58: everything will be mad

Andy had been wondering on and off how much of a storm to kick up when Marvell and Skip finally reappeared, but as their absence continued the possibility of a fertile, visionary brawl was getting more and more abstract. In a curiously gentle manner of which he was only half aware, his body seemed to be melting, rendering down to a weaker and less robust version of himself. He kept staring gravely at Diana and Lucy as they sat conversing on the divan. He thought how pleasantly asexual they were in appearance, how talkative and inconsequential. What he wanted to do, really, was to go over and lie down in between them both. He wouldn't disturb them. For once in his life he just wanted not to be minded.

The door welled open. Skip and Marvell came into the room.

Andy made as if to stand up. "Okay— What have you done with him—you fuckers?"

Skip eased himself into the dining alcove while Marvell sauntered across and sat on the arm of Roxeanne's chair.

"Hey, you fuckin' fags . . ." Andy's mind jolted. All along the room had been silent, expectant—but no one was hearing him. With an appalling effort Andy sat up straight. "Marvell," dragged his voice, "you fuckin' little . . ."

"Hey," said Marvell lightly. "What's with Andy?"

"Andy," called Quentin from the end of the world, "what's happening to you?”

: "I . . ."

Andy fell from his seat. He was treading air in the middle of the room. He saw the french windows and moved numbly toward them. Hands jutted out to assist or prevent him, but he fought them away and burst through into the colorful night.

His mind was flashing with tremendous activity—not thought, not thought: the phrases in his brain had been there long before he had; they were ready made. For the last time he tried to shout but his mind kept slipping back, slipping back to ... to come after me and don't go mad you're born just in time her distant eyes a long-ago Andy with no far-flung canceled sex but to hear the choppy water of the city's sleep with sick junkies on the lookout for warmth in a dark mattress land of crying grass and Andy.

Some minutes later Andy was picking himself off the lawn. Cold tears had evaporated from his cheeks. He had been back. And to what? To nothing and a tickling heart.

"Bastards," he said. "Deaf, dumb, blind fucking bastards." He turned and began to stride back toward the house.

"Andy ..."

Andy spun toward the garage. It was an impossible sound, like an animal or a wounded baby.

"Andy."

It was inches away. Andy looked down suddenly—and saw him through the tiny window slot of his room, his face lit by a crack of wan upstairs light.

"Keith?"

"Andy. I've done it. I'm dying."

Celia stood outside the sitting-room door. She was trembling with almost theatrical violence. "Quentin!" she shouted. "Quentin!"

The door opened. "Darling . . . ?"

She seemed to collapse in his arms but then jarringly drew back. He reached out to her. "Darling, darling. Ah now, ah now."

She backed away. "Come here," she said, leading him up the stairs. "There's something you must see. There's something you must know. Something everyone must know. Now."

"Darling, what is this? My dearest, you're . . ."

She halted on the landing and held up her hands to silence him. "Listen. There's— Someone's . . . There's excrement in our bed. In our bed."

"How unutterably squalid."

Celia shuddered and he moved closer. "Don't. Just listen. It is not human excrement. There are . . . it's got other things in it—the smell is quite foul—I don't know what they are. It's sort of alive."

He followed her into their room. Celia walked to the bed, turned toward him and lifted the top sheet. He gagged softly through his raised palm. "Like essense of human being," he said. They gathered the sheet by its corners, folding it double, double again, and double again.

"You see, darling, don't you," said Celia, "that it's all changed now. That we must do something. If we don't then nothing will mean anything any more. Everything will be mad if we don't. If we go downstairs now and pretend this hasn't happened—what'll we be then?"

"You're right, of course, darling."

"We'll just have to go down there and find out what's going on."

"Yes."

They embraced quickly. He picked up the folded sheet. They were about to move toward the door when sounds of clamor came from below. Then Andy's voice rattled cheerfully up the stairs: "Hey, Quent! Better get along, Mac. Little Keith's dying on us here!"

Dropping the sheet into the laundry basket he hurried from the room. Celia watched him go with a hard face. She knew that she had lost then.

59: something to do

It was by no means the paradox it may at first appear that the news of Whitehead's forthcoming death saw an infusion of coltish high spirits into Appleseed Rectory. It signaled, for one thing, the end of what Dr. Marvell Buzhardt was later

to call "the slipway factor," which invariably obtained when

the retrodrug took hold, and the Appleseeders' vertiginous slide into their own insecurities was wonderfully lightened by the more graphic and spectacular sufferings of the dying : boy, who now sat on the baronial sitting-room club armchair, with a full male audience gathered round his swilling dressing gown. And was Keith himself going to throw a dampener on their good cheer? Not a bit of it. Whitehead had never felt better in his life.

"Okay," said Andy, rubbing his hands together. "Now the way I see it is: we got to keep the little bastard from having a fit or blacking out or whatever. Check?"

"Obviously we can't involve the authorities," murmured Villiers.

"We could, we could make him throw up a lot," said Skip.

"Yeah," said Marvell. "Dump him in the fuckin' bath. Boiling water. Liter of gin. Make him drink fuckin' all of it."

"I've done that myself," said Giles. "It makes you feel awful."

"I'm not pregnant you know," said Keith huffily, folding his arms. "I mean, not one of you has even asked me what I took yet."

"Oh yeah," said Andy with a snort of laughter. "That's a point. Okay, Keith—wotcher take?"

"The eighty downers you gave me yesterday morning."

"Gave . . . downer—? But they didn't work."

"Oh yes they did. I tricked you."

Andy sat back. "Fuck me," he said.

