Martin Amis - Dead Babies

Diana, Diana Parry, is a mere shadow of her future self, a tall-for-her-age, severe-looking, badly coordinated girl with a narrow orange mouth and a sheet of black hair that hangs on her head like a paper-thin cowl. At present she is on her way from her mother's flat in London to her father's flat in Amsterdam. Her demeanor at Heathrow Airport is characteristic: she fumbles with her documents, drops her handbag, splinters fingernails on the suitcase handles, and is painfully conscious of the men's malevolent stares. Diana is particularly on edge today, having received a letter from her best friend Emily containing the ebullient postscript that Emily has just that minute begun to menstruate; this intelligence establishes Diana as not only the smallest-breasted but also the one nonpubescent girl in her coterie. While Diana is not at all sorry to leave her mother she is not especially anxious to see her father. She opens a magazine as the airplane accelerates along the runway.

And Whitehead? Thirteen years of age, Keith is at present: the subject of experimental (and, in the event, deleterious) gland-correction surgery in the Research Wing of the St. Pancras Hospital for Tropical Diseases. Since the age of five Whitehead has had always to observe a starvation diet to avoid grotesque obesity; with adolescence has come an explosion of fatty tissue, a hormonal influx that has alarmed even the most experienced of the hospital's dieticians. His three-strong, seventy-stone family trudges along two evenings a week; it sits and swears at Keith for half an hour ("The operation will be a complete bloody disaster, you realize," foretells Whitehead, Sr., enviously), then trudges off again, without good-byes. Little Keith excited so much revulsion in the public wards that the consultants were forced to move him into a private room. He will be discharged in five weeks' time; the doctors will pronounce him more fat-prone than ever but "as sane as can be expected." For the time being, Whitehead lies in pulsing, hot-faced, glandular silence by day and at night is the weeper of unreflecting tears.

These are the six that answer to our purposes, and we have taken them on ahead a small distance in time to Appleseed Rectory, a three-story structure which stands in the outskirts of the Hertfordshire village of Gladmoor. Gladmoor is still a village. It has survived the northern thrust of the London suburbs partly because of its inconvenient remoteness from the main intercity highways and partly because of its taxing proximity to the Luton Airport approach routes. Gladmoor has been conserved too, perhaps, by its capacity to astonish: straying down the one gray-brick road, seeing the wonky Edwardian streetlamps, the warped and splintery sign over the coach house, the great oaks which bend back toward the hills, visitors find it hard to expunge the sense of unreality, of suspension, which even the drumming aircraft cannot break, an aura of peace and sweetness almost as palpable as the integrity of the stone.

Approaching Appleseed Rectory from the direction of the village could be a particularly dislocating experience. When Quentin had sent directions to his American friends, for example, he had written: "Immediately after the hump-backed bridge, stop, get out of the car, and look hard to your left, and the house is inset twenty yards from the road. It's there!" With good reason: it was commonplace for regular callers at DEAD BABIES; 2O

the house to speed down the road past it, U-turn, miss it again, and oblige garrulous locals to redirect them. Appleseed Rectory always seemed to be the color of the sky against which it was set. The off-white brick made it look like something in a monochrome photograph, or like a painting glimpsed through net curtains. It was exceptionally narrow, windowless at either end, and seen from the road it would sometimes melt back to a bodiless shimmer. In hot weather the sun would draw thermal gradients from the roadside stream, corrugating the house like an image on a rippling banner. On rainy afternoons it would appear completely to recede into the vaporous, hospital-gray medium of the sky.

And inside the house itself perspective seems no less unreliable. Everyone is always blacking out at Appleseed Rectory, and they can't remember farther back than a few days. Everyone tends to be either drunk or stoned or hungover or sick at Appleseed Rectory, and they have learned to be empirical about all sense perceptions. Everything is out of whack at Appleseed Rectory; its rooms are without bearing and without certainty. The inhabitants suffer, too, from curious mental complaints brought on by prolonged use of drugs, complaints that can be alleviated only by drugs of different kinds. And so Appleseed Rectory is a place of shifting outlines and imploded vacuums; it is a place of lagging time and false memory, a place of street sadness, night fatigue, and canceled sex.

More in a moment.

Keith was still wallowing on the sofa in the smaller Rectory sitting room when Quentin and Andy appeared in the doorway. Ten o'clock, Friday morning.

"It's drug time!" Andy announced.

"Oh, God," said Keith.

One among many of Whitehead's domestic posts was that of drug-tester. Two or three times a week Andy and Quentin would approach him with a pill, or a scrap of blotting paper, or a sac of powder, or a vial of fluid, or a sachet of crystals, or a moist sugar lump, which Keith would then be required to swallow or suck or sniff or (occasionally) inject. Quentin and Andy would tell him how long they expected the drug to take and would disappear for that period. On their return Keith would either be giggling and leaping about, or shaking his head and saying, "Nothing yet," or shivering with terror beneath the sideboard, or enjoying agreeable hallucinations, or asleep, or crying, or cleaning the kitchen, or locked in the broom closet, or vomiting crazily, or unconscious and very white. Sometimes, if the effects of the drug seemed to be irresistibly efficacious, Quentin and Andy would personally join Keith in the experiment. If the converse, they would take seats and, in a spirit of detached inquiry, watch; they would note how little Keith's pupils bulged and throbbed, discuss the way in which he would twitch and pant, observe how, in the final stages, his skin paled, his tongue went lizard-green, and his lips gashed gold-vermilion.

"Nothing very special today," Andy went on. "Just a pound for three from the black guy in the canteen. He's pretty reliable — for a Pakky — so it should be quite mild and won't last long."

"Up or down?" asked Keith warily.

Andy glanced at Quentin and said, "Down. But not far." His brisk manner returned. "Pins-and-needly feeling after half an hour or so — we think — then you ought to feel a bit sleepy, dizzy, queasy — but nice. A thing of the past within a couple of hours."

Whitehead narrowed his eyes. "No side-effects?"

"Absolutely not."

"It doesn't make your piss go all black like that stuff the other week?"

"Uh-uh."

"I won't have all that green gunge coming out of my ears?"

"Promise."

"I won't be up all night trying to crap?"

"No way."

"And, look, they don't make your cock retract like that powdered stuff you—"

"Actually," digressed Andy, "one guy's eyes came out on

stalks when I hit him with some bad MDA, and his tongue went all—”

"Are you sure they don't muck up your cock, because I…" Keith stirred in his seat, settling on his buttocks as if they were cushions. "When's Lucy coming?"

"Lucy? Who knows?" said Quentin, appealing to Andy.

"Sometime this evening." Andy's gaze steadied. "Why?"

Whitehead sat up straight. "I'll give you three guesses!"