Dead Babies (24 page)

"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 L
ucent 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.