Martin Amis - Dead Babies

"Very nice. Very nice." The Constable took a tobacco pouch from his breast pocket and began to assemble a cigarette. "Very nice. You young people had a good time?"

"An excellent time, thank you awfully, Constable," replied Quentin dismissively.

The old cops' eyes conferred as Villiers unlocked the Jaguar and as Celia, Diana, Lucy — and Whitehead — milled round its four doors.

"Yours too. Well, well." The Sergeant placed a boot on the Chevrolet fender, straightened his hat and rested an elbow conspiritorially on the hood. "Where'd you go tonight, kids?" he asked Roxeanne and the remaining boys. His tone was not hostile or interrogative. On the contrary, he seemed if anything to be on the point of falling asleep.

The moment Quentin closed the Jaguar door behind him he saw his mistake. Andy was looking morose, Giles annihilated utterly, but Marvell, Skip, and Roxeanne were staring at one another in candid alarm. The old cops' slothful, obsequious patter, Quentin realized, would be indistinguishable from the gloating sarcasm of their American counterparts. Furthermore, everyone was carrying drugs.

Quentin lowered his window. "Gentlemen," he said in his most princely tone, "I'm well aware that you've got nothing better to do than lounge about improving your public image, but if you'll excuse us we ought to be making our way home."

The old cops' eyes conferred again. The Sergeant strolled over to the Jaguar and began to bounce his nightstick on the wheel mounting. "Know how long I'd have to work to get a car like this?"

"No. Nor do I care. A very long time indeed, I should imagine. Sergeant, I don't think this is. "

"You young people make me sick sometimes," he said in a hurt and angry voice, as if he would far sooner think

highly of them. "Literally sick." He spun round and wiggled

the nightstick under Giles's nose. "How long do you expect—" Giles wheeled away from him, his whole body swimming. The Sergeant seized his shoulder.

"Look at me when I'm talking to you, you little bastard! You're not home yet. You think we can't touch you — scum like you." He held the club up to Giles's mouth as if it were a microphone. "We still do it, you know, oh yes, but you just—" Giles retched loudly into the Sergeant's face. "Christ, for nothing I'd put you up against that wall and smash your bloody tee—"

Before the jet of vomit struck the man's chest, Quentin was out of the car — had stayed the old cop's raised right hand, had directed Giles's collapse into the arms of Skip and Marvell, had prodded a £20 note into the Sergeant's breast pocket, was brushing his jacket down with a silk handkerchief — and it was over, the untenable moment had opened and closed like a vent in another time.

The cars sighed up the diagonal ramp. In the Chevrolet, Giles had been laid out on the back seat. Skip drove fast through the exhausted precincts. In the Jaguar, the leather seats shone nervously under the silver motorway lights. A mile from home, Lucy fell asleep and her head dropped carelessly onto Keith's waiting shoulder. As Appleseed Rectory surged up at them through the night, tiny tears were glistening beneath the lids of his closed eyes.

There was — inevitably, we suppose — a certain amount of coming and going that night.

As soon as Diana's breathing had steadied and she had completed her repertoire of quiet, subliminal shrugs, the wakeful Andy said her name out loud, got no reply, slid out from between the sheets, furled a towel round his waist and crept downstairs.

"What do you want?" said Lucy.

Kneeling at the head of the sitting-room sofa, Andy lowered his head and kissed Lucy judiciously on her mouth, which remained slack.

"What do you want?"

Tracing soft patterns on her ear with his left hand, Andy's right felt for the familiar knot of Lucy's nightdress, which, when tweaked, would render her naked to the waist.

: "What do you want?"

Dipping his wettened lips to her breasts, Andy introduced cool fingers beneath the blankets, which burrowed surely through the warm folds.

"Look, stop it. Get off. What do you want?"

"Yawn!" said Andy. "Stop talking. How can you talk at a moment like this?"

"A moment like what?"

"Jesus — at a moment that starts getting fuckin' embarrassing when you start talking about it."

"But why?"

Andy untwisted the loop of his towel. It fell away to the floor. "Some snake," he said simply.

"Enormous deal. What's that supposed to do — get me going?"

"Yawn," he said.

"Well then, tell me — get off —what you want."

Andy persevered.

Down the kitchen passage Keith Whitehead fried on his hot mattress. He was burping terribly every few seconds. They were the very worst sort of burps to which he was subject, like hardboiled eggs imploding at the back of his throat. "Mouth farts" was what Keith had once called them.

Whitehead's legs still throbbed, in a way remote from himself, like — Christ — like glutted anacondas; he moved them about as if they were sections of another body. His stomach was gurgling to such effect that Keith punched it repeatedly with his fists; he kept shouting at it too, of course, with the impotent exasperation with which one shouts at hairtrigger alarm clocks, fizzy radios, banging shutters, some baby crying in a distant place. His frightened penis had retracted to the point of invisibility. The room itself was a 180-cubic-foot pool of wicked and unbelievable smells.

Little Keith was crying a good deal while he thought about his recent attempts to slim down for the Lucy weekend. Whitehead's program: twelve fluid ounces of water per day, jogging two hours a night round the garden, ear-bending aperients, two thousand shin-touching exercises every morning, no food whatever. His body's reply: nitric indigestion (what, Keith would ask himself, was he failing to digest?), IOO

paint-bubbling halitosis, 100 per cent constipation, a negligible increase in weight, and mouth farts.

"Thanks a lot," he said out loud.

What, then, were Whitehead's sex plans? They were as follows. A harrowing session in the upstairs bathroom — third-degree shower, industrial scrub, gargle with. Saniflush? Then Lucy. Kneeling on the bed, he established through his box window that the bathroom light had been extinguished. All was quiet inside the house. Ponderous with insincerity, little Keith stood up and dragged his dressing gown from the hook.

Whitehead was just deciding that he wouldn't, after all, knock on the sitting-room door when it whipped open and the half-naked majesty of Adorno was glowering above him. Andy stepped back in startled amusement.

"What the fuck do you think you're doing?"

"Just… I…"

Andy crouched. "Yeah, well, go easy on her, kid, okay?" he said, before straightening up and walking quickly up the stairs.

This, in any event, was more than enough for Keith. He was about to scurry quietly back to his box when a light came on inside the room and Lucy said, "Who's that?"

"Keith," he said weakly. "Sorry to disturb you, Lucy— just going to the bathroom."

"That's okay."

The light stayed on. Whitehead found himself peering round the door. Instead of the replete, engorged, spreadeagled figure he had expected, Lucy was sitting up on the sofa, evidently in some disarray, dabbing her cheeks with an old paper tissue.

"Anything the matter, Lucy?"

"Just Andy." She blew her nose. "He always makes me cry."

Andy swung round the corner of the stairs and halted abruptly. Dressed in a thin white T-dress, spreading her hennaed hair with firm hands, Roxeanne sat facing him on the landing.

Andy snapped his fingers, jabbed one of them at her, and spun around. "Right," he said, starting down the stairs again, "let's fuck."