Dead Babies

XXX: GILES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some observations on Giles's sex life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Giles — darling — come and hold me."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

31: picking up speed

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

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

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

32: THE COOL DOVES

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

"I swear, Quentin," said Andy yearningly, "unless some normal birds start coming here again, I'm going to get going on those fuckin' doves."

"Ah, but Andy — they're doves," said Quentin.

"They're still fuckin' birds, aren't they? What difference does that make?"

"But they're holy birds."

"Yeah, and I bet they read the Bible and do quid-a-jobs and never say 'fuck.' "

"Now, now, Andrew. Now, now."

For Quentin and Andy were out killing birds in the

garden. This recreation had recently come to carry a sense

of strain, particularly as regards Adorno. In the golden age of their first few weeks at the house, Andy would rise before six, gulp down some Irish coffee, and prowl into the garden: with the Webley rifle for stealthy two-hour sessions, often claiming to have dispatched between twenty and thirty of the pests in a single morning. Two months of this and aerial word got round that birds were non grata at Appleseed Rectory, and soon the little visitors ceased to wake Adorno with their song. Spiritedly, Andy got into the habit of emptying large bags of Swoop, Airies, and Wingmix on the lawn last thing at night, a wheeze initially so successful that he would sometimes find it unnecessary even to leave his room, picking the massed creatures off from his window. (If reproached by an Appleseed female about this policy Andy would counter, depending on his mood, that birds weren't cosmic and were therefore expendable, or alternatively that such crusades restored the precious bond of blood reciprocity between animal and man, or alternatively that it taught the greedy little fuckers a lesson.) Later still, of course, the most famished robins in England would give the Rectory lawn a mile-wide berth — despite the cream, dripping, pate, and freshly exhumed worms that Andy would array to tempt them to his green preserve. More recently still, in the early mornings, Andy could be glimpsed, a solitary and enigmatic figure, pacing the garden with his gun, forever gazing up in mute appeal at the indifferent skies.

"Well, they do live in the church," pursued Quentin gently, "and they are virtually the property of the village. Best to leave the doves alone, Andy."

"Yeah, well. And I suppose if I did get to work on them the fuckin' locals would only start to bitch about it. I just don't like the way they come down here every day so flash. As if they owned the fuckin' place. Well, I'll leave them alone for now but they'd just better not push their luck, is all."

"That's a sagacious Andy. Must maintain good relations with the pez. Have Lucy last night?"

"Nah— Just let her mouth-fuck me."

"I see. Was Diana pleased."

"She didn't get to know about it. I outsmarted her again."

"And tell me," Quentin asked him, "did you have Roxe-anne too?"

"Course."

"How do you mean, 'course'?"

"Well — anyone could tell she was going to make a play for me. For a start she was eye-fucking me all night — at that booze bar and stuff." Andy gestured across the garden. "A field-fuck," he said.

"Really, Andy. You and your fucks. What was it like— tolerably enjoyable?"

"Nah. Nothing special. Okay. Nothing special. You've fucked her, surely?" asked Andy, slightly taken aback.

"No; now you come to mention it, I don't believe I have. You see, Andy, when I ran into these people I was, shall we say, the houseguest of a certain screen actress, and so Roxeanne seemed, well, a tiny bit superfluous."

"Which one?"

Quentin shrugged and turned away. "Margot Make-piece…"

Andy's lemur eyes bulged. "Bullshit," he said. "No!"

"Oh yes."

"The one that— Can she? Right up the—?"

"Oh yes."

"Jesus."

"Anyway, we digress. With Roxeanne— I trust you acquitted yourself well?"

"I hit colossal form," said Andy.

"And Marvell and Skip? Did they try to get in on what I'm sure was a splendid act?"

"What, those fags? You're kidding. They're smarter than that."

"Don't underestimate them. They're peculiarly persistent. And persistently peculiar."

"Mm?"

"In a way, I'm beginning to regret having asked them. It doesn't seem to be going markedly well up to now. They've changed since I knew them. And they're generally so… so different, don't you feel?"

"The fuck, they're just American, that's all. Look, there's one!"

Andy was referring to an airborne speck well into the middle distance. Even as he spoke he lifted the gun and fired. They watched the little slug of metal die in a slow, plaintive arc; three hundred yards beyond, the dot winged its way

purposefully on. Lear-like imprecations fled from Andy's

mouth.

On Quentin's suggestion, Andy sought solace in peppering the Tuckle drainpipes and windowpanes for a quarter of an hour. But he soon grew bored and pitched the gun bitterly onto the grass. There was a dejected silence.

"It's going to be a hot mother today," said Quentin, resting a thin hand on Andy's shoulder and wincing at the sky.

"Yeah." Overhead, a DC 70 strained upward through the blue air. "Take me to America," Andy murmured.

"Come on, kid," said Quentin. "Let's go in."

33: BUT WHAT'S PERFECT

The Whitehead had beguiled the early morning in a sweaty fight with the garage toolbox, restoring and partly refashioning a pair of old platforms, platforms which he had worn every day between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one until — lined with asbestos and bakelite though the boots were— they had gone critical on him practically in the course of an afternoon. emptying lecture halls, toppling freshmen, razing flowerboxes, and asphyxiating charladies in his wake. Keith had had no choice but to seal the footwear hermetically that night and swathe them in dead towels at the bottom of his trunk. He was meanwhile required to go to college in Clark's sandals for a month, as he saved the necessary money — by going without such things as transport, warmth, food and drink — for some new supports.

Little Keith had nailed fist-thick, roughly-hewn wooden slabs to the soles of the rescued boots, chipped them flush with hammer and chisel and blackened them with polish. It was a painstaking and in many respects an imaginative piece of work; but it was his most daring reconstruction job to date — and Keith was no cobbler.

In his room, Whitehead placed a two-pence piece between his teeth and drained his legs into the hot holes. He levered himself — ever so cautiously — from the bed, in order to exert his full weight on the palpitating platforms. Gradually, gradually…

A tenth of a second later Keith was an invertebrate puddle on the floor of his room. "So far, so good," he croaked. White-head was, after all, fairly experienced in these matters and, even as he lay on the rug, twitching to the black anguish that coursed through his body, he was reasonably sanguine. He had a shrewd idea — thanks — of the sort of state his feet were in these days; he knew, at any rate, that they opened up whole new worlds of semantic reach to the epithet raw. (A drunken dietary consultant had once advised him, unofficially but with real concern, simply to have them off — and quickly.) And yet little Keith knew also what they, and he, could master and endure. Presently, he was confident, a soothing elixir of sweat and blood would begin to soften the chips of ruptured cardboard, would begin to lubricate the craters of the scored heel, would begin to deliquesce the stiffened creases of the biting vinyl. True, it would not compromise the bent nail ends which had already eased themselves a quarter of an inch into his hooves, but—

"But what's perfect," Keith asked out loud of his floor rug, "in this life of ours? As long as they don't squelch," he continued, reaching for a pillow to scream into, "just so long as they don't squelch, then I'm a happy man. Then I'm walking on air."

Ten minutes later Keith was on his feet, tears of pain running unhindered down his cheeks. He took an exploratory step, allowed his chest to billow, growled mightily deep in his throat, and willed on his body a species of control. Through his wall slit he espied Quentin and Andy ambling back toward the house. Stripped to the waist, Andy was gesticulating stylishly at the wholesome garden. Tugged at by Keith's tears his brown body swam beautifully through the knobbled windowpane.

"You can get used to anything, really, I suppose," White-head muttered.

Corrosion seeped up his ankles like rising water. It then occurred to Keith that if he had to wear these foot engines for as long as (say) a week, the loss of ectoplasm would more than discount the artificial gain in inches: with his gory shin stumps wedged into six-inch lifts, he'd be four-foot-eleven all over again. But it was unlikely that he would have to wear anything that long. How fortunate. For this small blessing Whitehead gave laconic thanks.

34: breakfast

"Giles! What are you doing up? Have you been out?"

The Mandarin on his lap, Giles was sitting at the kitchen: table, a cup of coffee cooling in front of him. Without curiosity he returned Andy's stare.

"Seeing my mother in London, actually."

"Yeah? How's she?"

Giles reached for the coffee cup. It got as far as his chin before he lurched forward violently and replaced it with a lingering, wristless hand. Frowning at the room, he took out his hip flask. "Who? My mother? Oh, she's mad. Gosh, she's so mad now."

"What she want?"

"She wants to come to the special Institute in Potter's Bar. So I can see her more often."

"The Blishner place?" said Andy. "What's she going in there for?"

"So I can see her more often."

"No, you little. What are they going to do to her there?"

"Actually, I don't know. But, gosh, she's jolly mad now."

"Do you get more cash?"

When Giles showed no loss of attention but no obvious interest in replying, Andy waltzed over to the dresser (on which numerous mugs were hooked and against which Diana leaned), taking an apple from the oriental bowl there. He placed the fruit in his mouth whole, chewed vigorously and swallowed — a habit of his.

(Giles averted his appalled gaze.)

"You've been out shooting birds in the garden, I suppose," said Diana unaffectionately.

"Oh, you haven't, have you, darling?" appealed Celia to her husband.

"The fuck we have," said Andy. "The little bastards won't come anywhere near here any more."

(Quentin crossed the kitchen and took Celia lightly in his arms.)

"I put," Andy went on, "I put stuff out for them — worms and stuff — but that's not good enough for them. Dripping, stuff like that. But do they come anywhere near the place? Not them, oh no."

(Diana lit a cigarette and sighingly exhaled.)

"I mean, how's a guy supposed to see any decent action around here if the flash little shits won't come near the place? Those doves. coming down here every day so casual.”

Andy's face darkened. "They'd just better watch themselves is all I'm saying."

Quentin was about to assure Celia that, nonsense, he was sure Andy had no intention of doing any such thing, when little Keith merged slowly through the doorway, his eyelids dark with pain.

"Good morning, campers," said Whitehead.

Keith's voicebox had been under orders to say this with volume and gusto. But the words had evaporated dryly from his mouth. "Good morning, campers," he said again. No improvement.

"Why, it's little Keith," said Andy. "Keith, good Christ, are you dying?"

"Good Lord, Keith," said Quentin with unfeigned alarm. "Here, quick, you'd better sit down."

Keith knew this to be excellent advice, and he took it as soon as his unstable form could get him into the room, thawing on to the nearest chair. Giles gazed up at him with expressionless eyes.

Diana disapproved of Keith on account of the horrible way he looked, and surveyed him now with fatigued contempt. Celia disliked him too, but was insatiably compassionate when it came to physical suffering and actually asked Whitehead whether he would like a cup of coffee. Andy, also, half remembering that he had struck Keith the night before — and quarter remembering that he had struck him very hard indeed — solicitously observed that Keith never looked up to much anyway and that perhaps he was just a bit under the weather.

All this made Keith want to cry again. He normally counted himself a lucky man if he could get into a room without exciting open derision: being totally ignored was, for him, an imperial entrance. However formal or perfunctory, actual concern always made him wistful for the status he knew he would never enjoy. With what was in fact his very least attractive smile, Whitehead explained that he had slept poorly and was suffering from acute migraine.

(Giles was watching carefully as Keith spoke. He, for one, had never been able to understand the point of all the fuss about little Keith. Whitehead's teeth looked okay to him.)

"Well, what about it?" asked Celia, exuding personal as well as general wariness. "Breakfast?”

"Don't call it that," said Andy sharply. "Just call it food. Food. All right," he said, relenting, "we might as well give it a try."

35: Lagging time

Although the Appleseed Rectory kitchen was a large, square, farmerly apartment, its lowness of ceiling and its habit of containing a lot of vivid sunlight tended to make the room seem oppressively populous when more than four or five persons were gathered between its walls. It began to seem so now. The shuffling Appleseeders — all of whom, except Giles and Whitehead, were engaged in the cautious preparation of orange juice, coffee, and thin toast — were joined by Skip (in very filthy underpants), Marvell (in filthy underpants), Roxe-anne (in underpants), and by Lucy, dressed, lard-skinned, small-eyed, and coughing into the hot light. Between permutations of legs The Mandarin erectly strolled.

"Christ, that cat's bum," said Andy in a critical, almost painterly tone, his eyes on the pink anus revealed by the Persian's high tail. "Can't we do something …?Iknow. I'm going to get a gray magic marker and color its arse over. Aw my HEAD!"

No one was thinking about it, no one was thinking much about anything, when the room suddenly became a miasma of hangovers. Alcohol crapulence clogs perception, but drug crapulence flays it, and by now the kitchen was a noisome feast for peeled senses. The room appeared to change its shape. Voices scattered into piano mumbles. The cigarette smoke formed a shelf at shoulder height, above which sun-bright faces wafted like mad masks. They plugged in kettles, hawked, ran water, retched; the Americans swung open the fridge, picked with dirty fingernails at a staling loaf, scratched, burped, farted, snorted into the dregs of yesterday's liquor bottles. "This butter's like off chick. Just sugar's safest. My eyes, my eyes. Eggs! The fuck. Gangway! I'm gonna be sick. Water — fight the dehydration. Stop breathing like that. Gag gag gag. I'm flashing! I'm flashing!. What's — the sizes are all wrong. Strange heat, strange heat. Don't be there, just don't BE therel”

I2O

Then came the lagging time. It came abruptly, flopped down like an immense and invisible jelly from the ceiling, swamping the air with marine languor and insect speeds— lagging time, with its numbness and disjunction, its inertia and automatism, its lost past and dead future. It was as if they were wandering through an endless, swarming, rotten, terminal marketplace after a year of unsleeping nights.

Now they were all moving to no effect — just moving, just switching things off and switching things on, just picking things up and putting things down and picking things up and stroking the cat and counting the mugs and fighting for air. It seemed that everything they did had already been done and done, and that everything they thought had already been thought and thought, and that this would never end. Excuse me, said panic to each of them in turn. They had no mouth and they had to scream.

Quentin forced his way across the room and gripped Giles by the shoulder. Giles looked up, apparently quite unaffected. His face cleared as if emerging from shadow into day. He stood up and opened the door. Time flooded in from the passage. The room stopped, and clicked back. They turned toward him.

"I think that, I think that what we all need is a drink."

They crowded into the corridor. They were out.

"Jesus I" said Andy on the way to the sitting room. "What in the fuck was that?"

"Lagging time," said Quentin.

"Yeah," said Marvell, dabbing his cheeks with a red bandana. "Fuckin' lagging time."

"Jesus. Never had that cocksucker before." Andy halted and turned toward them. "You know, my theory is that it was the food that did it." He started walking again. "To hell with this food gimmick. It's just not on any more, food. Fuck food."

36: the real thing again

Under Giles's sleepy but telling supervision, champagne cocktails went into production—"After all, it's practically eleven o'clock," Andy had said. One-and-a-half-liter bottles of 1979 Moet & Chandon were removed by Quentin and Andy from the semi-deepfreeze in the washroom while crates of reinforcements were shipped in by Skip from the garage. Giles then entrusted Quentin with his doorkeys and commissioned him to go up and enter his room, locate and gain admittance to his drinks cupboard, and detach from it five, perhaps six, liters of Napoleon brandy. By this time people had revisited the bedrooms and had started to appear in less advanced stages of undress; in particular, Marvell and Skip were in their usual jean suits, and Roxeanne was wearing a black midriff stole and a fishnet body stocking.

"Beat me, beat me," enthused Andy as the record player emitted sounds of what might have been a burning menagerie superimposed over a Sunday school choir practice. Windows were thrown open. Quentin marshaled the hash kits and amyl-nitrate poppers. Skip toured the room, his large hands cupping a pyramid of wide-spectrum amphetamines. Marvell issued depressants from the dinette-feature alcove. They were all talking.

"The thing is, actually," broke in Giles, keeping a sensible distance between himself and the waiting rank of champagne bottles, "I've always found that the thing is, actually, is to put a hell of a lot of brandy in them. About four or five times as much as anyone else ever puts in them — ever. At least half and half. At least. If in doubt, make believe the brandy is the champagne and the champagne is the brandy."

"Check," said Andy. "Check."

Celia accepted a tablet from Skip. She held it in the air between finger and thumb and said quizzically, "I don't know, darling, but shouldn't we be taking it a bit easy?"

"Relax, darling," purred Villiers.

"We can't feel any worse," said Diana, to Lucy's pale agreement.

"Hell, it's only a weekend," said Marvell. "The fuck."

"Keith! Get the liquor over here," bawled Andy, " — and I'm talking about now! I mean, what's a court dwarf for if he can't even. Christ, this is more like it, eh? The real thing again."

"Wait!" Giles held up his hands. "Wait a minute. Tell me before you start opening the champagne, okay? All those corks flying about, might catch me one right in the. "

"Is everyone. Look," said Andy, "go and lie down or something, will you, Keith, okay? I can't cope with you in here looking like that. Right, is everyone ready? Then let's go!"

Within a quarter of an hour, things were pretty well back to normal.

37: Those conversations

Those conversations.

"That's what they did. In the seventies. That's what they achieved. They separated emotion and sex."

"Nonsense, Marvell," said Quentin. "They merely showed that they could be separable. In the last analysis, of course, they aren't separable at all."

Marvell looked in appeal toward Roxeanne and Skip, who were abstractedly stroking one another on the floor, then back again. "Let's — let's try seeing it historically." Marvell swallowed his drink. "Things happen faster in the States so perhaps the situation's not clear yet for you people. Sure, there was a kind of reaction to the Other Way in the States a few years ago, but—"

"Shut up," said Andy tonelessly, to no one in particular.

". but — but it was a reaction really to the spinoffs of the Way, not to its thinking as such — the beaver displays, the fuck shows, the sex emporia, stuff like the experimental prostitution thing in LA. Then all last year there's been a whole reaffirmation of the whole thing, of the fundamental thing. And I don't just mean the sex conventions and the fuck-ins. Everywhere you go now, you can see that it's happened. People're quiet about it. No need to shout. They just know."

"Yes," said Quentin, "and in another few years there'll be another reaction and eventually we'll be the way we were."

