Dead babies, p.1
Dead Babies, page 1
Contents
PART ONE: FRIDAY
1 Let’s Go
2 Routine
3 Sounds Funny
4 Nice Arrows
5 Appleseed Rectory
6 Fat Chance
7 Penthouse Cloudscape
8 From the Pain
9 Gin and Tears
X Quentin
11 The Human Wigwam
12 Tall and Good
13 A Sort of Daydream
14 Out Here Somewhere
15 Meandered Up America
16 A Heavy Fire of Eyes
17 Some Bush
18 Oh No
19 Collapsing Balloon
XX Diana
21 Down Unknown Paths
22 Who’s He?
23 Drunk Space
24 Heavy Water
25 The Psychologic Revue
26 The Lugubrious Boogie
27 The Old Cops
28 Yanked
29 Silence and Day
PART TWO: SATURDAY
XXX Giles
31 Picking up Speed
32 The Cool Doves
33 But What’s Perfect
34 Breakfast
35 Lagging Time
36 The Real Thing Again
37 Those Conversations
38 Placements
39 Cunning Stunts
XL Whitehead
41 His Lucent Girlfriends
42 Plus Which
43 Cruel Body
44 Wars and Shit
45 The Billet-Doux
46 Wan Windows
47 A Bit Permanent
48 These Days
49 Hell of a Place
L Celia
51 Just Checked Out
52 Tear-Tracks
53 The Lumbar Transfer
54 Too Good To Waste
55 Don’t Be Disgusting
56 It Started Strangely
57 Old Dreads
58 Everything Will Be Mad
59 Something To Do
LX Andy
61 Into the Middle-Air
62 Ghostly Periods
63 The Antidote
64 High Tea, or Here We Go Again
65 Seems Silly Now
66 No More Games
67 Spring Clean
68 White Room
69 Wrong Yesterdays
PART THREE: SUNDAY
LXX Johnny
71 The Coming Lights
72 That Sad Welcome
About the Author
Martin Amis is the author of fourteen novels, the memoir Experience, two collections of stories and six collections of non-fiction. He lives in New York.
ALSO BY MARTIN AMIS
Fiction
The Rachel Papers
Success
Other People
Money
Einstein’s Monsters
London Fields
Time’s Arrow
The Information
Night Train
Heavy Water
Yellow Dog
The House of Meetings
The Pregnant Widow
Lionel Asbo
The Zone of Interest
Non-fiction
Invasion of the Space Invaders
The Moronic Inferno
Visiting Mrs Nabokov
Experience
The War Against Cliché
Koba the Dread
The Second Plane
The Rub of Time
Author’s Note
Not only are all characters and scenes in this book entirely fictitious; most of the technical, medical and psychological data are too. My working maxim here has been as follows: I may not know much about science but I know what I like.
M.A. London
October 1974
. . . and so even when [the satirist] presents a vision of the future, his business is not prophecy, just as his subject is not tomorrow . . . it is today.
MENIPPUS
Main Characters
The Appleseeders
THE HON. QUENTIN VILLIERS:tall, blond, elegant, urbane.
ANDY ADORNO:tall, dark, rowdy, aggressive.
GILES COLDSTREAM:smallish, fair, rich, anxious.
KEITH WHITEHEAD:very tiny, very fat – court dwarf to Appleseed Rectory.
THE HON. CELIA VILLIERS:robust, mousy, straightforward, wife to Quentin.
DIANA PARRY:dark, angular, shrewish, girlfriend to Andy.
The Americans
MARVELL BUZHARDT:small, hairy, authoritative, Jewish.
SKIP MARSHALL:tall, sallow, slow-talking, Southern.
ROXEANNE SMITH:full-formed, red-haired, American.
Others
LUCY LITTLEJOHN:silver-haired, jovial, a golden-hearted whore.
JOHNNY:a practical joker.
For Julie
Part One • Friday
1 Let’s Go
There were five bedrooms.
