Dead Babies (18 page)

"What do you want?"

Tracing soft patterns on her ear with his left hand, Andy's right felt for the familiar knot of Lucy's nightdress, which, when tweaked, would render her naked to the waist.

:
"What do you want?"

Dipping his wettened lips to her breasts, Andy introduced cool fingers beneath the blankets, which burrowed surely through the warm folds.

"Look, stop it. Get off. What do you want?"

"Yawn!" said Andy. "Stop talking. How can you talk at a moment like this?"

"A moment like what?"

"Jesus—at a moment that starts getting fuckin' embarrassing when you start
talking
about it."

"But why?"

Andy untwisted the loop of his towel. It fell away to the floor. "Some snake," he said simply.

"Enormous deal. What's that supposed to do—get me going?"

"Yawn," he said.

"Well then, tell me—get
off
—what you
want."

Andy persevered.

Down the kitchen passage Keith Whitehead fried on his hot mattress. He was burping terribly every few seconds. They were the very worst sort of burps to which he was subject, like hardboiled eggs imploding at the back of his throat. "Mouth farts" was what Keith had once called them.

Whitehead's legs still throbbed, in a way remote from himself, like—Christ—like glutted anacondas; he moved them about as if they were sections of another body. His stomach was gurgling to such effect that Keith punched it repeatedly with his fists; he kept shouting at it too, of course, with the impotent exasperation with which one shouts at hairtrigger alarm clocks, fizzy radios, banging shutters, some baby crying in a distant place. His frightened penis had retracted to the point of invisibility. The room itself was a 180-cubic-foot pool of wicked and unbelievable smells.

Little Keith was crying a good deal while he thought about his recent attempts to slim down for the Lucy weekend. Whitehead's program: twelve fluid ounces of water per day, jogging two hours a night round the garden, ear-bending aperients, two thousand shin-touching exercises every morning, no food whatever. His body's reply: nitric indigestion (what, Keith would ask himself, was he failing to digest?),
IOO

paint-bubbling halitosis, 100 per cent constipation, a negligible increase in weight, and mouth farts.

"Thanks a
lot,"
he said out loud.

What, then, were Whitehead's sex plans? They were as follows. A harrowing session in the upstairs bathroom—third-degree shower, industrial scrub, gargle with . . . Saniflush? Then Lucy. Kneeling on the bed, he established through his box window that the bathroom light had been extinguished. All was quiet inside the house. Ponderous with insincerity, little Keith stood up and dragged his dressing gown from the hook.

Whitehead was just deciding that he wouldn't, after all, knock on the sitting-room door when it whipped open and the half-naked majesty of Adorno was glowering above him. Andy stepped back in startled amusement.

"What the fuck do you think you're doing?"

"Just ... I ..."

Andy crouched. "Yeah, well, go easy on her, kid, okay?" he said, before straightening up and walking quickly up the stairs.

This, in any event, was more than enough for Keith. He was about to scurry quietly back to his box when a light came on inside the room and Lucy said, "Who's that?"

"Keith," he said weakly. "Sorry to disturb you, Lucy— just going to the bathroom."

"That's okay."

The light stayed on. Whitehead found himself peering round the door. Instead of the replete, engorged, spreadeagled figure he had expected, Lucy was sitting up on the sofa, evidently in some disarray, dabbing her cheeks with an old paper tissue.

"Anything the matter, Lucy?"

"Just Andy." She blew her nose. "He always makes me cry."

Andy swung round the corner of the stairs and halted abruptly. Dressed in a thin white T-dress, spreading her hennaed hair with firm hands, Roxeanne sat facing him on the landing.

Andy snapped his fingers, jabbed one of them at her, and spun around. "Right," he said, starting down the stairs again, "let's fuck."

Did Andy ever bother to check whether Roxeanne was
: IOI

following him as he strode to the kitchen passage garden door? No way. But when he had slid the bolt and she was halfway past him, he snatched at her hair and yanked her face back toward his own. "I'm going to fuck your brains out," he then told her.

They hardly noticed the premonitory sheen over the horizon, the soft moisture in the air, the bluish grass that ran away from them to the garden wall, the low moon.

"I'm going to fuck you," Andy pursued, making for the gate to the neighboring field, "and, kid, I'm talking about really
fucking
you, till you think you're gonna fall apart right down the middle. Baby," he said, "I'm gonna fuck you till you die. You're never gonna be fucked like you're gonna be fucked tonight.
Christ,
am I gonna fuck you. Kid, I tell you, you're in big trouble, cos the way I'm gonna lay it on you's gonna be . . ."

Andy slowed in a gentle hollow on the far side of the field, perhaps two hundred yards from the house. He turned around and sneered sexily at Roxeanne, whose hair lay undisturbed by the warm wind. Our excellent Adorno was wondering whether to slap her about a bit first, or rip her T-dress off, or kick her legs out from underneath her—something casual like that—but suddenly Roxeanne skipped backward and in one double-armed action had pulled off her nightdress and was naked.

"Yawn. No—c'mon—no, nothing lyrical, nothing like that. Come the fuck over here before I really beat up on you."

