Dead Babies (32 page)

Hard-on trouble, Andy? "Nah. Onna contrary. The prong I had on me—I could of mugged an eight-foot boogie with it. I tell you, when I went to the bathroom to lose the scotch, I hadda practically stand on my head if I wanted to piss in the can and not up my own fuckin' nose. Nah. Wasn't anything at all to do with that. Listen, anyhow. I can tell something awful's gonna happen, but I sort of give it a go. I mean, you have to, don't you? You do. It's only polite. She's practically got both my legs in her mouth by this time anyway, and I don't want to seem like some sort of pervert or fuckin' sex maniac—lean over and say, 'Sorry, kid, I don't feel like it.'
Fuck that. So I gave it a go. Christ. It was ... I don't know what it was. It was . . ."

It was canceled sex. It was a feeling of vast but theoretical weariness combined with acute and local foreboding, petty irritation arm in arm with cosmic disgust, vexed fussiness married to apocalyptic fear. How did she fit in? What were these—her breasts, her ankles, her hair—her
eyes?
What was her role and what were he and his body for? He felt like a bit player in some far-flung organization, the servile motor of another's body.

The girl was making a lot of noise now. The boy turned her onto her back and knelt between her spread legs. The girl closed her eyes and his broad hands smoothed and kneaded her thorax. The boy twitched. The girl glanced up to see that an expression of almost preposterous loathing had come over his face. He fell brokenly on to his side, wretching and shivering in the gray sheets. She inched away from him, crying silent tears.

Looking past her, Andy glimpsed a third body on the mattress: a young, athletic, olive-skinned figure in sawn-off jeans and white shirt, reclining on striped pillows, two beer cans resting on his stomach: a long-ago Andy. Thirteen years old, lithe and predatory, he waits smiling in the quarter light as one by one they appear and kneel for a moment at his side. A melancholy girl with distant eyes, an older woman with deep, maternal breasts, someone his age with impossibly tiny shoulders, witch-like hippies, black-leather blondes, nervy urchins, schoolgirls, widows, shop assistants, divorcees, traffic wardens, bus conductoresses, policewomen, girls from Tehran, Dorking, Massachusetts, Slough, Montego Bay, the Earl's Court Road, spicks, frogs, huns, sprouts, boogies, the one with damp hair that smelled of nutmeg, the one that kept her shirt on although her tits were casual, the one from downstairs, the one that bit his rig, the one from upstairs, the very pregnant one, the not so pregnant one, the twelve-year-old, the fifty-seven-year-old, the one that liked him beating her up, the one that hated him beating her up, the tall Pakky that had no snatch hairs, the short Geordie that had no hair, the one that gave him four kinds of venereal disease, the one he'd given four (different) kinds of venereal disease, the one with the ear-to-ear gobbler's mouth, the blind one, the one that screamed the house down, the bald one, the one with
:
the six-foot legs, the fucking fat one, the one with breasts like airships, the one with the turn-off dog-end nips, the one that wouldn't go down on him, the one with the flash bum, the melancholy girl with distant eyes . . . : they're all forgotten now, as their memory turns on the changing boy.

"Course, it comes and goes, this gimmick. I've only ever had the fuckin' thing about twenty times, really. Maybe thirty times. The way you handle it is— the minute it starts, just pretend it's a drug. Oh, look— I'm sweating, I'm weak as a chick, my heart's like a fuckin' tom-tom, and I feel like Frank's monster. Then it passes, is all. If you want, ten minutes later you can even fuck.

"You know, sometimes I think I was born just in time. I mean, I'm fuckin' glad I'm not younger than I am, born later. Some of the kids I knew at the flat . . . kids around fourteen or fifteen. Yeah, they get hard-on troubles same as the next guy, and they get things we get like false memory and street sadness. Night fatigue, things like that. Course. But they get this canceled sex thing the whole time. They get the shudders inna cot when they try and fuck. I tell you, they'll all be cock-choppers by the time they're eighteen. I'm just glad I got out before it could all catch up on me. Born in the middle, just right—when you don't go mad but still get lots of fucks. I suppose that's basically why I'll always vote Conservative. I don't know, mind, how the next lot of guys are going to make out, the lot that come after me. I'm just glad I'm not one of them, is all. Check?"