"What were they, Andy?" asked Marvell in a forensic tone, reaching for a ballpoint and pad. Stumblingly Andy told him. Marvell listened, nodded, and said to Keith, "Boy, you're very nearly dead. In twenty minutes or so you're gonna want to go to sleep; if you do, you're fucked. We better get that stuff out of you. If we don't you're gonna be on your feet. All night. Rox, bring me the brandy— I'd better monkey with it. Cos we're gonna be too."

" 'It is imperative,'" Lucy read out, " 'that you notify me of your decision within the next twenty-four hours. Thank you. Yours sincerely, Keith (Whitehead).' "

"See what I mean?" said Celia.

"Mm. Pretty sexy stuff. Can really turn a phrase. Celia, it hardly compares with 'Johnny's' letter to Diana." She held up the second piece of paper. "What's a 'perineum,' by the way?"

"The bit between your cunt and your bum," said Diana.

"Ah."

"Listen," said Celia. "Keith's been to an asylum; we also know he's been very ill—something to do with his stomach, so he could have"—she gestured sideways at the laundry basket—"and now this. He's obviously in a desperate—"

"Come on, Celia," Lucy said jovially, "don't be so silly! If Keith was Johnny he wouldn't . . . Keith just wouldn't do things like that. Honestly! Poor little bugger— he was in my room half of last night wondering how to give me a good-night kiss. He may be a bit looney—I mean, wouldn't you be?—but he wouldn't— you know."

Lucy appealed to Diana. The three of them were sitting in Celia's room, Lucy and Celia on the stripped bed, while Diana draped the adjacent sofa. All three were drinking liberally from the double-liter of tequila which Lucy had recently fetched from Giles's (by now untended) alcoholic archives. As with the men, the new crisis seemed to have presented them with at least a handful of transient certainties, a focus for their loosening minds, something to do.

Celia said, "Diana thinks it's Skip, I know. I thought it was Marvell for a bit, but I can't see what possible—"

"But, darling, it's got to be," said Lucy. "It's too frightening if it isn't." She sipped her tequila, spluttering slightly as she remembered another thing to add. "Mm—and someone called Johnny did something nasty to Giles this afternoon. He wouldn't tell me what but he was very jumpy and everything. He just came up and asked me which of the Yanks was called Johnny. He was quite flabbergasted that one of them wasn't."

"But don't you think," said Celia, "that Keith— I mean what those boys did to him. And Roxeanne and everything."

"Celia! You said yourself that you found it while Keith was upstairs."

"Oh, I don't know. I just want it to be over." Celia's eyes clouded and she reached for a paper tissue. "Can't it just be over?"

"If it was Keith it would be." Lucy moved to the window, drawn by the sounds from below. "Keith's out of action now. No. It's worse than Keith." She swiveled, hooking her elbows

backward on the sill. As she returned Celia's gaze the two

girls became aware that Diana had withdrawn from the conversation, had indeed withdrawn her presence from the room. "Diana?" they both asked.

: Diana tried to say something but the words were submerged. She sat up—no, she was slipping back, slipping back to ... to cry again and please the black road as intensely sad fireflies winking to a thickening presence of dew and sleeping bags in the starched chill of night fatigue every day lassitude and disgust from the pink retreat it's brief and pleasureless being alone without knowing why letters a day in hanging-garden avenues the first of many summers the time it is hating everything time wondering Diana.

She exhaled heavily and her jaw went square. She said, "I think it's Andy."

lx: andy

Andy, on being asked his age, can reply with veracity and more or less without self-consciousness that he's fucked if he knows. "Around twenty, I guess," it suits him to say, gesturing with a slack-wristed hand, "—give or take a year."

He is twenty-four. Today is his birthday. As he sprawled in the adjacent meadow, as he counted the extinguishing stars and nuzzled close to the crying grass: so, twenty-four years earlier, a swarthy girl drew the wet sheet from her face and asked, "Ten little tiny fingers? Ten little tiny toes?"

"He's cool, I think," the baleful hippie said, running a sleeve over his beard. "I think he's cool."

He was cool. His mother moved on two weeks later and for the first years of his life Andy crawled the mattress land of the dark, high-ceilinged, communal flat in Earl's Court, hunter of the spare breast, on the lookout for warmth, invader of unminded sleeping bags, growing up on cereals and old fruit. He was the foster child of a hundred postnatal waifs, the cossett of a dozen itinerant rhythm guitarists, the darling of scores of provincial pushers, the minion of a thousand sick junkies.

They called him Andy, on account of the unnatural size of his hands. He called himself Adorno, after the German Marxist philosopher whose death had brought so much despondence to the commune in the summer of 1972, when Andy was just a boy. Andy Adorno—it was the most exquisite name he had ever heard.

In the course of a routine raid by the local Hygiene and Sanitation Board operatives, the young Adorno's existence became known to the authorities. Mr, Derek Midwinter, the inspector under whose care Andy fell, is on record as describing his dealings with the boy as "a complete bloody nightmare." Originally proposing to remove Andy from the flat, register him with the censors, enroll him at a Child Care Unit and get his education underway, Midwinter ended up paying Andy £5.50 a week to leave him alone. (Adorno continued to hold sway over many representatives of authority with a trick-or-treat system he had devised; it featured complicated sexual blackmail and brute force.) When he was good and ready— in his own fucking sweet time-—Andy dawdled up to Holland Park Comprehensive and asked to speak to its principal. After a five-minute interview Andy was talking to girls in the playground while a pallid headmistress backdated his entrance forms. It was understood that he would study nothing but the Modern American Novel, and also that this specialization would not necessarily be reflected in his examination results. That afternoon Andy was voted form captain.

Earl's Court was his country.

