11: the Human wigwam
Does he know, for instance, what I'm feeling now? wondered Whitehead, as Quentin, glancing back into the kitchen before unbolting the front door, favored him with an oddly piercing, oddly meek, smile, the corners of his fine mouth curving downward at either end.
Did he know what it was like to be introduced to a girl a foot taller than oneself, the dwarfish humiliations involved in shaking hands with somebody practically twice one's height, the sneaky web of tensions that obtain when a person measuring four-foot-eleven (or "five-one," in Keith's parlance) meets a fellow human being who has cleared the magic divide of five-foot-six? For the Americans, Whitehead had established by peering in tiptoed apprehension out of the kitchen window on the way to the hall, seemed to have been selected to illustrate the elementary differences possible in the standard Earthling hominid: one rangy pale giant with cropped white hair and plasticene limbs; one tuft-faced goblin whose plaited brown braids extended to his waist; and . . . Roxeanne, it must have been, one of those terrifying, genetics-experiment, centerfold American girls—well over six feet in her platforms, a bonfire of lambent red hair, breasts like zeppelins, large firm high backside, endless legs. During his buildup to the ordeal, Keith had had a prayer that he would be able to suffer it in a sedentary, and thus unexposed, posture. Now, watching Quentin gambol out with a cheer to embrace the newcomers, and watching Celia approach the four in a solemn, formalized step, Whitehead began to see the full horror of what was in store for him.
Quentin held out a hand to his wife and turned to his friends. "Marvell . . . Skip . . . Roxeanne," he said huskily, gazing from one face to another, ". . . take my wife in."
There was a pause. Celia then moved forward to join the circle of arms, where she was embraced by each in turn and kissed on either cheek by Roxeanne and firmly on the mouth by Skip and Marvell. Grouping in a circle, the quartet leaned inward and touched foreheads. Besting his emotion, Quentin looked toward the porch, within which Andy, Diana, and Whitehead were uncertainly arranged. Quentin's voice was lusty, brave: "Come on!"he cried.
"Fuck this," sighed Diana.
"C'mon, it's only tender," Andy told Diana before striding
out into the drive.
Queasily Keith watched Andy kiss Roxeanne—with indecorous relish, he thought—and link arms crossways with : Marvell and Skip. Five foreheads touched. Whitehead looked up at Diana. "To hell with this, eh?" he pleaded.
Diana, more out of a reluctance to be with the loathsome Keith than a desire to be with the others, glanced at him in tired contempt and left him alone at the front door. A rather stiffer version of the Celia ritual was enacted, then the entire pyramid of legs, arms, and faces turned expectantly toward the tiny boy.
Keith was still reviewing various gambits—run screaming to his room? fall on his face? start crying? go mad again?— when he found himself skipping corpulently across the drive, piping out, "Room for one more inside?"
"Right here," said Marvell immediately; "There you go," said Skip, separating his arm from Celia's to allow him entry; "Oh, you're so small!" shouted Roxeanne in evident delight. As Keith craned his puckered mouth up at the seven grinning faces, Roxeanne, supported by Quentin and Andy, craned hers down to kiss it. She never got there: Quentin's foot slipped on the gravel, Roxeanne's right brick was whipped out from beneath her, the human wigwam swayed, wheeled round a quarter circle, tottered, and collapsed to shrieks of mirth on the ground.
Gradually they staggered laughingly to their feet. ". . . Drugs now," said Quentin, still trying to catch his breath, laughing again. "Much drugs."
The Appleseeders' stance on that topic found eloquent recapitulation and support a few minutes later from Marvell Buzhardt, the small, owlish American, postgraduate in psychology, anthropology, and environment at Columbia University, underground journalist, filmmaker, and pop-cultural entrepreneur. Dr. Buzhardt sat rolling joints at the kitchen table with Quentin and Andy, sliding round a bottle of duty-free liquor, while the girls made snacks for the projected picnic. Skip was unloading the Chevrolet, Whitehead running errands to the mini-market. Marvell had, in fact, recently published a short monograph on this theme in conjunction with the Berkeley Alternative University Press, a copy of which he promised to dig up for them before he left.
"What's the book got to say, man?"
"Simplistically, Andy, The Mind Lab has this to say," Marvell began. "For some time now it's been clear to all the genuine people studying this thing that the brain is a mechanical unit and that its aberrations aren't down to environmental, psychological contexts but to purely chemical reactions—that's all, nothing more. This idea has had a lot of trouble getting through because people won't let go of the belief that no part of us is divine. You go crazy, right? It's because you've got shit in your head, lousy chemicals. Anyhow, that's just the lead-in to the main polemic of my book."
At this point the Doctor ceased all activity with grass and cigarette papers in order to clench his hands pensively on his crown—to the secret boredom of Andy, who was less interested in talking about drugs than in getting a lot of them down him in the shortest possible time.
"Okay. So if you go crazy now," Marvell went on, "they give you good chemicals to counteract the bad ones in your head. Or electrics. The only mysterious thing about the brain is its complexity. Nothing cerebral about it, man, just one mother of a terminal of chemicals and nerve ends, and science can keep up with it now. So: why not apply this positively?"
"I don't know," said Andy, in moonish response to Marvell's interrogative, though in fact rhetorical, stare.
"No reason! Look—fuck—we're agreed that life is a rat's ass and that it's no fun being yourself all the time. So why not do with your brain what you do with your body? Fuck all this dead babies about love, understanding, compassion— use drugs to kind of ... cushion the consciousness, guide it, protect it, stimulate it. We have a fantastic range of drugs now, Andy. We have drugs to make you euphoric, sad, horny, violent, lucid, tender. We have drug combinations that will produce any kind of hallucination or sense modification you want. Alternatively, we have drugs that can neutralize these effects instantaneously. Not the old Leary line—no 'religion,' no false promises. We have chemical authority over the psyche—so let's use it, and have a good time."
"Piss," said Diana. "What about brain damage? False memory, street sadness?"
"Well . . ." Marvell rocked his hairy head from side to side. "There's kind of an appendix dealing with—"
"And anyhow, most of that," said Roxeanne, "is media hysteria."
Quentin: "How was the book received, Marvell?”
: "Pig and Smeg Sunday raved. The only straight press things I've seen, of course, tried to dismiss it as psycho agit-prop."
"Of course," said Andy, picking up Marvell's grass kit. "They would. Well, what have you got in mind for us today, then?"
The Doctor smiled. "Uh-uh. What have you got in mind?"
12: TALL AND GOOD
Quite overwhelmed by the colossal impression he seemed so far to have made on the guests, Whitehead stole tremulously across the garden. Keith's mission was to consolidate his feelings of well-being, and he proposed to do this by paying a call on the only people he had so far encountered in his life who made him feel flash, cool, grand, a pop-star, a Mohawk, one-up, stylish, sexy, brilliant, rich, tall and good. They were the Tuckles.
The Tuckles?
The Tuckles. If Quentin and Andy were at a loose end—or if they were under the auspices of some particularly electrifying drug—they used often to race out across the lawn to give a bad time to Mr. and Mrs. Sydney Tuckle, the wrecked dotard pair whom they were trying to evict from the Appleseed annex, a single-storied, two-room structure built into the corner of the garden wall and screened from the house by a bank of flowerless rhododendrons. The Tuckles had been installed there half a century earlier as factoti to some previous owners and had, insufferably, refused to budge since. Legally they were immovable, but Quentin and Andy, claiming to have dreams of converting the lodge into a studio/guest house/rumpus room, argued that if they could make life nasty enough for the couple they would leave of their own accord.