61: into the middle air

He took eight swallows of Hine, wiped his mouth and offered the flagon to little Keith. "How you feeling, kid?" Andy asked. Even as Marvell protested that an intake of brandy was hardly Keith's top priority, the soapy dwarf shook his head, or at any rate permitted his eyes to roll slightly. He was finding all movement more complicated than usual—i.e., very complicated indeed, unbelievably difficult, quite extraordinarily recondite—but he was still entirely compos mentis. Whitehead was in fact congratulating himself once again for electing
such a civilized and agreeable way to die. He shut his eyes softly—and his body disappeared! Never in his life had he felt so
light,
free, however illusorily, from that heaving, viscous, fudgy torso, with its cumbrousness, its demands, its noises, and its smells. He completed a tactile reconnaissance of his body. Nothing. He had finally escaped into the middle air.

"On your fuckin' feet, Keith," said Marvell. "Andy. Get him on his fuckin' feet."

Andy put the brandy bottle down sharply on the coffee table.
"You
get him on his fuckin' feet."

Quentin swept across the room. "No time for fun and games now, Andy," he said, dipping his fingers into White-head's yielding flesh.

"Okay," said Marvell. "Rox— Go inna kitchen. Get some mustard, pepper, bad butter, bad lard, bad milk—anything bad—aim it all in the fuckin' blender and bring it right back here."

"Howbout them boiled eggs Celia had?" Skip slowly suggested.

"Great. That oughta do it. Like eating dead babies, right? I have some emetics and laxatives and shit, but they'd make the Venus de Milo set up camp in the John, and we want to take it easy with this kid, you know?" Marvell leaned forward and slapped little Keith quite hard across the face. "Mm-hm. Oughta get him outside. Don't want him throwing up onna carpet."

Requiring a good deal of assistance, Whitehead was steered through the french windows. "Can I sit down? Please. Please let me sit down."

"Nope," said Marvell. "Lean on the wall right there."

"I know," said Andy suddenly. He stepped forward, clasped Keith's quadrangular nose with his left hand, and jammed a long right forefinger into his exposed throat.

A wretching quack sprang from Keith's mouth—as, with no less alacrity, did Andy's finger.

"AWW! Little fucker
bit
me!" shrieked Andy as he leaped at the reeling Whitehead.

It was only the remarkable speed of Quentin's intervention and Skip's timely aid that saved little Keith from a more summary loss of consciousness than he was destined soon to
: ienjoy. He was still coughing vilely when Roxeanne reappeared, bearing the full beaker above the heads of the crowd.

Diana's contention, that Johnny was in fact the man whose bed she had shared for the past six months, was put over by her with lucidity and unwonted calm. She talked of Andy's creed of violence: however boastful and erratic he tended to be on the subject, his devotion to that activity was at least partially real. She adduced his murderous daydreams about the Tuckles: even as she spoke, there stood on the garage workbench four crude Molotov cocktails which Andy was proposing to drop down their chimney. She testified to his aberrant and depressive behavior in recent weeks: Andy had admitted to two attacks of false memory that same afternoon. Finally, she disclosed that Keith's pornography collection had been savaged at some point during the day, presumably by Johnny: that made Andy the only resident to have been spared his attentions. And so on.

But was anybody really listening now? The noises from the garden had become loose and intermittent, like the sound of a megaphone down a windy street, and Diana's words seemed to get nowhere, seemed to fuse in the light of the colorless room. Celia and Lucy had glazed over and as soon as Diana fell silent she felt herself slip back into the same slow, watery retrospection. One by one the girls were wandering through the door.

"Slam him against the wall," said Marvell, accepting the frothy jug from Roxeanne. "Skip— Hold him hard. He's gonna drink alia this and he's gonna fuckin' hate it. Hold his nose, Rox, and keep his mouth open."

