21: down unknown paths

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

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

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

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

"I'm a queer," said Skip.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Adrenalin concentrate." "Casual.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

: "Can I have my turn now please."

"Pardon me?"

"Can I have my turn now please."

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

"Sure," said Marvell.

"Can I have my turn now please."

"Sure, Giles."

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

"About what?"

"Actually little things."

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

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

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

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

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

"A blackout," said Andy.

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

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

"Autonomous? Self-determinant? Solipsist?"

"That ought to do nicely."

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

"Nothing," said Diana.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Not for long," said Quentin.

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

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

"Make him gauche and gawky," said Lucy.

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

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

"And make him terrified," said Andy.

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

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

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

"Hey. Marvell."

"Oh yeah. Keith."

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

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

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

22: WHO'S HE?

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

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

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

"Mm."

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

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

"Don't touch me."

"What for?”

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

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

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

"Liberated . . . ?"

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

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

"Like fuck."

"Christ, You are! Well well well."

"I'm not jealous, just . . ."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"—and that's real dead babies. What?"

"Did you write this?"

"Write what?"

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

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

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

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

AND GET THE DEVILS OUT. JOHNNY

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

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

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

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

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

"What's going on, man?"

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

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

23: drunk space

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

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

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

more intentness at his face, leaning forward gradatim. He

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

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

". . . Lucy who?"

"Lucy."

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

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

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

"What?"

"Actually. I mean . . . oh, God."

"Giles, honestly."

"I know."

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

"Giles, why are we—"

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

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

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

"Mm, Skip."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lucy stood up. "And tonic?"

"Yes, please, actually."

"Big one?"

"Yes please."

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

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

24: Heavy water

Look!

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

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

"How do I look?"

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

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

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

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

"I love you," he said gravely.

"Thank you," she said. "I love you.”

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

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

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

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

"You look very touching."

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

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

25: THE PSYCHOLOGIC REVUE

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Is it always this empty?" asked Marvell.

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

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

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

gaunt auditorium.

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

"What are the gimmicks?"

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

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

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

"Who are they?" asked Marvell.

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

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

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

"Yeah?"

"Fuckin' better believe it, boy."

"How come?"

Precision and arbitrariness were the twin hallmarks of

Conceptualist activity. On the morning that inaugurated their

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yeah."

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

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

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

"Oh, let's leave. Please."

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

"Will it be all right, darling?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The audience was motionless with italic terror.

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

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

"Not bad. Not bad," said Marvell.

"Yeah," said Skip.

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

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

"How did they do it," said Celia.

"Quite simple," said Diana.

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

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

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

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

26: THE LUGUBRIOUS BOOGIE

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

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

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

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

"You all pigs."

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

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

"What kind of thing?"

"A fuck-thing."

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

"Don't matter," said Skip.

"Pigs."

"Look—hey—boogie," shouted Andy, "better get the fuck out of here, boy, okay? You're all fucked up and got nothing to say."

"We're not like that," said Roxeanne; "he doesn't mean it," she told the lugubrious boogie, pressing his hand against her hard breasts.

"Oh yes I do," said Andy. "Beat it, boogie, and I mean now."

" 'Boogie'?" queried Marvell. "Jesus, this guy talks more American than I do. Haven't heard "boogie" for a time. Say that in New York, Andy, and you'll get your head kicked off."

"I don't give a rat's arse. Because I wouldn't say it in New York. I respect and admire the American black. They fight. But over here they're just boogies far as I'm concerned."

A rank of nearby blacks straightened their heads, as if they might take issue with Andy on this point. Andy glared happily at them.

"You know," mused Giles to nobody in particular, "I thought I wasn't going to enjoy tonight, but I quite am, actually. Not once have I thought about my . . ." (Villiers extended a hand to refill Giles's beaker.)

Whitehead sat close to Lucy, achingly, illegally close. He noticed, with what he felt to be some impertinence, that her breasts were rather long and tubular beneath her virile white shirt— nothing like the trim conclavities of Diana's breasts nor the global fury of Roxeanne's. Nicer than Celia's, though; more touching somehow. He noticed too that her face was a bit colorless, for all its sequins and cosmetic murals, and her mouth somewhat puckered, but not testily so. Little Keith felt a kind of spurious intimacy with her. If only she wouldn't dislike him—never mind anything else yet.