"The fuck, after a million years of denying your needs, you can't expect the change to come in a week. But it's here now." Marvell laughed. "Kids over there, they're fucking in the first grade. We thought we were smart getting laid when we were twelve. They're blowing each other in the fuckin' playpens over there. No, it's here now and it won't go away and it won't turn into anything else."

Andy came alive. "I think that's disgusting," he said.

: "Little bastards. I didn't get fucked till I was nearly thirteen!"

"More importantly," Villiers resumed, "when are these promiscuous tots going to put in time on growing up? When will their sexual emotions have time to develop? When will their natures have time to absorb frustration, yearning, joy, surprise—?"

"Christ, Quentin," said Marvell, "you trying to reinstitute sex angst, or what? Know who you sound like? Fuckin' D. H. Lawrence! 'Sexual emotions'—fuck them. Sex is something your body does, like eating or shitting. Yeah, like shitting. Just something your body does."

An expression of weary decisiveness overcame Quentin's superb features. "Well, it's not something my body does for me. Nor Celia's, I should imagine. Nothing so brisk and heartless, thank God. Why do you suppose we got married?"

Marvell looked up at Quentin shyly, sneakily. "Come on, Quent, come on." He winked. "You did that, that was just some sort of gimmick, Quent, wasn't it?"

"No, it was marriage. And we got married to keep sex emotional."

"Christ. You're too much, Quent, truly. But look — it can't be done, man. Forget it. The iconography of desire's too pervasive now. The minute you're. the minute that you're fucking Celia here and you start to think about something else — some model or screen actress that's on every billboard and magazine you look at" — he snapped his fingers—"you'll know that's true. You'll know it."

"What you appear to be forgetting, Marvell," said Quentin, "is that Celia and I happen to be in love."

"Ugh," said Roxeanne.

Skip let out a low whistle.

"You know, Quentin," said Marvell seriously, "you can really be quite upsetting at times. I thought I might be able to get through my life without hearing that fuckin' word again, and now you come along, now here's a good friend of mine comes along and. Two years ago you wouldn't have—" Marvell looked up. An intense solar warning flashed in Quentin's green eyes. Marvell quickly dropped his head.

"Check," said Andy.

"You agree on this thing, Andy?" asked Roxeanne.

"Check. Not all of it. But love can't mean anything any more. That's hippie talk. Love's through. Love's all fucked up."

"Yeah, it's had it."

"Well, it hasn't had me," said Quentin with finality as Celia's hand crept toward his. "I know what love is, I know when I'm in love, and I'm in love. Is that clear?"

Marvell hung his head again. "Babies," he muttered. "Dead, dead babies."

38: Placements

The room reshuffled from time to time and people began to break away from the main group. Skip was probing, methodically but without success, for signs of conversational life in the couchant Giles. Andy talked to Lucy on the unmade divan that had served as her bed. Diana, accordingly, remained alone on the club armchair wondering up whom to sex: Quentin was engrossed in a new critical appreciation of Rimbaud, however, and Giles, the only other male she could conceivably approach, had roamed to a distant windowseat. With a picturebook on her lap, Celia sat on one of the ogre's cushions in the L of the larger drawing room. These last placements did not evade Marvell's notice. He caught Roxe-anne's eye. They exchanged glances.

Giles was, actually, sitting in two places: in the windowseat alcove and in his own brown study. But this was one of his very favorite nooks, comfortable, cushioned, contained. He especially enjoyed it when, as now, the sun spanned him with its warmth, lulling his shoulders and hair. Sometimes his mind would go quite blank and Giles would briefly escape, returning with a soft sigh of gratitude.

"Hi. Want another cocktail, Giles?" It was Roxeanne.

"No, I… the actually gin," he mumbled.

"Okay. Okay if I sit here, Giles?"

"No, I, in fact."

Partly of necessity, the windowseat being the size of most windowseats, Roxeanne sat close to Giles. She sat so close, indeed, that Giles felt as if proximity were a concept to which he had hitherto been a stranger. Surely, Giles thought, I've: never in my life been this close to anyone. She smelled, for a start, really tremendously strongly — a smell he identified dimly, and with reluctance, as a mixture of fresh sweat and of vaginal fluid of no less recent provenance. By way of corroboration he noticed that glistening red hair coiled both from her exposed armpits and from the eventful crotch of her pants. Within her transparent body stocking her breasts lapped and teemed. Giles gulped.

"Have a good time last light?"

"Gosh. Well I–It wasn't—"

"I can't hear you, Giles."

Is she on my lap, thought Giles, or am I on hers? The all-inclusiveness of her presence seemed to mantle them from the others and the rest of the room talked in a faraway rumble.

"It was jolly good fun, yes." He readjusted. "I didn't think it was going to be."

"How come you didn't think so, Giles?"

Her eyes were half closed and her voice, while intense and fully awake, appeared to be constantly on the point of slipping away. Her treasure cave of teeth was inches from his tightened stripe. With difficulty Giles said, "Just worries, worries. Just little things."

"That what you wanted the drug for, Giles? Why worry? Why worry? Why do you have to worry?"

Roxeanne's face was now completely glazed, her body irreducibly, suffocatingly close. The odor of her body, not unpleasant in itself, had become overpoweringly rank; it didn't remind Giles of anything now.

"Can I fuck you, Giles?"

". Well, d'you know, I'm not very keen on all that. "

Circling her wet tongue round her lips, she had trailed her hand up Giles's taut thigh.

"Then can I blow you, Giles?"

"I don't like that, either, much, actually."

"Do you want to come upstairs with me for a little time, Giles?" her voice moaned distantly at him. "For a little time, so I can kiss you. See my tongue?" It slipped like new meat from her mouth and looped to wetten the tip of her nose. "Kiss you, kiss you, wrap it right round your teeth—"

"No!" Giles sat up straight and burped into her face.

Roxeanne's expression did not change. Drowsily, moonily, she leaned close to his ear and said in a voice just as gentle and caressing as before,

"Eat shit. You ugly little fuck."

"Hi. Want another cocktail, Celia?" It was Marvell.

"No; honestly. Two would make me feel funny so early."

"Okay. Okay if I sit here, Celia?"

"I don't mind."

"Hey, what have you got there?"

"My picture book."

"Hey!"

"Oops! I'll move up."

Celia had what's known as two sides to her character— her docility would become girlish ingenuousness, her lack of imagination would phase into blinking naivete — and it was the smaller, more junior side that she was now letting out to play. Although the disparity between these personae was considerable, at times even grotesque, Celia seemed to be aware of no incongruity, slipping friskily between them with as little fuss as a child changing her toys. Marvell sensed her mood and for five minutes they discussed in equable undertones the adventures of Oily the Sailor, of Harry Hare, of Pig the Whistle and Small Stanley, of Water-Rat Reginald and Trap the Goat. Then Marvell wiped away the jewel of yellow-flecked blood that hung from his left nostril and said, "See Giles? Looks like he's doing just great with Rox."

Celia looked up.

"Yeah. Rox knows what the hell it's all about."

Celia did not answer.

"Knows how to get it all — from her body, her sensations. Knows how to make her senses work for her. She uses her senses like — like you'd use colors to make a pretty picture, Celia. Or like you'd do a jigsaw or dress a little doll. She knows what the brush is for, what all the colors do, how the surface likes it. That's how she regards her senses — as tools to make something full of joy and wonder. Would you like to express your body like that, Celia? See her with Giles? Know what she'd like to make with him?"

Celia shook her dipped head.

"No? D'you know what I'd like to make with you?"

Marvell cupped her far cheek with his fibrous right hand.

: He whispered moltenly in her ear. Beneath nickering lids Celia's eyes raced.

She stood up and said evenly, the woman again, "And to think my husband knows someone like you."

Marvell laughed drunkenly as she stumbled toward the door.

Quentin swept into the room. Celia was sitting on the bed. He knelt before her. "Dearest, dearest, don't," he honed tenderly.

"Oh, darling, I don't want them to be here."

"My poor bunny. What on earth did he say?"

"I couldn't ever tell you. It was… I couldn't tell you. Ever."

Obscure relief showed in Quentin's eyes. "Oh, some silly sex thing. Darling, you must. that's just the way they are."

Celia struggled. "I won't have people here like that. I won't. Make them go away now — why won't you make them go away now."

He held her. "Tomorrow. They'll be gone tomorrow."

"Too late then."

"There there."

She looked up and sniffed. "Tomorrow? It'll all be over by tomorrow? Promise?"

"I promise," promised Quentin.

39: cunning stunts

"How many bloody times do I have to tell you, Mrs. Tuckle, I don't take sugar in my tea."

"So sorry, sir, I'll—"

"Don't bother." Whitehead placed a heavy damp slipper on a nearby poof. "And I suppose you've drunk all that gin I brought you," he said, looking at the unopened bottle on the sideboard.

"No, sir. I don't think we've even—"

"I can see that. Well, I think I'll have some now. You wouldn't have any ice or tonic, of course, would you."

"I'm afraid the electricity's not—"

"Well, put some water in it then, for Christ's sake.”

"Yes, sir, of course. You will remember to thank Mr. Coldstream for us, sir, won't you?"

"As I said before," Keith reiterated, "I will if I remember to."

"Thank you, sir. If you don't mind me asking, sir. "

Keith waved a hand.

"If you don't mind me asking, who are your houseguests this weekend, sir?"

Whitehead reached out and accepted the glass of gin that was being waved cautiously around in front of his face. "About time," he said. "Well, I've asked just the four friends along. There's Lucy Littlejohn, an old… an old 'friend' of mine from my London days. And three Americans I met when I toured the States last year."

"I see, sir. Very interesting. Tell me, sir, what was the purpose of your visit to America? Was it your commercial concerns took you there, sir, or was it a purely pleasurable trip?"

Keith sipped his gin. "Mind your own bloody business," he said.

Whitehead walked back across the lawn with something less than his customary vim. The novelty of the Tuckles was palling. It wasn't the timbre of their remarks which bored him so much as the crude monotony of his own. Well, he would just have to think up more ways of being disagreeable to them, that's all.

Narrowing his eyes at the bay-windowed rear of Apple-seed Rectory, little Keith established that activity was still centered in the drawing room. On all fours, he crawled behind the derelict well, waited, then snaked quickly into the garage.

Keith squirmed past his door, wedged it shut behind him, and stopped dead. Protruding from the thin brown top blanket of his bunk was the face of a girl. Keith recognized the face at once: it belonged to Miss See-See della Gore, the wonderful showgirl who had posed with her legs open on the centerfold of Cunning Stunts, a recent specialist purchase of his. What was she doing there? The effect was curiously disturbing. The color photograph, with its luminescent, undersized face, rested on his pillow, disappearing into the bed, which bulged as if some amorphous body were actually shrouded there. Keith approached the bunk. The rabid eyes glared up at him. He: twitched back the top blanket a few inches, disclosing See-See's starfished body. He pulled the blanket off. Her spread legs seemed symbolically to enclose the debris of the rest of his pornographic library, torn to streamers, stained with what looked like semen and other obscure liquids — in his bed.

With agitated but determined movements Keith gathered the remains into a large pile. He turned, deciding to get a sack from the garage. He hardly registered the crude poster bearing the legend johnny tacked to his door. He wondered how the photographs could most unobtrusively be destroyed. He started to cry. A whole way of life was coming to an end for Keith Whitehead.

xl: whitehead

The Whiteheads have several claims to being the fattest family alive. At the time of writing you could just go along to Parky Street, Wimbledon, any Sunday, one o'clock in the afternoon — and you'd see them, taking their seats in the Morris for the weekly Whitehead jaunt to Brighton.

"Get your huge fat arse out of the way" — "Whose horrible great leg is this?" — "Is this bit your bum, Keith, or Aggie's?" — "I don't care whose guts these are, they've got to be moved" — "That's not Dad's arm, you stupid great bitch, it's my leg!"

"It's no good," says Whitehead, Sr., eventually, slapping his trotters on the steering wheel. "The Morris can't be expected to cope with this. You can take it in turns staying behind from now on."

And indeed, as each toothpaste Whitehead squeezes into the Morris, the chassis drops two inches on its flattened tires, and when Frank himself gets in behind the wheel, the whole car seems to sink imploringly to its knees.

"Flora, close that sodding door," Frank tells his wife.

"I can't, Frank. Some of my leg is still out there."

A crowd has gathered on the pavement. Neighbors lean with folded arms on half-washed cars. Curtains part along the terraced street.

"Oh, God," says Whitehead, Sr., "they're all watching now. Keith! Give your mother a hand with her leg."

Keith squats forward and fights his mother's thigh up into the car, while Frank leans sideways and tugs at the far door strap with one hand and a fistful of Mrs. Whitehead's hip with the other. Aggie, Keith's sister, sits crying with shame in the back seat; she sees her family conflate into one pulsing balloon of flesh.

"Come on — nearly home."

"No!" shrieks Flora. "There's still a bit of arm hanging out!"

"Got it," pants Keith.

The door closes noiselessly and to ironic cheers from the crowd the four grumpy pigs chug out into the street.

"Get your arse off the gear lever, woman," Frank demands as they pull up at the lights. "How'm I expected to drive with arse all over the gear lever? Keith! Move over, can't you, you fat little sod. You're weighing down the right rear wheel. I can feel her listing to the right."

"Ah, shut up, you fat old turd. How can I move with Aggie all over the place back here? It's you who's weighing it down, you great fat old fool."

"I happen to have reduced considerably of late. And there's no cause for you to be so heavy — you're only four foot and a fart."

"Ah, shut up. You fat old bugger. You fat old cunt."

"Keith," said his mother, "don't talk to your father like that."

"Ah, shut up. You fat old bitch. You fat old slag."

"Keith," said Aggie.

"Ah, shut up."

"This can't go on," says Mr. Whitehead as the car wobbles down through the motorway heat haze. "Starvation diet, all of us, all next week. You too, Keith. All next week. Starvation diet. This can't go on."

One hour later they sit in silence round a sea-front coffee shop table, paw-like hands dipping occasionally into a dome of cream, jam, and custard slices. Warm sugary tea runs down their chins.

The four Whiteheads are ninety stone, heavier than the average rugby pack, a crazily overglanded brood, their house a billowing cartoon world of sunken sofas, hammock-like beds, and winded armchairs. They shuffle about it snarling and swearing at one another with the sheer thyrotoxic strain of keeping their bodies afloat.

: Whitehead, Sr.(for instance, is a fabulously obese human being, better than thirty-five stone. As he trundles down the street school parties are floored by his myriad stray fists of flab; bus platforms snap off should he climb on board; lifts whinny, shudder, and stay where they are when he presses the up button and plummet terrifyingly whether or not he is so foolish as to depress the down; chairs splinter beneath him; tables somersault at a touch from his elbow; joists crack and floorboards powder. Frank's weight problem endangered, too, his position as cook at the bus terminus cafeteria: he would bend down in front of the cooker and— why — his behind had swiped a shelf of pans off the opposite wall; he would turn round from the sink to find that his paunch had cleared the table; loaves, half-dozen cartons of margarine, even sides of beef would get lost for days in the fleshly gowns of his stomach. (Old Whitehead had been known also to eat the cafeteria bare while the manager went to the lavatory.) When it became quite impossible for Frank to enter the kitchen without some of him being automatically — by definition — either on the hot plate, under the grill, in the oven, or down the toaster, he was invited to pick up his cards. Frank had been a worthless cook anyway, hardly able to prepare an egg.

To make up the loss in income Mr. Whitehead decided to expand the ailing family sweetshop. By compelling his wife to model eighteen hours a day at the Hornsey, Wimbledon, and Baron's Court Art Polytechnics, he saved enough money to gut the sitting room and have installed some bright steel ovens, a fablon-decked counter, and a sign saying White head's Takaway Fish and Chips. The concern prospered, and eventually the sweetshop was phased out.

The turning point was the turning point also of little Keith's life.

He well remembered the transition. Keith would come home from school, a crimson-faced four-foot box in his sixth-form blazer, be refused a chocolate bar, snap at his father, then change into his white overalls. (He hated changing into these because they made him look appreciably more horrible than his school clothes did.) In hostile silence he and his father would serve the remaining children from the adjacent primary school — there would be more of them than usual because of the many white-stocks-last bargains featured in the closing- down sale. At 5:15 or so Frank's knuckleless fingers were curling round a Mars Bar or a Turkish Delight. Keith would wait a few seconds, then remove a few peppermint creams from the high glass case. With slightly more hurried movements Frank might reach for a sachet of Poppets and Keith for a box of Maltesers. Now Frank whips his thumbnail down a carton of Savoy Truffles and upends it into his mouth; Keith's head fizzes with imploding sherbert lemons. Bubbles of Caramac pop on Mr. Whitehead's lips; his son is lockjawed with fudge and Newberry Fruits. Frank skillfully flips a tray of violet creams onto the counter and laps them up like a dog. A runaway train of Toblerone shunts down the tunnel of little Keith's throat. By six-thirty they are engaged in a lurching, slow-motion alligator race to the downstairs lavatory-vomitorium. By seven, their batter-moist mouths gape beneath the fish-shop chip chutes.

The family gained a hundredweight in five weeks.

Shortly afterward, Keith went mad for a time.

Nothing seemed to precipitate it. One moment he was toddling out of the Mod. Lit. Library in Milton Avenue, London NW20; the next moment he was toddling into the Gregory Blishner Institute, Potter's Bar, London NW36. What had happened in the interim was a rush of terror and confusion as solidly chemical as adrenalin, a telephone call, and a bus ride.

