Dead Babies

1: LET'S GO

There were five bedrooms.

In the master suite, on knees and elbows, Giles Coldstream was crawling around the floor in search of the telephone, both hands cupped tightly over his mouth. The curling green cord eventually led him to a heap of spent gin bottles beneath his desk. With his left palm still flat over his lips Giles tugged at the wire, hobbled into a crouch, and dialed two digits.

"Get me Dr. Wallman. Quickly. Dr. Sir Gerald Wall—"

But even as he spoke, a tooth the shape and hue of a potato chip slopped over his tongue and fell with a hollow rattle into the bakelite receiver.

"Please, quickly."

"What number do you want?" asked a female voice.

"Please. I'm — they're all—"

And now, in strips, like an unstrung necklace or rippling piano keys, they begin to cascade from his mouth.

"What number do you want?" the voice repeated.

Giles dropped the telephone. His hands fidgeted frenetically inside his mouth — trying to keep them there, trying to put them back. His face went glossy with tears as a bubble of blood welled from his lips.

"My teeth," he said. "Somebody please help me. They're all gone."

The bedroom across the passage was not, perhaps, as grand as Giles's, but it was spacious and well appointed, commanding a decent view of the village street and the soft rise of the hills beyond. At the table recessed into the alcove of its bay window sat the Honorable Quentin Villiers, blond and lean in a pair of snakeskin sexters, coolly shrouded by a dome of dust-speckled light from his angle lamp, which in turn threw charcoal shadows along the room behind him, half disguising the naked body of a girl asleep on the bed. Diderot's Le neveu de Rameau nestled on his golden thighs. Quentin closed the book, extinguished his cigarette and took a white pill from the snap-open box on the table. He nicked it into the air, throwing his head back to catch the bright little cylinder in his mouth. He gave his saliva time to wash the taste away.

The Hon. Quentin Villiers stood up. Through the partly drawn curtains he watched the village road turning gray in the quiet dawn. His reflection began to melt from the window-pane — the wavy fair hair, the thin mouth, the abnormally bright green eyes. When he switched off the lamp the rest of the room seemed to lighten.

"Darling, darling, wake up," said Quentin, massaging his wife back to consciousness. "It's me. it's me."

Celia Villiers stirred and blinked, her face flexing with recognition. Quentin carefully folded back the sheet and gazed with reverence at her breasts, caressing her throat with imperceptible fingertips.

"I love you," he whispered.

"Thank you. I love you too."

After a few minutes Quentin rolled over onto his back. Celia's brown-maned head disappeared in its slow sacramental journey down his chest. Then, with an expression of exaggerated calm, Quentin turned to gaze at the ceiling as she wettened his stomach with her tears.

The third and smallest of the first-floor bedrooms was separated from the one we have just left only by a slim sandwich of plaster and hardboard. Accordingly, the sound of the Villierses' lovemaking came through the partition with reasonably high fidelity, waking Diana Parry, the lighter sleeper of the adjacent pair.

Having resumed consciousness, then — a state she seemed never to be very far from — Diana propped herself up on her elbow and stared with an involuntary pang at the back of Andy Adorno's head, coated with hair no less dark and shiny than her own, and at his broad, gypsyishly birthmarked shoulders. While Celia's yodels of appreciation increased in volume and frequency, Diana began to enumerate the blackheads between Andy's shoulder blades. Diana did this in a hostile spirit, because Andy had not made love to her the night before. The noises from the other room became more jarred and ambiguous. It was always a frightening, rather inhuman sound, Diana thought.

Still asleep, Andy rolled over, causing a smell of moist towels, Andy's smell, to glide up the bed. Diana noted with transient satisfaction that his face was the color of vanilla and his breathing stertorous. She lifted the top sheet to look at Andy's whiskey paunch. It swelled and subsided peacefully.

Diana dropped the sheet back into place. Andy had had a coltish, alcoholic erection. Diana sneered at him.

Climbing cautiously from the bed, she picked up her cerise silk caftan and cuboid vanity case. She stepped over a broken guitar and weaved between the drum set and microphone stand. Next door, in the bathroom, she positioned the case on the closed toilet seat and drew a basinful of water. With hands like stiff little flippers, she started to wash her face.

The second-floor bedroom was as yet unoccupied and so need not detain us long. A conventionally low-ceilinged attic, it had a derelict and melancholy air for all the recent work that had clearly gone into its reclamation. The two single beds had been pushed together beneath the small window and made up with fresh double sheets. On the bedside table stood a bottle of Malvern Water, and three glasses. As a. kind of token, a large turquoise-haired gonk rested against the pillows, its limbs spastically askew, its mouth fixed in a mad, idiot leer.

In the fifth and final "bedroom" — actually a fetid nine-by-nine box situated between the garage and the boiler room— Keith Whitehead lay on sandpaper blankets farting like a wizard.

Let's go.

Whitehead is an almost preposterously unattractive young man — practically, for instance, a dwarf. Whenever people want to say something nice about his appearance they usually come up with "You've got quite nice coloring," a reference to his dark eyebrows and thin yellow hair. That granted, nothing remained to be praised about his unappetizing person — the sparse straw mat atop a squashed and petulant mask of acne; the dour, bulgy little torso and repulsively truncated limbs; the numb, cadaverous texture of the whole.

The more clothes you took off him, the more traumatic the spectacle became. His (equally fat but better proportioned) sister went into hysterics when she once surprised him in the bath. As he entered the Wimbledon municipal swimming pool two teenage girls spontaneously vomited into the shallow end (on being questioned, they said it was the quiffs on the nipples of Keith's D-cup breasts that had done the trick — Whitehead was subsequently banned from the baths). At school physical checkups, doctors habitually refused to lay a finger on him, and the PT master threatened to hand in his notice should Keith ever set foot in his gymnasium again. As if in reply to these bodily shortcomings, Keith's nature is one utterly lacking in wit, generosity, and charm. Whitehead is, moreover, keenly appreciative of this state of affairs, well aware that by almost anyone's standards he would be better off dead.

He reviewed it now, as he extracted himself from between the blankets and sat rocking on the bunk in his pungent pajamas, waking for the hundredth time in this house full of tall and affluent people. Keith was hungry; his stomach was rumbling so loudly that he kept yelling at it to shut up. It was eight o'clock. Probably the others weren't up yet and the kitchen would be his. He got to his feet and, after some consideration, put on his dressing gown, a tweedy brown horror that his parents had bought him the minute they were sure he wasn't going to grow out of it. Mr. and Mrs. Whitehead had allowed for, indeed banked on, their son growing a few more inches; this had turned out to be a needless precaution, and the heavy material now swilled amply in his wake. But Keith was hungry, and he was even more appalled by his clothes, grubby little items that he knew he was too fat for, than he was appalled by the risk of being found short-arsing round the house without his high-heeled boots on. In slippers, then, Keith Whitehead opened his "bedroom" door and crept across the garage into the house.

2: routine

And so when Giles Coldstream came into the kitchen White-head was already there. They looked at each other in momentary alarm. Keith sat flushed and breathless at the table, having just finished beating up The Mandarin, Celia's bronchitic Persian cat.

"Hello," said Giles, struck not for the first time by the relative adequacy of Whitehead's teeth.

"Hi," Keith gasped.

Giles sat down carefully next to Keith at the table and looked into his face for a few seconds; then he looked away. "I had my really heavy recurring dream last night, actually,”

said Giles. Giles said this with some surprise; he had never mentioned his dreams to anyone before. Why, then, had he told little Keith? It wasn't as if the morning so far had been anything but humdrumly routine. Giles had simply woken, sent his tongue slithering like a fish round his mouth, checked off his teeth in the bedside shaving mirror, and raced across the room to the huge, shuddering fridge where his early morning jug of Bloody Mary awaited him. Giles decided that he 'should have drunk more before venturing downstairs. Sobriety always made him indiscreet.

"What happened?" asked Keith, ". in your recurring dream?"

"Oh. All my teeth fell out again."

Whitehead frowned pleasantly. "I believe that's to do with fear of sexual failure. It's a sex dream — when all your teeth fall out."

"No, it isn't," grumbled Giles. "Not with me."

"What's it about with you then?"

"It's about all my teeth falling out."

"Ah. How do you know?"

"Because that's all they ever do."

"What?"

"Fall out."

Giles got up and walked across the kitchen to the draining board, which he clutched with both hands. He glazed over.

"Oh. I see," said Keith.

Giles shivered briefly. "But let's just not ever talk about it," he said. "Ever again. If that's all right by you."

Keith shrugged. "Fine," he said. "Fine by me."

The electric kettle began to come to the boil. Giles slowly backed away as the steam condensed on his arm.

"Ah. There goes my coffee," said Keith Whitehead.

Keith had been rinsing out a coffee cup when The Mandarin prowled grandly up to him. Whitehead sighed as he heard its friendly meow. He knew that all The Mandarin was thinking about was Jellymeat Kat. Disdainfully Keith polished the mug with a dishcloth. He was fucked if he was going to feed Celia's pet.

It was then that The Mandarin made her terrible mistake. With a chesty purr she nosed in under Keith's tweed truss and started to flow in figure-eight patterns round his feet, sending wispy fur tickling up his legs.

Whitehead's armpits came to life. "Right," he said.

Gently trapping The Mandarin between his thick white calves, Keith looped the dishcloth and held its end under the running tap. Next, he parted his gown, The Mandarin peered up at him with moist, affectionate eyes, and Keith caught her a good one right on the nose. From then on it was a scramble. As The Mandarin slithered out in terror from the tweed wigwam, Keith pivoted, kicked her into the corner, and came in with his waterlogged rag swinging. Two minutes later, having clouted and dribbled The Mandarin round the kitchen, Keith hoisted her out of the door on the end of his slipper, too winded to continue.

"Are you going to have anything, Giles?" asked Keith.

Giles played with the idea of having a lightly boiled egg. The idea did not attract him. He was off solids at the moment. "No, what I came down for, actually, was a lime." Giles intended, rather, to use this fruit in the preparation of some Gin Rickeys, a new drink he had read about.

Keith was going to have something. He thought it likely that he would die if he did not. He hadn't eaten for three days and the timpanist inside his stomach grew more importunate by the second.

"There's a lot of bacon," Keith coaxed. "It says on the packet that it's due to go bad tomorrow, so we might as well finish it. Want any?"

Giles started back, as if from a physical threat. Bacon was one of the foods he disapproved of most — not only for its toughness but also for its texture: those little knots of gristle and hide which could so easily be mistaken for escaping crowns, caps, bridges, or (who knows?) actual teeth. No. Giles liked to know what was going on in his mouth, thank you. We're sorry, but Giles had swallowed a cap or two in his time and wasn't about to let it happen again. (Once, stranded in Blackfriars on a rainy March afternoon, ravenous and without his credit cards, Giles had stolen into Trims, a health-food cafeteria, where it took him an hour and three-quarters to eat an almond rissole, sorting and grading each item with his tongue before letting it pass down his throat.) "No I won't," he said. "No, I really don't feel like anything."

"Well, I'd better have some then," Keith said fatly.

"Now where would one find… a lime."

"I'm not sure." Whitehead peeled five strips of bacon onto the grill. "Giles — have you any idea who's supposed to be coming for the weekend?"

"No. I didn't know anyone was coming. Besides, what day is it today?"

"It's Friday. Yes," Keith went on, "some friends of Quentin's. American, I believe. And also. Lucy Littlejohn."

Giles was under the dresser, burrowing among the wooden boxes. "Oh, really?"

"Apparently," said Keith. "I don't know anything about the Americans. Do you, do you know Lucy Littlejohn?"

"Mm, a bit," Giles muttered.

Keith jabbed at the bacon with a fork. "I hear she's. Quentin and Andy tell me—"

"Look, here's The Mandarin!" said Giles, turning on his haunches and running a hand along the Persian's arched, silvery back. "How are you, Mandarin. Have you fed her, Keith?"

"Yes."

"Oh. No, you've been fed, Mandarin. Yes, Keith's already fed you."

Whitehead shifted his weight from one foot to the other. "Because Quentin and Andy say Lucy's really something. She's really. quite a nympho."

"What do you mean exactly?"

Keith coughed, "lust that she'll fuck anyone."

"Ooh, I don't know about 'anyone,'" said Giles, dubiously, having fucked her himself.

"Andy's fucked her, Quentin's fucked her—"

"— I've fucked her," Giles weighed in.

"Brian Hall and all that lot have fucked her."

"Bob Henderson and all that lot have fucked her," said Giles. "Yes, I suppose she does fuck quite a lot of people. Cy Harling and all that lot have fucked her."

Whitehead, who had hardly fucked anyone, hadn't fucked her, and it was his dream to do so this very weekend. Thus, he said abruptly, "I hear she's got some sort of venereal thing" — a wheeze of his to put Giles off fucking her himself.

"Is that so?" Giles asked mildly, his head still invisible beneath the dresser. Normally this intelligence would have caused him considerable retrospective alarm. But he found that he was losing interest in sex these days.

"So they say," said Keith.

"Well," asked Giles, straightening up, "who hasn't nowadays?"

At length, Giles found his lime and Keith cooked his bacon. As they shuffled past each other Giles halted on his way to the door and looked the tiny Whitehead up and down.

"Hey," Giles pointed out ingenuously, nodding his head, "you're really a lot smaller without your boots on." Giles looked him up and down again, seemingly impressed by his own powers of observation. "Fatter, too. You know, I never really realized," he said, as if telling Keith something he would be intrigued with and grateful to learn, "just how small and fat you actually were."

When Giles was gone Keith smacked his plate down on the table, kicked the attentive Mandarin, closed his eyes, and, lips flapping, let out a long, frowsy sigh.

3: sounds funny

Celia sat up suddenly in bed, hugged her knees to her breasts, tilted her head to one side, and asked, "What shall we do with them when they arrive?"

Quentin Villiers rearranged the sheets to cover the lower half of his body. He did this rather fussily, but his voice remained genial and melodious. "I should prefer to wait and see what sort of state they're in. They'll have been driving all night and will doubtless be racked with amphetamines."

"I think I'll make them a cooked breakfast," said Celia.

"A cooked breakfast? A 'cooked' breakfast? My sweet, sometimes you are too deliciously outre. Eating a cooked breakfast — it would be like going to bed in pajamas, or reading an English novel."

"Darling, you're not to tease me."

"Well, my dearest, really. No. I rather thought a picnic. It might amuse them. " Quentin opened a hand toward the light that was gathering behind the bedroom curtains. "It promises to be a fine day and, besides, I should like some air myself."

Celia flopped back to her husband's side and nuzzled his neck with her large bruised lips. "You've been up all night, haven't you?"

Quentin released a mouthful of smoke and nodded slowly.

"What doing?"

"Cultivating the life of the mind."

"You hardly ever sleep now, do you?"

Quentin drew in a mouthful of smoke and shook his head slowly. "I do try to avoid it. It bores me so."

"Quentin?"

"Celia."

"Is it true that the three of them have scenes together?"

"Naturally. Why, haven't you ever joined in a threesome— or what I believe they call 'a troy'?"

"Never," said Celia. "Not even in my dissolute days. Have you?"

"No, I haven't either, curiously enough. They're sure to try to enlist us, by the way."

"But we won't, will we," said Celia, cuddling nearer.

Whether through regret or impatience, Quentin concealed a sigh in an emission of cigarette smoke. "Of course not," he said.

"Will the others?"

"An excellent question." He arranged the pillows behind his head to still greater advantage. "Andy most assuredly would, if given the ghost of a chance. Diana, I'm undecided about. I don't think Giles could really be bothered to. Little Keith would probably be prepared to be unseamed by Marvell and Skip if he thought that might win him an opportunity to make Roxeanne his own, which, again, I'd have thought it wouldn't. Roxeanne is fairly 'catholic' in her tastes, but in Keith's rather unsavory case.?" Quentin flapped a limp wrist.

"What about that character Lucy Littlejohn?"

"Character. My sweet, you talk as if she were forty-five. She's a colorful personality but she's hardly a character."

"She's an old flame of yours, isn't she."

"A spark, a mere cinder," protested Quentin.

Celia relaxed and the moment passed. "It sounds funny, doesn't it, darling," she said, "two men and one girl? Two girls and one man seems more on the cards. but. What do the three of them do?"

"They do most of it on a chair, I rather gather. Marvell, the little one, sits on Skip's, the big one's, lap, thereby impaling himself, and then Roxeanne impales herself frontways on Marvell's lap, so that she may kiss them both in turn. Frightfully eventful for Marvell, one imagines."

"Mm."

"There are some rather baroque variations, what they call soixante-neuf et six, but that's the main theme." Quentin gave one of his rare yawns. "They're terribly straightforward about it all. You can ask them for details when they come."

"Mm. It does sound funny, though, doesn't it?"

"Yes," said Quentin, "I suppose it does."

Next door, Andy Adorno peeled back his adhesive eyelids and focused with some degree of reluctance on Diana, who was lying on her side, facing him, the cerise caftan resting here and there on her perennially olive skin. She turned a page of her magazine and glanced at him. Andy closed his eyes again. The taste of dusty stone steps which lay coiled round his senses was augmented by a noisome wave of eau de cologne.

"Jesus fuckin' Christ," he murmured.

Diana turned a page. She said, "There's some coffee and toast I've brought you."

Andy correctly guessed that these nutriments were intended to moisten his mouth and sweeten his breath. Out of the corner of one of his narrow red eyes he looked at Diana again, noting the tactful makeup and the vigorously brushed black hair, through which Diana now ran a hand as she turned another page.

"What's with the glamour?" he asked.

"Just had a wash."

Andy sat up a few inches, his dark face creased with remorse. He said, "Jesus. coffee." He sighed. "And I suppose you want me to fuck you now, don't you?"

She passed him the cup, shaking her head.

"That's good. Cos I," said Andy putting his mug on the bedside table and sitting up, "feel like shit!" He juggled his face between stiff-fingered hands. Then he turned to her and added in a softer voice, "And anyway, I never do what I don't want to do. Okay?”

: "Okay."

"Aw, my fuckin' head!" roared Andy, as he sprang from the bed and stumbled from the room. Diana heard him battering violently on the bathroom door. "Christ! Who's in there?"

Keith tensed on the lavatory seat. He had been on it for fifteen minutes, soggy with constipation. "It's Keith."

"Keith! Don't you dare use this bathroom again." Andy wriggled with impatience. "Now move your arse!"

Keith's buttocks, by way of response, gave a loud yell as a pint of air rushed out between them. Both he and Andy gasped with fright.

Why, this dreadful shout from Whitehead's rear was heard by everyone in the house, by Giles as he squeezed lime juice into a frosted glass, by Celia as she marshaled her cosmetics, by Quentin Villiers as he zipped up his faded denim shirt, and by Diana as she lay on her bed, staring at the wall with cold, unblinking eyes.

4: nice arrows

Let us, then, illustrate our difficulties.

Within half an hour, three conversations were in progress.

one

En route to the kitchen for another lime, Giles Coldstream saw little Keith in the smaller of the two partitioned sitting rooms, flicking tiredly through the copy of Television Weekly which had been delivered that morning. Giles popped his head round the door.

"Hey, Keith, anything good on today? I can't remember."

"Yes, lots," said Keith.

Giles and Keith would often sit together, silently, like old men, in front of the television during the late mornings and afternoons — Giles because time and time again he found himself not thinking about his teeth, Whitehead on the broader principle that it must make useful contributions to his sanity.

"There's Imbroglio at eleven, of course," said Keith. "You

didn't see it yesterday, did you?"

"Yes I did. No I didn't," said Giles. "I missed that one, actually. What happened in it?”

"Well, the guy the photographer's wife didn't fuck went back to his son's mistress."

"Ah, I see. But. " Giles frowned gradually, "what about Jimmy?"

"What about him?"

"Jimmy. The mistress's daughter's boyfriend."

"I know who he is. He ran away from home again on Wednesday."

Giles seemed relieved. "That's right, of course he did. So all that was all right then."

"Why didn't you come down yesterday?"

"Um, sleeping or something, I think. Yesterday. was that Round the House, Chuckadoodledoo, Brumber and Al-phonse, and Tammy?"

"No, that's Tuesday."

Giles cocked his head. "Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"Well, what was on yesterday. Apart, of course, from Imbroglio?"

"Young Scientist, Vespa Newtown, Cooking Without Tears, and Elephant Boy."

"Oh, of course. When does it start today, actually?"

"Know Your Pony's on at ten-thirty," said Keith.

Giles smiled without opening his mouth. "Well, see you down here for that, then?"

"Right you are."

TWO

"How big's his cock, for instance?" inquired Diana, settling herself on the windowseat and placing the tea tray on Celia's crowded dressing table.