"Have you ever been in here before, Lucy?"

(Did one bother with that sort of thing these days? Whitehead assembled and compressed his buttocks, thus increasing his sitting height by a couple of inches.) "No. Have you . . . ? Sorry, what's your name?" (Her face was blank—but Keith could scarcely credit the solicitude of her manner.) "Keith."

"Keith? You're the one who . . . ? Oh, Andy." (And she smiled at him! At Whitehead! Without a whisper of ridicule in her face.)

"No, Lucy, I haven't either. It's interesting—all these different views. I think Roxeanne's on the right track really with . . . that man. Though you can see Andy's point of view. What do you make of it?"

Lucy leaned over and said in her relaxed London accent, "If I was a goner spade like that I'd rather have his talk than her finger up my bum."

(Her voice buzzed in his ear. Keith's pecker leaped.) A sympathetic, empirical Whitehead followed Lucy's eyes across the table. With his arms at his sides the lugubrious boogie was watching Roxeanne massage his lower lap with the flat of her strong hand. Quentin and Celia exchanged fastidious grimaces and Andy snorted in disbelief. Marvell and Skip, however, looked on smiling, their faces full of pleasant expectation. Diana's, too.

"Let me be, pig. . . . Take . . . Don't . . ." But Roxeanne murmured closer, urging him back against the wall with her powerful thorax. Her left hand joined her right on the lugubrious boogie's groin, and her fingers closed on something.

"Ah, no, don't," said Lucy. "Don't do this to him." By now all Appleseed eyes were on Roxeanne and a tingling silence had gathered over the table, enclosing the alcove from the rest of the bay. She bit her lip ticklishly as she unsnapped the lugubrious boogie's thin brown belt and sought for the catch of his zipper with bent forefinger and sharp thumb. She straightened the toggle and pulled it downward, evenly unmeshing the silver treads to disclose a widening triangle of grayish rayon. The lugubrious boogie sighed in a baffled, plaintive way and made to paw at Roxeanne's wrists. She didn't seem to need to take any notice. Her right-hand fingertips dipped into the moist area of his perineal divide while she introduced her left down the loose front band under his navel. Roxeanne wettened her mouth as the light-brown prepuce was hoisted clear of the gauzy underpants. He con- : templated his slack organ with a curiosity no less dazed and intent than that of his tablemates. Then, like a jerking second hand, the penis craned abruptly and the lugubrious boogie leaned forward into painful, heaving, tubercular tears.

Roxeanne stood up. She smiled. And they left him there with his elbows on the table, his face held in damp hands.

27: THE OLD COPS

In the concrete avenue Marvell looked around the semicircle of faces. "What now, Quent?"

Twenty feet away a cruising drophead MGE slowed in the narrow vehicle lane. It contained two swarthy persons in the front buckets and another perched up on the rumble seat; the third passenger wasn't good-looking enough to do that kind of thing, and he knew it. After a few seconds the car accelerated away.

"Hey, Quentin. What now?"

For the first time in the year Celia had known him, Quentin Villiers was showing less than his normally perfect serenity. He pinched the base of his nose with gloved fingers and blinked.

"Darling?" said his wife.

"I just want to ... find the cars," he muttered.

"What about—what was it?—the Gerry Show, place you mentioned," said Marvell. "Where those freaks and oldsters strip and fuck and stuff like that?"

"Really ... I somehow . . ."

"Or the Blow-Shop, get your ... Or the Hetero-Club, dump where queers can't get fucked. Or the—"

"Marvell, I don't think . . ."

"Darling?"

"One moment." Quentin folded his arms and stared down at his crossed wrists. When he looked up his features had recovered their poise. "Roxeanne," he said, "why on earth did you do that?"

"Do what? Look, what is this," Roxeanne demanded. "What's with you people anyway?"

"Christ," said Lucy.