Quentin had once set up, for example, a polyethylene-covered loudspeaker outside the Tuckle front window, through which he relayed at glass-shattering, eardrum-puncturing volume such sounds as road crashes, cannon salutes, airplane takeoffs, advancing mobs, heavy breathing, tank battles, ambulance sirens, elephant charges, shouts, screams, obscenities. When this gave no clear reward Quentin transmitted a high-pitched sonic hum for three days and three nights; on the fourth day Mr. Tuckle was seen groggily repadding the windows with blood trickling from his left ear, at which point Quentin good-humoredly gave in to domestic pressure and discontinued his broadcasts. Andy's ruses tended on the whole to be more atavistic in conception. He once peed through the keyhole and then, to Quentin's roars of laughter, defecated down the chimney onto the Tuckle hearth. In similar moods he had playfully blocked up their sewage outlet, cut off their heat and water over the Christmas weekend, fused their electricity circuit, and restricted their comings and goings by, variously, camping outside with an ax, blacking up their windows with hardboard (so they didn't dare come out), and training the pressurized garden hose on their door for ninety-six hours. Although it was at their peril that the Tuckles staggered out of the back gate to visit the shop—liable to be menaced, spat on, jostled—Quentin and Andy were of course far too cavalier to mount a systematic campaign. Indeed, we suspect that if the old pair ever did move on Quentin and Andy would miss them sorely.
Whitehead rapped on the toytown front door. He rapped again and backed off a few paces. "Come on," he said. "It's Keith Whitehead."
Suddenly the letterbox creaked for a split second. There followed the sound of bolts, many and elaborate, being thrown back. The door opened slowly. Mr. and Mrs. Tuckle edged out into the strange sunlight.
"Mr. Whitehead! Thank God!" Mr. Tuckle swayed so wholeheartedly on his feet that Keith reached out and balanced him against his wife. "I beg your pardon for the delay, sir," Tuckle pursued, "but Mr. Villiers must have seen you when you came down here on the Tuesday—because he stood outside the door here yesterday and called up that he was you and everyone else was out. We could have sworn it was you, sir. We could have sworn it was you. He said it just in the way you say it, sir. Why, I opened the door without really thinking. And there was Mr. Villiers, with the dark-haired one standing beside him with a dustbin. He hurled it—he hurled it at us and we flew back into the house. Mrs. Tuckle took the lid on her neck. He would have charged in here on top of us, sir, but Mr. Villiers held him back.”
: "It was your own bloody stupid fault for not looking first," said Keith.
"You're right, of course, sir, it was. Very rash."
"Well, what the hell do you expect me to do about it?"
For the first time Mr. Tuckle's voice showed real agitation. "No, sir, please. We don't expect you to control them. You can see they don't know what they're doing themselves half the time. We're grateful for what you do do, sir. Deeply grateful." Mrs. Tuckle confirmed this, her eyes damp with trust. Mr. Tuckle swallowed. "And could you tell Mr. Coldstream that we're deeply grateful for his gift."
"If I remember to," said Keith. (On hearing of the Tuckle plight Giles had asked Whitehead to take along a liter of gin the next time he went to see them, which Keith had done that Tuesday, adjudging the present too fattening to intercept.) "About shopping. And by the way, Mrs. Tuckle, it's no bloody use asking me to get Beenies at the mini-market. You know bloody well they don't stock them there."
"I'm sorry, sir, I didn't—"
"Anyway, you can do it yourselves today for once. Some guests of mine have arrived and I've decided to take everyone out for a picnic. It should be clear from one till at least three."
"Thank you, sir, thank you."
"Yes, and in future when I knock I'd better say 'White-head.' I won't say 'Keith' or 'Mr.' Then you'll know it's me. 'Whitehead.'"
Whitehead didn't seem as pleased by this innovation as he thought he was going to be, but when the Tuckles started to say "Thank you, sir, thank you—" again, Keith was off, striding back over the lawn, feeling far too flash to say good-bye.
13: a sort of daydream
"Away from the drill!"
"What? I say, Giles, are you all right?"
Giles had been lying on his bed, bent double with psychosomatic toothache, His strangled shout had been a semi-
delerious reply to Quentin's courtly knock. By 12:30, Giles had consumed five Gin Rickeys, four gin and tonics, three gin and its, two gin and bitters, and one gin.
"Oh, hello, Quentin," said Giles when he had unlocked the door. "I'm sorry I cried out at you like that, actually. I was just having a sort of daydream."
"Sorry to disturb you. Only we're all off on a picnic and I've come to get you."
"Literally 'all'?"
"Yes, I'm afraid so."
"Ah." Giles didn't want to go anywhere, but he knew that being alone in the house was something he would never be able even to contemplate. "I see. Well, I think I'd better come then."
From behind his back Quentin produced two vast cardboard boxes. "Celia has prepared lots of food," he said. "We'll need some drink, however."
Giles expressionlessly accepted the two boxes and turned to open his teak cupboard. He knelt. "Hang on. Mostly red or mostly white?"
"Let's see," said Quentin. "We've got beef, steak sandwiches, chick—"
"Stop! . . . Uh, sorry. But actually—could you just say the wines, actually. Okay?"
"Of course, Giles. Mostly red, please. Why not half a dozen St. Emilion '74 and half a dozen Chateauneuf-du-Pape "77," Quentin said simply. "Oh, and some Pouilly-Fume for the girls."
"There . . . we . . . are," said Giles some minutes later. "Now . . ." He took a liter of Napolean brandy from the lowest shelf and (after a silent consultation with Quentin) two of Glenfyddich Irish from the one above. Finally, having gone over to the desk to establish that his bottle of gin was at least half finished, Giles included a fresh Gordon's. "That ought to do it," he said to himself.
"Splendid. I'll get Skip up in a minute to lend a hand. No, you haven't met everyone yet, have you?"
Giles did not react to this question. But then, all of a sudden, as he was being led from the room he whipped around and clutched Quentin's jean jacket. "Mrs. Fry's not down there, is she?" he asked wildly.
"No, she's gone. Why? Why does she bother you. She's
a good soul, really, a treasure."
Once again Giles glazed over. "She's got . . . it's just her . . ." Giles was going to say "false teeth." He had been : present when Mrs. Fry sneezed out her dentures onto the draining board and laboriously reinserted them; since then he was subject to dizzy spells and retching fits whenever he saw her.
"Come on, Giles," said Quentin. "My friends have brought something that'll make you feel better. Everything will soon be all right. Come."
Giles looked around as if for the last time at his empty room, sniffed, gave Quentin a zestless smile, and moved with awkward caution out of the door.
14: out Here somewhere
"We can't go in there," he said.
"Why not?" asked Diana.
"Just look at that." Giles pointed to a large sign which stuck out at an angle from the barbed-wire fence. The sign had this to say:
FUCK OFF
TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED
"What about it?"
"It says," Giles explained, as if Diana might only recently have learned to read, " 'trespassers will be prosecuted.'"
"So?"
"Relax, Giles," said Quentin. "I know the man who owns this spread. Oofie Worthington. He said I could use it any time."
"Really, darling?" said Celia. "I didn't know you—"
"What about that barbed wire, then?" said Giles, abruptly taking a step backward and fastening a hand over his mouth.
"No problem," said Skip. The three Americans had loomed up on them. "I just hold it ... right here, and—hey, man, handle the other thing, okay?" Stamping their boots on the lower wire, Skip and Marvell elevated the upper one with their hands. Marvell grunted and winced a good deal while he was doing this but Skip's small, boyish face remained blank, almost dead. "Okay," he droned at last.
