Martin Amis - Dead Babies

They drank more champagne in a discotheque alcove. Dexter was putting his hand up Diana's dress a good deal; Diana retaliated by not uncrossing her legs. At eleven, when Diana JO

was wondering whether she could be bothered not to sleep with Dexter — it was, after all, the simplest way of terminating the evening — Andy came in.

Andy came in, stripped to the waist as usual, a bottle of twenty-peseta wine swinging from one hand, a length of bread in the other. He waved and shouted hellos at the bartenders and turntable operators, kissed two waitresses, and took the floor, dancing alone under the throbbing strobes with elaborate martial-arts movements. Ten minutes later he started to saunter round the club, nodding to his friends, peering closely but offhand at the prettier girls, until he came to Dexter and Diana, at which point he paused. Three feet from their table Andy came to an emphatic halt and began to stare at them both, declining to reply when Dexter uneasily asked what he could do for them. Andy inserted the last wedge of bread into his mouth and chewed on it for what must have been half a minute, meanwhile dusting his palms. Diana soon forgot her embarrassment as she concentrated with rapt distaste on the loose movement of his jaw, the swilling and munching of his large square teeth, the moist swipes of his thick tongue. "Hey there!" said Dexter with simulated amusement when Andy reached out for the half-full champagne bottle, held it up to the light, and swallowed its contents in one long pull, his adam's apple pulsing like a geyser bubble in the intermittent light. Andy dragged his bare forearm across his mouth and burped immensely. "Most refreshing," he said, replacing the bottle and moving round the table toward Dexter, at whose side he knelt and into whose large red ear he started intently to whisper. Andy and Dexter stood up. "Guess I'll be getting along," said Dexter wonderingly. Andy watched him leave and then, with a complacent air, turned to Diana. He held out a hand toward her.

Ninety seconds later Diana was being driven at speed by Andy Adorno down Ronda's main street. Her mind had been full of good things to say to Andy—"Wow, if big boy want, big boy take," "Look, hippie, I don't go for mysterious strangers," "OOoo, aren't you oddly compelling" — but there was something about his manner, something at once single-minded and negligent, which suggested to her that he was on some crappy drug and was liable to get ugly. Now she could think only of her immediate physical discomfort. Using one hand to keep the hem of her dress somewhere in the vicinity: of her navel, she put the other arm around his waist. He smelled of dew and sleeping bags. As her sleeve brushed his armpit she wondered vaguely if she would have time to wash the dress before she packed.

Andy abruptly beached the motorbike at the far end of the bridge over Ronda Gorge, the vast fault in the plateau on which the town was spread like assorted crockery on a great white tabletop. He led her back across the bridge to one of its semicircular, railinged indentations. "Have you ever looked over?" "Once. It stinks." "Not at night." He suffered her to kneel on the paved seat and to look out through the bars into the deep stone valley. He stood behind her, very close. "It's eight hundred feet down. Lots of guys a year come here especially to kill themselves. I spoke to the old wreck whose job it is to hose them off the rocks. They always do it here, from the middle, climb over the railings, look around. Think of it." While Andy spoke Diana sensed a thickening presence at the top of her exposed thighs. At first she thought it was his hand and paid no attention. Then her knuckles whitened on the railings as she heard the discreet trickle of his fly zipper. "Then they look around," Andy continued huskily, "and they must wonder how they could hate anywhere so casual. So they look down. Look down." Diana leaned over further, listened to the sound of a stream, telephone crickets, saw water shine, fireflies winking at each other. "Then they just let go, and the earth soars up and — AW, MY RIG!" Andy backed off, half doubling over. "The zip… got it… aw, my fuckin' snake!" After Andy had disengaged himself and they had stopped laughing, Diana waited a few seconds and said, "I'm going back tomorrow" — but he made her take the ticket from her bag and he swung it out over the bridge wall. Diana watched the slip of red paper wing its way down through the dark air.