Celia winced as she strained to unscrew a jar of face cream. "Pretty big. Well above average. Ah, thank you, Diana. How big's Andy's?"

Diana sighed. "Enormous. When he's not on anything, of course." She sipped her tea, and asked, peering over her cup, "How often does Quentin fuck you?"

With white-plumed fingertips Celia dabbed at her variegated, spot-sprinkled face. The clear fact that Celia's complexion was so much worse than her own slightly mitigated Diana's disgust when Celia said, "Once a night, at least. And usually in the morning.”

: "Even when he's on something?"

"Especially then. That doesn't seem to affect Quentin. Sometimes when he's speeding he can go on for hours."

"Really?"

"Oh yes, hours." Celia stopped kneading her face in order to glance alertly at Diana. Then she resumed. "Once literally all night. How often does Andy?"

"Oh, every night — or in the morning. And sometimes at odd times during the day. How good is Quentin?"

Celia went vacant. Then she said: "Fantastic. And Andy?"

Diana couldn't go vacant so she went knowing. Then she said: "Fantastic."

There was a pause.

"One of the most beautiful things Quentin does," said his wife, "is talk."

"Big deal."

"No, I mean when we're making love."

"Oh," said Diana briskly, "Andy does that too. Tm going to fuck your fucking cunt till—' "

"Oh no. Not like that." Celia shook her head. "Quentin, Quentin says poetry."

"Oh. No." Diana shook her head. "Andy doesn't do that."

three

Quentin and Andy were in fact playing darts in the garage. Between shots, they sipped Irish coffee from pint-sized mugs and passed thin, one-paper joints back and forth. Their tall bodies swayed indolently to the music from Andy's portable tape recorder. Whenever they were alone together there was always a pleasant tang in the air; it was not sexual tension so much as a mutual, agreed narcissism.

"Christ, what's that smell?" said Andy.

"It's the fungus on the boilers," said Quentin, "though no doubt deriving further piquancy from the aroma of little Keith's 'room.'"

"It's like bad chick." Andy accepted the darts Quentin offered him and walked to behind the chalk mark ten feet from the board. "Or like stale come — which figures."

"Why? What could little Keith possibly have to masturbate about?"

"Nothing," said Andy. "Nothing at all. But he's got plenty of visual aids.”

"Oh, really? What's he got in there?"

Andy took his three throws before replying. "Just a great load of cunt magazines."

"What genre?"

"Yeah, he page-fucks the models. Banana shots. Guys with bent rigs being gobbled. Open beavers. One's with the cameraman halfway up the girls' bums."

"Oh. Just straight stuff then?"

"Beat me, beat me," said Andy warmly as one of his favorite LPs wound onto the tape. He strolled to the wall and plucked his darts from the board. "Nice arrows. Yeah, mostly. Diana took a look in there the other night. Says he's got one or two of dogs buggering some old woman."

"That sounds very sexy," said Quentin. "Oh, dear, poor little Keith."

"Yeah, he's a mess, isn't he?"

"Sort of baby's face on a dwarf's body."

"Like a sort of wrecky little doll."

"Breath like a laser beam," mused Quentin.

"Or an oxyacetylene burner."

"Fat as a pig."

"Smells like a compost heap."

"Or a dotard's mattress."

"Be bald as an egg by the time he's twenty-five."

"Or twenty-four."

"Or twenty-three."

"Or twenty-two."

"He's that now."

"At least."

"Yes," said Andy. "It's amazing, when you come to think of it, that he's so cheerful."

"Especially with us handsome bastards about the place."

"Check." Andy nodded, his eyes closed. "Check."

5: appleseed rectorv

Are we presenting characters and scenes that are somehow fanciful, tendentious, supererogatory? Not at all. Quite the contrary. The reverse is the case. By the standards that here obtain Giles and Keith could be dismissed as pathetically introverted, Quentin and Andy as complacent and somewhat: fastidious, and Celia and Diana as sadly, even quaintly, inhibited. The household, indeed, considers itself a fortress for the old pieties, a stout anachronism, a bastion of the values it seems to us so notably to lack.

For we have gone on ahead a small distance in time. Our subjects are now mere adolescents, quite unaware of the shape their lives have begun to take. Let us glimpse them, then, in their transient innocence.

This summer, as we write, Giles Coldstream has just passed his Common Entrance and, following this coup, is holidaying victoriously at Monkenvale, the family seat, whose forty apartments are occupied by Giles, his mother, and a staff of thirteen. Giles is a radiantly unselfconscious little boy, rather undersized, brown-haired, eversmiling, the cossett of the house staff, the darling of the village, and shyly in love with the gardener's eldest son, who takes him fishing most afternoons and to the local cinema every Saturday and on alternate Wednesdays. Giles is accurately described by the cook as "such a sunny little thing"; he has moments of foreboding, brief but intense, only when his mother wheels herself into his room at night and when he visits the dentist.

It is being a glorious summer also for Andy Adorno, who is no less enjoyably whiling away his vac as an assistant sorter in the Notting Hill post office. By law, Andy is too young for the job, but he looks older than he is and the people at the post office like him as much as most people seem to. They have agreed to pay him £22 per week, cash, with the consequence that Andy is buying a fair amount of cocaine on Friday evenings. Despite his experiments with this and any other drug he can get his hands on, he remains cheerful, rowdy and energetic. Furthermore, at what he calls "the vague commune in Earl's Court" where he has always lived, Andy encounters lots to eat and drink, plenty of friendly guys with all sorts of amazing musical instruments, and a continuous stream of girls who keep on successfully trying to go to bed with him.

As usual, Celia Evanston is being toted round Europe by Aramintha Leitch, her stepmother, who is, as usual, between

divorces. They are at this moment checking out of La Traviata

in Monte Carlo and waiting for the Mercedes that will shortly take them to the Cannes Hilton. Lady Leitch, a small, athletic blonde, is being importuned variously and without sue- cess by the hotel manager, two hotel waiters, the janitor of the hotel swimming pool, and the maitre de of the hotel dining room. The first wants Lady Leitch to settle her bill; the other four want to know when Lady Leitch will return so that they can all sleep with her again: to each the noblewoman gives her Hebridean address. Celia can be made out in the corner of the foyer sitting amid a pile of luggage and hatboxes. A hideous bellboy crouches beside her; their conversation is in French and has the cadences of recrimination and denial. Finally, the girl stands — small, fat, shock-haired, but with a certain assurance — glances at her stepmother, and says, "Dix minutes." The hideous bellboy spreads his hands, as if this is all he had asked, all anyone could ask. The couple disappears arm in arm.

Celia's future husband, Quentin Villiers, is thirty miles away, by the side of the Italy road. He is on a walkabout-hitchhike tour of Europe and this is his first real holiday without elderly chaperones of one sort or another. Thus, although he has little money and few contacts, his green eyes are perpetually bright with pure hedonistic anticipation. He stands in a lay-by with his duffelbag, dressed only in faded Rob-Crusoe jeans cut off well up the thigh. Quentin is already six-foot, tanned and aquiline; the traffic practically concertinas when he sticks out his thumb.

Diana, Diana Parry, is a mere shadow of her future self, a tall-for-her-age, severe-looking, badly coordinated girl with a narrow orange mouth and a sheet of black hair that hangs on her head like a paper-thin cowl. At present she is on her way from her mother's flat in London to her father's flat in Amsterdam. Her demeanor at Heathrow Airport is characteristic: she fumbles with her documents, drops her handbag, splinters fingernails on the suitcase handles, and is painfully conscious of the men's malevolent stares. Diana is particularly on edge today, having received a letter from her best friend Emily containing the ebullient postscript that Emily has just that minute begun to menstruate; this intelligence establishes Diana as not only the smallest-breasted but also the one nonpubescent girl in her coterie. While Diana is not at all sorry to leave her mother she is not especially anxious to see her father. She opens a magazine as the airplane accelerates along the runway.

And Whitehead? Thirteen years of age, Keith is at present: the subject of experimental (and, in the event, deleterious) gland-correction surgery in the Research Wing of the St. Pancras Hospital for Tropical Diseases. Since the age of five Whitehead has had always to observe a starvation diet to avoid grotesque obesity; with adolescence has come an explosion of fatty tissue, a hormonal influx that has alarmed even the most experienced of the hospital's dieticians. His three-strong, seventy-stone family trudges along two evenings a week; it sits and swears at Keith for half an hour ("The operation will be a complete bloody disaster, you realize," foretells Whitehead, Sr., enviously), then trudges off again, without good-byes. Little Keith excited so much revulsion in the public wards that the consultants were forced to move him into a private room. He will be discharged in five weeks' time; the doctors will pronounce him more fat-prone than ever but "as sane as can be expected." For the time being, Whitehead lies in pulsing, hot-faced, glandular silence by day and at night is the weeper of unreflecting tears.

These are the six that answer to our purposes, and we have taken them on ahead a small distance in time to Appleseed Rectory, a three-story structure which stands in the outskirts of the Hertfordshire village of Gladmoor. Gladmoor is still a village. It has survived the northern thrust of the London suburbs partly because of its inconvenient remoteness from the main intercity highways and partly because of its taxing proximity to the Luton Airport approach routes. Gladmoor has been conserved too, perhaps, by its capacity to astonish: straying down the one gray-brick road, seeing the wonky Edwardian streetlamps, the warped and splintery sign over the coach house, the great oaks which bend back toward the hills, visitors find it hard to expunge the sense of unreality, of suspension, which even the drumming aircraft cannot break, an aura of peace and sweetness almost as palpable as the integrity of the stone.

Approaching Appleseed Rectory from the direction of the village could be a particularly dislocating experience. When Quentin had sent directions to his American friends, for example, he had written: "Immediately after the hump-backed bridge, stop, get out of the car, and look hard to your left, and the house is inset twenty yards from the road. It's there!" With good reason: it was commonplace for regular callers at DEAD BABIES; 2O

the house to speed down the road past it, U-turn, miss it again, and oblige garrulous locals to redirect them. Appleseed Rectory always seemed to be the color of the sky against which it was set. The off-white brick made it look like something in a monochrome photograph, or like a painting glimpsed through net curtains. It was exceptionally narrow, windowless at either end, and seen from the road it would sometimes melt back to a bodiless shimmer. In hot weather the sun would draw thermal gradients from the roadside stream, corrugating the house like an image on a rippling banner. On rainy afternoons it would appear completely to recede into the vaporous, hospital-gray medium of the sky.

And inside the house itself perspective seems no less unreliable. Everyone is always blacking out at Appleseed Rectory, and they can't remember farther back than a few days. Everyone tends to be either drunk or stoned or hungover or sick at Appleseed Rectory, and they have learned to be empirical about all sense perceptions. Everything is out of whack at Appleseed Rectory; its rooms are without bearing and without certainty. The inhabitants suffer, too, from curious mental complaints brought on by prolonged use of drugs, complaints that can be alleviated only by drugs of different kinds. And so Appleseed Rectory is a place of shifting outlines and imploded vacuums; it is a place of lagging time and false memory, a place of street sadness, night fatigue, and canceled sex.

More in a moment.

6: fat chance

Keith was still wallowing on the sofa in the smaller Rectory sitting room when Quentin and Andy appeared in the doorway. Ten o'clock, Friday morning.

"It's drug time!" Andy announced.

"Oh, God," said Keith.

One among many of Whitehead's domestic posts was that of drug-tester. Two or three times a week Andy and Quentin would approach him with a pill, or a scrap of blotting paper, or a sac of powder, or a vial of fluid, or a sachet of crystals, or a moist sugar lump, which Keith would then be required to swallow or suck or sniff or (occasionally) inject. Quentin and Andy would tell him how long they expected the drug to take and would disappear for that period. On their return Keith would either be giggling and leaping about, or shaking his head and saying, "Nothing yet," or shivering with terror beneath the sideboard, or enjoying agreeable hallucinations, or asleep, or crying, or cleaning the kitchen, or locked in the broom closet, or vomiting crazily, or unconscious and very white. Sometimes, if the effects of the drug seemed to be irresistibly efficacious, Quentin and Andy would personally join Keith in the experiment. If the converse, they would take seats and, in a spirit of detached inquiry, watch; they would note how little Keith's pupils bulged and throbbed, discuss the way in which he would twitch and pant, observe how, in the final stages, his skin paled, his tongue went lizard-green, and his lips gashed gold-vermilion.

"Nothing very special today," Andy went on. "Just a pound for three from the black guy in the canteen. He's pretty reliable — for a Pakky — so it should be quite mild and won't last long."

"Up or down?" asked Keith warily.

Andy glanced at Quentin and said, "Down. But not far." His brisk manner returned. "Pins-and-needly feeling after half an hour or so — we think — then you ought to feel a bit sleepy, dizzy, queasy — but nice. A thing of the past within a couple of hours."

Whitehead narrowed his eyes. "No side-effects?"

"Absolutely not."

"It doesn't make your piss go all black like that stuff the other week?"

"Uh-uh."

"I won't have all that green gunge coming out of my ears?"

"Promise."

"I won't be up all night trying to crap?"

"No way."

"And, look, they don't make your cock retract like that powdered stuff you—"

"Actually," digressed Andy, "one guy's eyes came out on

stalks when I hit him with some bad MDA, and his tongue went all—”

"Are you sure they don't muck up your cock, because I…" Keith stirred in his seat, settling on his buttocks as if they were cushions. "When's Lucy coming?"

"Lucy? Who knows?" said Quentin, appealing to Andy.

"Sometime this evening." Andy's gaze steadied. "Why?"

Whitehead sat up straight. "I'll give you three guesses!"

Quentin and Andy regarded each other uneasily. For Keith had said this in one of his "funny voices," an Americanized treble, as it might be Jiminy Cricket challenging Pinocchio with some pedagogic taunt.

"What?" said Andy.

"Cos I want some of the old dippy-dippy-dippy!"

Keith smiled at the silence as his words swung out into the room and hovered in the air above the round glass table. Each of them simultaneously became aware of a lone bird gurgling doggedly somewhere among the branches that swathed the sitting room windows.

"Dippy-dippy?" said Andy.

Keith strove on in a precarious Yogi Bear falsetto: "Dippy-dippy — the old in-out, in-out — dunking the dagger — some of the other — a bit of the old. " Whitehead trailed off.

Andy looked at Quentin again.

"Does he mean fucking, or what?"

"That's right," said Keith defeatedly, in his normal voice.

"Fucking Lucy?" asked Quentin.

"Mm. That's right. I only thought. "

Just then the telephone peeped and Quentin swayed across the room to answer it.

Andy joined Keith on the sofa. "Well, why the fuck didn't you say so, Keith?" Andy's tone grew earnest. "Keith, listen."

"What?"

"Don't ever speak in that voice again. Okay?"

"Okay."

"Christ, Keith. I really got the horrors for a moment. Thought you were going mad again."

"But I've used that voice before?"

"I know that," said Andy, "but don't ever use it again. Or any other of your funny voices. Okay? Now." He took a handful of pills from his pocket and sprinkled them onto the coffee table. "We'd really like you to take two, but they're semi-barbits so you won't be able to lush much, so one's okay, though I'd prefer it if you could handle two. I'll give you some for a present, but you—"

"Hey!" cried Quentin, muffling the telephone. One blue-jeaned leg emerged from the folds of Quentin's satin housecoat to rest on the arm of a nearby chair. "It's Lucy herself. Hello Lucy! And whose bed might you be in?" he asked, and started chuckling grandly at her reply.

Keith looked wildly around.

"Well, Lucy, if you will bathchair-snatch. Yes, once— for a dare. One moment, Andy should like a word. And when are you coming?" he added in an aggrieved voice. "Very well, see you then. No, I'm a one-girl guy now. The same to you."

As Quentin whisperingly handed the telephone to Andy, Keith took a pill from the small mound and rolled it thoughtfully in his palm.

"Luce? Andy! Incredible. How many? Yeah? Mythical. And" — he turned and winked at Keith—"we've got a little surprise for you, too. Someone very anxious to make your acquaintance. You wait and see. Keith Whitehead. Well, he's tall, dark — ooh, about six-one, six-two? — chiseled features—"

Whitehead gave a groan of protest.

"— thick black hair, absolute dynamite in the cot, I hear, rich as Croesus—"

"Andy, please."

"— thin as a blade, but, what with his height, you know, really built—'

"Andy."

"—take him in yourself tonight. Okay, kid. Bye!"

The telephone chirruped faintly as Andy replaced the receiver and turned grinning to Quentin. "That's what they call a soft sell," Quentin remarked.

"You appreciate," said Keith hoarsely, "you appreciate what you've just done, don't you?" The shape of Keith's mouth was such that his upper front teeth were always partly exposed; now the semicircular stripe of chapped red rubber virtually obscured his nostrils.

Andy hurried across the room and crouched blinking in front of him. "What?"

"You've just, you've…"

"What? Now you take your pills like a good little boy. What have I done?”

Keith waved a hand impotently.

"C'mon, Mac, fill me in."

Keith rested his head against the back of the sofa and swallowed something deep in his throat. His voice was speedy and distant. "If you hadn't said those things to Lucy I might have had a slim chance—"

"Slim chance? Slim chance? Fat chance, boy, fat chance."

"I might have had a… Oh, Christ, I might have had a chance to make. Ah, how could you conceive—"

"To make a good impression?" interjected Quentin, who had been watching the squat pair with twinkly disinterest. "What Keith is trying to say, Andrew, is that he harbors doubts about living up to the rather stylized picture of himself with which you have just furnished Miss Littlejohn. That lady now expects to be welcomed by a tall, slender, dark, handsome stranger and—"

"— And all she'll get is fat, fair, rough, little Keith. Yeah, of course, but I was only fucking about — she knows that. Christ, where's your sense of humor?"

"Well, Keith. Satisfied?"

Whitehead wasn't. "I was hoping you'd sort of talk to her, Andy, use your influence." He gestured at the pills. "I do you all these favors, couldn't you ask her to do me one?"

Andy seemed genuinely puzzled. "Why not just try her, like anyone else?"

"Look at me." Keith spread out his arms. He appeared to be about to cry. "I'm not like anyone else."

"I can't. " Andy clicked his tongue and stood up. "Okay. I'll, you know, I'll—Christ I hate all this pervert talk. Now fuckin' take those pills, Keith, and let's have no more of this shit."

When Andy had left the room Quentin walked over to the sofa and sat down on its arm. "Try not to be hurt by what Andy says," he murmured. "I dote on him, as you know, but I'm afraid that — if he has a fault — it might be a certain parsimony of imagination."

"Pardon?"

"I mean he tends to assume that everyone is very much like himself. Keith, are you all right?"

Whitehead sniffed and ran a finger along the isthmus that separated his nose and his mouth, collecting a bubble of snot which he wondered vaguely where to deposit. Quentin: held out his fringed silk sudary and Keith blew into it with grateful enthusiasm. It had occurred to him, working on the assumption that insensitivity must have its limits, that Andy had seen no important connection between Keith's ill looks and his ability to attract Lucy, that it might be all one to her, that she was as undiscriminating as people regularly suggested she was; but Quentin's compassionate words had burst even this tiny pimple of expectation. Keith sniffed again. "I don't care any more, anyway," he said.

"Keith, you must never talk like that," said Quentin.

The room paled as a cloud passed between it and the sun, then brightened again. Quentin leaned forward and gently tousled Keith's hair: the artfully posed strands scattered beneath his palm to divulge a broad area of unoccupied scalp. Quentin's fingers retreated.

"Don't worry," he said softly. "I'll make sure something unusual happens to you this weekend. Something or other, if not with Lucy."

7: penthouse cloudscape

Lucy Littlejohn lived in a top-floor Knightsbridge maisonette with three other girls. It was not by any means an atypical household and we would do well to look at it closely. On a normal day they rise between one and two in the afternoon either for long Badedas ablutions in the luxury bathroom or scathing showers in the downstairs closet. Then, while the color television flashes and rumbles in the background, they sprawl about the sitting room in nighties and dressing gowns, angelically aglow in the penthouse cloudscape, sipping coffee from French-style bowls and talking about their respective nights out. At four they wander off to shop in Sloane Street and Beauchamp Place, returning at six for glasses of Tio Pepe and further chat before drifting upstairs to change. Between telephone calls they flit in and out of each other's rooms to borrow scent, swap tights, crave advice. Their voices glide out from brightly lit bedrooms to congregate in the

dusky landing; the conversation might lead one to believe

that they are restaurant critics, nightlife pundits, gossip columnists, incognito bailiffs; they are not. At nine, the taxis and limousines start to arrive.

