Martin Amis - Dead Babies

"Okay. So if you go crazy now," Marvell went on, "they give you good chemicals to counteract the bad ones in your head. Or electrics. The only mysterious thing about the brain is its complexity. Nothing cerebral about it, man, just one mother of a terminal of chemicals and nerve ends, and science can keep up with it now. So: why not apply this positively?"

"I don't know," said Andy, in moonish response to Marvell's interrogative, though in fact rhetorical, stare.

"No reason! Look — fuck — we're agreed that life is a rat's ass and that it's no fun being yourself all the time. So why not do with your brain what you do with your body? Fuck all this dead babies about love, understanding, compassion— use drugs to kind of… cushion the consciousness, guide it, protect it, stimulate it. We have a fantastic range of drugs now, Andy. We have drugs to make you euphoric, sad, horny, violent, lucid, tender. We have drug combinations that will produce any kind of hallucination or sense modification you want. Alternatively, we have drugs that can neutralize these effects instantaneously. Not the old Leary line — no 'religion,' no false promises. We have chemical authority over the psyche — so let's use it, and have a good time."

"Piss," said Diana. "What about brain damage? False memory, street sadness?"

"Well. " Marvell rocked his hairy head from side to side. "There's kind of an appendix dealing with—"

"And anyhow, most of that," said Roxeanne, "is media hysteria."

Quentin: "How was the book received, Marvell?”

: "Pig and Smeg Sunday raved. The only straight press things I've seen, of course, tried to dismiss it as psycho agit-prop."

"Of course," said Andy, picking up Marvell's grass kit. "They would. Well, what have you got in mind for us today, then?"

The Doctor smiled. "Uh-uh. What have you got in mind?"

Quite overwhelmed by the colossal impression he seemed so far to have made on the guests, Whitehead stole tremulously across the garden. Keith's mission was to consolidate his feelings of well-being, and he proposed to do this by paying a call on the only people he had so far encountered in his life who made him feel flash, cool, grand, a pop-star, a Mohawk, one-up, stylish, sexy, brilliant, rich, tall and good. They were the Tuckles.

The Tuckles?

The Tuckles. If Quentin and Andy were at a loose end — or if they were under the auspices of some particularly electrifying drug — they used often to race out across the lawn to give a bad time to Mr. and Mrs. Sydney Tuckle, the wrecked dotard pair whom they were trying to evict from the Appleseed annex, a single-storied, two-room structure built into the corner of the garden wall and screened from the house by a bank of flowerless rhododendrons. The Tuckles had been installed there half a century earlier as factoti to some previous owners and had, insufferably, refused to budge since. Legally they were immovable, but Quentin and Andy, claiming to have dreams of converting the lodge into a studio/guest house/rumpus room, argued that if they could make life nasty enough for the couple they would leave of their own accord.

Quentin had once set up, for example, a polyethylene-covered loudspeaker outside the Tuckle front window, through which he relayed at glass-shattering, eardrum-puncturing volume such sounds as road crashes, cannon salutes, airplane takeoffs, advancing mobs, heavy breathing, tank battles, ambulance sirens, elephant charges, shouts, screams, obscenities. When this gave no clear reward Quentin transmitted a high-pitched sonic hum for three days and three nights; on the fourth day Mr. Tuckle was seen groggily repadding the windows with blood trickling from his left ear, at which point Quentin good-humoredly gave in to domestic pressure and discontinued his broadcasts. Andy's ruses tended on the whole to be more atavistic in conception. He once peed through the keyhole and then, to Quentin's roars of laughter, defecated down the chimney onto the Tuckle hearth. In similar moods he had playfully blocked up their sewage outlet, cut off their heat and water over the Christmas weekend, fused their electricity circuit, and restricted their comings and goings by, variously, camping outside with an ax, blacking up their windows with hardboard (so they didn't dare come out), and training the pressurized garden hose on their door for ninety-six hours. Although it was at their peril that the Tuckles staggered out of the back gate to visit the shop — liable to be menaced, spat on, jostled — Quentin and Andy were of course far too cavalier to mount a systematic campaign. Indeed, we suspect that if the old pair ever did move on Quentin and Andy would miss them sorely.

Whitehead rapped on the toytown front door. He rapped again and backed off a few paces. "Come on," he said. "It's Keith Whitehead."

Suddenly the letterbox creaked for a split second. There followed the sound of bolts, many and elaborate, being thrown back. The door opened slowly. Mr. and Mrs. Tuckle edged out into the strange sunlight.

"Mr. Whitehead! Thank God!" Mr. Tuckle swayed so wholeheartedly on his feet that Keith reached out and balanced him against his wife. "I beg your pardon for the delay, sir," Tuckle pursued, "but Mr. Villiers must have seen you when you came down here on the Tuesday — because he stood outside the door here yesterday and called up that he was you and everyone else was out. We could have sworn it was you, sir. We could have sworn it was you. He said it just in the way you say it, sir. Why, I opened the door without really thinking. And there was Mr. Villiers, with the dark-haired one standing beside him with a dustbin. He hurled it — he hurled it at us and we flew back into the house. Mrs. Tuckle took the lid on her neck. He would have charged in here on top of us, sir, but Mr. Villiers held him back.”

: "It was your own bloody stupid fault for not looking first," said Keith.

"You're right, of course, sir, it was. Very rash."

"Well, what the hell do you expect me to do about it?"

For the first time Mr. Tuckle's voice showed real agitation. "No, sir, please. We don't expect you to control them. You can see they don't know what they're doing themselves half the time. We're grateful for what you do do, sir. Deeply grateful." Mrs. Tuckle confirmed this, her eyes damp with trust. Mr. Tuckle swallowed. "And could you tell Mr. Coldstream that we're deeply grateful for his gift."

"If I remember to," said Keith. (On hearing of the Tuckle plight Giles had asked Whitehead to take along a liter of gin the next time he went to see them, which Keith had done that Tuesday, adjudging the present too fattening to intercept.) "About shopping. And by the way, Mrs. Tuckle, it's no bloody use asking me to get Beenies at the mini-market. You know bloody well they don't stock them there."

"I'm sorry, sir, I didn't—"

"Anyway, you can do it yourselves today for once. Some guests of mine have arrived and I've decided to take everyone out for a picnic. It should be clear from one till at least three."

"Thank you, sir, thank you."

"Yes, and in future when I knock I'd better say 'White-head.' I won't say 'Keith' or 'Mr.' Then you'll know it's me. 'Whitehead.'"

Whitehead didn't seem as pleased by this innovation as he thought he was going to be, but when the Tuckles started to say "Thank you, sir, thank you—" again, Keith was off, striding back over the lawn, feeling far too flash to say good-bye.

"Away from the drill!"

"What? I say, Giles, are you all right?"

Giles had been lying on his bed, bent double with psychosomatic toothache, His strangled shout had been a semi-