"Roxeanne: understand that I'm not asking you in accusation but in simple wonderment. What was the—”

"To show him who the pigs are."

"I'm sorry, I ..."

"Roxeanne," began Celia, "you really don't—"

"Don't what?"

"1 told her to stop it, didn't I," said Andy. "I tipped the boogie to deep six."

"You enjoyed it as much as I did," said Diana, which was broadly true.

"And what is all this shit anyway?" asked Marvell.

"Children children children—this will get us nowhere." Quentin consulted his spangled wristwatch. "It's past two. I don't think there's much point in going on anywhere now. Clash of cultural norms, no? Why don't we—?"

As if he were operating on a different oral threshold from the others, Giles's voice heaved clear of his strained throat. "I'm getting street sadness!" he cried, mouth open, hands over ears, neck bent. "I'm getting the street sadness!"

Lucy held his shoulders.

"Street sadness . . ." whispered Quentin to a frowning Marvell.

"I'm getting the street sadness!"

"The fuck, Giles," said Andy, still flappable, "sometimes you're like a fuckin' chick. Like a fuckin' chick."

"Make the gray go away!" said Giles. "Make it, make it!"

"Give him something. Quickly," said Lucy.

"Here," said Marvell. "Try this."

When the Appleseeders entered the underground carpark the old cops were leaning on the Chevrolet's heavy hood.

"Popeye," said Skip, hanging back.

"Take it easy," said Quentin, guiding him on.

As the youngsters approached and took up awkward formation around their cars, the old cops regarded them amicably. Their faces looked creased and shadowy in the expanse of the overlit vault.

"Good evening to you, officers—Sergeant, Constable," sang Quentin.

"Good evening, sirs, ladies," said the Sergeant. "Is this

your car, sir, may I ask?"

"Certainly you may. No, it's my friends'. This is, however," said Quentin, nodding at the Jaguar. "What is the Chevy, sir. "79?”

: " '78," said Skip.

"How'd you get it over here?"

"One of the airlift cargoes."

"Must've cost you."

"Yeah, it cost us."

"Very nice. Very nice." The Constable took a tobacco pouch from his breast pocket and began to assemble a cigarette. "Very nice. You young people had a good time?"

"An excellent time, thank you awfully, Constable," replied Quentin dismissively.

The old cops' eyes conferred as Villiers unlocked the Jaguar and as Celia, Diana, Lucy—and Whitehead—milled round its four doors.

"Yours too. Well, well." The Sergeant placed a boot on the Chevrolet fender, straightened his hat and rested an elbow conspiritorially on the hood. "Where'd you go tonight, kids?" he asked Roxeanne and the remaining boys. His tone was not hostile or interrogative. On the contrary, he seemed if anything to be on the point of falling asleep.

The moment Quentin closed the Jaguar door behind him he saw his mistake. Andy was looking morose, Giles annihilated utterly, but Marvell, Skip, and Roxeanne were staring at one another in candid alarm. The old cops' slothful, obsequious patter, Quentin realized, would be indistinguishable from the gloating sarcasm of their American counterparts. Furthermore, everyone was carrying drugs.

Quentin lowered his window. "Gentlemen," he said in his most princely tone, "I'm well aware that you've got nothing better to do than lounge about improving your public image, but if you'll excuse us we ought to be making our way home."

The old cops' eyes conferred again. The Sergeant strolled over to the Jaguar and began to bounce his nightstick on the wheel mounting. "Know how long I'd have to work to get a car like this?"

"No. Nor do I care. A very long time indeed, I should imagine. Sergeant, I don't think this is . . ."

"You young people make me sick sometimes," he said in a hurt and angry voice, as if he would far sooner think

highly of them. "Literally sick." He spun round and wiggled

the nightstick under Giles's nose. "How long do you expect—" Giles wheeled away from him, his whole body swimming. The Sergeant seized his shoulder.