Not that the preceding week had been entirely uneventful. For one thing it had included his inaugural few days at Wolf-son College, London — days that had opened up whole new eras of ostracism, mortification, and self-loathing. But Keith had been banking on that, and by and large he was agreeably surprised by the cordiality of his reception. On top of this, though, he had been independently menaced on the Monday by a traffic warden, an old man on the underground and a floor sweeper in a local pub. Keith had offered them no provocation and had accepted their threats and denunciations with respectful apologies. On the Tuesday he was denied service in a cafeteria — no reason given — and badly stoned by little boys in the park. The next day he crouched in his bedsitter drinking quarts of instant coffee. On the Thursday an entire Wool-worth's shop counter went into hysterics when he tried to buy a comb, a poker-faced conductor barred his entry onto an: uncrowded bus, he found and removed a sheet on the lodge notice board which read keith whitehead is A horror-show, his tutor advised him — for personal reasons which he would as soon not disclose — to change subjects, and his father rang to say that he spoke for the whole family in asking Keith never to contact them again. A more or less average week, you'd have thought. But on the Friday White-head started to be insane.

For an hour he sat waiting in the Institute's arc-lit vestibule. He beguiled it in an examination of the back of his hand, trying hard not to look down the endless yellow corridor where mad persons now groped and slunk along the walls as wraith-like male nurses swept past them with throbbing steel cylinders. "Whitehead? This way."

"How are you feeling?" the doctor asked.

"Sad and frightened."

The doctor knitted his fingers together over the desk and leaned forward. "How long, would you say, you have felt this way?"

Keith looked at his watch. "An hour and twenty minutes."

The doctor, a slow-talking Ceylonese, went on to ask Keith about his background, in a patient but unimaginative attempt to reveal traumas, blocks, repressions, and so forth. Although Keith answered all the doctor's questions with grim candor it soon became clear that his life had been quite devoid of emotional incident.

"Look," said Keith after a while, "you don't have to do all this. I know what the trouble is. It's quite straightforward."

The doctor sighed. "Okay. What is it?"

"No. I'm not telling you. You'll just think I've got paranoia."

"No, I won't."

"Yes, you will."

"No, I won't."

The doctor had already seen twenty-one male university students that morning. Six had complained of impotence, five of canceled sex, four of bedwetting, three of false memory, two of insomnia, and one of somnolence. The doctor had prescribed Contentules to every student except the one complaining of somnolence, whom he had instructed to go away.

"All right then," said Keith. "Well, as I told you, it's quite straightforward. No one likes me — actually most people dislike me instinctively, including my family — I'm not much good at my work, I've never had a girlfriend or a friend of any kind, I've got very little imagination, nothing makes me laugh, I'm fat, poor, bald, I've got a horrible spotty face, constipation, BO, bad breath, no prick, and I'm one inch tall. That's why I'm mad now. Fair enough?" "Yes," said the doctor.

Every life has its holiday, and Keith's month in the Institute was assuredly his. To begin with, he didn't go any madder. The panic and confusion receded at once, becoming a faint accusatory gibber at the nape of his neck. He found too that within a suspended community his sense of isolation could be turned to good account. He grew to think more coldly and shrewdly about his personal shortcomings. He found out what the average weight was for a five-foot man; he worked his way through the reading-room magazines, appreciatively noting down all instances of deformity and privation more acute than his own; a study of "The Human Body" section of the Guinness Book of Records assured him how puny his problems really were. In time, the feeling he had carried round with him since the age of six or seven, the feeling that he ought to be dead, gradually began to fade.

And with every day that passed little Keith took solace and grateful encouragement from his fellow inmates, watching the old teddyboys who yawned and sniveled in front of the common-room television, the fat forty-year-old infants who lay staked out with depressants in the wards, the mumbling bitches who leaned slumped like rubbish bags along the corridors, the sparrow-like girls kneeling nervously on the lawn. Airy with barbiturates, Keith would rove the Institute grounds, every now and then his face folding into a sneer or lightening with a thrill of relish as his colleagues made their twitching way past him. He had overheard it said that you always went madder at the Institute because "there was nothing to relate to." But Keith didn't want to relate to anything; he felt only hatred and contempt for the mutants around him, and if ever he wished to remind himself of the true direction of his life he simply gazed at the high Institute walls, visualized the road that went to London, and listened with pleasant detachment to the sounds of buses and high: heels in the street outside. The month did wonders for his confidence. Heck, he even got a girl.

Whitehead's sex life?

Eighteen years old, with £25 in the pocket of his tightest trousers, Keith had paced the clotted streets of Soho one mid-August evening, to cries of "Having a night out, Shorty?" "Isn't it past your bedtime, darling?" and "Hope it's bigger than you are, baby," until a frowning Negro beckoned him down the steps of a cafe basement. The Negro spread out his arms to introduce Keith to three sirens who perched on stools round a dirty hot-drinks machine.

"Well, well," said the center blonde. "Come on, then, big boy. How much you got?"

"Fifteen," said Keith.

The whore turned to the Negro. "Look, Mr. Boogie-Woogie, who the fuck do you think we are? You bring two-foot wonders down here with fifteen bloody—"

"Mary, I'm sorry," began the Negro brokenly.

"Why should I take it, Lester? Why, Lester, please tell me?"

"Oh, Mary," Lester implored. "I did not—"

"Twenty-five," Keith seemed to say. There was a silence.

"What was it you wanted, sonny Jim?"

"Eh? Oh, just a fuck."

"Yeah? Nothing flash?"

"Honestly."

Mary wagged her head at the girl on her right, who clicked her tongue.

Half an hour later Keith stood drowning in Piccadilly Underground. Melissa had taken his money, led him to a smelly cubicle, undressed on the bed and lay there like a section of plaster of Paris while Keith bounced and wriggled on top of her trying to purchase an erection. Then Melissa dragged out her cardboard box full of stimulator gadgets, electrode triggers, and prostate gimmicks, and sighingly applied vibrators, fur gloves, calipers.

"Look, you've had your twenty minutes."

"Oh, God," said Keith. "Look, couldn't you just try it with your hand?"

"Hey. C'mon now, sonny, you said no flash stuff.”

"That's not flash! What's flash about that? What could be less flash?"

"Go on. Bugger off. Go on, bugger off, you dirty little sod."

Keith demanded his money back. Melissa refused. Keith

asked for half his money back. Melissa refused. Keith begged

for his tube fare home. Melissa advised him to get going before

she kicked the shit out of him. Whitehead got going.

Things had been different with Lizzie.

When Keith first laid eyes on Lizzie Bardwell, in the Institute cafeteria, he naturally assumed that she was blind. She wore dark spectacles, kept her arms outstretched before her at all times, and had to be slotted into her seat by the two fat male orderlies. Keith watched closely as she ate. Lizzie was a thin, asymmetrically jointed figure with sparse carrot-colored hair and a triangular, freckle-dense face — but there was something about her Whitehead liked. Egged on by his Valium, and deciding that in the Institute no one knew what the hell was going on and that all the mad cunts wouldn't notice him getting shooed away, little Keith idled over to her table as she was eating her semolina and curds.

"Hi," he said. "Keith's the name. Mind if I sit here and talk?"

Lizzie shook down the bench a few inches and Whitehead vaulted in beside her.

"I am Lizzie Bardwell. Why are you in this place?"

"Hell — free meals, free bed, free drugs. Kind of restful. You?"

In a fast, highly inflected voice Lizzie said, "I've always had a sort of a squint, you know, which I'm very paranoid about. And it's got like I can't see because they're right on the side looking at the inside of my head." She placed her forefingers on either temple. "Like a kind of whale," she said, beginning to laugh, very loudly.

Keith began to laugh too, far, far louder.

Whitehead's dream girl. For the following week Keith was gallant and deferential, parading with Lizzie over the grounds, escorting her to therapy, sitting next to her at meals, waiting outside the shock-treatment booths, listening to incredibly

boring self-analyses, and only every now and then going noiselessly down on his knees to look up her skirt, or peering down her blouse when he rose to take his leave, or making: faces and V-signs at her while she chirruped on in sightless self-regard.

It happened on the eve of Whitehead's discharge, among the trees at the end of the front lawn.

"Although The Lunch have more native talent than One Times Two," said Keith, putting an arm round her narrow shoulders, "they haven't the professionalism."

"No?" said Lizzy. It was the first time they had touched.

"Or so it seems to me," he replied, pressing his free hand against one or other of her breasts. "Do you not feel this?"

"I always thought The Lunch lead guitarist, Gary Tyler, was too technical to ever really let go."

"Tyler, certainly," assented Keith as he guided a hot palm between her thighs. "But only in composition. In performance" — he hooked her dress over her waist and began to force down her tights—"he's as limited as the rest of them."

"Even in the Dark Tunnel album?"

"Not so much there, I grant you," little Keith conceded, tugging her bunched underthings over her shoes, "but you'll agree that his predictability is seldom, if ever, accompanied," he continued, rolling effortfully on top of her, "by what might be called a satisfactorily fulfilled expectation. For example. "

It was quick, as he remembered — quick, pleasureless and very mad.

Five days later Keith was enjoying a glass of water in the college bar when Quentin, Andy, Diana, and Giles came in.

"Nowhere to sit."

"By that little f attie over there," said Diana.

"What, the dwarf?" said Andy.

"I dislike dwarfs. They depress me," murmured Quentin, examining his rings.

"I'll handle it," said Andy.

Keith looked up in furtive terror as they crossed the bar toward his table. Andy stepped forward, compressed his nostrils with thumb and index finger, and nasally inquired, "There can't be anyone sitting here, now can there?"

"Highly unlikely," said Diana as the four sat,

"Bust out the fuckin' brandy, whyncha," said Andy. Keith sat stretched with horror. He didn't dare leave because they'd see just how short he really was.

"My mother's got manic depression again," said Giles through his laterally placed fingers, "and's got to go to the bin. She actually wants to know about some Institute near her, in Potter's Bar, actually. I don't want her to though, cos she'll make me see her more."

"That Blishner dump?" said Andy. "Yeah, I go there for drugs."

"Tell me things about it," said Giles. "Where is it, for instance, actually?"

Nobody seemed interested in replying.

"I can tell you," Keith found himself saying. "I can tell you, if you like."

"Really?" asked Giles. "Thanks, that would be… that would be… Have you got a pen or anything?"

"Yes," said Keith, producing one.

"Howda fuck do you know?" said Andy.

"I was there last month. I was in there."

"Yawn. A maddie. Let's make a run for it."

"No, I was in there, but I'm all right now."

"Good. Look, who the fuck are you anyway?" Andy asked, quite friendly now.

"Keith."

"Who?"

"Keith."

"Keith what, you little prick."

"Oh. It's an awful name. Whitehead."

"Whitehead's not such a bad name," said Giles. "White-head," he repeated experimentally.

"It is if you've got them all over your face," said White-head.

They all laughed.

"Hey," said Andy. "I like this dwarf. This dwarf, he's all right, you know? This dwarf's. okay."

41: his lucent GirLFriends

He watched the last of his lucent girlfriends curl in on herself, rise yearningly on the stirred embers, erase in black

smoke, and shrink to a charred and wizened ball. He poked the scattering fire with a stick. They were all dead now, his girlfriends. the one with the tenderly veined breasts, the: one that looked like a woman he had sometimes seen in the village, the one with the impossibly concave pants, the one with the deep and pleading eyes, the one whose lips had seemed to say. No, they were all dead, dead, and their ashes strewn upon the wind. What will my nights be now? he thought.

The question of who had done this thing to him interested Whitehead not at all. He had expressionlessly removed the johnny poster and burnt it along with everything else, without considering the matter further. It made no difference anyway. All the shame was his. He looked at Appleseed Rectory, half a mile away, hiding behind a nylon curtain of misty sunlight. "Get your staring done with," he said, beginning the long haul down the field.

"Open up, open up," shouted Keith wearily at the Tuckle door. "It's me, it's Whitehead."

The slat opened and the bolts were thrown back. Mr. Tuckle emerged. He stood there stonily.

"Out of the bloody way then," said Keith. "I want some more of that gin I brought you. That's if you haven't already bloody—"

Mr. Tuckle stood there stonily. Keith fell silent. He was in slippers, and now even Mr. Tuckle towered above him.

"What's the matter?" asked Keith.

"Go away, Mr. Whitehead," said Mr. Tuckle. "I'm sorry, sir, but we've decided that we don't want you here any more. Go away, Mr. Whitehead, please."

Keith limped in tears across the lawn. Once in his room he got to his knees and prayed for a few minutes. He then sat on his bed, sniffing richly. On the bunkside table, a piece of cheap writing paper and a ballpoint pen awaited the caress of his pudgy fingers. Dear Lucy, he began. As he wrote, his boots beckoned from the corner of the room.

42: PLUS WHICH

"Why, I'd restore a feudal society, of course," pronounced Quentin.

"Casual," said Andy, nodding.

"Casual?" said Roxeanne. "You mean you people aren't revolutionaries? Marvell, what the hell are we doing here with these people? What in fuck are you then?"

"We're ecstatic materialists," said Andy as he crawled across the floor, holding spent brandy bottles up to the light. "Meaning, we grab whatever the fuck's going." He drank deeply from an unattended glass. "Plus which, we grab it from people who haven't got much anyway. Check?"

Those conversations.

"Quentin," said Marvell. "In this feudal society, what if you were — what the hell are they? — serfs, yeah. What if you were a serf?"

"Bliss," Quentin replied. "The point eludes you. A hierarchical society is inversely reciprocal. The satisfactions of the higher echelons lie in command, protection, responsibility, in giving orders; the satisfactions of the lower echelons lie in docility, security, myopia, in obeying orders. It's a quasi-ritualistic enactment of one's role."

"What if you had a dumb lord and a smart serf?"

Andy pounced: "Then it's tough shit on the serf!"

"Precisely," Villiers affectionately agreed.

With conviction Roxeanne said, "You people have to be kidding. What do you feel — hey, Giles."

Giles looked up, smiling palely.

"Don't ask him," said Andy. "He's one too — practically a millionaire."

"Hey, Keith?"

Whitehead's boots were hurting him so much that he could hardly breathe, let alone speak.

"Don't ask him," said Andy. "He's not anything. He's just a wreck."

Roxeanne shook her head. "But you can't regress. There's no way. It's too late for that now. All you can do is smash everything, raze the entire planet, and then start over, make it new."

"In which event," crooned Quentin, "a feudal society would soon re-establish itself. It sounds very arduous. Why bother?"

"Not if you smashed everything. Culture, books, buildings, all the way back, every kind of institution, all the foci of—"

"All the what?" said Andy.

"Foci."

"Fuck you too," he said, shrugging.

: "All the foci of human memory. Obliterate it all. Entirely. Then we could really start over."

Throughout the morning Giles's anesthetized ears had fastened on and absorbed only the odd word or phrase— "bridge. gumboot… I'd give my eyeteeth… to crown it all… cap in hand. that's the drill. wisdom. " At Roxeanne's last words, however, he decided he could no longer remain silent. He sat up straight and said, "But what would happen— But what would happen to modern—"

Before Giles could stutter out the word dentistry, Andy was saying, "What's going on here? Hey! What's going on— there's no more lush! Come on, what's going on around here."

At length, Giles held out his cupboard keys.

"Christ, Giles," Andy said earnestly, "what kind of stunt was that to try and pull."

"Gin for me, Andy, actually," said Giles.

As Andy dashed from the room, Roxeanne turned to Quentin. Her voice was drained and plaintive. "What's the time?" she asked achingly.

"How much more day is there," Lucy said.

Quentin looked at his watch, a guilty host. It had stopped. "Not long," he said. "Not long."

Alcoholic inebriation had well passed the stage at which it might responsibly be explained away as extreme drunkenness. Even the relatively teetotal Celia had consumed well over a liter of brandy-orientated champagne cocktail. And yet the Appleseeders still seemed quite opinionatedly game. Their blood pressures and body temperatures were dropping, finding the time for various drugs to catch up to their stretched metabolisms. Whitehead, for example, felt that his torso might be a shipment of jumping beans, Diana and Celia alike believed that they were on the brink of grave hormonal upsets, Marvell burped with unusual volume and candor, and Lucy was under the impression that she was a ghost or a dead body. All about them, cellular and glandular negotiations raged.

Marvell gazed at his watch. "Oh-kay," he said. "Everybody all right? We should be out the other side of this thing pretty soon. Just wander around a bit and do what feels best to do. Any more of that cocktail.?"

The air in the room rolled. People began to fall through doorways.

43: CrueL BODY

All morning there had been talk between Andy and Skip of a game of badminton. Noticing that Skip's mouth was white-crumbed with dehydration, Andy malevolently challenged him to an immediate match.

"Now it's not a fuckin' American game," Andy briefed Skip as they extracted net and posts from the hall trunk. "So don't try kicking it or heading it or running around with it or any crap like that. You just" — he motioned with his racket— "whap it over the net with this, is all. Okay? And watch it, cos I'm fucking good."

Diana went upstairs to view the game from her bedroom window. She did this partly because she felt too ill to tolerate company, and partly because the confusion of her feelings for Andy had not yet abated the pleasure of watching him move about when he thought her eyes weren't on him. She lit a cigarette, resting her elbows on the wooden windowsill. The game began.

Andy won a few quick points by variously fair and foul means, penalizing Skip for "technical" misdemeanors, mis-positioning him to receive serve, capriciously amending the rules; but Skip had caught on fast and was moreover proving stubborn about the more audacious contradictions in Andy's scoring system. At 6–6, Andy was no longer master of his good temper, and when little Keith staggered out to admire the contest, Andy suggested that he fuck off again, menacing the craven Whitehead with his raised racket.

To Diana, Andy and Skip seemed equally strong and skilless, equally powerful and uncoordinated. Stripped to the waist, Andy looked marginally the more impressive, with his thick hair flapping and the glisten of sweat on his tanned back and glossy shoulders. Further, he had a habit of shouting Yeah! whenever he made a good shot and hooting sarcastically whenever Skip coerced him into a bad one. For all his clamorous bulk, though, Andy looked about seventeen. Skip, bespectacled, in T-shirt and khaki shorts, was far more composed, his mouth set resolutely throughout. And his body was hard and metallic by comparison, as if operated on tight cords — a sharp and unfriendly body, a cruel body.

"Johnny," said Diana.

