Martin Amis - Dead Babies

to call "the slipway factor," which invariably obtained when

the retrodrug took hold, and the Appleseeders' vertiginous slide into their own insecurities was wonderfully lightened by the more graphic and spectacular sufferings of the dying: boy, who now sat on the baronial sitting-room club armchair, with a full male audience gathered round his swilling dressing gown. And was Keith himself going to throw a dampener on their good cheer? Not a bit of it. Whitehead had never felt better in his life.

"Okay," said Andy, rubbing his hands together. "Now the way I see it is: we got to keep the little bastard from having a fit or blacking out or whatever. Check?"

"Obviously we can't involve the authorities," murmured Villiers.

"We could, we could make him throw up a lot," said Skip.

"Yeah," said Marvell. "Dump him in the fuckin' bath. Boiling water. Liter of gin. Make him drink fuckin' all of it."

"I've done that myself," said Giles. "It makes you feel awful."

"I'm not pregnant you know," said Keith huffily, folding his arms. "I mean, not one of you has even asked me what I took yet."

"Oh yeah," said Andy with a snort of laughter. "That's a point. Okay, Keith — wotcher take?"

"The eighty downers you gave me yesterday morning."

"Gave. downer—? But they didn't work."

"Oh yes they did. I tricked you."

Andy sat back. "Fuck me," he said.

"What were they, Andy?" asked Marvell in a forensic tone, reaching for a ballpoint and pad. Stumblingly Andy told him. Marvell listened, nodded, and said to Keith, "Boy, you're very nearly dead. In twenty minutes or so you're gonna want to go to sleep; if you do, you're fucked. We better get that stuff out of you. If we don't you're gonna be on your feet. All night. Rox, bring me the brandy— I'd better monkey with it. Cos we're gonna be too."

" 'It is imperative,'" Lucy read out, " 'that you notify me of your decision within the next twenty-four hours. Thank you. Yours sincerely, Keith (Whitehead).' "

"See what I mean?" said Celia.

"Mm. Pretty sexy stuff. Can really turn a phrase. Celia, it hardly compares with 'Johnny's' letter to Diana." She held up the second piece of paper. "What's a 'perineum,' by the way?"

"The bit between your cunt and your bum," said Diana.

"Ah."

"Listen," said Celia. "Keith's been to an asylum; we also know he's been very ill — something to do with his stomach, so he could have" — she gestured sideways at the laundry basket—"and now this. He's obviously in a desperate—"

"Come on, Celia," Lucy said jovially, "don't be so silly! If Keith was Johnny he wouldn't. Keith just wouldn't do things like that. Honestly! Poor little bugger— he was in my room half of last night wondering how to give me a good-night kiss. He may be a bit looney — I mean, wouldn't you be? — but he wouldn't— you know."

Lucy appealed to Diana. The three of them were sitting in Celia's room, Lucy and Celia on the stripped bed, while Diana draped the adjacent sofa. All three were drinking liberally from the double-liter of tequila which Lucy had recently fetched from Giles's (by now untended) alcoholic archives. As with the men, the new crisis seemed to have presented them with at least a handful of transient certainties, a focus for their loosening minds, something to do.

Celia said, "Diana thinks it's Skip, I know. I thought it was Marvell for a bit, but I can't see what possible—"

"But, darling, it's got to be," said Lucy. "It's too frightening if it isn't." She sipped her tequila, spluttering slightly as she remembered another thing to add. "Mm — and someone called Johnny did something nasty to Giles this afternoon. He wouldn't tell me what but he was very jumpy and everything. He just came up and asked me which of the Yanks was called Johnny. He was quite flabbergasted that one of them wasn't."

"But don't you think," said Celia, "that Keith— I mean what those boys did to him. And Roxeanne and everything."

"Celia! You said yourself that you found it while Keith was upstairs."

"Oh, I don't know. I just want it to be over." Celia's eyes clouded and she reached for a paper tissue. "Can't it just be over?"

"If it was Keith it would be." Lucy moved to the window, drawn by the sounds from below. "Keith's out of action now. No. It's worse than Keith." She swiveled, hooking her elbows

backward on the sill. As she returned Celia's gaze the two

girls became aware that Diana had withdrawn from the conversation, had indeed withdrawn her presence from the room. "Diana?" they both asked.

: Diana tried to say something but the words were submerged. She sat up — no, she was slipping back, slipping back to… to cry again and please the black road as intensely sad fireflies winking to a thickening presence of dew and sleeping bags in the starched chill of night fatigue every day lassitude and disgust from the pink retreat it's brief and pleasureless being alone without knowing why letters a day in hanging-garden avenues the first of many summers the time it is hating everything time wondering Diana.

She exhaled heavily and her jaw went square. She said, "I think it's Andy."

Andy, on being asked his age, can reply with veracity and more or less without self-consciousness that he's fucked if he knows. "Around twenty, I guess," it suits him to say, gesturing with a slack-wristed hand, " — give or take a year."

He is twenty-four. Today is his birthday. As he sprawled in the adjacent meadow, as he counted the extinguishing stars and nuzzled close to the crying grass: so, twenty-four years earlier, a swarthy girl drew the wet sheet from her face and asked, "Ten little tiny fingers? Ten little tiny toes?"

"He's cool, I think," the baleful hippie said, running a sleeve over his beard. "I think he's cool."

He was cool. His mother moved on two weeks later and for the first years of his life Andy crawled the mattress land of the dark, high-ceilinged, communal flat in Earl's Court, hunter of the spare breast, on the lookout for warmth, invader of unminded sleeping bags, growing up on cereals and old fruit. He was the foster child of a hundred postnatal waifs, the cossett of a dozen itinerant rhythm guitarists, the darling of scores of provincial pushers, the minion of a thousand sick junkies.

They called him Andy, on account of the unnatural size of his hands. He called himself Adorno, after the German Marxist philosopher whose death had brought so much despondence to the commune in the summer of 1972, when Andy was just a boy. Andy Adorno —it was the most exquisite name he had ever heard.

In the course of a routine raid by the local Hygiene and Sanitation Board operatives, the young Adorno's existence became known to the authorities. Mr, Derek Midwinter, the inspector under whose care Andy fell, is on record as describing his dealings with the boy as "a complete bloody nightmare." Originally proposing to remove Andy from the flat, register him with the censors, enroll him at a Child Care Unit and get his education underway, Midwinter ended up paying Andy £5.50 a week to leave him alone. (Adorno continued to hold sway over many representatives of authority with a trick-or-treat system he had devised; it featured complicated sexual blackmail and brute force.) When he was good and ready— in his own fucking sweet time-Andy dawdled up to Holland Park Comprehensive and asked to speak to its principal. After a five-minute interview Andy was talking to girls in the playground while a pallid headmistress backdated his entrance forms. It was understood that he would study nothing but the Modern American Novel, and also that this specialization would not necessarily be reflected in his examination results. That afternoon Andy was voted form captain.