A twenty-four-hour land. At nine, huge panting coaches were voiding four thousand aliens a day into its dusty squares. Drainpipe-latticed houses like foreign legion garrisons, their porches loud with penniless Greeks and tubercular Turks. Men in vests gazed from behind stagnant windows. By night half a million youths spilled from the electric pubs; dirty girls paraded and dirty boys cruised along the jagged strip; the darkness was hot with curry smells from the neon delicatessens. Tramps dozed behind nude-mag vendors' stalls. Dying Pakistanis hawked into dimly lit shop windows. At five in the morning, a windy threadbare silence would lapse on the spent districts. Food boxes and cigarette packets spun end over end among the fruit skins and beer cans. Hairnets of doped flies mantled the puddles and dogshit. From between railings old cats stared. Ramshackle buildings of rubbish lolled against the dark shopfronts, like collapsed dreams of the city's sleep.

Through the air came the whisper of the quickening town,

plaintive music over choppy water.

By day and during the early evenings Andy supervised his drugs consortia, looked after his fringe business concerns, bought records, played music, saw films, kicked dogs, watched TV, read, drank, ate, fucked. He was everywhere, a familiar and revered figure in the crowded landscape.

Late at night, just before the stillness came, he scaled condemned fire escapes and explored the roofs and skylights, lay on the sooty grass behind the Underground station, sat on swings and sang, climbed trees in the dark squares, screamed until the dawn went misty with tears, raced like an animal through the dying streets.

A radically telescoped resume of Andy's sex life.

An early developer, he started not sleeping with girls at the age of seventeen. Intense, confusing, sudden, strange—it was a revelation to him. "She was a casual girl, too," Andy broods. Looking in at Life on Mars for a nightcap one autumn evening, he had selected and duly approached a girl to take home. "Round eighteen, long blond hair. Dutch or something, nice face, good fig. All over me, quivering like a blender. Had to slap her down a bit, as I recall. There you are—I can even remember her name. Irma—something like that. Wilma. No. Norma. No. Hang about . . ." He escorted her to his door and preceded her up the cabbage-damp stairs. He led the way into his room, pitched himself onto the double mattress, and advised her to take off her clothes and join him. "Well. We're sort of talking and stuff. I get the scotch out and so on. She's nude, I'm nude, she's practically sitting on my face, and— you know—we're starting to get friendly. And then, well, Christ, it just sort of ... happened. I didn't fuck her."

Hard-on trouble, Andy? "Nah. Onna contrary. The prong I had on me—I could of mugged an eight-foot boogie with it. I tell you, when I went to the bathroom to lose the scotch, I hadda practically stand on my head if I wanted to piss in the can and not up my own fuckin' nose. Nah. Wasn't anything at all to do with that. Listen, anyhow. I can tell something awful's gonna happen, but I sort of give it a go. I mean, you have to, don't you? You do. It's only polite. She's practically got both my legs in her mouth by this time anyway, and I don't want to seem like some sort of pervert or fuckin' sex maniac—lean over and say, 'Sorry, kid, I don't feel like it.' Fuck that. So I gave it a go. Christ. It was ... I don't know what it was. It was . . ."

It was canceled sex. It was a feeling of vast but theoretical weariness combined with acute and local foreboding, petty irritation arm in arm with cosmic disgust, vexed fussiness married to apocalyptic fear. How did she fit in? What were these—her breasts, her ankles, her hair—her eyes? What was her role and what were he and his body for? He felt like a bit player in some far-flung organization, the servile motor of another's body.

The girl was making a lot of noise now. The boy turned her onto her back and knelt between her spread legs. The girl closed her eyes and his broad hands smoothed and kneaded her thorax. The boy twitched. The girl glanced up to see that an expression of almost preposterous loathing had come over his face. He fell brokenly on to his side, wretching and shivering in the gray sheets. She inched away from him, crying silent tears.

Looking past her, Andy glimpsed a third body on the mattress: a young, athletic, olive-skinned figure in sawn-off jeans and white shirt, reclining on striped pillows, two beer cans resting on his stomach: a long-ago Andy. Thirteen years old, lithe and predatory, he waits smiling in the quarter light as one by one they appear and kneel for a moment at his side. A melancholy girl with distant eyes, an older woman with deep, maternal breasts, someone his age with impossibly tiny shoulders, witch-like hippies, black-leather blondes, nervy urchins, schoolgirls, widows, shop assistants, divorcees, traffic wardens, bus conductoresses, policewomen, girls from Tehran, Dorking, Massachusetts, Slough, Montego Bay, the Earl's Court Road, spicks, frogs, huns, sprouts, boogies, the one with damp hair that smelled of nutmeg, the one that kept her shirt on although her tits were casual, the one from downstairs, the one that bit his rig, the one from upstairs, the very pregnant one, the not so pregnant one, the twelve-year-old, the fifty-seven-year-old, the one that liked him beating her up, the one that hated him beating her up, the tall Pakky that had no snatch hairs, the short Geordie that had no hair, the one that gave him four kinds of venereal disease, the one he'd given four (different) kinds of venereal disease, the one with the ear-to-ear gobbler's mouth, the blind one, the one that screamed the house down, the bald one, the one with : the six-foot legs, the fucking fat one, the one with breasts like airships, the one with the turn-off dog-end nips, the one that wouldn't go down on him, the one with the flash bum, the melancholy girl with distant eyes . . . : they're all forgotten now, as their memory turns on the changing boy.

"Course, it comes and goes, this gimmick. I've only ever had the fuckin' thing about twenty times, really. Maybe thirty times. The way you handle it is— the minute it starts, just pretend it's a drug. Oh, look— I'm sweating, I'm weak as a chick, my heart's like a fuckin' tom-tom, and I feel like Frank's monster. Then it passes, is all. If you want, ten minutes later you can even fuck.