All the girls have what they call "daytime lovers," but only Lucy habitually sacrifices her financial affairs to her amatory ones, a tendency apotheosized and, ironically, terminated by the handsome, insolvent Adorno. They met the summer before. Andy had run up to her in Pont Street and said, brushing the hair out of his eyes and not smiling, "Hey — why don't you let me come home with you now?" "Yes, all right," Lucy had said at once. They walked to her flat in silence, with tight chests and almost equal shares of surprise. "I wouldn't have asked," Andy said diffidently as he entered Lucy's room, "but you looked so nice."

And she was nice. Short brown-and-blond hair, big violet eyes, her innumerable saris, veils, beads, jewels, belts, garters, scarves not entirely obscuring her friendly figure, a forty-tooth smile and a deafening laugh, areas of mild grease showing through her elaborate though hastily applied makeup, worn-thin shiny patched jeans, lucent orange skin visible beneath her stained and holey blouse, immaculate white underwear. For fifty-five consecutive evenings Andy appeared, smudged and steaming from his holiday job in a Westminster timber yard, bearing a bottle of wine, some hash perhaps, and a toothbrush. For eight weeks Andy talked to Lucy about politics and the American novel, played her the derelict guitar he had restrung and unwarped (Lucy found this embarrassing at first but soon got not to mind it), told her about his life, and made high-powered love to her two or three times a night. And for two months Lucy paid no rent.

On the fifty-sixth evening Mitzi and Serena were waiting by the intercom when Andy let himself in. "Who're you seeing tonight — Louis Quinze?" he said, sweeping past them into the sitting room, where he was hushedly informed by Lucy that her flatmates' plans for the evening might well have fallen through and that he wasn't to vex them further, particularly in view of the fact that she was a little bit behind with the rent. But Adorno, biting the screwtop from a double liter of wine as he flicked off the television and picked up the guitar, wasn't listening; he had seen "the plastic trio" (his sobriquet for Lucy's friends) only once or twice and had betrayed no interest in them whatever. Ten minutes later the intercom whined, there was renewed activity in the hall, and Andy peered round to see a tiny Burmese gentleman dressed in gray military uniform. "Fucking with: soldiers now, are they?" he said. The midget relayed to Mitzi and Serena someone's compliments and apologies and held up a huge floral wreath over which the two girls fluttered apathetically.

Swearing and grumbling, the girls staggered in from the hall. Mitzi made for the telephone as Serena flopped down splay-legged in an armchair. "What's with the midge?" Andy asked. "Here, try this wine." Serena shook her head. "Euch," said Mitzi. Andy looked curiously at Lucy before dipping his head in fierce accompaniment to his guitar.

"Look," Mitzi told the telephone, "if you don't want to fuck just say so. It'll be a good fuck. It'll be a very good fuck." The telephone replied but Mitzi, who was in the process of accepting a cigarette and a light from Serena, could respond only with an angry hum of negation. "No — no — no cash! Two good fucks just for something to do. Yeah, Serena's here, so are there any, you know, is that. Heimito, or whatever the hell his name is.? Oh no, oh no — you send a cab. " Mitzi appeared to be on the point of authentic fury when something the telephone said calmed her. "Okay, okay, hon. Come get us. Ciaow." She hung up, spreading her palms at Serena, who shrugged.

"Everything together?" asked Lucy.

Mitzi must have caught irony in Lucy's tone. "Yeah," she said, "and you better get yourself together pretty soon. This place doesn't run on buttons."

A faraway murmur quite suddenly became a roar as the sound of a low-flying helicopter battered against the windows before receding again into the distance.

"Who was that?" snapped Mitzi. "Bob?"

Parting the curtains, Serena consulted her watch. "Uh-uh. Too early. Must be Gary."

"Right. He said he'd be going late this weekend. Christ, that Jap."

"No, he was from Burma, wasn't he?"

"Yeah, well what the fuck difference does it make?" asked Mitzi.

"Not a hell of a lot."

Simultaneously the girls became aware that Andy's strumming had ceased, that Andy was staring at Lucy, that Lucy had curled up on her chair and was swaying from side to side with her arms wrapped tightly round herself. Mitzi and Serena stirred, but Andy directed his gaze at them with such venomous contempt that they were both silenced by a rush of physical fear.

Andy shuddered. Then, with a relaxed, almost negligent wave of his arm, he splintered the guitar on the steel coffee table in front of him. "Lucy," he said, when the silence had quietened, "is this the way you are? Are you like this?" He sighed. "Lucy, go upstairs and pack a bag and come home with me. If you owe these dogs money, I'll pay it. If you're in trouble, I'll take care of it. Pack a bag and let's get the fuck out of here."

Lucy crumpled a bit into her chair, of course, saddened perceptibly and grew smaller and shook her head in token distraction; but she knew she wasn't going anywhere. She shook her head.

Awed as much by his offer as the fact that Lucy had refused it, Andy stood up, toyed momentarily with the idea of kicking Mitzi or raping Serena, looked round for more things to smash, saw nothing, and so contented himself with upending the table, spitting on the carpet, and breaking the lock of the front door as he left.

All this — or very nearly all this — Diana knew. And as she moved about the bedroom methodically assembling and pairing off Andy's drumsticks, stooping to pick up plectrums and harmonicas from the floor, righting the stack of guitars in the corner, restoring flutes and penny whistles to their boxes and records to their sleeves, bundling together his boyishly stained underpants and pleasingly aromatic T-shirts, blinking at moments of surprised emotion when she noticed his gym shoes placed side by side in the wardrobe or his beloved horse-brass saxophone strap laid out on the desk, Diana attempted to organize her responses to the history. Although she had screwed the above information out of Andy in a playful, bantering spirit, and with due reverence for his potent outrage and sexy disgust, it was with genuine and lasting pain that she thought about these early days with Lucy: equally, although she had screwed the following information out of him

in a reproachful, judicious spirit, with due condemnation of

his vengefulness and cruelty, it was with genuine heart-quickening glee that she thought about these later episodes.

: Diana swayed to a halt, turned, and met her eye in the wardrobe glass.

A week later, the following Friday, Andy went round to the flat, apologized to Serena and Mitzi (and also to the tanned Isabella, who had just flown in from Morocco), led the tearful, bewildered Lucy upstairs, made sarcastic love to her ("I think I Mailered her, actually — up her bum"), slapped her about a bit, and stalked off, leaving his unopened pay packet on the dressing table. The next night he appeared with Quentin, very drunk; he led Lucy up to her room again, made her strip at fistpoint, summoned Quentin and urged him to copulate with her while he watched from the corner, drinking wine and chuckling malevolently; Quentin said a lot of things like "Andy, really," and "Isn't this all rather. " and "Honestly, I do think.," but a combination of lust, alcohol and an anxiety not to seem a killjoy persuaded him to go ahead, and he did so with style and virtuosity. Lucy was then required to perform fellatio on Andy, who from time to time offered to knock her fucking head off whether she swallowed it or not, while Quentin dressed.

"No, man, it's creative," Andy told Quentin as they stumbled together down the stairs, " — radical rape, for her own fuckin' good. Anyway, I paid her yesterday."

Before leaving, the pair looked in on the sitting room. Andy exposed himself to each of the girls in turn, asked a television producer if he would like his face beaten to pulp, burst into tears, exhorted the entire company to go eat shit, and blacked out.

Andy's pranking continued just as engagingly when term started at London that September, though his visits became rarer and much less virulent. Once a fortnight or so, he and his friends would club together for the necessary £20 (it was Andy who insisted on this token, not Lucy) and roll round to Pont Street for some laughs. Customarily Lucy would do an elaborate strip for them, masturbate some of them, go to bed with one or two perhaps, and ask for a few minutes with Andy. Lucy seemed to have entered into the spirit of things by this time; she cried every now and then when Andy made love to her personally, alone, but on the whole she was resigned to the status Andy kept insisting was her true one.

She didn't know why she had refused Andy's offer yet neither could she claim that she regretted her refusal. The exuberance of her character insulated Lucy for the role; as soon as Andy's vindictive hostility appeared to have dissipated, after his first few raids on her person, there was nothing abject in her displays and nothing cringing in her submissions, merely a kind of inevitability.

But next it was Giles's turn, and here Andy's scheme suffered its first major reverse.

The sickly waif was shoved into the flat one navy-blue November night and beamingly introduced by Andy: "Here she is — do anything for fifty quid." They sat smalltalking in the kitchen. giles: How long, in actual fact, have you lived here? lucy: Ooh, nearly a year. giles: Oh, really? Because it's really. very nice, actually. lucy: It ain't a lot, but it's home. giles: In fact, how long did you say you'd lived here for? andy: Look, man, you don't have to do all that. They're all whores here.

Giles and Lucy were duly cheered up the stairs. Once in her room, Lucy went confidently over to the bed, smiled, and began to undo her shirt. "Actually," said Giles, producing an enormous flask from his hip pocket, "do you mind if we don't do anything, actually? I'll still give as much money as you like. I've got money, but I'm a bit. nervous. I mean, please don't think I'm a pervert or anything." "How old are you, Giles?" "Twenty and a half." "Have you had girlfriends?" "Oh yes. Only I just don't feel like it these. Though I think you're jolly attractive: you've got awfully nice. " (Giles was going to say "teeth"; but this merely reminded him of why he didn't feel like it.) "Okay, love, you can just lie here for a bit — don't worry, I won't sneak on you — and then go." "Gosh, thanks." Which he did, writing her out a blank check as he left.

What Andy had so tragically forgotten was that in many respects Giles was the dream man for Lucy: kind, pleasant if rather vacuous in appearance, amusing in his way, gentle, affectionate, and quite extraordinarily rich. Having instructed his solicitors to pay off all her debts, Giles entrusted Lucy

with his billfold and gave her a free hand, happy to go to any restaurants, cinemas, or clubs she suggested, to take a pullman to Brighton or a Daimler to the Lakes, and vetoing only overtly teeth-imperiling enterprises. After their eleventh night together Giles awoke with (i) not too much of a hangover and (ii) an erection, with which he shyly confronted Lucy and subsided trembling in her arms. They were inseparable all that winter.

The affair ended, as did so much else for Giles, when he wobbled down the staircase of the Old Compton Street Wheeler's, lost — co-instantaneously — his footing and Lucy's hand, tripped, fell, and smacked out his front two caps on the Soho pavement.

During Giles's three-month convalescence in various rural sanatoria, Andy cautiously remade Lucy's acquaintance. They agreed to contact each other whenever they felt sad or lonely, to confide in each other, to help each other in times of need, to be friends.

Diana's face was beginning to darken when Andy came into the room.

"Amazing," he said. "You've cleaned up all my stuff. My harps, too." He went over to his desk. "That's a bad horse-brass," he said approvingly, nodding his head.

Diana did not look up. "When is she coming?"

"Yeah, she rang. This afternoon sometime, early this evening."

Andy knelt, stroked back a handful of Diana's expensive black hair and planted a kiss on her temple. "Thanks, man," he said.

Although Diana was aware that this was Andy's "way" of apologizing for his earlier shortness, and also that by his standards it was an act of almost obsequious gallantry, she still felt the need not to respond, and turned away.

"Well," suggested Andy, "fuck you."

8: from the pain

Quentin pursued little Keith into the kitchen. Behind them came Andy, in some distress.

"C'mon, Keith," he said, "any action?"

Keith woggled out a chair from under the table and sat

down, the better to face the huge beauties who prowled round in front of him. He glanced at his watch. "How long—?”

"I know how long, you little spaz." Andy clapped his hands together. "An hour. If there's—"

A loud crash from the slammed back door was followed by the familiar fat-thighed shuffle of Mrs. Fry, the woman who charred three mornings a week for Appleseed Rectory, as she made her grunting way down the passage toward the kitchen.

Asway with frustration, Andy gripped the back of a chair and began to plead, "Look, if they're not fuckin' working now, they're—"

"Hey hey hey," interrupted Quentin, making compassionate, pacific nods with his head. "Not in front of the servants, Andrew."

Andy leaned back against the dresser. "Okay," he said in a strained voice. "Okay."

"Morning all!" A face that resembled that of a cruel pig wearing an onion-shaped blond toupee flashed with unsettling speed around the door.

"Good morning to you, Mrs. Fry," said Quentin. "How may we assist you?"

"Just want the mops, Mr. Villiers, thank you." There was a silence. Mrs. Fry stared at Quentin for a moment with what might have been appalled desire then barged past Keith's "outstretched" legs toward the broom closet. A smell of Domestos, baby powder, and aged sweat flew up into the air.

Whitehead looked at Mrs. Fry askance, largely due to the fact that he had made a highly unsuccessful pass at her the month before. Keith had been lying on his bunk, wondering what use to put to the early morning erection which he so painfully nursed, considering whether to reach down for a handful of the magazines that glistened beneath his bunk. Mrs. Fry had called from the garage that she wanted access to the brushes stored in his room. Whitehead bade her enter and, when she knelt down with her back to him, leaned forward in hot pajamas to cup the gauzy pink bosom of her apron. Mrs. Fry turned around and hit little Keith so hard on his right ear that he immediately burst out crying — not out of shock or frustration, merely from the pain.

"Got everything, Mrs. Fry?"

"Yes, thank you, Mr. Villiers." She smiled to reveal false teeth of perfect whiteness. " 'Scuse!" she hooted at Keith, who smartly wedged his legs under the chair.

: "Fuck," said Andy absentmindedly to himself, adjusting his heavy groin with both hands, "these jeans don't half get to your snake."

"Allow me," said Quentin, holding open the door past which Mrs. Fry disappeared. Quentin turned to Andy. "Well, I think you showed admirable restraint, Andy." There was perhaps the tiniest hint of real disapproval in his voice?

"Mm? Oh, that," said Andy. "The fuck, she just licks the floors around here." Anger returned to him like a jolt of electricity. He swooped down once again on little Keith, "Nothing? Not even dazed, hazy, not with it, vague, loose—"

Keith, who had protruded his lower lip ominously from the word "hazy" on, said, "Not a thing, Andy."

Andy shook his head as if to clear it. He started back, spun round full circle, and returned his gaze imploringly to Keith. "Take two more. Take four more. Take—"

"Slow down, Andy," said Quentin. "You've just been burnt, that's all."

"You'd better not be fucking with me," Andy told Keith hopefully.

"They just don't work, Andy."

"That fuckin' boogie!" Andy began to windmill his arms in incredulous rage. "Jesus! 'Yey, man, is forking good, be my fren, forking con your ass.' Forty pounds!" Andy took the flat, one-ounce tobacco tin out of his pocket and crashed it on the table, over which it slid to belly-rattle on the kitchen floor. Andy straightened, and said with abrupt calm, "I'm going to go beat him up. Coming?"

"Yes, I'll just get my coat," said Quentin. "Keith, if Celia asks tell her I shan't be more than twenty minutes."

"What are you intending to do to him, Andy," asked Keith when Quentin had left the room.

Andy held up a large-knuckled, many-ringed fist. "Either he's going to give me my money back and all the drugs I can carry or I'm going to kick the absolute shit out of him. I tell you, he's going to be one sorry boogie when I… Quentin!"

Andy's motorbike snarled into life. Keith heard the door shut again, the motorbike letting go with a whirl of gravel,

and the gears changing eagerly as it raced down the village

street. With slightly agitated movements Keith leaned to retrieve the tin of pills, which he snapped open. He stared at its contents for several seconds.

9: Gin and tears

"Glug glug glug," whispered Giles to himself, swirling the lime juice in its prefrosted beaker and holding it up to the light. "Glug glug glug glug glug."

Seen from outside his window Giles Coldstream might have been mistaken for a crazy scientist were it not for the amiable blandness of his face. The desk over which he was hunched was a fizzing, gargling laboratory of martini shakers, electric stirrers, corkscrews, siphons, ice buckets, glass coolers, lemon peelers, spoons.

Without taking his eyes from the misted beaker Giles reached out gropingly with his right hand until it settled on the lumpy green bottle of Gordon's gin, which he then unscrewed, upturned, and frowned at. "Ah. Empty," he said.

Giles sauntered the length of the room, opened the double doors of his vast teak drinks cupboard, selected a bottle of gin from the off-license-sized rank on the top shelf, and returned to his desk. Giles filled the tall beaker almost to the brim, adding, by way of an afterthought, scolding himself for his forgetfulness, a squirt of tonic. He sipped quizzically. "Delicious." Giles sipped again, more candidly this time, and ambled back to the bed. A creased Penguin of Iris Murdoch's The Black Prince, the tale of a sixty-year-old man's romance with a twenty-year-old girl, lay open on his pillow. He read a few more pages before disappointment at Miss Murdoch's continual shirking of the question of the protagonists' difference in teeth caused him to toss the book scathingly under his bed. "You can't 'suspend disbelief forever," he remarked. From the pile of hardbacks which The Black Prince joined— Teeth, Oral Hygiene: The Facts, The History of the Denture, A Dentist's Day, The Tooth—our good Giles selected one at random and sank with foreboding into the deep pillows.

Twenty pages later there was a firm rap on his bedroom door. "Giles?"

He peered woefully over his book. "Yes?" "Telephone." "Who is it, actually?" "Some old woman." "No. I meant outside the door. Who are you?”

: "Celia."

"Ah. Now Celia — couldn't you just sort of—"

"What? Look—" Celia fought with the handle. " — I can't—"

"Hang on." Giles swung his body off the bed and toddled over to the door, whose three bolts he threw back and which he opened a few millimeters.

When Giles saw Celia he screamed.

"Gosh, sorry about that," he said afterward. "I didn't really recognize you." Celia had a lardlike cream pack on her face and had brushed her hair out tangentially from her big square head. She looked like an anemic golliwog. "Look, um, uh. " Giles snapped his fingers weakly.

"Celia."

"Celia. Look — Celia — it may be my mother. In fact, it is. Do you think you could very kindly tell her I'm ill?"

"No, I'm afraid I couldn't. I've already told her you're well."

"I see. Am I right in thinking you've got a telephone in your room? May I take it in there?"

Celia swiveled and after a moment's hesitation Giles followed her across the landing.

"What's happened to your telephone?"

"I cut the wire," said Giles, not without pride.

Celia preceded him into the room and pointed to the telephone on the windowseat. "Whatever for?" she asked.

"The sudden ringing gives me such a fright sometimes. I thought I might fall over one of these days and knock out. "

Giles was going to say "some teeth," but he fell silent, blank and becalmed in the doorway.

"Well, you'd better answer it now you're here."

"Oh! Thank you. Celia."

Celia repaired to her dressing table. She took up the hairbrush with a roll of her eyes. "You stink of gin, you know."

"Do I?" asked Giles, faintly intrigued. "No, I didn't know that." Giles then gave Celia one of his smiles, which is to say he compressed and elongated his lips. "Hello? Mother? Oh, hello. This is Giles here. I'm very well, indeed, thank you

— awfully well. Ah, no, now, today isn't a good day, actually.

Oh, I've got lots of things I must do. Jolly busy indeed. And tomorrow, do you see, is Sunday, and one can't very well— If it were Saturday tomorrow then nothing would be simpler than to… Are you sure?" Giles muffled the receiver and looked up groggily at Celia. "Today wouldn't be Friday, would it? Oh, dear." He contemplated the telephone unhappily. "What? Yes, mother, you were right. Saturday it is then. Perfect. Well! I suppose I shall be along to see you then. Good-bye. And I love you."

Giles stood up; he gazed out of the window for a few seconds. "Look. Here come Andy and your husband on their motorbike," he murmured. He turned to leave.

"What's the matter with your mother these days, anyway?"

"Only mad. Just mad. Mad as anything."

Back at his desk Giles quickly prepared, and as readily swallowed, a tall, refreshing glass of lime, tonic, ice, gin and tears.

So now everyone else is beginning to gather in the kitchen. Adorno, still loosening up after his exertions with Kash-drahr Khoja, lumbers hungrily round the room, jogging, ducking, feinting. Diana, dressed in a white vest-and-panty scants suit, smoking a gold-tipped menthol cigarette, watches him with mild distaste. Little Keith sits at the table; he has a profound, all-pervasive testicular stomach ache, for which he thanks the corduroy trousers that miraculously contain the lower half of his body; he sports also a beige fishnet Fred Perry which smells of old cars, and boots so high heeled that he was required to lower himself into them from a chair: when the opportunity presents itself, little Keith pays his undivided attention to Diana's breasts. Owing to her pains at the altar of her dressing table, the wide-boned face of Celia Villiers enjoys a sleek, vinyl radiance, as fortuitously does her body, roped in a complex of floral bands which splay at the waist into a leather-lined jungle skirt. She halfheartedly berates her husband for vanishing just when his friends were due to arrive. Quentin, for his part, argues that Andy was in no state to be left alone with the mischievous blackie — whom he had half killed as it was. "Relax," says Andy, shadow-boxing in the corner. "I only batted him around a bit — keeps

the boy in line." It's midday, exactly twelve o'clock. The sun

sends planks of light in through the ribbed kitchen window.