(Unnecessarily—buckling his body, the hamper in his arms) Whitehead went first. One by one the girls followed. Quentin and Andy steered the twitchy Giles through, ferried the alcohol across, then hoisted Skip and Marvell over.
Quentin Villiers hastened to help unfurl the blankets with his wife. They kissed fleetingly and crouched to open the hamper.
"Is everyone going to eat now?" asked Giles vaguely, raising the gin bottle to his lips. "Because I think I shall just drink a lot instead, in fact."
At this juncture Skip paced up to Giles and grasped his free hand. "Hi, Giles," he said in his monotone bass. "I'm Skip."
Skip was showered with a spray of high-octane saliva as Giles gurgingly removed the gin bottle and tottered backward, arms lifted to protect his face. "Careful! Uh, sorry . . . Skip? I just didn't see you coming. My name's—" Giles sank to his knees. "Actually . . ." he said.
Now, in a complicated semi-embrace, Quentin, Celia, Marvell, and Roxeanne moved away from the picnic site the better to admire its surrounds. "I like it," said Marvell, attaching tufted hands to either hip. He let his eyes scan the curved field with the kneeling willow in the middle of it, the sturdier file of birches that lined the distant fence, the far hill, the sky. "I like this planet."
"Beautiful," said Roxeanne. "Beautiful, Quentin, truly."
"When we married," said Quentin, "I said that we should have to live out here somewhere." He turned to his wife, "Somewhere where there was still some England."
"Yeah," said Marvell.
"It's not a question of rapport with nature—what a horrid idea that is!—rather, a question of solidifying one's sense of oneself. I'm an Englishman. This is England. There's nothing English about London any more."
Celia and Roxeanne gazed up at Quentin with joy and wonder respectively. Indeed, Villiers' extraterrestrial good looks were very much in evidence that day. His frostily faded jeans and revealing denim shirt contrived to make him appear at once rugged and civilized; his damp-sand complexion contrasted favorably with the etiolated pallor of his housemates and the rather coarse suntans of the Americans; the gusty breeze curled but did not tousle the strands of his silvery blond hair.
: "You shun your spirit," he murmured, "every time you agree to sell your days to the city, to measure out your life at the city's pace."
"Right," said Marvell. "You feel like a cog, a sort of robot that's got to—"
"Hey, you lot," called Diana, "stop talking piss and come and help me with this fucking hamper."
Andy was urinating noisily against a nearby tree and Giles had curled up with the gin bottle. The fact was that little Keith had been lending catering assistance to Diana, who happened to object both to his revoltingly pudgy fingers occasionally skimming her own and also to being bracketed implicitly with the least attractive person present.
"For Christ's sake, let's break out some of that Irish," said Andy.
"Yes," said Quentin, "and let's take in some of this sun."
Marvell and Roxeanne arranged themselves on and around Skip's outstretched form—an arm here, a leg there. It didn't look self-conscious, somehow or other.
"Now," said Marvell. "I want you all to give this drug thing some genuine thought. I don't want to get too mechanistic about it but I've done this sort of project before, in controlled conditions, and I have some sort of article or possibly a pamphlet in view. Names changed; conjectural in idiom." Marvell yawned, and nestled further into the nook composed by Skip's chest and Roxeanne's shoulder. He looked like an unwholesome potentate, propped up against his friends' long bodies, his face shadowed and beady under its trellis of hair. "I don't know about you guys," he went on, "but I'm pretty fucked and I don't want to be flashing all night on this thing. We take off around seven, should be right. Think it over and give me your specifications when we get back. I'll be interested to see what you people choose."
It had taken Giles the last two-thirds of this peroration to crawl the five feet to where Andy lay spreadeagled on a blanket. On arrival, Giles poked Andy's shoulder.
"What?" said Andy.
"Hey, Andy," Giles whispered loudly. "What's that chap saying?"
Andy stretched. "Says he's got drugs'll do anything. Anything you like. You tell him what you want to happen to you and he'll make it happen.”
"What, anything? He—he could even make you stop worrying about your . . ."
"Anything, man," said Andy, searching for a more delicious posture in which to drowse. "Anything."
When Giles had removed the swimming green of the gin bottle from his lips and settled himself also on the ground, there lingered in his mind the afterimage of what had snapped into focus from the smoke between everything and his eyes, the three smiling faces of the Americans.
15: meandered up america
The Americans constituted a "triad," a "troy," which meant, more or less, that they got to fuck and bugger one another indiscriminately. It was their habit, too, to rope in another personage to form a "rectangle," or another couple to make up the full "star." And are we to believe that sexual excursions outside the group were censured? On the contrary, they were encouraged, applauded as adding further imaginative declensions to normal activity. The threesome had flourished for two years and showed lively signs of continuing to do so.
Their story went something like this.
Skip's father, Philboyd B. Marshall, Jr., a horrible human being, used to run a hot, dirty garage on the outskirts of Tara, Tennessee. Philboyd had done so many appalling and traumatic things to his son that anyone who heard about them spontaneously congratulated Skip on his apparent sanity. Philboyd had once raped him, for instance—not (we hasten to add) in a libidinous spirit, but because he had caught Skip emptying the latrine with a shovel rather than with his bare hands, as Philboyd had requested, this being itself a punishment for an earlier mischief. "Kitch you at that kind of non-sense again, boy, and you're in real trouble."
Father and son relations worsened. What with the gas station not doing so good these days, the way all the guys were moving out of Tara and all the niggers moving in, the fact that a man couldn't take a beer at Kramer's without getting
jostled by the longhairs . . . Philboyd's life became a
depressing series of grousing sessions, drunk bends and violence jags. The old mechanic died a little every time a Rican or a Jeeew pulled into his station, expecting gas what's more; : every time he saw the boogies come across the railway line, seemingly unharmed; every time the sun went down over the Coke sign back of the house, causing his evenings to be dimmed by a premature vault of shadow. When Skip became physically unable to take more of his motiveless beatings, Philboyd bought from the glue factory a three-legged mule, which he installed in an enclosure and went out to visit torments on twice daily with kitchen knives, meathooks, branding irons. This helped some, but not for long. The animal fell down dead on him two months later.
And so then of course some Vanderbilters get along from Nashville and Skip starts to hang out with them. They're all between twenty and thirty and Skip hasn't seen seventeen yet, but he has this peculiar facility with older boys. For Skip is what used to be called a "slag": he'll do anything; there's nothing he won't do. "Skip, see if you can dive from the cooling tower into that tank right there." "Every time." "Skip, take the shit buckets down to the trash pile, willya?" "Uh-huh." "Skip, go steal us some beers from Kramer's, okay?" "Right on." "Skip, eat that slug." "No sweat." Certain menial sexual chores fell also to the lanky boy, which he performed with care and avidity. As a student once remarked, "Skip'd rim a snake so long someone held its head." There were lots of drugs, too.
One day Philboyd motored past the Kampsite in his dump truck, saw Skip lying on the grass with a crew of whores and hippie fags. To his hopelessness and grief, Philboyd could not act immediately; time was—when there'd been enough tubby little rednecks like himself still living in Tara-—they could have pitched right in there and whomped up a storm. This reflection saddened him further. As it was, on Skip's return that night Philboyd clubbed his son around the kitchen with a frypan for three-quarters of an hour. "Ah, let the boy be, Philb," came Mrs. Marshall's sickly voice from the adjacent bedroom. "Trying to get some rest in here." "Shut the fuck up," replied Philboyd, who had in any case decided to take his wife's advice, being too old and fat to go on. "Skip, next time I see you which those queeahs again," he panted, "I'm
goan bust your head."
