37: Those conversations

Those conversations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Ugh," said Roxeanne.

Skip let out a low whistle.

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

"Check," said Andy.

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

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

"Yeah, it's had it."

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

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

38: Placements

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

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

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

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

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

"No, I, in fact."

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

"Have a good time last light?"

"Gosh. Well I— It wasn't—"

"I can't hear you, Giles."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Can I fuck you, Giles?"

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

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

"Then can I blow you, Giles?"

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

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

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

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

"Eat shit. You ugly little fuck."

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

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

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

"I don't mind."

"Hey, what have you got there?"

"My picture book."

"Hey!"

"Oops! I'll move up."

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

Celia looked up.

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

Celia did not answer.

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

Celia shook her dipped head.

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

Marvell cupped her far cheek with his fibrous right hand.

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

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

Marvell laughed drunkenly as she stumbled toward the door.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Too late then."

"There there."

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

"I promise," promised Quentin.

39: cunning stunts

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

"So sorry, sir, I'll—"

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

"No, sir. I don't think we've even—"

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

"I'm afraid the electricity's not—"

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

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

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

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

Keith waved a hand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

xl: whitehead

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Come on—nearly home."

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

"Got it," pants Keith.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Keith," said Aggie.

"Ah, shut up."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The family gained a hundredweight in five weeks.

Shortly afterward, Keith went mad for a time.

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

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

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

"How are you feeling?" the doctor asked.

"Sad and frightened."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No, I won't."

"Yes, you will."

"No, I won't."

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

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

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

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

Whitehead's sex life?

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

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

"Fifteen," said Keith.

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

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

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

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

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

"What was it you wanted, sonny Jim?"

"Eh? Oh, just a fuck."

"Yeah? Nothing flash?"

"Honestly."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keith demanded his money back. Melissa refused. Keith

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

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

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

Things had been different with Lizzie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keith began to laugh too, far, far louder.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Even in the Dark Tunnel album?"

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

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

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

"Nowhere to sit."

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

"What, the dwarf?" said Andy.

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

"I'll handle it," said Andy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nobody seemed interested in replying.

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

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

"Yes," said Keith, producing one.

"Howda fuck do you know?" said Andy.

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

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

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

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

"Keith."

"Who?"

"Keith."

"Keith what, you little prick."

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

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

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

They all laughed.

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

41: his lucent GirLFriends

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What's the matter?" asked Keith.

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

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

42: PLUS WHICH

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

"Casual," said Andy, nodding.

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

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

Those conversations.

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

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

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

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

"Precisely," Villiers affectionately agreed.

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

Giles looked up, smiling palely.

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

"Hey, Keith?"

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

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

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

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

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

"All the what?" said Andy.

"Foci."

"Fuck you too," he said, shrugging.

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

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

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

At length, Giles held out his cupboard keys.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

43: CrueL BODY

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

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

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

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

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

"Johnny," said Diana.

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

44: wars and shit

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

Giles did not reply.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Well, then."

Those conversations.

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

"Skip," said Skip.

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

"Sure. Makes you feel good.”

"Check. Marvell, am I wrong?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Hey. Andy."

"Yeah, what do you want, Rip?"

"Skip," said Skip.

"Check," said Andy.

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

"What heifer?"

"The heifer yesterday."

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

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

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

"I wanted to kill it."

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

: "Pardon me?"

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

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

"Aw—get him—/"

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

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

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

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

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

"What on earth happened?" asked Quentin.

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

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

"The letter?"

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

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

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

45: THE BILLET-DOUX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

46: wan windows

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

47: a bit permanent

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

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

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

"Mm. Got it from La Soeur."

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

"Whoring."

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

"Why wouldn't you?" asked Lucy.

"Had plenty cash of my own.”

: "What sort of men?" asked Celia.

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

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

"Fun."

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

"Me neither," lied Diana.

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

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

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

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

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

Those conversations.

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

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

"Well I am," said Celia. "Now.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Hi there, Keith. Wotcher doing?"

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

"Fancy," said Lucy.

"Will you read it, please."

"Okay."

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

"Well?" said Keith.

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

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

She shook her head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They laughed together.

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

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

"No way at all," said Lucy.

48: THESE DAYS

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

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

"Like you really fucked Roxeanne?"

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

Andy shadowboxed unenthusiastically. Diana walked on.

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

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

Andy stood grumbling to himself outside the mini-market.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andy shrugged. "I never did."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Me neither."

"Do you want to forget it?"

Andy shrugged. "Up to you."

"No it is not up to me."

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

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

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

"Quentin and Celia have more."

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

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

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

"It's my cunt."

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

"I want more."

"More fucks?"

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

Andy shrugged.

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

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

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

Andy started.

"Can't we go back?"

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

49: HELL OF A PLACE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yeah," said Andy.

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

". . . Yeah."

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

". . . Yeah."

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

". . . Yeah."

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

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

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

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

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

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

Those conversations.

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

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

Skip crouched, chuckling.

"Is it eating it?"

"It. . . Sure," said Skip.

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

"Okay."

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

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

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

l: celia

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

"What makes you think I want him?"

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

"What makes you think he wants me?"

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

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

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

"And what about you?"

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

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

sex until four.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeff gets up and stumbles after her.

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

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

Two minutes pass.

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

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

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

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

An actress holds up a brandy glass.

"Jesus. Let's get out."

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

"Right," said the interior decorator.

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

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

"How do you mean?"

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

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

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

"Yes," said Celia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I do," said Celia.

51: JUST CHECKED OUT

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

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

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

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

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

"It just freaked," said Marvell.

"Yeah."

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

"It was very old," he said.

"Yeah."

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

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

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

52: Tear-TracKS

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

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

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

"Yeah."

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

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

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

"Certainly, sir."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Andy? It's me."

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

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

". . . Yeah."

"What was it, actually?"

"False memory."

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

"It just keeps getting back to you."

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

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

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

'Johnny'?"

Andy half shook his head.

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

"No. I ... they don't . . ."

"May I have a go?"

Andy flapped a hand torpidly at the rifle.

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

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

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

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

53: THe LumBar TransFer

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

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

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

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

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

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

54: TOO GOOD TO WASTE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

fuckin' fat anyway."

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

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

Twenty minutes later the room was awheeze with boredom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

". . . YEAH!" roared Andy.

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

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

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

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

". . . hit him—just cos he . . ."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"With me?" asked Whitehead.

55: DON'T BE DISGUSTIING

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

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

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

"A good one?"

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

"Guess what's happening?"

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

"Wrong. Roxeanne is fucking little Keith!"

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

"To arrest Keith?"

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

"No, it's true."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"How did she take it?"

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

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

"Relax."

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

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

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

"Yeah, I am, actually."

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

"Yeah. It is."

56: it started strangely

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

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

"Well?"

"Well what?"

"Did it happen?"

"Did what happen?"

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

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

Andy wheeled round. "What's . . . ?"

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

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

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

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

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

"Fist-fu— You mean—right up the . . . ?"

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

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

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

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

"That fat little fuck," said Roxeanne.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What is it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Kinda scary. I like it."

"C'mon. Let's go."

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

57: old dreads

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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