"Look at me when I'm talking to you, you little bastard! You're not home yet. You think we can't touch you—scum like you." He held the club up to Giles's mouth as if it were a microphone. "We still do it, you know, oh yes, but you just—" Giles retched loudly into the Sergeant's face. "Christ, for nothing I'd put you up against that wall and smash your bloody tee—"

Before the jet of vomit struck the man's chest, Quentin was out of the car—had stayed the old cop's raised right hand, had directed Giles's collapse into the arms of Skip and Marvell, had prodded a £20 note into the Sergeant's breast pocket, was brushing his jacket down with a silk handkerchief —and it was over, the untenable moment had opened and closed like a vent in another time.

The cars sighed up the diagonal ramp. In the Chevrolet, Giles had been laid out on the back seat. Skip drove fast through the exhausted precincts. In the Jaguar, the leather seats shone nervously under the silver motorway lights. A mile from home, Lucy fell asleep and her head dropped carelessly onto Keith's waiting shoulder. As Appleseed Rectory surged up at them through the night, tiny tears were glistening beneath the lids of his closed eyes.

28: YANKED

There was—inevitably, we suppose—a certain amount of coming and going that night.

As soon as Diana's breathing had steadied and she had completed her repertoire of quiet, subliminal shrugs, the wakeful Andy said her name out loud, got no reply, slid out from between the sheets, furled a towel round his waist and crept downstairs.

"What do you want?" said Lucy.

Kneeling at the head of the sitting-room sofa, Andy lowered his head and kissed Lucy judiciously on her mouth, which remained slack.

"What do you want?"

Tracing soft patterns on her ear with his left hand, Andy's right felt for the familiar knot of Lucy's nightdress, which, when tweaked, would render her naked to the waist.

: "What do you want?"

Dipping his wettened lips to her breasts, Andy introduced cool fingers beneath the blankets, which burrowed surely through the warm folds.

"Look, stop it. Get off. What do you want?"

"Yawn!" said Andy. "Stop talking. How can you talk at a moment like this?"

"A moment like what?"

"Jesus—at a moment that starts getting fuckin' embarrassing when you start talking about it."

"But why?"

Andy untwisted the loop of his towel. It fell away to the floor. "Some snake," he said simply.

"Enormous deal. What's that supposed to do—get me going?"

"Yawn," he said.

"Well then, tell me—get off—what you want."

Andy persevered.

Down the kitchen passage Keith Whitehead fried on his hot mattress. He was burping terribly every few seconds. They were the very worst sort of burps to which he was subject, like hardboiled eggs imploding at the back of his throat. "Mouth farts" was what Keith had once called them.

Whitehead's legs still throbbed, in a way remote from himself, like—Christ—like glutted anacondas; he moved them about as if they were sections of another body. His stomach was gurgling to such effect that Keith punched it repeatedly with his fists; he kept shouting at it too, of course, with the impotent exasperation with which one shouts at hairtrigger alarm clocks, fizzy radios, banging shutters, some baby crying in a distant place. His frightened penis had retracted to the point of invisibility. The room itself was a 180-cubic-foot pool of wicked and unbelievable smells.

Little Keith was crying a good deal while he thought about his recent attempts to slim down for the Lucy weekend. Whitehead's program: twelve fluid ounces of water per day, jogging two hours a night round the garden, ear-bending aperients, two thousand shin-touching exercises every morning, no food whatever. His body's reply: nitric indigestion (what, Keith would ask himself, was he failing to digest?), IOO

paint-bubbling halitosis, 100 per cent constipation, a negligible increase in weight, and mouth farts.

"Thanks a lot," he said out loud.

What, then, were Whitehead's sex plans? They were as follows. A harrowing session in the upstairs bathroom—third-degree shower, industrial scrub, gargle with . . . Saniflush? Then Lucy. Kneeling on the bed, he established through his box window that the bathroom light had been extinguished. All was quiet inside the house. Ponderous with insincerity, little Keith stood up and dragged his dressing gown from the hook.

Whitehead was just deciding that he wouldn't, after all, knock on the sitting-room door when it whipped open and the half-naked majesty of Adorno was glowering above him. Andy stepped back in startled amusement.

"What the fuck do you think you're doing?"

"Just ... I ..."

Andy crouched. "Yeah, well, go easy on her, kid, okay?" he said, before straightening up and walking quickly up the stairs.

