Dead Babies (16 page)

"Is it always this empty?" asked Marvell.

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

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

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

gaunt auditorium.

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

"What are the gimmicks?"

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

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

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

"Who are they?" asked Marvell.

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

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

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

"Yeah?"

"Fuckin' better believe it, boy."

"How come?"

Precision and arbitrariness were the twin hallmarks of

Conceptualist activity. On the morning that inaugurated their

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yeah."

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

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

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

"Oh, let's leave. Please."

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

"Will it be all right, darling?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The audience was motionless with italic terror.

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

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

"Not bad. Not bad," said Marvell.

"Yeah," said Skip.

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

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

"How did they
do
it," said Celia.

"Quite simple," said Diana.

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

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

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

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

26: THE LUGUBRIOUS BOOGIE

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

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

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

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

"You all pigs."

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

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

"What kind of thing?"

"A fuck-thing."

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