"You know, sometimes I think I was born just in time. I mean, I'm fuckin' glad I'm not younger than I am, born later. Some of the kids I knew at the flat . . . kids around fourteen or fifteen. Yeah, they get hard-on troubles same as the next guy, and they get things we get like false memory and street sadness. Night fatigue, things like that. Course. But they get this canceled sex thing the whole time. They get the shudders inna cot when they try and fuck. I tell you, they'll all be cock-choppers by the time they're eighteen. I'm just glad I got out before it could all catch up on me. Born in the middle, just right—when you don't go mad but still get lots of fucks. I suppose that's basically why I'll always vote Conservative. I don't know, mind, how the next lot of guys are going to make out, the lot that come after me. I'm just glad I'm not one of them, is all. Check?"

61: into the middle air

He took eight swallows of Hine, wiped his mouth and offered the flagon to little Keith. "How you feeling, kid?" Andy asked. Even as Marvell protested that an intake of brandy was hardly Keith's top priority, the soapy dwarf shook his head, or at any rate permitted his eyes to roll slightly. He was finding all movement more complicated than usual—i.e., very complicated indeed, unbelievably difficult, quite extraordinarily recondite—but he was still entirely compos mentis. Whitehead was in fact congratulating himself once again for electing such a civilized and agreeable way to die. He shut his eyes softly—and his body disappeared! Never in his life had he felt so light, free, however illusorily, from that heaving, viscous, fudgy torso, with its cumbrousness, its demands, its noises, and its smells. He completed a tactile reconnaissance of his body. Nothing. He had finally escaped into the middle air.

"On your fuckin' feet, Keith," said Marvell. "Andy. Get him on his fuckin' feet."

Andy put the brandy bottle down sharply on the coffee table. "You get him on his fuckin' feet."

Quentin swept across the room. "No time for fun and games now, Andy," he said, dipping his fingers into White-head's yielding flesh.

"Okay," said Marvell. "Rox— Go inna kitchen. Get some mustard, pepper, bad butter, bad lard, bad milk—anything bad—aim it all in the fuckin' blender and bring it right back here."

"Howbout them boiled eggs Celia had?" Skip slowly suggested.

"Great. That oughta do it. Like eating dead babies, right? I have some emetics and laxatives and shit, but they'd make the Venus de Milo set up camp in the John, and we want to take it easy with this kid, you know?" Marvell leaned forward and slapped little Keith quite hard across the face. "Mm-hm. Oughta get him outside. Don't want him throwing up onna carpet."

Requiring a good deal of assistance, Whitehead was steered through the french windows. "Can I sit down? Please. Please let me sit down."

"Nope," said Marvell. "Lean on the wall right there."

"I know," said Andy suddenly. He stepped forward, clasped Keith's quadrangular nose with his left hand, and jammed a long right forefinger into his exposed throat.

A wretching quack sprang from Keith's mouth—as, with no less alacrity, did Andy's finger.

"AWW! Little fucker bit me!" shrieked Andy as he leaped at the reeling Whitehead.

It was only the remarkable speed of Quentin's intervention and Skip's timely aid that saved little Keith from a more summary loss of consciousness than he was destined soon to : ienjoy. He was still coughing vilely when Roxeanne reappeared, bearing the full beaker above the heads of the crowd.

Diana's contention, that Johnny was in fact the man whose bed she had shared for the past six months, was put over by her with lucidity and unwonted calm. She talked of Andy's creed of violence: however boastful and erratic he tended to be on the subject, his devotion to that activity was at least partially real. She adduced his murderous daydreams about the Tuckles: even as she spoke, there stood on the garage workbench four crude Molotov cocktails which Andy was proposing to drop down their chimney. She testified to his aberrant and depressive behavior in recent weeks: Andy had admitted to two attacks of false memory that same afternoon. Finally, she disclosed that Keith's pornography collection had been savaged at some point during the day, presumably by Johnny: that made Andy the only resident to have been spared his attentions. And so on.

But was anybody really listening now? The noises from the garden had become loose and intermittent, like the sound of a megaphone down a windy street, and Diana's words seemed to get nowhere, seemed to fuse in the light of the colorless room. Celia and Lucy had glazed over and as soon as Diana fell silent she felt herself slip back into the same slow, watery retrospection. One by one the girls were wandering through the door.

"Slam him against the wall," said Marvell, accepting the frothy jug from Roxeanne. "Skip— Hold him hard. He's gonna drink alia this and he's gonna fuckin' hate it. Hold his nose, Rox, and keep his mouth open."

As soon as the noisome fluid touched his lips Whitehead's whole body seemed to fizz with revulsion. Marvell's hirsute thumb had been planted on Keith's deep Adam's apple, which he tweaked and depressed in order to regulate the flow. When the last third of the beaker emptied over his shoulders, chest, neck, nose, and drowned mouth, both little Keith's legs seemed to bend up into the air. When Quentin and Skip released him, he remained soggily upright against the wall.

Nothing happened.

Crouching on the grass a few yards away, Andy looked up from nursing his bitten forefinger. "See, I told you," he said. "I know." Unhindered, Andy swooped up in front of Keith, half knelt sideways on, circled his arm like a baseball pitcher, and swung his fist full force into Keith's solar plexus. It seemed to dive wrist-high into his stomach before bouncing back.

If Whitehead had been in a cartoon (which is probably where he belonged), he would simply have imploded to a third of his mass and drifted up into the air. As it was, he collapsed instantaneously, his legs snatched from beneath him as though they had been lassoed by a cantering cowboy.

". . . My fuckin' hand!" shouted Andy. "You little—!"