In the master-suite, on knees and elbows, Giles Coldstream was creeping round the floor in search of the telephone, both hands pressed tightly over his mouth. The curling green cord eventually led him to a heap of spent gin bottles beneath his desk. With his left palm still flat over his lips Giles tugged at the wire, hobbled into a crouch, and dialled two digits.
‘Get me Dr Wallman. Quickly. Dr Sir Gerald Wall—’
– But even as he spoke, a tooth the shape and hue of a potato-chip slopped over his tongue and fell with a hollow rattle into the bakelite receiver.
‘Please, quickly.’
‘What number do you want?’ asked a female voice.
‘Please. I’m – they’re all—’
And now, in strips, like an unstrung necklace or rippling piano keys, they began to cascade from his mouth.
‘What number do you want?’ the voice repeated.
Giles dropped the telephone. His hands fidgeted frenetically inside his mouth – trying to keep them there, trying to put them back. His face went glossy with tears as a bubble of blood welled from his lips.
‘My teeth,’ he said. ‘Somebody please help me. They’re all gone.’
The bedroom across the passage was not, perhaps, as grand as Giles’s, but it was spacious and well-appointed, commanding a decent view of the village street and the soft rise of the hills beyond. At the table recessed into the alcove of its bay windows sat The Honourable Quentin Villiers, blond and lean in a pair of snakeskin sexters, coolly shrouded by a dome of dust-speckled light from his angle-lamp which in turn threw charcoal shadows along the room behind him, half disguising the naked body of a girl asleep on the bed. Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau nestled on his golden thighs. Quentin closed the book, extinguished his cigarette and took a white pill from the snap-open box on the table. He flicked it into the air, throwing his head back to catch the bright cylinder in his mouth. He gave his saliva time to wash the taste away.
The Hon Quentin Villiers stood up. Through the partly-drawn curtains he watched the village road turning grey in the tranquil dawn. His reflection began to melt from the window-pane, the wavy fair hair, the thin mouth, the abnormally bright green eyes. When he switched off the lamp the rest of the room seemed to lighten.
‘Darling, darling, wake up,’ said Quentin, massaging his wife back to consciousness. ‘It’s me . . . It’s me.’
Celia Villiers stirred and blinked, her face flexing with recognition. Quentin carefully folded back the sheet and gazed with reverence at her breasts, caressing her throat with imperceptible fingertips.
‘I love you,’ he whispered.
‘Thank you. I love you too.’
After a few minutes Quentin rolled over on to his back. Celia’s brown-maned head disappeared in its slow, sacramental journey down his chest. Then, with an expression of exaggerated calm, Quentin turned to gaze at the ceiling as she wettened his stomach with her tears.
The third and smallest of the first-floor bedrooms was separated from the one we have just left only by a slim sandwich of plaster and hardboard. Accordingly, the sound of the Villiers’s lovemaking came through the partition with reasonably high fidelity, waking Diana Parry, the lighter sleeper of the adjacent pair.
Having resumed consciousness – a state she seemed never to be very far from – Diana propped herself up on her elbow and stared with an involuntary pang at the back of Andy Adorno’s head, coated with hair no less dark and shiny than her own, and at his broad, gipsyishly birth-marked shoulders. While Celia’s yodels of appreciation increased in volume and frequency, Diana began to enumerate the blackheads between Andy’s shoulder-blades. Diana did this in a hostile spirit, because Andy had not made love to her the night before. The noises from the other room became more jarred and ambiguous. It was always a frightening, rather inhuman sound, Diana thought.
Still asleep, Andy rolled over, causing a smell of moist towels, Andy’s smell, to glide up the bed. Diana noted with transient satisfaction that his face was the colour of vanilla and his breathing stertorous. She lifted the top sheet to look at Andy’s whisky-paunch. It swelled and subsided peacefully.
Diana dropped the sheet back into place. Andy had had a coltish, alcoholic erection. Diana sneered at him.