: After a long, noisy rally, in which several reverses appeared to take place, Andy snapped his racket over his knee and stalked back toward the house, watched by a blankfaced Skip. Diana peered down as Andy's head bobbed out of sight. She smiled unpleasantly, until her eyes returned to the center of the lawn, where they were met by the American's.

44: wars and shit

"I can't believe I'm hearing this babies," said Marvell. "What are you, a fuckin' flower child?"

Giles did not reply.

"Listen," said Andy. "Listen," he said, flexing his shoulders as if about to lift some formidably heavy object. "Man has always been violent. It's only for a few years that we ever thought he might not be-and he was still having fuckin' wars and shit, Vietnam and that. Violence is innate, so it's sort of felt selfhood, realized livingness, it's expressing life in its full creative force — it's sort of creative to do it."

Giles frowned. "But what if you just went up to some poor old lady in the street and knocked out her, got her right in the. "

"Christ, hippie," said Andy, "what a crappy example. That's more like torture or something."

Giles frowned. "But isn't what you want. anarchy? I mean, what would become of law and policemen and fire engines and denti—"

"Yeah, well, you need all that too," said Andy, folding his arms. "But if I took you outside now and smacked the shit out of you, don't tell me you'd go running to the village pig, now, would you?" Andy leaned forward warningly.

Giles swallowed. "No, I promise, Andy."

"Well, then."

Those conversations.

"Hey. uh, Trip or Flap or whatever the fuck your name is—"

"Skip," said Skip.

"Skip. Check. You like fighting and fucking up animals and smashing things up and stuff, don't you?"

"Sure. Makes you feel good.”

"Check. Marvell, am I wrong?"

"No, you're not wrong," said Marvell.

"Check. Fuckin' check." Andy sat back and turned haughtily to Giles. "Okay?"

Giles was a worried man. This sort of talk was all very much in accord with his occasional anxieties about the house, with the air of unreason and casual menace that struck him at odd moments of sobriety: he didn't know — unpredictable shadows on the stairs, pockets of sourceless, murmured conversation, the feeling you got that no one was really alive there, the sense it gave of being suspended. Giles remembered his terrified awe when he had overheard a speed-racked Andy soliloquize one night about how he was going to slay Mr. and Mrs. Tuckle. "Then I'm going to get this fuckin' great meat cleaver," Andy had droned to himself, "and stuff all these ants and stuff up her snatch. And pull out her teeth with pliers. And staple up her lips. 'Ain't no use you beefing about it Mr. Tuckle. Take a seat, sir, please, whilst I make with the meathooks.'" Shudder shudder shudder. Giles had crept back to his room and hadn't come out of it again for five days.

"Andy," he said. "If you do decide to hit me, don't hit me in the face, please. All right? Anywhere, but not in the face. I'll pay you not to. "

Andy leaned forward and tousled Giles's hair. "Don't worry, chickenshit," he said. "It's not your turn yet."

"Thank you, Andy," said Giles, getting up to leave.

"Hey. Andy."

"Yeah, what do you want, Rip?"

"Skip," said Skip.

"Check," said Andy.

"Why — how come you didn't want me to go kick that heifer?"

"What heifer?"

"The heifer yesterday."

"Oh, the cow. Cos… it was all fucked up — and it had attacked us, so you ought to treat it with respeck."

"I wanted to go fuck it up some more."

"Well, I didn't want you to, see?"

"I wanted to kill it."

Andy gave Skip a hard look. "Well, you'd expect that from someone whose dad killed his mum.”

: "Pardon me?"

In the same tone Andy said, "You'd expect that from someone whose father killed his mother."

The scene changed like a film cut. Andy was carpeted on his back and Skip straddled his chest, hands white on Andy's throat.

"Aw — get him—/"

Providentially Quentin was mulling over some Rousseau in the smaller sitting room when he heard the struggle. He raced through the dividing doors. With Marvell's aid he peeled Skip from Andy's thrashing figure and flattened him on the sofa.

"What'd he say! What'd he say!" bawled Skip as Marvell ran to the dining alcove. He returned, fumbling with a hypodermic.

"Jesus," said Marvell. He eased the needle into Skip's flapping arm. "The fuck, Andy."

"What'd he say," moaned Skip, tears welling from his closed eyes, "what'd he say."

"I'd better lay an amnesiac on him too," said Marvell through his teeth. Skip's consciousness died from the room.

"What on earth happened?" asked Quentin.

Marvell explained while Andy climbed to his feet. He saw with relief that no one else was present. Moodily he dusted himself down.

"Now all we fuckin' need," Marvell was saying, "is for him to find the letter."

"The letter?"

"The one from his fuckin' father. It's in our room. I told you about it. It'd wreck his head to see it now."

"Ah yes, I remember. Give it to me," said Quentin, "for safekeeping. I'll return it before you leave. How fascinating. Tell me—"

As they conferred Andy moved over to the sofa, his back to the others. He leaned a palm on Skip's forehead, in the manner of one feeling its temperature. "Hope he's okay," he muttered. Andy's voice shook slightly when he said this be-cause he was pinching Skip's damaged ear with all his might. "He'll pull through," said Andy, wiping a bloody thumbnail on Skip's khaki shirt. "I think he'll pull through okay.”

45: THE BILLET-DOUX

Meanwhile, little Keith was sobbing loudly in the joyful solitude of the back passage. Following this treat, his legs now shooting out in all directions, Whitehead regained his cubicle where, with tweezers, chisel, and light hammer, he prised and chipped the blazing shoes from his feet. He sat back against the wall and let out a quiet roar of suppressed pain. Black blood ran down his shins.

Next to Whitehead on the floor lay the sex letter, the billet-doux, that he had composed for the delight of Lucy Littlejohn. Keith picked it up and surveyed it without embarrassment. It had, after all, none of the flaws common to such missives; it was not heated, rarefied, florid, or imprecise. On the contrary, it was a pedestrian — indeed, in style almost bureaucratic — synopsis of his present plight, with the rider that he would kill himself if Lucy did not alleviate it by sleeping with him. It began Dear Lucy and it ended Yours sincerely.

"'. the sum of nineteen pounds and seventy pence. It is imperative,'" Keith read out loud, " 'that you notify me of your decision within the next twenty-four hours. Thank you. Yours sincerely, Keith (Whitehead).'

"That'll get her going," he said, hobbling to his knees. "Oh yes, those brackets will get her going." He knelt against the bed and joined his hands in an informal attitude of prayer. "It's confidence wins today's girls," he snuffled.

"Please, God," he said to himself, "don't let all of this happen to me. It won't do to let it all happen to one person— to anyone, not just me. I still can't believe that it all has, really. I suppose it's that that keeps me going. Oh, great— fabulous. Look, why doesn't someone just come off it, is what I want to know." Keith looked around him. "I can't cope with this." Keith looked at his feet; even he was shocked. "I'm falling apart here. I can't cope with this. And who's doing it all to me, eh? Who?"

Well, we're sorry about it, Keith, of course, but we're afraid

that you simply had to be that way. Nothing personal, please understand — merely in order to serve the designs of this par-: ticular fiction. In fact, things get much, much worse for you later on, so appallingly bad that you'll yearn to be back at the Institute, or even in Parky Street, Wimbledon, with that family you so loathe. It's all too far advanced for us to intercede on your behalf. Tolerate it. You'll turn out all right in the end. Now go and lie on your bunk.

Keith lay spread on his bunk — spread like soft butter on warm toast, his body trickling gratefully into the folds of blankets and counterpane. He oozed nearer the wall as he heard female voices from outside. Next to the tobacco tin on his bedside table was a creased manila envelope. It contained an agitated reminder from the Advanced Dietary Research Commission. Whitehead replaced this with the billet-doux. "Ah, fuck it," he said, crossing out Kenneth Whitehead and putting, instead, Lucy (Littlejohn).

46: wan windows

Gazing about himself, Giles found that he was in his bedroom. This appeared to please him in a mild way. He strolled to the refrigerator. He started to hum. He removed from the frosted compartment a tall glass of gin and Southern Comfort, a drink he had not experimented with, nor indeed heard of, before. He even started to whistle. Shadows wandered in from the corners of the room.

He sipped, and held up the glass to examine it against the light. "Hey. This stuff. " He sipped, and held up the glass. "This stuff. isn't bad." He sipped.

Halfway across the room Giles remembered his daily letter to Mrs. Coldstream. He came to a halt and his knees wobbled. An expression of delirious puzzlement overtook his features.

What did she want him to write, what could have happened today, how could things change still, how could you make it new any more, what was there left to tell her now?

"Dear Mother," said Giles. "I nearly tripped down the stairs on the way out. Good job I didn't! Dear Mother, Luigi wasn't sure of the way back and we had to ask a man in the street. A bit of luck he did! Dear Mother, Everyone was up by the time I got back. High time, too! Dear Mother, I got drunk all day. Why? Dear Mother, I'm dying here fast. Dear Teeth, I'm gum the crown drill."

Giles sat down at his desk. Languidly he synchronized the jar of 15B pencils, the deck of A4 writing paper, the eager glass. Fifteen minutes later he had completed a letter full of such typically filial charms as sullenness, torpor, complete want of understanding or sympathy, plainly sarcastic affection, explosive false amusement, and clueless self-pity— spread like giant's graph readings over eleven airy sides. Giles forced the scroll into an envelope, well pleased with his work. Outside, the afternoon backed off across the hills, causing light to glow on the wan windows of some underwater warehouse or distant farm.

Gazing about himself, Giles found that he was in his bathroom. This appeared to displease him in a mild way. He felt intimidated by the white porcelain and hard steel. He stared sleepily into the mirror. He didn't notice that something had been written in shaving cream across the glass. "Heal me, heal me," he whispered. Then he noticed. It read Johnny. And then he saw the thing on his basin sidetable, the smashed mockup of his mouth, wet with someone's snot, saliva, and blood. Giles fainted half sideways into the deep carpet.

47: a bit permanent

"You can get used to anything in time, I suppose," said Lucy, descending like collapsed taffeta onto the lawn. "But I'd better start feeling better soon."

"Me too," said Diana. "I feel like a fiend."

"That's an awfully nice blouse, Lucy," said Celia. "Is it Thai silk?"

"Mm. Got it from La Soeur."

"Christ," said Diana. "How'd you manage that?"

"Whoring."

"Whoring," echoed Roxeanne. "I used to whore out on the Strip. Throat jobs. The guys used to get really phased because I wouldn't take any cash."

"Why wouldn't you?" asked Lucy.

"Had plenty cash of my own.”

: "What sort of men?" asked Celia.

"You know, just men. It was part of some project of Marvell's, I think."

"That's smart," said Diana. "Why did you?"

"Fun."

Celia frowned. "I think I'd find it terribly difficult to do anything with someone I didn't fancy a bit." She stopped frowning. "Do you know, I don't think I've ever been to bed with someone I didn't quite like," she lied.

"Me neither," lied Diana.

"Well, you're required to do that in my line of work," said Lucy. "The men you don't like require it. Fun? It's a nightmare. Sometimes I'm lying on my back counting wallpaper patterns and thinking about. pork pies or something, and there's some little Chink wriggling around like a maggot on top of me — and I know, I know: this is hell. This is hell. Think you wouldn't mind so long as his hair was different, his eyes were another color, his toes weren't like that. You would, though. It's a bloody good job I've got a heart of gold. Still, it beats typing."

"Right. And I don't think it makes that much difference," said Diana. "Say some man takes you out to a forty-pound dinner and everything. I mean, you'd feel a real slag if you didn't. It makes sense. Most people hate what they do. They spend all their lives hating it. It makes sense to finance what you like doing even if you get a bad fuck at the end of it. And with this protobiotic stuff. nothing too bad can happen."

"Nothing too bad," said Lucy. "You get to want a little bit more than nothing too bad."

"It's not that difficult," said Celia mildly. "I've done it— at a time I thought I never could again. It can be done still."

"No one I know can still do it," said Lucy. "And I'm fucked if I can."

Those conversations.

"Me too," said Diana. "If only women got sexual boredom too. But they just don't seem to get it the way men do. And you can't stay with someone who doesn't want you."

"Doesn't what?" asked a preoccupied Roxeanne, lifting her hands palm upward in a supplicant gesture in order to flex her breast muscles. "Give you a minute and you'll be saying women are basically monogamous."

"Well I am," said Celia. "Now.”

"Pardon me, Celia," Roxeanne said, "but I think you're the one who's in real trouble. This marriage gimmick— I mean, just think of the children, think of—"

"That's not really what I mean. I think I mean just having something serious and, well, and a bit permanent."

"That's what I think I mean too," said Lucy.

Diana looked away down the lawn. A vague regret edged at her, but she shrugged it off. When she looked back, Lucy was smiling at her. Diana smiled too.

"I've fucked them big," sang Lucy Littlejohn, closing the lavatory door behind her, "I've fucked them small. I've fucked them fat, I've fucked them all! I've fucked them—"

Shrewdly Whitehead had positioned himself on the first rung of the hall stairs; one hand clutched the banister rail, while the other held up a creased manila envelope.

"Hi there, Keith. Wotcher doing?"

"Lucy. I've written you a letter," said Keith.

"Fancy," said Lucy.

"Will you read it, please."

"Okay."

Little Keith watched as Lucy did so. She ran her eyes over it quickly, releasing a snort of incompetently suppressed laughter. Then her expression sobered and she perused it with some care.

"Well?" said Keith.

Lucy moved closer to him. She took one of his fingerless hands in hers.

"No? You won't?" he asked evenly.

She shook her head.

"Fair enough. Why not, by the way, just out of interest? Not enough money, or is it just me?"

Lucy leaned forward. "No one else knows this," she whispered. "Heroin. A year. I'm dying now."

"But your… It isn't. " Keith stared at her bare forearm.

"No, but my bum's like the far side of the moon."

Keith experienced intense gratification. "Why? Can you stop it now?"

"Nope. So you see, you sort of go off sex. You lose sex. That's one of the good things.”

"Ah, fuck it," said Keith. "My cock doesn't work any more anyway."

They laughed together.

"That's what I mean," said Lucy. "All this. " she gestured vaguely, "it's too many for me. Look at us now. Can you imagine us old?"

Keith seemed to consider this for a few seconds. "No way," he said.

"No way at all," said Lucy.

48: THESE DAYS

When she reached the end of the drive Diana turned to make sure Andy was following her. She heard the front door being yanked shut and Andy trotted into view. Diana looked beyond him at Appleseed Rectory. The dead texture of its bleached walls was even more pronounced in the summer-thunder afternoon. "All right, all right," he said.

Andy and Diana had spent so little time simultaneously alone and conscious in the past few weeks that they felt slightly adrift strolling together along the warm macadam of the village street. Her head bowed, Diana walked with arms folded across her chest. Andy's mind felt oppressively clear. The badminton had evaporated the champagne cocktails and the hash he smoked continuously did about as much for his jaded system these days as oxygen. Minutes passed. To forestall, or at least delay, boring things from Diana, Andy said, "Those Americans are getting me down. I'm going to beat one up if I get half a chance. And I mean really beat them up."

"Like you really fucked Roxeanne?"

This took Andy by surprise. He had forgotten Diana knew about that. He chose to ignore the remark. "Especially that tall fucker — the one with the crappy name. Rap. Yeah. Hey, I bet they sent you that note — the one on the bed. What you reckon? If I could just prove that I could really go to town. What you think?"

Andy shadowboxed unenthusiastically. Diana walked on.

"Fuck, Diana, you said you wanted to talk."

"I'm sorry. Andy, wait here a minute. Won't be long."

Andy stood grumbling to himself outside the mini-market.

He had been banned from its premises following an occasion two months earlier on which he had collapsed drunkenly into a six-foot display pyramid of BeanMeal tins and then slapped the elderly assistant manager round the shop for. for. Andy couldn't remember what for. He scanned the street for village down-and-outs — in particular Godfrey de Taunton, the legless hobo who had recently won Appleseed obloquy (and a skillful walloping from Adorno) for being found asleep in their coalshed. "De Taunton," Andy muttered, "you'd better not show yourself this afternoon." He looked the other way, shielding his eyes with his hand. "Is all."

Diana emerged from the mini-market. Andy noted with fresh boredom that she was still looking hunched and preoccupied. They began to walk back. To walk back in that foot-dragging, tense, dilatory, pregnant style that comes when something is nearly being said. Andy wanted to run, do cartwheels, leap in the air, go to the pub, scream.

"Baby, can we sit here for a bit?" said Diana, turning her head to a wooden bench recessed a few yards from the road and partly canopied by the leaves of the dying elm on the loose-soiled verge. The bench, they now noticed, was patterned with the amorous graffiti of the local young. Billy fks Jane, Susan Fs Emily, Tom fucks Cynthia, Chris F Peter. Andy sighed with disgust as he made out a much more scored and faded etching, Peter L Anne.

"It takes you back, doesn't it?" said Diana.

"Mm? Takes you back to what? Doesn't take me anywhere."

"I don't know. Christ, to when you carved this sort of thing on benches."

Andy shrugged. "I never did."

"Well, to when you could be bothered to think about things like that. When you had time to be bothered."

Andy shrugged. He took out his large, multipronged penknife and began to chip absentmindedly at Peter L Anne. "I've never had the time. It seems like I've always been like I am now, always lived like I live now. That's how it seems, anyway."

"You don't care about me any more, do you, baby?"

Andy kept his back turned. At first he had enjoyed her

calling him "baby." These days it made him shiver, as if in fear. He hesitated, then a listless determination came over: him. He dug the knife harder. "A bit. Not much. I don't know. What you feel about me?"

"I don't know. Something. Something or other. I've never stayed with anyone as long as I've stayed with you."

"Me neither."

"Do you want to forget it?"

Andy shrugged. "Up to you."

"No it is not up to me."

Andy shrugged. "I don't mind going on. See how it goes."

"Christ, isn't there more than that? What's going to happen to us all?"

"You just go on," said Andy, hardly able to believe his luck. He had never known Diana to be so dejected and un-aggressive, so unsure.

"Quentin and Celia have more."