The battered '78 Chevrolet sweeps up the pebbled, semicircular approach and drifts dustily to a halt, sending a squirt: of gravel into the oblong rosebed five yards from the front door. An ironic hush falls as the three Americans detach themselves from the car. Stretching, and now straightening up, hands on hips, to assess the house, they turn to one another with squinting smiles until a sudden movement from the kitchen alerts them to the presence of their observers. Three faces grow shrewd.

Everyone except little Keith moved instinctively out into the hall.

"The weekend starts here," said Quentin.

X: Quentin

"The only remotely vexing thing about the aeroplane crash that killed my parents," the Honorable Quentin Villiers is fond of saying, " — the only thing about the news that didn't make one simply weep with joy — is that my brother Neville survived it… Apart from vacs I led a rather somber and enclosed childhood — Christ's Hospital, Winchester, The House — and I knew Neville only as the overweight and generally hopeless young man who paid biannual visits to the seat in order to bore and rob my parents — who anyway deserved no better, I don't think I need add. Happily, though, Neville is eighteen years my senior, a homosexual, and an alcoholic. I was mightily cheered to learn recently, too, that while holidaying in nubile Indonesia (he pretends to be an agronomist), Neville contracted an admirably tenacious strain of syphilis, fore and aft, a strain which frequent calls on a reputedly rather depressing venue far south of the river have done nothing whatever to arrest, let alone cure. I dine with him as often as I think anyone well could at White's where I note his deterioration with a potent joy. He suffers appallingly also from gout, of course — a great Villiers infirmity, gout, an attractive complaint on the whole, though one that I have so far been spared. His blood pressure is alarmingly high; his heart capricious; I hourly await news of his death." (At this point Quentin usually takes Celia's hand or glances at her silkily.) "I shall inherit, then, in the none too distant future. At least — thank God — Neville had the gumption to wrest my father's money from him a decade before his timely death. I don't imagine for a moment that my brother will see out another decade, so these ghastly death duties are sure to be levied this time. The estate should nevertheless be enough to keep us in tolerable comfort for the rest of our lives, and a title still helps. I wonder if I shan't fight to reverse this pernicious ten-year ruling when I come to sit in the Lords. But until then I shall continue to live, firstly, off my wife— who has some money of her own, thank heaven — and, secondly, off my own modest salary, which, as everyone here knows, I never tire of finding means to supplement. Cheers!"

Obviously Quentin was an adept at character stylization, a master of pastiche, a connoisseur of verbal self-dramatization — and he needed to be. Although affiliated with London University Quentin was the only member of the household who wasn't supposed to be taking a degree there. Instead, he ran— more or less singlehanded — the university newspaper, a satirico-politico-literary magazine called Yes. Acquiring the editorship had been a singularly painless business. Quentin went along to the interview carrying a portfolio of anonymous learned articles which he hadn't written, a stack of laboriously forged references, and a mawkish panegyric from the homosexual literary editor of a Sunday newspaper. He needn't have bothered: the reviews were never checked, the references never taken up. When Quentin walked into the board room, a silver Lycidas in a clinging white chamois suit, a sigh of longing was heaved in unison by the entire committee. While Quentin outlined his editorial plans the delegates could only gaze meltingly into his champagne eyes; when he finished, a languid exchange of nods and smiles took place and Quentin was offered thanks for his attendance. No further candidates were seen.

And Quentin's editorial work was a jeu d'esprit, a personal tour de force.

To begin with he wrote most of the book reviews himself. He would allow a cooling-off period after publication, collate and synthesize the notices of rival journals, find the points on which they agreed, and rewrite them in the inimitable Yes style. Hence, the unanimous verdict that the prose of a novel was ornate and self-conscious would lead Quentin to write;

So-and-so's sentences read like a frenzied collage of George Eliot at her most sententious and James Joyce at his most abstruse.

: And when drunk:

So-and-so's book reads like a drunken compositor's rendering of the maddened yelps of Henry James and Gertrude Stein locked in verbal soixante-neuf.

Or, if a biographer were generally held to have been insensitive in the handling of his subject's private life, Quentin would remark:

So-and-so's dirty little fingers rifle through his subject's private life like a hick detective investigating a pimp's account book.

When stoned:

So-and-so cavorts through the dignified hideaway of his subject's private life with all the tact and discretion of a lobotomized orang-utan which has just sat on a hedgehog.

Or, if a literary critic were widely felt to have been over-generous to his chosen author, Quentin would note:

If so-and-so were anyone to go by, Shakespeare would be reduced to an imitator of McGonagall when compared to the writer on whom he so shamelessly fawns.

And on speed?

So-and-so's drooling idolatry of his author makes Tennyson's praise of Wellington look like a neck-scissors and body-slam followed by a forearm-smash.

And so on. The reviews, seldom more than a couple of hundred words, didn't claim to be definitive; but they were, as you see, "lively," together with being basically "sound." Quentin inserted formidable bylines, such as O. Seltnizt and D. R. S. M. Mainwairing, names that tended to correspond to numbered bank accounts here and abroad. On the rare occasions on which Quentin felt bound to commission reviews he would get Celia to type them out and return them with a printed slip reading:

Dear Sir/Madam: The Editor regrets that he is unable to use the contribution kindly submitted to him and returns it herewith.

Quentin never bothered to cross out the Sir or the Madam, and yet he always bothered to write on the back:

I've seen some shitty pieces in my time but by Christ

your — really takes the cake. Unimaginative,

sloppily written, poorly reasoned, ill-informed — I could go on. Were you drunk when you wrote it, or is the whole thing a joke? Either way, I shan't be needing any work from you. QV. Return the book immediately.

Two months later the review would appear, usually in the Round-Up columns, partly reshuffled and totally rewritten. The contributors often suspected malpractice but they were too young, baffled, and ashamed to take the matter further. The fierce esteem in which Quentin was held quickly silenced any direct complaint to the university and in most cases the only reprisals Quentin received were sheepish letters asking for another chance.

As regards the political side of the paper Quentin filled his pages with hate pieces too scabrous and extreme to be printed elsewhere; his correspondence columns were acknowledged to be the most compelling in modern journalism. The writers didn't care about payment, and besides Villiers explained that Yes was nonprofit-making. The remainder of the magazine was bulked out with vicious gossip about imaginary persons ("Anthea K. tells me that Henry W.'s erection problems continue to torment them"), rather good satire, exposes culled from celebrity acquaintances, Andy's erudite though often loosely argued contemporary music page (unpaid, but he wanted the records and concert tickets), and Quentin's excellent film and theater reviews. Production was handled, for a derisory wage, by little Keith, who had been brought several times to physical collapse with printers' errands and whose eyesight had been reduced from 20–20 to partial blindness by the speed-perpetuated galley-reading sessions that Quentin forced him to complete.

Yes was an astonishing success. Quentin charmed the big names into contributing and everyone else into subscribing. Circulation tripled, and, after a turquoise-suited Quentin was photographed on the front cover (caption: Yes Editor Quentin Villiers talking at conference to James Altman and Professor English Hoenikker, both off camera), the magazine won out-: spoken praise from William Burroughs, Gore Vidal, Angus Wilson, and a quorum of distinguished intellectuals.

Quentin is a superman. The versatility of the fellow I He can talk all day to a butcher about the longevity of imported meats, to an airhostess about safety regulations in the de Gaulle hangars, to an insurance salesman about postdated transferable policies, to a poet about nontypographical means of distinguishing six-syllable three-line stanzas and nine-syllable two-line ones, to an economist about pre-war counterinflationary theory, to a zoologist about the compensatory eye movements of the iguana. Just so, he can address a barrow boy in rhyming slang, a tourist in yokel French, a Sunderlander in Geordie, a Newmarket tout in genteel Cambridgeshire, a gypsy in Romany. He can mimic not only types but intimates too. He can bring Giles out of his room calling "Mother?" send Whitehead scurrying into the garage with a cackle from Mrs. Fry, cause Andy to rebuke the wordless Diana from going on at him, convince his own wife that it is not he who sits in a darkened room. These imitative gifts are matched by the astounding versatility of his physical presence. Quentin can silence a cocktail party just by walking into it or, alternatively, cruise around the room for half an hour and listen to people complain about his nonarrival. He can swank into the Savoy in T-shirt and jeans or sidle dinner-jacketed through the Glasgow slums. He can halt a conference with a movement of his little finger and yet sit so invisibly that directors start to discuss his salary without realizing he's there. "Or so it seems," Quentin is fond of saying, " — and that's all it needs to do."

Watch Quentin closely. Everyone else does. Stunned by his good looks, proportionately taken aback by his friendliness and accessibility, flattered by his interest, struck by the intimacy of his manner and lulled by the hypnotic sonority of his voice — it is impossible to meet Quentin without falling a little bit in love.

11: the Human wigwam

Does he know, for instance, what I'm feeling now? wondered Whitehead, as Quentin, glancing back into the kitchen before unbolting the front door, favored him with an oddly piercing, oddly meek, smile, the corners of his fine mouth curving downward at either end.

Did he know what it was like to be introduced to a girl a foot taller than oneself, the dwarfish humiliations involved in shaking hands with somebody practically twice one's height, the sneaky web of tensions that obtain when a person measuring four-foot-eleven (or "five-one," in Keith's parlance) meets a fellow human being who has cleared the magic divide of five-foot-six? For the Americans, Whitehead had established by peering in tiptoed apprehension out of the kitchen window on the way to the hall, seemed to have been selected to illustrate the elementary differences possible in the standard Earthling hominid: one rangy pale giant with cropped white hair and plasticene limbs; one tuft-faced goblin whose plaited brown braids extended to his waist; and. Roxeanne, it must have been, one of those terrifying, genetics-experiment, centerfold American girls — well over six feet in her platforms, a bonfire of lambent red hair, breasts like zeppelins, large firm high backside, endless legs. During his buildup to the ordeal, Keith had had a prayer that he would be able to suffer it in a sedentary, and thus unexposed, posture. Now, watching Quentin gambol out with a cheer to embrace the newcomers, and watching Celia approach the four in a solemn, formalized step, Whitehead began to see the full horror of what was in store for him.

Quentin held out a hand to his wife and turned to his friends. "Marvell. Skip. Roxeanne," he said huskily, gazing from one face to another, ". take my wife in."

There was a pause. Celia then moved forward to join the circle of arms, where she was embraced by each in turn and kissed on either cheek by Roxeanne and firmly on the mouth by Skip and Marvell. Grouping in a circle, the quartet leaned inward and touched foreheads. Besting his emotion, Quentin looked toward the porch, within which Andy, Diana, and Whitehead were uncertainly arranged. Quentin's voice was lusty, brave: "Come on!" he cried.

"Fuck this," sighed Diana.

"C'mon, it's only tender," Andy told Diana before striding

out into the drive.

Queasily Keith watched Andy kiss Roxeanne — with indecorous relish, he thought — and link arms crossways with: Marvell and Skip. Five foreheads touched. Whitehead looked up at Diana. "To hell with this, eh?" he pleaded.

Diana, more out of a reluctance to be with the loathsome Keith than a desire to be with the others, glanced at him in tired contempt and left him alone at the front door. A rather stiffer version of the Celia ritual was enacted, then the entire pyramid of legs, arms, and faces turned expectantly toward the tiny boy.

Keith was still reviewing various gambits — run screaming to his room? fall on his face? start crying? go mad again? — when he found himself skipping corpulently across the drive, piping out, "Room for one more inside?"

"Right here," said Marvell immediately; "There you go," said Skip, separating his arm from Celia's to allow him entry; "Oh, you're so small!" shouted Roxeanne in evident delight. As Keith craned his puckered mouth up at the seven grinning faces, Roxeanne, supported by Quentin and Andy, craned hers down to kiss it. She never got there: Quentin's foot slipped on the gravel, Roxeanne's right brick was whipped out from beneath her, the human wigwam swayed, wheeled round a quarter circle, tottered, and collapsed to shrieks of mirth on the ground.

Gradually they staggered laughingly to their feet.". Drugs now," said Quentin, still trying to catch his breath, laughing again. "Much drugs."

The Appleseeders' stance on that topic found eloquent recapitulation and support a few minutes later from Marvell Buzhardt, the small, owlish American, postgraduate in psychology, anthropology, and environment at Columbia University, underground journalist, filmmaker, and pop-cultural entrepreneur. Dr. Buzhardt sat rolling joints at the kitchen table with Quentin and Andy, sliding round a bottle of duty-free liquor, while the girls made snacks for the projected picnic. Skip was unloading the Chevrolet, Whitehead running errands to the mini-market. Marvell had, in fact, recently published a short monograph on this theme in conjunction with the Berkeley Alternative University Press, a copy of which he promised to dig up for them before he left.

"What's the book got to say, man?"

"Simplistically, Andy, The Mind Lab has this to say," Marvell began. "For some time now it's been clear to all the genuine people studying this thing that the brain is a mechanical unit and that its aberrations aren't down to environmental, psychological contexts but to purely chemical reactions — that's all, nothing more. This idea has had a lot of trouble getting through because people won't let go of the belief that no part of us is divine. You go crazy, right? It's because you've got shit in your head, lousy chemicals. Anyhow, that's just the lead-in to the main polemic of my book."

At this point the Doctor ceased all activity with grass and cigarette papers in order to clench his hands pensively on his crown — to the secret boredom of Andy, who was less interested in talking about drugs than in getting a lot of them down him in the shortest possible time.

"Okay. So if you go crazy now," Marvell went on, "they give you good chemicals to counteract the bad ones in your head. Or electrics. The only mysterious thing about the brain is its complexity. Nothing cerebral about it, man, just one mother of a terminal of chemicals and nerve ends, and science can keep up with it now. So: why not apply this positively?"

"I don't know," said Andy, in moonish response to Marvell's interrogative, though in fact rhetorical, stare.

"No reason! Look — fuck — we're agreed that life is a rat's ass and that it's no fun being yourself all the time. So why not do with your brain what you do with your body? Fuck all this dead babies about love, understanding, compassion— use drugs to kind of… cushion the consciousness, guide it, protect it, stimulate it. We have a fantastic range of drugs now, Andy. We have drugs to make you euphoric, sad, horny, violent, lucid, tender. We have drug combinations that will produce any kind of hallucination or sense modification you want. Alternatively, we have drugs that can neutralize these effects instantaneously. Not the old Leary line — no 'religion,' no false promises. We have chemical authority over the psyche — so let's use it, and have a good time."

"Piss," said Diana. "What about brain damage? False memory, street sadness?"

"Well. " Marvell rocked his hairy head from side to side. "There's kind of an appendix dealing with—"

"And anyhow, most of that," said Roxeanne, "is media hysteria."

Quentin: "How was the book received, Marvell?”

: "Pig and Smeg Sunday raved. The only straight press things I've seen, of course, tried to dismiss it as psycho agit-prop."

"Of course," said Andy, picking up Marvell's grass kit. "They would. Well, what have you got in mind for us today, then?"

The Doctor smiled. "Uh-uh. What have you got in mind?"

12: TALL AND GOOD

Quite overwhelmed by the colossal impression he seemed so far to have made on the guests, Whitehead stole tremulously across the garden. Keith's mission was to consolidate his feelings of well-being, and he proposed to do this by paying a call on the only people he had so far encountered in his life who made him feel flash, cool, grand, a pop-star, a Mohawk, one-up, stylish, sexy, brilliant, rich, tall and good. They were the Tuckles.

The Tuckles?

The Tuckles. If Quentin and Andy were at a loose end — or if they were under the auspices of some particularly electrifying drug — they used often to race out across the lawn to give a bad time to Mr. and Mrs. Sydney Tuckle, the wrecked dotard pair whom they were trying to evict from the Appleseed annex, a single-storied, two-room structure built into the corner of the garden wall and screened from the house by a bank of flowerless rhododendrons. The Tuckles had been installed there half a century earlier as factoti to some previous owners and had, insufferably, refused to budge since. Legally they were immovable, but Quentin and Andy, claiming to have dreams of converting the lodge into a studio/guest house/rumpus room, argued that if they could make life nasty enough for the couple they would leave of their own accord.

Quentin had once set up, for example, a polyethylene-covered loudspeaker outside the Tuckle front window, through which he relayed at glass-shattering, eardrum-puncturing volume such sounds as road crashes, cannon salutes, airplane takeoffs, advancing mobs, heavy breathing, tank battles, ambulance sirens, elephant charges, shouts, screams, obscenities. When this gave no clear reward Quentin transmitted a high-pitched sonic hum for three days and three nights; on the fourth day Mr. Tuckle was seen groggily repadding the windows with blood trickling from his left ear, at which point Quentin good-humoredly gave in to domestic pressure and discontinued his broadcasts. Andy's ruses tended on the whole to be more atavistic in conception. He once peed through the keyhole and then, to Quentin's roars of laughter, defecated down the chimney onto the Tuckle hearth. In similar moods he had playfully blocked up their sewage outlet, cut off their heat and water over the Christmas weekend, fused their electricity circuit, and restricted their comings and goings by, variously, camping outside with an ax, blacking up their windows with hardboard (so they didn't dare come out), and training the pressurized garden hose on their door for ninety-six hours. Although it was at their peril that the Tuckles staggered out of the back gate to visit the shop — liable to be menaced, spat on, jostled — Quentin and Andy were of course far too cavalier to mount a systematic campaign. Indeed, we suspect that if the old pair ever did move on Quentin and Andy would miss them sorely.

Whitehead rapped on the toytown front door. He rapped again and backed off a few paces. "Come on," he said. "It's Keith Whitehead."

Suddenly the letterbox creaked for a split second. There followed the sound of bolts, many and elaborate, being thrown back. The door opened slowly. Mr. and Mrs. Tuckle edged out into the strange sunlight.

"Mr. Whitehead! Thank God!" Mr. Tuckle swayed so wholeheartedly on his feet that Keith reached out and balanced him against his wife. "I beg your pardon for the delay, sir," Tuckle pursued, "but Mr. Villiers must have seen you when you came down here on the Tuesday — because he stood outside the door here yesterday and called up that he was you and everyone else was out. We could have sworn it was you, sir. We could have sworn it was you. He said it just in the way you say it, sir. Why, I opened the door without really thinking. And there was Mr. Villiers, with the dark-haired one standing beside him with a dustbin. He hurled it — he hurled it at us and we flew back into the house. Mrs. Tuckle took the lid on her neck. He would have charged in here on top of us, sir, but Mr. Villiers held him back.”

: "It was your own bloody stupid fault for not looking first," said Keith.

"You're right, of course, sir, it was. Very rash."

"Well, what the hell do you expect me to do about it?"

For the first time Mr. Tuckle's voice showed real agitation. "No, sir, please. We don't expect you to control them. You can see they don't know what they're doing themselves half the time. We're grateful for what you do do, sir. Deeply grateful." Mrs. Tuckle confirmed this, her eyes damp with trust. Mr. Tuckle swallowed. "And could you tell Mr. Coldstream that we're deeply grateful for his gift."

"If I remember to," said Keith. (On hearing of the Tuckle plight Giles had asked Whitehead to take along a liter of gin the next time he went to see them, which Keith had done that Tuesday, adjudging the present too fattening to intercept.) "About shopping. And by the way, Mrs. Tuckle, it's no bloody use asking me to get Beenies at the mini-market. You know bloody well they don't stock them there."

"I'm sorry, sir, I didn't—"

"Anyway, you can do it yourselves today for once. Some guests of mine have arrived and I've decided to take everyone out for a picnic. It should be clear from one till at least three."

"Thank you, sir, thank you."

"Yes, and in future when I knock I'd better say 'White-head.' I won't say 'Keith' or 'Mr.' Then you'll know it's me. 'Whitehead.'"

Whitehead didn't seem as pleased by this innovation as he thought he was going to be, but when the Tuckles started to say "Thank you, sir, thank you—" again, Keith was off, striding back over the lawn, feeling far too flash to say good-bye.

13: a sort of daydream

"Away from the drill!"

"What? I say, Giles, are you all right?"

Giles had been lying on his bed, bent double with psychosomatic toothache, His strangled shout had been a semi-

delerious reply to Quentin's courtly knock. By 12:30, Giles had consumed five Gin Rickeys, four gin and tonics, three gin and its, two gin and bitters, and one gin.

"Oh, hello, Quentin," said Giles when he had unlocked the door. "I'm sorry I cried out at you like that, actually. I was just having a sort of daydream."

"Sorry to disturb you. Only we're all off on a picnic and I've come to get you."

"Literally 'all'?"

"Yes, I'm afraid so."

"Ah." Giles didn't want to go anywhere, but he knew that being alone in the house was something he would never be able even to contemplate. "I see. Well, I think I'd better come then."

From behind his back Quentin produced two vast cardboard boxes. "Celia has prepared lots of food," he said. "We'll need some drink, however."

