Martin Amis - Dead Babies

Earl's Court was his country.

A twenty-four-hour land. At nine, huge panting coaches were voiding four thousand aliens a day into its dusty squares. Drainpipe-latticed houses like foreign legion garrisons, their porches loud with penniless Greeks and tubercular Turks. Men in vests gazed from behind stagnant windows. By night half a million youths spilled from the electric pubs; dirty girls paraded and dirty boys cruised along the jagged strip; the darkness was hot with curry smells from the neon delicatessens. Tramps dozed behind nude-mag vendors' stalls. Dying Pakistanis hawked into dimly lit shop windows. At five in the morning, a windy threadbare silence would lapse on the spent districts. Food boxes and cigarette packets spun end over end among the fruit skins and beer cans. Hairnets of doped flies mantled the puddles and dogshit. From between railings old cats stared. Ramshackle buildings of rubbish lolled against the dark shopfronts, like collapsed dreams of the city's sleep.

Through the air came the whisper of the quickening town,

plaintive music over choppy water.

By day and during the early evenings Andy supervised his drugs consortia, looked after his fringe business concerns, bought records, played music, saw films, kicked dogs, watched TV, read, drank, ate, fucked. He was everywhere, a familiar and revered figure in the crowded landscape.

Late at night, just before the stillness came, he scaled condemned fire escapes and explored the roofs and skylights, lay on the sooty grass behind the Underground station, sat on swings and sang, climbed trees in the dark squares, screamed until the dawn went misty with tears, raced like an animal through the dying streets.

A radically telescoped resume of Andy's sex life.

An early developer, he started not sleeping with girls at the age of seventeen. Intense, confusing, sudden, strange — it was a revelation to him. "She was a casual girl, too," Andy broods. Looking in at Life on Mars for a nightcap one autumn evening, he had selected and duly approached a girl to take home. "Round eighteen, long blond hair. Dutch or something, nice face, good fig. All over me, quivering like a blender. Had to slap her down a bit, as I recall. There you are — I can even remember her name. Irma — something like that. Wilma. No. Norma. No. Hang about. " He escorted her to his door and preceded her up the cabbage-damp stairs. He led the way into his room, pitched himself onto the double mattress, and advised her to take off her clothes and join him. "Well. We're sort of talking and stuff. I get the scotch out and so on. She's nude, I'm nude, she's practically sitting on my face, and— you know — we're starting to get friendly. And then, well, Christ, it just sort of… happened. I didn't fuck her."

Hard-on trouble, Andy? "Nah. Onna contrary. The prong I had on me — I could of mugged an eight-foot boogie with it. I tell you, when I went to the bathroom to lose the scotch, I hadda practically stand on my head if I wanted to piss in the can and not up my own fuckin' nose. Nah. Wasn't anything at all to do with that. Listen, anyhow. I can tell something awful's gonna happen, but I sort of give it a go. I mean, you have to, don't you? You do. It's only polite. She's practically got both my legs in her mouth by this time anyway, and I don't want to seem like some sort of pervert or fuckin' sex maniac — lean over and say, 'Sorry, kid, I don't feel like it.' Fuck that. So I gave it a go. Christ. It was… I don't know what it was. It was. "

It was canceled sex. It was a feeling of vast but theoretical weariness combined with acute and local foreboding, petty irritation arm in arm with cosmic disgust, vexed fussiness married to apocalyptic fear. How did she fit in? What were these — her breasts, her ankles, her hair — her eyes? What was her role and what were he and his body for? He felt like a bit player in some far-flung organization, the servile motor of another's body.

The girl was making a lot of noise now. The boy turned her onto her back and knelt between her spread legs. The girl closed her eyes and his broad hands smoothed and kneaded her thorax. The boy twitched. The girl glanced up to see that an expression of almost preposterous loathing had come over his face. He fell brokenly on to his side, wretching and shivering in the gray sheets. She inched away from him, crying silent tears.

Looking past her, Andy glimpsed a third body on the mattress: a young, athletic, olive-skinned figure in sawn-off jeans and white shirt, reclining on striped pillows, two beer cans resting on his stomach: a long-ago Andy. Thirteen years old, lithe and predatory, he waits smiling in the quarter light as one by one they appear and kneel for a moment at his side. A melancholy girl with distant eyes, an older woman with deep, maternal breasts, someone his age with impossibly tiny shoulders, witch-like hippies, black-leather blondes, nervy urchins, schoolgirls, widows, shop assistants, divorcees, traffic wardens, bus conductoresses, policewomen, girls from Tehran, Dorking, Massachusetts, Slough, Montego Bay, the Earl's Court Road, spicks, frogs, huns, sprouts, boogies, the one with damp hair that smelled of nutmeg, the one that kept her shirt on although her tits were casual, the one from downstairs, the one that bit his rig, the one from upstairs, the very pregnant one, the not so pregnant one, the twelve-year-old, the fifty-seven-year-old, the one that liked him beating her up, the one that hated him beating her up, the tall Pakky that had no snatch hairs, the short Geordie that had no hair, the one that gave him four kinds of venereal disease, the one he'd given four (different) kinds of venereal disease, the one with the ear-to-ear gobbler's mouth, the blind one, the one that screamed the house down, the bald one, the one with: the six-foot legs, the fucking fat one, the one with breasts like airships, the one with the turn-off dog-end nips, the one that wouldn't go down on him, the one with the flash bum, the melancholy girl with distant eyes.: they're all forgotten now, as their memory turns on the changing boy.

"Course, it comes and goes, this gimmick. I've only ever had the fuckin' thing about twenty times, really. Maybe thirty times. The way you handle it is— the minute it starts, just pretend it's a drug. Oh, look— I'm sweating, I'm weak as a chick, my heart's like a fuckin' tom-tom, and I feel like Frank's monster. Then it passes, is all. If you want, ten minutes later you can even fuck.

"You know, sometimes I think I was born just in time. I mean, I'm fuckin' glad I'm not younger than I am, born later. Some of the kids I knew at the flat. kids around fourteen or fifteen. Yeah, they get hard-on troubles same as the next guy, and they get things we get like false memory and street sadness. Night fatigue, things like that. Course. But they get this canceled sex thing the whole time. They get the shudders inna cot when they try and fuck. I tell you, they'll all be cock-choppers by the time they're eighteen. I'm just glad I got out before it could all catch up on me. Born in the middle, just right — when you don't go mad but still get lots of fucks. I suppose that's basically why I'll always vote Conservative. I don't know, mind, how the next lot of guys are going to make out, the lot that come after me. I'm just glad I'm not one of them, is all. Check?"

He took eight swallows of Hine, wiped his mouth and offered the flagon to little Keith. "How you feeling, kid?" Andy asked. Even as Marvell protested that an intake of brandy was hardly Keith's top priority, the soapy dwarf shook his head, or at any rate permitted his eyes to roll slightly. He was finding all movement more complicated than usual — i.e., very complicated indeed, unbelievably difficult, quite extraordinarily recondite — but he was still entirely compos mentis. Whitehead was in fact congratulating himself once again for electing such a civilized and agreeable way to die. He shut his eyes softly — and his body disappeared! Never in his life had he felt so light, free, however illusorily, from that heaving, viscous, fudgy torso, with its cumbrousness, its demands, its noises, and its smells. He completed a tactile reconnaissance of his body. Nothing. He had finally escaped into the middle air.