"Yeah, well — hey, give me a, a. " he snapped a finger forgetfully, "fuck, a cigarette. Jesus. Quentin and Celia — it's just a question of going on till you get too pissed off to change. And you can't cope with being alone. And the street sadness and false memory get bad. When that happens you stick with whoever you're with then. I can't see that it matters a shit who."

"You don't fuck me any more. You don't even hit me."

Andy leaned harder on the knife. "Yeah, well, that's just what I mean about getting pissed off. You get pissed off with cunts."

"It's my cunt."

"Nothing personal, Diana. It's just cunts. I hardly want to fuck anyone these days. I've done all that now." He chipped the last of the wood away and sat up straight. "Maybe we'll end up together. Things are beginning to slow down for me now. I haven't got that far to go."

"I want more."

"More fucks?"

"No. Just more. Not much more, but more."

Andy shrugged.

Diana dropped her cigarette to the earth. Although she was crying a little her voice was firm. She looked at the fading

graffiti. "Don't you think we must have made a mistake a

long time ago to end up like this. That something went wrong and that's now why we're all so dead. Baby?”

Andy started.

"Can't we go back?"

"Go back? Oh, to the house. Oh, yeah. Check."

49: HELL OF A PLACE

Andy returned just in time to break up a talk about bisexu-ality. Marvell had that minute asked Whitehead what his leanings were, but of course little Keith fell silent when he saw Andy swank out onto the lawn.

"All that camp and unisex and crap," said Andy: "dead babies now. When I was a kid they were doing all that. All a bluff set up by the queers. It's a pain in the arse."

Marvell laughed uproariously. "Would you — would you honestly claim to be a 'heterosexual'?"

"There are two sorts of bisexual," said Quentin. "Homosexuals and ugly heterosexuals."

"Yeah, well I'm a fuckin' heterosexual," said Andy.

"Andy: by saying that you realize you're limiting your relationships to a mere half of the human race?"

"Babies, babies. That's hippie talk, boy."

"You truly want to limit yourself in this way?"

"Yeah," said Andy.

"Don't you remember what you were saying about the Conceptualists? Think about it, Andy. We agree, don't we, that sex isn't erotic any more. It's carnal — conceptualized— to do just with geometries and sensations?"

". Yeah."

"And that Other sex is to do with choice rather than urge?"

". Yeah."

"And that perversion is justified — no, demanded—by an environment that is now totally man-made, totally without a biology?"

". Yeah."

"Then why," concluded Marvell, "why negate yourself into a rationalist one-sex block?"

"I just don't like queers, is all," said Andy, deep in thought.

Marvell snorted a nostrilful of blood onto the grass, wiped his nose with the back of his hand, and laughed drunkenly.

"Heard about the Body Bar in Santa Barbara? No? Hell of = a fuckin' place. The waiters and waitresses are nude, natch— and you get fucked there for the cover charge. But you hear the gimmicks? You can have cunt cubes in your drinks. I mean it. And not just flavored with cunt. Real juice in the cubes. They got. yeah, they got tit soda, cock cocktails, pit popsicles… Oh yeah, and ice cream that tastes of ass. Hell of a place."

Marvell snorted a nostrilful of blood onto the grass. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand. He laughed drunk-enly.

"It's arse, not ass," said Andy, rolling over. "Arse."

Those conversations.

Marvell stood swaying at the kitchen door. "Okay," he said, closing it noiselessly behind him and joining Skip by the cooker. Marvell handed Skip something small. At their feet The Mandarin purred stertorously as it worked its way through a large bowl of Kat.

"Right," said Marvell. "Dump it in its fuckin' food. Give it fuckin' all of it."

Skip crouched, chuckling.

"Is it eating it?"

"It. Sure," said Skip.

"Fuckin' cats. Kick the shit out of them one minute, feed them the next, they think you're fuckin' God. Okay?"

"Okay."

"Right. C'mon. Let's go watch the preview."

"Whose cat was it, Mar? D'you know?"

"Leave the door open. So it can get out. Celia's, I think. Yeah, it — I think it belonged to Celia."

l: celia

When Celia Evanston was seventeen her stepmother, Lady Aramintha Leitch, drew her into a frescoed alcove of her Roman apartment and offered her stepdaughter a new Jaguar, a flat in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, and 10,000k. per annum on the condition that Celia didn't make a pass at the water-ski instructor Lady Leitch was currently drunkening on the patio sundeck. Spottily Celia blinked into her stepmother's over-tanned face, slipping both hands into her jean pockets.

"What makes you think I want him?"

"Darling, it's just that Giovanni and I should like to be alone together."

"What makes you think he wants me?"

"God knows, but I do think it." Lady Leitch poked a cigarette under her top lip; it wobbled as she asked why Celia didn't do something about her complexion, her poise, and above all her hair. "And why are you so fat?"

"I eat a lot. And what does it matter about Giovanni, if I'm so hideous?"

"You're sixteen. It's not that he wants to but that he knows he can."

"And what about you?"

"No. Come on. Off with you. Off. Off. Off."

For two years Celia threw in her lot with the decadent London young, gave parties for shits in satin plus-fours and bitches in neon camisoles, ate at Tastes and Casa Ari beside pricks with powder-puffed hair and tarts in three-piece pinstripe suits, went to Serena's and Poor on the arms of bastards in high-heeled gambados and slags in tapestry body stockings. She awoke at eleven, exhumed whatever ponce or pimp happened to be in her bed, dressed with the care of the not-quite-pretty, would be drinking Bloody Marys with fat hairdressers and scum-of-the-earth antique dealers in an underlit Chelsea restaurant by twelve-thirty, on to the conservatory cool of the chosen lunch venue with trashy photographers and one-hundred-word models, stupid middle-aged fashion designers and vicious pop-group managers. In the afternoons she cruised the Fulham Road for minors, the street markets and coffee shops, a sampler of public schoolboys in their first velvet suits, suburban tikes with bouffant hair-dos, incipient queers in see-through strides. She dined on the park or by the river with the same cast of crooks, fools, and whores, before submerging into the heavy, soundless, crypt-like opulence of a preselected nightclub, where vile aliens trade in old models for new and shrewd prostitutes keep a few inches between the toilet seat and their bodies. Cocaine until three, some kind of

sex until four.

How foreign this was to her compliant and shockable nature Celia never realized until Quentin swept into her life. She had had no clue but her money, and this existence was: launched and kept afloat by money, was described and identified by money, was all about what money could do.

Celia didn't know her stepmother was in town until she rang from the Connaught. Aramintha had flown in from Rome to finalize her divorce, having a month before surprised Giovanni in bed with the bellboy and screwed a broken Fanta bottle into his startled face. She was now going under the name of Lady Aramintha Gormez.

"Darling, come to lunch," were Lady Gormez's opening words, as if Celia had dined with her the night before. Celia said she would and replaced the telephone on the bedside table. She gazed at the wall of clothes in the fitted closet opposite, wondering what to wear and whether her stepmother had changed much in two years.

"I'm never going back to Rome. And it's Barces up your Arces too," said Lady Gormez, referring to her Barcelona penthouse. "I just can't stand those honking little dagos. Franz and I rather think Switzerland. I must say, darling," Lady Gormez told her grapefruit, "you have improved enormously." She looked up. "You're not as fat as you were. your skin's improved, and your hair is really, really quite lustrous. London life must suit you."

Celia turned away. She thought that she probably didn't want to see her stepmother again.

An oblique glimpse, then, at Celia's sex life.

The day before she met Quentin Celia threw a small soiree at her Cheyne Walk flat: two actresses (good friends of hers), a personable interior decorator, and the loutish, sidling bass guitarist of a successfully retrograde pop-group. And so Celia straightens clumsily from the cushions, declines a joint from the interior decorator, takes the bass guitarist's hand, and says, "Are you going to come to my room for a little while?"

Jeff gets up and stumbles after her.

It is clear that Celia is naked beneath her smock, so old Jeff simply folds her onto the bed, hitching the material up

with his own body. Their lips joggle scummily. Then, with sharply flexed elbows, Celia pressures Jeffs head down over her breasts, stomach, until it lodges between her thighs. This is where she likes his head best to be.

Two minutes pass.

Downstairs, the interior decorator starts like a cat that has heard a distant meow in the night. Jeff rocks down the stairs, rubbing his mouth with his jean jacket sleeve.

"Christ, man, what am I doing?" He stops in the middle of the room and clamps his face between his hands. "Why'd you let me do it, man, plating a girl like that. My head must be really. really scrambled."

"Wow, what went on, man?" asked an actress.

"Oh, fuck, I don't know. Here."

An actress holds up a brandy glass.

"Jesus. Let's get out."

"We can go to my place," said an actress.

"Right," said the interior decorator.

Rigid, legs still apart, The Mandarin sniffing at her thighs, Celia hears the door slam shut.

"You're spreading yourself too thin, lovey," said her stepfather when she gave him a minimally bowdlerized version of the incident the following morning. He was on the way to a heavy mistress on the Embankment and had called in for tequila and sympathy. "Perhaps you shouldn't be spread that far. Just a suggestion."

"How do you mean?"

"Well, if you leave a little bit of yourself with everyone, you might find one day that there isn't much left. See?"

Celia said, "Then you'd have been used up long ago."

He laughed painfully through his hangover. "No, don't misunderstand, lovey, I've always thought that fucking was a godsend for us oldsters and a bane for you youngsters who came up with the idea in the first place. Bloody marvelous! All these people suddenly willing to do it, and no guilt! That was the really new thing for us." He coughed horribly.

"Yes," said Celia.

"Well, our sexual natures were formed, so we could never suffer from anything worse than ennui. I think that's why we let you do this to yourselves. To liberate ms. But your lot, lovey, you free libbers. you thought you'd get free. You didn't get free." He picked up his cigarette case. "I must be

off. Suki awaits. Give my cordial regards to the old bitch should you tangle with her again while she's here. Who's she: with now — nine-year-old Indonesians? Ta-ta, lovey. Take care."

Celia had not been intending to score that afternoon but the moment she saw Quentin she knew that she would have to have him. As he danced down Beauchamp Place, the breeze playing cheekily with the soft curls of his hair, the traffic seemed to wind to a halt and the very air to trail motionless in the sky. If necessary, she thought, she would simply present him with a blank check, waiving her more subtle last-ditch measures — the bland preludial offer of a tape recorder or silk robe, the ten-pound notes fanned on the hall table.

Oh, let him not be queer, she beseeched, bundling her shopping into the Jaguar and leaning negligently on its silver haunches.

"Hello," she said as he cruised past. "Didn't we meet at the Ormondes'?"

He paused and smiled lightly. "I have met a great many people at the Ormondes'," he said, "but I believe that you are not among that select band."

"Oh, dear. What a shame," said Celia.

"Yes. Isn't it," said Quentin.

She had wanted to roar back to her flat and beach him straightaway. As it was, she was led into beguiling the most adventurous and sensual few hours of her life: he took her for a walk. They promenaded via Kensington Gardens, along the Serpentine, to Speakers' Corner, and back through the park. For Celia it was a sweet, cocaine afternoon; she floated by his side, strummed by the resonant ease of his voice and the spectral beauty of his presence. At six o'clock, Quentin refused the offer of an introduction to The Mandarin and a Bellini at her Cheyne Walk flat, kissed her transiently on the forehead, and arranged to meet her for luncheon the following day. At Thor's she drank heavily to tame her sexual excitement. Quentin divined that it would not be hard for him to take advantage of Celia. He did so. As soon as she had finished a second Green Chartreuse, Quentin took Celia straight out and married her.

"I do," said Celia.

51: JUST CHECKED OUT

"Look!" she cried. "Here's my friend The Mandarin."

Celia turned and smiled into her husband's green eyes. Those present looked up blearily. "Isn't she in a good mood I"

She did seem to be. The Mandarin came jumping in from the kitchen. It spun round. Its tail hairbrushed and its body went tense. It leapt hissing in the air. Its body flattened out like a hunter. It ran galvanically round the room, on sofas, chairs, walls. It cuffed a champagne cork along the carpet. It lay on its back and indolently feinted at the air. It chased its tail. It ground and flexed its claws on the skirting board. It went into a series of soft little springs. It nosed about the floor in impossible caution. Its eyes closed. It edged into the lap-like convexity of a cushion. It curled up and—

"It curled up and then we all like flashed that it was dead," Roxeanne explained.

Andy knelt over The Mandarin's body. He raised its kittenish head — the creased eyelids, the folded-back, lupine ears. When he let go it fell at once into its dead posture.

"It just freaked," said Marvell.

"Yeah."

Andy crossed the room and gripped Celia's trembling shoulder. Quentin, in whose arms her head was buried, looked up hushedly at his friend.

"It was very old," he said.

"Yeah."

Andy returned for the last time to The Mandarin's body. "I loved that cat," he said unsteadily. "I did."

'It just checked out, man," said Marvell.

"Yeah," said Andy, breathing in. "But Jesus I hate this no-good motherfuckin' chickenshit weekend."

52: Tear-TracKS

"Good evening, sir. What can I get you? It's been an absolutely glorious day, sir, hasn't it?”

Andy pitched two one-pound notes onto the bar. "Brandy," he said. "Two doubles."

"Right you are, sir. The Hine, sir.? Or would you like to try the Martell?"

"Yeah."

"Would you prefer the three-star, sir, or the four?"

"I don't give a shit," said Andy.

Within half a minute Andy had two glasses of brandy in front of him. He emptied the first glass into the second and emptied the second into his mouth. He pitched two one-pound notes onto the bar. "Again," he said.

"Certainly, sir."

The landlord refilled both glasses. Sighing histrionically, Andy poured the one into the other. "Barkeep," he said as he moved off to the window with his drink, "you're a pain in the arse."

Andy felt bad. It wasn't the death of The Mandarin — it had been quite a casual kick bag, he supposed — but he had had no emotion for the cat other than mild irritation. No: it was false memory. He had sustained an attack of it that afternoon, his second in a week. For fifteen minutes he had lain on his bed thinking about his father — a gray-haired man who looked like a successful doctor, with an efficient, reserved manner and a charmingly defenseless smile — before realizing that he didn't have a father. He didn't have one. But, again, it wasn't this that depressed him; he wouldn't have been able to understand such a loss. The memory had come, as always, with none of the piecemeal haze of fantasy, but with all the settled and poignant soft clarity with which the past reconvenes. Only it was false memory. It wasn't his. Those images! They were like the displaced memories of someone else's mind, the photographs of another's past. Sadness washed through him. He felt secondhand.

"I feel secondhand," Andy muttered. "False memory. Bastard false memory."

"Sorry, sir? What was that. A refill, sir?"

Andy flipped a hand in the direction of the bar. "Ah, shut up," he said. "Just shut the fuck up."

Ignoring Skip's invitation to join the others in the sitting room, Andy rolled a ten-paper joint on the kitchen table and took it out to smoke in the garden, the air gun swinging loosely at his side. He sat down on the slope beneath the trees. It was evening and the cool doves filled the humming air.

The joint lit, Andy lay back and thought about a holiday he had had a few years ago, when he had taken a beaten-up Land-Rover to Italy. He had been hopelessly in love with a friend of his sister's at the time, a small, lithe Jewess called Anna whom he'd met only twice and kissed only once. He had written to her every day with youthful desperation, gushing more and more extravagant promises until.

Andy opened his eyes. The trees were suddenly loud with birds. "How long.?"

Andy sat up straight. He had never had a sister and he had never been to Italy and he had never been in love with a Jewess called Anna. False memory again. He pressed his palms to his temples and exhaled breath. "False memory again," he said. "Sonofabitch false memory again. Fucking hell."

"Andy? It's me."

Andy opened his eyes. Giles hovered uncertainly above him. "Uh, hello, kid," said Andy.

"You've been crying too," said Giles, noticing the fresh tear-tracks on Andy's cheeks.

". Yeah."

"What was it, actually?"

"False memory."

"Oh. I don't get that. I get street sadness. Even when I'm nowhere near streets. Why's that?"

"It just keeps getting back to you."

"Mm. Funny, isn't it, about drugs," said Giles. "They always said it would be brain damage, something like that. It isn't, though. It's just sadness. Sadness." Giles sniffed. "Marvell sent me to get you. He wants us to go and take some more. Shall we?"

"Drugs got me into this," mumbled Andy, "and drugs are gonna have to get me out."

"By the way, Andy, is one of those American chaps called

'Johnny'?"

Andy half shook his head.

"I thought they weren't. Andy, what are you sort of doing, : iactually?" Giles asked, gazing up at the white doves in the branches overhead. "Killing the birds?"

"No. I… they don't. "

"May I have a go?"

Andy flapped a hand torpidly at the rifle.

"What I… you just… it won't. pull the. and it. "

A compressed thud ignited the tree and the threshing castle hurled the birds off into the sky. A wide dove swung down to the earth. It spun like a dislodged Catherine wheel.

Andy stared up through the frightening leaves. "Giles! You stupid fuck! It's a dove, it's a dove!"

Giles reeled away from the wounded bird. "Kill it, Andy," he wailed. "Kill it."

53: THe LumBar TransFer

Inside Appleseed Rectory, the first light came on. From their various corners they were all moving quietly and purposefully toward the main room. With the passing of day and the advent of evening their sicknesses and anxieties seemed to be momentarily neutralized, blent off into the changing air. Soon the windows would be dark and there would be nothing but Appleseed Rectory and themselves.

"The central nervous system is a coded time scale," began Marvell, "and each overlap of neurones and each spinal latitude marks a unit in neuronic time. The further down the CNS you go — through the hind brain, the medulla, into the spinal track — gene activity increases and concentrates and you descend into the neuronic gallery of your own past, like your whole metabiologic personality going by in stills. As the drug enters the amnionic corridor it will start to urge you back through spinal and archaeopsychic time, reactivating in your mind screen the changing landscapes of your subconscious past, each reflecting its own distinct emotional terrain. The releasing mechanisms in your cytoplasm will be awakened and you will phase into the entirely new zone of the

neuronic psyche. This is the real you. This is total biopsychic

recall. This is the lumbar transfer. Come over here one at a time, please.”