Giles expressionlessly accepted the two boxes and turned to open his teak cupboard. He knelt. "Hang on. Mostly red or mostly white?"

"Let's see," said Quentin. "We've got beef, steak sandwiches, chick—"

"Stop!. Uh, sorry. But actually — could you just say the wines, actually. Okay?"

"Of course, Giles. Mostly red, please. Why not half a dozen St. Emilion '74 and half a dozen Chateauneuf-du-Pape "77," Quentin said simply. "Oh, and some Pouilly-Fume for the girls."

"There. we. are," said Giles some minutes later. "Now. " He took a liter of Napolean brandy from the lowest shelf and (after a silent consultation with Quentin) two of Glenfyddich Irish from the one above. Finally, having gone over to the desk to establish that his bottle of gin was at least half finished, Giles included a fresh Gordon's. "That ought to do it," he said to himself.

"Splendid. I'll get Skip up in a minute to lend a hand. No, you haven't met everyone yet, have you?"

Giles did not react to this question. But then, all of a sudden, as he was being led from the room he whipped around and clutched Quentin's jean jacket. "Mrs. Fry's not down there, is she?" he asked wildly.

"No, she's gone. Why? Why does she bother you. She's

a good soul, really, a treasure."

Once again Giles glazed over. "She's got. it's just her. " Giles was going to say "false teeth." He had been: present when Mrs. Fry sneezed out her dentures onto the draining board and laboriously reinserted them; since then he was subject to dizzy spells and retching fits whenever he saw her.

"Come on, Giles," said Quentin. "My friends have brought something that'll make you feel better. Everything will soon be all right. Come."

Giles looked around as if for the last time at his empty room, sniffed, gave Quentin a zestless smile, and moved with awkward caution out of the door.

14: out Here somewhere

"We can't go in there," he said.

"Why not?" asked Diana.

"Just look at that." Giles pointed to a large sign which stuck out at an angle from the barbed-wire fence. The sign had this to say:

FUCK OFF

TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED

"What about it?"

"It says," Giles explained, as if Diana might only recently have learned to read, " 'trespassers will be prosecuted.'"

"So?"

"Relax, Giles," said Quentin. "I know the man who owns this spread. Oofie Worthington. He said I could use it any time."

"Really, darling?" said Celia. "I didn't know you—"

"What about that barbed wire, then?" said Giles, abruptly taking a step backward and fastening a hand over his mouth.

"No problem," said Skip. The three Americans had loomed up on them. "I just hold it… right here, and — hey, man, handle the other thing, okay?" Stamping their boots on the lower wire, Skip and Marvell elevated the upper one with their hands. Marvell grunted and winced a good deal while he was doing this but Skip's small, boyish face remained blank, almost dead. "Okay," he droned at last.

(Unnecessarily — buckling his body, the hamper in his arms) Whitehead went first. One by one the girls followed. Quentin and Andy steered the twitchy Giles through, ferried the alcohol across, then hoisted Skip and Marvell over.

Quentin Villiers hastened to help unfurl the blankets with his wife. They kissed fleetingly and crouched to open the hamper.

"Is everyone going to eat now?" asked Giles vaguely, raising the gin bottle to his lips. "Because I think I shall just drink a lot instead, in fact."

At this juncture Skip paced up to Giles and grasped his free hand. "Hi, Giles," he said in his monotone bass. "I'm Skip."

Skip was showered with a spray of high-octane saliva as Giles gurgingly removed the gin bottle and tottered backward, arms lifted to protect his face. "Careful! Uh, sorry. Skip? I just didn't see you coming. My name's—" Giles sank to his knees. "Actually. " he said.

Now, in a complicated semi-embrace, Quentin, Celia, Marvell, and Roxeanne moved away from the picnic site the better to admire its surrounds. "I like it," said Marvell, attaching tufted hands to either hip. He let his eyes scan the curved field with the kneeling willow in the middle of it, the sturdier file of birches that lined the distant fence, the far hill, the sky. "I like this planet."

"Beautiful," said Roxeanne. "Beautiful, Quentin, truly."

"When we married," said Quentin, "I said that we should have to live out here somewhere." He turned to his wife, "Somewhere where there was still some England."

"Yeah," said Marvell.

"It's not a question of rapport with nature — what a horrid idea that is! — rather, a question of solidifying one's sense of oneself. I'm an Englishman. This is England. There's nothing English about London any more."

Celia and Roxeanne gazed up at Quentin with joy and wonder respectively. Indeed, Villiers' extraterrestrial good looks were very much in evidence that day. His frostily faded jeans and revealing denim shirt contrived to make him appear at once rugged and civilized; his damp-sand complexion contrasted favorably with the etiolated pallor of his housemates and the rather coarse suntans of the Americans; the gusty breeze curled but did not tousle the strands of his silvery blond hair.

: "You shun your spirit," he murmured, "every time you agree to sell your days to the city, to measure out your life at the city's pace."

"Right," said Marvell. "You feel like a cog, a sort of robot that's got to—"

"Hey, you lot," called Diana, "stop talking piss and come and help me with this fucking hamper."

Andy was urinating noisily against a nearby tree and Giles had curled up with the gin bottle. The fact was that little Keith had been lending catering assistance to Diana, who happened to object both to his revoltingly pudgy fingers occasionally skimming her own and also to being bracketed implicitly with the least attractive person present.

"For Christ's sake, let's break out some of that Irish," said Andy.

"Yes," said Quentin, "and let's take in some of this sun."

Marvell and Roxeanne arranged themselves on and around Skip's outstretched form — an arm here, a leg there. It didn't look self-conscious, somehow or other.

"Now," said Marvell. "I want you all to give this drug thing some genuine thought. I don't want to get too mechanistic about it but I've done this sort of project before, in controlled conditions, and I have some sort of article or possibly a pamphlet in view. Names changed; conjectural in idiom." Marvell yawned, and nestled further into the nook composed by Skip's chest and Roxeanne's shoulder. He looked like an unwholesome potentate, propped up against his friends' long bodies, his face shadowed and beady under its trellis of hair. "I don't know about you guys," he went on, "but I'm pretty fucked and I don't want to be flashing all night on this thing. We take off around seven, should be right. Think it over and give me your specifications when we get back. I'll be interested to see what you people choose."

It had taken Giles the last two-thirds of this peroration to crawl the five feet to where Andy lay spreadeagled on a blanket. On arrival, Giles poked Andy's shoulder.

"What?" said Andy.

"Hey, Andy," Giles whispered loudly. "What's that chap saying?"

Andy stretched. "Says he's got drugs'll do anything. Anything you like. You tell him what you want to happen to you and he'll make it happen.”

"What, anything? He — he could even make you stop worrying about your. "

"Anything, man," said Andy, searching for a more delicious posture in which to drowse. "Anything."

When Giles had removed the swimming green of the gin bottle from his lips and settled himself also on the ground, there lingered in his mind the afterimage of what had snapped into focus from the smoke between everything and his eyes, the three smiling faces of the Americans.

15: meandered up america

The Americans constituted a "triad," a "troy," which meant, more or less, that they got to fuck and bugger one another indiscriminately. It was their habit, too, to rope in another personage to form a "rectangle," or another couple to make up the full "star." And are we to believe that sexual excursions outside the group were censured? On the contrary, they were encouraged, applauded as adding further imaginative declensions to normal activity. The threesome had flourished for two years and showed lively signs of continuing to do so.

Their story went something like this.

Skip's father, Philboyd B. Marshall, Jr., a horrible human being, used to run a hot, dirty garage on the outskirts of Tara, Tennessee. Philboyd had done so many appalling and traumatic things to his son that anyone who heard about them spontaneously congratulated Skip on his apparent sanity. Philboyd had once raped him, for instance — not (we hasten to add) in a libidinous spirit, but because he had caught Skip emptying the latrine with a shovel rather than with his bare hands, as Philboyd had requested, this being itself a punishment for an earlier mischief. "Kitch you at that kind of non-sense again, boy, and you're in real trouble."

Father and son relations worsened. What with the gas station not doing so good these days, the way all the guys were moving out of Tara and all the niggers moving in, the fact that a man couldn't take a beer at Kramer's without getting

jostled by the longhairs. Philboyd's life became a

depressing series of grousing sessions, drunk bends and violence jags. The old mechanic died a little every time a Rican or a Jeeew pulled into his station, expecting gas what's more;: every time he saw the boogies come across the railway line, seemingly unharmed; every time the sun went down over the Coke sign back of the house, causing his evenings to be dimmed by a premature vault of shadow. When Skip became physically unable to take more of his motiveless beatings, Philboyd bought from the glue factory a three-legged mule, which he installed in an enclosure and went out to visit torments on twice daily with kitchen knives, meathooks, branding irons. This helped some, but not for long. The animal fell down dead on him two months later.

And so then of course some Vanderbilters get along from Nashville and Skip starts to hang out with them. They're all between twenty and thirty and Skip hasn't seen seventeen yet, but he has this peculiar facility with older boys. For Skip is what used to be called a "slag": he'll do anything; there's nothing he won't do. "Skip, see if you can dive from the cooling tower into that tank right there." "Every time." "Skip, take the shit buckets down to the trash pile, willya?" "Uh-huh." "Skip, go steal us some beers from Kramer's, okay?" "Right on." "Skip, eat that slug." "No sweat." Certain menial sexual chores fell also to the lanky boy, which he performed with care and avidity. As a student once remarked, "Skip'd rim a snake so long someone held its head." There were lots of drugs, too.

One day Philboyd motored past the Kampsite in his dump truck, saw Skip lying on the grass with a crew of whores and hippie fags. To his hopelessness and grief, Philboyd could not act immediately; time was — when there'd been enough tubby little rednecks like himself still living in Tara-they could have pitched right in there and whomped up a storm. This reflection saddened him further. As it was, on Skip's return that night Philboyd clubbed his son around the kitchen with a frypan for three-quarters of an hour. "Ah, let the boy be, Philb," came Mrs. Marshall's sickly voice from the adjacent bedroom. "Trying to get some rest in here." "Shut the fuck up," replied Philboyd, who had in any case decided to take his wife's advice, being too old and fat to go on. "Skip, next time I see you which those queeahs again," he panted, "I'm

goan bust your head."

And, to be sure, the next time he saw Skip with those queers again Philboyd attempted to keep his promise. He could hardly believe his good fortune. There was Skip with a solitary student, drinking beers in a downtown penny arcade. Philboyd slapped open the door and strode over to them, eagerly unhitching his belt. "This is it, son. I'm gonna kill your ass." Without reaching any kind of decision, Skip rose, made a circling motion with his right fist and then offered it up to Philboyd's chin at high velocity. Philboyd seemed to stay perfectly still for at least two or three seconds, his face frozen in unbelieving disappointment, before being snatched up into the air and cannonaded against the wall, down which he easily slid to collect in a fat puddle on the floor. With slow-motion fear his son scooped him up and straightened him against a fruit machine. "Dad.?" Skip's hands were shrugged off. "Ah, let me be, son." Philboyd stumbled home, hair matted with sawdust, blood, and beer, and dejectedly hosepiped his wife to death.

Seemed like Skip's life had fallen apart all around him. Ma was dead. Philboyd had a manslaughter charge to face. Marshall Mekanix was closed down. The authorities didn't appear to give a shit what he did. And he had always hated Tara anyhow.

Skip found employment in the automobile plant on the far apron of the second cloverleaf off the third spaghetti junction along the subsidiary expressway running westerly out of Nashville, Tennessee. He worked sixteen hours a day, without ambition and without boredom, taking off in borrowed cars at weekends for St. Louis, Memphis, Oklahoma, 'Pulco, Mexico City, where he participated in various nihilistic debauches, scrogging and getting scrogged, taking large quantities of mescaline and cocaine, the roller of middle-aged cowboys, the occasional witness of optimum sex tortures and genital mutilation profiles, a blank figure in the tumescent heat-hazed carscape, silent, unreflecting, and alone.

After two years of punching out automobile steering-column shroud toggles Skip threw everything he owned into a beatup '75 Plymouth, meandered up America just rolling like a stone nobody throwed—and Omaha, and Minneapolis, and Salt Lake City — until he hung an impulsive right off the interstate thruway and idled toward the fine town of Prescott, Arizona. Halfway there he killed a bottle of paregoric and blacked out in a rest stop; he awoke a buckled mess at the bottom of the roadside ditch, his car and money gone, his nose, ankle, and five ribs broken, his left pinkie missing, a: portion of his right ear bitten off, and a bad hangover. It took him forty-eight hours to regain the road.

"The first time we saw Skip? — enough to make a maggot gag. Roxeanne and I are out researching locations in Arizona for an existential Western I never got together, we're making for the nearest town to pick up some food, come around the bend in the Chev, and there's this sort of twitching heap by the side of the road. We slow up. Never in my life seen a human being nearer the state of nature. We pull over. Clothes half ripped off, face a pool of blood, body broken, random. I still have the photographs."

"Mar was cool but I was shaken up. Kept thinking, uh-oh, Popeye, some Trogs have been having fun, let's get out of here before they have some more, but Marvell said we'd better get him to somewhere and he was right. I put a blanket down for him in back and we like shoveled him in? We thought he might go stiff on us right there but then he started to groan and struggle, even saying things — like, 'I'm all fucked up… I'm all fucked up.' Marvell gunned it into Prescott, see what they could do there, said we could go on to Phoenix if his condition necessitated it. Bastards in Prescott Casualty said they couldn't even take his fucking temperature without State Reg. — and this guy doesn't have anything, no ID, no cash. He was like nobody. So it was LA, not knowing whether we'd have a stiff in back when we got there. LA they kind of roped him together again but they still wouldn't take him in. So we had to."

"I got some medic friends along. No problem. Skip was delirious for days, wriggling around in bed, moaning about his father and beer cans and stuff. When he came to he didn't appear to have any recollection of what had happened to him or of anything before it — found myself in there explaining that we were on the planet Earth, a spherical body revolving around the sun. The Sun? big fire in the sky? Most of it returned to him, though the stuff about his father comes and goes. It was strange, you know? Like bringing a new human being to life, like creating something. You feel strong things

then. And, Christ, if you'd seen the way that guy responded to

affection. Made you sick to think what his life had been."

"He used to tell these positively prehistoric stories about his father? Some animal. Skip's eyes would practically come out of his head when we told him about our parents — you know, mine are all house-on-the-hill and Marvell's used to be very heavily Yiddisher — that they were rich, affectionate, indulgent. Totally alien to his thought-style. He was kind of relieved when we told him they were all divorced now and that we only saw them for cash. Marvell explained to him about control, about how you don't need parents for much or for long, that you phase them out soon. If only Skip could have."

"Right. I don't think he thinks about his earlier life at all now. The father's still around, however. The authorities forwarded us a letter when we put Skip on Californian Reg. just before we came out here. Shit, what a document. I'll show it to you. We never handed it on to Skip. It would wreck his head to be taken back to those days again. Want to see someone go really wild? Ask Skip about his father. I don't recommend it. Anyhow, so it goes. It was no sweat for us; we had the cash and the space, he helps around the apartment, helps me on projects, fixes the car. He's happy."

"We're like his mother and father as well as his lovers." "Yeah, and he's. let's just say he does things for us."

16: a heavy fire of eyes

Whitehead had just drained his first glass of Pouilly Fume", had just turned down Celia's disdainful offer of a piece of crispbread topped with smoked salmon and, alas, butter, had just agreed with Roxeanne that Capricorns seldom got along with Leos (a proposition that Andy, a self-elected representative of the latter sign, began to pooh-pooh), when a ghastly bark sprang from between his lips, bringing all conversation to a halt.

In a tone of mock-heroic formality Keith begged the picnic's pardon, and the conversation cautiously resumed, what time awful quickenings started to occur inside his stomach. It hissed, whooped, spat — Keith whistled popular tunes in an attempt to drown its loud awakening; he was moreover obliged to squirm about on the blankets in order to contain the balloon of air that romped friskily around his colon. As the picnickers began actually to raise their voices to: make themselves heard, little Keith decided that he wouldn't wait to see what his metabolism was going to pull on him next. Hardly caring what sort of spectacle he made of himself, he slipped some paper napkins into his pocket, stood up, and looked quickly about him.

"Saw some interesting — I've got to go, to see. " No one stirred as Keith took his leave, as he trotted down the hill under a heavy fire of eyes.

Whitehead picked his way through the outskirts of the thicket, wading through not particularly long grass, his trousers creaking in alarm every time he lifted a foot to clear a log, his high heels wobbling and bending on each anthill and tuft of grass. He walked a tormented half mile, becoming ever easier to please as regards possible sites, but only after he had twice been brought to a kneeling position by the wedge of pain that rocketed from his coccyx to his perineum did he turn and stare back through the tent of nervous leaves. First removing his boots, then his trousers (which required him to lie on the ground and wriggle out of them like a snake shedding its skin), Keith crept in between two dense bramble bushes and melted backward against a severed trunk. A tight-chested grunt was followed by a moan of ecstasy.

"Hi."

Emerging silently from the trees Skip had come to a halt about five yards away. He now closed that distance and un-elongated himself into a crouch, his knees almost touching little Keith's. A grass stem remained motionless in the corner of his mouth as he said, "You like threes, Keith?"

Whitehead would have answered if he could.

"Threes," Skip ponderously repeated. "You and two guys. You and a guy and a girl."

When his voice did appear Keith was, retrospectively, most impressed by its performance. It did not gurgle or whimper, neither did it jump octaves or turn into a corky burp of adrenalin — all things Keith couldn't have blamed it for doing. In fact, it sounded urbane, detached, almost bored.

"Well, you know, Skip, I haven't really got strong views on the subject, although of course I try to be tolerant about that

kind of thing."

"Mm-hm. You like getting head?" ". Sorry?”

"Head. Getting blown. Getting sucked off."

"Oh! Well, not mad about it. But again of course it's all part of the basic. Yes, I'm for it, on the whole."

"Mm-hm. You like to be fucked?"

". Well, as I say, it's not one of the things one customarily. but you naturally try to keep an open. "

"Mm-hm." Skip swayed languidly on his haunches. "Mm-hm."

"Look— Skip— I don't want to seem abrupt but do you think we could finish this chat another time?"

"Pardon me?"

"Another time. I am on the toilet here."

"Sure you are," Skip said reassuringly. But then he rolled his eyes so that his pupils disappeared upward, revealing two sacs of glistening blood at the base of either socket. "Oh, sure, man. Another time."

17: some bush

"I must say, Roxeanne," Celia observed briskly, "you have got the most marvelous breasts."

"But they're so awfully big," said Roxeanne. "I think Diana's are so pretty? Really the perfect size."

At this Diana curled her lip slightly, as if to suggest that she had heard that line before. Celia resumed, "Yes, Diana's are pretty too. But yours are so enormous and so marvelously. solid. Look at mine. Yours seem to point upwards. They don't sag in the least."

Roxeanne shrugged, corroborating this. "Well," she said happily. "Hey, Quentin, is it cool if I take off my pants?"

As the afternoon sun had intensified, had seemed indeed to bear down on them with an invidious strength, Diana and Roxeanne had spent a lot of time — Diana shrewdly, Roxeanne vaguely — wondering which of them would be the first to remove her top. In almost any other company Diana would have had few reservations about taking the lead: her breasts, as Celia had pointed out, may not have been large but they were pretty; they covered a fetchingly disproportionate area

of her chest, were smoothly rounded, and rose to neat orange nipples which were soon tinted and hardened by the wind's: gentle ministry. Diana was, nevertheless, banking on Roxe-anne's being a good deal more punctured than they looked under her smock and had even assumed that she must, in the nature of things, be wearing a quarter or half-brassiere beneath it. As it was — having both muttered something about wanting to get a tan — the girls bared their treasures simultaneously. Except Marvell, who gazed on with complacence, and Giles, who was apparently unconscious, the fearsome glory of Roxeanne's breasts filled everyone present with utter consternation. They seemed to shoot upward out of her collar-bones (forming a ledge off which, had it occurred to her to do so, she could have not inconveniently dined), U-turned over symmetrical cupcake nipples, and repaired to the commodious launching pad of her rib cage without marking this junction by so much as a crease. Diana had looked at the vast tenement then back at her own diminutive cups with scarcely concealed incredulity, and only on the appearance of Celia's breasts — depressing items that flatly splayed in the direction of her armpits — did she begin to regain her equanimity.

"I beg your pardon, Roxeanne," said Quentin, "I didn't quite catch that."

"If I take off my pants?"

"Ah, a common ambiguity when colonials are of the company. Now, do you refer to your trousers or to your panties? Which?"

"How about both?"