This, in any event, was more than enough for Keith. He was about to scurry quietly back to his box when a light came on inside the room and Lucy said, "Who's that?"

"Keith," he said weakly. "Sorry to disturb you, Lucy— just going to the bathroom."

"That's okay."

The light stayed on. Whitehead found himself peering round the door. Instead of the replete, engorged, spreadeagled figure he had expected, Lucy was sitting up on the sofa, evidently in some disarray, dabbing her cheeks with an old paper tissue.

"Anything the matter, Lucy?"

"Just Andy." She blew her nose. "He always makes me cry."

Andy swung round the corner of the stairs and halted abruptly. Dressed in a thin white T-dress, spreading her hennaed hair with firm hands, Roxeanne sat facing him on the landing.

Andy snapped his fingers, jabbed one of them at her, and spun around. "Right," he said, starting down the stairs again, "let's fuck."

Did Andy ever bother to check whether Roxeanne was : IOI

following him as he strode to the kitchen passage garden door? No way. But when he had slid the bolt and she was halfway past him, he snatched at her hair and yanked her face back toward his own. "I'm going to fuck your brains out," he then told her.

They hardly noticed the premonitory sheen over the horizon, the soft moisture in the air, the bluish grass that ran away from them to the garden wall, the low moon.

"I'm going to fuck you," Andy pursued, making for the gate to the neighboring field, "and, kid, I'm talking about really fucking you, till you think you're gonna fall apart right down the middle. Baby," he said, "I'm gonna fuck you till you die. You're never gonna be fucked like you're gonna be fucked tonight. Christ, am I gonna fuck you. Kid, I tell you, you're in big trouble, cos the way I'm gonna lay it on you's gonna be . . ."

Andy slowed in a gentle hollow on the far side of the field, perhaps two hundred yards from the house. He turned around and sneered sexily at Roxeanne, whose hair lay undisturbed by the warm wind. Our excellent Adorno was wondering whether to slap her about a bit first, or rip her T-dress off, or kick her legs out from underneath her—something casual like that—but suddenly Roxeanne skipped backward and in one double-armed action had pulled off her nightdress and was naked.

"Yawn. No—c'mon—no, nothing lyrical, nothing like that. Come the fuck over here before I really beat up on you."

"Just look at me first."

Andy sighingly reviewed her meaty, impossible body. "Yeah yeah yeah. Incredible, too much. Now lie down, girl. One more word and I'll break your arm."

"I want to see you first."

"Slow, baby, slow," Andy facetiously assured her. "You'll be feeling it up your gut." He stepped forward.

"No hard-on?" she asked lightly.

Andy's foot was suspended in midair as he saw the peculiar relevance of Roxeanne's question. He didn't have one. Throughout his interview with Lucy it had been plugged into his navel and he had naturally assumed that it was still there. His sense agents flooded to his groin, whence they returned despondent messages. No hard-on.

Now how's this gonna look? Andy asked himself.

Squaring blankly up to a long S/M session, a rugged humiliation session, a bestiality session, a session of haughty pretense that his failure to tumesce was yet another means of asserting himself, Andy flexed his shoulders.

But then Roxeanne dropped to the earth. She lay down, placed her hands behind her knees and guided her legs up until her ankles were hooked on either side of her neck. "See red?" she asked

Blinking, Andy stumbled toward her.

"Oh yes, baby. Ah, God, you were—you really meant it. Toward the end I was . . . God, you were beautiful."

"Shut up," said Andy.

Andy felt like crying. He rolled onto his back to face the lightening sky. "Leave me alone. Get out of here."

"So that's how it is to have your brains fucked out. Now— now I really know."

"Shut up. Get out of here. Get out of the house. And take those queers, too. It was that pill fuckin' Marvell gave me."

"Yeah."

"Well, maybe it's just that I don't like you. I don't like you. Maybe it's that."

"What's that got to do with fucking? You'd like me fine if you could've gotten a jack."

"Shut up. Get out of here."

"Yes, ma'm. Couldn't take that twice in a night."

She picked up her T-dress, waving it in the air as she walked naked across the field.