And, to be sure, the next time he saw Skip with those queers again Philboyd attempted to keep his promise. He could hardly believe his good fortune. There was Skip with a solitary student, drinking beers in a downtown penny arcade. Philboyd slapped open the door and strode over to them, eagerly unhitching his belt. "This is it, son. I'm gonna kill your ass." Without reaching any kind of decision, Skip rose, made a circling motion with his right fist and then offered it up to Philboyd's chin at high velocity. Philboyd seemed to stay perfectly still for at least two or three seconds, his face frozen in unbelieving disappointment, before being snatched up into the air and cannonaded against the wall, down which he easily slid to collect in a fat puddle on the floor. With slow-motion fear his son scooped him up and straightened him against a fruit machine. "Dad . . . ?" Skip's hands were shrugged off. "Ah, let me be, son." Philboyd stumbled home, hair matted with sawdust, blood, and beer, and dejectedly hosepiped his wife to death.
Seemed like Skip's life had fallen apart all around him. Ma was dead. Philboyd had a manslaughter charge to face. Marshall Mekanix was closed down. The authorities didn't appear to give a shit what he did. And he had always hated Tara anyhow.
Skip found employment in the automobile plant on the far apron of the second cloverleaf off the third spaghetti junction along the subsidiary expressway running westerly out of Nashville, Tennessee. He worked sixteen hours a day, without ambition and without boredom, taking off in borrowed cars at weekends for St. Louis, Memphis, Oklahoma, 'Pulco, Mexico City, where he participated in various nihilistic debauches, scrogging and getting scrogged, taking large quantities of mescaline and cocaine, the roller of middle-aged cowboys, the occasional witness of optimum sex tortures and genital mutilation profiles, a blank figure in the tumescent heat-hazed carscape, silent, unreflecting, and alone.
After two years of punching out automobile steering-column shroud toggles Skip threw everything he owned into a beatup '75 Plymouth, meandered up America just rolling like a stone nobody throwed—and Omaha, and Minneapolis, and Salt Lake City—until he hung an impulsive right off the interstate thruway and idled toward the fine town of Prescott, Arizona. Halfway there he killed a bottle of paregoric and blacked out in a rest stop; he awoke a buckled mess at the bottom of the roadside ditch, his car and money gone, his nose, ankle, and five ribs broken, his left pinkie missing, a : portion of his right ear bitten off, and a bad hangover. It took him forty-eight hours to regain the road.
"The first time we saw Skip?—enough to make a maggot gag. Roxeanne and I are out researching locations in Arizona for an existential Western I never got together, we're making for the nearest town to pick up some food, come around the bend in the Chev, and there's this sort of twitching heap by the side of the road. We slow up. Never in my life seen a human being nearer the state of nature. We pull over. Clothes half ripped off, face a pool of blood, body broken, random. I still have the photographs."
"Mar was cool but I was shaken up. Kept thinking, uh-oh, Popeye, some Trogs have been having fun, let's get out of here before they have some more, but Marvell said we'd better get him to somewhere and he was right. I put a blanket down for him in back and we like shoveled him in? We thought he might go stiff on us right there but then he started to groan and struggle, even saying things—like, 'I'm all fucked up ... I'm all fucked up.' Marvell gunned it into Prescott, see what they could do there, said we could go on to Phoenix if his condition necessitated it. Bastards in Prescott Casualty said they couldn't even take his fucking temperature without State Reg.—and this guy doesn't have anything, no ID, no cash. He was like nobody. So it was LA, not knowing whether we'd have a stiff in back when we got there. LA they kind of roped him together again but they still wouldn't take him in. So we had to."
"I got some medic friends along. No problem. Skip was delirious for days, wriggling around in bed, moaning about his father and beer cans and stuff. When he came to he didn't appear to have any recollection of what had happened to him or of anything before it—found myself in there explaining that we were on the planet Earth, a spherical body revolving around the sun. The Sun? big fire in the sky? Most of it returned to him, though the stuff about his father comes and goes. It was strange, you know? Like bringing a new human being to life, like creating something. You feel strong things
then. And, Christ, if you'd seen the way that guy responded to
affection. Made you sick to think what his life had been."
"He used to tell these positively prehistoric stories about his father? Some animal. Skip's eyes would practically come out of his head when we told him about our parents—you know, mine are all house-on-the-hill and Marvell's used to be very heavily Yiddisher—that they were rich, affectionate, indulgent. Totally alien to his thought-style. He was kind of relieved when we told him they were all divorced now and that we only saw them for cash. Marvell explained to him about control, about how you don't need parents for much or for long, that you phase them out soon. If only Skip could have."
"Right. I don't think he thinks about his earlier life at all now. The father's still around, however. The authorities forwarded us a letter when we put Skip on Californian Reg. just before we came out here. Shit, what a document. I'll show it to you. We never handed it on to Skip. It would wreck his head to be taken back to those days again. Want to see someone go really wild? Ask Skip about his father. I don't recommend it. Anyhow, so it goes. It was no sweat for us; we had the cash and the space, he helps around the apartment, helps me on projects, fixes the car. . . . He's happy."
"We're like his mother and father as well as his lovers." "Yeah, and he's . . . let's just say he does things for us."
16: a heavy fire of eyes
Whitehead had just drained his first glass of Pouilly Fume", had just turned down Celia's disdainful offer of a piece of crispbread topped with smoked salmon and, alas, butter, had just agreed with Roxeanne that Capricorns seldom got along with Leos (a proposition that Andy, a self-elected representative of the latter sign, began to pooh-pooh), when a ghastly bark sprang from between his lips, bringing all conversation to a halt.
In a tone of mock-heroic formality Keith begged the picnic's pardon, and the conversation cautiously resumed, what time awful quickenings started to occur inside his stomach. It hissed, whooped, spat—Keith whistled popular tunes in an attempt to drown its loud awakening; he was moreover obliged to squirm about on the blankets in order to contain the balloon of air that romped friskily around his colon. As the picnickers began actually to raise their voices to : make themselves heard, little Keith decided that he wouldn't wait to see what his metabolism was going to pull on him next. Hardly caring what sort of spectacle he made of himself, he slipped some paper napkins into his pocket, stood up, and looked quickly about him.
"Saw some interesting—I've got to go, to see . . ." No one stirred as Keith took his leave, as he trotted down the hill under a heavy fire of eyes.
Whitehead picked his way through the outskirts of the thicket, wading through not particularly long grass, his trousers creaking in alarm every time he lifted a foot to clear a log, his high heels wobbling and bending on each anthill and tuft of grass. He walked a tormented half mile, becoming ever easier to please as regards possible sites, but only after he had twice been brought to a kneeling position by the wedge of pain that rocketed from his coccyx to his perineum did he turn and stare back through the tent of nervous leaves. First removing his boots, then his trousers (which required him to lie on the ground and wriggle out of them like a snake shedding its skin), Keith crept in between two dense bramble bushes and melted backward against a severed trunk. A tight-chested grunt was followed by a moan of ecstasy.
"Hi."
Emerging silently from the trees Skip had come to a halt about five yards away. He now closed that distance and un-elongated himself into a crouch, his knees almost touching little Keith's. A grass stem remained motionless in the corner of his mouth as he said, "You like threes, Keith?"
Whitehead would have answered if he could.
"Threes," Skip ponderously repeated. "You and two guys. You and a guy and a girl."