"There, there, Andrew," said Quentin, effortlessly containing his struggling friend. "There there."

Twenty minutes later and the uncooperative Whitehead had failed to respond, variously, to swallowing a half bushel of grass, having his kidneys ground and punched, getting his testicles mightily squeezed, and being swung circularly in midair, this way and that, by his arms, his legs and his hair.

Andy stood over Keith's punctured body. "Fuck him," he suggested. "That's what I say."

"Andy, don't be absurd," said Quentin. "Unless we can get him through this ourselves we'll—"

"We'll have to call the hospital. Or the police," said Celia, who had appeared from between the french windows. Behind her, in the more tranquil light, stood Lucy and Diana. "Let's just get him out of here, can't we?"

Andy stepped forward and booted Keith negligently in the ribs. The body accepted the blow as might a sack of half-dressed cement. "See? Poor little bastard. He's . . . he's all fucked up."

"Look, er . . ." Marvell knelt beside Keith on the paving stones. "Look, I can't have any law here." He felt Keith's pulse. "Best thing is, I drill him fulla emetics and aperients and stuff and we just leave him here for a time. Or"—he raised his voice—"or on the grass, huh, Cele? Don't want him exploding right here onna patio, yeah, am I wrong?"

Celia swirled back into the room.

"Chicks!" said Marvell indulgently, taking Keith's wrists

in his hands. "Try to be helpful and they— hey, Skip, haul his legs, willya? I know Rox'd blow her stack, any guy heaving on her— yeah, thassit, dump him onna lawn. Now here, my : Ifriend, we gotta problem. Lie him on his back, he'll gag on his own vomit. Lie him on his chest, he won't shit right. I don't know about you, kid, but I could use a Hine."

After a few minutes Keith was firmly roped to the still-blossoming apple tree; two grimed hypodermics hung from his bloated arms.

62: GHOSTLY PERIODS

Perspective was the next to go. As soon as they were back inside, all the corners in Appleseed Rectory came adrift, swam out of position, and folded back in new and unfamiliar conjunctions. Through its open doorway the kitchen was no more than a displaced rhomboid of light. The stairs concertinaed away in unaligned succession. The hall leaned back and forth like a seaborne doll's house. Everywhere they looked mad angles veered up at their eyes.

Giles lay shivering on his bed, a deep-river creature of his own sweat. His mouth was a hive, his teeth changing position like dancers. If he clenched his jaw they just wouldn't fit, wouldn't fit, crags, tors, ridges, beaks, grinding against each other like the rusty cogs of an old machine. He prayed for them to fly away, white birds escaping this sodden nest. Until then he would be locked deep in this house, this room, this mouth, this mouth, with its marshmallow teeth and its sweet-sherry gums.

He could hear the fridge juddering peacefully at him, but he knew he'd never get to it. There were so many things in the way and anyhow his mind kept slipping back, slipping back to ... to gauzy skin and dying pillows oh baby please 1 enjoyed the swell of the land in ghostly periods with blood she kissed him gorily as saddening dreams the various sunshine off dusty glass and his teeth an old mother old mother and baby Giles.

"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.

Roxeanne leaned forward sharply and frowned up at him. "Hey, man, what's with your teeth? They're all, you got wires and shit in there—"

Upending his glass and knocking his chair over, Giles backed away from the table, his face stunned with a look of guilty dismay.

"Here, let's . . ." said Roxeanne, bearing down on Giles, who retreated gesturing with his hands like an entertainer quelling applause. "The fuck, how old are you? And your teeth are all dead."

Containing his tears, a frightened child, Giles bolted from the room.

"Round and round the garden," sang Quentin and Andy, two prop forwards to Keith's dangling hooker, "ran the teddy bear. One step, two steps, tickly under there. Round and round the garden ran the—"

"Hey," broke off Andy, "it's pretty knackering, this. The fuck are those Yanks? Why can't they have a go for a bit?"

Keith began to groan. It was a reedy, cat-like sound.

"At least he's alive," observed Quentin. "We're not completely wasting our time."

"No," said Keith, pronouncing it "Mo" through pulped lips.

"Mo who, you little wreck?" Andy asked.

"Mo," said Keith. "Mot in the well. Doan frow me in the well. Dome drowm me."

"Don't throw you in the well? Quentin, he talks as if we throw him inna well every night. We've a bloody good mind to, Keith. There's gratitude for you."

" 'Don't drown me,'" repeated Quentin. "That reminds me— Keith never got the antidote, did he?"

Keith started crying, crying in painfully snatched falsetto, crying like a baby.

Quentin and Andy turned to each other with bulging eyes.

Giles was crying too. He was doing so at his desk while he assembled his writing paper and pencils. Fat tears smudged the sheet as he wrote :

Dear All. God knows I have had a hard enough life since my accident. It has not been easy but I have tried to muck along as best I could. But now, with these remarks of Rocks-Ann's, I really do not know what I shall

He sniffed wetly. He stood up. There was something else in his gait when he walked toward the drinks cupboard.

: "Round and round the . . . Jesus. My arm's fuckin' dropping off. Look—Quent—there they are. Hey! The fuck over here, you lazy shits!"

Skip and Marvell merged into the garage light, buckling their belts. They ambled toward the rocking trio.

"What kinda shape's he in?"

Andy unhitched Keith's arm from his shoulder and swung the naked body forcefully at Marvell and Skip. "Where you been? Crapping or screwing or what?"

"What difference does it make?" asked Marvell urbanely.

"Fuck-all to you guys, that's for sure," said Andy, pacing back toward the house with Quentin at his side.

