Dead Babies (28 page)

"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,
: i
actually?" 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.