Dead Babies (33 page)

"NO!"

Hiring every morsel of his strength, Giles cleared the bed and stormed the fridge. His hands were flapping so extravagantly that he had to refill the glass twice before any of the contents forced its way down his throat. When it did, Giles tried very hard to force it out again. No substance that toxic
l
(he felt certain) had ever entered
his
system before. He lowered his nose to the bottle. It was gin all right—but it smelled as harsh and alien as strong medicine to a delicate child.

"Glug glug glug," he said, and added in a voice suddenly panicky with comprehension, "goo goo goo!"

Within seconds he was out of the door. Behind him the darkness drummed with a thousand mothers.

This dwarf pleasureless and very mad dream girl nothing flash life has its holiday fair enough? terror and confusion for a four-foot box in a cartoon world of sugary tea crying with shame for each
... It broke off.

Whitehead twitched, jolting the back of his skull painfully against a protrusion in the gnarled apple tree. He was alive and he was awake—he even struggled briefly with his bonds. Assuredly Keith was in great pain, but this stemmed from the beating he had received from his housemates rather than from the barbiturates intended for his suicide, which were at present doing him nothing but good, numbing both the retro-drug and the punishment his body had recently sustained. He still felt vastly better than he would, say, on an average morning, appreciably trimmer, more wholesome, less corporeal.

What, nevertheless, was he doing here? At the best of times little Keith's head was not the most maneuverable of units and it was only with great discomfort and travail that he managed to scrape his chins over the stinging ropes about his neck to get a glimpse of the left-hand quarter of the house. All was dark and worryingly quiet. Why, then, had they done this to him? Was he there for fun, for sex, for target practice? He sensed something flapping against his upper arm, something heavy and metallic. He squinted down and saw the needle point dangling from his right "bicep"; burning his neck, he turned to see its twin dangling from his left.

Then he felt his body start to come alive. The soft machinery stirred: winches creaked, pumps groaned, tubes opened, pipes rustled. Keith arched with the effort of containing himself as once again he became a blast furnace, a

forest fire of frantic glands.

63: THE ANTIDOTE

And
when the distances went the house was hell at last. Each minute the atmosphere changed radically, boiling up to gas and thinning out to nothing at all. Currents of sweating air slopped through the shrunken rooms. The corridors tapered off into palls of submarine mist. Appleseed Rectory was hell now, and its inhabitants crawled round it with borrowed faces and canceled eyes. If they kicked against the womb, they folded onto the floor and were sucked down into a hot, thudding sleep.

—Skip came across Andy sprawled face down on the stairs. In Andy's palm was a large red pill, half eroded by perspiration. Skip removed it and popped it into his mouth as he crawled over Andy's body.

—Diana knelt in an upstairs closet. She searched through old clothes for yesterday's dolls.

—Giles crouched beneath the kitchen table. If he heard a noise he would scurry behind the cooker. If he heard a noise he would scurry beneath the kitchen table.

—Lucy opened her eyes. Marvell was urinating on her legs. She tried to speak and she could not speak.

—Roxeanne was a starfish on the thick sitting-room cushions. She masturbated caressingly with a chipped hukah pipe beak.

—Celia stood upright on the baronial armchair. Through her tears came snatches of forgotten nursery rhymes.

Now Quentin awoke in the empty hall. He climbed to his knees, holding his head between clenched fists. When his eyes opened to the bruised light he needed all his will to focus them on the fast-escaping outlines. He reeled to the nearest wall and pressed his forehead hard against the cold stone. Inhaling deeply, he summoned his body and his mind.

Quentin found Marvell in the washroom, alone, giggling softly into a pile of soiled underclothes.

Quentin picked Marvell up by the hair and slammed him furiously against the door.

Marvell's eyes stared.

I go

"The antidote," said Quentin clearly. "The antidote. You've got five minutes. Do it, Marvell. Or I'll kill you."

64: HIGH TEA, OR HERE WE GO AGAIN

Enough? Have we had enough? Nothing would be easier, of course, than to give the Americans some food, some sleep even, and pack them off—that would appear to get rid of
Johnny,
and, why, they could even drop little Keith at the hospital on the way. Might be some bother there but, on the whole— yes—it would demand small ingenuity to restore peace to Appleseed Rectory. Unfortunately, though, there is no "going back" on things that in a sense were never meant, things that got started too long ago. These things
go on.
It isn't over. It hasn't begun.

Two-thirty and high tea was served at the Appleseed kitchen in a mood of buzzing, ravenous hilarity. Sipping chilled Hock and a light Mateus rose, they negotiated vast stacks of toast and gentlemen's relish, cucumber and cress sandwiches, water biscuits spread with celery salt and avocado paste. Celia was still sad about The Mandarin (whom Quentin promised elaborately to bury the next day), but otherwise there was little to regret because there was little to remember. The only sure recollection they had was of an experience of almost vibrant fear coupled with something more numinous, the nudge of a deeper act of memory, a spiritual strain that had filled them all with an exquisite and gentle anguish. They felt like ocean divers after a fascinating and perilous expedition, or, more appropriately, like safely disembarked astronauts who, amid the populous celebrations, were quietly aware that they had known the full pain and tragic isolation of space.

