Dead Babies (19 page)

He beheld the kitchen with some diffidence. "What's up?" he asked.

"No—no hard-on!" shrieked Diana breathlessly, pointing at him as she rocked to and fro in her seat. "No hard-on!"

Andy blushed, frowned, traversed the room and hit a convulsed Whitehead as hard as he possibly could on the ear, and stalked into the hall.

One by one they followed.

Seven o'clock. Silence and day fall on Appleseed Rectory.

Marvell and Skip grunt and fart contentedly as Roxeanne slips in between them.

Diana joins an Andy fetal and taciturn.

His ear thudding like an earphone, Whitehead slaps a cache of glistening nude magazines onto his winded bunk.

Quentin smokes at the ceiling, Celia clinging to him tightly

in sleep.

And, out across the landing, the padded alarm buzzer sounds for Giles.

part two

saturday
XXX: GILES

Giles awoke with a short bark of displeasure. The Risen-shine buzzer faded, the radio hissed, and the machine clank-ingly set about preparing the crude Baby Bullshot—which Giles never drank anyway.

Out of bed seemed no place to be these days. It came on him sideways when he hit the floor, unraveled past him diagonally when he rushed the fridge, as if the whole house were on slipped land. Giles undulated against the refrigerator door. He was normally convinced that he would vomit before he could swallow so much as a half liter of vodka and tomato juice, but this morning, Saturday morning, his stomach felt scoured. Why? Friday night waved round his head like a fan of old curling photographs.

Both his hands closed on the wet glass and bore it deliberately to his lips. He drank it in one swallow, retched appallingly, and leaned to refill it.

"Glug glug," said Giles. "Glug glug glug."

Giles had recently fallen into the habit of sleeping in his clothes—or "ready-dressed," as he liked to think of it. All that needed to be done, then, in the half hour before his maxi-cab arrived, was to lower himself below the Plimsoll line of sobriety.

"Luigi, Luigi," mumbled Giles as the alcohol lapped at his smudged brain.

(Luigi was Giles's chauffeur. After three months of complete idleness in his lodgings at the Gladmoor public house, Luigi had motored the Daimler back to London and started a small car-hire concern with it, his overheads defrayed by Giles's continuing monthly checks. The chauffeur's name still came to Giles's lips whenever he had to get somewhere, but he no longer had any settled idea of what Luigi was supposed to be for.)

He moved to the window. Moistly he peered out at the shining lawn. He sipped. He thought about cleaning his teeth, shaking his head dubiously. He sipped. He retched, without changing his expression. He sipped.

"Old mother," he said. "Old mother, what do you want to see
me
for?"

He sat at his desk and ran his fingers up and down the skiddy red glass.

"Too early to cry yet," he said. "Too early now.”

He reached for his shoes, placed side by side on the floor. His left sock, he now noticed, had a hole in it, revealing one white, quivering toe. He leaned forward and gently rearranged the frayed material.

"Baby Giles," he said. "Baby Giles."

Giles's mother's mouth comprised, from left to right, a tapering upper eyetooth which eroded a millimeter a year into the black pool of her gum socket, two long wedge-shaped frontals which overlapped like tightly crossed fingers, a retreating bead of crushed molars, a lower incisor as yellow as sunshine off dusty glass, an El that resembled a squat, burnt-out matchstick, and a lonely lopsided masticator which jutted out between her lips even when they were closed. Maria Coldstream would argue that her teeth had got that way during Giles's gestation and slightly premature birth; before that, she would argue, they had been clean and strong.

In any event, the young Giles felt bad whenever they came near him—bright and various among the strong colors of the greenhouse, monochrome cogs down the dark hall, wet shadows at his bedside. They came on him interminably, the bits and pieces behind some recrimination or entreaty or kiss. At night they creaked down the long corridor to his room and ushered through the door as expectant as saddening dreams.

Mrs. Coldstream had no idea that she frightened her only son in this way and would have been* greatly distressed to learn as much. Even when her behavior had become, by almost anybody's standards, very frightening indeed, Maria never imagined that she favored Giles with any attentions which he did not warmly reciprocate. This was because her frontal brain had taken to being inoperative whenever—for example—she joined Giles in the downstairs shower closet after his Thursday cricket matches on the village green, whenever she offered to undress him prior to his Sunday afternoon naps, whenever she kissed him gorily on the mouth last thing at night.

On three occasions Giles woke up—to the usual sun, to the usual bluster of radiator pipes—and stretched marriage-ably in his broad four-poster, half opened his eyes, and found his mother pinned out on the bed beside him. The first two
: ICQ

times this happened Mrs. Coldstream regained a sort of consciousness at once and slipped unseeingly from the room. On the third morning, the morning they took her away, Giles had lain there for ninety minutes, statuesque with terror, gaping at his mother's mouth; it rested sullenly ajar on a pillow heavy with blood.

Some observations on Giles's sex life.

For a start, the village girls liked him. They would gather in the sweetshop as Giles, shy hander-out of bubblegum and gobstoppers, blushed under the encouragingly avuncular eyes of the gardener's son. When the fair arrived in the village, and it came to sitting next to Giles on the Dodgems and Whirligigs—the girls took it in turns. At fetes, bazaars, and other functions at which entertainment and goods could be exchanged for cash—Giles forked up. He got to kiss them after cricket matches. Giles was much in demand down the alley during youth-club dances at church. On half-day holidays he played Nervous all afternoon up in the back hills.

