Martin Amis - Dead Babies

There were five bedrooms.

In the master suite, on knees and elbows, Giles Coldstream was crawling around the floor in search of the telephone, both hands cupped tightly over his mouth. The curling green cord eventually led him to a heap of spent gin bottles beneath his desk. With his left palm still flat over his lips Giles tugged at the wire, hobbled into a crouch, and dialed two digits.

"Get me Dr. Wallman. Quickly. Dr. Sir Gerald Wall —"

But even as he spoke, a tooth the shape and hue of a potato chip slopped over his tongue and fell with a hollow rattle into the bakelite receiver.

"Please, quickly."

"What number do you want?" asked a female voice.

"Please. I'm — they're all —"

And now, in strips, like an unstrung necklace or rippling piano keys, they begin to cascade from his mouth.

"What number do you want?" the voice repeated.

Giles dropped the telephone. His hands fidgeted frenetically inside his mouth — trying to keep them there, trying to put them back. His face went glossy with tears as a bubble of blood welled from his lips.

"My teeth," he said. "Somebody please help me. They're all gone."

The bedroom across the passage was not, perhaps, as grand as Giles's, but it was spacious and well appointed, commanding a decent view of the village street and the soft rise of the hills beyond. At the table recessed into the alcove of its bay window sat the Honorable Quentin Villiers, blond and lean in a pair of snakeskin sexters, coolly shrouded by a dome of dust-speckled light from his angle lamp, which in turn threw charcoal shadows along the room behind him, half disguising the naked body of a girl asleep on the bed. Diderot's Le neveu de Rameau nestled on his golden thighs. Quentin closed the book, extinguished his cigarette and took a white pill from the snap-open box on the table. He nicked it into the air, throwing his head back to catch the bright little cylinder in his mouth. He gave his saliva time to wash the taste away.

The Hon. Quentin Villiers stood up. Through the partly drawn curtains he watched the village road turning gray in the quiet dawn. His reflection began to melt from the window-pane — the wavy fair hair, the thin mouth, the abnormally bright green eyes. When he switched off the lamp the rest of the room seemed to lighten.

"Darling, darling, wake up," said Quentin, massaging his wife back to consciousness. "It's me. it's me."

Celia Villiers stirred and blinked, her face flexing with recognition. Quentin carefully folded back the sheet and gazed with reverence at her breasts, caressing her throat with imperceptible fingertips.

"I love you," he whispered.

"Thank you. I love you too."

After a few minutes Quentin rolled over onto his back. Celia's brown-maned head disappeared in its slow sacramental journey down his chest. Then, with an expression of exaggerated calm, Quentin turned to gaze at the ceiling as she wettened his stomach with her tears.

The third and smallest of the first-floor bedrooms was separated from the one we have just left only by a slim sandwich of plaster and hardboard. Accordingly, the sound of the Villierses' lovemaking came through the partition with reasonably high fidelity, waking Diana Parry, the lighter sleeper of the adjacent pair.

Having resumed consciousness, then — a state she seemed never to be very far from — Diana propped herself up on her elbow and stared with an involuntary pang at the back of Andy Adorno's head, coated with hair no less dark and shiny than her own, and at his broad, gypsyishly birthmarked shoulders. While Celia's yodels of appreciation increased in volume and frequency, Diana began to enumerate the blackheads between Andy's shoulder blades. Diana did this in a hostile spirit, because Andy had not made love to her the night before. The noises from the other room became more jarred and ambiguous. It was always a frightening, rather inhuman sound, Diana thought.

Still asleep, Andy rolled over, causing a smell of moist towels, Andy's smell, to glide up the bed. Diana noted with transient satisfaction that his face was the color of vanilla and his breathing stertorous. She lifted the top sheet to look at Andy's whiskey paunch. It swelled and subsided peacefully.

Diana dropped the sheet back into place. Andy had had a coltish, alcoholic erection. Diana sneered at him.

Climbing cautiously from the bed, she picked up her cerise silk caftan and cuboid vanity case. She stepped over a broken guitar and weaved between the drum set and microphone stand. Next door, in the bathroom, she positioned the case on the closed toilet seat and drew a basinful of water. With hands like stiff little flippers, she started to wash her face.

The second-floor bedroom was as yet unoccupied and so need not detain us long. A conventionally low-ceilinged attic, it had a derelict and melancholy air for all the recent work that had clearly gone into its reclamation. The two single beds had been pushed together beneath the small window and made up with fresh double sheets. On the bedside table stood a bottle of Malvern Water, and three glasses. As a. kind of token, a large turquoise-haired gonk rested against the pillows, its limbs spastically askew, its mouth fixed in a mad, idiot leer.

In the fifth and final "bedroom" — actually a fetid nine-by-nine box situated between the garage and the boiler room— Keith Whitehead lay on sandpaper blankets farting like a wizard.

Let's go.

Whitehead is an almost preposterously unattractive young man — practically, for instance, a dwarf. Whenever people want to say something nice about his appearance they usually come up with "You've got quite nice coloring," a reference to his dark eyebrows and thin yellow hair. That granted, nothing remained to be praised about his unappetizing person — the sparse straw mat atop a squashed and petulant mask of acne; the dour, bulgy little torso and repulsively truncated limbs; the numb, cadaverous texture of the whole.

The more clothes you took off him, the more traumatic the spectacle became. His (equally fat but better proportioned) sister went into hysterics when she once surprised him in the bath. As he entered the Wimbledon municipal swimming pool two teenage girls spontaneously vomited into the shallow end (on being questioned, they said it was the quiffs on the nipples of Keith's D-cup breasts that had done the trick — Whitehead was subsequently banned from the baths). At school physical checkups, doctors habitually refused to lay a finger on him, and the PT master threatened to hand in his notice should Keith ever set foot in his gymnasium again. As if in reply to these bodily shortcomings, Keith's nature is one utterly lacking in wit, generosity, and charm. Whitehead is, moreover, keenly appreciative of this state of affairs, well aware that by almost anyone's standards he would be better off dead.

He reviewed it now, as he extracted himself from between the blankets and sat rocking on the bunk in his pungent pajamas, waking for the hundredth time in this house full of tall and affluent people. Keith was hungry; his stomach was rumbling so loudly that he kept yelling at it to shut up. It was eight o'clock. Probably the others weren't up yet and the kitchen would be his. He got to his feet and, after some consideration, put on his dressing gown, a tweedy brown horror that his parents had bought him the minute they were sure he wasn't going to grow out of it. Mr. and Mrs. Whitehead had allowed for, indeed banked on, their son growing a few more inches; this had turned out to be a needless precaution, and the heavy material now swilled amply in his wake. But Keith was hungry, and he was even more appalled by his clothes, grubby little items that he knew he was too fat for, than he was appalled by the risk of being found short-arsing round the house without his high-heeled boots on. In slippers, then, Keith Whitehead opened his "bedroom" door and crept across the garage into the house.