Climbing cautiously from the bed, she picked up her cerise silk kaftan and cuboid vanity-case. She stepped over a broken guitar and weaved between the drum-set and microphone stand. Next door, in the bathroom, she positioned the case on the closed lavatory seat and drew a basinful of water. With hands like stiff little flippers she started to wash her face.
The second-floor bedroom was as yet unoccupie
In the fifth and final ‘bedroom’ – actually a fetid nine-by-nine box situated between the garage and the boiler-cupboard – Keith Whitehead lay on sandpaper blankets farting like a wizard.
Let’s go.
Whitehead is an almost preposterously unattractive young man – practically, for instance, a dwarf. Whenever people want to say something nice about his appearance they usually come up with ‘You’ve got quite nice colouring’, a reference to his dark eyebrows and thin yellow hair. That granted, nothing remained to be praised about his unappetizing person – the sparse straw mat atop a squashed and petulant mask of acne; the dour, bulgy little torso and repulsively truncated limbs; the numb, cadaverous texture of the whole.
The more clothes you took off him, the more traumatic the spectacle became. His (equally fat but better proportioned) sister went into hysterics when she once surprised him in the bath. As he entered the Wimbledon Municipal Swimming Pool two teenage girls spontaneously vomited into the shallow end (on being questioned, they said it was the quiffs on the nipples of Keith’s D-cup breasts that had done the trick – Whitehead was subsequently banned from the baths). At school physical check-ups, doctors habitually refused to lay a finger on him, and the P.T. master threatened to hand in his notice should Keith ever set foot in his gymnasium again. As if in reply to these bodily shortcomings, Keith’s nature is one utterly lacking in wit, generosity and charm. Whitehead is, moreover, keenly appreciative of this state of affairs, well aware that by almost anyone’s standards he would be better off dead.
He reviewed it now, as he extracted himself from the blankets and sat rocking on the bunk in his pungent pyjamas, waking for the hundredth time in this house full of tall and affluent people. Keith was hungry; his stomach was rumbling so loudly that he kept yelling at it to shut up. It was eight o’clock. Probably the others weren’t up yet and the kitchen would be his. He got to his feet and, after some consideration, put on his dressing-gown, a tweedy brown horror that his parents had bought him the minute they were sure he wasn’t going to grow out of it. Mr and Mrs Whitehead had allowed for, indeed banked on, their son growing a few more inches; this had turned out to be a needless precaution, and the heavy material now swilled amply in his wake. But Keith was hungry, and he was even more appalled by his clothes, grubby little items that he knew he was too fat for, than he was appalled by the risk of being found short-arsing round the house without his highheeled boots on. In slippers, then, Keith Whitehead opened his ‘bedroom’ door and crept across the garage into the house.
2 Routine
And so when Giles Coldstream came into the kitchen Whitehead was already there. They looked at each other in momentary alarm. Keith sat flushed and breathless at the table, having just finished beating up The Mandarin, Celia’s bronchitic Persian cat.
‘Hello,’ said Giles, struck not for the first time by the relative adequacy of Whitehead’s teeth.
‘Hi,’ Keith gasped.
Giles sat down carefully next to Keith at the table and looked into his face for a few seconds; then he looked away. ‘I had my really heavy recurring dream last night, actually,’ said Giles. Giles said this with some surprise; he had never mentioned his dreams to anyone before. Why, then, had he told little Keith? It wasn’t as if the morning so far had been anything but humdrumly routine. Giles had simply woken, sent his tongue slithering like a fish round his mouth, checked off his teeth in the bedside shaving-mirror, and raced across the room to the huge, shuddering fridge where his early-morning jug of Bloody Mary awaited him. Giles decided that he should have drunk more before venturing downstairs. Sobriety always made him indiscreet.
‘What happened?’ asked Keith. ‘. . . In your recurring dream?’
‘Oh. All my teeth fell out again.’
