Martin Amis - Dead Babies

"On your fuckin' feet, Keith," said Marvell. "Andy. Get him on his fuckin' feet."

Andy put the brandy bottle down sharply on the coffee table. "You get him on his fuckin' feet."

Quentin swept across the room. "No time for fun and games now, Andy," he said, dipping his fingers into White-head's yielding flesh.

"Okay," said Marvell. "Rox— Go inna kitchen. Get some mustard, pepper, bad butter, bad lard, bad milk — anything bad — aim it all in the fuckin' blender and bring it right back here."

"Howbout them boiled eggs Celia had?" Skip slowly suggested.

"Great. That oughta do it. Like eating dead babies, right? I have some emetics and laxatives and shit, but they'd make the Venus de Milo set up camp in the John, and we want to take it easy with this kid, you know?" Marvell leaned forward and slapped little Keith quite hard across the face. "Mm-hm. Oughta get him outside. Don't want him throwing up onna carpet."

Requiring a good deal of assistance, Whitehead was steered through the french windows. "Can I sit down? Please. Please let me sit down."

"Nope," said Marvell. "Lean on the wall right there."

"I know," said Andy suddenly. He stepped forward, clasped Keith's quadrangular nose with his left hand, and jammed a long right forefinger into his exposed throat.

A wretching quack sprang from Keith's mouth — as, with no less alacrity, did Andy's finger.

"AWW! Little fucker bit me!" shrieked Andy as he leaped at the reeling Whitehead.

It was only the remarkable speed of Quentin's intervention and Skip's timely aid that saved little Keith from a more summary loss of consciousness than he was destined soon to: ienjoy. He was still coughing vilely when Roxeanne reappeared, bearing the full beaker above the heads of the crowd.

Diana's contention, that Johnny was in fact the man whose bed she had shared for the past six months, was put over by her with lucidity and unwonted calm. She talked of Andy's creed of violence: however boastful and erratic he tended to be on the subject, his devotion to that activity was at least partially real. She adduced his murderous daydreams about the Tuckles: even as she spoke, there stood on the garage workbench four crude Molotov cocktails which Andy was proposing to drop down their chimney. She testified to his aberrant and depressive behavior in recent weeks: Andy had admitted to two attacks of false memory that same afternoon. Finally, she disclosed that Keith's pornography collection had been savaged at some point during the day, presumably by Johnny: that made Andy the only resident to have been spared his attentions. And so on.

But was anybody really listening now? The noises from the garden had become loose and intermittent, like the sound of a megaphone down a windy street, and Diana's words seemed to get nowhere, seemed to fuse in the light of the colorless room. Celia and Lucy had glazed over and as soon as Diana fell silent she felt herself slip back into the same slow, watery retrospection. One by one the girls were wandering through the door.

"Slam him against the wall," said Marvell, accepting the frothy jug from Roxeanne. "Skip— Hold him hard. He's gonna drink alia this and he's gonna fuckin' hate it. Hold his nose, Rox, and keep his mouth open."

As soon as the noisome fluid touched his lips Whitehead's whole body seemed to fizz with revulsion. Marvell's hirsute thumb had been planted on Keith's deep Adam's apple, which he tweaked and depressed in order to regulate the flow. When the last third of the beaker emptied over his shoulders, chest, neck, nose, and drowned mouth, both little Keith's legs seemed to bend up into the air. When Quentin and Skip released him, he remained soggily upright against the wall.

Nothing happened.

Crouching on the grass a few yards away, Andy looked up from nursing his bitten forefinger. "See, I told you," he said. "I know." Unhindered, Andy swooped up in front of Keith, half knelt sideways on, circled his arm like a baseball pitcher, and swung his fist full force into Keith's solar plexus. It seemed to dive wrist-high into his stomach before bouncing back.

If Whitehead had been in a cartoon (which is probably where he belonged), he would simply have imploded to a third of his mass and drifted up into the air. As it was, he collapsed instantaneously, his legs snatched from beneath him as though they had been lassoed by a cantering cowboy.

". My fuckin' hand!" shouted Andy. "You little—!"

"There, there, Andrew," said Quentin, effortlessly containing his struggling friend. "There there."

Twenty minutes later and the uncooperative Whitehead had failed to respond, variously, to swallowing a half bushel of grass, having his kidneys ground and punched, getting his testicles mightily squeezed, and being swung circularly in midair, this way and that, by his arms, his legs and his hair.

Andy stood over Keith's punctured body. "Fuck him," he suggested. "That's what I say."

"Andy, don't be absurd," said Quentin. "Unless we can get him through this ourselves we'll—"

"We'll have to call the hospital. Or the police," said Celia, who had appeared from between the french windows. Behind her, in the more tranquil light, stood Lucy and Diana. "Let's just get him out of here, can't we?"

Andy stepped forward and booted Keith negligently in the ribs. The body accepted the blow as might a sack of half-dressed cement. "See? Poor little bastard. He's. he's all fucked up."

"Look, er. " Marvell knelt beside Keith on the paving stones. "Look, I can't have any law here." He felt Keith's pulse. "Best thing is, I drill him fulla emetics and aperients and stuff and we just leave him here for a time. Or" — he raised his voice—"or on the grass, huh, Cele? Don't want him exploding right here onna patio, yeah, am I wrong?"

Celia swirled back into the room.

"Chicks!" said Marvell indulgently, taking Keith's wrists

in his hands. "Try to be helpful and they— hey, Skip, haul his legs, willya? I know Rox'd blow her stack, any guy heaving on her— yeah, thassit, dump him onna lawn. Now here, my : Ifriend, we gotta problem. Lie him on his back, he'll gag on his own vomit. Lie him on his chest, he won't shit right. I don't know about you, kid, but I could use a Hine."

After a few minutes Keith was firmly roped to the still-blossoming apple tree; two grimed hypodermics hung from his bloated arms.

Perspective was the next to go. As soon as they were back inside, all the corners in Appleseed Rectory came adrift, swam out of position, and folded back in new and unfamiliar conjunctions. Through its open doorway the kitchen was no more than a displaced rhomboid of light. The stairs concertinaed away in unaligned succession. The hall leaned back and forth like a seaborne doll's house. Everywhere they looked mad angles veered up at their eyes.

Giles lay shivering on his bed, a deep-river creature of his own sweat. His mouth was a hive, his teeth changing position like dancers. If he clenched his jaw they just wouldn't fit, wouldn't fit, crags, tors, ridges, beaks, grinding against each other like the rusty cogs of an old machine. He prayed for them to fly away, white birds escaping this sodden nest. Until then he would be locked deep in this house, this room, this mouth, this mouth, with its marshmallow teeth and its sweet-sherry gums.

He could hear the fridge juddering peacefully at him, but he knew he'd never get to it. There were so many things in the way and anyhow his mind kept slipping back, slipping back to… to gauzy skin and dying pillows oh baby please 1 enjoyed the swell of the land in ghostly periods with blood she kissed him gorily as saddening dreams the various sunshine off dusty glass and his teeth an old mother old mother and baby Giles.