They settled on the steps outside the french windows. Fifteen yards away Skip, Marvell, and Keith marched round in the halflight like jagged clockwork figures in a silent film. Andy produced his hash kit and within half a minute had rolled two one-paper joints. "Hey, man," he said reflectively, handing one to Quentin and lighting them both. "That guy Keats. How old was he when he checked out?" "He was twenty-six," said Quentin. ("Walk right, walk right'." they heard Skip holler at the crippled Keith.) "Oh, really?" said Andy rather snootily. "I mean, that's not bad. What was all the . . . gimmick?" "I expect people thought he had yet to realize his full potential." Unimpressed, Andy protruded his lower lip and nodded a few times. "Fuck potential," he said.

"Quentin?" asked a new voice.

Quentin turned to the french windows, whence Giles falter-ingly emerged. "My good friend Giles," he said.

"How's Keith? Is he well again now?"

"He's as well as can be expected. Rather better, as it happens."

"Oh. I see. So you won't be taking him to the hospital."

"We do hope we may be spared that embarrassment, yes."

"Oh, actually. I see." Giles turned to go.

"Why do you ask, Giles?"

"Only that . . . that I've done it too. But I don't want to be a nuisance. Or a bore. I'll simply go back upstairs."

"You've done what too."

""Sort of killed myself, actually. I had, I've just drunk two liters of brandy—in one, well, no, actually in two, cos—”

"Giles, are you serious?"

"Mm. The book says I ought to die in twenty-five minutes, apparently. Seems silly now. But if you're not ... I mean, I don't ..."

Quentin leapt to his feet.

"Welcome to the gang, kid," said Andy, flicking his cigarette high into the air.

66: no more Games

Within twenty seconds Quentin was on the telephone to Hampstead Central Hospital, where a nurse of Irish provenance assured him that the patient, as described, had no chance whatever of reaching them alive. The only suitably equipped unit in mortal range, she said, was the Psychiatric Casualty Wing of the Blishner Institute, Potter's Bar. She would now ring there herself and ask them to ready a stomach pump in 64, to which ward the patient should be rushed as soon as he arrived. Throughout the conversation Giles sat smiling shamefacedly on the sofa. Lucy was beside him, stroking his hair and saying as little as she could.

Quentin slapped down the telephone.

"Right. Skip—which is faster—the Chevrolet or the Jaguar?"

"The Chev," said Skip. "I tune it. It, it'll hit—"

"Get in it and rev. Lucy, Roxeanne, get Giles in there. Andy, come on. Let's get Keith in there too. No more games."

In noisy formation, the Appleseeders crowded into the drive.

"Dump little Keith in back," said Marvell. "He still stinksa rat."

"It's the mercy-dash express!" said Andy, picking Keith up by his hair and the back of his belt and lobbing him into the trunk.

"Get up front, honey," Roxeanne told Lucy. "Tell Skip the way. I'll take care of Giles."

Andy joined Roxeanne and Giles in the back seat while Lucy ran round to join Skip in the front. The Chevrolet was already in gear when Quentin raced forward from the remaining group on the porch. He put his head through the : driver's window and handed Skip an envelope. "Here are the details. I know the head man there and it might speed things up. Open it when you get there." Skip put the letter into his flying jacket and zipped it up. Quentin smacked the car roof twice.

"Now gun it."

With a wide squirt of gravel the Chevrolet ground off into the night.

"Beat me, beat me," said Andy (for Skip had switched on the tape). "Beat me, beat me—aw, chop my head off."

As the car straightened onto the road Giles slumped from his seat to the floor. Andy was about to draw this to Roxeanne's attention when he noticed that her hand was busy on his lap. His eyes swelled.

"You fork off here?" said Skip.

"Fuck off yourself," said Andy.

"Yes. Here," said Lucy.

Skip pulled them onto the dual highway at 75 mph. The heavy car rode high up the verge before stabilizing again. Andy looked down at Roxeanne's head, which bobbed rhythmically over his groin.

"Christ," he said elatedly. "We're all dying here. We're all dying!"

67: spring clean

Quentin allowed Celia to embrace him momentarily before he shooed her back into the house. Diana and Marvell stood nervously in the hall.

"Now," he began. "Incompetent as we know the authorities to be I don't imagine they'll let two contiguous suicide attempts go completely unremarked. So shall we make a start? Marvell, may I make you responsible for the drugs? Round them up and come to me. Don't worry about the hash and whatnot—just the hard stuff. Celia, Diana: could you, as it were, spring clean? Banish, at any rate, the grosser evidences of debauchery. I'll get the lion's share of the bottles into the garage and reeky the garden. If we could reconvene in the drawing room in, say, fifteen minutes . . . ?”

By then it was three-thirty. From the one remaining vessel in the room Quentin poured four small glasses of Benedictine. "Splendid," he said. "Now we wait."

Marvell glanced as his watch. "Oughta be there by now."

For a moment they all sat back and let the tiredness pound through them. Then Diana stood up. "I'm going to bed," she announced.

Quentin got to his feet. He kissed Diana deftly on the lips. "Good night, Diana. Thank you for your help." He conferred silently with Marvell and Celia. "I think, however, that we'll stay up and see this through."

"Okay." Diana hesitated as she turned to leave. "Wait . . . isn't there something else? Isn't there—haven't we forgotten something?"

Quentin spread his arms. "I fail to see what."

The effort of recall flickered once more in Diana's eyes.

"The weekend—it's over then?"

"I don't know," said Quentin, "what else it could be."

68: white room

The Chevrolet came to a grilled halt broadside an ambulance in the Blishner Institute Psychiatric Casualty forecourts. As the five spilled from the car a tall young intern with long black hair noosed in a headband promptly wheeled a stretcher from between the sliding doors. "This him?" he asked, levering Giles onto the white sheeting. "Yeah." They had started back to the building when Andy abruptly snapped his fingers. "Fuck," he remarked to Lucy. "We forgot little Keith again."

