeanne's. Nicer than Celia's, though; more touching somehow. He noticed too that her face was a bit colorless, for all its sequins and cosmetic murals, and her mouth somewhat puckered, but not testily so. Little Keith felt a kind of spurious intimacy with her. If only she wouldn't dislike him—never mind anything else yet.

"Have you ever been in here before, Lucy?"

(Did one bother with that sort of thing these days? Whitehead assembled and compressed his buttocks, thus increasing his sitting height by a couple of inches.)
"No. Have you . . . ? Sorry, what's your name?" (Her face was blank—but Keith could scarcely credit the solicitude of her manner.) "Keith."

"Keith? You're the one who . . . ? Oh,
Andy."
(And she smiled at him! At Whitehead! Without a whisper of ridicule in her face.)

"No, Lucy, I haven't either. It's interesting—all these different views. I think Roxeanne's on the right track really with . . . that man. Though you can see Andy's point of view. What do you make of it?"

Lucy leaned over and said in her relaxed London accent, "If I was a goner spade like that I'd rather have his talk than her finger up my bum."

(Her voice buzzed in his ear. Keith's pecker leaped.) A sympathetic, empirical Whitehead followed Lucy's eyes across the table. With his arms at his sides the lugubrious boogie was watching Roxeanne massage his lower lap with the flat of her strong hand. Quentin and Celia exchanged fastidious grimaces and Andy snorted in disbelief. Marvell and Skip, however, looked on smiling, their faces full of pleasant expectation. Diana's, too.

"Let me be, pig. . . . Take . . . Don't . . ." But Roxeanne murmured closer, urging him back against the wall with her powerful thorax. Her left hand joined her right on the lugubrious boogie's groin, and her fingers closed on something.

"Ah, no, don't," said Lucy. "Don't do this to him." By now all Appleseed eyes were on Roxeanne and a tingling silence had gathered over the table, enclosing the alcove from the rest of the bay. She bit her lip ticklishly as she unsnapped the lugubrious boogie's thin brown belt and sought for the catch of his zipper with bent forefinger and sharp thumb. She straightened the toggle and pulled it downward, evenly unmeshing the silver treads to disclose a widening triangle of grayish rayon. The lugubrious boogie sighed in a baffled, plaintive way and made to paw at Roxeanne's wrists. She didn't seem to need to take any notice. Her right-hand fingertips dipped into the moist area of his perineal divide while she introduced her left down the loose front band under his navel. Roxeanne wettened her mouth as the light-brown prepuce was hoisted clear of the gauzy underpants. He con-
:
templated his slack organ with a curiosity no less dazed and intent than that of his tablemates. Then, like a jerking second hand, the penis craned abruptly and the lugubrious boogie leaned forward into painful, heaving, tubercular tears.

Roxeanne stood up. She smiled. And they left him there with his elbows on the table, his face held in damp hands.

27: THE OLD COPS

In the concrete avenue Marvell looked around the semicircle of faces. "What now, Quent?"

Twenty feet away a cruising drophead MGE slowed in the narrow vehicle lane. It contained two swarthy persons in the front buckets and another perched up on the rumble seat; the third passenger wasn't good-looking enough to do that kind of thing, and he knew it. After a few seconds the car accelerated away.

"Hey, Quentin. What now?"

For the first time in the year Celia had known him, Quentin Villiers was showing less than his normally perfect serenity. He pinched the base of his nose with gloved fingers and blinked.

"Darling?" said his wife.

"I just want to ... find the cars," he muttered.

"What about—what was it?—the Gerry Show, place you mentioned," said Marvell. "Where those freaks and oldsters strip and fuck and stuff like that?"

"Really ... I somehow . . ."

"Or the Blow-Shop, get your ... Or the Hetero-Club, dump where queers can't get fucked. Or the—"

"Marvell, I don't think . . ."

"Darling?"

"One moment." Quentin folded his arms and stared down at his crossed wrists. When he looked up his features had recovered their poise. "Roxeanne," he said, "why on
earth
did you do that?"

"Do what? Look, what is this," Roxeanne demanded. "What's with you people anyway?"

"Christ," said Lucy.

"Roxeanne: understand that I'm not asking you in accusation but in simple wonderment. What
was
the—”

"To show him who the pigs are."

"I'm sorry, I ..."

"Roxeanne," began Celia, "you really don't—"

"Don't
what?"

"1
told her to stop it, didn't I," said Andy. "I tipped the boogie to deep six."

"You enjoyed it as much as I did," said Diana, which was broadly true.

"And what is all this shit anyway?" asked Marvell.

"Children children children—this will get us nowhere." Quentin consulted his spangled wristwatch. "It's past two. I don't think there's much point in going on anywhere now. Clash of cultural norms, no? Why don't we—?"

