The Rachel Papers (14 page)

It struck me, not for the first time, that I owed it to the world to write some kind of dissertation before my untimely death. The trouble was that I never got further than the title and dedication before I started thinking how it would be received, its reviews and my trenchant answers to them. The long-awaited open letter to
The Times:

From Professor Sir Charles Highway

Sir, I should like to point out, for the last time, to Messrs Waugh, Connolly, Steiner, Leavis, Empson, Trilling,
et al,
that the argument of my
The Meaning of Life
was
intended
to be anti-comic in shape. The recent television publicity has done a good deal to becloud the issue...

And so on.

Beneath my bed was an unopened quarter of whisky, my liquid sleeping-pill. Were you allowed to booze before you started on the antibiotics? I wondered, as I drank it all anyway.

When drunkenness arrived I made for the bathroom. I spent a lot of time, especially at night, moving from bedroom to bathroom, from underground bathroom to underground bedroom, the hidden worlds of sleep, dreams, weariness, shame. Now where had I got all that from? Ah yes, I remembered some essay which claimed that the bedroom and the bathroom, the secret, private area of human life, was the world of 'death ... from which all human imagination comes'. (Geoffrey, by the way, didn't have one. He said he had once crapped while a girl of his had a wash. There you go.)

I ran a bath and stripped. Lowering my jockey-pants, a razor-blade on the basin shelf caught my eye. I looked down and looked up again. There was my rig and there was the razor-blade. 'Come on, don't be wet, have it off,' my mind coaxed. 'Just lop it off, lop the bugger off. Go on. Go
aarn.'

Tucking it between my legs, like a dog in disgrace, I got into the bath and lay back. The ceiling was slightly cracked in the corner. A house-proud spider worked on its translucent web. Eat a fly or something, I told it; be symbolic.

For goodness' sake, I had had only one real infection. The rest was temporary scares and growing neurosis about my private parts - parts (it bore pointing out) that had come to enjoy greater privacy over recent months. Now I looked at them only when I had to, and even then covertly, as if I were a queen and they were someone else's. Any spot or abrasion, even when I knew perfectly well it was a zip-scar or the remains of some tortured blackhead, meant going through the routine. It meant working it over. It meant waiting for the one-by-one elimination of my senses. It meant another trip to the local library, another afternoon browsing pinkly through medical dictionaries, ship's doctor's manuals.

Let it just try anything when I had a pee and Christ would I show it who was boss. I washed, got out, slipped a towel over my shoulder - had a pee. I couldn't tell whether it hurt or not. So I worked it over anyway, and good.

Normal procedure: I flicked it; slapped it; I garrotted it with both hands; a final searing chinese-burn - a last attempt to tempt out a drop of that most dreaded commodity, discharge. None was forthcoming. It looked at me as if bullied, picked-on. Cautiously at first, I applied a nailbrush to the helmet. I combed, with the rigour of an orphan matron, my pubic hairs. I swabbed my balls with after-shave. Perhaps a pipe-cleaner, steeped in Dettol ?

I experienced thrilling self-pity. 'What will that mind of yours get up to next?' I said, recognizing the self-congratulation behind this thought and the self-congratulation behind that recognition and the self-congratulation behind recognizing that recognition.

Steady on. What's so great about going mad ?

But even that was pretty arresting. Even that, come on now, was a pretty arresting thing for a nineteen-year-old boy to have thought.

'Yes. Very. One somehow gathers these responsibilities - or they seem to somehow gather on you. Because affection is a cumulative thing. People go on as if it were purely chemical. But it's not. How could it be ? You just
do
feel fond of people you've known for a long time.'

They get dependent on you and you start taking them for granted. And then maybe you think it's the safest thing. And you start worrying about how they're going to get on without you, and about you getting along without them.'