He ran back to the car, exhumed Keith from its trunk, and trotted back with the body slung over his shoulder.

"What's with this one?" asked the intern, staring at Keith's blood-bubbled face.

"Uh . . ." said Andy. "Uh, he just took this great load of aspirins."

"Like hell he did," said the intern. "You boys had better stick around,"

He led them between the automatic doors, through the dim vestibule, along a corridor and into a small white room.

"Stay here," he told them.

: Andy watched him go. "That guy wants a fight," he said, letting Keith's body drop from his shoulder to the floor.

"I'm not staying here," said Skip. "That guy means business and I'm loaded."

"Relax," said Andy. "I tellya, he's—"

"Hey!" said Roxeanne, opening a cupboard door to reveal four shelves of bottles and vials. "Get this!"

"Christ," said Andy. "Look. Mandies! Andrenalin! Amyl-nitrate!" He spun around to Skip. "Get inna car, turn it round. We'll be right out." He began loading his pockets, Roxeanne hers. Skip kicked Keith out of the way and hopped into the corridor.

And there was Keith, looking as if he had been dead for a week. And there was Giles, drowning, dying and dying in the white room. Lucy crept nearer the stretcher. She held his limp hand in both of hers. Her face burned with incredulous disgust. "Andy," she whispered.

Andy turned, wide-eyed, a jar of pills held up in either hand. "Yeah?"

"Andy. What are you doing?" Lucy's voice trembled. "Get out of here and leave us alone. Get out."

His hands dropped to his sides. "Ah, what the hell, Lucy? I mean, really—what the hell any more?"

69: wrong yesterdays

In the smaller of the Appleseed Rectory sitting rooms, Quentin reclined on a pink chaise-longue with Diderot's Le neveu de Rameau dandled on his thighs. But he wasn't reading. His forefingers placed in either nasal cleft, Quentin's head was tilted backward in a meditative posture.

In the larger of the Appleseed Rectory sitting rooms, unaware of Quentin's presence behind the half-closed partition doors, Celia and Marvell were together on the sofa.

"Yeah, that," Marvell was saying, "that'd be the time I was over here before. When I stayed at a, at Quentin's people's home?"

"Oh. So you visited Tallbury."

"Nah, not 'Tallbury.' What was it ... fuckin' great country place. It was . . .”

2OO

"Tallbury," said Celia. "So you met them before they got killed?"

"They did? All of them?"

"In an aeroplane crash," said Celia neutrally.

"What, some sorta charter flight?"

"Probably. They are more dangerous. The brother survived."

"The brother? Oh, right—the 'brother,' yeah. Ah, that's too bad. I liked them really a lot. Quentin never said."

Next door, the book slid from Quentin's thighs. He made no attempt to retrieve it.

"You liked them?" said Celia. "They and Quentin never got on."

"Nah, well—but they liked him, huh, Cele?"

"He only put up with them because of the trust money."

"Yeah," said Marvell. "That was the gimmick."

"Hardly a gimmick. The money is rightfully his."

"Guess you could put it that way."

Next door, Quentin's eyes closed. A bleached light played on the corners of his eyes.

"When was this?" asked Celia.

"Uh, early last year."

"Last year? But Quentin's parents died four years ago."

"Parents? Parents? No, no, Celia. This was a 'people's home'? It was a gimmick Quent had an interest in then. You know, one of the de-luxe old-fag joints? Quent financed it. Get the queers along, screw their cash, and maybe they leave you something when they pop off?"

"Quentin's 'people'?"

"Yeah. Inna home. He never had any parents far as I knew. It was a good gimmick. It was a very good gimmick. We were, I was pulling down four hundred, maybe five hundred—"

"Quentin?"

Quentin's eyes opened. He sighed, and a great weight seemed to slide upward from his body. Then it hit him, like newly fallen snow, all the blank wrong yesterdays.

"Quentin?" Celia called. "Quentin."

"Yes?" said Johnny.

part three

sunday lxx: johnny

did all kinds of jobs—Mondays he was bucket boy at Greek Charlie's downriver abortion factory, sold OK piss samples Tuesdays for the semilegal immigrants to smuggle into the Health Board Centre, evicted widows and cripples from South London tenements Wednesdays, Thursdays it was petnapping for the paravivisectionists, removed antisyndicate fingernails Fridays, the weekends his own—so then it was drugs, four acid plants run by him, as many trips to Tangier a month, dealt direct with Chinese heroin agents, cornered the coke concessions in three continents—into the sex market full time, so incredibly good looking that when he hit the street courting couples snarled with lust and reached out to steady each other, lorries and girl-driven minis alike mounted the pavement and cannonaded shop windows, people of all ages dropped to their knees in his wake, championed the fuck farms and pioneered the boyhire networks, two hundred a trick by the time he was through—until all these dreams began to slow down on him, all these pornographic, hallucinatory, and mercantile dreams —and suddenly it is not he who sits in a darkened room but flashing this way and that far to go through the night looking for a name, and so—

"Quentin?"

"Yes," said Johnny.

Celia came through the door and with a hideous, inhuman leap Johnny was on her back, a lithe-limbed insect accelerating her fall to the ground. Holding his wife by the hair Johnny smashed her face into the stone floor, smashed until it went all runny and sweet in his hands. Without looking round he jumped and swiveled his right arm backward and upward and shattered the approaching Marvell's jaw with the side of his fist. Johnny kicked. He kicked, and stopped when the twitching stopped.

Diana had felt the disturbance from below and was already in her dressing gown when she heard the gentle footfalls on the stairs and the soft knock.

