Martin Amis - Dead Babies

For an hour he sat waiting in the Institute's arc-lit vestibule. He beguiled it in an examination of the back of his hand, trying hard not to look down the endless yellow corridor where mad persons now groped and slunk along the walls as wraith-like male nurses swept past them with throbbing steel cylinders. "Whitehead? This way."

"How are you feeling?" the doctor asked.

"Sad and frightened."

The doctor knitted his fingers together over the desk and leaned forward. "How long, would you say, you have felt this way?"

Keith looked at his watch. "An hour and twenty minutes."

The doctor, a slow-talking Ceylonese, went on to ask Keith about his background, in a patient but unimaginative attempt to reveal traumas, blocks, repressions, and so forth. Although Keith answered all the doctor's questions with grim candor it soon became clear that his life had been quite devoid of emotional incident.

"Look," said Keith after a while, "you don't have to do all this. I know what the trouble is. It's quite straightforward."

The doctor sighed. "Okay. What is it?"

"No. I'm not telling you. You'll just think I've got paranoia."

"No, I won't."

"Yes, you will."

"No, I won't."

The doctor had already seen twenty-one male university students that morning. Six had complained of impotence, five of canceled sex, four of bedwetting, three of false memory, two of insomnia, and one of somnolence. The doctor had prescribed Contentules to every student except the one complaining of somnolence, whom he had instructed to go away.

"All right then," said Keith. "Well, as I told you, it's quite straightforward. No one likes me — actually most people dislike me instinctively, including my family — I'm not much good at my work, I've never had a girlfriend or a friend of any kind, I've got very little imagination, nothing makes me laugh, I'm fat, poor, bald, I've got a horrible spotty face, constipation, BO, bad breath, no prick, and I'm one inch tall. That's why I'm mad now. Fair enough?" "Yes," said the doctor.

Every life has its holiday, and Keith's month in the Institute was assuredly his. To begin with, he didn't go any madder. The panic and confusion receded at once, becoming a faint accusatory gibber at the nape of his neck. He found too that within a suspended community his sense of isolation could be turned to good account. He grew to think more coldly and shrewdly about his personal shortcomings. He found out what the average weight was for a five-foot man; he worked his way through the reading-room magazines, appreciatively noting down all instances of deformity and privation more acute than his own; a study of "The Human Body" section of the Guinness Book of Records assured him how puny his problems really were. In time, the feeling he had carried round with him since the age of six or seven, the feeling that he ought to be dead, gradually began to fade.

And with every day that passed little Keith took solace and grateful encouragement from his fellow inmates, watching the old teddyboys who yawned and sniveled in front of the common-room television, the fat forty-year-old infants who lay staked out with depressants in the wards, the mumbling bitches who leaned slumped like rubbish bags along the corridors, the sparrow-like girls kneeling nervously on the lawn. Airy with barbiturates, Keith would rove the Institute grounds, every now and then his face folding into a sneer or lightening with a thrill of relish as his colleagues made their twitching way past him. He had overheard it said that you always went madder at the Institute because "there was nothing to relate to." But Keith didn't want to relate to anything; he felt only hatred and contempt for the mutants around him, and if ever he wished to remind himself of the true direction of his life he simply gazed at the high Institute walls, visualized the road that went to London, and listened with pleasant detachment to the sounds of buses and high: heels in the street outside. The month did wonders for his confidence. Heck, he even got a girl.

Whitehead's sex life?

Eighteen years old, with £25 in the pocket of his tightest trousers, Keith had paced the clotted streets of Soho one mid-August evening, to cries of "Having a night out, Shorty?" "Isn't it past your bedtime, darling?" and "Hope it's bigger than you are, baby," until a frowning Negro beckoned him down the steps of a cafe basement. The Negro spread out his arms to introduce Keith to three sirens who perched on stools round a dirty hot-drinks machine.

"Well, well," said the center blonde. "Come on, then, big boy. How much you got?"

"Fifteen," said Keith.

The whore turned to the Negro. "Look, Mr. Boogie-Woogie, who the fuck do you think we are? You bring two-foot wonders down here with fifteen bloody—"

"Mary, I'm sorry," began the Negro brokenly.

"Why should I take it, Lester? Why, Lester, please tell me?"

"Oh, Mary," Lester implored. "I did not—"

"Twenty-five," Keith seemed to say. There was a silence.

"What was it you wanted, sonny Jim?"

"Eh? Oh, just a fuck."

"Yeah? Nothing flash?"

"Honestly."

Mary wagged her head at the girl on her right, who clicked her tongue.

Half an hour later Keith stood drowning in Piccadilly Underground. Melissa had taken his money, led him to a smelly cubicle, undressed on the bed and lay there like a section of plaster of Paris while Keith bounced and wriggled on top of her trying to purchase an erection. Then Melissa dragged out her cardboard box full of stimulator gadgets, electrode triggers, and prostate gimmicks, and sighingly applied vibrators, fur gloves, calipers.

"Look, you've had your twenty minutes."

"Oh, God," said Keith. "Look, couldn't you just try it with your hand?"

"Hey. C'mon now, sonny, you said no flash stuff.”

"That's not flash! What's flash about that? What could be less flash?"

"Go on. Bugger off. Go on, bugger off, you dirty little sod."

Keith demanded his money back. Melissa refused. Keith

asked for half his money back. Melissa refused. Keith begged

for his tube fare home. Melissa advised him to get going before

she kicked the shit out of him. Whitehead got going.

Things had been different with Lizzie.

When Keith first laid eyes on Lizzie Bardwell, in the Institute cafeteria, he naturally assumed that she was blind. She wore dark spectacles, kept her arms outstretched before her at all times, and had to be slotted into her seat by the two fat male orderlies. Keith watched closely as she ate. Lizzie was a thin, asymmetrically jointed figure with sparse carrot-colored hair and a triangular, freckle-dense face — but there was something about her Whitehead liked. Egged on by his Valium, and deciding that in the Institute no one knew what the hell was going on and that all the mad cunts wouldn't notice him getting shooed away, little Keith idled over to her table as she was eating her semolina and curds.

"Hi," he said. "Keith's the name. Mind if I sit here and talk?"

Lizzie shook down the bench a few inches and Whitehead vaulted in beside her.

"I am Lizzie Bardwell. Why are you in this place?"

"Hell — free meals, free bed, free drugs. Kind of restful. You?"

In a fast, highly inflected voice Lizzie said, "I've always had a sort of a squint, you know, which I'm very paranoid about. And it's got like I can't see because they're right on the side looking at the inside of my head." She placed her forefingers on either temple. "Like a kind of whale," she said, beginning to laugh, very loudly.

Keith began to laugh too, far, far louder.

Whitehead's dream girl. For the following week Keith was gallant and deferential, parading with Lizzie over the grounds, escorting her to therapy, sitting next to her at meals, waiting outside the shock-treatment booths, listening to incredibly