Yes, it was seven o'clock and a pall of thunder hung above the Rectory rose gardens. The formerly active air was now so weighed down that it seeped like heavy water over the roof. Darkness flowed in the distance, and the dusk raked like a black searchlight across the hills toward them.

But pity the dead babies. Now, before it starts. They couldn't know what was behind them nor what was to come. The past? They had none. Like children after a long day's journey, their lives arranged themselves in a patchwork of vanished mornings, lost afternoons, and probable yesterdays.

54: TOO GOOD TO WASTE

"Keith!" shouted Andy as he wheeled the videotape into the center of the room. "Lie down and plug that bit in under there. You dumb fuck — not that bit! Christ. How long did Marvell say it'd take? An hour? Roxeanne — Diana — get me a brandy, willya. I'm practically blacking out here."

"This stuff should really be heavy," said Roxeanne eagerly. "We picked up the tapes in New York just before we came out — haven't seen all of them yet."

"Not really heavy," droned Skip. "Just with pigs, shit like that."

"It remains axiomatic," observed Villiers, "that sex films fatigue. If they're not sexy, they're sexy. Which is the more tiresome?"

"That's good coming from you," said Marvell.

"I've never seen a sex film before," whispered Giles over his glass.

"Keith! Will you — will you get the fuck out of there?"

Whitehead had been subject to crawl beneath the bottom shelf of the fitted bookcase in order to plug in the videotape. So very short were his arms, however, that he couldn't reach the socket. Andy kicked at and stomped on his tremblingly obtruded legs.

"Give me that." He snatched the plug from Keith's hand and knelt on the carpet. He sipped his drink. "You're too

fuckin' fat anyway."

At length Andy slapped the cartridge into the tape console, turned on the power, and sat down, adjusting his groin and staring with hostility around the room.

"Right then. If I don't get a bonk," he said, "somebody pays."

Twenty minutes later the room was awheeze with boredom.

Various unspeakable acts had been variously portrayed. A porker had indeed made a young lady his, and there had been an additional coupling between a twelve-year-old boy and a representative of the monkey tribe. Large helpings of excrement had been consumed ("Oh, wretched evacuees!" Quentin cried), people had showered in urine, and they were shown a genuine sex death, in which an elderly actress was asphyxiated on a brace of craning phalloi. The remainder was a jangling bestiary, in whopping closeup, of gaping vaginas, rhubarb penises, and gouged behinds.

"Fuck you, Marvell," said Andy. "Fuck you. I wouldn't cross the street to do all this shit, let alone watch it. I don't know why the fuck I'm still sitting here. I don't know the fuck why I am."

"Why not put on something really sexy," said Lucy, "like Dumbo."

"What, what's the matter?" asked Skip. "Nothing wrong with this stuff."

"Change it. I don't like all the. " said Giles in a muffled voice. His head had been buried in a cushion ever since the first reel, when an actress had removed her false teeth the better to fellate a crippled Negro.

Marvell shifted in his seat. He appeared to be genuinely pained by the coolness of the Appleseed response. "Hey, Skip, get— put on the thing Archie gave us. The new one." He turned to Quentin as Skip broke the cassette seal. "Yeah, I know. But this one's different. Some Canadian sex outfit put it together. This should be new."

"Can anything be that any more?" breathed Quentin, crossing his legs and folding his arms.

The scene opened up onto a featureless suburban sitting room. Directly in front of camera stood a low-slung sofa. No other furniture was visible between it and the gray, picture-less far wall. Simultaneously, from either wing, a young man and woman entered and sat down next to each other. Dressed in white shirts and dark suits of conventional cut, they were of pleasant but unremarkable appearance. After a stylized pause, the young man put his right arm round the young woman's shoulders. She turned to him with an expression of cordial reserve. They kissed. The young man moved closer, by way of consolidation, but the girl was not responding so much as lending her acquiescence, her hands remaining palm upward at her side. When, half a minute later, he began to kiss her throat and ear, something flickered remotely in her half-closed eyes. He cupped her far cheek with his left hand, allowing it to ski down her shoulder to the top button of her blouse. The girl shrugged the hand away. The action was repeated several times, the girl retaliating with less and less resolve. Then the man's palm descended quietly, contingently, on the bosom of the girl's blouse. Their kisses grew more arrowy.

"The fuck with this. That Archie's gonna—"

"Shut up," said Andy, erasing Marvell with a wave of his arm. "Shut up."

By now the top two buttons of the girl's shirt had been breached and the man had begun to pay studiedly oblique attention to her thighs. His long right arm was hooked round her shoulders, where it continued to mobilize her chest, as his left casually smoothed her neat charcoal skirt. The girl diverted her hands against this new threat. Another button popped open.

"Jesus," whispered Andy. "She's wearing a bra!"

The girl's ambiguous resistance was by this stage centered exclusively on her nethers, abandoning the quarter-naked billows of her breasts to the man's importunate palm. As he stepped up the tempo of his kisses, he endeavored to slide his left wrist between her kneecaps. They remained firmly clamped. Changing his tactic, the man raised his left hand to her breasts and began to circle his elbows on her loins. The skirt hitched up a few inches.

"Stockings," said Andy raptly. "Bloody hell."

Whether through arousal or agitation, their movements had become strained and aggressive. Bearing down on her breasts with his face, the man had introduced a stretched left leg which he attempted to steer between hers. The girl's legs gave. Now he seemed to be climbing on top of her, his mouth and both his hands congregating on her breasts while his forearms and torso hoisted up her skirt. As he did so the girl gave the impression of settling below him but abruptly: began to slither out from underneath. Her skirt rode high up her thighs, shoving into camera view stockings, white suspender-belt, and taut pink panties — on whose strained mound the young man closed his fingers.

". YEAH!" roared Andy.

At once the girl lurched to her feet, struck the man forcefully across the cheek, and strode off the screen. The picture melted on a face all beaten up with lust.

Giles had frozen with a glass inches from his parted lips. Blood had suffused Whitehead's visage, momentarily banishing its dull cadaverous sheen. The Villierses had clutched each other, and Diana and Lucy were glancing confusedly around the room.

"She. she…" Andy writhed in his chair. "She didn't fuck him. she didn't fuck him," he croaked.

Only the Americans had showed no reaction. They consulted one another cluelessly; and then Roxeanne spoke. "If that's. Listen—" She raised her voice to pierce the jerky chatter. "Listen. If something like that gets you up, why don't we get something going right here."

". hit him — just cos he. "

". almost made it. Thought he was gonna. "

". laid it on that bra. those fuckin' stockings. "

Roxeanne looked threateningly at Marvell, who spread his hands and said, "Quent. Hey, Quentin! Listen, uh, we're. Is just that Rox is all pissed off cos nothing's happening?"

Quentin's exquisite brow puckered. "What species of thing isn't happening?"

"Doesn't anyone like to fuck around here?" asked Roxeanne.

Andy climbed to his feet and gazed down giddily at his groin. "My prong. I can hardly blink!"

"Hey, Andy," called Marvell, "why don't you start things rolling?"

"Yeah," said Roxeanne, "now that you've got one."

"Mm?" He looked up. "Nah. Nah, fuck all that. Do it yourself." He began to stagger toward the door. "I'm gonna have a wank. This is too good to waste. Awww, my snake," cried Andy brokenly as he tumbled from the room.

"I'm beginning to see what's the matter with you people," said Roxeanne. "You're so fucked up you can't even— What have I got to do. Any of you. Let's just get going. Let's move.”

She looked at Quentin, at Giles, at Celia, at Diana, at Lucy, at Quentin again. "Any of you. Come on. Let's just start with something."

"With me?" asked Whitehead.

55: DON'T BE DISGUSTIING

For the rest of his life Keith was to remember the divine comedy of that slow, andante ascent to the Rectory attic. One part of his mind, of course, was still anxiously trained on his immediate surrounds. The exit from the sitting room, for instance — with what eerie ease it had been conducted! Roxe-anne had simply turned to him — had, then, actually, smiled — and walked coolly out of the door. Picking his way through a forest of embarrassment, Whitehead had followed, encountering neither laughter, protest, nor spontaneous intervention from any member of the room. As he now scaled the thinning stair carpet, a different area of his mind — though a no less self-conscious area — shook with hilarious awe. Another step. Watching Roxeanne's strong legs lift in front of him, he felt that whatever happened, however pathetic and grotesque the scene turned out to be, he would have captured something of real and lasting value. Another step. He would have swerved his life alongside something not entirely ridiculous, would have completed a raid on the inarticulate, would have transcended this bad body, would have touched good skin. Another step. Foreboding flashed against him as they passed Andy's creaking room. Another step. Safe. On the last flight he experienced a rush of sheer gratitude; he wanted to stop, to take her in his arms, to kiss her at length and with soft languor, and return in silence to his friends. Another step. But things started speeding up.

She walk fast into room, turn, take off shirt, slip down she jeans, no pants, take she breast in she hand. On bed. "Come here." He go, he kneel, she mouth over he lip. She push he back on bed, climb up front of he to kneel across he shoulder, grip he ear to press to she pubis. Straddle he lap then. Undo he shirt, shinny down he trousers next. He sit up sudden take off he boot, she lick he back and she lick he under arm. He lie down she climb onto he again for tug he hair, drive sheself up he face. She swivel full circle, bend forward. She draw he genital into she mouth and gimmick she perineum to he face so good. She urinate some. She climb down he body so lick he thigh. She get she finger, grind it to it root up he anus. He defecate some. She press she nail into he hip, drag breast up he leg, feed on his penis. He head stretch back in long silent scream.

As Andy slipped down the stairs, Quentin loomed out of the passage shadows. Together they stole into the kitchen.

"A good one?"

"Fuckin' marvelous," said Andy, dusting his palms. "I don't know why people bother with anything else — I really don't. I was practically bent double."

"Guess what's happening?"

"Lemme see. Skip's fucking Mrs. Tuckle."

"Wrong. Roxeanne is fucking little Keith!"

"Quentin," said Andy, "call the police."

"To arrest Keith?"

"To arrest Roxeanne. What kind of pervert can we have up there? Keith!"

"No, it's true."

"Don't be disgusting, man. I mean, it's not that I'm shocked; I just don't happen to think it's particularly funny, is all."

"It's true, Andy. No one else would, so little Keith volunteered."

Andy threw his head back in a roar of dark, anarchical laughter. "Keith! That shape!"

"If shape it could be called that shape had none."

"Still, you know, you've got to give her credit. Come on, man, you have. Anyway, what difference does it make in the end? You get used to all kinds of shit." Andy wagged his head at the sitting-room door. "What gives in there?"

"Not a great deal, as it happens. Skip's trying to pull Lucy, who appears to be trying to pull, or at any rate solace, Giles. And — well — Marvell's trying to pull Diana… I

oughtn't to have mentioned it. He's having small success."

"I don't give a pig's rig. I talked to Diana this afternoon. We're forgetting it." "No, really?”

"Yeah. I just fuckin' told her, was all. No sweat."

"How did she take it?"

"Well, it completely cracked her up. Course. But the fuck, you know? Hadda happen."

"I'm sorry to hear that, Andy."

"Relax."

"And tell me — what devilment are you planning now?"

"Nah. " Andy was about to shrug deprecatingly, but then his face cleared and became quizzical. "I. "

"You're feeling it, aren't you?"

"Yeah, I am, actually."

"It's quite impossible to describe, isn't it?"

"Yeah. It is."

56: it started strangely

It started strangely. Not with a rush or a jolt, but as if it had always been there. The rosewood of the kitchen table seemed to have faded into a weak pastel brown. The blue and yellow tiles on the ceiling had receded and blurred so that its pattern was no longer distinct. Even the plain white of the walls appeared to have become something more washy, more neutral. Color had begun to drain from the house.

Andy had just sat himself down on the sofa and poured himself a sextuple Benedictine when Roxeanne came into the sitting room. He banged down his drink and hurried toward her. Marvell and Skip got to their feet.

"Well?"

"Well what?"

"Did it happen?"

"Did what happen?"

Andy's shoulders went slack. "Okay, I asked you nice. Now did you fuck him or didn't you fuck him?"

"I didn't fuck him." Roxeanne nodded to Marvell and Skip. They moved toward the door. Skip was rolling up his right sleeve. Marvell's fingers toyed with his belt buckle.

Andy wheeled round. "What's.?"

Waving Skip and Marvell on, Roxeanne said to Andy, "He

couldn't get a hard-on. And he threw up. It's not girls he likes."

"When we get in there," Marvell was telling Skip as they left the room, "don't fuck around. Just get his fuckin' legs and—"

Andy gestured hesitantly at the closed door. He turned to Roxeanne. "What's going on?"

Roxeanne sat down. She looked hot and very angry indeed, but her voice remained calm, even rather piano. "I'm getting some theories about this house. There's no one in it knows how to fuck right." She sighed. "What they're going to do, Andy, is: Marvell's just going to screw him — okay — but Skip's gonna fist-fuck him first. Got it?"

"Fist-fu— You mean — right up the.?"

Roxeanne placed her straight right hand on the inside crook of her left elbow. "Fist-fuck," she said.

"All that? Up the. right in his…?" Andy placed his arm obliquely across his stomach. It went from his hip bone to his solar plexus. He stared at Lucy and Diana. "But it can't. He's only little. It'll go right up to his— It'll fuck him all up."

Roxeanne reached for the liquor bottle. "Skip told me that after the initial tightness it goes all sort of hollow," she said matter-of-factly. "It all sort of… gives, you know? It does no permanent damage. It's amazing what people can get away with these days."

Andy stared flinching at the door. A thin, insect scream had joined the sounds of violent struggle from above.

"That fat little fuck," said Roxeanne.

Marvell bent down to zip up his boot. "That bastard Archie," he said.

"Yeah," said Skip, pulling a T-shirt over his head. "What was he trying to pull?"

"Last time I go to that shiteater. He can't do that to me, he knows that. It'll finish him. Time to retire."

"Maybe," droned Skip as he buckled his belt, "maybe it was some kinda, like a joke. I mean, the other movies, they were okay."

"Maybe, fuck. It was a hundred, same as the rest. That cocksucker. Shirley Temple I want I go to the movie library."

Skip leaned in front of a suitcase. Suddenly he let out a roar of consternation and outrage. Marvell shivered. Then he remembered that the letter from Skip's father was safely in Quentin's keeping.

"What is it?”

"A motherfuckin'— Come here, Mar. Take a fuckin' look at that."

Marvell crossed the room, straightening the collar of his shirt. Skip motioned limply at the suitcase. Among a knot of tightly packed clothes was a spilt bottle of yellow nail varnish.

"At least it's colorless," said Marvell.

"How many, how many times? I fuckin' told her."

Marvell clicked his tongue. "Yeah, well don't tangle with her right now about it. I know Rox and I know when she's getting impatient."

Skip turned. "Yeah? Any ideas for next?"

"Some." Marvell drove his hands through his hair. "Some. How's the drug doing?"

"Kinda scary. I like it."

"C'mon. Let's go."

At the far end of the room, between the bed and the wardrobe, was a pile of blankets, sheets, and clothes. Inside it was a motionless lump. That was Whitehead.

57: old dreads

During the Americans' twenty-minute absence from the sitting room Celia joined in her husband's wholly successful attempt to restore calm to the room, to moderate Roxeanne's rebarba-tiveness to the odd aside, to reduce Andy's climbing temper to a rubble of imprecation. Nor was it Villiers' superb diplomatic skills alone that softened the atmosphere. The mood of the room was one of growing introspection, of cold solipsism, and things were passing them by.

Celia herself was having a good time. In gradual, succulent stages, she was re-experiencing all the joy and security of her recent months with Quentin-the farcically beautiful Hamlet beside her — reliving each declension of the tender and exquisite deliverance his love had been. But it was also going, all this; she was falling away too — tumbling slowly from the present, the present that Quentin so notably adorned — falling away to the isolation and contingency of a life without him. Celia thought she saw something out of the corner of her eye. She swiveled to meet it but her mind kept slipping back to… to I do beach him straightaway but didn't get free used up The Mandarin best to be good friends told her grapefruit: what money could do and their bodies with bastards pricks shits eat a lot be alone and you're Celia.

She turned to the man next to her on the sofa and he could have been anyone; he had lost the lineaments of Quentin Villiers. Even when he turned to her, meeting her troubled eyes with a smile that completely defined her thoughts and fears, she was unable to suppress a shiver.

Celia excused herself and climbed the stairs to her room, confused but unterrified. She had found the old strengths along with the old dreads. She closed the door behind her, reassured that all was quiet now above. The solidity of the familiar objects — her makeup, her shoes, his books, his hairdryer — steadied her further. The present was there all right, then, even if it was leaving her for a short time. What were those phrases she had heard? They weren't from her mind.

Celia shrugged, and smiled at the unmade bed, leaning over to kiss the aromatic pillow where her husband's face had recently lain. Then she noticed a slip of paper pinned to the headboard. Thinking that it was one of Quentin's aphorisms or epigrammatic love poems, she knelt on the bed to examine it. There was a crudely drawn arrow directing her under the blankets, and a caption reading: Johnny's left it all down there. Intending to make the bed anyway, Celia pulled off the quilt and exposed the bottom sheet. A wild noise gushed from her hanging mouth.

Keith awoke from a shallow, hurtful sleep. Sensing the shag of the blankets and the heat of the close darkness, he thought at first that he was in his room. He was, he noticed, in tears, and his nose was running freely, but then again he quite often woke up like that. As he snuggled closer to himself, wondering how much night there was to go, a sick wave of memory dragged over him.

Keith sat up, throwing off the sticking clothes. The light jogged his eyes — he was naked suddenly. A shaft of hollow-ness in his stomach burned the way to his numb backside. He looked down and saw that he had at some point ejaculated. This made him start crying again.

