Martin Amis - Dead Babies

And Lucy. To little Keith's narrow blue eyes she was something of a disappointment. The tales he had heard about her were, by and large, dehumanizing in tendency. Lucy was a thing that fucked people for money, that would wank you off for a favor, that removed its clothes if you asked it to. But here she was — to all appearances spectacularly human. Further, while only slightly less pretty than Keith's much-thumbed mental photographs of her, Lucy's looks were 50 expressive of personality, so dispiritingly unusual. Surveying her crew-cut silver hair, sequinned eyelids, pendulous mouth, multipainted teeth, nonexistent chin, and quite extraordinarily baroque and bulky costume, one was at a loss to see why people hadn't thought of looking that way before. No. Lucy was palpably the holder of views, the entertainer of thoughts, the proprietress of some individuality. Just listen to her—

"Eye-eye-eye. I really made a friend of that dwarf taximan. When I got into the cab I said to myself, 'Kid, the man who's driving you — he's a dwarf. He's sitting on practically the Encyclopaedia Britannica just to get a hand to the steering wheel. Don't talk about dwarfs till he gets you there and goes away again.' I sat in the back trying to think of things not to do with dwarfs to say to him. Halfway through the park I got as far as telling him I'd just been to see Snow White and the Seven. and then sort of trailed off. It wasn't my fault— that's what I saw this morning. So what I want to make clear is, before we go on, I don't mean any offense, no matter what things come out of my mouth. So are there any dwarfs or queers or Jews here or anything like that, so I know?"

"Well, I'm a Jew," said Marvell.

"I'm a queer," said Skip.

". And I'm a dwarf," said Keith (before anyone else could), to vast applause.

"See? See? Hey, whose shoes do you have to walk a mile in to get a drink around here?"

As Quentin self-reprovingly poured Lucy a whiskey from the flagon that Giles had recently sauntered down the stairs with, Marvell asked, impatiently, "What do you want a drink for, Lucy, anyhow?"

The Americans, you see, had received Lucy with snotty reserve, with ostentatious cool. They had spent the past half hour in a more or less successful attempt to establish an atmosphere of gravity and devotional calm. Marvell had brought down from his room a large cuboid case, laying it carefully on the table in the grotto-like dining alcove of the larger sitting room, from which he fussily produced and then arranged various bottles, vials, syringes, nostril spoons. Skip had loped round the house marshaling its inhabitants, laconically instructing them to take their seats in the living room. There they were met by Roxeanne, who in the intervals of trying to restore Giles to life gathered chairs and incidentally: cemented her alienation of Diana by sexily persuading Andy not to put a record on. The household had entered into the spirit of things with a kind of ironic docility, but the clamor of Lucy's entrance quite broke their mood.

"Is this a seance or something?" asked Lucy.

"What do you want a drink for, Lucy," Marvell asked again, less edgily. "I have much better gimmicks right here."

"Far out. I don't want a gimmick, I want a drink."

Since "far out" had come to carry roughly the same force as "oh really?" Marvell's asperity returned. "Look, explain it to her, Quent, willya? I reiterate, I don't want to get too straight about this but we'll be all out of whack if we do it unscientifically. Okay?"

The denseness of the sitting-room furnishings, together with its chocolate brown wallpaper and deep-blue fitted carpet, gave it a premature receptivity to the advancing dusk. Although, at 7:30, it was obvious that there was plenty of light left on the other side of its two tall windows, the texture of the room closed stealthily in on itself. When Marvell spoke his voice wandered out plaintively into the incipient evening.

"Have any of you. have any of you decided which way you want to go yet?"

"I have," said Andy, getting to his feet. He brushed his hair out of his eyes and clapped his hands together. "I want to feel sexed-up, big rigged, violent and strong."

"I imagine," said Marvell, his hands already busy inside his box, "I imagine you feel most of those things most of the time, don't you, Andy?"

"Check. But I want to feel all of them all of the time— all of tonight anyway."

Marvell took a multicolored capsule and split it with an unsettlingly long thumbnail onto a blank sheet of paper. To the pyramid of powder he added sections of two other pills. Andy was now instructed to fold the paper double, forming a channel down which the brew could be poured into his mouth. He asked if he was allowed to wash it down with whiskey and was told that he might. Marvell held up what could have been an eardrop syringe. "Take two drops of this on your tongue."

"What was it?" asked Andy, having done so.

"Adrenalin concentrate." "Casual.”

"You got about a half hour, forty-five minutes. Right. Uh, Celia?"

Celia frowned. "Well, it rather depends on what we're going to do tonight."

"Don't tell me," said Diana drearily, eyes half closed, "another club crawl."

"C'mon, Diana," said Andy, "what in the fuck's wrong with that? I'm feeling pretty. pretty loose already."

"Actually, Diana," Quentin joined in, "I had planned to give our friends a very oblique glimpse of our London nightlife."

"Sounds okay to us," said Marvell, briefly consulting Skip and Roxeanne. "Celia?. How about it?"

Celia sat upright. "Well. Obviously I want to feel a bit speedy — in case we dance. And I wouldn't mind some mescaline, or perhaps. "

"Try to be more specific, Celia, please. Don't talk drugs. Talk feelings, moods."

"Well, I… I just want to have a good time." Celia turned again to Quentin, who warmly met her eye. "And to feel full of love," she said.

The room blushed. Raising his quiff-like eyebrows, Marvell rummaged boredly inside the case, eventually bringing out a single pink pill which he lobbed across the room. "Just a straight High extract," he sighed. "Okay, how about Keith there?"

Whitehead waved a hand negligently in the air. Bootless, he had no intention of performing a miniature waddle across the room, and the request he was steeling himself to make would in any case be for Marvell's ears only. "Haven't quite decided yet. Mind if I sit on it?"

"So what else do you do with it?" drawled Skip, smirking sleepily.

Keith did not see the relevance of that remark. "All right with you, Marvell?" he asked.

Marvell was smiling at Skip, but quickly returned his gaze to little Keith. "Sure — but not too long now, okay? Lucy," said Marvell, some sternness returning to his voice, "how about you."

"Ooh, what a treat," said Lucy. "Isn't Captain Marvell clever to be able to—”

: "Can I have my turn now please."

"Pardon me?"

"Can I have my turn now please."

Giles had spoken with such robotic clarity that everyone turned to him in surprise. He was sitting erectly on the edge of his chair, palms open upward in the air. His face was tenser than it had been all day and his expression changed with unusual rapidity, like a blind man moving down unknown paths.

"Sure," said Marvell.

"Can I have my turn now please."

"Sure, Giles."

"Please. Just stop me. Can't you make my. Only stop me worrying all the time."

"About what?"

"Actually little things."

"About what things, man? I have to know about what?"

Giles relaxed, drunk and battered, into the sofa. His right hand was covered by Lucy's as his left fluttered like a damaged bird. A delta of tears formed slowly on his cheeks.

"Yawn," said Andy. "A crying jag."