They called him Little Lord Fauntleroy. This pleased Giles and he always tried to look smart, got Mrs. Baden to press his elephant cords, tiptoed down the drive straightening his gray school shirt, glanced gingerly back at the house, Victorian and insane in the early gloom, was joined at the gate and led up the long path above the lake by a posse of the pungent, frizzy-haired daughters of the village, and would be drawn giggling into the hillside copse, there to be tickled, pinched, and affectionately reviled. Next, in ghostly periods, all but one of them disappear. She crosses her arms in front of her chest and slides the crackling pink jersey over her head and turns to unzip her dress, which tends to be navy-blue and very creased. Giles bides his time, panting quietly with gratitude and disbelief. Her underthings seldom match. Giles lends circumspect assistance with the removal of her dimming bra, for all the world as if he hasn't got an erection, keeps noticing the weather and the scary trees as she debarks her pants and helps him off with his. A tensed Coldstream might shinny on top of her for ten seconds before she goes away, flushed and ironical,

Then he sits and gasps the air, gets to his feet, races down the open hill with arms like spindly cartwheels, pees at the
IIO

wind, shouts into the dark swell of the land, attempts to vault the gate, falls over, climbs it vibrating like a tuning fork, and sprints across the lawn to the gardener's son.

The gardener's son. "What happened?" "She just let me do it!" "Which of them, Giles?" "Ellen." "Want to watch her. Boys from Dowley have her." "Still, she was very nice. No, she was." "What was it like then?" "Oh, I wasn't any good again." "Oh, well. Still." "I enjoyed it."

So they go down to the lake and sit on the log and smoke fags and talk into the night. There they kiss tremulously, walking home over the lawn in one another's arms.

Outside the Dowley Kinema, a Wednesday night, the gardener's son disappeared into the pub for two packets of crisps. The local boys approached, faded jeans folded up over the ankles, collarless striped shirts, bright braces, and cropped crowns, their breath smoky in the autumn air. Giles turned around; for the last time in his life his face was candid and unperplexed. Suddenly the wet pavement slid up and hit him on the shoulder. With all the time in the world Giles folded his arms across his face. When the first boot caved into his mouth, Giles thought of his mother, aware that a lastingly terrible thing was happening to him.

But the teeth were on him now and they wouldn't go away. They kept saying, "We'll get Mrs. Baden back, because she was your favorite cook, baby, wasn't she? She was, I know. And your room, of course, shall have to be entirely gutted and redone. It's entirely ridiculous to think you bore it for so long. We should only have to get the man who plated the little greenhouse along so he could do it, your room—could he? Can they? People who do greenhouses? Little ones?"

Giles stood at the high window, staring down at the tiny mad dolls in the street below. "Yes, mother," he murmured.

"See? Oh, baby, I
knew
you'd love it!"

Mrs. Coldstream was a manic-depressive. As a child, Giles had quite liked her being manic, but nowadays he always tried to catch her when she was depressive.
That
wasn't so bad. Sometimes she was so depressive that you could just sit it out, watching light move while she obviously stared and wept. Once or twice, Giles had simply crept from the room after a quarter of an hour.

But today she was manic and Giles's face swam in the windowpane.

"Giles—darling—come and hold me."

Giles turned to her with stolen eyes. "Mother," he said, "is there anything good on television?"

"Giles—I don't want to gogglebox! I just want you to hold me—baby, baby, please. I can't bear it. A moment, a moment."

"Gosh, mother, you really can't—you're not allowed to, someone like me, actually."

"Oh, my baby—please please please. Come
here,
my darling. I've got so much, so much. Hold me tight before I die. . . . Baby? Yes, yes. Ah, yes. That's a sweet darling. Thank you, my baby,
thank
you."

Gauzy skin and dying pillows, old smell of chloroform and hot baby powder, stiff webbed hands in his hair, that bad mouth drinking up his tears.

"For you can never leave me, Giles, can you?"

The tears eddied down his cheeks. "No, mother. I can never leave you."

"Baby Giles," she whispered. "Baby Giles."

31: picking
UP
speed

He gave the fat-necked cab driver an unspecified number of five-pound notes and began to apologize, firstly for seeming to have no idea at all where Appleseed Rectory was, and secondly for having repeatedly addressed him as Luigi. The chauffeur counted the money, allowed his face to fall into an uncontrollable gloat, and accelerated stridently away. "Oh, and—keep the change, actually," Giles told the spinning dust. Giles milled round to face the house, slowly finding his footing on the ripped gravel. He drank from his liter hipflask and looked meltingly up at Appleseed Rectory. He looked up at its bleached walls, the flaking sills and drainpipes, the wasted concrete and dark windows, with a familiar jarred relief. He had no feeling for the house, nothing whatever beyond provisional recognition, but he was fairly sure of there

being good things in it—drink, friends, a known room. Perhaps the most attractive feature of the house, Giles moreover mused, was that he wouldn't have to leave it until his mother called again. Through the air came the sound of distant
wings. Sudden foreboding discovered him. He was all teeth once more. Giles swayed before the neutral building, the clouds picking up speed above his head.

Which, of course, is precisely what everything else has started to do—
pick up speed.
Friday was slow: it sailed gaily by in commodious chunks, like a procession of battered river-boats heading for the jeweled estuary of night. See? But Saturday is fast and rough; adrift, it rushes along in snatches, sideways, at an angle, never head on, and is finished, really, before any of them know it.

32: THE COOL DOVES

Twice a day, at midmorning and just before dusk, the brood of doves which nested in the roof of the nearby church sailed down the rise of the village, treading air in the thick thermals above Appleseed Rectory, and swam across the garden to land in the friendly branches of the oak in the neighboring field, where they would ululate and moan at the changing light, compose themselves once again and lift off, swerving in line over the roadside stream to regain their mossy tiles. They came with ritual calm and regularity to Appleseed Rectory, as if in decorous salute to a former home. Time always seemed to pause and take a breath when the cool doves approached, and their lessening wings never failed to hold the eye.