Whitehead frowned pleasantly. ‘I believe that’s to do with fear of sexual failure. It’s a sex dream – when all your teeth fall out.’
‘No, it isn’t,’ grumbled Giles. ‘Not with me.’
‘What’s it about with you then?’
‘It’s about all my teeth falling out.’
‘Ah. How do you know?’
‘Because that’s all they ever do.’
‘What?’
‘Fall out.’
Giles got up and walked across the kitchen to the draining-board, which he clutched with both hands. He glazed over.
‘Oh. I see,’ said Keith.
Giles shivered briefly. ‘But let’s just not ever talk about it,’ he said. ‘Ever again. If that’s all right by you.’
Keith shrugged. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Fine by me.’
The electric kettle began to come to the boil. Giles slowly backed away as the steam condensed on his arm.
‘Ah. There goes my coffee,’ said Keith Whitehead.
Keith had been rinsing out a coffee cup when The Mandarin prowled grandly up to him. Whitehead sighed as he heard its friendly miaow. He knew that all The Mandarin was thinking about was Jellymeat Kat. Disdainfully Keith polished the mug with a dishcloth. He was fucked if he was going to feed Celia’s pet.
It was then that The Mandarin made her terrible mistake. With a chesty purr she nosed in under Keith’s tweed truss and started to flow in figure-eight patterns round his feet, sending wispy fur tickling up his legs.
Whitehead’s armpits came to life. ‘Right,’ he said.
Gently trapping The Mandarin between his thick white calves, Keith looped the dishcloth and held its end under the running tap. Next, he parted his gown, The Mandarin peered up at him with moist, affectionate eyes, and Keith caught her a good one right on the nose. From then on it was a scramble. As The Mandarin slithered out in terror from the tweed wigwam, Keith pivoted, kicked her into the corner, and came in with his waterlogged rag swinging. Two minutes later, having clouted and dribbled The Mandarin round the kitchen, Keith hoisted her out of the door on the end of his slipper, too winded to continue.
‘Are you going to have anything, Giles?’ asked Keith.
Giles played with the idea of having a lightly-boiled egg. The idea did not attract him. He was off solids at the moment. ‘No, what I came down for, actually, was a lime.’ Giles intended, rather, to use this fruit in the preparation of some gin-rickies, a new drink he had read about.
Keith was going to have something. He thought it likely that he would die if he did not. He hadn’t eaten for three days and the timpanist inside his stomach grew more importunate by the second.
‘There’s a lot of bacon,’ Keith coaxed. ‘It says on the packet that it’s due to go bad tomorrow, so we might as well finish it. Want any?’
Giles started back, as if from a physical threat. Bacon was one of the foods he disapproved of most – not only for its toughness but also for its texture: those little knots of gristle and hide which could so easily be mistaken for escaping crowns, caps, bridges, or (who knows?) actual teeth. No. Giles liked to know what was going on in his mouth, thank you. We’re sorry, but Giles had swallowed a cap or two in his time and wasn’t about to let it happen again. (Once, stranded in Blackfriars on a rainy March afternoon, ravenous and without his credit cards, Giles had stolen into Trims, a healthfood cafeteria, where it took him an hour and three-quarters to eat an almond rissole, sorting and grading each item with his tongue before letting it pass down his throat.)
‘No I won’t,’ he said. ‘No, I really don’t feel like anything.’
‘Well, I’d better have some then,’ Keith said fatly.
‘Now where would one find . . . a lime.’
‘I’m not sure.’ Whitehead peeled five strips of bacon on to the grill. ‘Giles – have you any idea who’s supposed to be coming for the weekend?’
‘No. I didn’t know anyone was coming. Besides, what day is it today?’
‘It’s Friday. Yes,’ Keith went on, ‘some friends of Quentin’s. American, I believe. And also . . . Lucy Littlejohn.’
Giles was under the dresser, burrowing among the wooden boxes. ‘Oh, really?’