Quentin glanced at his wife. "Well, old Oofie is in Kuwait, so far as I know. As long as you don't mind the odd wayfarer or rustic?" He laughed, holding out his hands. "By all means."

Laughing also, Roxeanne said, "They're very welcome," lay back, hooked her thumbs into the waistband of her jeans and eased her seemingly infinite legs out of them. Her (anyway otiose) panties followed. "Okay," she concluded, "no smart-ass remarks about natural redheads."

"Certainly not," said Quentin sincerely.

Diana stared hard at Andy as he rolled over, propped his

head up on his palms for a few seconds, his face perhaps six

inches from Roxeanne's alabaster midriff, and reassumed his original position. "Christ," he mused softly. "Some bush.”

18: OH NO

Oh no, surely they can't all be at it already, can they?

Whitehead posed this question to himself while emerging from the thicket and beginning to make his way up the incline toward the picnickers, all by now in varying stages of deshabille. From his vantage, the sections of bare, mottled flesh lost their outlines in the dusty summer air; as he traipsed toward them their bodies seemed to shimmer and merge, to resolve and separate, to flow together and then to cease. Twenty yards away, quite suddenly, they regained their distinctness, becoming again immobile and discreet. Whitehead slowed with relief.

Then — more — he came to a halt, still unnoticed by the eight further up the slope, and sank, without emphasis and without any sense of irony, to his knees, a tubby supplicant of the warming wind. The keen anxiety he always felt on approaching any group of people now quietly allied itself to a deeper, more settled foreboding. Keith had once, when tran-quilized, told a friendly dietician that he hadn't minded discovering that he was small, fat, and ugly half as much as he had minded discovering that he would always be those things, that all of it could never change now. Would it ever — just a bit? Although Whitehead didn't consider himself a highly sexed person — his masturbatory career, for instance, he had come to regard as an increasingly disturbing and ghostly adventure — he felt it highly likely that if he failed to have a definite sexual experience this weekend he would make some sort of attempt to kill himself. It was not release he craved, far less pleasure, merely a token withdrawal of the insult of ugliness. Little Keith picked up a blade of grass and twirled it in his fingers. The action returned blood and self-consciousness to his features, steadying him somewhat. He smiled furtively as he recalled the incident with Skip. Christ. There really wasn't anything people wouldn't do any more. Being, so far as he could ascertain, a heterosexual, Whitehead had found the approach dramatically unsexy, but it was quite flattering all the same, and it went to show that a lot was in the air. The weekend would, in any case, be unlike any other.

On rejoining his friends Keith's anticipations were strengthened and elaborated. If he looked to his right, he : 6l

could see — for what they were worth — the breasts of the square-faced girl called Celia, wife to the gorgeous Villiers; if he turned to his left he could admire Diana Parry's dinky navel and compact stomach; practically under his nose was a square foot of tawny pubic hair. Keith didn't dare look at anything, of course. He had never had so much sex in his life. But as the newly returned Skip smilingly caught his eye, a whole range of sexual possibilities couldn't help opening itself up for little Keith Whitehead.

And, both less and more straightforwardly, a whole range of them opens itself up for us, too. We could — let's see — we could have Diana take his hand and shoo him off to the woods, have Celia lean over and tenderly unbuckle his thin plastic belt, have Roxeanne shinny beneath him there and then. Of course, we can bring this about any time we like— but Keith can't, oh no.

19: COLLAPSING BALLOON

"Look," said Andy, "there's some cows over there. How casual."

"Yeah. Coming on pretty authentic," said Marvell.

Giles, who had shown no sign of life whatever for the past ninety minutes, lifted his head and narrowed his eyes over the lip of his gin bottle. "How do you know they're not bulls?"

"Because," said Andy, "bulls have horns and cows have tits. They've got tits."

"No," said Skip slowly. "That's not so."

"How come?" Andy asked.

"Some cows don't have tits. Some bulls don't have horns."

"Oh yeah?"

"That's right. For example, a cow might not have had calves yet."

"Is that a fact?"

"Sure."

Andy sank back. "Well what the fuck difference does it make anyway?"

As if in answer to this query a black heifer detached

itself from the ambling herd, trotted up the dip in the field,

paused, arrived at some sort of decision, and came bowling

down the slope toward the picnickers in a firm-legged gallop.

Approximately four seconds later they were lying in a bloody, groaning heap on the other side of the barbed-wire fence. In an electric, hair-triggered scramble they had climbed, jumped, dived over, under, and between the barbs — clawing one another out of the way, springing from flattened torsos, pulling each other's hair for leverage — to subside like a collapsing balloon of flesh in the adjacent field. Whispered obscenities broke the silence as the wheezing tangle of limbs gradually came apart and a dazed cataloguing of injuries began.

All three girls bled not very profusely from abrasions sustained on their shoulders and bare breasts. Skip had a vent of skin flapping on his wrist, Andy a deep and dirty gash on his cheek. Only Quentin was entirely unscathed.

Keith, who was still severely winded, having been used as a trampoline by everyone else, had a cut nose and lip and a four-inch stripe running across his forehead like a second mouth. More material to his desire, though, was the fact that his only good trousers were irreparably torn and that the six-inch heel of one of his boots was nowhere to be found. Giles squatted with his back to the carnage; one hand held a pocket mirror to his mouth, whose interior the other frenetically enumerated; the cap on his left incisor came away without any fuss between his fingers; with a distracted cry he flopped twiching to the earth.

"Jesus," said Marvell, "we've got our ancestors to thank for that."

Skip leapt to his feet. "Eat shit, eat shit!" he roared, his mouth whitening.

The heifer now stood a few feet from the fence, staring at the disarray in companionable wonder. Its instincts had programmed it to run up to the picnic in that fashion, but they had programmed it also to swerve away at the last moment and trot off wondering what to do next.

"Motherfuck, motherfuck," said Skip. He uprooted a brick from the base of the fence and moved along the wire calling out softly, waving his hand.

As the animal frowned, dipped its head and moved forward, Skip brought the brick down on its pate with a long-armed swing. There was a dull crunch.

The heifer remained motionless, then jerked backward. It turned, skipped into the field, ran about in untidy decreasing circles, and keeled over onto the grass.

: There was a silence.

"You've killed it," said Andy. "It's all fucked up."

"It does seem to be totally buggered," agreed Quentin.

"I'm gonna go kick it some," said Skip, stepping forward.

Female voices were raised in protest. Andy stood in Skip's path and a halfhearted scuffle took place before Quentin lent his support. Whereas Andy restrained Skip with dislike, and because he didn't particularly want him to kick the heifer, Quentin restrained Skip considerably, in the spirit of a wise man preventing a fellow Jew from attacking a platoon of Nazis, with due respect for Skip's wrath. At length Skip relaxed.

"Just get the whiskey, man," said Quentin.

"Yeah," said Andy. "Let's get drunk."

"Yeah. Yeah!" screamed Giles.

Within half an hour the nine were re-established on the near side of the barbed-wire fence. Nobody's injuries had proved to be more serious than anything handkerchiefs and saliva wouldn't relieve — except Andy's ripped cheek, which he claimed to have "cooled" by emptying a bottle of Glenfyddich over it. This move exhausted the supply of spirits and the wine was therefore started on in earnest. Weightwatchers Celia, Diana, and Whitehead didn't object to the switch, having been on Pouilly Fume all along, but there was loud complaint from the others about the inability of wine to do much for them these days. (Giles, face downward at the corner of the blanket, had made no response to demands for his bottle of gin.) "I guess this'll keep us up till we get back," said Marvell, boredly unwrapping his hash kit. The food, also, was partaken of gingerly: pieces of meat were picked up between finger and thumb and held aloft like live worms before being quickly dispatched; offending portions of salad and cheese were disgustedly spat out on the grass; water biscuits, apples, celery, and radishes enjoyed fair popularity, but little truck was had with such greasy and malodorous dishes as sardines, liver sausage, and anchovies. The company snorted when bananas were mentioned and actually

gagged in unison when boiled eggs were produced ("No," said

Celia, putting them away, "perhaps that wasn't a good idea"). Twenty minutes with a bottle of wine apiece, however, and loquacity returned, mainly in the form of piecemeal self- congratulation about the recent escape. Quentin then began a speech on the writings of the late Alain Robbe-Grillet; its length, periodicity, and range of reference held in thrall everyone but Keith (anyway groggy enough with heat, the memory of Roxeanne's body, and his triannual deliverance from the costive state) and Andy. The restless Adorno rolled over in front of Diana and started to stroke her hair and whisper sexy things to her neck. Diana turned away toward the curved field, where without comment she saw the injured heifer climb uncertainly to its knees, its feet, then zigzag away. When she looked back at Andy she noticed that some blood from his cheek had dripped onto the downy white scants of her pantie suit. "Keep away from me," she said quietly. "Just keep, the fuck, away from me," said Diana.

xx: Diana

Diana spends a lot of time wondering what the hell she's doing in Appleseed Rectory. Occasionally — when the attentive Villiers pours her a Tio Pepe at 11:30, or while she drives to the shopping center in Celia's I-type Jaguar, or as Giles's unsteady hand appears round his bedroom door with a wad of £20 notes to settle the quarterly accounts, or during the moments after Andy has made love to her — Diana feels, well, a sort of fleeting satisfaction with the stage her life has reached. But most days she sits there hating everything, the place she's in, the people she's living with, the light around her, the time of day it is.

For this there are excellent reasons. Diana's background may not in itself be illustrious, but it has an unquestionable luster. Always she has mingled with the great. At the age of six Diana spent the first of many summers at Moreley Court, where her ermine waterbed was maintained at body temperature and where every night she found her toothbrush pre-pasted in the ormolu bathroom. Two years later she wintered with the Beresford-Parkinsons in the famous Ariadne Palace on Lake Geneva, down whose hanging-garden avenues unsmiling dwarfs ferried her breakfast to the aviary swimming pool. As a teenager she was the perennial houseguest of the Rudolphes, the Perths, of the screen personalities Murray and Elspeth Krane, of the Balfours, the Grizes, of Sir Henry and Lady Doorlock, of the motion picture producer "Tubby" de Large and his lovely young wife, Lurleen. And, a little later, she is marriageably to be seen on the west patio of the Castello Pinero near Padua, basking naked on the glossy decks of Logo Lesbos' schooner among the Seychelle reefs, quaffing champagne in Giovanni Raffini's dune litter at the topless beaches of Acapulco. Youngish, well-connected, cosmopolitian readers can expect to see her about the place in six or seven years' time. At cockail parties, soirees, premieres, and so on, she will usually be accompanied by one or other of her parents, but after a few months she will begin to arrive alone, still a rather hesitant figure, slightly ill at ease about the aggressive sexiness of her catsuits and leotards, continually on edge about her appearance, until, during her second year of social immersion, she will be widely celebrated for her aplomb, verbal asperity, and daring and expertise in bed.

Diana's half-vicarious celebrity can be explained, on the one hand, by her mother's editrixship of "Nell's Notebook" in the pages of the distinguished glossy Euroscene, and, on the other, by her father's position as Assistant Chief Casting Director of Magnum Cinematic Promotions, Ltd., Paris and New York. Examples of that matrimonial tendency whereby unlike poles attract, Eleanor is practical, intelligent and cunning, a sharp-faced woman and angular, while Bruce is foolish, guileless, and benign, a shaggy middle-aged boy with a demeanor of nonspecific, goofy good will. Their Parisian idyll spanned Diana's conception and gestation, and survived her birth by two months, at which point Eleanor decided that she didn't much like Bruce and got on an airplane to London, where she embarked on a continuing series of compact, knowing little affairs with persons flourishing in the media; the hopeless Bruce meanwhile staggered around Paris getting drunk for six months, then took up with a Breton ingenue of such ingenuousness that she has since forgotten French and failed to learn English. Between these hearths the young Diana was patted like a listless shuttlecock for the first fifteen years of her life.

From the beginning Eleanor Parry policed her daughter's social life with astuteness and dedication. She enrolled Diana at the sort of schools where the children of the fashionable were likely to gather — Eldahurst Kindergarten, Laura and June Bateson House, The Hendlebury Association for the Furtherance of Girls' Education, Hampstead Comprehensive— then withdrew her once the requisite circle of acquaintances had been made. Selflessly Mrs. Parry attended all parents' meetings, liaison projects and school bazaars. A brief perusal of the register furnished her with remarks like, "Oh, of course, you're little Sarah's parents! My Diana absolutely adores Sarah," or, "Then Bettina's your child. Oh, dear, I'm afraid poor Diana must pester her dreadfully." Parental invitations soon followed and were as readily accepted by the young columnist. Host and hostess would then receive, consecutively, a flattering profile in "Nell's Notebook" and a long letter from Eleanor about what difficulty Diana had in making friends. And Diana was such a ferociously immaculate guest (an excellent gauger of mood, correct forms of address, prompt thank-you missives, tips for the maids) that it seemed churlish not to ask her again.

For his part, big Bruce Parry saw to it that Diana's thrice-yearly holidays with him in Paris and New York were varied and eventful. As was the case with his ex-wife, everyone was to some extent in Bruce's debt and his social standing was thus providentially enhanced. Unflappable and always eager to please, old Bruce had given many one-line parts to talentless mistresses of superannuated company-owners, had often found employment for loafing sons of neurotic lighting-cameramen, had regularly steered hysterectomized vamps through mid-career crises, was prepared to put in unpaid overtime to cover up for menopausal assistant directors and alcoholic production managers, had been known to work around the clock to appease coronary-prone producers, depressive financiers, and apoplectic entrepreneurs. And — heck — the guy just likes kids. Confidentially known in Magnum House as "The Nursery," the apartment of Bruce Parry and his alingual consort is an indulgent, eventempered Disneyland of sweets, crackers, and party games. Accordingly, little dark-haired Diana is a feted personage whenever she visits her father, the receptacle of much guilty hospitality.

Unfair. There is genuine warmth and feeling in the childish

Diana. Although she is deeply unresponsive to her parents,

there is much that remains — for she's the girl who writes thirty letters a week, who gives you her old handbags and makeup, who spends three hours a day vocally marshaling her: dolls' house, who steals stockings from the boutique, who'll tell you about sex, who likes the tanned boy in ragged socks and sandals and chucks the yobs' caps under buses, who kicks the matron and shows her pants to the gardener, who'll offer you up to 20p. to shout fuck off outside Miss Granger's study, who'd rather come with you than go home, and who bursts into tears without knowing why. Diana is as baffled as anyone by her cold envy for her mother, her cold contempt for her father, and by her fear of being alone.

A word about Diana's sex life.

Nine days after the first menstrual bloodstain had been sighted on her sheets Diana was successfully, and very painfully, seduced by a thirty-five-year-old stuntman at a Bruce Parry shindig. High time too, she thought, dispatching letters to her friends the next morning. When she got back to London she told her mother about it. Mrs. Parry, who would never stand any nonsense from Diana, marched her straight down to the gynecologist's and put her on the pill. Diana could be said never to have looked back: an intelligible procedure— at what, anyway? If someone neither sordid nor unattractive seemed to want to go to bed with her, Diana went to bed with him. Along they came — tramp tramp tramp — slowly and sporadically at first, then in steady Indian file. Unlike many of her friends, Diana never felt that she had "let herself down" in these affaires, no matter how brief and pleasureless they might have been. She had never slept with anyone who wasn't rich, well-groomed, and halfway civilized; the ubiquitous venereal maladies which she could not but occasionally complain weren't, in her case, of the chronic variety and her tolerance to antibiotics was happily low; on no account would she entertain gentlemen friends at home and her bedroom remained a silent, pink retreat of dolls and paper tissues; up until the age of nineteen, up until Andy, Diana hadn't once spent an entire night with a man, would leave unfussily when the act was completed, had never woken up to new skin and breath.

For Diana, sex was not a fleshy concern; it was a dial in

the machinery of her self-regard, a salute to her clothes sense,

applause for her exercises, a hat tipped to her dieting, the required compliment to her hairdresser, the means socially to measure herself against others. She quite enjoyed it, too, now that most people were good enough at pressing the right buttons to give her clitorial orgasms of admittedly varying quality. If anyone happened to be particularly rich, handsome, or accomplished in bed, Diana would perhaps see them more than once, and, if they were moreover kind and/or amusing, she might even get quite to like them. But sexual lassitude and disgust seemed to be everywhere among the young, and two-night stands were becoming a rarity. The party, the man, the dinner, the flat, the fuck, the taxi, the scalding bath. Besides being good exercise in itself Diana found that it helped her to eat less. She would get out of bed the next morning and complete her callisthenics program with fresh verve.

Diana and Eleanor Parry were sunbathing by the Reina Victoria swimming pool one August afternoon when Andy Adorno boomed down the Seville Road into Ronda on his 1,225 cc. Harley Davidson Hurricane, stripped to the waist, his gout of black hair driven back from his face, his heavy body dusted and sweatstained in the mountain sunshine. He pulled up at the traffic lights adjacent to the hotel driveway, and, revving hugely in the empty road, glanced round about him, enjoying the heat, the noise, the new town. Twenty yards away, Diana and Eleanor looked up from their magazines. "Why aren't there any Spick laws about scooters," said Mrs. Parry. "I don't think he's Spanish," said Diana. "Mm, too tall." Adorno turned and met their eyes; he smiled, apparently pleased that he was the theme of their irritation. "You English too?" he shouted. Removing her sunglasses, Diana nodded. "Catch you around," he said as he hurled the bike forward with needless violence into the town, causing the tan-suited patrones of the hotel to watch the thinning sprays of grit with cardiac disgust.

They saw him every day — punching the pintables that lined the cafe terraces, shooting pool with the soldiers in the main square casino, lurching out of side roads by the bus station on his bike, bellowing past the hotel to El Hondon swimming pool with some bikini-ed Swede or American clutching his waist. Diana and Eleanor would mention Andy from time to time. "Saw that hooligan with the motorbike this morning in Bar Oliva drinking Anises. the yob on the motorbike was in the Telefonica with some dagos today.

: the bike oik almost ran someone down in the market square… I wish the bike oik wouldn't go around half naked all the time. "

Parry fille and Parry mere were alike convalescing after a long run of abbreviated affairs. In particular, Diana had recently tired of a set of spendthrift stockbrokers which she had found herself going to bed with; Eleanor had recently been spurned by the young director of a new radio company, who had waived her frank entreaties at a crowded after-dinner party. For Mrs. P. the cure was relatively straightforward— she needed a rest. The younger Diana, on the other hand, was suffering from the inevitable attack of night fatigue; night fatigue, with its languor and apathy, an indefinite series of one-directional days over which the dusk hung like the promise of extinction. So they gave themselves up to silence, dark glasses, and sun, to a period during which they would re-invigorate their bodies and conserve their sexual energies, going to bed early, sober and alone.

With two weeks of the holiday still to run Mrs. Parry decided that she didn't much like Ronda and got on an airplane to London. The evening before, over dinner in the starched chill of the Reina dining room, Eleanor complained of a slight restlessness, and when Diana went to her mother's room the next morning she found her gone.

Diana had, she supposed, intended to stay out the month, but as she ate lunch that day and reread her mother's note a familiar tremor came over her. The night fatigue was passing; she felt active, envious, neglected again. At two she walked down to the Iberia office and booked a flight for the next day. She spent the rest of the afternoon drinking up the remaining sun, every now and then anxiously examining her bikini marks. She returned to her room, did her exercises until her thighs were as stiff as steel rods and her breasts felt like little fists of muscle, and then, as a sort of token, put on her short white Pucci dress, checking in the mirror that her black pubic triangle was just discernible beneath it as she left for the hotel bar. She was there bought champagne until 8:30 by a perspiring American called Dexter, with whom she dined. "Let's look in at Coca's afterwards," Dexter then said.

They drank more champagne in a discotheque alcove. Dexter was putting his hand up Diana's dress a good deal; Diana retaliated by not uncrossing her legs. At eleven, when Diana JO

was wondering whether she could be bothered not to sleep with Dexter — it was, after all, the simplest way of terminating the evening — Andy came in.

Andy came in, stripped to the waist as usual, a bottle of twenty-peseta wine swinging from one hand, a length of bread in the other. He waved and shouted hellos at the bartenders and turntable operators, kissed two waitresses, and took the floor, dancing alone under the throbbing strobes with elaborate martial-arts movements. Ten minutes later he started to saunter round the club, nodding to his friends, peering closely but offhand at the prettier girls, until he came to Dexter and Diana, at which point he paused. Three feet from their table Andy came to an emphatic halt and began to stare at them both, declining to reply when Dexter uneasily asked what he could do for them. Andy inserted the last wedge of bread into his mouth and chewed on it for what must have been half a minute, meanwhile dusting his palms. Diana soon forgot her embarrassment as she concentrated with rapt distaste on the loose movement of his jaw, the swilling and munching of his large square teeth, the moist swipes of his thick tongue. "Hey there!" said Dexter with simulated amusement when Andy reached out for the half-full champagne bottle, held it up to the light, and swallowed its contents in one long pull, his adam's apple pulsing like a geyser bubble in the intermittent light. Andy dragged his bare forearm across his mouth and burped immensely. "Most refreshing," he said, replacing the bottle and moving round the table toward Dexter, at whose side he knelt and into whose large red ear he started intently to whisper. Andy and Dexter stood up. "Guess I'll be getting along," said Dexter wonderingly. Andy watched him leave and then, with a complacent air, turned to Diana. He held out a hand toward her.