As soon as the noisome fluid touched his lips Whitehead's whole body seemed to fizz with revulsion. Marvell's hirsute thumb had been planted on Keith's deep Adam's apple, which he tweaked and depressed in order to regulate the flow. When the last third of the beaker emptied over his shoulders, chest, neck, nose, and drowned mouth, both little Keith's legs seemed to bend up into the air. When Quentin and Skip released him, he remained soggily upright against the wall.

Nothing happened.

Crouching on the grass a few yards away, Andy looked up
from nursing his bitten forefinger. "See, I told you," he said. "I know." Unhindered, Andy swooped up in front of Keith, half knelt sideways on, circled his arm like a baseball pitcher, and swung his fist full force into Keith's solar plexus. It seemed to dive wrist-high into his stomach before bouncing back.

If Whitehead had been in a cartoon (which is probably where he belonged), he would simply have imploded to a third of his mass and drifted up into the air. As it was, he collapsed instantaneously, his legs snatched from beneath him as though they had been lassoed by a cantering cowboy.

". . . My
fuckin' hand!"
shouted Andy. "You little—!"

"There, there, Andrew," said Quentin, effortlessly containing his struggling friend. "There there."

Twenty minutes later and the uncooperative Whitehead had failed to respond, variously, to swallowing a half bushel of grass, having his kidneys ground and punched, getting his testicles mightily squeezed, and being swung circularly in midair, this way and that, by his arms, his legs and his hair.

Andy stood over Keith's punctured body. "Fuck him," he suggested. "That's what I say."

"Andy, don't be
absurd,"
said Quentin. "Unless we can get him through this ourselves we'll—"

"We'll have to call the hospital. Or the police," said Celia, who had appeared from between the french windows. Behind her, in the more tranquil light, stood Lucy and Diana. "Let's just get him out of here, can't we?"

Andy stepped forward and booted Keith negligently in the ribs. The body accepted the blow as might a sack of half-dressed cement. "See? Poor little bastard. He's . . . he's all fucked up."

"Look, er . . ." Marvell knelt beside Keith on the paving stones. "Look, I can't have any law here." He felt Keith's pulse. "Best thing is, I drill him fulla emetics and aperients and stuff and we just leave him here for a time. Or"—he raised his voice—"or on the grass, huh, Cele? Don't want him exploding right here onna patio, yeah, am I wrong?"

Celia swirled back into the room.

"Chicks!" said Marvell indulgently, taking Keith's wrists

in his hands. "Try to be helpful and they— hey, Skip, haul his legs, willya? I know Rox'd blow her stack, any guy heaving on her— yeah, thassit, dump him onna lawn. Now here, my
: I
friend, we gotta problem. Lie him on his back, he'll gag on his own vomit. Lie him on his chest, he won't shit right. I don't know about you, kid, but I could use a Hine."

After a few minutes Keith was firmly roped to the still-blossoming apple tree; two grimed hypodermics hung from his bloated arms.

62: GHOSTLY PERIODS

Perspective was the next to go. As soon as they were back inside, all the corners in Appleseed Rectory came adrift, swam out of position, and folded back in new and unfamiliar conjunctions. Through its open doorway the kitchen was no more than a displaced rhomboid of light. The stairs concertinaed away in unaligned succession. The hall leaned back and forth like a seaborne doll's house. Everywhere they looked mad angles veered up at their eyes.

Giles lay shivering on his bed, a deep-river creature of his own sweat. His mouth was a hive, his teeth changing position like dancers. If he clenched his jaw they just wouldn't fit, wouldn't fit, crags, tors, ridges, beaks, grinding against each other like the rusty cogs of an old machine. He prayed for them to fly away, white birds escaping this sodden nest. Until then he would be locked deep in this house, this room, this mouth, this mouth, with its marshmallow teeth and its sweet-sherry gums.

He could hear the fridge juddering peacefully at him, but he knew he'd never get to it. There were so many things in the way and anyhow his mind kept slipping back, slipping back to ... to
gauzy skin and dying pillows oh baby please 1 enjoyed the swell of the land in ghostly periods with blood she kissed him gorily as saddening dreams the various sunshine off dusty glass and his teeth an old mother old mother and baby
Giles.