"Just look at me first."

Andy sighingly reviewed her meaty, impossible body. "Yeah yeah yeah. Incredible, too much. Now lie down, girl. One more word and I'll break your arm."

"I want to see
you
first."

"Slow, baby, slow," Andy facetiously assured her. "You'll be feeling it up your gut." He stepped forward.

"No hard-on?" she asked lightly.

Andy's foot was suspended in midair as he saw the peculiar relevance of Roxeanne's question. He didn't have one. Throughout his interview with Lucy it had been plugged into his navel and he had naturally assumed that it was still there. His sense agents flooded to his groin, whence they returned despondent messages. No hard-on.

Now how's this gonna look? Andy asked himself.

Squaring blankly up to a long S/M session, a rugged humiliation session, a bestiality session, a session of haughty pretense that his failure to tumesce was yet another means of asserting himself, Andy flexed his shoulders.

But then Roxeanne dropped to the earth. She lay down, placed her hands behind her knees and guided her legs up until her ankles were hooked on either side of her neck. "See red?" she asked

Blinking, Andy stumbled toward her.

"Oh yes, baby. Ah, God, you were—you really meant it. Toward the end I was . . . God, you were beautiful."

"Shut up," said Andy.

Andy felt like crying. He rolled onto his back to face the lightening sky. "Leave me alone. Get out of here."

"So that's how it is to have your brains fucked out. Now— now I really know."

"Shut up. Get out of here. Get out of the house. And take those queers, too. It was that pill fuckin' Marvell gave me."

"Yeah."

"Well, maybe it's just that I don't like you. I don't like you. Maybe it's that."

"What's that got to do with fucking? You'd like me fine if you could've gotten a jack."

"Shut up. Get out of here."

"Yes, ma'm. Couldn't take
that
twice in a night."

She picked up her T-dress, waving it in the air as she walked naked across the field.

He looked on as she glided down through the windy grass. He sniffed. "Bitch," he said. Andy lay back and watched the stars begin to go out, his body sunk deep in the first dew.

29: silence and day

". . . and I still saw him but then it was all really over by then, or at least I don't think it was for him any more than it really was for me, but he seemed to want to pretend to think that if we went on not doing what we pretended to think were the most important things for us not to not do, then things wouldn't sort of . . ." Etc., etc., thought Whitehead.

: Keith could scarcely keep his little red eyes open. It was 5:30, and he had long relinquished any intention of—you had to laugh—"making a pass" at the white-haired girl in the bed over which he leaned. Unversed though he was in these matters, little Keith supposed he was right in thinking that a two-hour analysis of a past affair would not have been the gambit of a woman keen to go to bed with him. In addition, only her pillow-propped head was visible and she hadn't taken her eyes off the ceiling for better than ninety minutes.

". . . so we decided that if we just took it easy for a while and didn't try and hide the things that weren't mattering anyway, and so guess what, we—"

Whitehead started. "What?"

"Oh, Keith, I'm sorry. I'm speeding, and I always go on when I speed."

"Not at all."

"Maybe we'd better go to sleep now."

Perfunctorily Whitehead fluttered his eyelashes.

"Thanks for letting me bore you."

Perfunctorily Whitehead leaned forward, pursing chapped lips.

"Good night." She turned over away from him, pulling the sheet up above her ears. "Could you put the light out as you go?"

"Of course. Good night. Lucy."

He put the light out and walked toward the door. On the way be stubbed his toe viciously on the metal-based coffee table, but he was half in tears anyway, tears of tiredness and contrition and self-disgust, and didn't bother to register the pain.

Diana waited and waited in the kitchen, her fingers stitched tight in front of her. The invigorating coldness she had felt all evening had not dissipated into sleep, and when Andy had showed no sign of wanting to make love to her and every sign of wanting to make love to someone else, Diana had decided to let him get on with it, to let it happen. She had allowed half an hour to pass before coming downstairs,

listened at the door and heard Lucy's voice, entered the

kitchen, made coffee, smoked, and sat where she could see the drawing-room door. She looked at her watch and realized that not once all night had she thought about
Johnny.

More or less simultaneously, Keith stepped out into the hall and Roxeanne emerged from the direction of the back door passage. Whitehead wiped his sore eyes and began to smile. Roxeanne folded her arms and looked away. Diana put down her cigarette and said, "Well, well. Aren't we a lot of night-owls? What have you been up to in there, Keith?"

"Merely chatting to Lucy."

"Oh—you mean to say you haven't been fucking her?"

"Oh no. Nothing like that. She was feeling a bit low so I thought I'd ... chat to her."

"Really?"

"Just tried to cheer her up, that's all."

"How about you, 'Roxeanne'? Done anything good?"

"Nothing too great." Roxeanne folded her arms tighter. "And take that I-smell-shit look off your face."

"Haven't seen Andy by any chance?"

"Yeah."

Diana resisted it, but sadness entered her voice. "What happened."

"He—he . . ." Roxeanne unfolded her arms and sank down loosely on a chair. "Andy couldn't get a hard-on."

They were still laughing when Andy came in.