When his voice did appear Keith was, retrospectively, most impressed by its performance. It did not gurgle or whimper, neither did it jump octaves or turn into a corky burp of adrenalin—all things Keith couldn't have blamed it for doing. In fact, it sounded urbane, detached, almost bored.
"Well, you know, Skip, I haven't really got strong views on the subject, although of course I try to be tolerant about that
kind of thing."
"Mm-hm. You like getting head?" ". . . Sorry?”
"Head. Getting blown. Getting sucked off."
"Oh! Well, not mad about it. But again of course it's all part of the basic . . . Yes, I'm for it, on the whole."
"Mm-hm. You like to be fucked?"
". . . Well, as I say, it's not one of the things one customarily . . . but you naturally try to keep an open . . ."
"Mm-hm." Skip swayed languidly on his haunches. "Mm-hm."
"Look— Skip— I don't want to seem abrupt but do you think we could finish this chat another time?"
"Pardon me?"
"Another time. I am on the toilet here."
"Sure you are," Skip said reassuringly. But then he rolled his eyes so that his pupils disappeared upward, revealing two sacs of glistening blood at the base of either socket. "Oh, sure, man. Another time."
17: some bush
"I must say, Roxeanne," Celia observed briskly, "you have got the most marvelous breasts."
"But they're so awfully big," said Roxeanne. "I think Diana's are so pretty? Really the perfect size."
At this Diana curled her lip slightly, as if to suggest that she had heard that line before. Celia resumed, "Yes, Diana's are pretty too. But yours are so enormous and so marvelously . . . solid. Look at mine. Yours seem to point upwards. They don't sag in the least."
Roxeanne shrugged, corroborating this. "Well," she said happily. "Hey, Quentin, is it cool if I take off my pants?"
As the afternoon sun had intensified, had seemed indeed to bear down on them with an invidious strength, Diana and Roxeanne had spent a lot of time—Diana shrewdly, Roxeanne vaguely—wondering which of them would be the first to remove her top. In almost any other company Diana would have had few reservations about taking the lead: her breasts, as Celia had pointed out, may not have been large but they were pretty; they covered a fetchingly disproportionate area
of her chest, were smoothly rounded, and rose to neat orange nipples which were soon tinted and hardened by the wind's : gentle ministry. Diana was, nevertheless, banking on Roxe-anne's being a good deal more punctured than they looked under her smock and had even assumed that she must, in the nature of things, be wearing a quarter or half-brassiere beneath it. As it was—having both muttered something about wanting to get a tan—the girls bared their treasures simultaneously. Except Marvell, who gazed on with complacence, and Giles, who was apparently unconscious, the fearsome glory of Roxeanne's breasts filled everyone present with utter consternation. They seemed to shoot upward out of her collar-bones (forming a ledge off which, had it occurred to her to do so, she could have not inconveniently dined), U-turned over symmetrical cupcake nipples, and repaired to the commodious launching pad of her rib cage without marking this junction by so much as a crease. Diana had looked at the vast tenement then back at her own diminutive cups with scarcely concealed incredulity, and only on the appearance of Celia's breasts—depressing items that flatly splayed in the direction of her armpits—did she begin to regain her equanimity.
"I beg your pardon, Roxeanne," said Quentin, "I didn't quite catch that."
"If I take off my pants?"
"Ah, a common ambiguity when colonials are of the company. Now, do you refer to your trousers or to your panties? Which?"
"How about both?"
Quentin glanced at his wife. "Well, old Oofie is in Kuwait, so far as I know. As long as you don't mind the odd wayfarer or rustic?" He laughed, holding out his hands. "By all means."
Laughing also, Roxeanne said, "They're very welcome," lay back, hooked her thumbs into the waistband of her jeans and eased her seemingly infinite legs out of them. Her (anyway otiose) panties followed. "Okay," she concluded, "no smart-ass remarks about natural redheads."
"Certainly not," said Quentin sincerely.
Diana stared hard at Andy as he rolled over, propped his
head up on his palms for a few seconds, his face perhaps six
inches from Roxeanne's alabaster midriff, and reassumed his original position. "Christ," he mused softly. "Some bush.”
18: OH NO
Oh no, surely they can't all be at it already, can they?
Whitehead posed this question to himself while emerging from the thicket and beginning to make his way up the incline toward the picnickers, all by now in varying stages of deshabille. From his vantage, the sections of bare, mottled flesh lost their outlines in the dusty summer air; as he traipsed toward them their bodies seemed to shimmer and merge, to resolve and separate, to flow together and then to cease. Twenty yards away, quite suddenly, they regained their distinctness, becoming again immobile and discreet. Whitehead slowed with relief.
Then—more—he came to a halt, still unnoticed by the eight further up the slope, and sank, without emphasis and without any sense of irony, to his knees, a tubby supplicant of the warming wind. The keen anxiety he always felt on approaching any group of people now quietly allied itself to a deeper, more settled foreboding. Keith had once, when tran-quilized, told a friendly dietician that he hadn't minded discovering that he was small, fat, and ugly half as much as he had minded discovering that he would always be those things, that all of it could never change now. Would it ever—just a bit? Although Whitehead didn't consider himself a highly sexed person—his masturbatory career, for instance, he had come to regard as an increasingly disturbing and ghostly adventure—he felt it highly likely that if he failed to have a definite sexual experience this weekend he would make some sort of attempt to kill himself. It was not release he craved, far less pleasure, merely a token withdrawal of the insult of ugliness. Little Keith picked up a blade of grass and twirled it in his fingers. The action returned blood and self-consciousness to his features, steadying him somewhat. He smiled furtively as he recalled the incident with Skip. Christ. There really wasn't anything people wouldn't do any more. Being, so far as he could ascertain, a heterosexual, Whitehead had found the approach dramatically unsexy, but it was quite flattering all the same, and it went to show that a lot was in the air. The weekend would, in any case, be unlike any other.
On rejoining his friends Keith's anticipations were strengthened and elaborated. If he looked to his right, he : 6l
could see—for what they were worth—the breasts of the square-faced girl called Celia, wife to the gorgeous Villiers; if he turned to his left he could admire Diana Parry's dinky navel and compact stomach; practically under his nose was a square foot of tawny pubic hair. Keith didn't dare look at anything, of course. He had never had so much sex in his life. But as the newly returned Skip smilingly caught his eye, a whole range of sexual possibilities couldn't help opening itself up for little Keith Whitehead.
And, both less and more straightforwardly, a whole range of them opens itself up for us, too. We could—let's see—we could have Diana take his hand and shoo him off to the woods, have Celia lean over and tenderly unbuckle his thin plastic belt, have Roxeanne shinny beneath him there and then. Of course, we can bring this about any time we like— but Keith can't, oh no.
19: COLLAPSING BALLOON
"Look," said Andy, "there's some cows over there. How casual."
"Yeah. Coming on pretty authentic," said Marvell.
Giles, who had shown no sign of life whatever for the past ninety minutes, lifted his head and narrowed his eyes over the lip of his gin bottle. "How do you know they're not bulls?"
"Because," said Andy, "bulls have horns and cows have tits. They've got tits."
"No," said Skip slowly. "That's not so."
"How come?" Andy asked.
"Some cows don't have tits. Some bulls don't have horns."
"Oh yeah?"
"That's right. For example, a cow might not have had calves yet."
"Is that a fact?"
"Sure."
Andy sank back. "Well what the fuck difference does it make anyway?"