Ninety seconds later Diana was being driven at speed by Andy Adorno down Ronda's main street. Her mind had been full of good things to say to Andy—"Wow, if big boy want, big boy take," "Look, hippie, I don't go for mysterious strangers," "OOoo, aren't you oddly compelling" — but there was something about his manner, something at once single-minded and negligent, which suggested to her that he was on some crappy drug and was liable to get ugly. Now she could think only of her immediate physical discomfort. Using one hand to keep the hem of her dress somewhere in the vicinity: of her navel, she put the other arm around his waist. He smelled of dew and sleeping bags. As her sleeve brushed his armpit she wondered vaguely if she would have time to wash the dress before she packed.

Andy abruptly beached the motorbike at the far end of the bridge over Ronda Gorge, the vast fault in the plateau on which the town was spread like assorted crockery on a great white tabletop. He led her back across the bridge to one of its semicircular, railinged indentations. "Have you ever looked over?" "Once. It stinks." "Not at night." He suffered her to kneel on the paved seat and to look out through the bars into the deep stone valley. He stood behind her, very close. "It's eight hundred feet down. Lots of guys a year come here especially to kill themselves. I spoke to the old wreck whose job it is to hose them off the rocks. They always do it here, from the middle, climb over the railings, look around. Think of it." While Andy spoke Diana sensed a thickening presence at the top of her exposed thighs. At first she thought it was his hand and paid no attention. Then her knuckles whitened on the railings as she heard the discreet trickle of his fly zipper. "Then they look around," Andy continued huskily, "and they must wonder how they could hate anywhere so casual. So they look down. Look down." Diana leaned over further, listened to the sound of a stream, telephone crickets, saw water shine, fireflies winking at each other. "Then they just let go, and the earth soars up and — AW, MY RIG!" Andy backed off, half doubling over. "The zip… got it… aw, my fuckin' snake!" After Andy had disengaged himself and they had stopped laughing, Diana waited a few seconds and said, "I'm going back tomorrow" — but he made her take the ticket from her bag and he swung it out over the bridge wall. Diana watched the slip of red paper wing its way down through the dark air.

Whenever Diana thinks about those seconds now she re-experiences them simultaneously — discreet trickle, crickets telephoning, shine of water, winking fireflies — but it is with enduring consternation that she reviews the following month. "Come on," he said, checking her out of the hotel, "I'm going

to make you nice," Halfway up Europe on that fucking bike.

They spent the night with some unspeakable hippies in Granada, Andy conducting a sale of dud narcotics on whose proceeds the couple dined at the Ritornello club in Alicante, where he moreover made her dance. They spent two nights in a zoo-peseta pension in Peniscola ("Cock-coke," Andy called it), slept on the beach at Sitges, and lived naked for a week on a Pyrenean ridge. They ate jumbo prawns and collected a mescaline consignment in the Marseilles docks, stayed at the George IV in Monte Carlo, contracted scabies in a Le Touquet youth hostel, and sat for thirty-six hours in the Orly waiting rooms. Apart from the squalor, the crappy people they encountered, the filthy macrobiotic food he occasionally bothered to make her eat, and that fucking motorbike, what appalled Diana most was the unforgivable corniness of her predicament. Tight little rich girl encounters working-class spunk. Seen from the outside everything he did was in trite inverted commas: he was uninhibited, zany, impulsive—"lyrical." And yet being with him was an utterly unreflecting activity; Diana never hesitated because nothing gave Andy pause. There was the sex, too, of course, and it was perhaps this that gave Diana most retrospective embarrassment. Unlike the delicate, artful sex technicians she had slept with in the past, Andy didn't seem to concern himself much with her own inclination or pleasure. For some reason this made her feel achingly passionate and (the word made her squirm) "tender," also. Once, in the Pyrenees, he encouraged her to drink too much wine and she was sick over her naked body. He held her shoulders. "Now you won't like me any more," she had said. Andy hurled her down in the long grass and made love to her with unprecedented ferocity. Ten minutes out of his presence and she began to feel confused, frightened, and intensely sad.

He dropped her off at the preliminary customs checkpoint in Boulogne harbor. Andy asked Diana what she was going to do when she got back. She told him she would be starting at London in October. Which college? She told him which college. Andy couldn't help it — he had to laugh. "Why are you laughing?" she asked. But Andy kicked the bike into gear and Diana kissed his lips quickly before he could zip off down the salty black road.

Diana was still crying three weeks later when she took her place in the check-in queue at Wolfson College, London,

a huge post-modern matchbox which loomed starkly over

Golders Green bus depot. Although her transparent silk trouser suit assumed a perfunctory sexiness, Diana stood in an ·' unwonted slouch and her head hung, resigned and unalert. He recognized her anyway. "There you are at last—I've been here a year already." He kissed her condiment lips as the students threaded past. "Are you going to come and live with me, or what?" She started to cry again. "Yes, please," said Diana.

21: down unknown paths

Oh, but it was not just from her that Miss Lucy Littlejohn got an uneasy reception when she flounced into Appleseed Rectory at seven o'clock that evening, chewing gum, smoking a cigarette, peeling a banana, carrying an empty bottle of wine, trying to mend a broken onyx necklace, and wanting a great deal of cash for the undersized mini-cab driver who had himself escorted her to the door. Andy greeted Lucy with exactly the kind of grisly animality that Diana had dreaded most. (As Andy kissed Lucy's mouth for the second time Diana remembered noticing that he really was a bit too fat, and noticing also that his being a bit too fat was one of her favorite things about him.) Quentin, on the other hand, popped his lips on Lucy's cheek with soldierly restraint, having preceded the gesture with the introduction of his wife. Distant twinges threatened Giles's normal equanimity when Lucy knelt by the side of his chair, whispered in his ear, and kissed his tightened lips; three ten-pound notes fluttered absentmindedly from his fingers. The Americans were then presented en masse by a fluent Villiers. Unintroduced, Whitehead observed these intercourses from the corner of the room, where he was perched on a baronial velvet armchair.

And Lucy. To little Keith's narrow blue eyes she was something of a disappointment. The tales he had heard about her were, by and large, dehumanizing in tendency. Lucy was a thing that fucked people for money, that would wank you off for a favor, that removed its clothes if you asked it to. But here she was — to all appearances spectacularly human. Further, while only slightly less pretty than Keith's much-thumbed mental photographs of her, Lucy's looks were 50 expressive of personality, so dispiritingly unusual. Surveying her crew-cut silver hair, sequinned eyelids, pendulous mouth, multipainted teeth, nonexistent chin, and quite extraordinarily baroque and bulky costume, one was at a loss to see why people hadn't thought of looking that way before. No. Lucy was palpably the holder of views, the entertainer of thoughts, the proprietress of some individuality. Just listen to her—

"Eye-eye-eye. I really made a friend of that dwarf taximan. When I got into the cab I said to myself, 'Kid, the man who's driving you — he's a dwarf. He's sitting on practically the Encyclopaedia Britannica just to get a hand to the steering wheel. Don't talk about dwarfs till he gets you there and goes away again.' I sat in the back trying to think of things not to do with dwarfs to say to him. Halfway through the park I got as far as telling him I'd just been to see Snow White and the Seven. and then sort of trailed off. It wasn't my fault— that's what I saw this morning. So what I want to make clear is, before we go on, I don't mean any offense, no matter what things come out of my mouth. So are there any dwarfs or queers or Jews here or anything like that, so I know?"

"Well, I'm a Jew," said Marvell.

"I'm a queer," said Skip.

". And I'm a dwarf," said Keith (before anyone else could), to vast applause.

"See? See? Hey, whose shoes do you have to walk a mile in to get a drink around here?"

As Quentin self-reprovingly poured Lucy a whiskey from the flagon that Giles had recently sauntered down the stairs with, Marvell asked, impatiently, "What do you want a drink for, Lucy, anyhow?"

The Americans, you see, had received Lucy with snotty reserve, with ostentatious cool. They had spent the past half hour in a more or less successful attempt to establish an atmosphere of gravity and devotional calm. Marvell had brought down from his room a large cuboid case, laying it carefully on the table in the grotto-like dining alcove of the larger sitting room, from which he fussily produced and then arranged various bottles, vials, syringes, nostril spoons. Skip had loped round the house marshaling its inhabitants, laconically instructing them to take their seats in the living room. There they were met by Roxeanne, who in the intervals of trying to restore Giles to life gathered chairs and incidentally: cemented her alienation of Diana by sexily persuading Andy not to put a record on. The household had entered into the spirit of things with a kind of ironic docility, but the clamor of Lucy's entrance quite broke their mood.

"Is this a seance or something?" asked Lucy.

"What do you want a drink for, Lucy," Marvell asked again, less edgily. "I have much better gimmicks right here."

"Far out. I don't want a gimmick, I want a drink."

Since "far out" had come to carry roughly the same force as "oh really?" Marvell's asperity returned. "Look, explain it to her, Quent, willya? I reiterate, I don't want to get too straight about this but we'll be all out of whack if we do it unscientifically. Okay?"

The denseness of the sitting-room furnishings, together with its chocolate brown wallpaper and deep-blue fitted carpet, gave it a premature receptivity to the advancing dusk. Although, at 7:30, it was obvious that there was plenty of light left on the other side of its two tall windows, the texture of the room closed stealthily in on itself. When Marvell spoke his voice wandered out plaintively into the incipient evening.

"Have any of you. have any of you decided which way you want to go yet?"

"I have," said Andy, getting to his feet. He brushed his hair out of his eyes and clapped his hands together. "I want to feel sexed-up, big rigged, violent and strong."

"I imagine," said Marvell, his hands already busy inside his box, "I imagine you feel most of those things most of the time, don't you, Andy?"

"Check. But I want to feel all of them all of the time— all of tonight anyway."

Marvell took a multicolored capsule and split it with an unsettlingly long thumbnail onto a blank sheet of paper. To the pyramid of powder he added sections of two other pills. Andy was now instructed to fold the paper double, forming a channel down which the brew could be poured into his mouth. He asked if he was allowed to wash it down with whiskey and was told that he might. Marvell held up what could have been an eardrop syringe. "Take two drops of this on your tongue."

"What was it?" asked Andy, having done so.

"Adrenalin concentrate." "Casual.”

"You got about a half hour, forty-five minutes. Right. Uh, Celia?"

Celia frowned. "Well, it rather depends on what we're going to do tonight."

"Don't tell me," said Diana drearily, eyes half closed, "another club crawl."

"C'mon, Diana," said Andy, "what in the fuck's wrong with that? I'm feeling pretty. pretty loose already."

"Actually, Diana," Quentin joined in, "I had planned to give our friends a very oblique glimpse of our London nightlife."

"Sounds okay to us," said Marvell, briefly consulting Skip and Roxeanne. "Celia?. How about it?"

Celia sat upright. "Well. Obviously I want to feel a bit speedy — in case we dance. And I wouldn't mind some mescaline, or perhaps. "

"Try to be more specific, Celia, please. Don't talk drugs. Talk feelings, moods."

"Well, I… I just want to have a good time." Celia turned again to Quentin, who warmly met her eye. "And to feel full of love," she said.

The room blushed. Raising his quiff-like eyebrows, Marvell rummaged boredly inside the case, eventually bringing out a single pink pill which he lobbed across the room. "Just a straight High extract," he sighed. "Okay, how about Keith there?"

Whitehead waved a hand negligently in the air. Bootless, he had no intention of performing a miniature waddle across the room, and the request he was steeling himself to make would in any case be for Marvell's ears only. "Haven't quite decided yet. Mind if I sit on it?"

"So what else do you do with it?" drawled Skip, smirking sleepily.

Keith did not see the relevance of that remark. "All right with you, Marvell?" he asked.

Marvell was smiling at Skip, but quickly returned his gaze to little Keith. "Sure — but not too long now, okay? Lucy," said Marvell, some sternness returning to his voice, "how about you."

"Ooh, what a treat," said Lucy. "Isn't Captain Marvell clever to be able to—”

: "Can I have my turn now please."

"Pardon me?"

"Can I have my turn now please."

Giles had spoken with such robotic clarity that everyone turned to him in surprise. He was sitting erectly on the edge of his chair, palms open upward in the air. His face was tenser than it had been all day and his expression changed with unusual rapidity, like a blind man moving down unknown paths.

"Sure," said Marvell.

"Can I have my turn now please."

"Sure, Giles."

"Please. Just stop me. Can't you make my. Only stop me worrying all the time."

"About what?"

"Actually little things."

"About what things, man? I have to know about what?"

Giles relaxed, drunk and battered, into the sofa. His right hand was covered by Lucy's as his left fluttered like a damaged bird. A delta of tears formed slowly on his cheeks.

"Yawn," said Andy. "A crying jag."

"Well," said Marvell grimly, "I can give him a wide-spectrum anxiety calmant, but I…"

Giles's head sank back on his shoulders and his slipped mouth readjusted itself, less sulky in sleep.

"A blackout," said Andy.

"I'd say it would be unwise to give him anything at this moment in time," said Marvell. "I'll lay it on him later. However, Lucy, you were.?"

"Okay, Marv, okay. Here we go. I don't want any sadness tonight. Cast off, skipper, I'm on board. I don't want to worry about anyone but me."

"Autonomous? Self-determinant? Solipsist?"

"That ought to do nicely."

"I got it." Marvell unscrewed the cap of a tube of lozenges, one of which he cautiously immersed in a saucer of crimson ointment. "Great. Now, Diana. What do you want?"

"Nothing," said Diana.

'The fuck, Diana," yawned Andy, "you've got to have

something. Why are you so fuckin' defiant all the time?" "I didn't say it defiantly, just in complete boredom. I want a drug, but I want a drug to stop me feeling anything. And to kill the past. That is, if tonight's going to be as stupid and nasty as it looks like being."

Amused comment rippled through the room. Marvell stirred himself. "That'll be no sweat to fix," he said.

Roxeanne and Skip obligingly opted for the "usual" (sense intensifiers and heartbeat accelerators respectively), while, with considerable pomp, Marvell prepared his own stimulant, setting a match to a combustible powder whose sooty residue he lollipopped onto his forefinger and dipped into his mouth. "It's called a Prospero," he said. "Makes me feel in control. Mm — hey — I forgot: Quent."

Folding his arms, Quentin sat back, his choice musculature extending itself adorably over the sofa. The residual unease that had slowed the atmosphere of the room was instantly chased away by the creamy mellifluousness of his voice.

"A hypothesis," he said. "It occurs to me that one's mannerisms, one's behavioral ticks, are neither quite innate nor quite fortuitous. We project them as mechanisms of defense and appeal, of withdrawal and capitulation; they are means of stylizing our attitude to others and to the world. Forgive me— intolerably ill-put. At any rate, as a profoundly cultivated and therefore profoundly unspontaneous creature I thought it might be interesting if I were shorn of these — my reflexes, my stock responses — so as to become, as it were, socially unclothed. My fetching manner must at times be excessively irritating so I hereby give you the chance to banish it and refurnish me. I throw the matter open: make of me what you will."

"Isn't this all somewhat unspecific?" complained Marvell.

"Not for long," said Quentin.

"To begin with," said Diana, "you could give him a stutter. That at least might make him talk less."

"Bravo, Diana!" roared Quentin. "You've got the idea. Marvell, make me inarticulate."

"Make him gauche and gawky," said Lucy.

"Why not make him rather shy," said Celia perplexedly.

"Make him as horny as a dog," said Roxeanne.

"And make him terrified," said Andy.

Quentin spread his hands and smiled. "Marvell: you have your instructions.”

: Ten minutes later, after Quentin had inhaled, sucked, and sniffed various occult compounds, Marvell brushed himself down and regained the dining table alcove. He looked around the room. "That about does it," he said.

Whitehead sat tight in his chair until the very last moment. Couples were dispersing in the direction of the bedrooms. Giles, once revived, had gaggingly swallowed his calmant and was being led by Lucy from the room. Diana had gone up, muscularly alone; Roxeanne had followed Andy, Quentin, and Celia from the room. Skip remained in his seat, his features fossilized in a blocked daze, then sloped off.

"Hey. Marvell."

"Oh yeah. Keith."

Keith left his chair, hoisted himself into the room and went nearer to Marvell, nearer and nearer until he could lift himself up onto the bench opposite him.

"Hey there," said Marvell, looking over the lid of his box. "What can I do for you?"

"Make me tall," said Keith. "Make me tall, make me tall."

22: WHO'S HE?

Andy unbuckled his belt and lowered his jeans. "Worrr, that's better. Christ, some scene with that cow. That mad fucker really whopped it, didn't he?"

"He really is mad," said Diana, leaving her pantie suit in a white puddle on the carpet as she stepped out of it and, naked, took up her hairbrush.

"Yeah. Those dead, undersea eyes," Andy said dreamily, untying his jockey pants.

"Mm."

Diana continued to look into the mirror, continued to brush her hair.

"You're skinnier, you know. You've lost weight," said Andy experimentally. She ignored him. Encouraged, Andy leaned a hand on the lower curve of her waist, where a trace of her bikini line was still visible. "Yes, I really think you've lost weight."

"Don't touch me."

"What for?”

"Just advice." Diana turned around. "It's just advice. I mean there's Lucy to consider, and that fat Yank. You've got stiff work to do tonight, big boy."

"No, I haven't. And what if I have?"

"I don't care what you do. Look, fats, I don't care what you do so long as you're not going to come in here afterwards just kinda jogging your shoulders and just kinda talking about it and just kinda showing how casual and liberated you—"

"Liberated.?"

"As if it's really quite attractive of you to do these things. I don't mind as long as it doesn't suddenly turn into something nice about you. Okay?"

At the beginning of the first speech Andy had compressed his neck, allowing his shiny fringe to fall over his forehead. Through it he reproachfully glanced at Diana's taut symmetrical face. She looked like a granite-hard hockey player recalling, for his consideration, a bad injury. "Diana, I really don't know what's the matter with you." Andy straightened up. He smiled suddenly. "No! I don't believe it! Come on, you're— you're jealous, aren't you?"

"Like fuck."

"Christ, You are! Well well well."

"I'm not jealous, just. "

"But we've discussed this," said Andy in disbelief. "Jesus. Did I grouse when you fucked that actor while I was in Amsterdam? When you fucked Bruce Howard after that party — did I beef?"

"So who's got the perfect memory — I didn't even fuck him I"

"So you blew him then. I mean, what the fuck difference does it make."

"What about you? You fuck girls you don't even want to fuck."

"How the fuck do I know I want to fuck them till I fuck them? Be reasonable, woman. And anyway, so fucking what? Diana, it makes me sick to hear this sort of talk in this house. Christ, you think you're living with civilized people and then someone springs this sort of crap on you." His tone had become confidently indignant, regretful. "You think you know someone — you respect them as decent, genuine human beings — then you find they've still got these sick anxieties about: something as trivial as— Now, Diana, you just, you just hear me out here. Nobody's getting away with that kind of dead babies when I'm living in this house. I'm fucked if I'm going to get leant on with this trashy talk—"

Diana sat on her bed with her back to him as Andy lectured cheerfully on. Her form grew preoccupied. She spoke softly, without turning around. "Andy. Did you write this?"

"— and that's real dead babies. What?"

"Did you write this?"

"Write what?"

Diana turned and held up a sheet of foolscap paper. Her face was pale and very cold.

"What is it, man?" said Andy, with concern.

The letter was written in erect black capitals, justified at either margin, and so uniform that at first it seemed to have been typewritten or typeset. Andy frowned.

DIANA. YOU DON'T NEED ME TO TELL YOU WHAT'S GOING ON. OR DO YOU? HAVE YOU EVER THOUGHT, TURNING TO THE MIRROR OR CATCHING YOUR EYE IN A SHOP-WINDOW, WHAT YOUR FEATURES SAY? GOOD LOOKS, SEX, AFFLUENCE, SELF-PRESERVATION? OH NO. I SEE WHAT'S IN YOUR MIND, THE DISGUST IN YOUR MOUTH, YOUR EYES FULL OF BURNING PUS. CAN'T YOU SENSE THE LOATHING THAT PULSES AROUND YOU IN THE AIR? DON'T YOU KNOW HOW WE ALL FEEL? WE'D LIKE TO CARVE YOUR FAT THIGHS, CHOP OFF YOUR SPROUTING LITTLE TITS, GRIND SABRES UP YOUR ANUS, CHEW AT YOUR PERINEUM UNTIL YOU DIE,

AND GET THE DEVILS OUT. JOHNNY

While Andy read, Diana folded her arms across her naked breasts and started to cry with childish volume, making no attempt to conceal her snot and tears.