He hobbled and rocked round the room assembling his clothes. His puffed skin, at once babyish and corpse-like, dappled unhealthily in the swinging light. From time to time he fell over, or gasped in breathless grief. His madras shirt was torn; the staples on his trouser seat had been wrenched apart and there was an irreparable split down the inside thigh. He got into their remains and grafted on his boiling boots. He thought what to do.

Keith's first, and only, instinct was to hide. "Hide," he said. He felt no self-pity about what had happened, none at all. He felt shame merely. What he wanted now was not to be seen. He would forgive them anything but their talk and their eyes.

He knew where to go. There could be nowhere else now. Keith opened the door and stood tensed in his ragged clothes. With alarming speed he darted down into the shadowy stairs.

58: everything will be mad

Andy had been wondering on and off how much of a storm to kick up when Marvell and Skip finally reappeared, but as their absence continued the possibility of a fertile, visionary brawl was getting more and more abstract. In a curiously gentle manner of which he was only half aware, his body seemed to be melting, rendering down to a weaker and less robust version of himself. He kept staring gravely at Diana and Lucy as they sat conversing on the divan. He thought how pleasantly asexual they were in appearance, how talkative and inconsequential. What he wanted to do, really, was to go over and lie down in between them both. He wouldn't disturb them. For once in his life he just wanted not to be minded.

The door welled open. Skip and Marvell came into the room.

Andy made as if to stand up. "Okay— What have you done with him — you fuckers?"

Skip eased himself into the dining alcove while Marvell sauntered across and sat on the arm of Roxeanne's chair.

"Hey, you fuckin' fags. " Andy's mind jolted. All along the room had been silent, expectant — but no one was hearing him. With an appalling effort Andy sat up straight. "Marvell," dragged his voice, "you fuckin' little. "

"Hey," said Marvell lightly. "What's with Andy?"

"Andy," called Quentin from the end of the world, "what's happening to you?”

: "I. "

Andy fell from his seat. He was treading air in the middle of the room. He saw the french windows and moved numbly toward them. Hands jutted out to assist or prevent him, but he fought them away and burst through into the colorful night.

His mind was flashing with tremendous activity — not thought, not thought: the phrases in his brain had been there long before he had; they were ready made. For the last time he tried to shout but his mind kept slipping back, slipping back to… to come after me and don't go mad you're born just in time her distant eyes a long-ago Andy with no far-flung canceled sex but to hear the choppy water of the city's sleep with sick junkies on the lookout for warmth in a dark mattress land of crying grass and Andy.

Some minutes later Andy was picking himself off the lawn. Cold tears had evaporated from his cheeks. He had been back. And to what? To nothing and a tickling heart.

"Bastards," he said. "Deaf, dumb, blind fucking bastards." He turned and began to stride back toward the house.

"Andy …"

Andy spun toward the garage. It was an impossible sound, like an animal or a wounded baby.

"Andy."

It was inches away. Andy looked down suddenly — and saw him through the tiny window slot of his room, his face lit by a crack of wan upstairs light.

"Keith?"

"Andy. I've done it. I'm dying."

Celia stood outside the sitting-room door. She was trembling with almost theatrical violence. "Quentin!" she shouted. "Quentin!"

The door opened. "Darling.?"

She seemed to collapse in his arms but then jarringly drew back. He reached out to her. "Darling, darling. Ah now, ah now."

She backed away. "Come here," she said, leading him up the stairs. "There's something you must see. There's something you must know. Something everyone must know. Now."

"Darling, what is this? My dearest, you're. "

She halted on the landing and held up her hands to silence him. "Listen. There's— Someone's. There's excrement in our bed. In our bed."

"How unutterably squalid."

Celia shuddered and he moved closer. "Don't. Just listen. It is not human excrement. There are. it's got other things in it — the smell is quite foul — I don't know what they are. It's sort of alive."

He followed her into their room. Celia walked to the bed, turned toward him and lifted the top sheet. He gagged softly through his raised palm. "Like essense of human being," he said. They gathered the sheet by its corners, folding it double, double again, and double again.

"You see, darling, don't you," said Celia, "that it's all changed now. That we must do something. If we don't then nothing will mean anything any more. Everything will be mad if we don't. If we go downstairs now and pretend this hasn't happened — what'll we be then?"

"You're right, of course, darling."

"We'll just have to go down there and find out what's going on."

"Yes."

They embraced quickly. He picked up the folded sheet. They were about to move toward the door when sounds of clamor came from below. Then Andy's voice rattled cheerfully up the stairs: "Hey, Quent! Better get along, Mac. Little Keith's dying on us here!"

Dropping the sheet into the laundry basket he hurried from the room. Celia watched him go with a hard face. She knew that she had lost then.

59: something to do

It was by no means the paradox it may at first appear that the news of Whitehead's forthcoming death saw an infusion of coltish high spirits into Appleseed Rectory. It signaled, for one thing, the end of what Dr. Marvell Buzhardt was later

to call "the slipway factor," which invariably obtained when

the retrodrug took hold, and the Appleseeders' vertiginous slide into their own insecurities was wonderfully lightened by the more graphic and spectacular sufferings of the dying: boy, who now sat on the baronial sitting-room club armchair, with a full male audience gathered round his swilling dressing gown. And was Keith himself going to throw a dampener on their good cheer? Not a bit of it. Whitehead had never felt better in his life.

"Okay," said Andy, rubbing his hands together. "Now the way I see it is: we got to keep the little bastard from having a fit or blacking out or whatever. Check?"

"Obviously we can't involve the authorities," murmured Villiers.

"We could, we could make him throw up a lot," said Skip.

"Yeah," said Marvell. "Dump him in the fuckin' bath. Boiling water. Liter of gin. Make him drink fuckin' all of it."

"I've done that myself," said Giles. "It makes you feel awful."

"I'm not pregnant you know," said Keith huffily, folding his arms. "I mean, not one of you has even asked me what I took yet."

"Oh yeah," said Andy with a snort of laughter. "That's a point. Okay, Keith — wotcher take?"

"The eighty downers you gave me yesterday morning."

"Gave. downer—? But they didn't work."

"Oh yes they did. I tricked you."

Andy sat back. "Fuck me," he said.

"What were they, Andy?" asked Marvell in a forensic tone, reaching for a ballpoint and pad. Stumblingly Andy told him. Marvell listened, nodded, and said to Keith, "Boy, you're very nearly dead. In twenty minutes or so you're gonna want to go to sleep; if you do, you're fucked. We better get that stuff out of you. If we don't you're gonna be on your feet. All night. Rox, bring me the brandy— I'd better monkey with it. Cos we're gonna be too."

" 'It is imperative,'" Lucy read out, " 'that you notify me of your decision within the next twenty-four hours. Thank you. Yours sincerely, Keith (Whitehead).' "

"See what I mean?" said Celia.

"Mm. Pretty sexy stuff. Can really turn a phrase. Celia, it hardly compares with 'Johnny's' letter to Diana." She held up the second piece of paper. "What's a 'perineum,' by the way?"

"The bit between your cunt and your bum," said Diana.

"Ah."

"Listen," said Celia. "Keith's been to an asylum; we also know he's been very ill — something to do with his stomach, so he could have" — she gestured sideways at the laundry basket—"and now this. He's obviously in a desperate—"

"Come on, Celia," Lucy said jovially, "don't be so silly! If Keith was Johnny he wouldn't. Keith just wouldn't do things like that. Honestly! Poor little bugger— he was in my room half of last night wondering how to give me a good-night kiss. He may be a bit looney — I mean, wouldn't you be? — but he wouldn't— you know."

Lucy appealed to Diana. The three of them were sitting in Celia's room, Lucy and Celia on the stripped bed, while Diana draped the adjacent sofa. All three were drinking liberally from the double-liter of tequila which Lucy had recently fetched from Giles's (by now untended) alcoholic archives. As with the men, the new crisis seemed to have presented them with at least a handful of transient certainties, a focus for their loosening minds, something to do.

Celia said, "Diana thinks it's Skip, I know. I thought it was Marvell for a bit, but I can't see what possible—"

"But, darling, it's got to be," said Lucy. "It's too frightening if it isn't." She sipped her tequila, spluttering slightly as she remembered another thing to add. "Mm — and someone called Johnny did something nasty to Giles this afternoon. He wouldn't tell me what but he was very jumpy and everything. He just came up and asked me which of the Yanks was called Johnny. He was quite flabbergasted that one of them wasn't."

"But don't you think," said Celia, "that Keith— I mean what those boys did to him. And Roxeanne and everything."

"Celia! You said yourself that you found it while Keith was upstairs."

"Oh, I don't know. I just want it to be over." Celia's eyes clouded and she reached for a paper tissue. "Can't it just be over?"

"If it was Keith it would be." Lucy moved to the window, drawn by the sounds from below. "Keith's out of action now. No. It's worse than Keith." She swiveled, hooking her elbows

backward on the sill. As she returned Celia's gaze the two

girls became aware that Diana had withdrawn from the conversation, had indeed withdrawn her presence from the room. "Diana?" they both asked.

: Diana tried to say something but the words were submerged. She sat up — no, she was slipping back, slipping back to… to cry again and please the black road as intensely sad fireflies winking to a thickening presence of dew and sleeping bags in the starched chill of night fatigue every day lassitude and disgust from the pink retreat it's brief and pleasureless being alone without knowing why letters a day in hanging-garden avenues the first of many summers the time it is hating everything time wondering Diana.

She exhaled heavily and her jaw went square. She said, "I think it's Andy."

lx: andy

Andy, on being asked his age, can reply with veracity and more or less without self-consciousness that he's fucked if he knows. "Around twenty, I guess," it suits him to say, gesturing with a slack-wristed hand, " — give or take a year."

He is twenty-four. Today is his birthday. As he sprawled in the adjacent meadow, as he counted the extinguishing stars and nuzzled close to the crying grass: so, twenty-four years earlier, a swarthy girl drew the wet sheet from her face and asked, "Ten little tiny fingers? Ten little tiny toes?"

"He's cool, I think," the baleful hippie said, running a sleeve over his beard. "I think he's cool."

He was cool. His mother moved on two weeks later and for the first years of his life Andy crawled the mattress land of the dark, high-ceilinged, communal flat in Earl's Court, hunter of the spare breast, on the lookout for warmth, invader of unminded sleeping bags, growing up on cereals and old fruit. He was the foster child of a hundred postnatal waifs, the cossett of a dozen itinerant rhythm guitarists, the darling of scores of provincial pushers, the minion of a thousand sick junkies.

They called him Andy, on account of the unnatural size of his hands. He called himself Adorno, after the German Marxist philosopher whose death had brought so much despondence to the commune in the summer of 1972, when Andy was just a boy. Andy Adorno—it was the most exquisite name he had ever heard.

In the course of a routine raid by the local Hygiene and Sanitation Board operatives, the young Adorno's existence became known to the authorities. Mr, Derek Midwinter, the inspector under whose care Andy fell, is on record as describing his dealings with the boy as "a complete bloody nightmare." Originally proposing to remove Andy from the flat, register him with the censors, enroll him at a Child Care Unit and get his education underway, Midwinter ended up paying Andy £5.50 a week to leave him alone. (Adorno continued to hold sway over many representatives of authority with a trick-or-treat system he had devised; it featured complicated sexual blackmail and brute force.) When he was good and ready— in his own fucking sweet time-Andy dawdled up to Holland Park Comprehensive and asked to speak to its principal. After a five-minute interview Andy was talking to girls in the playground while a pallid headmistress backdated his entrance forms. It was understood that he would study nothing but the Modern American Novel, and also that this specialization would not necessarily be reflected in his examination results. That afternoon Andy was voted form captain.

Earl's Court was his country.

A twenty-four-hour land. At nine, huge panting coaches were voiding four thousand aliens a day into its dusty squares. Drainpipe-latticed houses like foreign legion garrisons, their porches loud with penniless Greeks and tubercular Turks. Men in vests gazed from behind stagnant windows. By night half a million youths spilled from the electric pubs; dirty girls paraded and dirty boys cruised along the jagged strip; the darkness was hot with curry smells from the neon delicatessens. Tramps dozed behind nude-mag vendors' stalls. Dying Pakistanis hawked into dimly lit shop windows. At five in the morning, a windy threadbare silence would lapse on the spent districts. Food boxes and cigarette packets spun end over end among the fruit skins and beer cans. Hairnets of doped flies mantled the puddles and dogshit. From between railings old cats stared. Ramshackle buildings of rubbish lolled against the dark shopfronts, like collapsed dreams of the city's sleep.

Through the air came the whisper of the quickening town,

plaintive music over choppy water.

By day and during the early evenings Andy supervised his drugs consortia, looked after his fringe business concerns, bought records, played music, saw films, kicked dogs, watched TV, read, drank, ate, fucked. He was everywhere, a familiar and revered figure in the crowded landscape.

Late at night, just before the stillness came, he scaled condemned fire escapes and explored the roofs and skylights, lay on the sooty grass behind the Underground station, sat on swings and sang, climbed trees in the dark squares, screamed until the dawn went misty with tears, raced like an animal through the dying streets.

A radically telescoped resume of Andy's sex life.

An early developer, he started not sleeping with girls at the age of seventeen. Intense, confusing, sudden, strange — it was a revelation to him. "She was a casual girl, too," Andy broods. Looking in at Life on Mars for a nightcap one autumn evening, he had selected and duly approached a girl to take home. "Round eighteen, long blond hair. Dutch or something, nice face, good fig. All over me, quivering like a blender. Had to slap her down a bit, as I recall. There you are — I can even remember her name. Irma — something like that. Wilma. No. Norma. No. Hang about. " He escorted her to his door and preceded her up the cabbage-damp stairs. He led the way into his room, pitched himself onto the double mattress, and advised her to take off her clothes and join him. "Well. We're sort of talking and stuff. I get the scotch out and so on. She's nude, I'm nude, she's practically sitting on my face, and— you know — we're starting to get friendly. And then, well, Christ, it just sort of… happened. I didn't fuck her."

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

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

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

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

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

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

61: into the middle air

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing happened.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Celia swirled back into the room.

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

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

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

62: GHOSTLY PERIODS

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

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

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

"NO!"

Hiring every morsel of his strength, Giles cleared the bed and stormed the fridge. His hands were flapping so extravagantly that he had to refill the glass twice before any of the contents forced its way down his throat. When it did, Giles tried very hard to force it out again. No substance that toxic l(he felt certain) had ever entered his system before. He lowered his nose to the bottle. It was gin all right — but it smelled as harsh and alien as strong medicine to a delicate child.

"Glug glug glug," he said, and added in a voice suddenly panicky with comprehension, "goo goo goo!"

Within seconds he was out of the door. Behind him the darkness drummed with a thousand mothers.

This dwarf pleasureless and very mad dream girl nothing flash life has its holiday fair enough? terror and confusion for a four-foot box in a cartoon world of sugary tea crying with shame for each … It broke off.

Whitehead twitched, jolting the back of his skull painfully against a protrusion in the gnarled apple tree. He was alive and he was awake — he even struggled briefly with his bonds. Assuredly Keith was in great pain, but this stemmed from the beating he had received from his housemates rather than from the barbiturates intended for his suicide, which were at present doing him nothing but good, numbing both the retro-drug and the punishment his body had recently sustained. He still felt vastly better than he would, say, on an average morning, appreciably trimmer, more wholesome, less corporeal.

What, nevertheless, was he doing here? At the best of times little Keith's head was not the most maneuverable of units and it was only with great discomfort and travail that he managed to scrape his chins over the stinging ropes about his neck to get a glimpse of the left-hand quarter of the house. All was dark and worryingly quiet. Why, then, had they done this to him? Was he there for fun, for sex, for target practice? He sensed something flapping against his upper arm, something heavy and metallic. He squinted down and saw the needle point dangling from his right "bicep"; burning his neck, he turned to see its twin dangling from his left.

Then he felt his body start to come alive. The soft machinery stirred: winches creaked, pumps groaned, tubes opened, pipes rustled. Keith arched with the effort of containing himself as once again he became a blast furnace, a forest fire of frantic glands.

63: THE ANTIDOTE

And when the distances went the house was hell at last. Each minute the atmosphere changed radically, boiling up to gas and thinning out to nothing at all. Currents of sweating air slopped through the shrunken rooms. The corridors tapered off into palls of submarine mist. Appleseed Rectory was hell now, and its inhabitants crawled round it with borrowed faces and canceled eyes. If they kicked against the womb, they folded onto the floor and were sucked down into a hot, thudding sleep.

— Skip came across Andy sprawled face down on the stairs. In Andy's palm was a large red pill, half eroded by perspiration. Skip removed it and popped it into his mouth as he crawled over Andy's body.

— Diana knelt in an upstairs closet. She searched through old clothes for yesterday's dolls.

— Giles crouched beneath the kitchen table. If he heard a noise he would scurry behind the cooker. If he heard a noise he would scurry beneath the kitchen table.

— Lucy opened her eyes. Marvell was urinating on her legs. She tried to speak and she could not speak.

— Roxeanne was a starfish on the thick sitting-room cushions. She masturbated caressingly with a chipped hukah pipe beak.

— Celia stood upright on the baronial armchair. Through her tears came snatches of forgotten nursery rhymes.

Now Quentin awoke in the empty hall. He climbed to his knees, holding his head between clenched fists. When his eyes opened to the bruised light he needed all his will to focus them on the fast-escaping outlines. He reeled to the nearest wall and pressed his forehead hard against the cold stone. Inhaling deeply, he summoned his body and his mind.

Quentin found Marvell in the washroom, alone, giggling softly into a pile of soiled underclothes.

Quentin picked Marvell up by the hair and slammed him furiously against the door.

Marvell's eyes stared.

I go

"The antidote," said Quentin clearly. "The antidote. You've got five minutes. Do it, Marvell. Or I'll kill you."

64: HIGH TEA, OR HERE WE GO AGAIN

Enough? Have we had enough? Nothing would be easier, of course, than to give the Americans some food, some sleep even, and pack them off — that would appear to get rid of Johnny, and, why, they could even drop little Keith at the hospital on the way. Might be some bother there but, on the whole— yes — it would demand small ingenuity to restore peace to Appleseed Rectory. Unfortunately, though, there is no "going back" on things that in a sense were never meant, things that got started too long ago. These things go on. It isn't over. It hasn't begun.