As if in answer to this query a black heifer detached
itself from the ambling herd, trotted up the dip in the field,
paused, arrived at some sort of decision, and came bowling
down the slope toward the picnickers in a firm-legged gallop.
Approximately four seconds later they were lying in a bloody, groaning heap on the other side of the barbed-wire fence. In an electric, hair-triggered scramble they had climbed, jumped, dived over, under, and between the barbs—clawing one another out of the way, springing from flattened torsos, pulling each other's hair for leverage—to subside like a collapsing balloon of flesh in the adjacent field. Whispered obscenities broke the silence as the wheezing tangle of limbs gradually came apart and a dazed cataloguing of injuries began.
All three girls bled not very profusely from abrasions sustained on their shoulders and bare breasts. Skip had a vent of skin flapping on his wrist, Andy a deep and dirty gash on his cheek. Only Quentin was entirely unscathed.
Keith, who was still severely winded, having been used as a trampoline by everyone else, had a cut nose and lip and a four-inch stripe running across his forehead like a second mouth. More material to his desire, though, was the fact that his only good trousers were irreparably torn and that the six-inch heel of one of his boots was nowhere to be found. Giles squatted with his back to the carnage; one hand held a pocket mirror to his mouth, whose interior the other frenetically enumerated; the cap on his left incisor came away without any fuss between his fingers; with a distracted cry he flopped twiching to the earth.
"Jesus," said Marvell, "we've got our ancestors to thank for that."
Skip leapt to his feet. "Eat shit, eat shit!" he roared, his mouth whitening.
The heifer now stood a few feet from the fence, staring at the disarray in companionable wonder. Its instincts had programmed it to run up to the picnic in that fashion, but they had programmed it also to swerve away at the last moment and trot off wondering what to do next.
"Motherfuck, motherfuck," said Skip. He uprooted a brick from the base of the fence and moved along the wire calling out softly, waving his hand.
As the animal frowned, dipped its head and moved forward, Skip brought the brick down on its pate with a long-armed swing. There was a dull crunch.
The heifer remained motionless, then jerked backward. It turned, skipped into the field, ran about in untidy decreasing circles, and keeled over onto the grass.
: There was a silence.
"You've killed it," said Andy. "It's all fucked up."
"It does seem to be totally buggered," agreed Quentin.
"I'm gonna go kick it some," said Skip, stepping forward.
Female voices were raised in protest. Andy stood in Skip's path and a halfhearted scuffle took place before Quentin lent his support. Whereas Andy restrained Skip with dislike, and because he didn't particularly want him to kick the heifer, Quentin restrained Skip considerably, in the spirit of a wise man preventing a fellow Jew from attacking a platoon of Nazis, with due respect for Skip's wrath. At length Skip relaxed.
"Just get the whiskey, man," said Quentin.
"Yeah," said Andy. "Let's get drunk."
"Yeah. Yeah!" screamed Giles.
Within half an hour the nine were re-established on the near side of the barbed-wire fence. Nobody's injuries had proved to be more serious than anything handkerchiefs and saliva wouldn't relieve—except Andy's ripped cheek, which he claimed to have "cooled" by emptying a bottle of Glenfyddich over it. This move exhausted the supply of spirits and the wine was therefore started on in earnest. Weightwatchers Celia, Diana, and Whitehead didn't object to the switch, having been on Pouilly Fume all along, but there was loud complaint from the others about the inability of wine to do much for them these days. (Giles, face downward at the corner of the blanket, had made no response to demands for his bottle of gin.) "I guess this'll keep us up till we get back," said Marvell, boredly unwrapping his hash kit. The food, also, was partaken of gingerly: pieces of meat were picked up between finger and thumb and held aloft like live worms before being quickly dispatched; offending portions of salad and cheese were disgustedly spat out on the grass; water biscuits, apples, celery, and radishes enjoyed fair popularity, but little truck was had with such greasy and malodorous dishes as sardines, liver sausage, and anchovies. The company snorted when bananas were mentioned and actually
gagged in unison when boiled eggs were produced ("No," said
Celia, putting them away, "perhaps that wasn't a good idea"). Twenty minutes with a bottle of wine apiece, however, and loquacity returned, mainly in the form of piecemeal self- congratulation about the recent escape. Quentin then began a speech on the writings of the late Alain Robbe-Grillet; its length, periodicity, and range of reference held in thrall everyone but Keith (anyway groggy enough with heat, the memory of Roxeanne's body, and his triannual deliverance from the costive state) and Andy. The restless Adorno rolled over in front of Diana and started to stroke her hair and whisper sexy things to her neck. Diana turned away toward the curved field, where without comment she saw the injured heifer climb uncertainly to its knees, its feet, then zigzag away. When she looked back at Andy she noticed that some blood from his cheek had dripped onto the downy white scants of her pantie suit. "Keep away from me," she said quietly. "Just keep, the fuck, away from me," said Diana.
xx: Diana
Diana spends a lot of time wondering what the hell she's doing in Appleseed Rectory. Occasionally—when the attentive Villiers pours her a Tio Pepe at 11:30, or while she drives to the shopping center in Celia's I-type Jaguar, or as Giles's unsteady hand appears round his bedroom door with a wad of £20 notes to settle the quarterly accounts, or during the moments after Andy has made love to her—Diana feels, well, a sort of fleeting satisfaction with the stage her life has reached. But most days she sits there hating everything, the place she's in, the people she's living with, the light around her, the time of day it is.
For this there are excellent reasons. Diana's background may not in itself be illustrious, but it has an unquestionable luster. Always she has mingled with the great. At the age of six Diana spent the first of many summers at Moreley Court, where her ermine waterbed was maintained at body temperature and where every night she found her toothbrush pre-pasted in the ormolu bathroom. Two years later she wintered with the Beresford-Parkinsons in the famous Ariadne Palace on Lake Geneva, down whose hanging-garden avenues unsmiling dwarfs ferried her breakfast to the aviary swimming pool. As a teenager she was the perennial houseguest of the Rudolphes, the Perths, of the screen personalities Murray and Elspeth Krane, of the Balfours, the Grizes, of Sir Henry and Lady Doorlock, of the motion picture producer "Tubby" de Large and his lovely young wife, Lurleen. And, a little later, she is marriageably to be seen on the west patio of the Castello Pinero near Padua, basking naked on the glossy decks of Logo Lesbos' schooner among the Seychelle reefs, quaffing champagne in Giovanni Raffini's dune litter at the topless beaches of Acapulco. Youngish, well-connected, cosmopolitian readers can expect to see her about the place in six or seven years' time. At cockail parties, soirees, premieres, and so on, she will usually be accompanied by one or other of her parents, but after a few months she will begin to arrive alone, still a rather hesitant figure, slightly ill at ease about the aggressive sexiness of her catsuits and leotards, continually on edge about her appearance, until, during her second year of social immersion, she will be widely celebrated for her aplomb, verbal asperity, and daring and expertise in bed.
Diana's half-vicarious celebrity can be explained, on the one hand, by her mother's editrixship of "Nell's Notebook" in the pages of the distinguished glossy Euroscene, and, on the other, by her father's position as Assistant Chief Casting Director of Magnum Cinematic Promotions, Ltd., Paris and New York. Examples of that matrimonial tendency whereby unlike poles attract, Eleanor is practical, intelligent and cunning, a sharp-faced woman and angular, while Bruce is foolish, guileless, and benign, a shaggy middle-aged boy with a demeanor of nonspecific, goofy good will. Their Parisian idyll spanned Diana's conception and gestation, and survived her birth by two months, at which point Eleanor decided that she didn't much like Bruce and got on an airplane to London, where she embarked on a continuing series of compact, knowing little affairs with persons flourishing in the media; the hopeless Bruce meanwhile staggered around Paris getting drunk for six months, then took up with a Breton ingenue of such ingenuousness that she has since forgotten French and failed to learn English. Between these hearths the young Diana was patted like a listless shuttlecock for the first fifteen years of her life.
