Martin Amis - Dead Babies

Upstairs, in agreeable contrast, The Hon. Quentin Villiers leaned backward stiffly in order that Celia might clip up the collar of his frilled taffeta blouse.

"How do I look?"

In his violet suede suit, the half-length trousers tucked into alligator-skin thigh boots, and with his silver-blond flyaway hair curled playfully up from his forehead, Quentin looked blindingly beautiful, rather Chattertonian, and definitively upper class. It gave Celia a sweet toothache pang just to be near him.

"You look absolutely extraordinary. Like a sex cubicle. God, how I wish I had your complexion," said Celia, reclaiming her own with a palmful of thick brown paste. "My loathsome spots are bound to start gleaming through."

"Drivel, my sweet. It distresses me to hear you talk in that vein." Quentin leaned forward, no less stiffly, and smoothed his lips over Celia's half-open mouth.

She looked up at him, heavy water gathering in her eyes. The wave of sick disbelief passed as Quentin placed his dry hands on her cheeks.

"I love you," he said gravely.

"Thank you," she said. "I love you.”

Quentin cruised away to stand before the full-length wardrobe mirror, teasing his hair with long fingers.

"Darling," said Celia, "can you feel any of those strange drugs you chose? You're not getting a sadness or anything, are you?"

"Nothing whatever. Not a murmur. And you?"

"Yes, my hands are in gear already." Celia stood up, her square face uncertain and amused. "Do I look not too bad?"

"You look very touching."

Celia smiled gummily — and for a moment she did indeed look just that. "Darling, have you decided on the itinerary yet?"

"I've given the matter some thought, yes. To begin with we could do much worse than look in at—"

The Psychologic Revue was held fortnightly at a semiderelict 1920s cinema in what used to be Kilburn High Road, now a jangling caravan grouped here and there beween the northern motorway access routes. The Chevrolet and the Jaguar swung together off the flyover and moaned down through the darkness toward the Universal, a sooty Gothic structure which hovered massively over the secondhand car showrooms and ramshackle eateries that littered its surroundings. The shadowy caves nestling between the motorway caissons, route-indicator stanchions, and overpass columns held a companionable gloom, secret and unmenacing. Overhead, the beams of a million streetlamps joined in a shaft of neutral, watery sodium which filtered off into the sky like an abandoned gateway to the night.

"Some set," murmured Marvell, as the Chevrolet approached.

"I tell you," said Andy from the back seat, "if any of those fuckin' little tramps gives anybody any trouble just let me know and he's going to be one sick junkie, is all."

Twenty yards away, scattered about the dim foyer steps, a score of down-and-outs looked on fearfully as the Apple-seeders poured from the cars and moved toward them. "Ah, the vanity of travel," said Quentin. Andy raced on ahead to kick a gangway through the crowd — saying "Get out of here" and "Get some cash," occasionally boxing a protuberant head or stomping on a tardy hand. The tramps crawled away without protest or comment. "LEAVE HER ALONE, YOU FUCKIN' BUM!" bellowed Andy as a coughing hobo was slow to roll out of Diana's queenly path. Andy's heavy-duty boot eased his transit across the steps.

"Christ," summed up Andy, straightening his combat jacket when they had gained the foyer. "Try and take in a show around here and what you got to do? Beat your way through a mess of bums. Giles — pay the gentleman and let's get inside."

The interior decor of the Universal was not so much pretentious as straightforwardly apocalyptic: a distant channeled ceiling which receded in a succession of trompe l'oeil false summits, hundredweights of dank purple curtain, 3-D brass frescoes, deep-ribbed walls and stucco cornices. The building had been condemned, most emphatically and categorically, in the late 1960s — thereby vastly increasing its popularity as a decadent venue — but in the tinged red light it seemed to possess a certain monolithic solidity. The Apple-seeders made their way down the aisle on the sticky carpet, appraising the small and opulent audience concentrated in the first few rows before the semicircular stage.

"Is it always this empty?" asked Marvell.

"Only cool people know about it — that's how come the cash," said Andy, referring thus elliptically to the dozen ten-pound notes Giles had earlier offered the damson-suited commissionaire.

Although Whitehead had done a fair bit of equivocal hanging back and a certain amount of hesitant trotting forward in a bid to sit next to Lucy as they filed into the third row, he found himself wedged between Skip and Marvell — both of whom, even in Keith's estimation, seemed to be taking an unhealthily close interest in him. The patrons already seated made no attempt to retract their legs for the newcomers and had to be reminded by Andy of the need for this courtesy before obliging. The atmosphere was at once

twitchy and slothful. A haze of terminal apathy hung in the

gaunt auditorium.

"My God," said Quentin, brushing the plastic seatcover with a velvet glove. "It's like a dotard matinee in here. Open as my heart shall always be to persons of fashion, I wish they'd occasionally show some sign of real animation."

"What are the gimmicks?"

"Now just you wait and see, Skip. I promise you one thing — it's never quite like it was the last time."

As the girls chatted contrapuntally, as Quentin outlined his thinking on "counteralternative" theater, as Skip failed once again to engage Giles in conversation, as Whitehead wondered what to do when his legs exploded — as the whiskey flasks were snapped open and the marijuana showboats lit— signs, at least, of real animation gathered in the hall. It had now struck ten o'clock, and foot stamps, obscene catcalls, and seat rattling began a lazy crescendo. In particular, two tall youngsters dressed up as businessmen in the front row were exerting themselves to some effect, pitching an empty tequila bottle onto the stage, producing an anguished whine from a subsonic whistle, urinating without standing up into the orchestra pit.

Adorno was about to lean forward and invite them to shut the fuck up — when he appeared to notice something. "Hold it," he said. "They're Conceptualists."

"Who are they?" asked Marvell.

"Conceptualists." Andy had started to peer apprehensively around the auditorium.

"Oh, right, I've heard about them. Something between old-style Hell's Angels and Chuck Manson."

"Nothing like that," said Andy, in such disgust that for a moment he seemed to be looking at Marvell through his nostrils rather than his eyes. "Nothing like that at all. They're new, different. I think they're the only people who've made creative sense of what's happening to the world now. For me, they're the only ones to have really made something out of what technology has done to sex and violence. They'll last, too."

"Yeah?"

"Fuckin' better believe it, boy."

"How come?"

Precision and arbitrariness were the twin hallmarks of

Conceptualist activity. On the morning that inaugurated their

"Gestures," as they called them, fifteen lowly civil servants were found scalped in their beds. They were all sewage-disposal civil servants. A political organization? Fifteen days later a random selection of doctors, health inspectors, social workers, charity secretaries, and Salvation Army officials had their Achilles' tendons severed in a lightning wave of synchronized attacks. On the first day of the following month the newspapers reported that thirty hardware shop owners, in various parts of the country, had had their left eyes spooned out. Four weeks later stolen helicopters showered over key cities a bizarre confetti of pornographic postcards, atrocity photographs, suppressed medical reproductions, vetoed X-ray plates, and blacklisted urinalyses. (The police were not so much worried, by this time, as utterly hysterical.) The remains of perverse sexual scenarios periodically came to light — they weren't publicized, but it was assumed that the same organization was responsible: a stylized car crash, the impacted instrument panels of either vehicle stained with semen; an operating theater, broken into at night and made the scene of a bloody debauch; aircraft hangars, chemistry laboratories, racetrack pits, drug-experimentation plants, and electrical appliance showrooms similarly abused; the crippled and insane looted from various asylums and returned dumbstruck; a kidnapped surgeon required at gunpoint to perform strange anal surgery on a masked patient; an eighteen-month-old girl found in a ditch with severe genital injuries.