The Rachel Papers (5 page)

We met at the party in August. It was a wine and lights flashing and everyone jumping up and down party, as opposed, say, to a lie on the dank carpet cradling empty Pipkins wishing there was more than one girl there party, or, again, to a smoke hash and eat syphcakes while Charles Manson, Esq., pats the bongoes and recites scabrous prose poems party. It was the very best kind of party.

Geoffrey and I had got wind of it from a young (quite posh) hippie in the Marble Arch Okeefenokee Pancake House. He wouldn't tell us the address until Geoffrey offered him a hallucinogen (in fact an asthma pill of mine he had momentarily immersed in a bottle of blue-black Quink).

'It's LDH,' Geoffrey had whispered to him, 'just over from the States. Better than acid. Stronger than MDA. Chas?'

'Oh - any day.'

'Make it a beautiful one, man," Geoffrey nodded to him as we left. 'Peace.'

Rachel arrived in a group of four - what looked like a random car-load - but stayed alone by the door, arms folded adultly. She talked to no one, although she kept waving and shouting hellos. I stood with some other girlless duds along the adjacent wall; my pits prickled as she twice refused offers to take the floor. The second loping Greek lingered awhile to remonstrate with her. Far from stepping in and saying 'Okay, mac, you heard the lady,' I waited for him to go away.

She looked confident and self-possessed all right, as young ladies in these circumstances generally do, but, like myself, excluded rather than merely detached from the festivities. She must have soul, I thought. In my case, though, it was simply a question of being unable to dance in front of other people. Geoffrey, who was gyrating away quite giddily not ten feet from me, postulated that it was one of the best, if not in fact
the
best, ways of pulling girls. But I dance only when I am alone, in ten-second spurts, usually before a mirror, sometimes naked, more often attired in sexter-style underpants.

She lit a cigarette. That would give me five precious minutes in which to think.

I did an instant assessment. She was fairly formidable, a bit out of my league really. She didn't belong to the aggressively sexy genre, like some of the more tear-jerking girls there, whose golden thighs and teeming breasts I found about as approachable as leprosy. However: tallish, nearly my height, shoulder-length black hair conventionally shaped around strong features, she made much of her eyes, her nose made much of itself, black boots and black cowgirl skirt met at the knee, manly white blouse, expensive handbag, few bracelets, one insignificant ring, rather stern no-crap stance, intelligent lower-middle class with a good job, something bossy like public relations, living alone, older than me, possibly half Jewish.

The ethnic detail, yes, would provide me with an opening. I am in rny own appearance if anything rather oppressively Caucasian, but I could always go up and say This party's none too kosher, is it?' or 'I see your schul-days are over.' At that moment I glanced round and guessed that I was the proprietor of the only foreskin in the room. Perhaps I should appeal to her Aryan side then, or at any rate show my sensitivity to this two-way pull she must so often feel. 'Hi there, couldn't help noticing you looked possibly half Jewish. It must be..." Oh, I'm a right one I am.

In fact, I only just did it. A mental chant,
timor mortis conturbat me,
and I began on my clumsiest pull ever. My legs started off, at first spasticly shooting out in all directions, then co-ordinating into a groovy shuffle. The top half of my body sloped forward fifteen degrees. My arms flapped limply from the elbow. My shoulders became ear-muffs.

I opted for thick Chelsea :

'Hhulloh,' as if someone had just informed me that this greeting had an initial
h
and I was trying it out.

'Hello.' Her tone was patronizingly neutral; her accent instantly turned mine into educated upper-middle.

'Hello,'
I said, now with prurient emphasis, a squadron-commander introduced to a fetching Parisienne. 'I notice you haven't got a drink.' This was an excellent line because there usually followed: 'Are you giving this party?'

'Are you giving this party?' she said. But here there was no gate-crasher cringing to be put grandly at its ease. Rather, a dull incredulity.

Nerve going, I elected to be literary. 'Certainly not. Parties of this kind are not given, they are received.'

There was a silence.

'Man comes and drinks the wine and lies beneath,' I said. -It was completely spur-of-the-moment, I promise you
(Tithonus,
line three.) But she wouldn't get the reference and would simply think I was being hearty. My rescue operation ?

'And after many a summer dies the swan,' I added consumptively, then Tennyson said that,' with a little more of the old satirical edge. I laughed, as if at a private joke. She looked at me, unblinking.

'Sorry. I tend to talk crap when I'm nervous.'

'How come you're nervous?'

The same reason you're not.'

'Which is?'

I had no desire whatever to enlarge on this cryptic reply. 'Christ, how should I know?'
Christ?
Was that wise, what with her being half Jewish and all ? I held up a hand, to silence her, to call a halt. 'Why don't we talk about something that interests you? Make-up ... clothes ... babies
... ?
Anything you like. Let me get you a drink.'

'How do you know they interest me?'

'You're a girl.'

'So?'

'They interest you. All girls like talking about those things, surely you must know that. It's all all girls ever talk about. Shops ...
pillow
-slips ... hairbrushes.'

'You can't generalize like —'

'Why no—'

' —
because,
there are so many exceptions.'

'Oh really?'

She sighed. 'I'm an exception.'

'Then you're the exception that makes the rule.'

Bloodcurdling, I quite agree; yet the bookish teenager will often find himself behaving in this way.

The Costa Brava was filling up now. Wild-eyed birdlike persons cruised to and fro; the coat-stand had become cluttered with crutches and white sticks; suspiciously a nearby mutant checked me over for deformities. Why didn't I mind it here?