From the beginning Eleanor Parry policed her daughter's social life with astuteness and dedication. She enrolled Diana at the sort of schools where the children of the fashionable were likely to gather—Eldahurst Kindergarten, Laura and June Bateson House, The Hendlebury Association for the Furtherance of Girls' Education, Hampstead Comprehensive— then withdrew her once the requisite circle of acquaintances had been made. Selflessly Mrs. Parry attended all parents' meetings, liaison projects and school bazaars. A brief perusal of the register furnished her with remarks like, "Oh, of course, you're little Sarah's parents! My Diana absolutely adores Sarah," or, "Then Bettina's your child. Oh, dear, I'm afraid poor Diana must pester her dreadfully." Parental invitations soon followed and were as readily accepted by the young columnist. Host and hostess would then receive, consecutively, a flattering profile in "Nell's Notebook" and a long letter from Eleanor about what difficulty Diana had in making friends. And Diana was such a ferociously immaculate guest (an excellent gauger of mood, correct forms of address, prompt thank-you missives, tips for the maids) that it seemed churlish not to ask her again.
For his part, big Bruce Parry saw to it that Diana's thrice-yearly holidays with him in Paris and New York were varied and eventful. As was the case with his ex-wife, everyone was to some extent in Bruce's debt and his social standing was thus providentially enhanced. Unflappable and always eager to please, old Bruce had given many one-line parts to talentless mistresses of superannuated company-owners, had often found employment for loafing sons of neurotic lighting-cameramen, had regularly steered hysterectomized vamps through mid-career crises, was prepared to put in unpaid overtime to cover up for menopausal assistant directors and alcoholic production managers, had been known to work around the clock to appease coronary-prone producers, depressive financiers, and apoplectic entrepreneurs. And—heck—the guy just likes kids. Confidentially known in Magnum House as "The Nursery," the apartment of Bruce Parry and his alingual consort is an indulgent, eventempered Disneyland of sweets, crackers, and party games. Accordingly, little dark-haired Diana is a feted personage whenever she visits her father, the receptacle of much guilty hospitality.
Unfair. There is genuine warmth and feeling in the childish
Diana. Although she is deeply unresponsive to her parents,
there is much that remains—for she's the girl who writes thirty letters a week, who gives you her old handbags and makeup, who spends three hours a day vocally marshaling her : dolls' house, who steals stockings from the boutique, who'll tell you about sex, who likes the tanned boy in ragged socks and sandals and chucks the yobs' caps under buses, who kicks the matron and shows her pants to the gardener, who'll offer you up to 20p. to shout fuck off outside Miss Granger's study, who'd rather come with you than go home, and who bursts into tears without knowing why. Diana is as baffled as anyone by her cold envy for her mother, her cold contempt for her father, and by her fear of being alone.
A word about Diana's sex life.
Nine days after the first menstrual bloodstain had been sighted on her sheets Diana was successfully, and very painfully, seduced by a thirty-five-year-old stuntman at a Bruce Parry shindig. High time too, she thought, dispatching letters to her friends the next morning. When she got back to London she told her mother about it. Mrs. Parry, who would never stand any nonsense from Diana, marched her straight down to the gynecologist's and put her on the pill. Diana could be said never to have looked back: an intelligible procedure— at what, anyway? If someone neither sordid nor unattractive seemed to want to go to bed with her, Diana went to bed with him. Along they came—tramp tramp tramp—slowly and sporadically at first, then in steady Indian file. Unlike many of her friends, Diana never felt that she had "let herself down" in these affaires, no matter how brief and pleasureless they might have been. She had never slept with anyone who wasn't rich, well-groomed, and halfway civilized; the ubiquitous venereal maladies which she could not but occasionally complain weren't, in her case, of the chronic variety and her tolerance to antibiotics was happily low; on no account would she entertain gentlemen friends at home and her bedroom remained a silent, pink retreat of dolls and paper tissues; up until the age of nineteen, up until Andy, Diana hadn't once spent an entire night with a man, would leave unfussily when the act was completed, had never woken up to new skin and breath.
For Diana, sex was not a fleshy concern; it was a dial in
the machinery of her self-regard, a salute to her clothes sense,
applause for her exercises, a hat tipped to her dieting, the required compliment to her hairdresser, the means socially to measure herself against others. She quite enjoyed it, too, now that most people were good enough at pressing the right buttons to give her clitorial orgasms of admittedly varying quality. If anyone happened to be particularly rich, handsome, or accomplished in bed, Diana would perhaps see them more than once, and, if they were moreover kind and/or amusing, she might even get quite to like them. But sexual lassitude and disgust seemed to be everywhere among the young, and two-night stands were becoming a rarity. The party, the man, the dinner, the flat, the fuck, the taxi, the scalding bath. Besides being good exercise in itself Diana found that it helped her to eat less. She would get out of bed the next morning and complete her callisthenics program with fresh verve.
Diana and Eleanor Parry were sunbathing by the Reina Victoria swimming pool one August afternoon when Andy Adorno boomed down the Seville Road into Ronda on his 1,225 cc. Harley Davidson Hurricane, stripped to the waist, his gout of black hair driven back from his face, his heavy body dusted and sweatstained in the mountain sunshine. He pulled up at the traffic lights adjacent to the hotel driveway, and, revving hugely in the empty road, glanced round about him, enjoying the heat, the noise, the new town. Twenty yards away, Diana and Eleanor looked up from their magazines. "Why aren't there any Spick laws about scooters," said Mrs. Parry. "I don't think he's Spanish," said Diana. "Mm, too tall." Adorno turned and met their eyes; he smiled, apparently pleased that he was the theme of their irritation. "You English too?" he shouted. Removing her sunglasses, Diana nodded. "Catch you around," he said as he hurled the bike forward with needless violence into the town, causing the tan-suited patrones of the hotel to watch the thinning sprays of grit with cardiac disgust.
They saw him every day—punching the pintables that lined the cafe terraces, shooting pool with the soldiers in the main square casino, lurching out of side roads by the bus station on his bike, bellowing past the hotel to El Hondon swimming pool with some bikini-ed Swede or American clutching his waist. Diana and Eleanor would mention Andy from time to time. "Saw that hooligan with the motorbike this morning in Bar Oliva drinking Anises . . . the yob on the motorbike was in the Telefonica with some dagos today . . .
: the bike oik almost ran someone down in the market square ... I wish the bike oik wouldn't go around half naked all the time. . . ."
Parry fille and Parry mere were alike convalescing after a long run of abbreviated affairs. In particular, Diana had recently tired of a set of spendthrift stockbrokers which she had found herself going to bed with; Eleanor had recently been spurned by the young director of a new radio company, who had waived her frank entreaties at a crowded after-dinner party. For Mrs. P. the cure was relatively straightforward— she needed a rest. The younger Diana, on the other hand, was suffering from the inevitable attack of night fatigue; night fatigue, with its languor and apathy, an indefinite series of one-directional days over which the dusk hung like the promise of extinction. So they gave themselves up to silence, dark glasses, and sun, to a period during which they would re-invigorate their bodies and conserve their sexual energies, going to bed early, sober and alone.
