Martin Amis - Dead Babies

She turned to the man next to her on the sofa and he could have been anyone; he had lost the lineaments of Quentin Villiers. Even when he turned to her, meeting her troubled eyes with a smile that completely defined her thoughts and fears, she was unable to suppress a shiver.

Celia excused herself and climbed the stairs to her room, confused but unterrified. She had found the old strengths along with the old dreads. She closed the door behind her, reassured that all was quiet now above. The solidity of the familiar objects — her makeup, her shoes, his books, his hairdryer — steadied her further. The present was there all right, then, even if it was leaving her for a short time. What were those phrases she had heard? They weren't from her mind.

Celia shrugged, and smiled at the unmade bed, leaning over to kiss the aromatic pillow where her husband's face had recently lain. Then she noticed a slip of paper pinned to the headboard. Thinking that it was one of Quentin's aphorisms or epigrammatic love poems, she knelt on the bed to examine it. There was a crudely drawn arrow directing her under the blankets, and a caption reading: Johnny's left it all down there. Intending to make the bed anyway, Celia pulled off the quilt and exposed the bottom sheet. A wild noise gushed from her hanging mouth.

Keith awoke from a shallow, hurtful sleep. Sensing the shag of the blankets and the heat of the close darkness, he thought at first that he was in his room. He was, he noticed, in tears, and his nose was running freely, but then again he quite often woke up like that. As he snuggled closer to himself, wondering how much night there was to go, a sick wave of memory dragged over him.

Keith sat up, throwing off the sticking clothes. The light jogged his eyes — he was naked suddenly. A shaft of hollow-ness in his stomach burned the way to his numb backside. He looked down and saw that he had at some point ejaculated. This made him start crying again.

He hobbled and rocked round the room assembling his clothes. His puffed skin, at once babyish and corpse-like, dappled unhealthily in the swinging light. From time to time he fell over, or gasped in breathless grief. His madras shirt was torn; the staples on his trouser seat had been wrenched apart and there was an irreparable split down the inside thigh. He got into their remains and grafted on his boiling boots. He thought what to do.

Keith's first, and only, instinct was to hide. "Hide," he said. He felt no self-pity about what had happened, none at all. He felt shame merely. What he wanted now was not to be seen. He would forgive them anything but their talk and their eyes.

He knew where to go. There could be nowhere else now. Keith opened the door and stood tensed in his ragged clothes. With alarming speed he darted down into the shadowy stairs.

Andy had been wondering on and off how much of a storm to kick up when Marvell and Skip finally reappeared, but as their absence continued the possibility of a fertile, visionary brawl was getting more and more abstract. In a curiously gentle manner of which he was only half aware, his body seemed to be melting, rendering down to a weaker and less robust version of himself. He kept staring gravely at Diana and Lucy as they sat conversing on the divan. He thought how pleasantly asexual they were in appearance, how talkative and inconsequential. What he wanted to do, really, was to go over and lie down in between them both. He wouldn't disturb them. For once in his life he just wanted not to be minded.

The door welled open. Skip and Marvell came into the room.

Andy made as if to stand up. "Okay— What have you done with him — you fuckers?"

Skip eased himself into the dining alcove while Marvell sauntered across and sat on the arm of Roxeanne's chair.

"Hey, you fuckin' fags. " Andy's mind jolted. All along the room had been silent, expectant — but no one was hearing him. With an appalling effort Andy sat up straight. "Marvell," dragged his voice, "you fuckin' little. "

"Hey," said Marvell lightly. "What's with Andy?"

"Andy," called Quentin from the end of the world, "what's happening to you?”

: "I. "

Andy fell from his seat. He was treading air in the middle of the room. He saw the french windows and moved numbly toward them. Hands jutted out to assist or prevent him, but he fought them away and burst through into the colorful night.

His mind was flashing with tremendous activity — not thought, not thought: the phrases in his brain had been there long before he had; they were ready made. For the last time he tried to shout but his mind kept slipping back, slipping back to… to come after me and don't go mad you're born just in time her distant eyes a long-ago Andy with no far-flung canceled sex but to hear the choppy water of the city's sleep with sick junkies on the lookout for warmth in a dark mattress land of crying grass and Andy.

Some minutes later Andy was picking himself off the lawn. Cold tears had evaporated from his cheeks. He had been back. And to what? To nothing and a tickling heart.

"Bastards," he said. "Deaf, dumb, blind fucking bastards." He turned and began to stride back toward the house.

"Andy …"

Andy spun toward the garage. It was an impossible sound, like an animal or a wounded baby.

"Andy."

It was inches away. Andy looked down suddenly — and saw him through the tiny window slot of his room, his face lit by a crack of wan upstairs light.

"Keith?"

"Andy. I've done it. I'm dying."

Celia stood outside the sitting-room door. She was trembling with almost theatrical violence. "Quentin!" she shouted. "Quentin!"

The door opened. "Darling.?"

She seemed to collapse in his arms but then jarringly drew back. He reached out to her. "Darling, darling. Ah now, ah now."

She backed away. "Come here," she said, leading him up the stairs. "There's something you must see. There's something you must know. Something everyone must know. Now."

"Darling, what is this? My dearest, you're. "

She halted on the landing and held up her hands to silence him. "Listen. There's— Someone's. There's excrement in our bed. In our bed."

"How unutterably squalid."

Celia shuddered and he moved closer. "Don't. Just listen. It is not human excrement. There are. it's got other things in it — the smell is quite foul — I don't know what they are. It's sort of alive."

He followed her into their room. Celia walked to the bed, turned toward him and lifted the top sheet. He gagged softly through his raised palm. "Like essense of human being," he said. They gathered the sheet by its corners, folding it double, double again, and double again.

"You see, darling, don't you," said Celia, "that it's all changed now. That we must do something. If we don't then nothing will mean anything any more. Everything will be mad if we don't. If we go downstairs now and pretend this hasn't happened — what'll we be then?"

"You're right, of course, darling."

"We'll just have to go down there and find out what's going on."

"Yes."

They embraced quickly. He picked up the folded sheet. They were about to move toward the door when sounds of clamor came from below. Then Andy's voice rattled cheerfully up the stairs: "Hey, Quent! Better get along, Mac. Little Keith's dying on us here!"

Dropping the sheet into the laundry basket he hurried from the room. Celia watched him go with a hard face. She knew that she had lost then.

It was by no means the paradox it may at first appear that the news of Whitehead's forthcoming death saw an infusion of coltish high spirits into Appleseed Rectory. It signaled, for one thing, the end of what Dr. Marvell Buzhardt was later