To my right, dentures clicking like castanets, an old man chopped through a hot-dog at insect speed. Straight ahead, a middle-aged rocker snivelled and yawned. To my left ... Mad Millie herself, whose home was a wheelless 1943 Bedford van parked on the brow of Kensington's Rackham Hill. She was at present menacing the window-pane in a tired mutter. I accidentally caught her eye. She coughed me a transient rainbow of germs, and chased it with the toneless observation: 'You're the foulest little creature I've seen on the moon.' My expression replied, 'You may well have something there.' A chartreuse caterpillar of glinting phlegm crept easily down her chin. She staunched it with a wad of left-over hamburger roll and placed it primly between her lips.

In Smith's over the road I thought intently about my exams. The Tutors was plainly nothing more than a rapacious farce: loopy directress, no facilities, and apparently low on teachers, since I would have to contact the English master myself. It didn't bother me, though. A year earlier I would have wanted a real school and would have felt silly and vulnerable in anything else. Now it seemed only a detail of life, not its whole structure. Interesting. I must be getting on.

Ran into Jenny on the front doorstep. She was on her way out to have lunch with a friend. I didn't think girls did that sort of thing nowadays, and said so. Jenny laughed vivaciously, but looked not at ease. Norman was in and there was a scotch egg in the fridge we could share. I told her to be sure and have a good time.

In my room I looked out my
Rachel
note-pad in preparation for the telephone call. I flicked through it making notes, underlining the odd pertinent phrase, sketching personas. But my mind was wandering. Outside the window, Bina, only one of Jenny's democratic two tabby cats, her body tensed in dumb caution, snaked down the steps to the dustbins. I came across the only extant autograph MS of my first date with Rachel. I felt mournful, squelchy.

After a while she allowed me to go and get her a drink. When I returned from the kitchen she was gone. She wasn't gone. She was smooching with someone very tall in a white suit. I stood holding the glasses like a Negro waiter in Rhodesia House, Nashville, Tennessee. The ballad churned into its first middle-eight. About two minutes to go. What would she do then ? I wanted to ask my host if there were perhaps any broom-cupboards or disused lavatories he wouldn't mind me locking myself into until the party was over.

One of the glasses of wine disappeared. I looked up to see Geoffrey.

'What happened to yours?' he asked.

'Cooled me. What happened to yours?'

'Having a crap or something.' He shrugged. 'But she's coming back. Is yours coming back?'

'You never know. What's yours like?'

'Fantastic. Bi-ig tits.'

'So I saw. But what's she like?'

7 don't know. Just likes dancing and drinking. We haven't talked that much.'

And he asked me: 'What's with all this "what's she like"?'

'Yeah, sorry. Is she going to fuck you, do you think?'

He nodded, eyes closed.

The record ended. I didn't dare turn round.

'Hey,' said Geoffrey, 'yours is kissing that guy.'

'Really?'

'Yeah but... they're saying goodbye. He's pulling out.'

I looked. The white suit was backing away; Rachel swivelled on her heel and walked towards us.

'She's coming,' I whispered. 'Be flash. Say we're a group or something.'

Geoffrey was brilliant. He looked good and talked with confidence. Allusively he lowered names. He plugged me with stooge feed lines, pretended he had never heard two of (some say) my funniest anecdotes. He stole a full bottle of wine from the kitchen. And, it transpired, Rachel vaguely knew Geoffrey's sister. The dialogue was bringing regular smiles to Rachel's full brown lips - to reveal credibly flawed teeth; the top two front ones overlapped slightly, giving a sharp prow to the otherwise semicircular line of white; a felicitous touch, I always think. Everything went beautifully until the return of Geoffrey's. Geoffrey's was called Anna, and was therefore Swedish, which seemed rather to come as a bolt out of the blue as far as Geoffrey was concerned.

The general
tone
of the gathering was lowered at this point. Not that Anna wasn't perfectly charming, only that from Rachel's point of view it was so obviously me and my pull and Geoffrey and his pull getting together to plan a spotty removal to someone's house or flat or room to drink quarts of weak instant coffee and listen to records and be made inefficient passes at - precisely what Geoffrey and I had in mind. For the party was disintegrating quickly now. There remained only one or two drunken couples, some po-faced wankers, and the odd unattached (and so presumably pretty seriously deformed) girl.

'Look, I ought to help clear up,' said Rachel.

'Nonsense,' I said. 'Don't do that. Leave it to whoever was frivolous and conceited enough to give the party.'

Geoffrey joined in with some vehemence. 'No, fuck all this,' he argued. 'Why not come back to our place instead?" He stroked Anna's shoulder. Anna smiled.

'No, I really will clear up.'

'What the devil for?' I asked.

'Because it's my party. I live here. All right ? I hope you had a good time.'

We watched her go.

'How fucking funny,' said Geoffrey. 'Charles, you're well away there.'

Suddenly Norman bellowed down the stairs.

'Hey, Charles, are you in?'

'Yeah,' I shouted, standing.

'Oh,' he roared back, but didn't say anything.

'I'll come up.'

Norman was in the kitchen fighting a cardboard box.

'What's in it?'

'Cider,' Norman gasped.

Eventually he wrestled all the string and paper into an armful-sized bundle and forced it down the Aga, stirring the coals with a broom-handle so that the box burned up with a deep and satisfying roar.

'Where'd you get it?'

'Fell off a lorry.'

'Christ,' I said. 'Surprised it didn't smash open. Did you -'

'No, cunt,' said Norman, now crouching in front of the keg and filling two pub-style pint-glasses.
'Stolen.
Got it off a mate. Two quid. Retails at four thirty-five.'

I coughed and took off my spectacles. 'Does it make you extra pissed?'

Norman handed me my glass, drank his in one, and crouched again to refill it.

'Where's Jenny gone?' I asked.

'Up west, shopping, with some foreign tart from Bristol.'

'When'll she be back? Any idea?'