"Who is it?" she said.

"It's Quentin," said Johnny.

Diana opened the door: "You," she said as he closed it behind him.

"Oh no. Johnny, don't kill me," said Diana. "Please don't kill me, Johnny."

71: THE COMING LIGHTS

Skip tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. He trained the Chevrolet's rearview mirror on the hospital exit. He swore. Then Skip remembered the envelope Quentin had given him. He took it from his jacket. It was, he now saw, addressed to himself, to Skip Marshall, Reg: 87695438, c/o Buzhardt, 20120 South Richmond Avenue, LA, Calif. 90065. The seal had already been broken and the paper was crinkled. Skip took the letter out; he recognized the strained, precipitous hand.

San. I am out of Honkville and I reckon as how we could take another try at it, your Ma's last words to me as I cradled her in my arms was we shuould, she for-gived you and I both. I have your bus money home, she said for you to get back be my baby boy when first you colud. You're loving pa, Philboyd Marshall Junior.

PS: Do it boy—johnny

The piece of blue paper fluttered from Skip's fingers as Andy and Roxeanne appeared through the automatic doors and raced down the steps.

Roxeanne got in beside Skip while Andy dived onto the back seat.

"Luce's staying with the deadies but we ain't!" shouted Andy, cupping his hands over his mouth and letting out a high-pitched whoop. "Rox— crack out some of that Adren!"

When the Chevrolet pulled out onto the motorway Skip pressed the accelerator pedal to the floor.

"Pull over at the next access, honey," said Roxeanne. "Andy and I want to fuck. Don't we, Andy?"

". . . Yeah," said Andy from the back seat.

Skip did not respond. The car passed the 80 mph speed limit.

"Ah, baby, come on," said Roxeanne. "You can watch. Can't he, Andy?"

"I don't give a shit," said Andy.

: Skip did not respond. The speedometer dial jerked up to 90 mph.

"Hey, take it easy," said Roxeanne. "Hey, Skip—slow down!"

Skip did not respond. His dead, spectacled eyes were steady on the unraveling highway.

"Casual," murmured Andy. "It's ton street. Cajjj."

Abruptly Roxeanne's jaw plummeted. She held up the blue paper. "Andy, you crazy fuck! You give him this?"

The car was moving at no mph.

"What?" Andy leaned forward. "Nah— Quent did. It's just—"

Roxeanne had begun to pound with her fists on Skip's metallic arms. "Oh, fuck fuck fuck!" she screamed. "Baby, baby, don't kill us! Andy—stop him, stop him!"

"Quentin," said Andy. "He's Johnny?"

"Andy Andy Andy!"

"Diana . . ." said Andy, and exhaled.

"Andy . . . Andy . . ."

Andy sank back. "Ah, I don't give a shit," he said.

The Chevrolet was traveling at 135 mph when it climbed the flyover exit route ramp. Skip made no attempt to negotiate the thirty-degree turn. The car tore through the roadside trestles and flew up into the coming lights.

72: THAT SAD WELCOME

Keith asked the mini-cabbie if he wouldn't mind pulling over. It was seven o'clock and a bright dawn had begun to show over the luminous hills. Dusky and tumescent though he was with bruises, Whitehead had an obscure desire to walk the remaining five hundred yards to the house. He offered the driver three of the four ten-pound notes Lucy had given him. The driver seemed gratified. "Thank you, sir," he said.

Little Keith tasted the air between swollen lips, smarting again to the tranquil anonymity of the village. Half-tears gathered in his puffed-over eyes. He moved on gradually, in a way relishing the stealth forced on him by his damaged legs, enjoying the sweet and painful integrity of his body. The intern had asked him, with every show of urgency, to stay on for treatment at the Institute, but—no—Keith had wanted to return as soon as possible to his anxious friends. He was, even now, embarrassingly moved that they had—with all that determination and concern—rescued him from the death he had so childishly invited. In his mind he praised also the skills of Marvell, whom he assumed to be responsible for the "unidentified drug" which, the doctors said, had providentially compressed his fat tissues and halted the fatal permeation of the barbiturates. He looked around at the oblongs of graying brick, the unresting trees (what was it they were saying . . . fresh, fresh, fresh), the darting birds, the different sky. How, he thought, could he ever have wished to be elsewhere? He felt as if he had undertaken a long journey and had survived to be born again—born again, through the midwifery of this sudden weekend.

Keith felt, moreover, in the know, one of the cognoscenti, the possessor of exclusive information, tall with news. Giles was dead. He was dead. Before the stomach pumps could even be made operational his breathing had ceased, and on the application of the respirators his heart had instantly collapsed. Giles's mother had been brought down from the wards above; Mrs. Coldstream had embraced little Keith, bathing his cheeks in her tears. The intern, again, had offered to telephone Appleseed Rectory, but Keith had forestalled him. He wanted all of that sad welcome, the faltering sympathy of his friends. Keith rehearsed phrases, wondering how best to present the melancholy story. He had himself seen Giles laid out on the white stretcher, Lucy weeping over his poor shoulders, his quiet face sullen and babyish in death.

Keith limped steadily over the bridge. He paused at the opening of the drive. Appleseed Rectory stole out from under the morning shadows. Keith blinked. Was it really there? Perversely he thought of turning back, of running away. But then he smiled at his own foreboding. It's all over, he thought, stepping onto the damp gravel.

The Appleseed kitchen: the suitcase, the car keys, the bag of drugs, the roll of notes, the burnished ax. On the wall, the (decoy) excremental G of the Conceptualist Gesture. Johnny was there. He leaned forward eagerly by the window. As he watched Keith move up the drive, his green eyes flashed into the dawn like wild, dying suns.