Then Andy dropped his plate with a clatter and got suddenly to his feet. "Little Keith!" he said. "What happened to little Keith?"

"Oh, Christ," said Diana as the boys sped from the room, "here we go again."

In the pewter light from the garage it seemed as if the apple tree had grown a second stump, a squat and knobbed extension at its base.

Skip looked at Marvell. "Jesus. You think he's still alive?"

"Andy?"

"Don't ask me, squire," said Andy. "I'm fucked if I'm going near him while he smells like that."

Quentin buried his nose in a perfumed handkerchief.

"He twitched then," said Marvell, adding more quietly, "I think he twitched then."

"How will we ever know?" said Quentin through his handkerchief.

Andy snapped his fingers. "Got it! The
hose.
Come on, Quent, give us a hand," he said happily. "Like I always maintain—you can do anything once you put your mind to it."

The hose used at Appleseed Rectory had been bought secondhand, on Andy's suggestion, from the municipal fire department warehouses in Catford,
SE5.
Although of limited utility in the garden—it did not irrigate so much as void any bed on which it was trained—only a heavy-duty implement, Andy had argued, would be equal to such routine domestic tasks as local-yob suppression, Tuckle intimidation, and so on. (Andy had pooh-poohed the objection that pressurizing the tap would cost Giles £2,000, and Giles had stuck up for him.) The mouth of the hose had a diameter of four inches. Experiments had shown that it could flatten a villager from twenty-five yards.

At a little under a third of that distance from Keith, Andy now stood with his restless legs planted wide apart. His right hand was held aloft, while his left gripped the hose's heavy snout. Then Andy chopped his raised arm through the air. "Now!" he yelled.

As the first pole of water hit him in the face, Keith's ragged, wobbling figure found its contours and, as Andy played the hose up and down his body, the slumped form seemed actually to dance free of its bonds. Six minutes later Andy's right arm chopped through the air once more. "Right!" he said. "That oughta handle it."

In a loose semicircle, Andy, Quentin, Skip, and Marvell warily approached the tree.

Quentin and Marvell looked at each other in candid horror.

"Mm. On second thought maybe I should have backed off some with the hose," said Andy, himself noticing the new
orange blood that had started to well from Keith's mouth, nose, and eyes.

Marvell felt for Whitehead's still-vibrating wrist. "He's still there! It's faint, but he's still there!"

"Onna other hand," said Andy, "it was probably just what he needed. A good jolt. Just the job."

"Cut him down, Skip," said Marvell.

When Skip had severed the last of the ropes, Keith fell forward like a thick plank into the mud created by the broad wash of the hose. Except for the thin leather belt he was virtually naked, his dressing gown torn away by the force of the water; the remains of his clothes stuck to his white body in thin damp strings.

"Wotcher reckon, Marv?" asked Andy.

Marvell took out his hypodermic wallet and knelt on the grass. "I'll plug some meth up his ass. Then we'd better walk him around some."

"Check. I'll just give him one more go with the hose. Now we've got the bloody thing out. Just to clean him up. Don't want all that mud on our hands."

"Mud? Oh, yeah, right."

"Is he okay?" called Lucy from the french windows.

"Keith?" said Andy. "He's laughing."

65: seems
SILLY
now

When Lucy came back into the sitting room, Giles was standing by the door, looking tense.

"They say Keith's okay."

". . . Oh. Good."

"What is it, Giles?"

"Lucy, a friend of mine wants me to ask you something."

"Which friend?"

"Just a friend."

"I see."

"A friend," said Giles.

"Yes, I'm with you. What does he want to know?"

"My friend wants to know if you could ever—if you could

marry someone who didn't have any ... if he had . . ." "If he had what?”

:
"No, that's the point—if he didn't have ... if he had . . . if he didn't have . . ."

"If he
didn't
have what, then?"

'If he didn't have ... if he had . . ."

"Say it, Giles. Christ."

"Well, you see, what my cousin wants to know, actually, is could you marry someone who had . . . who didn't have . . ."

"Jesus.
WHAT?"

"Who didn't have teeth. Who had false ones. Could you?"

"If I loved him, of course I could!"

Giles sank against the door. "Gosh. I never thought I should marry," he said to steady himself.

Giles poured out a glass of Hock and said to Roxeanne, "They say Keith is well again."

Roxeanne said that she thought he probably would be. "You can get away with most things these days."

Celia stood up and, with Diana's assistance, began to load the dishwasher. "Well," she said, "if he is he's going to have to find somewhere else to live."

"Right," said Diana. "I've got no time for suicides. It's just
too
boring. A schoolfriend of mine was in a crash once and I went to see her every day for three months. A year later the bitch stuck her head in the oven because her guy couldn't kick being queer. Did I go to the hospital once? No way. I told her why not, too."

"I agree," said Celia. "It's selfish, stupid, and utterly boring."

"Well," said Giles. "I don't know, I just feel . . . That drug and everything ... I just feel terribly
relieved."

And then Giles Coldstream did something he had not done for five years. He turned full face to Roxeanne and he smiled —not his habitual tragicomic-mask, thin-lipped stripe, but a bright, frank, boyish, ripple-eyed grin.