'But that's the trap. Worrying about being without them is a cop-out. And you mustn't let yourself get hustled into a false position.' My use of the split-infinitive and the hippie colouring of my speech were attributable in part to Rachel's hippie satchel - one of those tasselled, ropey-looking nosebags -which, or so she claimed, was made entirely from natural fibres and dyes (i.e. snot, hair, ear-muck). I had remarked on how nice it looked.

'Yes. That's the trouble.'

I felt the pre-pass flush come over me. After all, here she was, sitting on my bed and talking to me without any real sign of dislike. Over lunch at the Tea Centre, my sympathy vis-avis DeForest had been so discreet, my manner so genial, so ... right, my invitation to 'forget school', to 'live a little', so relaxed, so unpushy, that - here she was, sitting on my bed.

Fortunately, my room was in a state of red alert nowadays and Rachel's telephone call hadn't caught me with my pants down.

She had said matter-of-factly that she was fine and that DeForest wasn't going to be at school that day and that perhaps it would be 'a good thing' if we met for lunch and 'had a chat'. Her blandness had frightened me at first. I didn't like that 'chat'. There was something honestly all for the best about it. But I, as cool as you like, had not contacted her since Nanny Sunday; so the initiative was mine.

'Can I put the other side on ?'

She was referring to the Beatles record (late-middle period -between pretty-boy rock and bleared occult) which had just come to an end. This had seemed a safe choice, since to be against the Beatles (late-middle period) is to be against life.

All I had had to do, really, was make the bed more thoroughly (sprinkling talc between the sheets), readjust the record stacks, and, as a last-minute thought, place two unfinished poems on the coffee-table, to be shyly gathered up when and if I got her in there.

I watched Rachel crouch in front of the gramophone. She was wearing a fawn crew-neck jersey, a tight (and quite short) pinstripe skirt, and brown knee-high boots. As she knelt her arse formed a ... whatever you like - an arse-shaped semicircle above the heels of her boots.

Rachel settled herself again on the bed and, with modest sways of the head and in a small but pleasing voice, began to sing along with the gnomic George Harrison: about the space between us all, about those persons who wilfully conceal themselves behind a wall of illusion, and so on.

I was still soggy with retrospective alarm about the miraculous escape I had had eighty minutes earlier. When I followed Rachel into the room the first thing I saw was a huge notice on the mantelpiece. The notice had this to say:

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON'T LET HIM TOUCH YOU HE HAS GOT AN UNUSUALLY REVOLTING DISEASE

The notice was written on a small bottle of pills (pressed into my shaking hand twenty-four hours before). The notice was in code form; it said :

Flagyll. One to be taken four times daily.

I pocketed the pills while Rachel was looking at the copy of
Encounter
on my bed. Later I put them on the shelf in the bathroom, out of the reach of children.

Seconded by the boyish Paul McCartney Rachel now urged me to send her a postcard, drop her a line, stating my point of view and indicating precisely what I meant to say. Instead, I tried to read an
Encounter
article on the relationship between art and life. Rachel was leaning back on the bed. She fell silent. She looked out of the window. And she lit a cigarette, her first since we had got back, her first for an hour. I peered over the rim of my spectacles. Even supine Rachel seemed erect, reminiscent of early Jennifer. Her knees were hunched up so that I could see the opaque darker-brown tops of her tights and the elusive shadow above.

It was natural that I should pick up the improvised saucer-ashtray from the coffee-table and only polite to glide over and put it on the backless bedside chair. It seemed fair enough to stand by the window for a while, to be expected that I should drop the
Encounter
to the floor, totally credible to sit on the lower third of the bed, and quite on the cards when my left foot brushed against her boots. This was how it seemed to Rachel. To me, as always, the pass was a new and unexpected turn: dreamy and inevitable enough, but alien, altogether different from what had gone before.

Lovely Rita meter maid

Lovely Rita meter maid

sang Rachel. Then she stopped singing.

Do I speak ?

There was a warm, musty silence. The diagonal curls of smoke from her cigarette were spangled by a thousand grains of dust highlit by the shaft of autumn sun. The shaft of autumn sun struck through the recently dismembered tree in the front garden, squeezed between the railings, quartered itself against the window-frame, wormed its way into the room.