Whenever Diana thinks about those seconds now she re-experiences them simultaneously — discreet trickle, crickets telephoning, shine of water, winking fireflies — but it is with enduring consternation that she reviews the following month. "Come on," he said, checking her out of the hotel, "I'm going

to make you nice," Halfway up Europe on that fucking bike.

They spent the night with some unspeakable hippies in Granada, Andy conducting a sale of dud narcotics on whose proceeds the couple dined at the Ritornello club in Alicante, where he moreover made her dance. They spent two nights in a zoo-peseta pension in Peniscola ("Cock-coke," Andy called it), slept on the beach at Sitges, and lived naked for a week on a Pyrenean ridge. They ate jumbo prawns and collected a mescaline consignment in the Marseilles docks, stayed at the George IV in Monte Carlo, contracted scabies in a Le Touquet youth hostel, and sat for thirty-six hours in the Orly waiting rooms. Apart from the squalor, the crappy people they encountered, the filthy macrobiotic food he occasionally bothered to make her eat, and that fucking motorbike, what appalled Diana most was the unforgivable corniness of her predicament. Tight little rich girl encounters working-class spunk. Seen from the outside everything he did was in trite inverted commas: he was uninhibited, zany, impulsive—"lyrical." And yet being with him was an utterly unreflecting activity; Diana never hesitated because nothing gave Andy pause. There was the sex, too, of course, and it was perhaps this that gave Diana most retrospective embarrassment. Unlike the delicate, artful sex technicians she had slept with in the past, Andy didn't seem to concern himself much with her own inclination or pleasure. For some reason this made her feel achingly passionate and (the word made her squirm) "tender," also. Once, in the Pyrenees, he encouraged her to drink too much wine and she was sick over her naked body. He held her shoulders. "Now you won't like me any more," she had said. Andy hurled her down in the long grass and made love to her with unprecedented ferocity. Ten minutes out of his presence and she began to feel confused, frightened, and intensely sad.

He dropped her off at the preliminary customs checkpoint in Boulogne harbor. Andy asked Diana what she was going to do when she got back. She told him she would be starting at London in October. Which college? She told him which college. Andy couldn't help it — he had to laugh. "Why are you laughing?" she asked. But Andy kicked the bike into gear and Diana kissed his lips quickly before he could zip off down the salty black road.

Diana was still crying three weeks later when she took her place in the check-in queue at Wolfson College, London,

a huge post-modern matchbox which loomed starkly over

Golders Green bus depot. Although her transparent silk trouser suit assumed a perfunctory sexiness, Diana stood in an ·'unwonted slouch and her head hung, resigned and unalert. He recognized her anyway. "There you are at last— I've been here a year already." He kissed her condiment lips as the students threaded past. "Are you going to come and live with me, or what?" She started to cry again. "Yes, please," said Diana.

Oh, but it was not just from her that Miss Lucy Littlejohn got an uneasy reception when she flounced into Appleseed Rectory at seven o'clock that evening, chewing gum, smoking a cigarette, peeling a banana, carrying an empty bottle of wine, trying to mend a broken onyx necklace, and wanting a great deal of cash for the undersized mini-cab driver who had himself escorted her to the door. Andy greeted Lucy with exactly the kind of grisly animality that Diana had dreaded most. (As Andy kissed Lucy's mouth for the second time Diana remembered noticing that he really was a bit too fat, and noticing also that his being a bit too fat was one of her favorite things about him.) Quentin, on the other hand, popped his lips on Lucy's cheek with soldierly restraint, having preceded the gesture with the introduction of his wife. Distant twinges threatened Giles's normal equanimity when Lucy knelt by the side of his chair, whispered in his ear, and kissed his tightened lips; three ten-pound notes fluttered absentmindedly from his fingers. The Americans were then presented en masse by a fluent Villiers. Unintroduced, Whitehead observed these intercourses from the corner of the room, where he was perched on a baronial velvet armchair.