With two weeks of the holiday still to run Mrs. Parry decided that she didn't much like Ronda and got on an airplane to London. The evening before, over dinner in the starched chill of the Reina dining room, Eleanor complained of a slight restlessness, and when Diana went to her mother's room the next morning she found her gone.
Diana had, she supposed, intended to stay out the month, but as she ate lunch that day and reread her mother's note a familiar tremor came over her. The night fatigue was passing; she felt active, envious, neglected again. At two she walked down to the Iberia office and booked a flight for the next day. She spent the rest of the afternoon drinking up the remaining sun, every now and then anxiously examining her bikini marks. She returned to her room, did her exercises until her thighs were as stiff as steel rods and her breasts felt like little fists of muscle, and then, as a sort of token, put on her short white Pucci dress, checking in the mirror that her black pubic triangle was just discernible beneath it as she left for the hotel bar. She was there bought champagne until 8:30 by a perspiring American called Dexter, with whom she dined. "Let's look in at Coca's afterwards," Dexter then said.
They drank more champagne in a discotheque alcove. Dexter was putting his hand up Diana's dress a good deal; Diana retaliated by not uncrossing her legs. At eleven, when Diana JO
was wondering whether she could be bothered not to sleep with Dexter—it was, after all, the simplest way of terminating the evening—Andy came in.
Andy came in, stripped to the waist as usual, a bottle of twenty-peseta wine swinging from one hand, a length of bread in the other. He waved and shouted hellos at the bartenders and turntable operators, kissed two waitresses, and took the floor, dancing alone under the throbbing strobes with elaborate martial-arts movements. Ten minutes later he started to saunter round the club, nodding to his friends, peering closely but offhand at the prettier girls, until he came to Dexter and Diana, at which point he paused. Three feet from their table Andy came to an emphatic halt and began to stare at them both, declining to reply when Dexter uneasily asked what he could do for them. Andy inserted the last wedge of bread into his mouth and chewed on it for what must have been half a minute, meanwhile dusting his palms. Diana soon forgot her embarrassment as she concentrated with rapt distaste on the loose movement of his jaw, the swilling and munching of his large square teeth, the moist swipes of his thick tongue. "Hey there!" said Dexter with simulated amusement when Andy reached out for the half-full champagne bottle, held it up to the light, and swallowed its contents in one long pull, his adam's apple pulsing like a geyser bubble in the intermittent light. Andy dragged his bare forearm across his mouth and burped immensely. "Most refreshing," he said, replacing the bottle and moving round the table toward Dexter, at whose side he knelt and into whose large red ear he started intently to whisper. Andy and Dexter stood up. "Guess I'll be getting along," said Dexter wonderingly. Andy watched him leave and then, with a complacent air, turned to Diana. He held out a hand toward her.
Ninety seconds later Diana was being driven at speed by Andy Adorno down Ronda's main street. Her mind had been full of good things to say to Andy—"Wow, if big boy want, big boy take," "Look, hippie, I don't go for mysterious strangers," "OOoo, aren't you oddly compelling"—but there was something about his manner, something at once single-minded and negligent, which suggested to her that he was on some crappy drug and was liable to get ugly. Now she could think only of her immediate physical discomfort. Using one hand to keep the hem of her dress somewhere in the vicinity : of her navel, she put the other arm around his waist. He smelled of dew and sleeping bags. As her sleeve brushed his armpit she wondered vaguely if she would have time to wash the dress before she packed.
Andy abruptly beached the motorbike at the far end of the bridge over Ronda Gorge, the vast fault in the plateau on which the town was spread like assorted crockery on a great white tabletop. He led her back across the bridge to one of its semicircular, railinged indentations. "Have you ever looked over?" "Once. It stinks." "Not at night." He suffered her to kneel on the paved seat and to look out through the bars into the deep stone valley. He stood behind her, very close. "It's eight hundred feet down. Lots of guys a year come here especially to kill themselves. I spoke to the old wreck whose job it is to hose them off the rocks. They always do it here, from the middle, climb over the railings, look around. Think of it." While Andy spoke Diana sensed a thickening presence at the top of her exposed thighs. At first she thought it was his hand and paid no attention. Then her knuckles whitened on the railings as she heard the discreet trickle of his fly zipper. "Then they look around," Andy continued huskily, "and they must wonder how they could hate anywhere so casual. So they look down. Look down." Diana leaned over further, listened to the sound of a stream, telephone crickets, saw water shine, fireflies winking at each other. "Then they just let go, and the earth soars up and—AW, MY RIG!" Andy backed off, half doubling over. "The zip ... got it ... aw, my fuckin' snake!" After Andy had disengaged himself and they had stopped laughing, Diana waited a few seconds and said, "I'm going back tomorrow"—but he made her take the ticket from her bag and he swung it out over the bridge wall. Diana watched the slip of red paper wing its way down through the dark air.
Whenever Diana thinks about those seconds now she re-experiences them simultaneously—discreet trickle, crickets telephoning, shine of water, winking fireflies—but it is with enduring consternation that she reviews the following month. "Come on," he said, checking her out of the hotel, "I'm going
to make you nice," Halfway up Europe on that fucking bike.
They spent the night with some unspeakable hippies in Granada, Andy conducting a sale of dud narcotics on whose proceeds the couple dined at the Ritornello club in Alicante, where he moreover made her dance. They spent two nights in a zoo-peseta pension in Peniscola ("Cock-coke," Andy called it), slept on the beach at Sitges, and lived naked for a week on a Pyrenean ridge. They ate jumbo prawns and collected a mescaline consignment in the Marseilles docks, stayed at the George IV in Monte Carlo, contracted scabies in a Le Touquet youth hostel, and sat for thirty-six hours in the Orly waiting rooms. Apart from the squalor, the crappy people they encountered, the filthy macrobiotic food he occasionally bothered to make her eat, and that fucking motorbike, what appalled Diana most was the unforgivable corniness of her predicament. Tight little rich girl encounters working-class spunk. Seen from the outside everything he did was in trite inverted commas: he was uninhibited, zany, impulsive—"lyrical." And yet being with him was an utterly unreflecting activity; Diana never hesitated because nothing gave Andy pause. There was the sex, too, of course, and it was perhaps this that gave Diana most retrospective embarrassment. Unlike the delicate, artful sex technicians she had slept with in the past, Andy didn't seem to concern himself much with her own inclination or pleasure. For some reason this made her feel achingly passionate and (the word made her squirm) "tender," also. Once, in the Pyrenees, he encouraged her to drink too much wine and she was sick over her naked body. He held her shoulders. "Now you won't like me any more," she had said. Andy hurled her down in the long grass and made love to her with unprecedented ferocity. Ten minutes out of his presence and she began to feel confused, frightened, and intensely sad.
He dropped her off at the preliminary customs checkpoint in Boulogne harbor. Andy asked Diana what she was going to do when she got back. She told him she would be starting at London in October. Which college? She told him which college. Andy couldn't help it—he had to laugh. "Why are you laughing?" she asked. But Andy kicked the bike into gear and Diana kissed his lips quickly before he could zip off down the salty black road.
Diana was still crying three weeks later when she took her place in the check-in queue at Wolfson College, London,
a huge post-modern matchbox which loomed starkly over
Golders Green bus depot. Although her transparent silk trouser suit assumed a perfunctory sexiness, Diana stood in an ·' unwonted slouch and her head hung, resigned and unalert. He recognized her anyway. "There you are at last—I've been here a year already." He kissed her condiment lips as the students threaded past. "Are you going to come and live with me, or what?" She started to cry again. "Yes, please," said Diana.