Two-thirty and high tea was served at the Appleseed kitchen in a mood of buzzing, ravenous hilarity. Sipping chilled Hock and a light Mateus rose, they negotiated vast stacks of toast and gentlemen's relish, cucumber and cress sandwiches, water biscuits spread with celery salt and avocado paste. Celia was still sad about The Mandarin (whom Quentin promised elaborately to bury the next day), but otherwise there was little to regret because there was little to remember. The only sure recollection they had was of an experience of almost vibrant fear coupled with something more numinous, the nudge of a deeper act of memory, a spiritual strain that had filled them all with an exquisite and gentle anguish. They felt like ocean divers after a fascinating and perilous expedition, or, more appropriately, like safely disembarked astronauts who, amid the populous celebrations, were quietly aware that they had known the full pain and tragic isolation of space.

Then Andy dropped his plate with a clatter and got suddenly to his feet. "Little Keith!" he said. "What happened to little Keith?"

"Oh, Christ," said Diana as the boys sped from the room, "here we go again."

In the pewter light from the garage it seemed as if the apple tree had grown a second stump, a squat and knobbed extension at its base.

Skip looked at Marvell. "Jesus. You think he's still alive?"

"Andy?"

"Don't ask me, squire," said Andy. "I'm fucked if I'm going near him while he smells like that."

Quentin buried his nose in a perfumed handkerchief.

"He twitched then," said Marvell, adding more quietly, "I think he twitched then."

"How will we ever know?" said Quentin through his handkerchief.

Andy snapped his fingers. "Got it! The hose. Come on, Quent, give us a hand," he said happily. "Like I always maintain — you can do anything once you put your mind to it."

The hose used at Appleseed Rectory had been bought secondhand, on Andy's suggestion, from the municipal fire department warehouses in Catford, SE5. Although of limited utility in the garden — it did not irrigate so much as void any bed on which it was trained — only a heavy-duty implement, Andy had argued, would be equal to such routine domestic tasks as local-yob suppression, Tuckle intimidation, and so on. (Andy had pooh-poohed the objection that pressurizing the tap would cost Giles £2,000, and Giles had stuck up for him.) The mouth of the hose had a diameter of four inches. Experiments had shown that it could flatten a villager from twenty-five yards.

At a little under a third of that distance from Keith, Andy now stood with his restless legs planted wide apart. His right hand was held aloft, while his left gripped the hose's heavy snout. Then Andy chopped his raised arm through the air. "Now!" he yelled.

As the first pole of water hit him in the face, Keith's ragged, wobbling figure found its contours and, as Andy played the hose up and down his body, the slumped form seemed actually to dance free of its bonds. Six minutes later Andy's right arm chopped through the air once more. "Right!" he said. "That oughta handle it."

In a loose semicircle, Andy, Quentin, Skip, and Marvell warily approached the tree.

Quentin and Marvell looked at each other in candid horror.

"Mm. On second thought maybe I should have backed off some with the hose," said Andy, himself noticing the new orange blood that had started to well from Keith's mouth, nose, and eyes.

Marvell felt for Whitehead's still-vibrating wrist. "He's still there! It's faint, but he's still there!"

"Onna other hand," said Andy, "it was probably just what he needed. A good jolt. Just the job."

"Cut him down, Skip," said Marvell.

When Skip had severed the last of the ropes, Keith fell forward like a thick plank into the mud created by the broad wash of the hose. Except for the thin leather belt he was virtually naked, his dressing gown torn away by the force of the water; the remains of his clothes stuck to his white body in thin damp strings.

"Wotcher reckon, Marv?" asked Andy.

Marvell took out his hypodermic wallet and knelt on the grass. "I'll plug some meth up his ass. Then we'd better walk him around some."

"Check. I'll just give him one more go with the hose. Now we've got the bloody thing out. Just to clean him up. Don't want all that mud on our hands."

"Mud? Oh, yeah, right."

"Is he okay?" called Lucy from the french windows.

"Keith?" said Andy. "He's laughing."

65: seems silly now

When Lucy came back into the sitting room, Giles was standing by the door, looking tense.

"They say Keith's okay."

". Oh. Good."

"What is it, Giles?"

"Lucy, a friend of mine wants me to ask you something."

"Which friend?"

"Just a friend."

"I see."

"A friend," said Giles.

"Yes, I'm with you. What does he want to know?"

"My friend wants to know if you could ever — if you could

marry someone who didn't have any… if he had. " "If he had what?”

: "No, that's the point — if he didn't have… if he had. if he didn't have. "

"If he didn't have what, then?"

'If he didn't have… if he had. "

"Say it, Giles. Christ."

"Well, you see, what my cousin wants to know, actually, is could you marry someone who had. who didn't have. "

"Jesus. WHAT?"

"Who didn't have teeth. Who had false ones. Could you?"

"If I loved him, of course I could!"

Giles sank against the door. "Gosh. I never thought I should marry," he said to steady himself.

Giles poured out a glass of Hock and said to Roxeanne, "They say Keith is well again."

Roxeanne said that she thought he probably would be. "You can get away with most things these days."

Celia stood up and, with Diana's assistance, began to load the dishwasher. "Well," she said, "if he is he's going to have to find somewhere else to live."

"Right," said Diana. "I've got no time for suicides. It's just too boring. A schoolfriend of mine was in a crash once and I went to see her every day for three months. A year later the bitch stuck her head in the oven because her guy couldn't kick being queer. Did I go to the hospital once? No way. I told her why not, too."

"I agree," said Celia. "It's selfish, stupid, and utterly boring."

"Well," said Giles. "I don't know, I just feel. That drug and everything… I just feel terribly relieved."

And then Giles Coldstream did something he had not done for five years. He turned full face to Roxeanne and he smiled — not his habitual tragicomic-mask, thin-lipped stripe, but a bright, frank, boyish, ripple-eyed grin.

Roxeanne leaned forward sharply and frowned up at him. "Hey, man, what's with your teeth? They're all, you got wires and shit in there—"

Upending his glass and knocking his chair over, Giles backed away from the table, his face stunned with a look of guilty dismay.

"Here, let's. " said Roxeanne, bearing down on Giles, who retreated gesturing with his hands like an entertainer quelling applause. "The fuck, how old are you? And your teeth are all dead."

Containing his tears, a frightened child, Giles bolted from the room.

"Round and round the garden," sang Quentin and Andy, two prop forwards to Keith's dangling hooker, "ran the teddy bear. One step, two steps, tickly under there. Round and round the garden ran the—"

"Hey," broke off Andy, "it's pretty knackering, this. The fuck are those Yanks? Why can't they have a go for a bit?"

Keith began to groan. It was a reedy, cat-like sound.

"At least he's alive," observed Quentin. "We're not completely wasting our time."

"No," said Keith, pronouncing it "Mo" through pulped lips.

"Mo who, you little wreck?" Andy asked.

"Mo," said Keith. "Mot in the well. Doan frow me in the well. Dome drowm me."

"Don't throw you in the well? Quentin, he talks as if we throw him inna well every night. We've a bloody good mind to, Keith. There's gratitude for you."

" 'Don't drown me,'" repeated Quentin. "That reminds me— Keith never got the antidote, did he?"

Keith started crying, crying in painfully snatched falsetto, crying like a baby.

Quentin and Andy turned to each other with bulging eyes.

Giles was crying too. He was doing so at his desk while he assembled his writing paper and pencils. Fat tears smudged the sheet as he wrote:

Dear All. God knows I have had a hard enough life since my accident. It has not been easy but I have tried to muck along as best I could. But now, with these remarks of Rocks-Ann's, I really do not know what I shall

He sniffed wetly. He stood up. There was something else in his gait when he walked toward the drinks cupboard.

: "Round and round the. Jesus. My arm's fuckin' dropping off. Look — Quent — there they are. Hey! The fuck over here, you lazy shits!"

Skip and Marvell merged into the garage light, buckling their belts. They ambled toward the rocking trio.

"What kinda shape's he in?"

Andy unhitched Keith's arm from his shoulder and swung the naked body forcefully at Marvell and Skip. "Where you been? Crapping or screwing or what?"

"What difference does it make?" asked Marvell urbanely.

"Fuck-all to you guys, that's for sure," said Andy, pacing back toward the house with Quentin at his side.

They settled on the steps outside the french windows. Fifteen yards away Skip, Marvell, and Keith marched round in the halflight like jagged clockwork figures in a silent film. Andy produced his hash kit and within half a minute had rolled two one-paper joints. "Hey, man," he said reflectively, handing one to Quentin and lighting them both. "That guy Keats. How old was he when he checked out?" "He was twenty-six," said Quentin. ("Walk right, walk right'." they heard Skip holler at the crippled Keith.) "Oh, really?" said Andy rather snootily. "I mean, that's not bad. What was all the. gimmick?" "I expect people thought he had yet to realize his full potential." Unimpressed, Andy protruded his lower lip and nodded a few times. "Fuck potential," he said.

"Quentin?" asked a new voice.

Quentin turned to the french windows, whence Giles falter-ingly emerged. "My good friend Giles," he said.

"How's Keith? Is he well again now?"

"He's as well as can be expected. Rather better, as it happens."

"Oh. I see. So you won't be taking him to the hospital."

"We do hope we may be spared that embarrassment, yes."

"Oh, actually. I see." Giles turned to go.

"Why do you ask, Giles?"

"Only that. that I've done it too. But I don't want to be a nuisance. Or a bore. I'll simply go back upstairs."

"You've done what too."

""Sort of killed myself, actually. I had, I've just drunk two liters of brandy — in one, well, no, actually in two, cos—”

"Giles, are you serious?"

"Mm. The book says I ought to die in twenty-five minutes, apparently. Seems silly now. But if you're not… I mean, I don't…"

Quentin leapt to his feet.

"Welcome to the gang, kid," said Andy, flicking his cigarette high into the air.

66: no more Games

Within twenty seconds Quentin was on the telephone to Hampstead Central Hospital, where a nurse of Irish provenance assured him that the patient, as described, had no chance whatever of reaching them alive. The only suitably equipped unit in mortal range, she said, was the Psychiatric Casualty Wing of the Blishner Institute, Potter's Bar. She would now ring there herself and ask them to ready a stomach pump in 64, to which ward the patient should be rushed as soon as he arrived. Throughout the conversation Giles sat smiling shamefacedly on the sofa. Lucy was beside him, stroking his hair and saying as little as she could.

Quentin slapped down the telephone.

"Right. Skip — which is faster — the Chevrolet or the Jaguar?"

"The Chev," said Skip. "I tune it. It, it'll hit—"

"Get in it and rev. Lucy, Roxeanne, get Giles in there. Andy, come on. Let's get Keith in there too. No more games."

In noisy formation, the Appleseeders crowded into the drive.

"Dump little Keith in back," said Marvell. "He still stinksa rat."

"It's the mercy-dash express!" said Andy, picking Keith up by his hair and the back of his belt and lobbing him into the trunk.

"Get up front, honey," Roxeanne told Lucy. "Tell Skip the way. I'll take care of Giles."

Andy joined Roxeanne and Giles in the back seat while Lucy ran round to join Skip in the front. The Chevrolet was already in gear when Quentin raced forward from the remaining group on the porch. He put his head through the: driver's window and handed Skip an envelope. "Here are the details. I know the head man there and it might speed things up. Open it when you get there." Skip put the letter into his flying jacket and zipped it up. Quentin smacked the car roof twice.

"Now gun it."

With a wide squirt of gravel the Chevrolet ground off into the night.

"Beat me, beat me," said Andy (for Skip had switched on the tape). "Beat me, beat me — aw, chop my head off."

As the car straightened onto the road Giles slumped from his seat to the floor. Andy was about to draw this to Roxeanne's attention when he noticed that her hand was busy on his lap. His eyes swelled.

"You fork off here?" said Skip.

"Fuck off yourself," said Andy.

"Yes. Here," said Lucy.

Skip pulled them onto the dual highway at 75 mph. The heavy car rode high up the verge before stabilizing again. Andy looked down at Roxeanne's head, which bobbed rhythmically over his groin.

"Christ," he said elatedly. "We're all dying here. We're all dying!"

67: spring clean

Quentin allowed Celia to embrace him momentarily before he shooed her back into the house. Diana and Marvell stood nervously in the hall.

"Now," he began. "Incompetent as we know the authorities to be I don't imagine they'll let two contiguous suicide attempts go completely unremarked. So shall we make a start? Marvell, may I make you responsible for the drugs? Round them up and come to me. Don't worry about the hash and whatnot — just the hard stuff. Celia, Diana: could you, as it were, spring clean? Banish, at any rate, the grosser evidences of debauchery. I'll get the lion's share of the bottles into the garage and reeky the garden. If we could reconvene in the drawing room in, say, fifteen minutes.?”

By then it was three-thirty. From the one remaining vessel in the room Quentin poured four small glasses of Benedictine. "Splendid," he said. "Now we wait."

Marvell glanced as his watch. "Oughta be there by now."

For a moment they all sat back and let the tiredness pound through them. Then Diana stood up. "I'm going to bed," she announced.

Quentin got to his feet. He kissed Diana deftly on the lips. "Good night, Diana. Thank you for your help." He conferred silently with Marvell and Celia. "I think, however, that we'll stay up and see this through."

"Okay." Diana hesitated as she turned to leave. "Wait. isn't there something else? Isn't there — haven't we forgotten something?"

Quentin spread his arms. "I fail to see what."

The effort of recall flickered once more in Diana's eyes.

"The weekend — it's over then?"

"I don't know," said Quentin, "what else it could be."

68: white room

The Chevrolet came to a grilled halt broadside an ambulance in the Blishner Institute Psychiatric Casualty forecourts. As the five spilled from the car a tall young intern with long black hair noosed in a headband promptly wheeled a stretcher from between the sliding doors. "This him?" he asked, levering Giles onto the white sheeting. "Yeah." They had started back to the building when Andy abruptly snapped his fingers. "Fuck," he remarked to Lucy. "We forgot little Keith again."

He ran back to the car, exhumed Keith from its trunk, and trotted back with the body slung over his shoulder.

"What's with this one?" asked the intern, staring at Keith's blood-bubbled face.

"Uh. " said Andy. "Uh, he just took this great load of aspirins."

"Like hell he did," said the intern. "You boys had better stick around,"

He led them between the automatic doors, through the dim vestibule, along a corridor and into a small white room.

"Stay here," he told them.

: Andy watched him go. "That guy wants a fight," he said, letting Keith's body drop from his shoulder to the floor.

"I'm not staying here," said Skip. "That guy means business and I'm loaded."

"Relax," said Andy. "I tellya, he's—"

"Hey!" said Roxeanne, opening a cupboard door to reveal four shelves of bottles and vials. "Get this!"

"Christ," said Andy. "Look. Mandies! Andrenalin! Amyl-nitrate!" He spun around to Skip. "Get inna car, turn it round. We'll be right out." He began loading his pockets, Roxeanne hers. Skip kicked Keith out of the way and hopped into the corridor.

And there was Keith, looking as if he had been dead for a week. And there was Giles, drowning, dying and dying in the white room. Lucy crept nearer the stretcher. She held his limp hand in both of hers. Her face burned with incredulous disgust. "Andy," she whispered.

Andy turned, wide-eyed, a jar of pills held up in either hand. "Yeah?"

"Andy. What are you doing?" Lucy's voice trembled. "Get out of here and leave us alone. Get out."

His hands dropped to his sides. "Ah, what the hell, Lucy? I mean, really — what the hell any more?"

69: wrong yesterdays

In the smaller of the Appleseed Rectory sitting rooms, Quentin reclined on a pink chaise-longue with Diderot's Le neveu de Rameau dandled on his thighs. But he wasn't reading. His forefingers placed in either nasal cleft, Quentin's head was tilted backward in a meditative posture.

In the larger of the Appleseed Rectory sitting rooms, unaware of Quentin's presence behind the half-closed partition doors, Celia and Marvell were together on the sofa.

"Yeah, that," Marvell was saying, "that'd be the time I was over here before. When I stayed at a, at Quentin's people's home?"

"Oh. So you visited Tallbury."

"Nah, not 'Tallbury.' What was it… fuckin' great country place. It was. ”

2OO

"Tallbury," said Celia. "So you met them before they got killed?"

"They did? All of them?"

"In an aeroplane crash," said Celia neutrally.

"What, some sorta charter flight?"

"Probably. They are more dangerous. The brother survived."

"The brother? Oh, right — the 'brother,' yeah. Ah, that's too bad. I liked them really a lot. Quentin never said."

Next door, the book slid from Quentin's thighs. He made no attempt to retrieve it.

"You liked them?" said Celia. "They and Quentin never got on."

"Nah, well — but they liked him, huh, Cele?"

"He only put up with them because of the trust money."

"Yeah," said Marvell. "That was the gimmick."

"Hardly a gimmick. The money is rightfully his."

"Guess you could put it that way."

Next door, Quentin's eyes closed. A bleached light played on the corners of his eyes.

"When was this?" asked Celia.

"Uh, early last year."

"Last year? But Quentin's parents died four years ago."

"Parents? Parents? No, no, Celia. This was a 'people's home'? It was a gimmick Quent had an interest in then. You know, one of the de-luxe old-fag joints? Quent financed it. Get the queers along, screw their cash, and maybe they leave you something when they pop off?"

"Quentin's 'people'?"

"Yeah. Inna home. He never had any parents far as I knew. It was a good gimmick. It was a very good gimmick. We were, I was pulling down four hundred, maybe five hundred—"

"Quentin?"

Quentin's eyes opened. He sighed, and a great weight seemed to slide upward from his body. Then it hit him, like newly fallen snow, all the blank wrong yesterdays.

"Quentin?" Celia called. "Quentin."

"Yes?" said Johnny.