He looked on as she glided down through the windy grass. He sniffed. "Bitch," he said. Andy lay back and watched the stars begin to go out, his body sunk deep in the first dew.

29: silence and day

". . . and I still saw him but then it was all really over by then, or at least I don't think it was for him any more than it really was for me, but he seemed to want to pretend to think that if we went on not doing what we pretended to think were the most important things for us not to not do, then things wouldn't sort of . . ." Etc., etc., thought Whitehead.

: Keith could scarcely keep his little red eyes open. It was 5:30, and he had long relinquished any intention of—you had to laugh—"making a pass" at the white-haired girl in the bed over which he leaned. Unversed though he was in these matters, little Keith supposed he was right in thinking that a two-hour analysis of a past affair would not have been the gambit of a woman keen to go to bed with him. In addition, only her pillow-propped head was visible and she hadn't taken her eyes off the ceiling for better than ninety minutes.

". . . so we decided that if we just took it easy for a while and didn't try and hide the things that weren't mattering anyway, and so guess what, we—"

Whitehead started. "What?"

"Oh, Keith, I'm sorry. I'm speeding, and I always go on when I speed."

"Not at all."

"Maybe we'd better go to sleep now."

Perfunctorily Whitehead fluttered his eyelashes.

"Thanks for letting me bore you."

Perfunctorily Whitehead leaned forward, pursing chapped lips.

"Good night." She turned over away from him, pulling the sheet up above her ears. "Could you put the light out as you go?"

"Of course. Good night. Lucy."

He put the light out and walked toward the door. On the way be stubbed his toe viciously on the metal-based coffee table, but he was half in tears anyway, tears of tiredness and contrition and self-disgust, and didn't bother to register the pain.

Diana waited and waited in the kitchen, her fingers stitched tight in front of her. The invigorating coldness she had felt all evening had not dissipated into sleep, and when Andy had showed no sign of wanting to make love to her and every sign of wanting to make love to someone else, Diana had decided to let him get on with it, to let it happen. She had allowed half an hour to pass before coming downstairs,

listened at the door and heard Lucy's voice, entered the

kitchen, made coffee, smoked, and sat where she could see the drawing-room door. She looked at her watch and realized that not once all night had she thought about Johnny.

More or less simultaneously, Keith stepped out into the hall and Roxeanne emerged from the direction of the back door passage. Whitehead wiped his sore eyes and began to smile. Roxeanne folded her arms and looked away. Diana put down her cigarette and said, "Well, well. Aren't we a lot of night-owls? What have you been up to in there, Keith?"

"Merely chatting to Lucy."

"Oh—you mean to say you haven't been fucking her?"

"Oh no. Nothing like that. She was feeling a bit low so I thought I'd ... chat to her."

"Really?"

"Just tried to cheer her up, that's all."

"How about you, 'Roxeanne'? Done anything good?"

"Nothing too great." Roxeanne folded her arms tighter. "And take that I-smell-shit look off your face."

"Haven't seen Andy by any chance?"

"Yeah."

Diana resisted it, but sadness entered her voice. "What happened."

"He—he . . ." Roxeanne unfolded her arms and sank down loosely on a chair. "Andy couldn't get a hard-on."

They were still laughing when Andy came in.

He beheld the kitchen with some diffidence. "What's up?" he asked.

"No—no hard-on!" shrieked Diana breathlessly, pointing at him as she rocked to and fro in her seat. "No hard-on!"

Andy blushed, frowned, traversed the room and hit a convulsed Whitehead as hard as he possibly could on the ear, and stalked into the hall.

One by one they followed.

Seven o'clock. Silence and day fall on Appleseed Rectory.

Marvell and Skip grunt and fart contentedly as Roxeanne slips in between them.

Diana joins an Andy fetal and taciturn.

His ear thudding like an earphone, Whitehead slaps a cache of glistening nude magazines onto his winded bunk.

Quentin smokes at the ceiling, Celia clinging to him tightly

in sleep.

And, out across the landing, the padded alarm buzzer sounds for Giles.

part two

saturday 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.