Rachel stubbed out her cigarette.

I squeezed her leathery ankle.

She turned towards me, exhaling smoke, smiling.

Her lips were smudged with some pasty brown substance, almost the colour of her skin. I stared at them, leaning over. Those diamond-hard, slightly crooked teeth. Those lurid gums. Did I dare offer up my grim stripe to that pristine orifice ?

The orifice was still smiling when I kissed it.

It yielded, but by no means voraciously, so mine kept its distance, varying the angle every few seconds. Rachel was still on her side. The manoeuvre had involved leaning over her legs and lower torso. I supported myself, with some effort, on a single quivering arm, positioned near the small of her back, with enough purchase to keep some distance between our bodies. With my free hand I did things like describing the outline of her hair against her face, stroked her jawline, let a finger hover above her right ear. But I could keep this up for only so long.

After a first kiss there are normally two things you can do. Either extricate your mouth, grin with it, and say something (necessarily) cinematic; or move on to the neck, throat and ears. My posture suggested the first, since I couldn't get at the rest of her face without falling backwards on to the floor or collapsing wheezily on top of her. But I preferred the second method, having, indeed, never tried the other. The kiss had been underway for better than thirty seconds now. I made it more positive, introducing tongue a quarter of an inch. Rachel's mouth widened the same distance. Right.

Great strength was called for to lower my body down to just above hers, so that I could bring in the support of my right elbow (crooked for this purpose) to take the pressure off my left arm. In one movement I shifted my nine stone on to said elbow, slid my legs over Rachel's to the other side of the bed thereby settling in beside her, withdrew my mouth, and lay my head on her chest.

I listened to the fizz of cashmere and the crumpling of (more or less) empty brassiere. My knees came up to rest against Rachel's, keeping a good six inches between her skirt and my groin. I lay there still.

As hoped, Rachel's left hand came up and stroked my hair. Smirking at the wallpaper, I stayed in position for a quarter of a minute and laid an arm across her waist. Then I looked meekly up at her. She was gazing at the ceiling, deep in some maternal fantasy perhaps ? I doubted it.

Tactically, this was less than ideal. Too wistful, and this gives time for regret. I brought my face to within an inch of hers, having crunched my back teeth together. I kissed her again, far more emphatically this time, paying special attention to the corners of her mouth and to the points at which her teeth and gums met - both very sensitive areas. Meanwhile, I 'did' her left ear with the index finger of my right hand. If 'done' skilfully this can cause the subject to become ga-ga with arousal. The thing is
hardly to touch
the ear, to touch it as lightly as possible consistent with touching it at all. The nearer you get to not touching it the better. (I knew because I had had it 'done' to me, in the St Giles bus shelter, by a wonderful waitress. I had almost fainted, but I was seventeen then.)

Rachel responded tolerably well. Her tongue, as yet, was held in abeyance. However, she was jostling her lips a fair amount and made some of the right noises. When I pressed a corduroy kneecap against the point where hers met, though, her legs could not be said to have leapt apart. Nor, to be honest, did she have so much as one finger up my bum.

Just as well.

With my left hand I was making swirling motions on Rachel's stomach, outside her jersey, not touching her breasts but coming mischievously near them sometimes. Thus I maintained a tripartite sexual application in contrapuntal patterns. This sort of thing: insert tongue, remove finger from ear; withdraw tongue, stroke neck, trail pinkie of left hand along narrow gash between her jersey and skirt (tastefully avoiding navel); kiss and semi-lick throat and neck, 'do' ear, and place hand unemphatically on knee; stop 'doing' ear and stroke hairline, bring mouth towards hers and hand up her leg at similar speeds; with mouth almost there, hold her gaze for long second while hand takes off at aeroplane trajectory from the runway of her thigh and lands ... on her stomach again just as mouths meet. That sort of thing.