As if he were operating on a different oral threshold from the others, Giles's voice heaved clear of his strained throat. "I'm getting street sadness!" he cried, mouth open, hands over ears, neck bent. "I'm getting the street sadness!"

Lucy held his shoulders.

"Street sadness . . ." whispered Quentin to a frowning Marvell.

"I'm getting the street sadness!"

"The fuck, Giles," said Andy, still flappable, "sometimes you're like a fuckin' chick. Like a fuckin'
chick."

"Make the gray go away!" said Giles. "Make it, make it!"

"Give him something. Quickly," said Lucy.

"Here," said Marvell. "Try this."

When the Appleseeders entered the underground carpark the old cops were leaning on the Chevrolet's heavy hood.

"Popeye," said Skip, hanging back.

"Take it easy," said Quentin, guiding him on.

As the youngsters approached and took up awkward formation around their cars, the old cops regarded them amicably. Their faces looked creased and shadowy in the expanse of the overlit vault.

"Good evening to you, officers—Sergeant, Constable," sang Quentin.

"Good evening, sirs, ladies," said the Sergeant. "Is this

your car, sir, may I ask?"

"Certainly you may. No, it's my friends'. This is, however," said Quentin, nodding at the Jaguar. "What is the Chevy, sir. "79?”

:
" '78," said Skip.

"How'd you get it over here?"

"One of the airlift cargoes."

"Must've cost you."

"Yeah, it cost us."

"Very nice. Very nice." The Constable took a tobacco pouch from his breast pocket and began to assemble a cigarette. "Very nice. You young people had a good time?"

"An excellent time, thank you awfully, Constable," replied Quentin dismissively.

The old cops' eyes conferred as Villiers unlocked the Jaguar and as Celia, Diana, Lucy—and Whitehead—milled round its four doors.

"Yours too. Well, well." The Sergeant placed a boot on the Chevrolet fender, straightened his hat and rested an elbow conspiritorially on the hood. "Where'd you go tonight, kids?" he asked Roxeanne and the remaining boys. His tone was not hostile or interrogative. On the contrary, he seemed if anything to be on the point of falling asleep.

The moment Quentin closed the Jaguar door behind him he saw his mistake. Andy was looking morose, Giles annihilated utterly, but Marvell, Skip, and Roxeanne were staring at one another in candid alarm. The old cops' slothful, obsequious patter, Quentin realized, would be indistinguishable from the gloating sarcasm of their American counterparts. Furthermore, everyone was carrying drugs.

Quentin lowered his window. "Gentlemen," he said in his most princely tone, "I'm well aware that you've got nothing better to do than lounge about improving your public image, but if you'll excuse us we ought to be making our way home."

The old cops' eyes conferred again. The Sergeant strolled over to the Jaguar and began to bounce his nightstick on the wheel mounting. "Know how long I'd have to work to get a car like this?"

"No. Nor do I care. A very long time indeed, I should imagine. Sergeant, I don't think this is . . ."

"You young people make me sick sometimes," he said in a hurt and angry voice, as if he would far sooner think

highly of them. "Literally sick." He spun round and wiggled

the nightstick under Giles's nose. "How long do you expect—" Giles wheeled away from him, his whole body swimming. The Sergeant seized his shoulder.

"Look
at me when I'm talking to you, you little bastard! You're not home yet. You think we can't touch you—scum like you." He held the club up to Giles's mouth as if it were a microphone. "We still do it, you know, oh yes, but you just—" Giles retched loudly into the Sergeant's face. "Christ, for nothing I'd put you up against that wall and smash your bloody tee—"

Before the jet of vomit struck the man's chest, Quentin was out of the car—had stayed the old cop's raised right hand, had directed Giles's collapse into the arms of Skip and Marvell, had prodded a £20 note into the Sergeant's breast pocket, was brushing his jacket down with a silk handkerchief —and it was over, the untenable moment had opened and closed like a vent in another time.

The cars sighed up the diagonal ramp. In the Chevrolet, Giles had been laid out on the back seat. Skip drove fast through the exhausted precincts. In the Jaguar, the leather seats shone nervously under the silver motorway lights. A mile from home, Lucy fell asleep and her head dropped carelessly onto Keith's waiting shoulder. As Appleseed Rectory surged up at them through the night, tiny tears were glistening beneath the lids of his closed eyes.

28: YANKED

There was—inevitably, we suppose—a certain amount of coming and going that night.

As soon as Diana's breathing had steadied and she had completed her repertoire of quiet, subliminal shrugs, the wakeful Andy said her name out loud, got no reply, slid out from between the sheets, furled a towel round his waist and crept downstairs.

"What do you want?" said Lucy.

Kneeling at the head of the sitting-room sofa, Andy lowered his head and kissed Lucy judiciously on her mouth, which remained slack.