"Christ," said Andy. It was only the second time she had cried in his presence. "Take it easy, baby. I'm looking after

you. Nothing's going to happen." Andy patted her shoulder.

"Hang on, baby, nothing's going to happen."

Andy belted a towel round his waist and walked out onto the landing. "JOHNNY!" he yelled. "Johnny." Appleseed Rectory again recessed into silence. "Who's he?" he heard Quentin say somewhere. A few seconds later Roxeanne came out of the sitting-room door.

"What's going on, man?"

On an impulse Andy skipped down the stairs and seized Roxeanne's shoulders. Tigerishly he slammed her up against the door and kissed her mouth with incurious violence; Roxeanne pumped her middle against his, whispered, "I want to drain you empty," pushed him against the banister, and walked regally upstairs.

Andy staggered off to find Lucy. One way or another he thought it was going to be quite an interesting weekend.

23: drunk space

Giles stands swimming in the center of his room. It is clear from his stalled face and dead posture that he is operating at drunk speed, a castaway in drunk space. His hands take interminably long to curl round the gin bottle and to train it on his mouth. While he swallows his eyes recede, as if only ten per cent of him were there. His face is a corpse's face, numb and luminous with a year of slow drunk hours.

Giles tilted away into his bathroom and steadied himself against the washbasin. The room was a real study. On a table by the basin stood two electric toothbrushes and seven manual ones of various rakes and texture, a waterpick, an economy tub of Selto, three sorts of toothpaste, four packets of Interdens, a serried rank of mouthwashes, a dentician's impression of Giles's teeth (which resembled a miniature mockup of a building site — pulleys, ladders, cranes) — and a white enamel tray of surgical instruments. Every sharp surface in the room, including the doorknob and toilet flush handle, was padded with sponge.

He bared his teeth at the mirror and jactitated feebly as a heifer ran toward him. On automatic, his hand crept out toward the gin decanter shelved to his left. He gazed with

more intentness at his face, leaning forward gradatim. He

watched himself for a full minute in puzzled accusation, and said, "You've got to stop crying." He closed his eyes and his: mind dropped back through a penny arcade of dental afternoons.

"Giles? Giles! It's me. Lucy."

". Lucy who?"

"Lucy."

"Oh, yes, sorry, Lucy, actually," said Giles, unbolting the door.

Lucy bustled into the room. Giles hugged the wall, like a spy, as if he were banking on Lucy passing him by unobserved. She had never been in Giles's room before but her far-flung senses quickly catalogued its contents. She opened the drinks cupboard and removed a liter of whiskey from it. To Giles's clogged nerves she was merely a spectral truss of clothes and color, and yet he felt also, more obscurely, that it stood for something he knew and could depend on. His mouth widened friendily as he tried to focus with more rigor on her loosening shape.

"Oh, hello, Lucy. Cheers, actually."

"What?"

"Actually. I mean. oh, God."

"Giles, honestly."

"I know."

She drew him to the bed and sat down beside him. She drank from the bottle, a rivulet of whiskey coursing down through the patchwork cosmetics on her cheek. Between them the air was motionless with a sense of dislocation, as if neither of them could believe what they had once meant to each other.

"Giles, why are we—"

But Lucy noticed a minute facial gesture, something instantly checking out in Giles's eyes. More cautiously, she said, "Why are we here with those baddies? Those awful Americans?"

"Yes," said Giles with abrupt animation, "they are awful, aren't they?"

"Awful. Real baddies. The worst people I've met for a very long time — for ages. Scum of the earth. That little Trog with the drugs,"

"Mm, Skip."

"No, Skip's the streak of piss who never says anything.

The bossy one. Marvell. Fucking stupid name. And that girl!" Lucy tensed her breasts and folded a hand sultrily over her mouth. " 'Oooh, Indy, kin I bite yrr cack aff?' She looks like a horse. It's just not on to have a body like that. It's just not on."

Giles's expression grew wistful. "I think she's got — I've never seen ones like that before — I think she's got absolutely the most beautiful. "

"Forget it," said Lucy. "They can't be real. She has to be on two silicon boosts a day."

Giles had been going to say that Roxeanne had the most beautiful teeth he had ever seen, actually, but he brought his gaze down to the pillow and seemed to fall into a muse.

Her eyes absently quartering the room, Lucy lit a long cigarette. "Where am I supposed to be sleeping tonight? Any idea?"

Giles cast his mind torpidly through the house, filling rooms, allotting bed partners. "In… At… With. " Realizing that his was the only obviously eligible room, Giles turned to Lucy in dawning trepidation. For a moment his eyes became guarded and quiescent, like those of a weak animal in the presence of another species.

"Giles, whatever's the matter with you these days." It was not a question.

"I don't know either, really." He blinked and sighed. "Lucy, would you very kindly mix me a. "

Lucy stood up. "And tonic?"

"Yes, please, actually."

"Big one?"

"Yes please."

She quickly took his hand. "Don't worry, baby, I'll catch a sofa or something."

Folding up on the bed, Giles wedged a pillow between his face and the wall. His tongue patrolled the inner ridges of his gums as Lucy's shape deliquesced before him. Almost weightless now, his mind backed off into random, punctured sleep.

24: Heavy water

Look!

Here comes Whitehead, toppling out of his room, stilted on heelless boots which he has stuffed with toilet paper up to the: calves and in which his crushed, unsocked feet now groan and rot. The resultant blockage of his sweat pores will soon give Keith the impression that a rubber plunger has been attached to his scalp, initiating a corpuscle-dash to his head. In fact, little Keith's face is worryingly white, like morning snow, and his legs are big with blood pools, putting extra strain on the sawn-off Whitehead Senior bags that he has hurriedly tapered with a stapling machine. Further sartorial attractions include a paisley nylon scarf with which he conceals the rope of fat encircling his neck and a blue cheesecloth shirt so coarse in texture that it has already reduced his nipples to blood puddings. Vilely, Keith pauses by the garage exit, his hand scouting his crown for bald patches. "What are you doing?" he asks himself out loud. "What makes you think you can pull this off?" But the drug prods him somewhere in the spine and he feels a surge not so much of confidence as of fuddled resignation. Wobbling queasily on his tight-packed shoes, Whitehead spills out into Brobding-nag.

Upstairs, in agreeable contrast, The Hon. Quentin Villiers leaned backward stiffly in order that Celia might clip up the collar of his frilled taffeta blouse.

"How do I look?"

In his violet suede suit, the half-length trousers tucked into alligator-skin thigh boots, and with his silver-blond flyaway hair curled playfully up from his forehead, Quentin looked blindingly beautiful, rather Chattertonian, and definitively upper class. It gave Celia a sweet toothache pang just to be near him.

"You look absolutely extraordinary. Like a sex cubicle. God, how I wish I had your complexion," said Celia, reclaiming her own with a palmful of thick brown paste. "My loathsome spots are bound to start gleaming through."

"Drivel, my sweet. It distresses me to hear you talk in that vein." Quentin leaned forward, no less stiffly, and smoothed his lips over Celia's half-open mouth.

She looked up at him, heavy water gathering in her eyes. The wave of sick disbelief passed as Quentin placed his dry hands on her cheeks.

"I love you," he said gravely.

"Thank you," she said. "I love you.”

Quentin cruised away to stand before the full-length wardrobe mirror, teasing his hair with long fingers.

"Darling," said Celia, "can you feel any of those strange drugs you chose? You're not getting a sadness or anything, are you?"

"Nothing whatever. Not a murmur. And you?"

"Yes, my hands are in gear already." Celia stood up, her square face uncertain and amused. "Do I look not too bad?"

"You look very touching."

Celia smiled gummily — and for a moment she did indeed look just that. "Darling, have you decided on the itinerary yet?"

"I've given the matter some thought, yes. To begin with we could do much worse than look in at—"

25: THE PSYCHOLOGIC REVUE

The Psychologic Revue was held fortnightly at a semiderelict 1920s cinema in what used to be Kilburn High Road, now a jangling caravan grouped here and there beween the northern motorway access routes. The Chevrolet and the Jaguar swung together off the flyover and moaned down through the darkness toward the Universal, a sooty Gothic structure which hovered massively over the secondhand car showrooms and ramshackle eateries that littered its surroundings. The shadowy caves nestling between the motorway caissons, route-indicator stanchions, and overpass columns held a companionable gloom, secret and unmenacing. Overhead, the beams of a million streetlamps joined in a shaft of neutral, watery sodium which filtered off into the sky like an abandoned gateway to the night.

"Some set," murmured Marvell, as the Chevrolet approached.

"I tell you," said Andy from the back seat, "if any of those fuckin' little tramps gives anybody any trouble just let me know and he's going to be one sick junkie, is all."

Twenty yards away, scattered about the dim foyer steps, a score of down-and-outs looked on fearfully as the Apple-seeders poured from the cars and moved toward them. "Ah, the vanity of travel," said Quentin. Andy raced on ahead to kick a gangway through the crowd — saying "Get out of here" and "Get some cash," occasionally boxing a protuberant head or stomping on a tardy hand. The tramps crawled away without protest or comment. "LEAVE HER ALONE, YOU FUCKIN' BUM!" bellowed Andy as a coughing hobo was slow to roll out of Diana's queenly path. Andy's heavy-duty boot eased his transit across the steps.

"Christ," summed up Andy, straightening his combat jacket when they had gained the foyer. "Try and take in a show around here and what you got to do? Beat your way through a mess of bums. Giles — pay the gentleman and let's get inside."

The interior decor of the Universal was not so much pretentious as straightforwardly apocalyptic: a distant channeled ceiling which receded in a succession of trompe l'oeil false summits, hundredweights of dank purple curtain, 3-D brass frescoes, deep-ribbed walls and stucco cornices. The building had been condemned, most emphatically and categorically, in the late 1960s — thereby vastly increasing its popularity as a decadent venue — but in the tinged red light it seemed to possess a certain monolithic solidity. The Apple-seeders made their way down the aisle on the sticky carpet, appraising the small and opulent audience concentrated in the first few rows before the semicircular stage.

"Is it always this empty?" asked Marvell.

"Only cool people know about it — that's how come the cash," said Andy, referring thus elliptically to the dozen ten-pound notes Giles had earlier offered the damson-suited commissionaire.

Although Whitehead had done a fair bit of equivocal hanging back and a certain amount of hesitant trotting forward in a bid to sit next to Lucy as they filed into the third row, he found himself wedged between Skip and Marvell — both of whom, even in Keith's estimation, seemed to be taking an unhealthily close interest in him. The patrons already seated made no attempt to retract their legs for the newcomers and had to be reminded by Andy of the need for this courtesy before obliging. The atmosphere was at once

twitchy and slothful. A haze of terminal apathy hung in the

gaunt auditorium.

"My God," said Quentin, brushing the plastic seatcover with a velvet glove. "It's like a dotard matinee in here. Open as my heart shall always be to persons of fashion, I wish they'd occasionally show some sign of real animation."

"What are the gimmicks?"

"Now just you wait and see, Skip. I promise you one thing — it's never quite like it was the last time."

As the girls chatted contrapuntally, as Quentin outlined his thinking on "counteralternative" theater, as Skip failed once again to engage Giles in conversation, as Whitehead wondered what to do when his legs exploded — as the whiskey flasks were snapped open and the marijuana showboats lit— signs, at least, of real animation gathered in the hall. It had now struck ten o'clock, and foot stamps, obscene catcalls, and seat rattling began a lazy crescendo. In particular, two tall youngsters dressed up as businessmen in the front row were exerting themselves to some effect, pitching an empty tequila bottle onto the stage, producing an anguished whine from a subsonic whistle, urinating without standing up into the orchestra pit.

Adorno was about to lean forward and invite them to shut the fuck up — when he appeared to notice something. "Hold it," he said. "They're Conceptualists."

"Who are they?" asked Marvell.

"Conceptualists." Andy had started to peer apprehensively around the auditorium.

"Oh, right, I've heard about them. Something between old-style Hell's Angels and Chuck Manson."

"Nothing like that," said Andy, in such disgust that for a moment he seemed to be looking at Marvell through his nostrils rather than his eyes. "Nothing like that at all. They're new, different. I think they're the only people who've made creative sense of what's happening to the world now. For me, they're the only ones to have really made something out of what technology has done to sex and violence. They'll last, too."

"Yeah?"

"Fuckin' better believe it, boy."

"How come?"

Precision and arbitrariness were the twin hallmarks of

Conceptualist activity. On the morning that inaugurated their

"Gestures," as they called them, fifteen lowly civil servants were found scalped in their beds. They were all sewage-disposal civil servants. A political organization? Fifteen days later a random selection of doctors, health inspectors, social workers, charity secretaries, and Salvation Army officials had their Achilles' tendons severed in a lightning wave of synchronized attacks. On the first day of the following month the newspapers reported that thirty hardware shop owners, in various parts of the country, had had their left eyes spooned out. Four weeks later stolen helicopters showered over key cities a bizarre confetti of pornographic postcards, atrocity photographs, suppressed medical reproductions, vetoed X-ray plates, and blacklisted urinalyses. (The police were not so much worried, by this time, as utterly hysterical.) The remains of perverse sexual scenarios periodically came to light — they weren't publicized, but it was assumed that the same organization was responsible: a stylized car crash, the impacted instrument panels of either vehicle stained with semen; an operating theater, broken into at night and made the scene of a bloody debauch; aircraft hangars, chemistry laboratories, racetrack pits, drug-experimentation plants, and electrical appliance showrooms similarly abused; the crippled and insane looted from various asylums and returned dumbstruck; a kidnapped surgeon required at gunpoint to perform strange anal surgery on a masked patient; an eighteen-month-old girl found in a ditch with severe genital injuries.

Andy's spirited championship of the Conceptualists was not entirely disinterested. He had known several, one or two intimately, and had long been impressed by their calm and ruthlessness, their eerie anonymity, the almost erotic yearning with which they talked of their Gestures, and above all by their icy efficiency. As a youth, Adorno had had a dream of establishing his own Conceptualist chapter in London's Earl's Court, marshaling his men with invisible dexterity, submitting his own projects to Conceptualist HQ, attracting the attention of the team's most hardened operatives, rising within the organization as an indispensable executive figure, being at last petitioned to mastermind all future Gestures. Although Andy had already gained one of the two qualifications for Conceptualist membership (he was over six feet tall) and would shortly acquire the second (a humanities degree), that

prayer had long ago begun to fade. Waking early, perhaps, or

beached on a slow afternoon, Andy was often unable to lose the suspicion that he was too wavering a figure rightly to deserve membership of such a movement, that he lacked the go

coldness, cunning, and cruelty that so dignified its true representatives. The suspicion, and more recently the near certainty, of these failings in himself had given rise to some of Andy's blackest moments.

"I didn't know the Conceptualists were into all that," said Marvell in a tone of respectful apology. "How can you tell those guys belong?"

"The suits, sharp narcissistic look, cropped hair, tall, hard, very fit. " Andy shrugged limply.

"Yeah."

"And they're. they're outside. Do you know what I mean?" Andy seemed to want an answer.

"Yeah. I know what you mean." Marvell chuckled and said, "They're off duty now, right?"

"Not sure." For the first time concern showed in Andy's voice. Everyone fell silent. "It isn't standard, the way they're fucking about. They're not supposed to be flash like this. Unless they've got some kind of Gesture going."

"Oh, let's leave. Please."

"Relax, Celia," said Andy, with a mixture of impatience and serenity, making it clear that he was more worried about a possible breach of Conceptualist decorum than about their own safety.

"Will it be all right, darling?"

Quentin Villiers lay back in his seat, exhaling huge rings of resinous smoke. He nodded slowly as the Universal lights began to go down.

Out onto the stage sidled a spectacularly deformed old man, a hand wrapped like a flannel over his dented forehead. Squaring up to the mike, he thanked all those who had been kind enough to look in at the Psychologic Revue that night and was sorry to have to inform them that the anticipated artistes, Neural Lobe, had regrettably been unable to keep their booking and that he hoped he would not be letting everyone down when he said that he had persuaded Acey-Deecey and his band to stand in for them tonight. He rolled his eyes haggardly at the audience and reversed through the velvet curtains, which swept grandly open.

Twenty minutes later the Universal was getting heavy. Acey-Deecey, a pensionable cabaret performer, had proved to be fat, ill-rehearsed, drunk, and entirely lacking in all the at-: tributes of showmanship. As he told long, unfunny jokes, thrummed on the piano, and danced with wonky corpulence, he had become aware that his audience was by no means a captive one, and so began to simulate an even more toe-curling pathos, recounting his long history of failure, telling of previous flops with a forgiving smile, simpering into the microphone about his obesity, lack of rehearsing time, alcoholism, etc. The auditorium wheezed and bawled.

"But here's perhaps one song I can sing," Acey was saying, prune-eyed. "A song that perhaps I've got the right to sing. It was made famous by a very wonderful lady who was dead before any of you were born. It's called 'Nobody Knows You,' and it's the blues, and it goes something like this. "

("They're trying to do the embarrassment routine again," drawled Quentin. "It's meant to be this bad, but no one gets embarrassed any more — embarrassment has gone. Surely they know that.")

"Once I lived the life of a millionaire," sang the old man, nodding his head raptly at his paunch. "Spent all my money, didn't have a care. Takin' all my friends out for a—"

And his voice was a horrible, dislocating thing, without body, shape, or feeling, a nerveless skirl that seemed to empty the air around it. The audience shrank back in appalled silence.

". bootleg liquor, champagne and wine. Till I began to fall so low, didn't have a penny, had—"

Then it happened. The two tall men from the front row had leaped the orchestra pit and were on the stage. Almost before his last words were out, Acey was on his knees with his hair pulled back — and the man had smacked him in the throat with the iron glove. A rope of blood jumped from his mouth. Then he eye-forked him with a popping sound and dug his boot into Acey's groin, making his legs spring up and flutter. The man wrenched his head from behind until a long sick crack folded out onto the stunned air.

The audience was motionless with italic terror.

"But Concep— They don't—" gibbered Andy, as the man ground his boot into Acey's face and it split like a waterlogged pumpkin. They stood panting over his broken body.

It wasn't until Acey had got to his feet, peeled back the sopping mask, and, flanked by the two "Conceptualists," given a deep bow that the audience made any reaction at all. Some whimpered, some emitted quiet, retrospective screams, some cried with relief, everyone gasped, and a few applauded. Slow with adrenalin, the audience shuffled toward the exit doors.

"Not bad. Not bad," said Marvell.

"Yeah," said Skip.

"I'm glad it amused you," said Quentin.

"A drag it wasn't for real," said Roxeanne.

"How did they do it," said Celia.

"Quite simple," said Diana.

"Thought I was going to be sick, actually. But then it all seemed a long way away," said Giles.

"Did you enjoy it, Lucy?" said Keith.

"Sorry, I can't hear you," said Lucy.

"Christ. To think that was supposed to be a gesture! That! They really had me worried for a moment — I thought they really were Conceptualists!" said Andy.

26: THE LUGUBRIOUS BOOGIE

"You a pig," wept the lugubrious boogie. "You all pigs."

Round the sackcloth table at the far end of a scotch-room alcove in the bowls of an alcoholic concourse beneath the bistro mezzanines of an eat-and-drink complex of an amenity estate north of Euston Station, the Appleseeders sat nursing half a dozen cork flasks of para-natural whiskey. ("And now some low life," Quentin had said, coughing into his perfumed handkerchief.) Incapacitated Irishmen, morose Mediterraneans, taciturn blacks, bronchitic prostitutes, and vomiting immigrant workers lined the scotch-room benches, being served whiskeys of varying sizes by unsmiling young men in pre-faded denim jumpsuits.

The lugubrious boogie placed his neck against the low bare-brick wall. "Pigs," he gasped.

Roxeanne moved closer to him and took his curled hand. "Why, man? Tell me why. Tell me why we're pigs."

"You all pigs."

"Forget it, Rox," called Andy from the other side of the table. "He's a mess. Drunk and all fucked up. No use talking to them when they're — what the hell do you know, you dumb boogie.”

: Roxeanne was not discouraged. Skip leaned over and droned quietly into Andy's ear, "Roxeanne has a thing for coons."

"What kind of thing?"

"A fuck-thing."

"With him? With that? He has to be thirty-five."

"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.

"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.

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.